LATE one afternoon, as Oakley sat at his desk in the broad streak of yellow light that the sun sent in through the west windows, he heard a step on the narrow board-walk that ran between the building and the tracks. The last shrill shriek of No. 7, as usual, half an hour late, had just died out in the distance, and the informal committee of town loafers which met each train was plodding up Main Street to the post-office in solemn silence.

He glanced around as the door into the yards opened, expecting to see either Holt or Kerr. Instead he saw a tall, gaunt man of sixty-five, a little stoop-shouldered, and carrying his weight heavily and solidly. His large head was sunk between broad shoulders. It was covered by a wonderful growth of iron-gray hair. The face was clean-shaven and had the look of a placid mask. There was a curious repose in the man's attitude as he stood with a big hand—the hand of an artisan—resting loosely on the knob of the door.

“Is it you. Dannie?”

The smile that accompanied the words was at once anxious, hesitating, and inquiring. He closed the door with awkward care and coming a step nearer, put out his hand. Oakley, breathing hard, rose hastily from his chair, and stood leaning against the corner of his desk as if he needed its support. He was white to the lips.

There was a long pause while the two men looked into each other's eyes.

“Don't you know me, Dannie?” wistfully. Dan said nothing, but he extended his hand, and his father's fingers closed about it with a mighty pressure. Then, quite abruptly, Roger Oakley turned and walked over to the window. Once more there was absolute silence in the room, save for the ticking of the clock and the buzzing of a solitary fly high up on the ceiling.

The old convict was the first to break the tense stillness.

“I had about made up my mind I should never see you again, Dannie. When your mother died and you came West it sort of wiped out the little there was between me and the living. In fact, I really didn't know you would care to see me, and when Hart told me you wished me to come to you and had sent the money, I could hardly believe it.”

Here the words failed him utterly. He turned slowly and looked into his son's face long and lovingly. “I've thought of you as a little boy for all these years, Dannie—as no higher than that,” dropping his hand to his hip. “And here you are a man grown. But you got your mother's look—I'd have known you by it among a thousand.”

If Dan had felt any fear of his father it had left him the instant he entered the room. Whatever he might have done, whatever he might have been, there was no question as to the manner of man he had become. He stepped to his son's side and took his hand in one of his own.

“You've made a man of yourself. I can see that. What do you do here for a living?”

Dan laughed, queerly. “I am the general manager of the railroad, father,” nodding towards the station and the yards. “But it's not much to brag about. It's only a one-horse line,” he added.

“No, you don't mean it, Dannie!” And he could see that his father was profoundly impressed. He put up his free hand and gently patted Dan's head as though he were indeed the little boy he remembered.

“Did you have an easy trip West, father?” Oakley asked. “You must be tired.”

“Not a bit, Dannie. It was wonderful. I'd been shut off from it all for more than twenty years, and each mile was taking me nearer you.”

The warm yellow light was beginning to fade from the room. It was growing late.

“I guess we'd better go up-town to the hotel and have our supper. Where is your trunk? At the station?”

“I've got nothing but a bundle. It's at the door.”

Dan locked his desk, and they left the office.

“Is it all yours?” Roger Oakley asked, pausing as they crossed the yards, to glance up and down the curving tracks.

“It's part of the property I manage. It belongs to General Cornish, who holds most of the stock.”

“And the train I came on, Dannie, who owned that?”

“At Buckhorn Junction, where you changed cars for the last time, you caught our local express. It runs through to a place called Harrison—the terminus of the line. This is only a branch road, you know.”

But the explanation was lost on his father. His son's relation to the road was a magnificent fact which he pondered with simple pleasure.

After their supper at the hotel they went up-stairs. Roger Oakley had been given a room next his son's. It was the same room General Cornish had occupied when he was in Antioch.

“Would you like to put away your things now?” asked Dan, as he placed his father's bundle, which he had carried up-town from the office, on the bed.

“I'll do that by and by. There ain't much there—just a few little things I've managed to keep, or that have been given me.”

Dan pushed two chairs before an open window that overlooked the square. His father had taken a huge blackened meerschaum from its case and was carefully filling it from a leather pouch.

“You don't mind if I light my pipe?” he inquired.

“Not a bit. I've one in my pocket, but it's not nearly as fine as yours.”

“Our warden gave it to me one Christmas, and I've smoked it ever since. He was a very good man, Dannie. It's the old warden I'm speaking of, not Kenyon, the new one, though he's a good man, too.”

Dan wondered where he had heard the name of Kenyon before; then he remembered—it was at the Emorys'.

“Try some of my tobacco, Dannie,” passing the pouch.

For a time the two men sat in silence, blowing clouds of white smoke out into the night. Under the trees, just bursting into leaf, the street-lamps flickered in a long, dim perspective, and now and then a stray word floated up to them, coming from a group of idlers on the corner below the window.

Roger Oakley hitched his chair nearer his son's, and rested a heavy hand on his knee. “I like it here,” he said.

“Do you? I am glad.”

“What will be the chances of my finding work? You know I'm a cabinet-maker by trade.”

“There's no need of your working; so don't worry about that.”

“But I must work, Dannie. I ain't used to sitting still and doing nothing.”

“Well,” said Oakley, willing to humor him, “there are the car shops.”

“Can you get me in?”

“Oh yes, when you are ready to start. I'll have McClintock, the master mechanic, find something in your line for you to do.”

“I'll need to get a kit of tools.”

“I guess McClintock can arrange that, too. I'll see him about it when you are ready.”

“Then that's settled. I'll begin in the morning,” with quiet determination.

“But don't you want to look around first?”

“I'll have my Sundays for that.” And Dan saw that there was no use in arguing the point with him. He was bent on having his own way.

The old convict filled his lungs with a deep, free breath. “Yes, I'm going to like it. I always did like a small town, anyhow. Tell me about yourself, Dannie. How do you happen to be here?”

Dan roused himself. “I don't know. It's chance, I suppose. After mother's death—”

“Twenty years ago last March,” breaking in upon him, softly; then, nodding at the starlit heavens, “She's up yonder now, watching us. Nothing's hidden or secret. It's all plain to her.”

“Do you really think that, father?”

“I know it, Dannie.” And his tone was one of settled conviction.

Dan had already discovered that his father was deeply religious. It was a faith the like of which had not descended to his own day and generation.

“Well, I had it rather hard for a while,” going back to his story.

“Yes,” with keen sympathy. “You were nothing but a little boy.”

“Finally, I was lucky enough to get a place as a newsboy on a train. I sold papers until I was sixteen, and then began braking. I wanted to be an engineer, but I guess my ability lay in another direction. At any rate, they took me off the road and gave me an office position instead. I got to be a division superintendent, and then I met General Cornish. He is one of the directors of the line I was with at the time. Three months ago he made me an offer to take hold here, and so here I am.”

“And you've never been back home, Dannie?”

“Never once. I've wanted to go, but I couldn't.” He hoped his father would understand.

“Well, there ain't much to take you there but her grave. I wish she might have lived, you'd have been a great happiness to her, and she got very little happiness for her portion any ways you look at it. We were only just married when the war came, and I was gone four years. Then there was about eleven years When we were getting on nicely. We had money put by, and owned our own home. Can you remember it, Dannie? The old brick place on the corner across from the post-office. A new Methodist church stands there now. It was sold to get money for my lawyer when the big trouble came. Afterwards, when everything was spent, she must have found it very hard to make a living for herself and you.”

“She did,” said Dan, gently. “But she managed somehow to keep a roof over our heads.”

“When the law sets out to punish it don't stop with the guilty only. When I went to her grave and saw there were flowers growing on it, and that it was being cared for, it told me what you were. She was a very brave woman, Dannie.”

“Yes,” pityingly, “she was.”

“Few women have had the sorrow she had, and few women could have borne up under it as she did. You know that was an awful thing about Sharp.”

He put up his hand and wiped the great drops of perspiration from his forehead.

Dan turned towards him quickly.

“Why do you speak of it? It's all past now.”

“I'd sort of like to tell you about it.”

There was a long pause, and he continued:

“Sharp and I had been enemies for a long time. It started back before the war, when he wanted to marry your mother. We both enlisted in the same regiment, and somehow the trouble kept alive. He was a bit of a bully, and I was counted a handy man with my fists, too. The regiment was always trying to get us into the ring together, but we knew it was dangerous. We had sense enough for that. I won't say he would have done it, but I never felt safe when there was a fight on in all those four years. It's easy enough to shoot the man in front of you and no one be the wiser. Many a score's been settled that way. When we got home again we didn't get along any better. He was a drinking man, and had no control over himself when liquor got the best of him. I did my share in keeping the feud alive. What he said of me and what I said of him generally reached both of us in time, as you can fancy.

“At last, when I joined the church, I concluded it wasn't right to hate a man the way I hated Sharp, for, you see, he'd never really done anything to me.

“One day I stopped in at the smithy—he was a blacksmith—to have a talk with him and see if we couldn't patch it up somehow and be friends. It was a Saturday afternoon, and he'd been drinking more than was good for him.

“I hadn't hardly got the first words out when he came at me with a big sledge in his hand, all in a rage, and swearing he'd have my life. I pushed him off and started for the door. I saw it was no use to try to reason with him, but he came at me again, and this time he struck me with his sledge. It did no harm, though it hurt, and I pushed him out of my way and backed off towards the door. The lock was caught, and before I could open it, he was within striking distance again, and I had to turn to defend myself. I snatched up a bar of iron perhaps a foot long. I had kept my temper down until then, but the moment I had a weapon in my hand it got clean away from me, and in an instant I was fighting—just as he was fighting—to kill.”

Roger Oakley had told the story of the murder in a hard, emotionless voice, but Dan saw in the half-light that his face was pale and drawn. Dan found it difficult to associate the thought of violence with the man at his side, whose whole manner spoke of an unusual restraint and control. That he had killed a man, even in self-defence, seemed preposterous and inconceivable.

There was a part of the story Roger Oakley could not tell, and which his son had no desire to hear.

“People said afterwards that I'd gone there purposely to pick a quarrel with Sharp, and his helper, who, it seems, was in the yard back of the smithy setting a wagon tire, swore he saw me through a window as I entered, and that I struck the first blow. He may have seen only the end of it, and really believed I did begin it, but that's a sample of how things got twisted. Nobody believed my motive was what I said it was. The jury found me guilty of murder, and the judge gave me a life sentence. A good deal of a fuss was made over what I did at the fire last winter. Hart told me he'd sent you the papers.”

Dan nodded, and his father continued:

“Some ladies who were interested in mission work at the prison took the matter up and got me my pardon. It's a fearful and a wicked thing for a man to lose his temper, Dannie. At first I was bitter against every one who had a hand in sending me to prison, but I've put that all from my heart. It was right I should be punished.”

He rose from his chair, striking the ashes from his pipe.

“Ain't it very late, Dannie? I'll just put away my things, and then we can go to bed. I didn't mean to keep you up.”

Oakley watched his precise and orderly arrangement of his few belongings. He could see that it was a part of the prison discipline under which he had lived for almost a quarter of a century. When the contents of his bundle were disposed of to his satisfaction, he put on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, with large, round glasses, and took up a well-thumbed Bible, which he had placed at one side.

“I hope you haven't forgotten this book, Dannie,” tapping it softly with a heavy forefinger.