The wires coming down from the north were flashing the railroad’s call for help. A band of madmen had struck the end of the line at Leavit’s Creek and had destroyed the half-finished bridge. They had raced down the line, driving the frightened labourers before them, tearing up the ties and making huge fires of them on which they threw the new rails, heating and twisting these beyond any hope of future usefulness.

Labourers, foremen and engineers of construction had fled literally for their lives. The men of the hills had no quarrel with them. They preferred not to injure them. But they were infuriated men with their wrongs fresh in mind and with deadly hunting rifles in hand. The workmen on the line needed no second warning. They would take no chances with an enemy of this kind. They were used to violence and rioting in their own labour troubles, but this was different. This was war. They threw themselves headlong upon handcars and work engines and bolted down the line, carrying panic before them.

In a single night the hill men with Jeffrey Whiting at their head had ridden down and destroyed 278 nearly twenty miles of very costly construction work. There were yet thirty miles of the line left in the hills and if the men were not stopped they would not leave a single rail in all the hill country where they were masters.

The call of the railroad was at first frantic with panic and fright. That was while little men who had lost their wits were nominally in charge of a situation in which nobody knew what to do. Then suddenly the tone of the railroad’s call changed. Big men, used to meeting all sorts of things quickly and efficiently, had taken hold. They had the telegraph lines of the State in their hands. There was no more frightened appeal. Orders were snapped over the wires to sheriffs in Adirondack and Tupper and Alexander counties. They were told to swear in as many deputies as they could lead. They were to forget the consideration of expense. The railroad would pay and feed the men. They were to think of nothing but to get the greatest possible number of fighting men upon the line at once.

Then a single great man, a man who sat in a great office building in New York and held his hand upon every activity in the State, saw the gravity of the business in the hills and put himself to work upon it. He took no half measures. He had no faith in little local authorities, who would be bound to sympathise somewhat with the hill people in this battle.

He called the Governor of the State from Albany to his office. He ordered the Governor to turn out the State’s armed forces and set them in motion toward the hills. He wondered autocratically that the Governor had not had the sense to do this of himself. The Governor bridled and hesitated. The Governor had been living on the fiction that he was the executive head of the State. It took Clifford W. Stanton just three minutes to disabuse him completely and forever of this illusion. He explained to him just why he was Governor and by whose permission. Also he pointed out that the permission of the great railroad system that covered the State would again be necessary in order that Governor Foster might succeed himself. Then the great man sent Wilbur Foster back to Albany to order out the nearest regiment of the National Guard for service in the hills.

Before the second night three companies of the militia had passed through Utica and had gone up the line of the U. & M. Their orders were to avoid killing where possible and to capture all of the hill men that they could. The railroad wished to have them tried and imprisoned by the impartial law of the land. For it was characteristic of the great power which in those days ruled the State that when it had outraged every sense of fair play and common humanity to attain its ends it was then ready to spend much money creating public opinion in favour of itself.

Jeffrey Whiting stood in the evening in the cover of the woods above Milton’s Crossing and watched a train load of soldiers on flat cars come creeping up the grade from the south. This was the last of the hills. He had refused to let his men go farther. Behind him lay fifty miles of new railroad in ruins. Before him lay the open, settled country. His men, once the fever of destruction had begun to run in their blood, had wished to sweep on down into the villages and carry their work through them. But he had stood firm. This was their own country where they belonged and where the railroad was the interloper. Here they were at home. Here there was a certain measure of safety for them even in the destructive and lawless work that they had begun. They had done enough. They had pushed the railroad back to the edge of the hills. They had roused the men of the hills behind them. Where he had started with his seventy-two friends, there were now three hundred well-armed men in the woods around him. Here in their cover they could hold the line of the railroad indefinitely against almost any force that might be sent against them.

But the inevitable sobering sense of leadership and responsibility was already at work upon him. The burning, rankling anger that had driven him onward so that he had carried everything and everybody near him into this business of destruction 281 was now dulled down to a slow, dull hate that while it had lost nothing of its bitterness yet gave him time to think. Those men coming up there on the cars were not professional soldiers, paid to fight wherever there was fighting to be done. Neither did they care anything for the railroad that they should come up here to fight for it. Why did they come?

They had joined their organisation for various reasons that usually had very little to do with fighting. They were clerks and office men, for the most part, from the villages and factories of the central part of the State. The militia companies had attracted them because the armouries in the towns had social advantages to offer, because uniforms and parade appeal to all boys, because they were sons of veterans and the military tradition was strong in them. Jeffrey Whiting’s strong natural sense told him the substance of these things. He could not regard these boys as deadly enemies to be shot down without mercy or warning. They had taken their arms at a word of command and had come up here to uphold the arm of the State. If the railroad was able to control the politics of the State and so was able to send these boys up here on its own business, then other people were to blame for the situation. Certainly these boys, coming up here to do nothing but what their duty to the State compelled them to do; they were not to be blamed.

His men were now urging him to withdraw a little distance into the hills to where the bed of the road ran through a defile between two hills. The soldiers would no doubt advance directly up the line of what had been the railroad, covering the workmen and engineers who would be coming on behind them. If they were allowed to go on up into the defile without warning or opposition they could be shot down by the hill men from almost absolute safety. If he had been dealing with a hated enemy Jeffrey Whiting perhaps could have agreed to that. But to shoot down from ambush these boys, who had come up here many of them probably thinking they were coming to a sort of picnic or outing in the September woods, was a thing which he could not contemplate. Before he would attack them these boys must know just what they were to expect.

He saw them leave the cars at the end of the broken line and take up their march in a rough column of fours along the roadbed. He was surprised and puzzled. He had expected them to work along the line only as fast as the men repaired the rails behind them. He had not thought that they would go away from their cars.

Then he understood. They were not coming merely to protect the rebuilding of the railroad. They had their orders to come straight into the hills, to attack and capture him and his men. The railroad was not only able to call the State to protect 283 itself. It had called upon the State to avenge its wrongs, to exterminate its enemies. His men had understood this better than he. Probably they were right. This thing might as well be fought out from the first. In the end there would be no quarter. They could defeat this handful of troops and drive them back out of the hills with an ease that would be almost ridiculous. But that would not be the end.

The State would send other men, unlimited numbers of them, for it must and would uphold the authority of its law. Jeffrey Whiting did not deceive himself. Probably he had not from the beginning had any doubt as to what would be the outcome of this raid upon the railroad. The railroad itself had broken the law of the State and the law of humanity. It had defied every principle of justice and common decency. It had burned the homes of law-supporting, good men in the hills. Yet the law had not raised a hand to punish it. But now when the railroad itself had suffered, the whole might of the State was ready to be set in motion to punish the men of the hills who had merely paid their debt.

But Jeffrey Whiting could not say to himself that he had not foreseen all this from the outset. Those days of thinking in jail had given him an insight into realities that years of growth and observation of things outside might not have produced in him. He had been given time to see that 284 some things are insurmountable, that things may be wrong and unsound and utterly unjust and still persist and go on indefinitely. Youth does not readily admit this. Jeffrey Whiting had recognised it as a fact. And yet, knowing this, he had led these men, his friends, men who trusted him, upon this mad raid. They had come without the clear vision of the end which he now realised had been his from the start. They had thought that they could accomplish something, that they had some chance of winning a victory over the railroad. They had believed that the power of the State would intervene to settle the differences between them and their enemy. Jeffrey Whiting knew, must have known all along, that the moment a tie was torn up on the railroad the whole strength of the State would be put forth to capture these men and punish them. There would be no compromise. There would be no bargaining. If they surrendered and gave themselves up now they would be jailed for varying terms. If they did not, if they stayed here and fought, some of them would be killed and injured and in one way or another all would suffer in the end.

He had done them a cruel wrong. The truth of this struck him with startling clearness now. He had led them into this without letting them see the full extent of what they were doing, as he must have seen it.

There was but one thing to do. If they dispersed 285 now and scattered themselves through the hills few of them would ever be identified. And if he went down and surrendered alone the railroad would be almost satisfied with punishing him. It was the one just and right thing to do.

He went swiftly among the men where they stood among the trees, waiting with poised rifles for the word to fire upon the advancing soldiers, and told them what they must do. He had deceived them. He had not told them the whole truth as he himself knew it. They must leave at once, scattering up among the hills and keeping close mouths as to where they had been and what they had done. He would go down and give himself up, for if the railroad people once had him in custody they would not bother so very much about bringing the others to punishment.

His men looked at him in a sort of puzzled wonder. They did not understand, unless it might be that he had suddenly gone crazy. There was an enemy marching up the line toward them, bent upon killing or capturing them. They turned from him and without a spoken word, without a signal of any sort, loosed a rifle volley across the front of the oncoming troops. The battle was on!

The volley had been fired by men who were accustomed to shoot deer and foxes from distances greater than this. The first two ranks of the soldiers fell as if they had been cut down with 286 scythes. Not one of them was hit above the knees. The firing stopped suddenly as it had begun. The hill men had given a terse, emphatic warning. It was as though they had marked a dead line beyond which there must be no advance.

These soldiers had never before been shot at. The very restraint which the hill men had shown in not killing any of them in that volley proved to the soldiers even in their fright and surprise how deadly was the aim and the judgment of the invisible enemy somewhere in the woods there before them. To their credit, they did not drop their arms or run. They stood stunned and paralysed, as much by the suddenness with which the firing had ceased as by the surprise of its beginning.

Their officers ran forward, shouting the superfluous command for them to halt, and ordering them to carry the wounded men back to the cars. For a moment it seemed doubtful whether they would again advance or would put themselves into some kind of defence formation and hold the ground on which they stood.

Jeffrey Whiting, looking beyond them, saw two other trains come slowly creeping up the line. From the second train he saw men leaping down who did not take up any sort of military formation. These he knew were sheriffs’ posses, fighting men sworn in because they were known to be fighters. They were natural man hunters who delighted 287 in the chase of the human animal. He had often seen them in the hills on the hunt, and he knew that they were an enemy of a character far different from those harmless boys who could not hit a mark smaller than the side of a hill. These men would follow doggedly, persistently into the highest of the hills, saving themselves, but never letting the prey slip from their sight, dividing the hill men, separating them, cornering them until they should have tracked them down one by one and either captured or killed them all.

These men did not attempt to advance along the line of the road. They stepped quickly out into the undergrowth and began spreading a thin line of men to either side.

Then he saw that the third train, although they were soldiers, took their lesson from the men who had just preceded them. They left the tracks and spreading still farther out took up the wings of a long line that was now stretching east to west along the fringe of the hills. The soldiers in the centre retired a little way down the roadbed, stood bunched together for a little time while their officers evidently conferred together, then left the road by twos and fours and began spreading out and pushing the other lines out still farther. It was perfect and systematic work, he agreed, that could not have been better done if he and his companions had planned it for their own capture.

There were easily eight hundred men there in 288 front, he judged; men well armed and ready for an indefinite stay in the hills, with a railroad at their back to bring up supplies, and with the entire State behind them. And the State was ready to send more and more men after these if it should be necessary. He had no doubt that hundreds of other men were being held in readiness to follow these or were perhaps already on their way. He saw the end.

Those lines would sweep up slowly, remorselessly and surround his men. If they stood together they would be massacred. If they separated they would be hunted down one by one.

Their only chance was to scatter at once and ride back to where their homes had been. This time he implored them to take their chance, begged them to save themselves while they could. But he might have known that they would do nothing of the kind. Already they were breaking away and spreading out to meet that distending line in front of them. Nothing short of a miracle could now save them from annihilation, and Jeffrey Whiting was not expecting a miracle. There was nothing to be done but to take command and sell his life along with theirs as dearly as possible.

The echoes of the outbreak in the hills ran up and down the State. Men who had followed the course of things through the past months, men who 289 knew the spoken story of the fire in the hills which no newspaper had dared to print openly, understood just what it meant. The men up there had been goaded to desperation at last. But wise men agreed quietly with each other that they had done the very worst thing that could have been done. The injury they had done the railroad would amount to very little, comparatively, in the end, while it would give the railroad an absolutely free hand from now on. The people would be driven forever out of the lands which the railroad wished to possess. There would be no legislative hindrances now. The people had doomed themselves.

The echoes reached also to two million other men throughout the State who did not understand the matter in the least. These looked up a moment from the work of living and earning a living to sympathise vaguely with the foolish men up there in the hills who had attacked the sacred and awful rights of railroad property. It was too bad. Maybe there were some rights somewhere in the case. But who could tell? And the two million, the rulers and sovereigns of the State, went back again to their business.

The echo came to Joseph Winthrop, Bishop of Alden, almost before a blow had been struck. It is hardly too much to say that he was listening for it. He knew his people, kindly, lagging of speech, slow to anger; but, once past a certain point of 290 aggravation, absolutely heedless and reckless of consequences.

He did not stop to compute just how much he himself was bound up in the causes and consequences of what had happened and what was happening in the hills. He had given advice. He had thought with the people and only for the people.

He saw, long before it was told him in words, the wild ride down through the hills to strike the railroad, the fury of destruction, the gathering of the forces of the State to punish.

Here was no time for self-examination or self-judgment. Wherein Joseph Winthrop had done well, or had failed, or had done wrong, was of no moment now.

One man there was in all the State, in all the nation, who could give the word that would now save the people of the hills. Clifford W. Stanton who had sat months ago in his office in New York and had set all these things going, whose ruthless hand was to be recognised in every act of those which had driven the people to this madness, his will and his alone could stay the storm that was now raging in the hills.

Once the Bishop had seen that man do an act of supreme and unselfish bravery. It was an act of both physical and moral courage the like of which the Bishop had never witnessed. It was 291 an act which had revealed in Clifford W. Stanton a depth of strong fineness that no man would have suspected. It was done in the dim, dead time of faraway youth, but the Bishop had not forgotten. And he knew that men do not rise to such heights without having very deep in them the nobility to make it possible and at times inevitable that they should rise to those heights.

After these years and the encrusting strata of compromise and cowardice and selfishness which years and life lay upon the fresh heart of the youth of men, could that depth of nobility in the soul of Clifford W. Stanton again be touched?

Almost before the forces of the State were in motion against the people of the hills, the Bishop, early of a morning, walked into the office of Clifford Stanton.

Stanton was a smaller man than the Bishop, and though younger than the latter by some half-dozen years, it was evident that he had burned up the fuel of life more rapidly. Where the Bishop looked and spoke and moved with the deliberate fixity of the settling years, Stanton acted with a quick nervousness that shook just a perceptible little. The spiritual strength of restraint and inward thinking which had chiselled the Bishop’s face into a single, simple expression of will power was not to be found in the other’s face. In its stead there was a certain steel-trap impression, as though the man 292 behind the face had all his life refused to be certain of anything until the jaws of the trap had set upon the accomplished fact.

Physically the two men were much of a type. You would have known them anywhere for New Englanders of the generation that has disappeared almost completely in the last twenty years. They had been boys at Harvard together, though not of the same class. They had been together in the Civil War, though the nature of their services had been infinitely diverse. They had met here and there casually and incidentally in the business of life. But they faced each other now virtually as strangers, and with a certain tightening grip upon himself each man realised that he was about to grapple with one of the strongest willed men that he had ever met, and that he must test out the other man to the depths and be himself tried out to the limit of his strength.

“It is some years since I’ve seen you, Bishop. But we are both busy men. And––well–– You know I am glad to have you come to see me. I need not tell you that.”

The Bishop accepted the other man’s frank courtesy and took a chair quietly. Stanton watched him carefully. The Bishop was showing the last few years a good deal, he thought. In reality it was the last month that the Bishop was showing. But it did not show in the steady, untroubled 293 glow of his eyes. The Bishop wasted no time on preliminaries.

“I have come on business, of course, Mr. Stanton,” he began. “It is a very strange and unusual business. And to come at it rightly I must tell you a story. At the end of the story I will ask you a question. That will be my whole business.”

The other man said nothing. He did not understand and he never spoke until he was sure that he understood. The Bishop plunged into his story.

“One January day in ‘Sixty-five’ I was going up the Shenandoah alone. My command had left me behind for two days of hospital service at Cross Keys. They were probably some twenty miles ahead of me and would be crossing over the divide towards Five Forks and the east. I thought I knew a way by which I could cut off a good part of the distance that separated me from them, so I started across the Ridge by a path which would have been impossible for troops in order.

“I was right. I did cut off the distance which I had expected and came down in the early afternoon upon a good road that ran up the eastern side of the Ridge. I was just congratulating myself that I would be with my men before dark, when a troop of Confederate cavalry came pelting over a rise in the road behind me.

“I leaped my horse back into the brush at the side of the road and waited. They would sweep on past and allow me to go on my way. Behind them came a troop of our own horse pursuing hotly. The Confederate horses were well spent. I saw that the end of the pursuit was not far off. The Confederates––some detached band of Early’s men, I imagine––realised that they would soon be run down. Just where I had left the road there was a sharp turn. Here the Confederates threw themselves from their horses and drew themselves across the road. They were in perfect ambush, for they could be seen scarcely fifteen yards back on the narrow road.

“I broke from the bush and fled back along the road to warn our men. But I did no good. They were beyond all stopping, or hearing even, as they came yelling around the turn of the road.

“For three minutes there was some of the sharpest fighting I ever saw, there in the narrow road, before what remained of the Confederates broke after their horses and made off again. In the very middle of the fight I noticed two young officers. One was a captain, the other a lieutenant. I knew them. I knew their story. I believe I was the only man living who knew that story. Probably I did not know the whole of that story.

“The lieutenant had maligned the captain. 295 He had said of him the one thing that a soldier may not say of another. They had fought once. Why they had been kept in the same command I do not know.

“Now in the very hottest of this fight, without apparently the slightest warning, the lieutenant threw himself upon the captain, attacking him viciously with his sword. For a moment they struggled there, unnoticed in the dust of the conflict. Then the captain, swinging free, struck the lieutenant’s sword from his hand. The latter drew his pistol and fired, point blank. It missed. By what miracle I do not know. All this time the captain had held his sword poised to lunge, within easy striking distance of the other’s throat. But he had made no attempt to thrust. As the pistol missed I saw him stiffen his arm to strike. Instead he looked a long moment into the lieutenant’s eyes. The latter was screaming what were evidently taunts into his face. The captain dropped his arm, wheeled, and plunged at the now breaking line of Confederates.

“I have seen brave men kill bravely. I have seen brave men bravely refrain from killing. That was the bravest thing I ever saw.”

Clifford Stanton sat staring directly in front of him. He gave no sign of hearing. He was living over for himself that scene on a lonely, forgotten Virginia road. At last he said as to himself:

“The lieutenant died, a soldier’s death, the next day.”

“I knew,” said the Bishop quietly. “My question is: Are you the same brave man with a soldier’s brave, great heart that you were that day?”

For a long time Clifford Stanton sat staring directly at something that was not in the visible world. The question had sprung upon him out of the dead past. What right had this man, what right had any man to face him with it?

He wheeled savagely upon the Bishop:

“You sat by the roadside and got a glimpse of the tragedy of my life as it whirled by you on the road! How dare you come here to tell me the little bit of it you saw?”

“Because,” said the Bishop swiftly, “you have forgotten how great and brave a man you are.”

Stanton stared uncomprehendingly at him. He was stirred to the depths of feelings that he had not known for years. But even in his emotion and bewilderment the steel trap of silence set upon his face. His lifetime of never speaking until he knew what he was going to say kept him waiting to hear more. It was not any conscious caution; it was merely the instinct of self-defence.

“For months,” the Bishop was going on quietly, “the people of my hills have been harassed by you in your unfair efforts to get possession of the lands upon which their fathers built 297 their homes. You have tried to cheat them. You have sent men to lie to them. You tried to debauch a legislature in your attempt to overcome them. I have here in my pocket the sworn confessions of two men who stood in the shadow of death and said that they had been sent to burn a whole countryside that you and your associates coveted––to burn the people in their homes like the meadow birds in their nests. I can trace that act to within two men of you. And I can sit here, Clifford Stanton, and look you in the eye man to man and tell you that I know you gave the suggestion. And you cannot look back and deny it. I cannot take you into a court of law in this State and prove it. We both know the futility of talking of that. But I can take you, I do take you this minute into the court of your own heart––where I know a brave man lives––and convict you of this thing. You know it. I know it. If the whole world stood here accusing you would we know it any the better?

“Now my people have made a terrible mistake. They have taken the law into their own hands and have thought to punish you themselves. They have done wrong, they have done foolishly. Who can punish you? You have power above the law. Your interests are above the courts of the land. They did not understand. They did not know you. They have been misled. They have listened to men like me preaching: ‘Right shall 298 prevail: Justice shall conquer.’ And where does right prevail? And when shall justice conquer? No doubt you have said these phrases yourself. Because your fathers and my fathers taught us to say them. But are they true? Does justice conquer? Does right prevail? You can say. I ask you, who have the answer in your power. Does right prevail? Then give my stricken people what is theirs. Does justice conquer? Then see that they come to no harm.

“I dare to put this thing raw to your face because I know the man that once lived within you. I saw you––!”

“Don’t harp on that,” Stanton cut in viciously. “You know nothing about it.”

“I do harp on that. I have come here to harp on that. Do you think that if I had not with my eyes seen that thing I would have come near you at all? No. I would have branded you before all men for the thing that you have done. I would have given these confessions which I hold to the world. I would have denounced you as far as tongue and pen would go to every man who through four years gave blood at your side. I would have braved the rebuke of my superiors and maybe the discipline of my Church to bring upon you the hard thoughts of men. I would have made your name hated in the ears of little children. But I would not have come to you.

“If I had not seen that thing I would not have come to you, for I would have said: What good? The man is a coward without a heart. A coward, do you remember that word?”

The man groaned and struck out with his hand as though to drive away a ghastly thing that would leap upon him.

“A coward without a heart,” the Bishop repeated remorselessly, “who has men and women and children in his power and who, because he has no heart, can use his power to crush them.

“If I had not seen, I would have said that.

“But I saw. I saw. And I have come here to ask you: Are you the same brave man with a heart that I saw on that day?

“You shall not evade me. Do you think you can put me off with defences and puling arguments of necessity, or policy, or the sacredness of property? No. You and I are here looking at naked truth. I will go down into your very soul and have it out by the roots, the naked truth. But I will have my answer. Are you that same man?

“If you are not that same man; if you have killed that in you which gave life to that man; if that man no longer lives in you; if you are not capable of being that same man with the heart of a great and tender hero, then tell me and I will go. But you shall answer me. I will have my answer.”

Clifford Stanton rose heavily from his chair and stood trembling as though in an overpowering rage, and visibly struggling for his command of mind and tongue.

“Words, words, words,” he groaned at last. “Your life is made of words. Words are your coin. What do you know?

“Do you think that words can go down into my soul to find the man that was once there? Do you think that words can call him up? When did words ever mean anything to a man’s real heart! You come here with your question. It’s made of words.

“When did men ever do anything for words? Honour is a word. Truth is a word. Bravery is a word. Loyalty is a word. Hero is a word. Do you think men do things for words? No! What do you know? What could you know?

“Men do things and you call them by words. But do they do them for the words? No!

“They do them–– Because some woman lives, or once lived! What do you know?

“Go out there. Stay there.” He pointed. “I’ve got to think.”

He fell brokenly into his chair and lay against his desk. The Bishop rose and walked from the room.

When he heard the door close, the man got up and going to the door barred it.

He came back and sat awhile, his head leaning heavily upon his propped hands.

He opened a drawer of his desk and looked at a smooth, glinting black and steel thing that lay there. Then he shut the drawer with a bang that went out to the Bishop listening in the outer office. It was a sinister, suggestive noise, and for an instant it chilled that good man’s heart. But his ears were sharp and true and he knew immediately that he had been mistaken.

Stanton pulled out another drawer, unlocked a smaller compartment within it, and from the latter took a small gold-framed picture. He set it up on the desk between his hands and looked long at it, questioning the face in the frame with a tender, diffident expression of a wonder that never ceased, of a longing never to be stilled.

The face that looked out of the picture was one of a quiet, translucent beauty. At first glance the face had none of the striking features that men associate with great beauty. But behind the eyes there seemed to glow, and to grow gradually, and softly stronger, a light, as though diffused within an alabaster vase, that slowly radiated from the whole countenance an impression of indescribable, gentle loveliness.

Clifford Stanton had often wondered what was that light from within. He wondered now, and questioned. Never before had that light seemed 302 so wonderful and so real. Now there came to him an answer. An answer that shook him, for it was the last answer he would have expected. The light within was truth––truth. It seemed that in a world of sham and illusions and evasions this one woman had understood, had lived with truth.

The man laughed. A low, mirthless, dry laugh that was nearer to a sob.

“Was that it, Lucy?” he queried. “Truth? Then let us have a little truth, for once! I’ll tell you some truth!

“I lied a while ago. He did not die a soldier’s death. I told the same lie to you long ago. Words. Words. And yet you went to Heaven happy because I lied to you and kept on lying to you. Words. And yet you died a happy woman, because of that lie.

“He lied to you. He took you from me with lies. Words. Lies. And yet they made you happy. Where is truth?

“You lived happy and died happy with a lie. Because I lied like what they call a man and a gentleman. Truth!”

He looked searchingly, wonderingly at the face before him. Did he expect to see the light fade out, to see the face wither under the bitter revelation?

“I’ve been everything,” he went on, still trying 303 to make his point, “I’ve done everything, that men say I’ve been and done. Why?

“Well––Why?” he asked sharply. “Did it make any difference?

“Hard, grasping, tricky, men call me that to my face––sometimes. Well––Why not? Does it make any difference? Did it make any difference with you? If I had thought it would–– But it didn’t. Lies, trickery, words! They served with you. They made you happy. Truth!”

But as he looked into the face and the smiling light of truth persisted in it, there came over his soul the dawn of a wonder. And the dawn glowed within him, so that it came to his eyes and looked out wondering at a world remade.

“Is it true, Lucy?” he asked gently. “Can that be truth, at last? Is that what you mean? Did you, deep down, somewhere beneath words and beneath thoughts, did you, did you really understand––a little? And do you, somewhere, understand now?

“Then tell me. Was it worth the lies? Down underneath, when you understood, which was the truth? The thing I did––which men would call fine? Or was it the words?

“Is that it? Is that the truth, Lucy? Was it the fine thing that was really the truth, and did you, do you, know it, after all? Is there 304 truth that lives deep down, and did you, who were made of truth, did you somehow understand all the time?”

He sat awhile, wondering, questioning; finally believing. Then he said:

“Lucy, a man out there wants his answer. I will not speak it to him. But I’ll say it to you: Yes, I am that same man who once did what they call a fine, brave thing. I didn’t do it because it was a great thing, a brave thing. I did it for you.

“And––I’ll do this for you.”

He looked again at the face in the picture, as if to make sure. Then he locked it away quickly in its place.

He thought for a moment, then drew a pad abruptly to him and began writing. He wrote two telegrams, one to the Governor of the State, the other to the Sheriff of Tupper County. Then he took another pad and wrote a note, this to his personal representative who was following the state troops into the hills.

He rose and walked briskly to the door. Throwing it open he called a clerk and gave him the two telegrams. He held the note in his hand and asked the Bishop back into the office.

Closing the door quickly, he said without preface:

“This note will put my man up there at your service. You will prefer to go up into the hills 305 yourself, I think. The officers in command of the troops will know that you are empowered to act for all parties. The Governor will have seen to that before you get there, I think. There will be no attempt at prosecutions, now or afterwards. You can settle the whole matter in no time.

“We will not buy the land, but we’ll give a fair rental, based on what ores we find to take out. You can give your word––mine wouldn’t go for much up there, I guess,” he put in grimly––“that it will be fair. You can make that the basis of settlement.

“They can go back and rebuild. I will help, where it will do the most good. Our operations won’t interfere much with their farm land, I find.

“You will want to start at once. That is all, I guess, Bishop,” he concluded abruptly.

The Bishop reached for the smaller man’s hand and wrung it with a sudden, unwonted emotion.

“I will not cheapen this, sir,” he said evenly, “by attempting to thank you.”

“A mere whim of mine, that’s all,” Stanton cut in almost curtly, the steel-trap expression snapping into place over his face. “A mere whim.”

“Well,” said the Bishop slowly, looking him squarely in the eyes, “I only came to ask a question, anyhow.” Then he turned and walked briskly from the office. He had no right and no wish to know what the other man chose to conceal beneath that curt and incisive manner.

So these two men parted. In words, they had not understood each other. Neither had come near the depths of the other. But then, what man does ever let another man see what is in his heart?

All day long the line of armed men had gone spreading itself wider and wider, to draw itself around the edges of the shorter line of men hidden in the protecting fringe of the hills. All day long clearly and more clearly Jeffrey Whiting had been seeing the inevitable end. His line was already stretched almost to the breaking point. If the enemy had known, there were dangerous gaps in it now through which a few daring men might have pushed and have begun to divide up the strength of the men with him.

All the afternoon as he watched he saw other and yet other groups and troops of men come up the railroad, detrain and push out ever farther upon the enveloping wings to east and west.

Twice during the afternoon the ends of his line had been driven in and almost surrounded. They had decided in the beginning to leave their horses in the rear, and so use them only at the last. But the spreading line in front had become too long to be covered on foot by the few men he had. They were forced to use the speed of the animals to make a show of greater force than 307 they really had. The horses furnished marks that even the soldiers could occasionally hit. All the afternoon long, and far into the night, the screams of terrified, wounded horses rang horribly through the woods above the pattering crackle of the irregular rifle fire. Old men who years before had learned to sleep among such sounds lay down and fell asleep grumbling. Young men and boys who had never heard such sounds turned sick with horror or wandered frightened through the dark, nervously ready to fire on any moving twig or scraping branch.

In the night Jeffrey Whiting went along the line, talking aside to every man; telling them to slip quietly away through the dark. They could make their way out through the loose lines of soldiers and sheriffs’ men and get down to the villages where they would be unknown and where nobody would bother with them.

The inevitable few took his word–– There is always the inevitable few. They slipped away one by one, each man telling himself a perfectly good reason for going, several good reasons, in fact; any reason, indeed, but that they were afraid. Most of them were gathered in by the soldier pickets and sent down to jail.

Morning came, a grey, lowering morning with a grim, ugly suggestion in it of the coming winter. Jeffrey Whiting and his men drew wearily out to their posts, munching dryly at the last of 308 the stores which they had taken from the construction depots along the line which they had destroyed. This was the end. It was not far from the mind of each man that this would probably be his last meal.

The firing began again as the outer line came creeping in upon them. They had still the great advantage of the shelter of the woods and the formation of the soldiers, while their marksmanship kept those directly in front of them almost out of range. But there was nothing in sight before them but that they would certainly all be surrounded and shot down or taken.

Suddenly the fire from below ceased. Those who had been watching the most distant of the two wings creeping around them saw these men halt and slowly begin to gather back together. What was it? Were they going to rush at last? Here would be a fight in earnest!

But the soldiers, still keeping their spread formation, merely walked back in their tracks until they were entirely out of range. It must be a ruse of some sort. The hill men stuck to their shelter, puzzled, but determined not to be drawn out.

Jeffrey Whiting, watching near the middle of the line, saw an old man walking, barehead, up over the lines of half-burnt ties and twisted rails. That white head with the high, wide brow, the slightly stooping, spare shoulders, the long, 309 swinging walk–– That was the Bishop of Alden!

Jeffrey Whiting dropped his gun and, yelling to the men on either side to stay where they were, jumped down into the roadbed and ran to meet the Bishop.

“Are any men killed?” the Bishop asked before Jeffrey had time to speak as they met.

“Old Erskine Beasley was shot through the chest––we don’t know how bad it is,” said Jeffrey, stopping short. “Ten other men are wounded. I don’t think any of them are bad.”

“Call in your men,” said the Bishop briefly. “The soldiers are going back.”

At Jeffrey’s call the men came running from all sides as he and the Bishop reached the line. Haggard, ragged, powder-grimed they gathered round, staring in dull unbelief at this new appearance of the White Horse Chaplain, for so one and all they knew and remembered him. Men who had seen him years ago at Fort Fisher slipped back into the scene of that day and looked about blankly for the white horse. And young men who had heard that tale many times and had seen and heard of his coming through the fire to French Village stared round-eyed at him. What did this coming mean?

He told them shortly the terms that Clifford W. Stanton, their enemy, was willing to make with them. And in the end he added:

“You have only my word that these things will be done as I say. I believe. If you believe, you will take your horses and get back to your families at once.”

Then, in the weakness and reaction of relief, the men for the first time knew what they had been through. Their knees gave under them. They tried to cheer, but could raise only a croaking quaver. Many who had thought never to see loved ones again burst out sobbing and crying over the names of those they were saved to.

The Bishop, taking Jeffrey Whiting with him, walked slowly back down the roadbed. Suddenly Jeffrey remembered something that had gone completely out of his mind in these last hours.

“Bishop,” he stammered, “that day––that day in court. I––I said you lied. Now I know you didn’t. You told the truth, of course.”

“My boy,” said the Bishop queerly, “yesterday I asked a man, on his soul, for the truth––the truth. I got no answer.

“But I remembered that Pontius Pilate, in the name of the Emperor of all the World, once asked what was truth. And he got no answer. Once, at least, in our lives we have to learn that there are things bigger than we are. We get no answer.”

Jeffrey inquired no more for truth that day.