The Fourteenth Infantry, volunteers, were mustered out on the last day of April. Sandy Cass and Kid Sadler came that night into the great city of the river and the straits with their heads full of lurid visions which they set about immediately to realize. Little Irish was with them, and Bill Smith, who had had other names at other times. And Sandy woke the next morning in a room that had no furniture but a bed, a washstand, a cracked mirror, and a chair. He did not remember coming there. Some one must have put him to bed. It was not Kid Sadler or Little Irish; they were drunk early, with bad judgment. It must have been Bill Smith. A hat with a frayed cord lay on the floor. “That's Bill's hat,” he said. “He's got mine.”

The gray morning filled the window, and carts rattled by in the street. He rose and drank from the pitcher to clear the bitterness from his mouth, and saw himself in the glass, haggard and holloweyed. It was a clean-cut face, with straight, thin lips, straight eyebrows, and brown hair. The lips were white and lines ran back from the eyes. Sandy did not think he looked a credit to himself.

“Some of it's yellow fever,” he reflected, “and some of it's jag. About half and half. The squire can charge it to the yellow.”

He wondered what new thing Squire Cass would find to say to his “rascally nephew, that reprobate Ulysses.” Squire Cass was a red-faced gentleman and substantial citizen of that calm New England town of Wimberton, which Sandy knew very well and did not care for. It was too calm. But it would be good for his constitution to go there now. He wondered if his constitution would hold out for another night equally joyful; “Maybe it might;” then how much of his eighty dollars' back pay was blown in. He put on his clothes slowly, feeling through the pockets, collected two half-dollars on the way, came to the last and stopped.

“Must have missed one;” and began again. But that crumpled wad of bills was gone altogether. “Well, if I ain't an orphan!”

He remembered last a place with bright glass chandeliers, a gilt cupid over the bar, a girl in a frowzy hat, laughing with large teeth, and Kid Sadler singing that song he had made up and was so “doggone stuck on”:

“Sandy Cass! A-alas!

We 'll be shut up

In the lockup

If this here keeps on.”

It got monotonous, that song.

“Sandy Cass! A-alas!

A comin' home,

A bummin home—”

He liked to make poetry, Kid Sadler. You would not have expected it, to look at his sloppy mustache, long dry throat, and big hands. The poetry was generally accurate. Sandy did not see any good in it, unless it was accurate.

“Little Irish is a Catholic, he come from I-er-land;

He ain't a whole cathedral, nor a new brass band;

He got religion in 'is joints from the hoonin of a shell,

An 'is auburn hair's burned bricky red from leanin over

hell''

That was accurate enough, though put in figures of speech, but the Kid was still more accurate regarding Bill Smith:

“Nobody knows who Bill Smith is,

His kin nor yet his kith,

An nobody cares who Bill Smith is,

An neither does Bill Smith;”

which was perfectly true. Anyhow the Kid could not have taken the wad, nor Little Irish. It must have been Bill Smith.

“It was Bill,” he decided.

He did not make any special comments. Some thing or other happens to a man every day. He went down-stairs, through a dim narrow hallway.

“Hope there don't any one want something of me. I don't believe they 'll get it.”

There were sounds in the basement, but no one met him. In the street the Ninth Avenue car rolled by, a block away. He saw a restaurant sign which said fearlessly that a stew cost ten cents, went in and breakfasted for fifteen, waited on by a thin, weary woman, who looked at his blue coat and braided hat with half-roused interest.

The cobble-stones on Sixth Avenue were shining and wet. Here and there some one in the crowd turned to look after him. It might have been the uniform, the loafer's slouch of the hat, taken with the face being young and too white.

The hands of the station clock stood at ten. He took a ticket to the limit of eighty-five cents, heard dimly the name of a familiar junction; and then the rumble of the train was under him for an hour. Bill Smith had left him his pipe and tobacco. Bill had good points. Sandy was inclined to think kindly of Bill's thoughtfulness, and envy him his enterprise. The roar of the car-wheels sounded like Kid Sadler's voice, hoarse and choky, “A-alas, a-alas!”

It was eleven o'clock at the junction. The mist of the earlier morning had become a slow drizzle. Trains jangled to and fro in the freight yards. He took a road which led away from the brick warehouses, streets of shady trees and lawns, and curved to the north, along the bank of a cold, sleepy river.

There was an unpainted, three-room house somewhere, where a fat woman said “Good land!” and gave him a plate full of different things, on a table covered with oil-cloth. He could not remember afterward what he ate, or what the woman said further. He remembered the oil-cloth, which had a yellow-feverish design of curved lines, that twisted snakily, and came out of the cloth and ran across the plate. Then out in the gray drizzle again.

All the morning his brain had seemed to grow duller and duller, heavy and sodden; but in the afternoon red lights began dancing in the mist. It might have been five miles or twenty he had gone by dusk; the distinction between miles and rods was not clear—they both consisted of brown mud and gray mist. Sometimes it was a mile across the road. The dusk, and then the dark, heaved, and pulsed through blood-red veins, and peeled, and broke apart in brilliant cracks, as they used to do nights in the field hospital. There seemed to be no hope or desire in him, except in his feet, which moved on. The lights that travelled with him got mixed with lights on each side of a village street, and his feet walked in through a gate. They had no reason for it, except that the gate stood open and was painted white. He pushed back the door of a little garden tool-house beside the path, and lay down on the floor. He could not make out which of a number of things were happening. The Fourteenth Infantry appeared to be bucking a steep hill, with the smoke rolling down over it; but on the other hand Kid Sadler was singing hoarsely, but distinctly, “A-alas, a-alas!” and moreover, a dim light shone through a white-curtained window somewhere between a rod and a mile away, and glimmered down the wet path by the tool-house. Some one said, “Some of it's jag and some of it's the yellow. About half and half.” He might have been making the remark himself, except that he appeared to be elsewhere. The rain kept up a thin whisper on the roof of the tool-house. Gasps, shouts, thumping of feet, clash of rifle and canteen. The hill was as steep as a wall. Little Irish said, “His legs was too short to shtep on the back av his neck wid the shteepness av the hill.”

“A-alas! A comin' home.”

“Oh, shut up, Kid!”

“A-alas, a-alas!” The dark was split with red gashes, as it used to be in the field hospital. The rain whispered on the roof and the wet path glimmered like silk.

It was the village of Zoar, which lies far back to the west of Wyantenaug Valley, among low waves of hills, the house the old Hare Place, and Miss Elizabeth Hare and Gracia lived there behind the white gateway.

That gateway had once been an ancient arch overhead, with a green wooden ball topping it. Some one cut a face on the ball, that leered into the street. It did not in the least resemble Miss Elizabeth, whose smile was gentle and cool; but it was taken down from its station of half a century; and Gracia cried secretly, because everything would needs be disconsolate without an arch and a proper wooden ball on top of it, under which knights and witch ladies might come and go, riding and floating. It seemed to break down the old garden life. Odd flowers would not hold conversations any more, tiger-lilies and peonies bother each other, the tigers being snappish and the peonies fat, slow, and irritating. Before Gracia's hair had abandoned yellow braids and become mysterious, when she learned neat sewing and cross-stitch, she used to set the tigers and peonies quarrelling to express her own feelings about neat sewing and cross-stitch. Afterward she found the memory of that wickedness too heavy, and confessed it to Miss Elizabeth, and added the knights and witch ladies. Miss Elizabeth had said nothing, had seemed disinclined to blame, and, going out into the garden, had walked to and fro restlessly, stopping beside the tigers and peonies, and seeming to look at the arched gateway with a certain wistfulness.

Miss Elizabeth had now a dimly faded look, the charm of a still November, where now and then an Indian summer steals over the chill. She wore tiny white caps, and her hair was singularly smooth; while Gracia's appeared rather to be blown back, pushed by the delicate fingers of a breeze, that privately admired it, away from her eager face, with its gray-blue eyes that looked at you as if they saw something else as well. It kept you guessing about that other thing, and you got no further than to wonder if it were not something, or some one, that you might be, or might have been, if you had begun at it before life had become so labelled and defined, so plastered over with maxims.

The new gateway was still a doubtful quantity in Gracia's mind. It was not justified. It had no connections, no consecrations; merely a white gate against the greenery.

It was the whiteness which caught Sandy Cass's dulled eyes, so that he turned through, and lay down in the tool-house, and wondered which of a number of incongruous things was really happening: Little Irish crying plaintively that his legs were too short—“A-alas, a-alas!”—or the whisper of the rain on the roof.

Gracia lifted the white curtains, looked out, and saw the wet path shining.

“Is it raining, Gracia?”

“It drizzles like anything, and the tool-house door is open, and, oh, aunty! the path shines quite down to the gate.”

“It generally shines in the rain, dear.”

“Oh!” said Gracia, thoughtfully. She seemed to be examining a sudden idea, and began the pretence of a whistle which afterward became a true fact.

“I wish it wouldn't be generally, don't you? I wish things would all be specially.”

“I wouldn't wi—I wouldn't whistle, if I were you,” said Miss Elizabeth, gently.

“Oh!” Gracia came suddenly with a ripple and coo of laughter, and dropped on her knees by Miss Elizabeth. “You couldn't, you poor aunty, if you tried. You never learned, did you?”

Miss Elizabeth hesitated.

“I once tried to learn—of your father. I used to think it sounded cheerful. But my mother would n't allow it. What I really started to say was, that I wouldn't, if I were you, I wouldn't wish so many things to be other than they are. I used to wish for things to be different, and then, you know, when they stay quite the same, it's such a number of troubles.”

Gracia clasped her fingers about one knee, studied the neatly built fire and the blue and white tiles over it, and thought hard on the subject of wishes. She thought that she had not wished things to be different, so much as to remain the same as of old, when one wore yellow braids, and could whistle with approval, and everything happened specially. Because it is sad when you begin to suspect that the sun and moon and the growths of spring do not care about you, but only act according to habits they have fallen into, and that the shining paths, which seem to lead from beyond the night, are common or accidental and not meant specially. The elder romancers and the latest seers do insist together that they are, that such highways indeed as the moon lays on the water are translunary and come with purposes from a celestial city. The romancers have a simple faith, and the seers an ingenious theory about it. But the days and weeks argue differently. They had begun to trouble the fealty that Gracia held of romance, and she had not met with the theory of the seers.

Sandy Cass went through experiences that night which cannot be written, for there was no sequence in them, and they were translunary and sub-earthly; some of them broken fragments of his life thrown up at him out of a kind of smoky red pit, very much as it used to be in the field hospital. His life seemed to fall easily into fragments. There had not been much sequence in it, since he began running away from the house of the squire at fifteen. It had ranged between the back and front doors of the social structure these ten years. The squire used to storm, because it came natural to him to speak violently; but privately he thought Sandy no more than his own younger self, let loose instead of tied down. He even envied Sandy. He wished he would come oftener to entertain him. Sandy was a periodical novel continued in the next issue, an irregular and barbarous Odyssey, in which the squire, comparing with his Pope's translation, recognized Scylla and Charybdis, Cyclops and Circe, and the interference of the quarrelling gods. But that night the story went through the Land of Shadows and Red Dreams. Sandy came at last to the further edge of the Land; beyond was the Desert of Dreamless Sleep; and then something white and waving was before his eyes, and beyond was a pale green shimmer. He heard a gruff voice:

“Hm—Constitution, Miss Hare. That chap had a solid ancestry. He ought to have had a relapse and died, and he 'll be out in a week.”

Another voice said in an awed whisper:

“He's like my Saint George!”

“Hm—Legendary? This St. G. looks as if he'd made up with his devil. Looks as if they'd been tolerably good friends.”

A third voice remonstrated:

“Doctor!”

“Hm, hm—My nonsense, Miss Gracia, my nonsense.”

The two ladies and the doctor went out.

It was a long, low room, white, fragrant, and fresh. Soft white curtains waved in open windows, and outside the late sunlight drifted shyly through the pale green leaves of young maples. There were dainty things about, touches of silk and lace, blue and white china on bureau and dressing-table, a mirror framed with gilded pillars at the sides and a painted Arcadia above.

“Well, if I ain't an orphan!” grumbled Sandy, feebly.

An elderly woman with a checked apron brought him soup in a bowl. She was quite silent and soon went out.

“It's pretty slick,” he thought, looking around. “I could n't have done better if I'd been a widow.”

The drifting quiet of the days that Sandy lay there pleased him for the time. It felt like a cool poultice on a wound. The purity and fragility of objects was interesting to look at, so long as he lay still and did not move about among them. But he wondered how people could live there right along. They must keep everything at a distance, with a feather-duster between. He had an impression that china things always broke, and white things became dirty. Then it occurred to him that there might be some whose nature, without any worry to themselves, was to keep things clean and not to knock them over, to touch things in a feathery manner, so that they did not have to stay behind a duster. This subject of speculation lasted him a day or two, and Miss Elizabeth and Gracia began to interest him as beings with that special gift. He admired any kind of capability. Miss Elizabeth he saw often, the woman in the checked apron till he was tired of her. But Gracia was only now and then a desirable and fleeting appearance in the doorway, saying:

“Good morning, Saint George.”

She never stayed to tell him why “Saint George.” It came to the point that the notion of her yellow hair would stay by him an hour or more afterward. He began to wake from his dozes, fancying he heard “Good morning, Saint George,” and finally to watch the doorway and fidget.

“This lying abed,” he concluded, “is played out.” He got up and hunted about for his clothes. His knees and fingers trembled. The clothes hung in the closet, cleaned and pressed, in the extraordinary neighborhood of a white muslin dress. Sandy sat down heavily on the bed. Things seemed to be whizzing and whimpering all about him. He waited for them to settle, and pulled on his clothes gradually. At the end of an hour he thought he might pass on parade, and crept out into the hall and down the stairs. The sunlight was warm in the garden and on the porch, and pale green among the leaves. Gracia sat against a pillar, clasping one knee. Miss Elizabeth sewed; her work-basket was fitted up inside on an intricate system. Gracia hailed him with enthusiasm, and Miss Elizabeth remonstrated. He looked past Miss Elizabeth to find the yellow hair.

“This lying abed,” he said feebly, “is played out.”

Sitting in the sunlight, Sandy told his story gradually from day to day. It was all his story, being made up of selections. He was skilful from practice on the squire, but he saw the need of a new principle of selection and combination. His style of narrative was his own. It possessed gravity, candor, simplicity, an assumption that nothing could be unreasonable or surprising which came in the course of events, that all things and all men were acceptable. Gracia thought that simplicity beautiful, that his speech was like the speech of Tanneguy du Bois, and that he looked like Saint George in the picture which hung in her room—a pale young warrior, such as painters once loved to draw, putting in those keen faces a peculiar manhood, tempered and edged like a sword. Sandy looked oddly like him, in the straight lines of brow and mouth. Saint George is taking a swift easy stride over the dead dragon, a kind of level-eyed daring and grave inquiry in his face, as if it were Sandy himself, about to say, “You don't happen to have another dragon? This one wasn't real gamy. I'd rather have an average alligator.” She laughed with ripples and coos, and struggled with lumps in her throat, when Sandy through simplicity fell into pathos. It bewildered her that the funny things and pathetic things were so mixed up and run together, and that he seemed to take no notice of either of them. But she grew stern and indignant when Bill Smith, it was but probable, robbed the unsuspecting sleep of his comrade.

“You see,” said Sandy, apologetically, “Bill was restless, that was the reason. It was his enterprise kept bothering him. Likely he wanted it for something, and he could n't tell how much I might need without waking me up to ask. And he couldn't do that, because that'd have been ridiculous, would n't it? Of course, if he'd waked me up to ask how much I wanted, because he was going to take the rest with him, why, of course, I'd been obliged to get up and hit him, to show how ridiculous it was. Of course Bill saw that, and what could he do? Because there wasn't any way he could tell, don't you see? So he left the pipe and tobacco, and a dollar for luck, and lit out, being—a—restless.”

And Gracia wondered at and gloried in the width of that charity, that impersonal and untamed tolerance.

Then Sandy took up the subject of Kid Sadler. He felt there was need of more virtue and valor. He took Kid Sadler and decorated him. He fitted him with picturesque detail. The Kid bothered him with his raucous voice, froth-dripped mustache, lean throat, black mighty hands, and smell of uncleanness. But Sandy chose him as a poet. It seemed a good start. Gracia surprised him by looking startled and quite tearful, where the poet says:

“Nobody cares who Bill Smith is,

An neither does Bill Smith;”

which had seemed to Sandy only an accurate statement.

But the Kid's poetry needed expurgation and amendment. Sandy did it conscientiously, and spent hours searching for lines of similar rhyme, which would not glance so directly into byways and alleys that were surprising.

“A comin' home,

A roamin' home—”

“I told the Kid,” he added critically, “roamin' wasn't a good rhyme, but he thought it was a pathetic word.”

“Oh, when I was a little boy 't was things I did n't know,

An when I growed I knowed a lot of things that was n't so;

An now I know a few things that's useful an selected:

As how to put hard liquor where hard liquor is expected—”

and so on, different verses, which the Kid called his “Sing Song.” Sandy's judgment hung in doubt over this whether the lines were objectionable. He tempered the taste of the working literary artist for distinct flavor, and his own for that which is accurate, with the cautions of a village library committee, and decided on,

“An puts them things in moral verse to uses onexpected.”

“I don't know what he meant by 'onexpected,'” Sandy commented with a sense of helplessness, “but maybe he meant that he didn't know what he did mean. Because poets,” getting more and more entangled, “poets are that kind they can take a word and mean anything in the neighborhood, or something that'll occur to 'em next week.”

Gracia admired the Kid, though Miss Elizabeth thought she ought to refer to him as Mr. Sadler, which seemed a pity. And she declared a violent love for Little Irish, because “his auburn hair turned bricky red with falling down a well,” and because he wished to climb hills by stepping on the back of his neck. It was like Alice's Adventures, and especially like the White Knight's scheme to be over a wall by putting his head on top and standing on his head.

After all humors and modifications, Sandy's story was a wild and strange thing. It took new details from day to day, filling in the picture. To Gracia's imagination it spread out beyond romance, full of glooms, flashes, fascinations, dangers of cities, war and wilderness, and in spite of Sandy's self-indifference, it was he who dominated the pilgrimage, coloring it with his comment. The pilgrim appeared to be a person to whom the Valley of the Shadow of Death was equally interesting with Vanity Fair, and who entering the front gate of the Celestial City with rejoicing would presently want to know whither the back gate would take him. It seemed a pilgrimage to anywhere in search of everything, but Gracia began to fancy it was meant to lead specially to the new garden gate that opened so broadly on the street, and so dreamed the fancy into belief. She saw Sandy in imagination coming out of the pit-black night and lying down in the tool-house by the wet shining path. The white gate was justified.

Sandy's convalescence was not a finished thing, but he was beginning to feel energy starting within him. Energy! He knew the feeling well. It was something that snarled and clawed by fits.

“I'm a wildcat,” he said to himself reflectively, “sitting on eggs. Why don't he get off? Now,” as if addressing a speculative question for instance to Kid Sadler, “he could n't expect to hatch anything, could he?”

It was such a question as the Kid would have been pleased with, and have considered justly. “Has he got the eggs?”

“I don't know. It's a mixed figure, Kid.”

“Does he feel like he wanted to hatch 'em?”

“What'd he do with 'em hatched? That's so, Kid.”

“Is he a wildcat?”

“Yep.”

“He is. Can a wildcat hatch eggs? No, he can't.”

“A wildcat”—the Kid would have enjoyed following this figure—“ain't an incubator. There ain't enough peacefulness in him. He'd make a yaller mess of 'em an' take to the woods with the mess on his whiskers. It stands to reason, don't it? He ain't in his own hole on a chickadee's nest.”

Sandy stood looking over the gate into the village street, which was shaded to dimness by its maples, a still, warm, brooding street.

“Like an incubator,” he thought, and heard Gracia calling from up the path:

“Saint George!”

Sandy turned. She came down the path to the gate.

“Aren't you going to fix the peony bed?”

“Not,” said Sandy, “if you stay here by the gate.”

Gracia looked away from him quickly into the street.

“It's warm and quiet, isn't it? It's like—”

Zoar was not to her like anything else.

“Like an incubator,” said Sandy, gloomily, and Gracia looked up and laughed.

“Oh, I shouldn't have thought of that.”

“Kid Sadler would have said it, if he'd been here.”

“Would he?”

“Just his kind of figure. And he'd be saying further it was time Sandy Cass took to the woods.”

He had an irritating spasm of desire to touch the slim white fingers on the gate. Gracia moved her hands nervously. Sandy saw the fingers tremble, and swore at himself under his breath.

“Why, Saint George?”

“Thinking he was a wildcat and he'd make a yel—a—Maybe thinking he didn't look nat—I mean,” Sandy ended very lamely, “the Kid'd probably use figures of speech and mean something that'd occur to him by and by.”

“You're not well yet. You're not going so soon,” she said, speaking quite low.

Sandy meditated a number of lies, and concluded that he did not care for any of them. He seemed to dislike them as a class.

This kind of internal struggle was new and irritating. He had never known two desires that would not compromise equably, or one of them recognize its place and get out of the road. The savage restlessness in his blood, old, well-known, expected, something in brain and bone, had always carried its point and always would. He accounted for all things in all men by reference to it, supposing them to feel restless, the inner reason why a man did anything. But here now was another thing, hopelessly fighting it, clinging, exasperating; somewhere within him it was a kind of solemn-eyed sorrow that looked outward and backward over his life, and behold, the same was a windy alkali desert that bore nothing and was bitter in the mouth; and at the ends of his fingers it came to a keen point, a desire to touch Gracia's hair and the slim fingers on the gate.

Gracia looked up and then away.

“You're not well yet.”

“You've been uncommonly good to me, and all—”

“You mustn't speak of it that way. It spoils it.” It seemed to both as if they were swaying nearer together, a languid, mystical atmosphere thickening about them. Only there was the drawback with Sandy of an inward monitor, with a hoarse voice like Kid Sadler's, who would be talking to him in figures and proverbs.

“Keep away from china an' lace; they break an' stain; this thing has been observed. Likewise is love a bit o' moonlight, sonny, that's all, an' a tempest, an' a sucked orange. Come out o' that, Sandy, break away; for, in the words o' the prophet, 'It's no square game,' an' this here girl, God bless her! but she plays too high, an' you can't call her, Sandy, you ain't got the chips. Come away, come away.”

“And that,” Sandy concluded the council, “is pretty accurate. I'm broke this deal.”

He stood up straight and looked at Gracia with eyes drawn and narrowed.

She felt afraid and did not understand.

“You don't know me. If you knew me, you'd know I have to go.”

The wind rose in the afternoon, and blew gustily through street and garden. The windows of Miss Elizabeth's sitting-room were closed. The curtains hung in white, lifeless folds. But in Gracia's room above the windows were open, and the white curtains shook with the wind. Delicate and tremulous, they clung and moulded themselves one moment to the casement, and then broke out, straining in the wind that tossed the maple leaves and went up and away into the wild sky after the driving clouds.

Sandy turned north up the village street, walking irresolutely. It might be thirty miles to Wimberton. The squire had sent him money. He could reach the railroad and make Wimberton that night, but he did not seem to care about it.

Out of the village, he fell into the long marching stride, and the motion set his blood tingling. Presently he felt better; some burden was shaken off; he was foot-loose and free of the open road, looking to the friction of event. At the end of five miles he remembered a saying of Kid Sadler's, chuckled over it, and began humming other verses of the “Sing Song,” so called by the outcast poet.

“Oh, when I was a little boy, I laughed an then I cried,

An ever since I done the same, more privately, inside.

There's a joke between this world an me 'n it's tolerable grim,

An God has got his end of it, an some of it's on him.

For he made a man with his left han, an the rest o' things

with his right;

An the right knew not what the left han did, for he hep

it out o' sight.

It's maybe a Wagner opery, it ain't no bedtime croon,

When the highest note in the universe is a half note out

o' tune''

“That appears to be pretty accurate,” he thought. “Wonder how the Kid comes to know things.”

He swung on enjoying the growth of vigor, the endless, open, travelled road, and the wind blowing across his face.