Green River was getting ready for the rally in Odd Fellows' Hall. It was six o'clock on the evening of the seventeenth of September, and "Grand rally, Odd Fellows' Hall, September Seventeenth at eight-thirty," had been featured for weeks in the Green River Record, on the list that with a somewhat arrogant suggestion of prophetic powers possessed by the _Record_ was headed "Coming Events." It was always a scanty list, especially in the fall, when ten, twenty, thirty companies began to play larger centres, and church lawn parties and circuses could no longer appear on it. Sometimes not more than six events were to come in a gray and workaday world. But six were enough to announce. Even a true prophet is not expected to see all the future, only to see clearly all that he sees, and the Record did that.

This rally was important enough to be listed all by itself, and it did not need the adjective grand. It was The Rally.

It was Green River's own—a local, almost a family, affair. No out-of-town celebrities were to be imported this time, to be listened to with awe and then wined and dined by the Colonel safe from the curious eyes of the town. This time old Joe Grant was to preside, as he had done as a matter of course on all such occasions when he was the acknowledged head of the town in political and financial matters, in the old days of high-sounding oratory and simpler politics that were gone forever, but were not very long ago. Judge Saxon, an old timer, too, and better loved than the Honourable Joe, had declined the honour of presiding, but had the authentic offer of it, his first distinction of the kind for years.

It was a local but very important occasion. It was Colonel Everard's first official appearance as candidate for mayor. It was to be a very modest appearance. No more time was allotted for his speech than for Luther Ward's. He was putting himself on a level with Luther and the Judge and the Honourable Joe and identifying himself at last with local politics. The evening emphasized the great man's condescension in accepting this humble office and honouring Green River. Even with the scandal of Theodore Burr's suicide unexplained still and only two weeks old, interest centred on the rally. It was a triumph for the town.

Green River was almost ready. Dugan's orchestra was engaged for the evening, instead of a rival organization from Wells, which the Colonel often imported upon private and public occasions. Jerry Dugan was getting old, too, like the Judge and the Honourable Joe. He had not lost the peculiar wail and lilt from his fiddling, but he had made few recent additions to his repertoire. Just now the band concert in front of Odd Fellows' Hall was winding up with his old favourite: "A Day on the Battlefield."

It had the old swing still, contagious as ever. Loafers in front of the hall shuffled their feet in time to it. Moon-struck young persons hanging two by two over the railings of the bridge to gaze at the water straightened themselves and listened. An ambitious soloist lounging against the court-house fence across the square began to whistle it with elaborate variations, at the inspiring moment when "morning in the forest" had bird-called and syncopated itself into silence, and actual fighting, and the martial music of the charge began.

High and lilting and shrill, it hung in the still night air, alive for the hour, challenging the echoes of dead tunes that lingered about the square, only to die away and be one with them at last; band music, old-fashioned band music, blatant and empty and splendid, clear through the still night air, attuned to the night and the town.

"Good old tune. Gets into your feet," Judge Saxon said, while his wife adjusted his tie before the black walnut mirror in their bedroom, but his unusual tribute to the tune was perfunctory to-night, and his wife ignored it, wisely taking this moment of helpfulness to plunge him suddenly and briskly into a series of questions which she had been trying in vain for some time to get the correct answers to.

"Hugh," she said, "why wouldn't you take the chair to-night?"

"You were the only thing I ever tried to take away from Joe Grant and got away with it, Millie," the Judge explained gallantly.

"Don't you think this rally is like old times? Don't you want to see the town stand on its own feet again, instead of being run from outside?"

"I do, Millie."

Mrs. Saxon made her next point triumphantly, connecting it with the point before by some obscure logic known only to ladies.

"Hugh, a father could not do more for Lillian Burr than the Colonel has since poor Theodore went. The house full of flowers, calling there himself every day and twice a day, though she won't see him; but Lillian won't see any one. The Colonel's been ailing himself, too, but he wouldn't put off the rally and disappoint the town. And the new library will open this fall, and there's talk that he's giving an organ to the church. Hugh, don't you think Theodore's death may have sobered him? Don't you think this may be the beginning of better things? Don't you think——"

"I think you're making a butterfly bow. I don't like them," said the Judge, with the ingenuous smile that somehow closed a subject. She sighed, but changed her attack.

"Turn round now. I want to brush you. Hugh, what has happened to Neil Donovan?"

"What do you mean, happened to him?" snapped the Judge, and then added soberly, "I don't know, Millie. I wish I did."

"An Irish boy can get just so far and no farther."

"How far, Millie?"

"Don't be flippant, Hugh. There's something strange about Neil lately. He didn't speak three times at the table last time he came to supper here. He looks at me as if he didn't know who I was when I speak to him on the street sometimes. There's no life in him. He's like Charlie and all the rest of them—giving out just when things are going his way; that's an Irish boy every time."

"When things are going his way? When his best friend has just shot himself?"

"I didn't refer to that, Hugh," said Mrs. Saxon with dignity.

"No?"

"I referred to Neil's family affairs, and the fact that Colonel Everard has taken him up."

"Maggie home and behaving herself and no questions asked, Charlie shipped to Wells, and Neil going shooting twice with the Colonel?"

"Three times, Hugh."

"And that's what you call things going his way."

"Hugh, why should those two spend any time together at all? They hate each other, or I always thought so—that is, if a man like the Colonel could hate a boy like Neil. What does he want of Neil now? What does Neil want of him?"

"They don't tell me, Millie."

"But it's queer. It frightens me, Hugh. It's as queer as——"

"What?"

"Everything," Mrs. Saxon said, goaded into an exaggeration foreign to her placid type, "everything, lately. You refusing to preside to-night. Lillian Burr shutting herself up in this uncanny way. It is uncanny, even if she is in trouble. Minna Randall taking to church work, and sewing for hours at a time, and taking long drives with her husband. They haven't been inside the Colonel's doors for weeks. Their second girl told our Mary that they have refused five invitations there in the last month. It's my idea that he gave that last stag dinner because he couldn't get Minna or Edith there, or any woman. Why should his own circle turn against him, just when he's doing real good to the town? And it's not only his own circle that's against him. I was matching curtains at Ward's when Sebastian came in to-day, and Luther Ward was barely civil to him—the Colonel's own secretary. What's wrong with the town, Hugh? Can't it be grateful to the Colonel, now when he really deserves it?"

"Don't worry about what Everard deserves. He's not likely to get it, Millie."

Again the Judge was closing the subject, and this time his wife had no more to say. She gave his threadbare, scrupulously pressed coat a final pat and jerk of adjustment, and stood off and looked at him.

"You'll do," she said, "now go along. The music's stopping. It won't look well if you're late."

She turned off the flickering gas jet above the marble-topped bureau abruptly, but not before the Judge had caught the gleam of tears in her eyes.

"Why girl," he said, and came close to her and slipped an arm round her plump, comfortable waist. "You're really troubled."

"Yes."

"And vexed with me for not helping you."

"Yes."

He had drawn her toward a front window of the big, square room. The Judge and his wife stood by it quietly, looking down through a triangle of white, starched curtains at the glimmering, sparsely lit length of street below, and straightening out their difficulties in darkness and silence, as all true lovers should, even lovers at fifty, as these two were fortunate enough to be.

"Millie, I don't want to tease you," the Judge said. "I'll tell you anything you want to know."

"I've been so worried," she wept comfortably against his shoulder. "I'm so afraid."

"Why?"

"I feel as if something—anything might happen. I—oh, you'll only laugh. I can't just tell you, Hugh."

"I'll tell you," said the Judge.

He hesitated and then went on slowly, speaking more to himself than to her.

"Women hate change. That makes them dread it, even when it's not coming. You're dreading it, but it's not coming now, dear. There's feeling against Everard. You're right, but you exaggerate it. It's instinctive and unformulated. It hasn't gone far and won't go any farther. He won't let it. The rally and the library and this new democracy stuff, stag dinners to Ward's crowd and all, are part of a campaign to stop it. The campaign will succeed. Everard's own crowd won't quarrel with him. They can't afford to. Everard has pulled through worse times than this. I've helped him myself, and I shall help him again.

"There'll be no change, Millie. Things will go on just the way they are. I've lived the best years of my life believing that it was best they should, and if I'm wrong, I'm too old to change my mind. I've said somebody had to own the town, and it might as well be Everard. I've said the Burrs and Kents and Randalls, and old Joe Grant's young wife with their parties and drinks and silly little love affairs, were playing too hard, but doing no real harm, planting their cheap, fake smart set here in Green River where it don't belong. Now poor Theodore Burr's dead. That don't look like play. Harry Randall's so deep in debt to the bank for what Everard's let him borrow that he has to stay on there at three thousand a year, though he's been offered twice that in Wells. Everard won't let him go. And the best I can say about myself in the years I've worked for Everard is that I've kept my hands clean, if I have had to keep my eyes shut, but I can say that to you, Millie."

"It does look like old times down there," he went on softly, after a minute. "The street and the lights are the same. And it sounds like old times. It was from a rally in the hall that I first went home with you, Millie. Remember? I was just a boy then, but I wish I was half the man I was then, to-night." He heard a murmur of protest, and laughed. "But I do, Millie. I—wouldn't be helping Everard."

"Oh, Hugh!"

"Don't worry. Everard will pull through all right. Look at the Randalls over there, starting for the hall. Leave your windows open, Millie, and you'll soon hear them all cheering for Everard. The moon won't rise till late, but it will be full to-night. Listen, the band's going into the hall now."

The Judge rested his cheek for a moment against his wife's soft, smooth hair, the decorous, satisfying caress of a decorous generation, then he raised his head with a long, tired sigh.

"I wish I was young," he said. "I wish I was young to-night."

"I wish I was young," the Judge had said, with a thrill and hunger that was the soul of youth itself in his voice. At the moment when he said it, a boy who had the privilege that the Judge coveted, and was not enjoying it just then, was leaning against the court-house railing, and watching Green River crowd into Odd Fellows' Hall.

Another boy had pushed his way across the square to his side, and was not heartily welcomed there, but was calmly unconscious of it.

"Some night, Donovan," he remarked,

"Some night, Willard," Neil agreed gravely.

"Going in? Good for three hours of hot air?"

"I'm not going. No."

"Good boy. Say—" Mr. Willard Nash lowered his voice as he made this daring suggestion—"we'll go around to Halloran's, and get into a little game."

His invitation was not accepted.

"Jerry Dugan's not dead yet," observed Willard presently.

Strains of a deservedly popular waltz tune, heard from inside the hall, gave faint but unmistakable proof of this. Willard kept time with his feet as he listened, paying the tune the tribute of silence, a rare one from him. Standing so, the two were sharply contrasted figures, though the flickering lamps in the square threw only faint light here, and showed them darkly outlined against the railing, as they leaned there side by side. Pose, carriage, every movement and turn of the head were different, as different as a bulky and overgrown child is from a boy turning into a man.

"Some night," Willard repeated, unanswered, but unchilled by it, "and some crowd."

The hall had been filling fast. Though the waltz still swung its faint challenge into the night, so much of Green River had responded to it already that now it was arriving only by twos and threes. But the groups still followed each other fast under the big globe of light at the entrance door, gayly shaded with red for the occasion, and up the bare, clattering stairs to the floor above, and the hall.

Willard was right, more right than he knew. There was a crowd up there, a crowd as Willard did not understand the word; a crowd with a tone and temper of its own and a personality of its own. It was subject to laws of its own and could think and feel for itself, and its thoughts and feelings were made up of the brain stuff of every person in it, but different from them all. It was a newly created thing, a new factor in the world, and like all crowds it was born for one evening, to live for that evening only, and do its work and die.

Upstairs behind closed doors, such a crowd was forming; getting ready to think its own thoughts and act and feel, and so many houses, little and big, had emptied themselves to contribute to it, so many family discussions like the Saxons' had gone on as a prelude to it, that you might fairly say the crowd up there was Green River.

Willard, watching the late arrivals and commenting upon them to Neil, still an uncommunicative audience, was vaguely stirred.

"This gets me," he conceded. "There's something about old Dugan's music that always gets me. For two cents, I'd go in. I sat through a patent medicine show there last week, because I didn't have the sense to stay away. It always gets me when there is anything doing in the hall. And—" he paused, heavily testing his powers of self-analysis, "it gets me," he brought out at length, "more to-night than it ever did before. It—gets me."

"Look, there's Joe Grant," Willard went on. "This is his night, all right. Look at the bulge to that manuscript case, and the shine to his hair. He mixes varnish with his hair dye, all right. I said, look at him."

"I'm looking."

"Well, you don't do much else. What's eating you to-night? Say, will you go in if I will?"

An inarticulate murmur answered him.

"What's that?"

"No."

"All right. Well, what do you know about that? Look there."

"I'm looking."

The latest comers were crowding hurriedly into the entrance hall by this time, and with them, a slender, heavily veiled figure had slipped quickly through the door and out of sight.

"Was that Lil?" Willard said. "Lil Burr?"

"Yes."

"She wouldn't come here; I don't believe it."

"I know it."

"How?"

"She told me."

"What was she doing, talking to you? Why, she won't talk to anybody. She——"

"You'll be late at Hallorans'."

"Aren't you coming?"

"No."

"But you said you would. I don't want to go if you don't. I don't half like to leave you here, you act so queer to-night. What makes you act so? What's eating——"

"Nothing."

Willard detached himself from the railings and regarded his friend, suddenly breathless with surprise, and deeply grieved. Nothing. The word, harmless in itself, had been spoken so that it hit him like an actual blow, straight from the shoulder. Neil, shifting so that the light showed his face, was returning his look with the sudden, unreasoning anger that we feel toward little sounds that beat their slow way into our consciousness at night, to irritate us unendurably at last.

"Go," he urged, "go along to Halloran's. Go anywhere."

"Well, what do you know about that?" began Willard, offended, and then forgave him. There was a look in Neil's pale face that commanded forgiveness. It was pale and strained with a trouble that had nothing to do with Willard, and Willard was respectful and inarticulate before it.

"That's all right," Willard muttered, "that will be all right. I'll go."

Neil took no notice of this promise. Up in the hall the waltz had swelled to a high, light-hearted climax, heady and strained, like the sudden excitements that sweep a crowd. It came clear through the open windows, making one last appeal to the boy below to come up and be part of what was there. And just then a small closed car swept down through the empty square and stopped. Two men stepped out, and paused in the doorway under the red-shaded light.

One was the Colonel's secretary, waiting on the step beyond range of the light, a tall, shadowy figure, and the other, who stood with the light on his face, was Colonel Everard.

He was still pale from his week of illness, but his keen eyes and clear-cut profile were more effective for that. He stood listening to the sounds from upstairs, and he smiled as he listened. He turned at last and looked out across the square as if he could feel Neil's eyes upon him and were returning their look, and then turned away and disappeared up the stairs.

"Neil," Willard was announcing uneasily, "I think a lot of you. I'd do a lot for you. If you're in wrong, any way, if——"

Willard broke off, rebuffed. Neil did not even look at him. He stood staring at the lighted doorway where the Colonel had stood and smiled, as if he could still see him there. He was a creature beyond Willard's world, as he looked, but unaccountably fascinating to Willard. Willard regarded him in awed silence.

Now Dugan's music had stopped. Some one above shut a window with a clatter that echoed disproportionately loud. Then there was silence up there, tense silence, and the call of the silence was harder to resist than the music. The boy by the court-house railing could not resist it. He pushed away Willard's detaining hand, and without a word to him or another glance at him, was across the square and through the red-lighted door, and running up the stairs.

"What do you know about that?" Willard demanded, in vain. "What do you know——"

Willard, certainly, knew nothing, and gave up the attempt to understand, with a sigh.

A little later the vantage point of the court-house fence was unoccupied. Of the two boys who had occupied it, one was making a belated and rather disconsolate way toward Halloran's—the one who would be boasting to-morrow that he had spent the last fifteen minutes with Neil Donovan. The other boy stood listening outside the closed doors of the hall.

It was half an hour later and it had been an important half-hour in Odd Fellows' Hall, that uneventful but vital time when the newly made creature that is the crowd is passive, gathering its forces slowly, getting ready to fling the weight of them into one side of a balance irrevocably, if it has decisions to make; the most important half-hour of the evening if you were interested in the psychology of crowds. The Honourable Joe Grant was not. He would have said that the first speech dragged and the half-hour had been dull. Dull or significant, that half-hour was over, and Green River was waking up. In the listening hush of the hall the big moments of the evening, whatever they were to be, were creeping nearer and nearer. Now they were almost here.

The Honourable Joe had just introduced Luther Ward and heavily resumed his seat. He sat portly and erect and entirely happy behind the thin-legged, inadequate looking table that held a water pitcher, his important looking papers, and his watch. The ornately chased gold watch that had measured so many epoch-making hours for Green River was in public life again, like the Honourable Joe. He fingered it affectionately, wiped his forehead delicately from time to time with a purple silk handkerchief, followed Mr. Ward's remarks with unwavering brown eyes, and smiled his benevolent, public-spirited smile. This was his night indeed.

Behind the Honourable Joe, on the stage in a semicircular row of chairs were the speakers of the evening, and before him was Green River.

The badly proportioned little hall was not at its best to-night. It was too brightly lit and the footlights threw an uncompromising glare upon the tiny stage. Red, white, and blue cheesecloth in crude, sharp colouring draped windows and stage, making gay little splashes of colour that emphasized the dinginess of the room. Only the Grand Army flag, borrowed and draped elaborately above the stage, showed faded and thin against the brightness of the cheesecloth, but kept its dignity and kept up its claim to homage still. And the ugliness of the room was a thing to be discounted and forgotten, like some beautiful, full-blooded woman's tawdry, and ill-chosen clothes, because this room held Green River.

Green River, filling the little room to over-flowing, standing in the rear of the room, crowding every available inch of space on benches, window sills, and an emergency supply of camp chairs, impressive as that much sheer bulk of humanity, crowded between four walls, becomes impressive, and impressive in its own right, too; Green River represented as it was, with all the warring, unreconciled elements that made the town.

For they were all here, Paddy Lane, and the Everard circle, and the intermediate stages of society, the Gaynors and other prosperous farmers and unprosperous farmers and their wives, from the outskirts of the town, and citizens a cut above them both, like the Wards, were all represented here. Mrs. Kent, hatless and evening coated, was elbowed by a lady from Paddy Lane, hatless because she had no presentable hat, and wearing a ragged shawl. These two were side by side, and they had the same look on their faces. There was something of it now on every face in the room. It was a look of listening and waiting.

It was on every face, and it grew more intense every minute that Luther Ward's speech droned on, though it was only a dry, illogical rehash of political issues that could not have called that look into any face. It was as if the audience listened eagerly through it because every word of it was bringing them nearer to something that was to follow. What was it? What did Green River want? What was it waiting for? Green River itself did not know, but it was very near.

Perhaps it was coming now. This might well be the climax of the evening. No more important event was scheduled. Luther Ward, looking discontented with his performance, but relieved to complete it, had sunk into his chair to a scattered echoing of applause, and the next speaker was Colonel Everard.

The Honourable Joe was rising to introduce him. The little introductory speech was a masterpiece, for, though the Colonel had edited every word of it, it was still in the Honourable Joe's best style, flowery and sprinkled with quotations.

"I will not say more," it concluded magnificently, "of one whose life and work among you can best speak for itself, and who will speak for himself now, in his own person. I present to you the Republican candidate for mayor, Colonel Everard."

And now the Honourable Joe had bowed and smiled himself into his seat, and the great man was on his feet, and coming forward to the centre of the stage. The first real applause of the evening greeted him, not very hearty or sustained, but prompt at least. He looked like a very great man indeed, as he stood acknowledging it, his most effective self, a strong man, though so lightly built, erect and pliant of carriage, a man with infinite reserves of power and dignity. He was smiling, and his smile was the same that the boy by the court-house fence had seen, a tantalizing smile of assurance and charm and power, as if he were master of himself and the town.

This was his moment, planned for and led up to for weeks, but Colonel Everard was slow to take advantage of it. He stood still, with his eyes toward the rear of the hall. As he stood so, heads here and there turned and looked where he was looking. Presently all Green River saw what the Colonel saw. A boy was pushing his way toward the front of the hall—a boy who had slipped quietly inside the doors unnoticed fifteen minutes before, and came forward now just as quietly, but held their eyes as he came. Now he had reached the stage, and he broke through the barrier of golden-rod that fenced the short flight of steps, crushing the flowers under his feet, and now he was on the stage confronting Colonel Everard. It was Neil Donovan.

"Sit down," he said to the great man. "They're not going to listen to you. They're going to listen to me."

After that he did not wait to see if the great man took his amazing advice. He came forward alone, and spoke to Green River. He was not an imposing figure as he stood there, only a lean, eager boy, with dark, flashing eyes, and a face that was very pale in the glare of the footlights. He hardly raised his tense, low-pitched voice as he spoke, but Green River heard.

"You're going to listen to me."

And it was true. Green River was going to listen. In the middle of the hall, where the chief delegation from Paddy Lane was massed, a ripple of excitement promised the boy support. It was seconded by a muttering and shuffling of feet on the rear benches, devoted to the youth of the town. From here and there in the hall there were murmurs of protest, too, dying out one by one, and ceasing automatically, like the whispered consultation that went on behind him on the stage.

But the boy did not wait for support or regard interruptions. He did not need to. The audience was his in spite of them, and he knew it and they knew it. Whatever he had to say, important or not, it was what they had been waiting for; that was what the evening had been leading to, and it was here at last. Pale and intent, the boy looked across the footlights at Green River. The audience was his, but he had no pride in the triumph. He began haltingly to speak.

"It will do no good to you or me, but you're going to listen. I've got a word to say about Everard.

"He's sucked your town dry for years and you know it. He's had the pick of your men and used their brains and their youth, and he's had the pick of your women. If there are any of you here that he's got no hold on, it's because you're worth nothing to him. He's got the town. Now he's driven one of your boys to his death.

"'I can't beat him.' That's what Theodore Burr said to me the night he died. 'They won't blame him for this. I want to die because I don't want to live in the world with him, but I'll do no harm to him by dying, only to Lily and me. They won't blame him. You can't beat Everard.'

"Well, you don't blame Everard. He's got you where you don't blame him, whatever he does. You shut your eyes to it. He's got you. You know all this and you shut your eyes. Now I'll tell you some things you don't know. Everard's been trying for weeks to bribe me to keep my mouth shut, like he bribed Charlie for years. He might have saved his breath and his money. I can't hurt him, whether I keep my mouth shut or not. You won't blame him. You'll let him get away with this, too. But you're going to know."

The boy came closer still to the footlights and leaned across them, pausing and deliberately choosing his words. The pause, and the look in his dark, intent eyes as he stood there challenged Green River and dared it to interrupt him. But it was too late to interrupt, too late to stop him now. And behind him in the place of honour in the centre of the row of chairs on the stage, one man at least was powerless to stop him: Colonel Everard, who listened with a set smile on his lips, and a set stare in his eyes.

"He's the man that broke Maggie Brady's life to pieces," Neil's low voice went on. "Everard's the man. He got her away from town. He filled her head with him and set her wild and she had to go. When he was tired of her, he left her in a place he thought she'd be too proud to come back from. She was proud, but he's broken her pride, and she crawled back to us. The prettiest girl in the town, she was, and you all knew that, and my sister and more to me——" he broke off abruptly, and laughed a dry little laugh that echoed strangely in the silent room. His voice sounded dry and hard as he went on.

"He broke Maggie's life, but what's that to you, that give him a chance at your women, knowing well what he is, and leave them to take care of themselves with him, your own women that are yours to take care of, daughters and wives? It's nothing to you, but you're going to know it, and you're going to know this. I had it straight from Theodore Burr the night he died.

"Everard's going to sell you out at the next election, the whole of you—his own crowd, too. He's been planning it for months. He's worked prohibition for all it's worth to him; worked for it till the state went dry, and then he's made money for you that are in it with him, and more for himself, protecting places like Halloran's that sell liquor on the quiet, and the smuggling of liquor into the state. Well, he's made money enough that way, and it's getting risky, and now he sees a way to make more and let nobody in on it. He's going to sell out to the liquor interests and work against prohibition, and the big card he'll use will be exposing Halloran's and the secret traffic in liquor, and all the crowd that's been buying protection from him. There's a big campaign started already, and big money being spent. There'll be big money in it for him. There'll be arrests made here and a public scandal. He's going to sell the town.

"Maybe that interests you some. Maybe it gets you. It won't for long. He'll crawl out of it and lie out of it and talk you and buy you back to him. Well, I know one thing more, and he can't lie or crawl out of it. My father could have put him behind bars any time in twenty years. He's a common thief.

"It was when he was seventeen, and studying law first, back in a town up state that's not on the map or likely to get there, and he was called by a name there that wasn't Everard. He was seventeen, but he was the same then as now; he had the same will to get on and the power to, no matter who he trampled on to get there, and the same charm that got men and women both, though they didn't trust him—got them even when he was trampling on them and they knew it. It got him into trouble there with two girls at once. One was the girl that gave him his start, the chance to go into her uncle's office. He was the biggest man in the town. Older than Everard, this girl was, and teaching in the school he went to, when she fell in love with him and brought him home to her town and gave him his chance. He was tired of her, and she was where it was bound to come out soon how things were with them, and so was the other girl, a girl that he wasn't tired of, the daughter of the woman where he boarded. He tried to get her to go away with him. She wouldn't go and she wouldn't forgive him, but the town was getting too hot for him, and he had to go.

"He had to go quick and make a clean getaway and he wanted a real start this time. He had to have money. That was a dead little town. There was only one place he could get money enough, in the little hotel there. It was the only bank they had. The keeper of it used to cash checks and make loans. Everard was lucky, the same then as now. There was almost five thousand dollars in the safe in the hotel office the night he broke into it, and that was enough for him. He had a fight with the hotel clerk, but he got away with the money, and he got away from the town.

"The clerk was his best friend in town—never trusted him, but fell for him the same as the girls and lent him money and listened to his troubles—and fell for him again when he ran across him again, years later, here in Green River. Everard told him he'd sent the money back, and he kept the secret. He never took hush money for it like Charlie. He said Everard ought to have his chance, and was straight now. But he fell for Everard again, that's what happened. Everard had him, the same as the rest of you.

"The clerk was my father."

The boy's voice broke off. There was dead silence in the hall. Green River had been listening almost in silence, and did not break it now. Presently the boy sighed, shrugged his thin shoulders as if they were throwing off an actual weight, and spoke again, this time in a lifeless voice, with all the colour and drama wiped out of it, a voice that was very tired.

"That's all," he said. "That's back of him, with his fine airs and his far-reaching schemes and his big name in the state. You've stood for a crook. Will you stand for a common criminal, a common thief? Now you know and it's up to you. That's all."

An hour later a boy was hurrying through the dark along the road to the Falls.

He was almost home. Green River lay far behind with its scattered, sparsely strewn lights. The flat fields around him and the unshaded road before him, so bleak by day, were beautiful to-night, far reaching and mysterious. Above them, flat looking and unreal, remote in a coldly clouded sky, hung the yellow September moon.

"I've done for myself," the boy was saying half out loud, as if the faraway moon could hear. "I've lost everything now. I've done for myself."

The boy was sure of this, but could have told little more about the events of the evening. He remembered listening outside the hall doors until he was drawn inside in spite of himself, and listening there until something snapped in his brain, and suddenly the long days of repression, of vainly wondering what to do with his hard-won knowledge, were over, and he was pouring it all out in one jumbled burst of speech. He had no plan and no hope of doing harm to his enemy by speaking. He had to speak.

After he had spoken he remembered getting down from the stage and out of the hall somehow. He remembered the crushed goldenrod, slippery under his feet. Against a background of blurred, unrecognizable faces, he remembered a tall, black-garbed figure that rose to its feet swaying and then steadying itself. It was Lilian Burr. Less clearly he remembered a wave of sound from the hall that followed him as he hurried away across the square. It was not like applause. He did not know or care what it meant. After that, he remembered only the cool dark of the September night as he walked through it aimlessly at first, and then turned toward home.

"I've lost everything," he had said, and it must be true. How could he face the Judge again? How could he go on living in Green River? This was what all his long-cherished dreams had come to; a scene that Charlie might have made, and disgrace in the eyes of the town. He had lost everything.

Yet strangely, as he said it, he knew that it was not true. Whatever he had lost, he had better things left. He had those free and splendid minutes of speaking out his heart. They could not be taken from him. The freedom and relief of them was with him still. And he had the road firm under his feet, and the clean air blowing the fever out of his brain, and the strength of his own young body, clean strength, good to feel as he walked through the night. And along the dark road before him, familiar as it was, and worn so many times by discouraged feet, the white track of moonlight beckoned him, clean and new. It was a way that might lead anywhere—to fairy-land, to success, to the end of the world.

Now the boy made the turn in the road that brought him within sight of home. Faint lights twinkling from it, intimate and warm, invited him as never before. Was his mother waiting up for him? Home itself, lighted and intimate and safe, was enough to find waiting. His heart gave a strange little leap that hurt, but was keen pleasure, too. Almost running, he covered the last bit of road, crossed the grassy front yard and then climbed the creaking front steps, and stood for a minute that was unendurably long, fumbling with the door.

The door was unlocked and gave suddenly, opening wide, and he stood on the threshold of the kitchen. The lights he had seen were in the sitting-room beyond. In this room there was only moonlight. It came through the window that looked out on the marshy field, the fairies' field. Surely there must be fairies there to-night, out in the empty green spaces, flooded with moonlight. But the fairies were not all in the field, there was one in the room. Neil could see it.

The old rocking chair stood in the moonlit window. It was holding two, his mother, and some one else—the fairy, golden haired and white robed and slender, and close in his mother's arms. As he stood and wondered and looked, a board creaked under his feet. It was the faintest of sounds, but a fairy's ears are keen, and the fairy heard, and stirred, and turned in his mother's arms.

Now Neil could see her face. It was flushed and human and warm, and in her eyes, opening grave and deep, was a look that was the shyest but surest of welcomes. The welcome was all for Neil, and the fairy was Judith.