CHAPTER I.
A Father’s Love

Mauney Bard did not enjoy mending fences. They were quite essential in the general economy of farming. Without them the cows would wander where they had no business, trampling precious crops or perhaps getting mired in these infernal boglands. In principle, therefore, his present occupation was logical, but in practice it was tedious.

During the long afternoon he occasionally paused for diversion to gaze across the wide tract of verdant wilderness before him. Like a lake, choked by vegetation from beneath and strangled by determined vegetation on all sides, the Lantern Marsh surrendered its aquatic ambition. There was very little water to be seen. Only a distant glare of reflected sky remained here and there, espied between banks of thick sedges. A cruel conspiracy of nature! Acres of rice-grass and blue flags with their bayonet-like leaves stabbed up through the all-but-hidden surface, while a flat pavement of rank lilies hastened to conceal any water that dared show itself. For two gloomy miles the defeated thing extended, while outraged evergreens, ill-nourished and frantic, crowded close, like friends, to shield its perennial disgrace.

It had always been there, unexplored and forbidding, inhabited by the mud hen, the wild duck, and the blue crane. Mauney sometimes hated its desolate presence and wondered why his father’s farm had to be so near it. But the question challenged custom and actuality—things his young brain had not learned to affront.

Late in the afternoon he was roused from work by a sound as of tensed, satin fans cutting the air. He looked up to behold the broad wings of a blue crane, passing low. The rising wind which had roused it from its feeding grounds brought the dank odor of decayed poplar wood and the wild aroma of rice-grass. His eye dropped to the green waste of the marsh, brushed into fitful waves of tidal grey, and then shifted to the moving limbs of bare hemlocks and birches at the border of the swamp.

Chilled by the sharp blast, he straightened himself to his feet, his shirt moulded to the underlying sculptory of his vigorous young chest. His wind-tossed, auburn hair peeled back from his fine forehead, as his wide, blue eyes received the rugged beauty and his lips smiled from sheer visual delight. Then, as he gazed, a bright magic, bursting from the west behind him, transformed his wilderness momentarily to a static tableau of metallic gold.

It was supper time. Moments since the kitchen bell had been ringing, rocking under its cupola on the kitchen roof. His father, his brother and the hired man, fertilizing the grain field beyond the shoulder of the hill, would have heard it and be promptly on their way. After drawing on his faded coat, he picked up a pair of pliers from the ground and shoved them into the hip pocket of his overalls. He shouldered his axe and saw, then started.

The long marsh was separated from his father’s farm by the Beulah road, a narrow clay highway curving past the head of the swamp toward the village of Beulah. In the opposite direction, it ran on eventually to the town of Lockwood on the bank of the St. Lawrence. The Bard farmhouse, a prosperous red brick structure, faced the road and the swamp, presenting a stone fence of dry masonry, and within the fence an apple-orchard. At one side a lane, guarded by a board gate, led in from the road.

As Mauney swung up the lane toward the farmyard the crisp snap of a whip was borne to his ears from below the shoulder of the grain-field, followed by a man’s call to his horses:

“Git ap!... yah lazy devils!... git ap!”

A second crack of the whip—then the rumble of heavy wheels and the rattle of the board-bottom of the wagon. The usual, boring sights and sounds!

The yard echoed to the barking of a collie who was springing in savage enjoyment at the heels of tardy cows. The lazy animals jogged in awkward trot, as their full udders swung to the rhythm of their gait. As Mauney crossed the yard, wading with gluey steps through the soft under-foot, the dog darted toward him, splashing through brown-stained pools of stagnant water.

“Go on back, Rover!” he commanded, stepping aside to avoid his rough welcome. “Chase them up, Rover!”

Rover paused on his four feet only long enough to cast up a glance of searching inquiry at his young master’s face, when, as if satisfied that his mood were congenial, he immediately returned to his task with doubled despatch.

In making toward the great, red barn at the farther side of the yard, Mauney passed the henhouse, from which radiated a pungent, ammoniacal odor, all too familiar to his nostrils. In the drive shed, on the beams several white hens were settling to roost. One of these fowl, jealous of position, pecked the head of its fellow, causing an expostulant cackle of pain. The sudden disturbance of this sound spread to the precincts of the quiescent henhouse, whereupon one crescendo of rasping invective followed another, leading to a distracting medley of full-throated excitement, that subsided only at the masterly clarion of a rooster, angry at being disturbed.

The returning wagon now rumbled nearer, over flat stones behind the barn, its heavy roar measured by the regular, metallic clip of the horses’ well-shod hoofs. “Git ap, there! What’re yuh doin’ there!” came the gruff voice of his father. A loud whip-crack broke the steady rhythm of the horses’ hoofs into an irregular gallop, while the thunder of the wagon filled the yard with increasing vibration.

Mauney ascended the stone bridge to the great double doors, which, owing to the wind, he opened with difficulty, and entered to grease the teeth of his saw and hang it carefully on two spikes driven into the side of the hay mow. He stood his axe in a corner and tossed the pliers into an empty soap box that stood on a rough carpenter’s bench. One of the doors, which he had left open, now slammed shut, stirring up a stifling cloud of chaff and rendering the interior of the barn unpleasantly dark. In turning he stumbled over a stick of stove-wood, used for blocking the wheels of the hay-wagon, and fell forward. Putting, out his right hand, he brought the palm down heavily on the sharp end of a spike that projected from an upturned board. He regained his feet quickly and clasped his injured hand. It was too dark to see, but he felt a trickle of hot fluid accumulating in his other palm. A sickening pain mounted his arm in spirals, but he whistled a snatch of a song, and left the barn.

As he passed quickly toward the kitchen, the heavy team of Clydesdales rounded the corner of the yard, lifting their front feet high, their heads tightly reined, with foam blowing from their white mouths. As they were pulled up to a stop a horse within the barn whinnied. Then Mauney presently heard the jingle of chains as the team were being unhitched, and in the quiet air, his father’s voice saying:

“The young fellah’s gave us the slip!”

His brother William’s voice replied in the same disagreeable tone: “Wonder he wouldn’t give us a hand unhitchin.’ Fixin’ fences is easier’n spreadin’ cow dung. Least he could do would be to throw the horses a little hay!”

A warm wave of anger flushed Mauney’s face as he halted in the middle of the yard, half determined to go back, but his hand drove him imperatively toward the kitchen. On the edge of the porch he relieved his boots of adhering mud and manure on a scraper made from an old draw-knife turned upside down between supports. The two long upper panels of the kitchen door were replaced by glass and draped inside by a plain cotton curtain, through which a glow of lamp-light gave Mauney a grateful impression of homely coziness. After rubbing his boots on the oval verandah mat of plaited rags, he pressed down the thumb latch and entered.

“Hello, Maun,” came a woman’s voice from the pantry, half-drowned by the noise of a mechanical egg-beater. “D’juh get the marsh fence finished?”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, you remember,” he replied as affably as his feelings allowed.

“That’s right,” she called above the sound, “but your old man prob’ly thinks it didn’t take over a week.”

Mauney was examining his hand near the coal-oil lamp on the kitchen table. The spike had completely perforated his palm leaving a torn wound that still bled. He tossed his hat to the old couch by the door and bent nearer the lamp. Although big-bodied he had a boyish face, filled now with youthful perplexity. The skin over the prominent bridge of his nose had an appearance of being tightly drawn, although his nostrils were as sensitive as the young lips beneath them. His chin, by its fullness, suggested a vague, personal determination to be expected in one older, but his eyes sparkled with that devotion of eager attention which is reserved to youth alone.

He glanced toward the pantry from which the beating sound still emerged. “Do you know what to do for this?” he asked loudly.

The noise of the beater stopped.

“What d’juh say?”

“I hurt my hand and—”

She came forth, with her muscular arms covered by shreds of dough, and walked to glance at his stained hand.

“Oh good God!” she exclaimed, turning away. “I certainly do hate blood, Maun.”

She began rubbing the adherent dough from her arms.

“Just a minute,” she said. “Go soak it in the wash basin—here’s some warm water.” Taking a tea-kettle from the flat-topped stove, she poured into the basin, adding some cold water from the cistern pump.

As Mauney proceeded to follow her advice she rummaged through a cotton bag, hung on the back of the pantry door. “It’ll be all right, Maun,” she cheerfully prophesied. “A cut like that is safe if it bleeds, but if it don’t, watch out!”

She was a well-formed woman of twenty-seven, a trifle masculine about the shoulders, but with a feminine enough face displaying sharp, hazel eyes beneath black, straight brows. Her nose was passably refined, but her full lips wore a careless smile that lent not only a gleam of golden teeth, but a mild atmosphere of coarseness to her face. The excitement of Mauney’s injury had called up circumscribed patches of crimson to her cheeks and accentuated the nervous huskiness of her voice.

“One time,” she continued, while she tore a white cloth into long narrow strips, “my cousin ran a nail in her foot. They got Doc. Horne, and he did—God only knows what—but her foot got the size of a pungkin, only redder.”

“Blood-poisoning?”

“Yep.”

As she rolled two or three crude bandages she glanced occasionally at Mauney, with keen, appraising eyes that followed the stretch of his broad shoulders bent over the sink. As she nervously applied the bandage, a moment later, the sound of boots scraping outside the door contributed an added haste to her manner. Before she had finished, the door opened to admit Seth Bard.

Mauney’s father was of average height, but heavily built, with ponderous shoulders and a thick, short neck. Beneath the broad, level rim of his Stetson the lamp-light showed the full, florid face of a man who continually peered at life through half-closed lids in calloused, self-confident reserve, or as if hiding what men might read in his eyes, if he opened them. He stopped abruptly inside the door, his thumbs caught into the top of his trousers, and stood haughtily still for an instant, the personification of master in his house.

Mauney’s back was turned toward him so that the father could not see the occupation causing such seemingly friendly terms between his son and his hired woman. His narrow eyes studied them in mystification.

“What’s all this?” he gruffly demanded, as the face of William appeared over his shoulder with the same inquisitive expression.

“Annie’s doing up my hand,” Mauney replied calmly.

Bard covered the floor in long strides to glance at the white bandage through which a red stain had already soaked.

“Do it up yerself!” he commanded, seizing the woman’s arm and pulling her away. “Where’s the supper, Annie?”

“Oh, it’ll be ready by the time you get some o’ the muck off your hands,” she said, good-naturedly, as she set about stirring a boiling pot on the stove.

As Mauney stood trying to adjust the dressing, he struggled to overcome an instinct of fight, wondering how much longer he would be able to tolerate his father’s crude domination. Presently the woman had the supper served and the men, having washed themselves, were sitting down.

The oval table was covered with a plain yellow oil-cloth. At the middle stood a heavy earthenware dish filled with steaming, half-peeled potatoes, and near it, on a folded newspaper, an agateware sauce-pan held beet-roots. Five plates of blurred willow pattern were piled by the father’s place, while before them a roast of pork, with crisply-browned skin, still sizzled in its own grease. By the woman’s place, at the opposite end, stood a large agate tea-pot and a chunk of uncolored butter, upon whose surface salt crystals sparkled in the lamplight. The lamp was shaded by a sloping collar of scorched pasteboard, while the constant flicker of the yellow flame rendered tremulously uncertain the faces around the board.

Mauney’s usual taciturnity, inspired by a feeling of being constantly misunderstood whenever he spoke, was increased by the pain in his hand, so that he sat in silence, catching the conversation of the others as something quite outside his own immediate consciousness. He was thinking about a new book the school teacher had loaned him.

“Well,” remarked Bard, seizing his carving knife, and plunging his fork deep into the roast, “I guess this just about finishes the pig, don’t it?”

“Yep. You’ll have to kill to-morrow,” the woman replied, as she reached for the hired man’s tea cup. She noticed he was nibbling at an onion, which he had taken from his pocket. “Ain’t you afraid yer best girl will go back on you, Snowball?” she teased.

“Nope,” he said with a weak-minded grin. “I d-don’t never worry much about the women folks, so I don’t!” He was a small-bodied, but wiry, individual of perhaps forty-five, with a scranny, wry neck and a burnished face of unsymmetrical design. The cervical deformity tilted his head sidewise and gave him an appearance of being in a constant attitude of listening, as if an unseen, but shorter, person were always beside him whispering in his ear. When he spoke he snapped his eyelids as if he alertly appreciated the full significance of his environment, and was perpetually on guard against the wiles of his associates.

“Hold on, Snowball!” William said, across the table, with a glare of mock earnestness, as he reached to sink his knife into the butter. “You know you’re lyin’. All the pretty gals up to Beulah is crazy about you.”

Snowball laughed a silent, internal kind of laugh that caused his shoulders to rise and fall in rapid jerks to its rhythm, and ended in its first audible accompaniment—a sound exactly like the suction of a sink-basin drawing in the last eddying portion of water.

“The gals is g-gone on you, Bill, not me!” he retorted, with much keen winking of his lids, and entered immediately on a second bout of noiseless, private laughter which terminated, after the others had forgotten his remarks, in the same astonishing sound.

“D’juh see the bay mare to-day, Bill?” Bard presently inquired, across the level of a wide slice of bread, from which he had bitten out a semi-circular portion. William looked up knowingly from his well-loaded fork and nodded his head sagely with a slight lifting of his brows, as though an intimate understanding existed.

“I should say so. What are you going to do with her, Dad?” he asked.

Bard’s slit-like eyes narrowed even more than usual, as for a moment, he chewed meditatively.

“Goin’ to get rid of her,” he said, with the careless quickness of one pronouncing expert opinion. “Sorry I raised her, Bill. Never liked her sire. Thompson never had much luck with that Percheron stud. He’s been leadin’ that horse around down the Clark Settlement, and I seen some o’ the colts. All the same!”

“What’s the matter with the bay mare?” Mauney enquired anxiously.

“She’s goin’ to be sold—that’s what’s the matter with her!” he replied curtly. “And I don’t want to hear no growlin’, understand me!”

“I wasn’t growling.”

“No—but you was a-thinkin’ in them terms.”

“Well, I thought she was mine, Dad. You gave her to me when she was a colt. I never thought so much of any animals as I do of her, and, more than that, I never noticed anything wrong with her.”

“H’m!” sneered Bard. “You got to go into farmin’ a little deeper’n you do, to notice anything.”

Outside the door, the dog growled, then barked in an unfriendly tone. The sound of a horse’s hoofs in the lane and the squeaking of a buggy caused them to stop eating.

“Dave McBratney!” William announced presently, glancing through the window into the twilight. “I’d know that horse if I seen it in hell.”

Bard, after first loading his mouth, rose to open the door.

“Good evenin’, Dave!” he said.

“Good night, Mr. Bard,” came a young man’s voice. “Wait till I tie up this here hoss. He’s liable to run away.”

This provoked laughter around the table which lasted until McBratney, a tall, dashing youth with playful, black eyes, stepped into the kitchen and greeted the people with individual nods. A slight discoloration of his lips indicated that he was chewing tobacco. He wore a black, soft hat, with its rim pulled down in front, and the tip of a peacock feather stuck into the sweat-stained band at one side. Beneath his jacket, a grey flannel shirt with soft collar boasted a polka-dot bow-tie and a heavy watch chain, whose large golden links connected two breast pockets. From the handkerchief pocket of his coat, protruded the border of a red bandanna and the stem of a pipe.

“Been up to Beulah?” William asked.

“Yep!”

“Anything new?”

“Nothin’ much, Bill,” replied McBratney, as he seated himself in the low, yellow rocking-chair and began to teeter back and forth. “The only stir is the new preacher, I guess. I heard he was comin’ down the Lantern Marsh this afternoon to make some calls.”

“I reckon that’s why you cleaned out, Dave!” said Bard.

“You bet; but they say he’s quite a nice, sociable little chap. Joe Taylor was telling me in Abe Lavanagh’s barber shop that he seen the new preacher up at the post office, waitin’ for the mail to be distributed. He says he was grabbin’ right aholt o’ everybody’s paw, just like a regular old-timer.”

“What’s his wife like, Dave?” Bard enquired.

“I don’t know. Dad was sayin’ last night, it don’t matter about the preacher so much; it all depends on his wife, whether they’re goin’ to take with the people.”

“Surely,” agreed Bard. “You take McGuire who was here before Squires. McGuire may have had his faults—I’m not sayin’ he didn’t—but he wasn’t too bad a little fellow at all. But that wife o’ his—why, she’d a’ ruined any man!”

“Lap-dogs!” laughed McBratney.

“Sure, and you’d a’ thought she had some kind o’ royal blood in her the way she’d strut down the sidewalk.” Bard delved in his hip pocket for his pipe as he pushed his chair back from the table. “A preacher’s wife,” he continued philosophically, but with his usual oracular impressiveness, “has got to be sort o’ human-like. Did you hear what happened to McGuire?”

“No.”

Bard, his empty pipe perched between his teeth, blew several quick blasts of air through it to clear it of sticky contents, while he cut fine shavings of tobacco from a plug with a large-bladed jack-knife.

“I was talkin’ to somebody who had been out west,” he continued, “and McGuire was runnin’ a real estate office, makin’ money too.”

McBratney reserved his comment until he had gone to the door to spit. “That’s a nice job for a preacher to go into, Mr. Bard,” he said, sarcastically. “I guess he wasn’t called of the Lord.”

“I never blamed him!” Bard exclaimed, striking the table with his stubby right hand, from which the middle fingers were gone. “No, sir! He showed the man in him. But there’s just one thing more I’d a’ done!”

“What’s that, Dad?” William asked.

Bard leaned eagerly forward and clenched his fists. “I’d a’ got that prig of a woman cornered up between me and the end of the room, and I’d a’ choked her till she was green in the face, and then I’d a’ handed over all her lap-dogs an’ yellow parasols and I’d a’ shot her right out onto the road!”

“You’re damned right,” approved McBratney.

“You bet,” agreed William Bard.

The humor of his master’s threat had evidently appealed very forcibly to Snowball, for, after a few seconds, he emitted the queer suction sound, heralding the termination of his period of mirth.

A few minutes later they all left the kitchen for the dairy shed, where the cows waited to be milked. Mauney, disabled for milking, pumped water and carried pails. He noticed McBratney conversing in low tones with his brother, who occasionally turned up the cow’s teat to sprinkle Rover with a warm spray of milk.

When the milking was finished, the cows were wandering slowly back toward the pasture and William had driven off toward Beulah with his companion, Mauney entered the stable and unfastened the latch of a box-stall.

“Whoa, Jennie girl!” he said softly.

The mare, crunching hay, turned her head, whinnied, and stepped over for him to come in. In the dim light that entered from a cobwebbed window he could just see her big eyes watching him, as he put out his hand and stroked her sleek neck. She was his great pride, for, since the day she had been given to him, he had watered and fed her himself, brushed and washed her and led her to pasture. She was the only living thing that he had regarded as his very own, but to-night he felt uncertain about his claim. Quickly he ran his hand over her legs, patted her chest and listened to the sound of her breathing.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Jennie, girl,” he said as he took a fork and threw straw about the floor of the stall.

It was as if he was being robbed of an old friend. Her face haunted him as he went back to the kitchen where his father and the woman were discussing a new cream separator; and when he went upstairs to his room he could see the dark eyes of his pony looking toward him with pathetic appeal.

If his father and brother were studying to render his life miserable, he thought, they would not improve on their present success. What had he done to deserve their constant dislike? If he picked up a book he had learned to expect their ridicule. If he were detected in a mood of quiet reflection, a seemingly normal occupation, why should he have learned to expect a sarcastic jeer? He felt that his mother, had she but lived, would have understood better, for her nature was more like his own.

In such a mood of discontent he sat idly on the edge of his bed, striving to find some possible fault of his own that might merit his evident ostracism. Previously, the possession of his bay pony had given him unbelievable comfort, for in moments of suppressed exasperation he had gone to her stall and transferred, with gentle pattings, the affection that he was prevented from bestowing on his kin. “We’re old chums, aren’t we, Jennie?” Then the world would look brighter and consolation would come to him. But the prospect of her being sold to a stranger made him very sad.

Presently a horse and buggy drove up the lane and stopped almost beneath him. Mauney opened the window to listen, since he knew it was too early for William to be returning.

“Who’s that?” he heard his father’s voice enquire.

“Is this where Mr. Bard lives?” enquired a strange but cultured voice.

“You bet.”

“I’m your pastor, Mr. Bard,” the strange voice continued. “And if you have a few moments, I’ll come in just long enough to get acquainted. It’s a little late, but I didn’t think you’d be in bed yet. I’ll just tie her here, thanks. My name, as I presume you’ve heard, is Tough, but I’m not as tough as I look.”

“How are yu’, Mr. Tough?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“There’s nobody here, but me an’ the hired woman—but—”

“No matter! I’ll take you as I find you. I understand that Mrs. Bard died some years since.”

“Yes. My wife wasn’t never very strong, an’ I never married again.”

“Very sad, indeed. We can’t always tell what’s behind these things, but we try to think they happen for a purpose.”

In Mauney’s breast something tightened at these words. Dim recollections of his mother’s faded face, so thin, but so ineffably sweet, as she closed her eyes in their interminable rest, made him wonder if her going had not been better than staying—staying with the man who had looked, dry-eyed, upon her dead face! Staying to share the unhappiness of her younger son! A wave of joy thrilled him. For one thing he would remain for ever glad—that his mother was dead, safely dead—out of his father’s reach!

He did not know how long he had stood by the window, but he presently heard the kitchen door open.

“That’s one of Tom Sunderland’s livery horses, ain’t it, Mr. Tough?”

“Yes, and he’s very slow and lazy. As a matter of fact I wanted to mention horses to you.”

“You ain’t got a horse o’ yer own, then?”

“Not yet. You might know perhaps where I could get a reliable pony, quiet enough for Mrs. Tough?”

“Now, Mr. Tough, maybe I might. I suppose you want a purty good piece o’ horse flesh?”

“Well, yes, I do.”

“Wife a horse fancier, Mr. Tough?”

“Oh, she’s fond of driving; yes.”

A slight pause, during which Bard coughed.

“It’s purty hard,” he said, clearing his throat, “to buy a horse that’s a good roadster and at the same time a good looker an’ quiet like; understand me.”

“Just so.”

“Now I’ve got a three-year-old mare here that ain’t never been beat in these here parts for looks. O’ course, I ain’t never even thought o’ sellin’ ’er. She was sired by the best Percheron that was ever led around this section.”

“Something fancy, I imagine.”

“She lifts her feet like a lady; she’s fast, and intelligent more’n the hired man.”

“What’s she worth?”

Bard laughed. “Well,” he replied “I hardly know, as I say, I never thought o’ lettin’ ’er go.”

“But you could give me some idea.”

“I know I turned down a three-hundred-dollar offer a couple o’ months ago.”

The Reverend Tough whistled softly. “The Lord’s servants,” he said, “are notoriously lacking in the world’s goods, Mr. Bard. I fear I would have to seek a cheaper animal.”

There was a well-considered pause before Bard spoke.

“You better come down and see her in the daylight,” he said. “You might not want her. But I’d like to see you with a good horse—your profession calls for it.”

“I think so, too.”

“And when it comes to that, I wouldn’t be against knocking off, say, a hundred, if you really want her.”

“Really! That’s good of you. Now, look here, Mr. Bard, I’ll come down to-morrow and see her. It’s comforting to know that a man in these days can get a little for love, when he hasn’t got the price.”

With mutual expressions of good will their conversation ended and Mauney listened to the preacher’s buggy squeaking down the clay road toward Beulah. He walked to the front window of his room and watched it until it disappeared in the mist that had blown westward from the swamp. Then his gaze moved to the Lantern Marsh, a grey, desolate waste under a fog through which the moon struggled. His nature recoiled from the hated picture.

Soon he slept. He dreamed of his father—and of a warm stream of blood he could not see, but only feel in his hands.

CHAPTER II.
Teachers and Preachers.

The sultry heat of the April noon rose in tremulous vibrations from the barnyard, next day, when for a moment, absolute silence prevailed. From beneath his sun-splashed hat the shaded face of Bard scowled into the blue shadow of the barn where Mauney stood indolently biting at the end of a wisp of timothy.

“What are yuh mopin’ about?” Bard called sharply. “Wake up! I don’t want no more o’ this here mopin’, understand me. The mare is sold and that’s the end of it. Shake a leg, there, and go hitch up Charlie. You’ve got to drive up to Beulah an’ get this here cheque into the bank afore it closes. D’juh hear?”

Past the end of the kitchen Mauney’s eye caught the retreating figure of his pony being led up the clay road behind the preacher’s buggy. His dishevelled auburn hair was stuck to his glistening forehead, and his clear blue eyes burned with an emotion that gave a bitter firmness to his lips. Before he could pull himself from his mood his father had come with rapid strides near him.

“Are you goin’ to move?” he fiercely demanded, his eyes glaring hatred. “Or am I goin’ to move yuh?”

Mauney calmly ignored his threat, while his eyes focused indifferently on the cheque in his father’s hand.

“D’yuh want me to mess up yer pretty face?” fumed Bard.

“I’m not just a slave of yours,” said Mauney deliberately, with a perceptible straightening of his body, as he turned to enter the stable door.

“You better move, young fellow,” said Bard, following him. “Here, take this cheque. And mind you get back in time to finish that fence or you’ll work in the moon-light.”

Mauney drove off in a dazed state of mind, wondering if his lot were but typical of human life in general, or if, by some chance he had been born into an exceptionally disagreeable home. He wondered what particular power enabled him to bear the insulting treatment invariably accorded him and whether that mysterious force would always continue to serve him. He had tried faithfully to look for likeable traits in his father’s character. He admired his strength of purpose—that terrible will that drove him through his long days of labor under hot suns—and felt that he was very capable. He knew that the farm would always be skilfully run under his father’s guidance, but this was the full statement of his filial faith. For beyond this cold admiration there was no attraction, no hint of warm regard.

At the end of the swamp the road curved to the left in a broad bend, giving a view of the shining tin roofs of Beulah, on a hill two miles before him. Nearby stood the Brick School House, with its little bell-tower, its white picket fence, its turnstile and bare-worn playground, the neat pile of stove-wood by the weather-stained shed at the rear, and the two outhouses by the corners of the lot. As he drew nearer the bell rocked twice, giving out its laconic signal for noon recess. In a moment a scramble of children with tin lunch-pails poured forth, running to selected spots under the bare maples.

“Hello, Mauney,” came a familiar voice from the door as he passed.

“Are you going up to the village, Miss Byrne?” he asked, lifting his hat.

“I’d like to?” she smiled.

“Come on,” he invited, cramping the horse to the other side, that she might more conveniently enter.

Miss Jean Byrne was a graceful young woman whose manner breathed unusual freshness. Her oval face possessed a certain nun-like beauty, chiefly by reason of her deep hazel eyes, quiet emblems of a devotional disposition. Her good color, however, and an indulgent fulness of lips, saved her face from an ultra-spirituality and her low, contralto laughter neutralized a first impression of asceticism. Mauney had never noticed that she was really quite a large woman, although he had been a pupil in her school for two years.

“How goes it, Mauney?” she asked, having noticed an unwonted sadness in his face, usually so bright.

“Not too badly. I’m enjoying that book you lent me,” he replied, with a smile.

“Come now—something’s wrong,” she said, searching his face as they drove along together.

“I’m feeling sore to-day,” he admitted, striking the wheel with his whip. “My father sold my pony to the preacher, and I’m not going to forgive him. It was my pony. He hadn’t any right to sell it.”

After a pause he turned and looked into her eyes. “I guess we all have our little troubles, Miss Byrne, eh?”

She understood him. In fact Miss Byrne held him more intimately in her quiet thoughts than he surmised, and more intimately than their ages and contact would have explained. She had often stood over him, during his last term, observing the mould of his shoulders under his loose, flannel shirt, instead of the book on his desk. She had often lost the thread of her instructions in the unconscious light of his blue-eyed day-dreaming. Then, too, his English compositions had displayed such merit that she had marvelled at his ability, and wondered whether environment were really as strong an influence as heredity in forming a pupil’s mind. Every teacher who is fortunate has one pupil who becomes the oasis in the daily desert of thankless toil, the visible reward of seeds sown in darkness. Mauney Bard was easily her oasis and reward. She always maintained that there were only two classes of pupils who impressed their teacher, the noisy, empty ones and the “dog” kind. The canine qualities she meant were silent faithfulness and undemonstrative affection.

Her wistful eyes softened with delicate sympathy as she glanced at his clean profile, and she thought of a sculptor’s marble. But whenever he turned toward her, it was the trusting simplicity of a youth talking with his mother. Mother! It was forced upon her, so that her breast warmed with medleys of sensation.

“Oh, what’s wrong with your hand?” she asked.

“Nothing much—I jabbed it on a nail yesterday.”

“Aren’t you doing anything for it?”

“Annie’s the doctor—that’s our hired girl.”

“Mauney Bard, you go straight to the doctor’s,” she said. “You might lose your arm, or even your life, if it becomes inflamed.”

He looked at her quizzically, and then nodded with a smile. “All right,” he agreed.

The horse broke into a walk at the foot of the big hill, leading up to the main street of Beulah. At the top the thoroughfare with its bare archway of maples came into view. The houses were characteristic of the residential section, set back beyond lawns and well separated, although here and there small grocery stores were to be seen with well-filled windows and idle, white-aproned proprietors. As they passed the double-windowed front of the Beulah weekly, the blatant explosions of a gasoline engine indicated that the journal was on press. A little further along a lamp-post bearing a large coal-oil lamp stood by the board side-walk, with a signboard nailed at right angles to the street, displaying in large black letters the name “Doctor Horne,” while the physician’s residence, a neat stone house with black pencilled mortar, looked out from a grove of basswood trees.

“Do you know Dr. Horne?” she enquired.

He nodded.

“There he is now,” she said, “He’s certainly an odd genius. Look at the sleeves!”

Horne was a big, solid man of sixty, with jet-black hair under his grey cloth cap, and jet-black, bushy eyebrows raised airily. His neat, black moustache was pushed forward in a mock-careless pout. He walked with great speed, as if engrossed completely in his thoughts, but with an air of picturesque indifference, as if his thoughts were entirely lightsome. At intervals he tugged at his coat sleeves, first one and then the other, a nervous eccentricity of no significance except that it kept his coat cuffs near his elbows, displaying his white shirt sleeves for the amusement of other pedestrians. Beulah never tired of this sexagenarian bachelor. He drove a horse as black as his own hair and demanded the same degree of speed from it as from himself, namely, the limit. When starting on a country call he would jump into his buggy and race to the border of the village, beyond which the journey was made more leisurely, while on his return the whip was not taken from its holder until the houses came in sight. The Beulahite pausing on the street to watch him would remark with a chuckle:

“There goes Doc. Horne, hell-for-leather!”

Mauney left Miss Byrne at the post-office, visited the bank, and drove directly back to the doctor’s, hitching his horse to the lamp-post. The office was a smaller portion of the house at one side, which Mauney approached. He rang the bell.

“Come in out of that!” immediately came the doctor’s heavy voice.

Mauney stepped into an office furnished with several leather chairs, a desk on which reposed a skull, a safe holding on its top a stuffed loon, an open bookcase filled with dusty volumes of various colors, and a phalanx of bottles against one wall from which radiated a strong odor of drugs. He looked about in vain for the doctor.

“Sit down, young fellow!” came a stern command from the adjoining surgery. In a moment or two the big physician bustled out, and, stopping in front of Mauney’s chair, stared down at him savagely as if he were the rankest intruder, meanwhile smoking furiously and surrounding himself with blue cigar smoke.

“Say!” he said, at length, jerking the cigar roughly from his mouth. “Who the devil are you?”

“Mauney Bard!”

“Oh, God, yes! Of course you are. Of course you are!” Horne spluttered, walking impulsively to the bookcase and rivetting his attention on the binding of a book.

“So you’re one of Seth Bard’s curses, eh?” he said, at length, in a preoccupied tone, with his back still turned to Mauney. “Been fighting?”

“No, doctor, I ran a nail in my hand,” he replied, with a smile.

Horne shuffled a pace to his left to transfer his keen attention to another bookbinding, which so completely absorbed him that Mauney was sure he had forgotten his patient. After what seemed five minutes, Horne turned about and, going to his desk, plumped himself down into a swivel-chair. His eye-brows nearly touched the line of his hair as his black eyes stole to the corner of his lids in a sly study of his patient.

“Nail eh? Rusty?”

Mauney commenced undoing the bandage.

“Hip! Hip!” admonished Horne. “I didn’t tell you to take that off. Wait till I tell you, young fellow. Lots of time. Rusty?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Come in here!”

Horne jumped up and went into the surgery. He quickly cut away the crude bandage and merely glanced at the wound.

“Soreness go up your arm, young fellow?”

“Yes, a little bit.”

“Uh—Hum!”

Horne clasped his arms behind his back and stamped dramatically up and down the surgery, rattling the instruments in their glass case by the wall. Suddenly he faced Mauney.

“How would you like to lose your arm, young man?” he asked seriously.

“I’d hate to.”

“Then I’m going to open up that wound freely,” he said, walking toward the instrument case. “Do you want to take chloroform?”

“No—I think I can stand it.”

Home selected a knife and pulling a hair out of his head tried its edge.

“She’s sharp—damned sharp!” he remarked, dropping the instrument into a basin of solution. “You think you can stand it, eh? Remember, I offered you chloroform.”

Presently he picked the knife out of the basin.

“Come here, you. Put your hand in that solution. Hold it there a minute. Does it nip?”

Mauney nodded.

“Well, let it nip. Now take your hand out. Stand up straight. Hold it out here.”

Horne pressed the blade deeply into the tissues, then withdrew it. Looking up into his patient’s face:

“Did you feel it?”

“Just a little, Doctor,” said Mauney, biting his lip.

“Don’t you faint, Bard!”

“I’m not going to.”

“Yes you are!”

“I am not!” insisted Mauney as the color returned to his face.

While the doctor put on a fresh dressing his manner altered. He whistled a snatch of a country dance.

“You look like your mother, boy,” he said more gently. “I looked after your poor mother. You were just a young gaffer then. She was a very fine woman. She was too damned good for your old man. I’ve told Seth that before now.”

“Will this need to be dressed again?” Mauney asked, as they later stood in the waiting room.

“Yes. On Saturday.”

Horne’s attention was drawn to the figure of a woman approaching the office.

“Hello!” he said softly. “Surely Sarah Tenent isn’t sick. I’ll bet she’s peddling bills for the revival services.”

The bell rang.

“All right, come in, Mrs. Tenent.”

“How do you do, doctor?” she said, very deferentially, as she entered.

“Just about as I choose, Mrs. Tenent,” he replied coldly, watching her minutely.

She took a large white paper notice from a pile on her arm.

“Will you serve the Lord,” she asked with great soberness, “by hanging this in your office, doctor?”

He glanced over it and read aloud, very hurriedly: “Revival Services, Beulah Church, commencing Sunday. Rev. Francis Tooker and Rev. Archibald Gainford, successful evangelists, will assist the new pastor, Rev. Edmund Tough. Special Singing. Come.”

He passed it back to her and shook his head.

“No, no—not here, I’d never hang it here. I have patients who are not of thy fold, Mrs. Tenent. My function is to cure the sick. That sign would make some of them sicker. No, no.”

The woman left the office in silent disapproval of Horne’s attitude. Mauney put on his hat and was leaving the office, when the doctor appeared in the door behind him.

“Hold on, young chap!” he commanded. “Wait you! Didn’t I see you driving into the village with a young lady?”

“I didn’t think you noticed us,” laughed Mauney.

“Who was she?”

“Miss Byrne. She teaches at the Brick School.”

“Yes, yes. Of course she does. Fine young lady,” he said, studying Mauney with much lifting of his brows and pouting of his lips. “But you’re too young, Bard. Why don’t you get somebody your own age?”

“Oh,” Mauney said quickly, while his face flushed; “She’s probably got a beau. It isn’t me, anyway, doctor.”

Horne, greatly amused at the emotional perturbation of his patient, chuckled, while his black eyes sparkled.

“Get along with you, Bard!” he said, “Get along home with you and don’t forget to come up on Saturday, mind!”

The revival meetings became the talk of the countryside. Beulah, composed for the most part of retired farmers, had unusual leisure in which to think—a leisure captured by the glamor of religion, which was the strongest local influence. Although the village was a century old it had preserved, with remarkable success, the puritanism of the pioneer period, partly because it enjoyed so little touch with the commercial energies of the nation at large, and partly because the local churches had remained diligent in spiritual service. But in a population so uniformly composed of idle folk, the general view-point lay itself open to become biased. There was too much emphasis on the ghostly estate and too little on the need of practical endeavor. Beulah had forgotten long since that the Church must have its lost world, else it becomes unnecessary, and to the average citizen, lulled as he was by surfeit of beatific meditation, the board sidewalks had begun to take on an aureate tinge, the houses, a pearly lustre. The spiritual concern of the religiously eager Beulahite had in it, unfortunately, no concept of national character, but was pointed sharply at the individual. His sense of personal security was only less unhealthy than his over-bearing interest in the soul welfare of his neighbor. Saved by repeated redemptions himself, he remained strangely skeptical of the validity of the phenomenon in others. Hence, at fairly regular intervals, a general village consciousness of sin developed, becoming insistently stronger until it found its logical expression—the revival meeting.

Mauney, during the next week, listened to the religious talk of the community with mild curiosity. Mrs. McBratney, the pious mother of David, said to him one afternoon from the side of her buggy:

“I hope you’ll attend the revival meetings, Mauney. Your mother would want you to go. We are praying for great things.

“I’ve been on my knees for the young people,” she continued, “and I believe David has got conviction.”

Tears suddenly filled her eyes and her chin quivered with such tremulous emotion as to embarrass Mauney, who could fancifully imagine that David had been smitten by a plague.

“I believe he will be converted,” she managed to say, before her voice broke into a sob, “and I pray the Lord will show you the light, too, Mauney.”

He felt that perhaps it would have been good form to say “Thank you,” for he was sure her intentions were sterling, but he resented her reference to his mother, who seemed to him, in memory, a creature too much of sunshine and peace to be associated with anything so dolefully emotional.

He had never been a regular attendant at church. He remembered having sat beside his mother many times in the auditorium listening to unintelligible sermons and strenuous anthems. But from the day, five years ago, when as a chief mourner he had sat blankly stupefied, hearing comforting words that failed to comfort, and music whose poignant solemnity froze him with horrid fear, he had never been invited either by desire or family suggestion to return.

By the second week of the meetings David McBratney was reported to have been converted. He had stopped coming to see William as had been his custom. Neighbors said there could be no doubting the genuineness of his reformation for he had ceased chewing tobacco and was contemplating entry into the ministry of the Church. During supper at the Bard farm on Saturday evening a lull in the conversation was broken by a sarcastic laugh from William.

“Well, Dad, I guess they’ve got Dave,” he said. “Abe Lavanagh was tellin’ me to-day that Dave has went forward every night this here week. I never figured he’d get religion.”

Bard philosophically chewed on the idea as he peered at the lamp through his narrow eyes.

“There is just two kinds of people,” he asserted at length. “The fools and the damned fools. Now there’s a boy who’s got every chance of inheriting his old man’s farm. And I’m tellin’ you, Bill, it’s a purty good piece o’ land.”

“You bet.”

“Just about as good as is bein’ cultivated this side of Lockwood. There ain’t a stone left in the fields, but what’s piled up in the fences. William Henry has slaved this here thirty years—got the mortgage cleaned up—and that barn o’ his, Bill, why you couldn’t build it to-day for five thousand!”

“No, nor six, Dad.”

“Then look at the machinery the old man’s got. I’m tellin’ yuh Dave ain’t goin’ to drop into nothing like that, agin. William Henry must be seventy!”

“May be seventy-one, Dad.”

“Anyhow he ain’t goin’ to last a great while longer. If I was Dave I’d forget this religion business. ’Taint goin’ to get him nowhere. Ain’t that right, Snowball?”

The hired man, having finished supper, was sitting back drowsily, but at the sound of his name he winked his eyes cautiously.

“I dunno,” he said, “I don’t never bother much about religion, so I don’t!”

In Dr. Horne’s office that week the subject of the revival came up while Mauney was having his hand dressed.

“Some queer people here in this one-horse town!” mused Horne. “Do you remember George Pert who died a couple or three years ago?”

“Lived down by the toll-gate?”

“That’s him. Lazy as twelve pigs. Use to lie abed till noon. Wife kept a market garden. Never paid his doctor’s bills. Yes, sir! George Pert! He got a cancer of the bowel, poor devil. Sick. Pretty far gone. I went in one day and found preacher Squires sitting by the bed. ‘Well, Mr. Pert,’” (Horne’s voice assumed an amusing clerical solemnity) “‘Are you trusting in the Lord?’ George nods his head. ‘Yes’ says he, ‘I’m so sartin o’ salvation, that if only one person in Beulah is going to heaven I know it’s me!’

“They’re a nosey bunch, here!” Horne continued, as he wound a bandage on Mauney’s hand. “Self-satisfied! Let your light so shine—good! But don’t focus your light into a red-hot spot to burn out your neighbor’s gizzard. Last night Steve Moran came into the office and sat down. ‘Doctor’ says he, ‘I just came in to see if your feet were resting on the Rock.’ Says I, ‘Steve, you blackguard, you owe me five dollars from your wife’s last confinement, fifteen years ago. If you don’t go to hell out o’ here, you’ll be resting in a long black box!’”

Mauney was surprised how much people talked about the revival. Enthusiasts carried out from the meetings, by their words and manner, an infectious fervor that directed the curious attention of others to the thing that was happening night by night in the Beulah church. Finally, on Sunday evening, he decided to see it for himself and drove to town. The church sheds were filled to overflowing so that he tied old Charlie to a fence post in the yard. Through the colored windows he heard the voluminous roar of voices lifted in the cadence of a hymn. The church was crowded. The vestry at the entrance was full of waiting people and, through one of the doors leading to the auditorium, he glimpsed a sea of heads. At the farther end of the great room, in a low gallery, sat the choir, facing him, and below them on the pulpit platform three preachers were seated in red plush chairs. The seated congregation were singing an unfamiliar hymn whose rhythm reminded him of march music he had heard bands playing in Lockwood. Ushers were carrying in chairs to accommodate the overflow.

David McBratney, carrying an armful of red hymn books touched Mauney on the shoulder.

“Here’s a book,” he whispered, proffering one. “I’ll get you a seat in a few minutes. Glad to see you here, Mauney.”

McBratney’s face glowed with a strange luminosity, puzzling to Mauney, and his speech and manner were quickened by nervous tension. Presently he led the way to a chair in the aisle.

At the end of a stanza one of the preachers jumped suddenly to his feet and interrupted the organ.

“You’re not half singing!” he shouted angrily. “You can do better than that. If you haven’t more voice than that, how do you expect the Lord to hear your words of praise? Now, on the next stanza, let yourself out. Ready!”

He raised both arms high above his head and, as the organ commenced, brought them to his side with such force that he was compelled to take a step forward to regain his balance. His words had the effect he desired, for a deafening volume of sound rose and fell quickly to the lilt of the march-music, suggesting to Mauney the image of neatly-uniformed cadets with stiffened backs and even steps, moving along Lockwood streets on a holiday.

When the hymn ended, a soft hand touched Mauney on the arm and, looking to his right, he saw Jean Byrne seated in the end of the oaken pew directly next to him. She was just letting her closed hymnal drop into her lap.

“Glad to see you,” she whispered, guarding her lips with her gloved hand.

One of the preachers rose slowly from his chair. He was a stout man of fifty, mild-appearing and pleasant, with clean-shaven face and grey hair. He walked forward to the edge of the carpeted platform, rested his elbow on the side of the pulpit and raised his face to gaze slowly over the quieting congregation. “My dear friends,” he said in soft, silver tone, “I thank God for the hymn we have just been singing. It has been indeed very inspiring. Brother Tooker and myself have been in your little town for two weeks now, and have grown so fond of the people that we view to-night’s meeting with inevitable feelings of regret, because, so far as we can see the divine guidance, it will be our last night with you. But we have also feelings of hope, because we are praying that there may be a great turning to God as a result of this meeting.”

As he paused to shift his weight slowly to his other foot and clasp his hands behind his frock coat, the congregation was silent. Only the sound of a horse stamping in the shed could be heard.

“During our fortnight with you,” he continued, “many souls have been led to the Cross. We thank God for that. But there are many more who are still living in sin—some of them are here to-night.”

As his glance shifted over the mass of upturned faces, Mauney fancied he paused perceptibly as he looked his way.

“It is to you, who are in sin, that we bring a message of hope. You have only to take God at his word, who sent His Son to save that which was lost.”

“Amen!” came a vigorous response from an old man in the front pew.

“You have only to believe on Him who is righteous and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

“Amen!” from near the back.

“Amen!” also, from the side, half-way up.

At this juncture a woman in the body of the auditorium burst forth, in good voice, singing the first verse of “Though your sins be as scarlet,” whereat the preacher indulgently acquiesced, and waved for the congregation to join her. At the end of the first stanza he raised his hand.

“The lesson for to-night is taken from the first chapter of the beloved Mark.” As he carefully read the passage of scripture the ushers were busy leading in more people, so that, when he finished, the floor was entirely filled save for two narrow aisles, one on either side, leading from the back to the altar railing.

The Reverend Francis Tooker, as he walked confidently forward, was seen to be tall and thin, with a long, florid face and a great mass of stiff, black hair. He raised his large, bony hand.

“Let every head be bowed!” he commanded, sharply.

After a short invocation he commenced his discourse. He dealt at length with the experiences of the prodigal son, pictured in adequate language the depths of profligacy to which he had sunk, stressed the moment of his decision to return home, and waxed touchingly eloquent over the reception which his father accorded him.

“And now, people,” he said more brusquely, as he slammed shut the big pulpit Bible and ran his long fingers nervously through his hair. “You’ve got a chance to do what that boy did. You’ve been acting just the way he acted—don’t dare deny it! You’ve been wallowing in the dirt with the pigs, and you’re all smeared up. What are you going to do about it?”

The audience, keyed up to the former flow of his unfaltering eloquence, were now mildly shocked by the informality of his pointed question. He walked to the very edge of the platform while his eyes grew savage and his face red.

“What are you going to do about it?” he shouted, clenching his fists and half-squatting. Then, rising quickly, he hastened to the other side of the pulpit. “Are you going to arise and go to your Father? Or are you going to keep on mucking about with the pigs? Don’t forget that for anyone of you this night may be your last. To-night, perhaps you” (he pointed), “or you,” (he pointed again) “may be required to face God. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to die forgiven of your sins like a man, or are you going to shut your ears to the word of God and die like any other pig?”

No sound interrupted the intense silence. No one moved. Even the flickering lamps seemed to steady their illumination to a glaring, yellow uniformity.

Suddenly his manner altered. Moving to a position behind the pulpit he rested his elbows on the Bible and folded his hands together out over the front edge of the book-rest, while his voice assumed a quiet, conversational tone.

“Remember that on this night, the twentieth day of April, 1914, you were given an opportunity to come out full-breasted for God. I have discharged my duty. The rest remains for you to do. If you are sorry for your sins, say so. If you regret the kind of life you’ve been leading, confess it. Come out and get washed off clean. The invitation is open. The altar awaits to receive you.”

As he pointed to the altar railing, his black eyes flashed hypnotically.

“Those who have sinned, but are repentant and seek redemption, please stand.”

For about ten seconds a great inertia possessed the seated congregation. Then two men stood up near the front of the pews, followed soon after by groups of both men and women in various parts of the auditorium, until, at length, only a sporadic rising here and there marked a new mood of hesitancy.

“While the choir sings,” the preacher said softly, “I will ask you to steal away to the foot of the altar. The choir will please sing the first two verses of ‘Come Ye Disconsolate,’ and you who have, by standing, thus signified your desire for salvation, will move quietly forward and kneel by the railing.”

As the slow, full chords of the hymn began the preacher’s voice kept calling “Come away, Brother,” and the standing penitents sought the narrow aisles and moved slowly forward to kneel with their heads touching the oaken railing. The Rev. Archibald Gainford and the Rev. Edmund Tough descended from the platform to the crescent-shaped altar space and, bending down, spoke words of comfort to the suppliants.

As the choir stopped and the organ notes faded, the exhorter produced a silver watch and examined it, hurriedly.

“If we had more time,” he said, “how many more would like to come forward? Please stand.”

A dozen or more rose to their feet.

“Well,” he said, with a smile, as he returned his watch to his pocket, “we have plenty of time. Come out, brother!”

Caught by this subtle snare, many of the presumably wavering individuals found it impossible to refuse his invitation, while a few sat down again.

When the meeting eventually drew to a close, after a long hymn, sung with the same exciting rhythm as the first one, Mauney rose with the rest and moved impatiently toward the door, walking beside Jean Byrne and talking to her of obvious matters. Her face, he noticed, was flushed and her eyes shining with unusual brightness from delicately moist lids, while her voice seemed husky and uncertain. The auditorium emptied slowly. The steps leading down from the front doorway to the walk presented the customary Sunday night groups of village beaux waiting to accompany their sweethearts home, or perhaps stroll with them through quiet, moonlit streets.

Beulah village council, anxious to keep taxes at a minimum, had never provided street-lighting, so that pedestrians, on dark nights, carried lanterns, unless they were lovers, in which case they relied either on moonlight or familiarity with the local geography.

Jean Byrne had come to the village in the buggy of Mr. and Mrs. Fitch with whom she boarded on the Lantern Marsh road, but Mauney, being alone, invited her to drive down with him. She accepted and soon they were off together.

“I could have kicked over a pew in there to-night,” said Mauney at length, tersely.

“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” she said. “Personally I think it’s very unreal. Perhaps some people derive good from it, though.”

“Perhaps. But it hasn’t any connection with real life, Miss Byrne. I can’t help feeling you’ve got to let the common daylight into things.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s easy enough to see how they get pulled into it,” he went on. “There’s a sort of excitement about it. I don’t think one person by himself could get so excited.”

“You mean there’s a mob consciousness?”

“Yes, exactly—a lot of minds rubbing each other, like.”

“I believe you’ve hit it, Mauney,” she said. “I never thought of it like that before. How did you manage to think that out?”

“Well, I’ve always noticed, if I’m in a crowd, that it’s hard for me to stay just as I am when I’m alone. Now, I hate people who are always chirping like chipmunks—you’ll meet them at socials and dances. They don’t say anything that matters and might better keep their mouths shut. But if I get with them I’ll notice how it affects me, for after I leave I feel sort of weak.”

“You must enjoy observing things like that, Mauney.”

“No, I don’t enjoy it,” he replied. “That’s just what I’m up against the whole time at home. My father and brother and the hired girl keep up an endless rattle of talk, all the time, about things that aren’t important. I keep quiet on purpose because I don’t want to talk about them.”

“What sort of things do they discuss?”

“Oh—the price of eggs, what somebody did with a certain horse, who married so-and-so and who she was before she did it, and whether the preacher’s wife is human, and then they’re always teasing Snowball; but he isn’t such a fool as they think he is.”

For a moment Miss Byrne studied Mauney’s face, bright with moonlight.

“Well, what kind of things do you think are important?” she asked. “I mean what would you like to discuss, if you had your own way at home?”

“I couldn’t say exactly,” he said, reflectively. “But I’m discontented all the time, and feel ignorant. I want an education. I’m interested in history, most.”

While she listened to his words, Miss Byrne was enjoying the landscape as they drove slowly along. It was no new thing for her to feel fresh attractions toward Mauney, but to-night, for some reason that she did not seek, she felt uncomfortably warm toward him, and presently her soft, gloved hand pressed his hand tenderly, and remained holding it. It came as a surprise to him, and he glanced quickly at her face, across which the sharp shadow of her hat formed a line just above her lips. He could distinguish her eyes turned away in the direction of the moonlit fields she was admiring, and her pretty lips, vivid and tender, sent a strange thrill through his body. Although he made no effort to draw away his hand, he disliked the situation as something he could not grasp. Lying helplessly captured, his fingers felt the heat of her hand. She had stopped talking and he noticed her bosom moving as deeply as if she were asleep, but more quickly. He had the same feeling, for an instant, as in the meeting, of an outside power insidiously exciting his mind, but noticed with a definite sense of relief that they were nearing Fitch’s gate. In a moment he freed his hand from hers and pulled up the horse.

“Mauney!”

She spoke his name in a low, unsteady voice and pressed her hand against his arm. That she was not warning him of some sudden obstacle in their way, was clear, for, on looking toward the road, he saw nothing. When he turned to her, her hat was hiding her bowed face and her hand was relaxing slowly—so very slowly—and falling from his arm. The emotion that caused her breathing to be broken by queer, jerky pauses mystified him.

“Are you ill, Miss Byrne?” he ventured to ask, and noticed that his own voice was tremulous.

She shook her head slowly and began to climb out of the buggy. “No, Mauney boy,” she replied softly. “I was just lonesome, I guess. Goodnight!” He was puzzled. As he drove along he grew exceedingly impatient. There were so many things, he thought, beyond his comprehension.

CHAPTER III.
Mauney Meets Mrs. Day.

When he reached home, Mauney found his father talking in the kitchen with William Henry McBratney while the hired girl lay on the sofa with the cat asleep on her bosom. His father, seated with his socked feet resting on the stove damper and his chair tilted back, looked up as he entered from the yard.

“Well,” he addressed him, “I hope to God you didn’t get it.”

“Get what?” asked Mauney, surprised at being noticed, and irked by his father’s abrupt manner.

“You wasn’t in a place where you’d be likely to get a bottle of whiskey, was you?” Bard quickly responded.

“Oh—you mean religion, Dad?”

Without further acknowledgment of Mauney’s presence than a sarcastic motion of his head, Bard addressed his neighbor.

“I guess that’s about all he’d get up to Beulah church, ain’t it, William Henry?”

“Yes, sir, that’s about the size of it, Seth!” admitted McBratney, smacking the arm of the chair with his bony palm, as if one would naturally expect to get a variety of commodities at Beulah church. He possessed an evil, circular face, with gray hair falling untidily over a low forehead. His long, thin legs seemed largest at the knee-joints as he sat with difficulty in the low rocking-chair, and his long, brown neck, with its prominent Adam’s apple, gave his small, ball-like head an unreal appearance of detachment. When he spoke, in his high-pitched, rasping voice, his Adam’s apple shifted up and down his throat as if it were a concealed bucket bringing the words up from his body.

“That’s about the size of it, I tell yuh!” he repeated. “And when they get religion, Seth, why there ain’t no good tryin’ to drill any reason into ’em!”

Mauney stood in the door leading to the former dining-room, watching McBratney’s small eyes shine with wicked animation.

“As I was tellin’ yuh,” he went on, “the woman wouldn’t let up on him, day ner night, pesterin’ the life out o’ the boy, goin’ into her room there off the kitchen an prayin’ like she was tryin’ to ward off a cyclone.”

He suddenly bent forward, so that his long hands nearly touched the floor, suggesting to Mauney an enraged orang-outang looking through the bars of his circus cage.

“An’ now that she’s got her way, what do you think?”

Bard knocked the bowl of his pipe against the edge of the stove.

“God only knows! What?” he said.

“Dave’s made up his mind to go preachin’!”

“I heard that,” admitted Bard with a sly smile. “I s’pose you’ll be proud to have a son o’ yours called of the Lord, eh?”

“Called o’ nothing!” declared McBratney, hammering the chair arm with his fist, then settling back, with much silent movement of his Adam’s apple. “I’ve tried to reason with him, but his mind is stopped workin’ or else it’s workin’ just a little bit too fast fer me. I think he’s just framin’ an excuse to leave the farm.”

“Give him a few weeks, William Henry,” suggested Bard. “He may get over this here frenzy o’ his. Dave always struck me as a purty sharp lad an’ I reckon it’s only temporary, like.”

The hired girl looked up from her idle occupation of stroking the cat’s fur.

“Many folks out to church, Maun?” she asked.

Bard, as though he resented her speaking to his son, made a gesture toward the table.

“Here, Annie,” he said authoritatively, “Go cut up a loaf o’ bread and set out a bowl of preserves. Me and William Henry is goin’ to have a bite to eat.”

Up in his own room, Mauney later tried to read a small book Miss Byrne had given him. It was a leather-bound copy of Thomas À Kempis. He wondered why she had chosen such a gift, for the subject matter was too cloistral. Tossing it aside, he picked up an Ancient History she had recently loaned him and became absorbed in it until he was able to forget some of the things that rankled in his breast, among others, Jean Byrne’s peculiar manner in the buggy. Lying with his head propped on a pillow he read until his eyes ached. In fancy he lived in ancient palaces among courtiers and councillors, saw the regalia of royal fÊtes, through which came the sound of war trumpets. He read of ambitious sculptors whose names were written on the roster of deathless fame and saw steel engravings of their work—headless, armless torsos, nicked and cracked by the ravage of centuries. He saw conquerors leading stalwart armies, deciding the fate of nations. The story held him to the last page and he saw that the aspirations of a mighty nation were dead; the rising star of ambition was quenched in its ascent; and only a vast pile of melancholy tokens remained to interest scholars who delved with spades. And he went to sleep in great wonderment as to what it all signified.

A few days later he took the Ancient History to return it to Miss Byrne. As he approached Fitch’s gate on foot, he heard Jean’s low laughter, and on passing between the lilac hedges, saw her on the front verandah with Mrs. Fitch.

“Good evening,” he said, “you both seem to be enjoying yourselves.”

“Come and sit down, Mauney. Mrs. Fitch has just been convulsing me with a story from real life,” she invited, her eyes red from laughter. “What have you been doing to-day?”

“Oh, the same old stuff,” he replied, nodding slyly towards Mrs. Fitch, busy with long, white knitting-needles. “I thought I’d stroll over and hear the latest scandal.”

Mrs. Fitch was a woman of fifty, with scrupulously tidy grey hair, a square jaw, silver spectacles and thin lips suggesting latent deviltry.

“Wal, Maun,” she said, without looking up from her rapidly-interplying ivory-points, “we ain’t accurate scandal-mongers. Not the kind that talk about folks for the sake of harmin’ them. But things do strike us peculiar like, at times, and gives our livers a healthy shakin’ up. I’ve just been telling Miss Byrne about the young Hawkins brat.” She paused and cast a sharp glance over the tops of her glasses. “You know him?” she asked.

Mauney nodded and smiled, for it was common knowledge that the son of Miss Lizzy Hawkins could not claim, with any degree of accuracy, the paternal factor of respectability enjoyed by most children.

“Wal,” she resumed, her eyes returning to the line of her knitting, “young Hawkins was a-playin’ in the road out here after school. Along comes William Henry McBratney drivin’ the old, grey horse. He sees the Hawkins boy and he pulls up and he says, says ’e, ‘Where’s your father, you young brat!’ Young Hawkins, of course, didn’t know him—hasn’t brains enough to know anybody, but, after a minute of heavy thinkin’ he looks up at McBratney and he says, says ’e, ‘Maw told me, me father was down in South Americky workin’ on a steam roller, but I heard her tellin’ me grandmother as how me father’s name is William Henry McBratney!’”

Mauney laughed as Mrs. Fitch soberly glanced over her spectacles again.

“And then,” she resumed, “old William Henry leans half out of his buggy, waving his whip and shouting, without knowing as how he had an audience: ‘Tell yer mother to keep her damned mouth shut, you brat!’

“I guess it’s true enough,” she went on presently, pulling a string of yarn from the revolving ball in her lap. “And then people talk about Dave McBratney for getting converted. It was the best thing he ever done! If I was a son of William Henry’s I’d get converted before you could say Jack Robinson.”

Mauney had never so little enjoyed talking with Jean Byrne as to-night. The episode of Sunday evening had left a distasteful flavor in his mind, for, although he tried to forget it, the incident kept flashing back upon his memory. He was left alone on the verandah with her presently, and immediately felt an awkwardness, hard to overcome. Hitherto, she had always been just his teacher. But to-night, dressed in a yellow-flowered frock, with a pale yellow ribbon holding her dark hair down on her brow, she had lost a quality of dignity. He noticed also a hundred fine lights of tenderness in her eyes that he had never seen before.

He talked with her a few minutes and gave back the history.

“Let me get you another book,” she said, starting toward the door.

“Please don’t bother—just now, Miss Byrne,” he said.

“Why not, Mauney?”

“I’m so busy I haven’t time to read,” he lied.

He thought afterward that in that moment when he refused to accept her kindness she divined perfectly the underlying feeling. It was his last conversation with Jean Byrne. He went home quite sadly. There was no surfeit of comforts in that home of his, to be sure, which could render him careless of helpful friendships: but, although he felt the significance of refusing her offer, knowing it meant the end of things between them, his sadness was over the seeming weakness in her that had caused his dislike. He might not have been so astonished at other women. But of Jean Byrne he had expected differently.

His life in the Lantern Marsh thus robbed of one more brightness became the more uninteresting. He felt the need of companionship. Struggling through long days, of planting, sowing, and haying, he forced back the tug of expanding desires that urged him to different pursuits. In the evenings he would stand looking down the road that led to Lockwood, wishing that he were travelling it never to return. To Lockwood, to Merlton beyond, to the world. He dreamed of a different life from his own, where people were gentle, where they knew things and would be willing to teach him out of their knowledge. But these dreams were folded to rest each night in heavy sleep and the light of each morning found them dissipated. He wanted books, but there was no library in Beulah. He had no money of his own and knew the foolishness of asking his father for it.

At the end of June, Jean Byrne returned to her home in Lockwood, and Mrs. Fitch remarked to him one day that she was not coming back, but was going to be married in the autumn to a doctor in her own town. Mrs. Fitch was curious, no doubt, to discover a reason for Mauney’s never having come back to see her again.

“Miss Byrne was a good teacher, Maun,” she said, as they talked in the Beulah post-office, “and I think she was powerful fond o’ you, boy. She told me onct as how she expected you would some day make your mark in the world.”

Mauney felt tears welling into his eyes and turned away from her without further comment. He drove home blaming himself for having been rude to Jean Byrne. Her confidence in him, expressed through Mrs. Fitch, had come as sharp reward for his ingratitude. And yet, was it his fault?

On a sultry July evening an unexpected break in the monotony of his life occurred. He was sitting alone on the front steps of the farm-house, having just come in from the fields, when his attention was attracted by a cloud of dust on the Lockwood road. A motor car was travelling rapidly along and as it drew near, slackened its speed. When it stopped directly at the foot of the orchard he surmised the people in it had paused for directions. A woman in the back seat waved to him and he quickly responded.

They were all strangers, the man at the wheel and the two women in the rear seat, although he felt there was something quite familiar about the grey-haired woman sitting nearest him.

“Is this where the Bards live?” she asked a little nervously. She was a small-bodied woman of perhaps fifty with very fine features, and clear, blue eyes that smiled pleasantly through rimless spectacles and the fawn motor veil that covered her face.

“Yes,” Mauney replied, gazing curiously at her, and then at the others.

The man, chewing the end of an unlighted cigar, looked at the house with a frown and then glancing backward said in a low tone:

“Well, suit yourself, Mary. You might regret it if you didn’t.”

The woman, presumably his wife, looked with an undecided expression toward the house, as if she feared it.

“Is your name Bard, please?” she asked, raising her veil, and minutely inspecting Mauney’s face.

“Yes,” he said, glancing again at the others.

“He looks the dead image of her!” the other woman remarked prosaically to the man.

“And are you Mauney?” asked his interlocutor.

His brow was puckered with a dawning idea that soon caused his face to brighten up.

“Are you my Aunt Mary?” he asked, eagerly.

“How did you know?”

He came nearer and took her extended hand.

“Mauney, this is your Uncle Neville, and this is your Uncle’s sister, Jane Day. This must be quite an extraordinary surprise to you, isn’t it?”

Mauney nodded.

“Aren’t you going to stay?” he asked. “When did you come to this country?”

“We came about a week ago, Mauney. Your Uncle Neville is over on business, and our headquarters are in Merlton. We motored all the way from Merlton to-day just to see where—where you lived, you know.”

“You must be tired. What time did you leave?”

“About seven this morning, but the country has been simply beautiful, every inch of the way.”

“Come in. Put your car in the shed. I’ll go and tell my father.”

“Wait!” said his aunt. “Just let’s talk a moment. You’ve got a brother, but I’ve forgotten his name.”

“William.”

“Of course—how stupid of me to forget! Did you ever receive a letter I wrote you, Mauney, just after your mother died?”

“No, I don’t remember getting one,” he replied, with an expression of curiosity.

“That’s strange. Apparently it went astray. But I always wondered—but then I wrote you again, Mauney, about three years ago. Didn’t you get that?”

He shook his head.

“Funny!” she said, looking toward her husband.

“There’s nothing funny about trans-Atlantic mails, my dear,” said Mr. Neville Day, lighting his cigar. “It’s got well past the funny stage with me.”

“And then I sent you a postcard once, I remember. Didn’t you even get that, Mauney?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Well, anyway, we’re here,” she said, with sudden decision. “And if I don’t see him, I’ll always wish I had.”

“All right, Mary,” said Neville Day. “Now stick to that, my dear. Would you mind telling your father there’s somebody here to see him, Mauney?”

“Certainly,” Mauney agreed, turning to leave.

“Oh, wait!” called his aunt. “Wait a minute. You know I—I don’t think I can see him, Neville. No, I can’t. I really cannot.”

The uncle smoked calmly, studying his finger-nails, while Mauney stood riddled with curiosity.

“Come here, dear,” said his aunt. “Promise me not to mention us to your father. We aren’t going in, and it’s—it’s so hard to explain why we aren’t.”

Neville Day and Miss Jane Day got out of the car and walked slowly along the edge of the road together. His aunt asked Mauney to get in the rear seat and sit beside her. As she turned toward him, he could see his mother’s likeness with startling vividness.

“Your mother used to write to me about you, Mauney,” she said. “You were her favorite, I’m glad you’re such a big fellow. How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“It’s terrible how the time goes. I suppose you’re happy and well all the time—”

He gauged the expression in her eyes. He felt completely at home with her. She looked so much like his mother that he wanted to remain with her endlessly.

“Well, Aunt Mary,” he said slowly, “I’m not very happy, I’m afraid.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked sympathetically.

“I don’t know.”

“Does your father treat you all right?”

“I think he tries to, Aunt Mary, but since my mother died, I’ve always been—dissatisfied. How long are you going to stay—I mean here?”

“We’ll have to return to Lockwood—is that the name?”

He nodded.

“We’ll go back there for the night and return to Merlton, to-morrow.”

“Why won’t you come in, and see my father?” he asked.

“Well you see, Mauney, it’s—it’s so late, you know.”

Her explanation was patently false, for he saw her face struggle to remain composed, and then noticed a queer hardness come upon it.

“Do you know where the old Conyngham place is?” she asked.

“Sure. Over there!” he pointed to a field not far away.

“You knew about that, didn’t you?”

He shook his head and glanced with a puzzled expression toward the old, dilapidated house that had always stood at the edge of his father’s big corn field. It was uninhabited and partly obscured by wild cucumber vines.

“I only knew it was called the old Conyngham place,” he said. “When mother was alive, she used to go over there and keep geraniums in boxes in the front windows, and our hired man—the one we had before—lived there with his wife for quite a long time.”

“Well, your mother used to live there, Mauney,” his aunt said, “She was looking after Uncle James. You see his wife had died and he was old and sick with asthma.” She glanced toward the opposite side of the road. “I suppose this bog-land here gave him the disease. He was all alone and when we got his letter, your mother made up her mind to come out and look after him. So she left Scotland when she was just seventeen. She remained right with him to the last, and certainly did not spare herself.”

“My mother never told me that,” Mauney interrupted.

“No. She wouldn’t tell you. But while she was looking after Uncle James our own mother died in Carstairs and it was too far for her to come home. Then I married Neville and, poor girl, she felt that all her relatives were gone. So, after Uncle James died, she—she stayed here, you see.”

“Married my father.”

“Yes, Mauney,” she said sadly. “Remember, dear boy, your mother was the sweetest girl that—”

She hesitated, as if her interest in the farm house and the orchard had suddenly usurped her attention.

“You’ve got quite a big farm, Mauney,” she said. “Are you going to stay here and be a farmer, too?”

“I guess I’ll have to, Aunt Mary,” he smiled.

“I see.”

“But I’d like to get some education, some time.”

Her pretty, blue eyes wandered from his face to the figures of Neville Day and his sister who were just turning about to come back toward the car. For a moment her face became dreamy as if she were mentally exploring the pleasant future. Then she took a card from her purse and handed it to him.

“My address is on that, Mauney,” she said. “Please write to me once in a while and let me know how you are getting along. We go back to Scotland in another week. Dear me, you ought to be glad you live in America.”

Soon her husband was beside the car.

“That land could all be reclaimed,” he said, wagging his thumb toward the marsh. “It wouldn’t cost over two thousand, either.”

“Dollars?” asked Mrs. Day.

“No, pounds.”

“They don’t need to do that sort of thing,” stated Miss Day. “As it is now, there’s plenty of tillable soil not under cultivation. I fancy that it will be a long time before these farmers will find it necessary to reclaim land.”

Day glanced at his watch.

“If you don’t mind, Mary,” he said, “it’s getting late and we’d better try to make Lockwood before dark. How far is it, Mauney?”

“It’s just over twenty miles.”

They entered the car while Mauney stood on the road waiting to say good-bye. Neville Day tossed away the stump of his cigar and settled down behind the wheel, adjusting his motor-cap more comfortably.

“Oh!” he said, turning to hand up a large parcel, done up in wrapping paper. “You forgot the books.”

Mrs. Day laughed.

“Mauney,” she said, “I brought you three books, but I’m not going to give them to you. They are just wild Indian stories of adventure.”

“Why did you buy that truck, my dear?” asked Day.

“Why, I really didn’t figure it out, Neville,” she laughed. “I imagined Mauney about fourteen. But I’ll change them and send them down.”

Mauney took the proffered hands of Day and his sister and then his Aunt Mary’s. When his aunt was kissing him on the cheek, Neville Day was clearing his throat and chewing at the end of a new cigar. Soon the motor-car backed into the lane; then, with a sudden lurch ahead, it snorted up the road, his aunt waving her hand in farewell. Mauney watched it until it was engulfed in a dense cloud of dust and the noise of its opened exhaust had quieted to a faint rumble. Then he walked slowly up the lane toward the house.

By the kitchen door he encountered his father pumping himself a tin ladleful of well water.

“Who was them people?” he demanded.

“Some tourists.”

“What’d they stop here for?”

“One of the women wanted to pick some blue weed by the side of the road.”

“H’m! I wish to God she’d pick some of the blue weed out the grain field,” he said. “Why did they turn around and go back?”

“They wanted to get to Lockwood before dark, I guess.”

Later in the evening, Mauney sat on the kitchen verandah lost in thought. He leaned back in his tilted chair and rested his head on the window-sill. Presently he fell asleep. He was awakened by a sharp sensation on his chin.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, opening his eyes to see the hired girl standing near him, smiling broadly.

“I just pulled one of them hairs out o’ your chin, Maun,” she laughed. “When are yuh goin’ to start to shave ’em?”

CHAPTER IV
The Harvest Moon

The story he had heard from his aunt, with its unexplained gaps, filled Mauney’s mind for days. He wondered most about what she had not told him. Her seemingly instinctive fear—or was it scorn?—of meeting his father roused torturing curiosity. Probably his mother’s letters had told her either plainly or in suggestive language of her great unhappiness.

The motor-car visit haunted him. It was so unnatural, as though, in a painful dream, he had beheld his own mother, whose features were to remain before him in waking hours. Spectre-like out of the unknown world she had come, to vanish immediately, leaving scant comfort, herself immune from his ardent desire to detain her.

The incident was characteristic of life, as he was learning to know it, for he gained cognizance of an enigmatical curse aimed at whatever promised happiness. One whom even a few moments had enshrined in his affections must tremble and disappear, as a delicate bird, hovering for an instant, is driven away by a sight or smell.

Every aspiration of his existence was leashed to his father’s stolid nature. He traced the deterring thongs, one by one, back to the paternal influence. Some hidden action or some unrevealed quality of his father’s had driven his aunt away in a dust-cloud. And the dust which rose up to obscure her loved face was symbolic, for dust of a kind was slowly settling upon the freshness of his own nature.

One evening his reverie of unhappiness was broken by a familiar voice when, turning about, he beheld David McBratney trudging along with a large, grey, telescope valise. In answer to his question, McBratney replied that he was starting on foot for Lockwood, where next morning he would take the train for Merlton to begin his ministerial studies. He was walking because his father, suffering from ill-humor, had refused him a horse. But evidently, there was no martyrdom about the situation.

“He’s an old man,” Dave said, putting down his burden and wiping his forehead with a big, red handkerchief, “and I didn’t like to start no row.”

“Are you going for good?” Mauney asked, rising from the grass and walking slowly to the edge of the road.

“Sure. I sold my three-year-old yesterday for a hundred, and that’ll keep me for a while up to Merlton. I guess Dad will come around after a while. But I reckon I’d just blow away, quiet like, without causin’ too much commotion.”

“You’re a cheerful cuss, Dave,” Mauney said.

“You bet,” he laughed, as he turned to look back toward his home. “I tell yuh, Maun, when a fellah gets sort o’ squared away with God Almighty, why, he can’t be no other way. Some o’ the neighbors says I’m makin’ a big mistake to leave the farm. But that farm ain’t nothin’ to me now. Maybe I won’t never have a bit o’ land to me name, but, I’m tellin’ yuh, I’ve got somethin’ as more’n makes up. Well, Maun, old boy,” he said, picking up his valise and sticking out his big, sun-burned hand. “I’ll be goin’ along. Good-bye. Best of luck to yuh!”

For minutes Mauney stood thoughtfully watching his retreating figure as, swinging into a long stride, he covered the first lap of his long walk to Lockwood. His big figure grew smaller and smaller and the valise dwindled to a little grey speck, but he never turned to look back and soon he was lost in a bend of the road.

Although Mauney disliked in McBratney, what he considered half-familiar references to the Creator, he distinctly admired his courage and did not hesitate to express his admiration next day at supper when the subject came up. Evidently Bard had called at the McBratney’s that afternoon on his way from Beulah.

“The old man’s all broke up,” he said. “Poor old chap. There he is right in the middle of the hayin’ with nobody to help him, and Dave walks right out an’ leaves him. He might ’a’ stayed till the first o’ August, anyway.”

“I guess Dave’s got it pretty bad, Dad,” William remarked as he spread a large chunk of butter over his bread. “Anybody that’ll start out an’ walk to Lockwood on a hot night, carrying a big grip, why, there’s somethin’ wrong with his brains. I never figured Dave’d be such a damned fool!”

Mauney looked up sharply at his brother.

“He isn’t a damned fool!” he said flushing. “I may not have any more use for religion than you have, Bill, but I admire any fellow who does what he thinks is right!”

“Is that so?” scoffed William, glaring across the table. “Well, now look here, freshie—”

Mauney, inflamed by the word, as well as by his brother’s sneering manner, jumped to his feet, and became the centre of attention.

“I refuse to be called ‘freshie’ by you,” he said with some effort at restraint, “and I have just enough sympathy with Dave McBratney that I’m not going to have you call him a damned fool, either!”

Bard pounded the table.

“Here, sit down, Maun,” he commanded and then turned with a faint smile toward his elder son. “Bill, eat your victuals and be quiet. O’ course,” he added presently, “there ain’t no doubt but what Dave is a damned fool, and he’s goin’ to wake up one o’ these days and find it out, too. But now he’s gone away I don’t see what the old man’s goin’ to do. I advised him to sell out the farm and go up to Beulah an’ take it easy. There ain’t no good o’ William Henry stayin’ down here no longer. He’ll have to get a hired man now, and with wages where they is he wouldn’t clean up nothin’.”

After a short silence, William chuckled softly as he raised his saucer of hot, clear tea to his lips.

“I was just thinkin’ about the Orange Walk down to Lockwood last year,” he explained. “There was Dave, with a few drinks in him, struttin’ around the park, darin’ everybody to a scrap. Gosh, it’s funny to think o’ him bein’ a preacher. I mind that night—we didn’t get home till seven o’clock the next mornin’ an’ I pitched in the harvest field all that day.”

“Sure,” nodded Bard. “I’ve done the same thing many a time when I was your age.”

“And the next night,” continued William proudly, “me and Dave was up to Ras Livermore’s harvest dance. That hoe-down lasted till five in the mornin’. I can see Dave yet, sweatin’ through the whole thing—never missed a dance.”

“Wonder if Ras is goin’ to put on a shin-dig this here harvest?” mused Bard.

“He ain’t never missed puttin’ one on since I can remember,” said the hired girl, who had been listening intently.

“The other day,” William remarked, “I saw Ras up in Abe Lavanagh’s barber shop. I ast him if he was goin’ to have a dance this year an’ he hit me an awful clout on the back an’ he says: ‘Better’n’ bigger’n ever, my boy. Come an’ bring yer fleusie. They’ll be plenty to eat, and Alec Dent is goin’ to fiddle again.’”

“And I guess Dave won’t hear the music, neither,” said Bard.

About ten days after his aunt’s visit Mauney received a letter from her, written in Merlton, and containing a crisp, five-dollar bill. “I really haven’t had time to choose a gift for you,” she wrote, “so please buy any little thing you fancy. Your Uncle Neville and I are leaving for New York to-night, and intend sailing the next day for Scotland. Neville is afraid England will be drawn into this terrible European mix-up, and of course, if that happens, he may have to leave his business as he holds a majority in the Scottish Borderers. I’m praying there won’t be a war, but it certainly does look dark.”

War! Mauney located the Beulah Weekly in the wood-box and searched its columns in vain for any mention of European politics. He wished that his father had consented to have a rural telephone installed, so that he could telephone now to some of the neighbors and find out what was transpiring. Next day in Beulah he asked the postmaster through the wicket if there seemed to be any danger of a war.

“War!” the man repeated, staring stupidly through his high-refractive spectacles. “Whereabouts?”

“In Europe.”

The postmaster reflectively poked his index finger into his mouth to free his molar teeth from remnants of his recent supper.

“I guess not,” he said lazily. “I ain’t heard nothin’ about it.”

“Do you know a good Merlton newspaper?” Mauney enquired.

“Oh, yes,” he replied, his face at once brightening to a patronizing smile. “The Merlton Globe is the best. It is the newsiest paper printed in the country, unexcelled for its editorials, has the largest unsolicited circulation, is unequalled for its want ad. columns, and reflects daily the current thought and events of both hemispheres. Yuh’d certainly get what yer huntin’ for in the Merlton Globe, Mr. Bard, ’cause if there’s any war on anywhere—don’t matter where—they’d most likely have it.”

“What does it cost?” Mauney asked.

“Only five dollars per year,” he replied politely, removing an eye-shade from his forehead, and staring anxiously at his customer. “Of course, I’m the local agent, you know,” he added.

“Oh! are you?”

“Oh, yes—yes,” he said, with a nervous little laugh, his hands together as if in the act of ablution.

For a moment Mauney hesitated, while his hand, deep in his pocket, felt the crisp treasury note with which he was so tempted to part. A number of considerations caused him to weigh well his present transaction, but he soon gave his initials to the eager postmaster and went home satisfied.

Seth Bard had, of course, always been able to find sufficient news in the Beulah Weekly. It is doubtful if he would have spent the annual dollar on it except for the long column advertising farm sales. He usually spent half an hour searching this portion of the paper, then a listless five minutes over the personal column, which, to his particular mind, provided an amusing satire, only to fall asleep, later, as he tried to read the fragmentary generalities that filled the stereotyped section. The hired girl religiously preserved the editions until she had found time to read the instalments of a continued love story. When the Merlton Globe began to arrive with the name of “Mr. Mauney Bard” upon it, a precedent seemed to have been established for introducing unwelcome new factors into the self-sufficient household.

“Where’d you get the money?” Bard demanded, in accordance with Mauney’s expectations.

“Found it,” he replied, just as he had planned to do.

There was no more questioning, although Mauney knew his father did not believe him. With queer pride, Bard scorned to read the big daily, although the woman found back numbers useful for lining pantry shelves.

“We don’t worry none about what’s goin’ on over in Europe, Bill,” remarked the father one evening while Mauney sat nearby reading the paper. “If they want to put on a war over there, why, let ’em sail to it. ’Taint none o’ our business.”

“Guess we got ’bout enough to do, running this here farm, Dad,” William agreed, “without wastin’ any time with that kind o’ truck.”

The annual harvest dance at Ras Livermore’s was a long-standing event of great local interest, for, since most people could remember, it had been as faithful in its appearance as the harvest itself. Men of fifty recalled gala nights spent there in their exuberant twenties. Livermore was benevolent and kindly, well over seventy, and had developed hospitality to a degree where he required it now as a social tonic. No invitations were sent out because rumour of the event invariably preceded the event itself, thus fixing the date, and, as to the personnel of the guests, Livermore’s slogan of “Everybody come” was sufficient, for he knew that the ultra-religious of Beulah would never appear and that the best recommendation for the qualities of a guest was the very spontaneity that impelled him or her to be present.

For the past three years it had been one of the bright spots in Mauney’s life and so, on the day of the dance, he brought downstairs his best suit of clothes for the hired girl to sponge and press. The men did not get in from the grain field until seven o’clock.

“Me and Annie’ll manage the milkin’ to-night,” Bard generously announced, as they ate supper. “Snowball’s goin’ too. Soon’s yuh get through eatin’, Maun, go bed the horses, and, Bill, you an’ Snowball pump the cows some water an’ draw the binder under the machine shed. Then hitch up old Charlie, jump into yer boiled shirts, and get up to Ras’s.”

“Ain’t you goin’, Dad?” William asked.

“No. I’m goin’ over to see William Henry an’ make him an offer on his farm. Annie’ll have to stay here an’ look after the house. I’m gettin’ too old fer this here dancin’ business anyway. I used to be able to stay with the best of ’em, Bill, but a plug o’ chewing tobacco is about as much dissipation as I can stand now.”

By nine o’clock Mauney, with his brother and Snowball, were driving up through Beulah and turning at the end of the village along the Stone Road. Three miles through the darkening landscape brought them nearer a cluster of pine trees behind which Livermore’s large frame house could be seen with every window alight. Between the trees were suspended yellow Japanese lanterns in long, bellying rows, beneath which could be seen the moving white gowns of women and the dark forms of men standing in groups. Buggy-loads of people were constantly arriving and being directed by Livermore who, dressed in an old-fashioned cut-away suit, was strutting about as actively as a man of thirty. A congestion of buggies at the lane entrance required William to pull up the horse, and wait his turn.

“Hello, Ras!” came the shout of greeting from one of the buggies. “How’s yer old heart?”

“She’s still a-pumpin’!” he replied, causing a general outburst of laughter, since Livermore was noted for an individualistic strain of wit, and anything he might say was to be thus rewarded.

“Hello, is that you, Bill?” he called as they passed him. “I see yer girl is here before you. Drive right in. There’s more people here to-night than yuh’d see at yer own funeral. Hurry up, Bill, ’cause there’s a mighty sight o’ fine women-folks here, and not a Methodist foot among ’em.”

Even a half-hour later, as Mauney strolled about the lawn chatting with acquaintances, load after load of laughing people continued to arrive, and he joined the crowd who were lined up watching Livermore greet his guests.

“Drive right into the yard, boys,” he called. “If they hain’t room under the cow-sheds, hitch ’em up to the wind-mill.”

“Quite a turn-out, Ras,” remarked Doctor Horne, as he suddenly reined his black horse into the lane.

“Hello, Doc! Well, well, well, if here ain’t Doc Horne!” exclaimed Livermore, advancing to shake the physician’s hand. “I tell yuh, doc, it’s a pretty frisky lot o’ people. You kin tie your horse to the fence, case you git a call an’ have to leave early. One o’ the boys’ll show you.”

“Is that scoundrel, Alec Dent, here to-night?” asked Horne in a mock-whisper, leaning over the side of his buggy.

“Yes, an’ dancin’ is goin’ to start directly, Doc. Alec has just had a pint o’ rye whiskey an’ there ain’t enough furniture left on the kitchen floor fer an Esquimo to start house-keepin’ with.”

“Whoop!” laughed Horne in a loud chuckle, as he touched his horse with the whip. “Erastus, you old reprobate, you old skunk!”

Women were busy preparing five long tables under the pine trees for the refreshments which would be served at midnight. Mauney was inveigled into carrying benches by Myrtle McGee, one of the acknowledged belles of the countryside, who came up to him in her usual direct way, carrying a pile of plates, and smiling seductively.

“D’yuh want to work?” she enquired, with a much more intimate address than the occasion demanded.

“That’s what I came up here to avoid,” Mauney laughed as he looked down into her sharp, black eyes.

“But you’d help me, wouldn’t you?” she pouted. “Go fetch some o’ them benches, like a good boy.”

After he had obeyed, and while the crowd of people were slowly moving back toward the kitchen, drawn by the lure of the violin music, she came up with him again, fanning her flushed face with her handkerchief. She was not more than twenty and wore a pleated, white silk gown that gave attractive exposure of her arms and bosom, smooth and firm like yellowed ivory, and contrasted markedly with her jet-black hair, decorated by a comb of brilliants.

“Well,” she said, tilting her head sidewise, and according him an angled glance, “I s’pose you’re goin’ to give me yer first dance, ain’t yuh, Maun?”

A subtle compliment was conveyed in this unconventional invitation, and Mauney, surprised at his own susceptibility, at once agreed. Together they strolled toward the kitchen verandah where already a crowd was assembled. The windows and doors of the kitchen were all removed, and Mauney, peering above the mass of eager heads, saw a broad strip of yellow floor, reflecting the light of several oil-lamps set in wall brackets. As yet no dancing had begun, but Alexander Dent, a corpulent man of sixty with a heavy, pasty face, was perched on top of the kitchen stove, where, seated on a chair, his body swung to the rhythm of his bow.

“Jest gettin’ warmed up!” he announced, with a sly glance from the corner of his black eyes toward the crowd at the doors.

This was the twenty-eighth annual harvest dance at which he had assumed responsibility for the music. In accordance with his ideal of never growing old he had undertaken, in late years, to dye his hair and moustache much blacker than they had ever been even in his youth. Only his chin, which receded weakly beneath his bushy moustache, gave any evidence of age, for his quick eyes, his animated movements, the tap-tap of his toe keeping time against the stove lid, suggested youth. He was to be accompanied by an organ set at the top of three steps leading to the dining room, at which Mrs. Livermore, second wife of the host, already presided in readiness. As Dent finished his first flourish and began tucking a large, white silk handkerchief under his chin Erastus Livermore appeared on the floor and initiated applause in which every one joined. In a moment the host raised his hand for order.

He was a big man, slightly bent at the shoulders, with a high, sloping forehead, a bald pate, a grey, tobacco-stained moustache and dim, grey eyes, full of quiet hospitality that sparkled brightly as he spoke.

“Folks,” he said, by way of opening the function, “I dunno why I allus have to get out here an’ say a few words. The woman told me I had to do it, so I guess that’s reason enough.”

A burst of laughter followed this remark.

“When I look around and see you folks all dressed up in yer Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes, makes me think of how much the styles is changed since the first dance we put on here. In them days, the women folks all had big hoop skirts, that ud hardly go through that there door. But now we see a change. They believe more in advertisin’ and showin’ off their ankles.”

“Ras—Ras!” came Mrs. Livermore’s disapproving voice.

Again the guests laughed, this time more heartily.

“Well—ain’t it true, folks?” he asked.

“Sure, Ras!”

“You bet.”

Just then the rural telephone, which was attached to the kitchen wall, rang five short rings.

“That’s our call,” Livermore said to his wife. “Tell ’em to come a jumpin’, we hain’t even started yet.”

When she had answered the telephone she whispered something to her husband.

“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry to have to call our old friend, Doctor Horne. He’s wanted at onct down the Graham road, at Bob Lombard’s. I guess maybe the baby has swallowed a carpet tack.”

“Thanks, Ras,” came Horne’s voice from outside. “Don’t let me interrupt your speech!”

“Come back if you can, Doc!”

“I think by the way you and Alexander Dent are starting in, you may need me before you get through,” replied Horne, already untying his horse from the fence nearby. When the laughter had again subsided, Livermore continued.

“An’ there’s only two o’ that old brigade left here to-night,” he said, “myself and Alec Dent.”

The musician’s name was greeted by a loud hand-clapping to which he responded by rising from his chair and executing a deep salaam.

“Mind the lids, Alec,” continued Livermore. “I bet Alec ain’t forgot them hoop skirts.”

“Why, no,” affirmed the musician in a clear, bass voice, as he seated himself. “Them was the fantastic days, Rastus. It was right on this floor I met the woman that’s been bossin’ me around ever since. Them was the days!”

“Now, folks,” said the host, “With these few openin’ words, I’ll call on our old friend to play a cotillion, an’ I want everybody to light right in an’ hoe ’er down till mornin’! Joe Hanson, the man on the right with the false teeth, is goin’ to call off, a-standin’ on the wood-box, an’ I want to see the young folks get well het up. Ready, Alec?”

The butt of his bow was poised over the strings of his violin, his head nestled down to the instrument, his toe lifted preparatory to the opening note. He nodded.

“Then let her go!”

The thrilling call of the violin immediately drew four sets to occupy their places on the kitchen floor—tall, sun-burned youths with coats cast aside, smiling at their partners who quivered with eagerness to be started. Mauney and Miss McGee were unable to gain entrance, but collided with Amos Blancher, a husky fellow to whom she had evidently promised the first dance. He demanded an explanation.

“Why, Ame,” she said, “you’re too slow to catch a cold. Mauney an’ I are goin’ to have the first dance together, ain’t we, Maun?”

Blancher scowled ill-temperedly at Mauney and backed away, muttering under his breath.

“It’s goin’ to be a corkin’ good set, too,” predicted Miss McGee, leaning against Mauney’s arm as they watched the progress of the dance.

“Address your partner; corners the same,” commanded Hanson from his position on the wood-box.

Everyone bowed, and immediately scuffled their feet in rhythm with the music.

Another bow, in a different figure, and again the prancing of eager feet.

“Right and left through and inside couple swing. Right and left back and the same old thing!”

Hanson entered into the spirit so thoroughly that his voice took on a barbarous rhythm, but he enunciated his directions very clearly considering the fact that his upper plate habitually fell away from the roof of his mouth on open syllables.

“Ladies turn out, with the bull in the ring; gents come out and give birdie a swing!”

The process of giving “birdie” a swing included a vigorous masculine lurch which brought the lady from the floor with much sailing of her skirts and exposure of her muscular, black-stockinged calves.

“Lady round lady and gents go slow; lady round gent and gents don’t go.”

Thus continued the strenuous dance, while the faces of the dancers began to flush with the warmth of their exercise, and the fiddler proceeded exuberantly and with growing animation from one movement to the next. When the first set was finished, another, made up of different dancers, commenced, leaving only time for Alexander Dent to reach for a proffered glass of spirits. By an unwritten law it was understood that whiskey was reserved only for the fiddler as an indulgent acknowledgment of his services, but the stealthy movement of the occasional youth to the back box of his buggy in the yard was forgiven if he exercised moderation.

Those not engaged in dancing played euchre in the dining room or sat on long benches on the verandah telling stories, exchanging gossip or discussing crops. By midnight, Mauney, weary of the music, and weary, too, of the monotonous jargon of his associates, stole a few moments by himself on the end of the front verandah farthest from the rest.

The great orb of the red, harvest moon was rising like a ball of molten, quivering fire from the deep purple scarf of smoky air that lay upon the horizon, while a warm breeze moved from the stubble field nearby. His thoughts drifted fancifully, trying to free themselves from the weird thralldom of the dance, imagining the moon the secret source of heat that supplied the dancers with energy, and the warm breeze an emanation from their impassioned enthusiasm. Past him, as he sat secluded behind a vine of Virginia creeper, a youth and a maiden, unsuspecting his presence, walked quietly side by side until they stood by the cedar edge at the border of the grove. He watched the moonlight reflected from the maiden’s face as she glanced quickly toward the house, and from her arms as they encircled her lover’s neck. The lover bent toward her and pressed his lips passionately upon her mouth. Then they returned, with a new rhythm in their gait, to join the crowd who sat at the other side of the house.

Mauney breathed with mild difficulty as if stifled by the glamor of the sultry night. Then in a mood of inexplicable detachment he wandered again through the groups of people, half unconscious of their presence. He stood watching the dancers once more and listening to the endless grind of the fiddle. A round dance was in progress and his eyes followed the two lovers now clasped in the dreamy movement of a waltz. He could not understand why the picture blurred as he watched it. He was thinking of the beauty of love—the tragedy of love—this closed, complete, unopening circle of passion that drifted to the beat of the music heedless of the universe. His eyes wandered from their graceful forms to dwell upon the yellow glow of the Japanese lanterns.

A stronger breeze came from the fields and moved the big lanterns till one of them caught fire and burned, attracting the attention of a score of people.

Then there were five, sudden, sharp rings!

The music ceased. The dancers paused. Livermore entered from the verandah, and going to the telephone put the receiver to his ear. Casual curiosity prompted a general quietness among the guests.

“Hello! Yes, this is Ras, speakin’. Who’s that? Hello, Frank, why ain’t you up to the dance? What?”

Turning about, Livermore waved to the guests. “Be quiet jest a minute. It’s kind o’ hard to hear him.”

For a moment he listened, while the changing expression on his face provoked greater curiosity and greater quietness.

“Ain’t that a caution?” he exclaimed, hanging up the receiver. “If England hain’t gone and declared war on Germany.”

“What’s that?” asked a voice on the verandah.

“War—the British is gone to war,” Livermore answered. “Frank Davidson just got back from Lockwood, an’ says the news just reached Lockwood afore he left.”

“War, eh?”

“Yep! So Frank says. Maybe it’s just talk.”

“Well, I guess it ain’t goin’ to do us no harm, Ras, anyhow,” said Alec Dent, waving with his fiddle-stick. “Get off the floor an’ give ’em a chance, Ras.”

Again the slow, measured music of the waltz floated out on the night air, and Mauney watched the lovers continue in their embrace.

His heart pounded with excitement. Vague sympathies, eager yearnings, and impatient impulses moved by turns in his breast. That which the newspapers had suspected had become fact. How could these people continue to dance in the face of such catastrophic news? He could not dance. He could only think and think, and wonder why, in the unexplorable depths of his heart, he was glad that war was come.

“A military gent I see”—Thackeray, “The Newcomes.”