These long automobile rides familiarized her as nothing else could not only with the State but with her father. She came to understand and share his peculiar, proprietary interest in the lovely Kentucky countryside. He pointed out to her its beauties of wood and hill and pasture like the owner of some vast estate exhibiting it to visitors, with a frank and pardonable pride. It is a habit of mind not unusual to the native of certain localities—notably Virginia and Maryland and Kentucky; but in her wandering, unimportant old father it seemed to Joan a little piteous, as if he had sunk his small identity into that of his great State, content to make its history his history, its glory his.

"Here," he would say reverently, "is the spot where we made our final victorious stand against the Indians. Sacred ground, my daughter!" Or—"This is the place where our women went down to the spring for water, risking their lives, bless their hearts! because the men could not be spared from the defense of the stockade. You should thank God that you are a Kentucky woman!" He sometimes forgot in his enthusiasm that she had not been, so to speak, born to the purple—though that fact, as he once explained to her, was merely an accident, due to a certain miscalculation of dates.

Joan came to realize in this new intimacy with her father that his futility was owing in large part to circumstances over which he had no control: notably the times in which he lived. He had been born a little too late or perhaps a little too early. There is no need for men of his type in the piping times of peace; but had his prime chanced to occur during some convulsed period of the world's history, it is conceivable that Richard Darcy might have rendered a great account of himself. He was a born leader of men, with unfortunately little opportunity to exercise his talent. During the only war that came within his range of vision (our late unpleasantness with Spain), he had chanced to be involved with certain trusting friends in a financial situation so acute that the affairs of the nation had been obliged to stand aside until he extricated himself; by which time, to his lasting regret, the war was over.

He had, of course, no right to his title. It had simply accrued to him as titles often do accrue to men of his type, particularly in the South; partly by inheritance, growing as he grew, beginning with a modest lieutenancy in the State Guards, which had been his one and only taste of the career for which he had been created. He never spoke of himself as "Major"; but from the habit of years he had perhaps come to think of himself so, accepting the unsought honor gracefully as he accepted whatever else came his way, whether of good or evil.

It is a pity that he could not have fallen asleep, say, at twenty, in his clean, brave youth; and awakened in the month of August 1914, ready for the day's work....

The Darcys and Joan were running home after a long trip in the Bluegrass one evening, slipping along without lights in the glow of an October aftermath, when at the turn of an unfrequented lane they came suddenly upon a crowd of people collected about a bridge. The chauffeur brought the car to an abrupt stop. It was at once surrounded by several men with handkerchiefs tied over the lower parts of their faces.

"What the devil—" cried Major Darcy.

"Highwaymen!" gasped Joan.

A man with a pistol in his hand said laconically, "No, we ain't highwaymen, lady. We wasn't expectin' comp'ny, but sence you've come, you'll hev to stay. Set right where you are and don't look. We'll be through this job in a minute."

"Nonsense! Let us pass at once," said the Major indignantly. "Drive on over the bridge, James!"

"Better not, James," drawled the laconic one. "We're usin' that bridge ourselves just now."

The chauffeur hesitated, walling his eyes in fright. Joan, who was seated beside him, reached for the ignition switch to start the engine, but turned on instead the lighting-switch. The sudden glare of the headlights revealed some twenty or thirty roughly dressed men of the farmer class, and in their midst, bound hand and foot with rope, a cowering negro.

"My God! It's a lynching," quavered Effie May.

The Major had by this time collected his startled wits.

With a sudden oath he jerked open the door and got out.

"What are you up to here, men? Don't touch me, sir!"—this to one who had laid a hand on his sleeve.

There was a quality in her father's voice that sent a thrill through Joan. She had never heard it before. The man removed his hand.

"We're just stringin' up a nigger for the best of reasons," he explained. "'Tain't no business of yourn, stranger."

"I'll make it my business," said Richard Darcy sternly. "You're not going to disgrace this State while I am here!"

The effect was histrionic; and yet Joan realized that her father was not blustering. He meant it.

There came a wail from beyond that made her shiver, the cry of a man in mortal terror. "I ain't never done it, 'fore Gawd I ain't never tetched that woman. Oh, Boss! O-o-oh, Boss!" It was like the cry of a damned soul to God. "Don' you let 'em git me!"

There was an agony of hope in the appeal, as of one who sees at hand unexpected deliverance.

The Major responded to it, speaking in quiet reassurance as she had sometimes heard him speak, years ago, when she had wakened out of some nightmare in the little bed beside her parents'.

"All right, boy. They shan't get you,"

He strode through the crowd, putting men out of his way right and left. In sheer surprise they let him pass till he reached the negro, who cringed to him, catching at his hand.

Then a voice cried out, "Here, we're wastin' time. Muzzle the old boy!"

The Major turned and stared magnificently in the direction of his voice, nettled by the term "old boy."

"Evidently," he remarked, "the gentleman does not know who I am!"

Joan was seized with an hysterical desire to laugh. At such a moment the bombast of it was too much. Suppose they should inquire minstrel-fashion, "Well, then, Mr. Johnsing, who are you?"

But the crowd was not as used to her father as she was. They hesitated, impressed by his hauteur, his fine clothes, the waiting limousine. They stirred uneasily. A voice near her murmured, "Mebbe it's the Governor!"

Richard Darcy took instant advantage of the impression he had created, and began to speak. It was not the first time she had heard him make a speech, for he was frequently called upon to aid some friend in turning the tide of political battle. The Major, indeed, had rather a reputation for assisting his friends into office—It was typical of Joan that she listened critically despite her thumping heart; that she watched what she could see of the faces about her, picked out by the lights of the car; that she missed no expression on the gray, working features of the negro, darting wild glances about him like a newly caged wolf she had seen once at the Zoo, frantically eying the people who stood to stare at it.

Her father's voice poured out in a golden flood, running the gamut from anger to gentle suasion. It was the voice of the natural orator, which depends very little for its effect upon words. Once, passing a negro church, Joan had heard just such a voice rising and falling within, and though not a word of the sermon reached her, after a few moments she had been almost ready to sway and moan with the congregation as it muttered, "Yas, good Lawd!" "Be mussiful to us po' sinners" "Come, Jesus, come down and take me home!"

Some such effect began to be visible on the Major's audience. There were stirrings and murmurings that suggested applause. He rose to them. The eloquence that lies so close under the skin of Southern-born men—certainly of all Southern-born men of Irish stock—came to the surface and flowered. He showed this handful of rough farmers what it should mean to them to be natives of so great and glorious a commonwealth ("'Commonwealth'—what a splendid word, my friends!"); wearing in her bosom all the riches of the earth, nourishing at that bosom a race of supermen ("And superwomen, my friends! superwomen!"); carrying in her womb the greatness of the country's future.

"Statesmen we give to the world—law-makers, not lawbreakers! Soldiers we give, not midnight marauders and assassins!" (If he borrowed freely from a certain greater Kentucky orator who speaks only with his pen, the Major was unaware of plagiarism.) "Show me the fools who say Kentuckians are lawless? We make our laws as we need them, gentlemen—and we obey them! Perhaps the greatest of our laws is this: 'Never kick a dog when it is down.'" His voice sank to a warm and personal friendliness. "I ask you, gentlemen—is there any dog more down than the negro? It is not his fault that he is here where he is no longer wanted. It is not his fault that he brought with him when he came the ways and the intelligence of the jungle. It is ours, perhaps, that he has kept them. We shall never tame the negro by proving ourselves savages!—My friends, you and I here in Kentucky pride ourselves on breaking our horses and our dogs by means of kindness. Shall we do less for our unfortunate black brother?"

A voice in the crowd remarked, "You can claim kin with him ef you want to, Jedge—I ain't!"

A ripple of laughter greeted this sally, and Joan's tension relaxed. She felt intuitively that a crowd which laughs does not kill.

While he spoke, her father had more than once caught her eye over the heads of the others, urgently, meaningly. Now he nodded to her. Joan suddenly caught the message he was trying to convey.

"He wants us to go to him. Quick, James! Start your engine. Quietly!"

In his nervousness, however, the chauffeur started the car with a jerk, and many faces moved in their direction. The Major turned on the full tide of his voice, and rose to his climax.

"My friends," he asked solemnly, "have you thought to take into your hands the privilege of the Most High, who saith, 'Vengeance is mine'? Perhaps you have called vengeance 'justice'? Even so there is a finer thing than justice. There is mercy. And there is something we may give even greater than mercy—something to which each of us poor souls has a human right. I refer, gentlemen, to the benefit of the doubt.

"Some day every one of us here present—who knows how soon?—must stand before the Judgment Seat, cowering as this wretch is cowering now. And what we dare to ask then will be perhaps not justice, nor even mercy—but simply the benefit of the doubt."

Tears came into Joan's eyes. It seemed to her that for a moment her father had forgotten his purpose there, and was speaking not for another but for himself....

His mind, however, had not left the business in hand. After a slight and telling pause, he said in his ordinary conversational voice, "Now I am going to take this negro with me, gentlemen, if you don't mind. I have at hand a safe conveyance, as you see. I pledge you my word to deliver him in person to the sheriff of this county."

He beckoned to Joan.

The spell was broken, and pandemonium reigned. "Look out—he's makin' a get-away!"

"Aw, what's the use? Leave him go!"

"By God, it was my sister—"

"Let me at him"—

"The gen'leman's right, I tell you!"—

And penetrating all a laconic drawl, "Stranger, leggo that nigger, and leggo quick."

Joan, on tiptoe, saw her father's head and beckoning hand above the crowd.

"Go on, James!" she said tensely. "Never mind if you run them down—"

"Stop!" gasped Effie May. "Don't you see those pistols? They mean to shoot!"

The terrified James did not know which to obey.

"Here, give me the wheel," ordered Joan. "Be quiet, Effie May!" Into her mind came scornfully one of her father's sayings, "The canaille are invariably timid."

Effie May suddenly screamed again. "They're going to shoot!"

And as if at a signal for which they had been waiting, two shots barked out.

The Major, still finely erect, thrust the negro behind him, and at the same moment Joan sprang out of the car to go to his defense; two instinctive acts which proved them father and child, and also proved indubitably the Darcy right to pride of race.

His steady voice reached her again as she struggled through the milling crowd; "You poor fools, look to what your folly has already led you! You've shot the wrong man. You've shot me!"

There was a second of appalled silence. Then a man muttered "Golly!" and turned and fled. His panic was contagious. One after another, by twos and threes, the lynchers melted hastily away. When Joan reached her father he was seated on the ground, leaning for support against the bridge railing, alone except for the shackled negro.

He still had command of the situation. "Take my penknife, Dollykins, and set this boy free so that he can run," he ordered.

Joan cut the ropes, sick with relief. He was so calm that she thought he must have been bluffing the crowd.

"Dad! Dad! You're not really hurt, then?"

He smiled up at her. "Not hurt, my child. Killed," he said, dramatic to the last....

The negro did not run. In return for his defender's heroism, he performed a small act of heroism himself—not so small either, perhaps, considering that his life depended upon what use he made of the next few hours.

"I'll tote him to de car, lady," he offered, pantingly; and delayed further to give the paralyzed chauffeur instructions as to where to find the nearest doctor.

Joan sat on the floor of the limousine with her father's head in her lap, only half aware of his labored, fluttering breath, of the blood upon her dress, of her step-mother's wild pleadings with him just to look at her, just to say one word to his Effie May, who loved him—

She was strangely exalted. Her mind seemed to have slipped into a region of consciousness where things were made suddenly clear to her, troubling questions answered, doubts set forever aside.

"A gentleman," she kept repeating to herself. "A gentleman!"

It seemed to her in that moment a great thing to have been born a gentleman, even if one became nothing more; to know that whatever the fortunes of life, one would be able to meet them gallantly and unafraid, because of a something within stronger than personal will or habit: the sum of the wills and habits of many ancestors. She was sorry for the canaille, the Effie Mays, who had no such inner power to rely upon....

As they carried him into a doctor's office, Richard Darcy's eyes opened. They passed the face of his frantic wife unseeing, and came to rest upon Joan in some anxiety.

"You all right, Dollykins? Must not allow—mere trifle like this—upset—"

"Nothing shall upset me, Father," she said, smiling at him.

"Children so necessary—family traditions—"

She bent close to him. "My son is going to be proud to carry on the family traditions, dear."

His face cleared. "Good girl!" There was a little bubbling breath. "I promised Mary—"

But Joan never learned what promise it was that he had made, and doubtless broken, to his Mary.