OAKLEY was alone in the bare general offices of the Huckleberry line-as the Buckhom and Antioch Railroad was commonly called by the public, which it betrayed in the matter of meals and connections. He was lolling lazily over his desk with a copy of the local paper before him, and the stem of a disreputable cob pipe between his teeth.

The business of the day was done, and the noise and hurry attending its doing had given way to a sudden hush. Other sounds than those that had filled the ear since morning grew out of the stillness. Big drops of rain driven by the wind splashed softly against the unpainted pine door which led into the yards, or fell with a gay patter on the corrugated tin roof overhead. No. 7, due at 5.40, had just pulled out with twenty minutes to make up between Antioch and Harrison, the western terminus of the line. The six-o'clock whistle had blown, and the men from the car shops, a dingy, one-story building that joined the general offices on the east, were straggling off home. Across the tracks at the ugly little depot the ticket-agent and telegraph-operator had locked up and hurried away under one umbrella the moment No. 7 was clear of the platform. From the yards every one was gone but Milton McClintock, the master mechanic, and Dutch Pete, the yard buss. Protected by dripping yellow oil-skins, they were busy repairing a wheezy switch engine that had been incontinently backed into a siding and the caboose of a freight.

Oakley was waiting the return of Clarence, the office-boy, whom he had sent up-town to the post-office. Having read the two columns of local and personal gossip arranged under the heading “People You Know,” he swept his newspaper into the wastebasket and pushed back his chair. The window nearest his desk overlooked the yards and a long line of shabby day coaches and battered freight cars on one of the sidings. They were there to be rebuilt or repaired. This meant a new lease of life to the shops, which had never proved profitable.

Oakley had been with the Huckleberry two months. The first intimation the office force received that the new man whom they had been expecting for over a week had arrived in Antioch, and was prepared to take hold, was when he walked into the office and quietly introduced himself to Kerr and Holt. Former general managers had arrived by special after much preliminary wiring. The manner of their going had been less spectacular. They one and all failed, and General Cornish cut short the days of their pride and display.

Naturally the office had been the least bit skeptical concerning Oakley and his capabilities, but within a week a change was patent to every one connected with the road: the trains began to regard their schedules, and the slackness and unthrift in the yards gave place to an ordered prosperity. Without any apparent effort he found work for the shops, a few extra men even were taken on, and there was no hint as yet of half-time for the summer months.

He was a broad-shouldered, long-limbed, energetic young fellow, with frank blue eyes that looked one squarely in the face. Men liked him because he was straightforward, alert, and able, with an indefinite personal charm that lifted him out of the ordinary. These were the qualities Cornish had recognized when he put him in control of his interests at Antioch, and Oakley, who enjoyed hard work, had earned his salary several times over and was really doing wonders.

He put down his pipe, which was smoked out, and glanced at the clock. “What's the matter with that boy?” he muttered.

The matter was that Clarence had concluded to take a brief vacation. After leaving the post-office he skirted a vacant lot and retired behind his father's red barn, where he applied himself diligently to the fragment of a cigarette that earlier in the day McClintock, to his great scandal, had discovered him smoking in the solitude of an empty box-car in the yards. The master mechanic, who had boys of his own, had called him a runty little cuss, and had sent him flying up the tracks with a volley of bad words ringing in his ears.

When the cigarette was finished, the urchin bethought him of the purpose of his errand. This so worked upon his fears that he bolted for the office with all the speed of his short legs. As he ran he promised himself, emotionally, that “the boss” was likely to “skin” him. But whatever his fears, he dashed into Oakley's presence, panting and in hot haste. “Just two letters for you, Mr. Oakley!” he gasped. “That was all there was!”

He went over to the superintendent and handed him the letters. Oakley observed him critically and with a dry smile. For an instant the boy hung his head sheepishly, then his face brightened.

“It's an awfully wet day; it's just sopping!”

Oakley waived this bit of gratuitous information.

“Did you run all the way?”

“Yep, every step,” with the impudent mendacity that comes of long practice.

“It's rather curious you didn't get back sooner.”

Clarence looked at the clock.

“Was I gone long? It didn't seem long to me,” he added, with a candor he intended should disarm criticism.

“Only a little over half an hour, Clarence.”

The superintendent sniffed suspiciously.

“McClintock says he caught you smoking a cigarette to-day—how about it?”

“Cubebs,” in a faint voice.

The superintendent sniffed again and scrutinized the boy's hands, which rested on the corner of his desk.

“What's that on your fingers?”

Clarence considered.

“That? Why, that must be walnut-stains from last year. Didn't you ever get walnut-stains on your hands when you was a boy, Mr. Oakley?”

“I suppose so, but I don't remember that they lasted all winter.”

Clarence was discreetly silent. He felt that the chief executive of the Huckleberry took too great an interest in his personal habits. Besides, it was positively painful to have to tell lies that went so wide of the mark as his had gone.

“I guess you may as well go home now. But I wouldn't smoke any more cigarettes, if I were you,” gathering up his letters.

“Good-night, Mr. Oakley,” with happy alacrity.

“Good-night, Clarence.”

The door into the yards closed with a bang, and Clarence, gleefully skipping the mud-puddles which lay in his path, hurried his small person off through the rain and mist.

Oakley glanced at his letters. One he saw was from General Cornish. It proved to be a brief note, scribbled in pencil on the back of a telegram blank. The general would arrive in Antioch that night on the late train. He wished Oakley to meet him.

The other letter was in an unfamiliar hand. Oakley opened it. Like the first, it was brief and to the point, but he did not at once grasp its meaning. This is what he read:

“DEAR Sir,—I enclose two newspaper clippings which fully explain themselves. Your father is much interested in knowing your whereabouts. I have not furnished him with any definite information on this point, as I have not felt at liberty to do so. However, I was able to tell him I believed you were doing well. Should you desire to write him, I will gladly undertake to see that any communication you may send care of this office will reach him.

“Very sincerely yours,

“Ezra Hart.”

It was like a bolt from a clear sky. He drew a deep, quick breath. Then he took up the newspaper clippings. One was a florid column-and-a-half account of a fire in the hospital ward of the Massachusetts State prison, and dealt particularly with the heroism of Roger Oakley, a life prisoner, in leading a rescue. The other clipping, merely a paragraph, was of more recent date. It announced that Roger Oakley had been pardoned.

Oakley had scarcely thought of his father in years. The man and his concerns—his crime and his tragic atonement—had passed completely out of his life, but now he was free, if he chose, to enter it again. There was such suddenness in the thought that he turned sick on the moment; a great wave of self-pity enveloped him, the recollection of his struggles and his shame—the bitter, helpless shame of a child—returned. He felt only resentment towards this man whose crime had blasted his youth, robbing him of every ordinary advantage, and clearly the end was not yet.

True, by degrees, he had grown away from the memory of it all. He had long since freed himself of the fear that his secret might be discovered. With success, he had even acquired a certain complacency. Without knowing his history, the good or the bad of it, his world had accepted him for what he was really worth. He was neither cowardly nor selfish. It was not alone the memory of his own hardships that embittered him and turned his heart against his father. His mother's face, with its hunted, fugitive look, rose up before him in protest. He recalled their wanderings in search of some place where their story was not known and where they could begin life anew, their return to Burton, and then her death.

For years it had been like a dream, and now he saw only the slouching figure of the old convict, which seemed to menace him, and remembered only the evil consequent upon his crime.

Next he fell to wondering what sort of a man this Roger Oakley was who had seemed so curiously remote, who had been as a shadow in his way preceding the presence, and suddenly he found his heart softening towards him. It was infinitely pathetic to the young man, with his abundant strength and splendid energy; this imprisonment that had endured for almost a quarter of a century. He fancied his father as broken and friendless, as dazed and confused by his unexpected freedom, with his place in the world forever lost. After all, he could not sit in judgment, or avenge.

So far as he knew he had never seen his father but once. First there had been a hot, dusty journey by stage, then he had gone through a massive iron gate and down a narrow passage, where he had trotted by his mother's side, holding fast to her hand.

All this came back in a jerky, disconnected fashion, with wide gaps and lapses he could not fill, but the impression made upon his mind by his father had been lasting and vivid. He still saw him as he was then, with the chalky prison pallor on his haggard face. A clumsily made man of tremendous bone and muscle, who had spoken with them through the bars of his cell-door, while his mother cried softly behind her shawl. The boy had thought of him as a man in a cage.

He wondered who Ezra Hart was, for the name seemed familiar. At length he placed him. He was the lawyer who had defended his father. He was puzzled that Hart knew where he was; he had hoped the little New England village had lost all track of him, but the fact that Hart did know convinced him it would be quite useless to try to keep his whereabouts a secret from his father, even if he wished to. Since Hart knew, there must be others, also, who knew.

He took up the newspaper clippings again. By an odd coincidence they had reached him on the very day the Governor of Massachusetts had set apart for his father's release.

Outside, in the yards, on the drenched town, and in the sweating fields beyond, the warm spring rain fell and splashed.

It was a fit time for Roger Oakley to leave the gray walls, and the gray garb he had worn so long, and to re-enter the world of living things and the life of the one person in all that world who had reason to remember him.