Ben Ames Williams

CHAPTER I
ON HIS OWN FEET

THE inauguration of a small-town Mayor is no great matter for excitement. But Hardiston was interested in Wint, and wanted to have a look at him, so everybody came to see him step into his new responsibilities.

The Hardiston council chamber was on the second floor of the fire house. This was a three-story building of red brick, and a place of awe and wonder for the small boys of the town. The fire engine and the hose cart were kept on the ground floor, in front. Behind them were the stalls for the four sleek horses; behind the stalls again, a number of iron-barred stalls for human beings. Here were housed the minor criminals, arrested by Marshal Jim Radabaugh for petty peculations or disorders, and waiting for their hearings before the Mayor. These little cells were not designed to house prisoners for any length of time, and for the most part they were furnished simply with heaps of straw pilfered from the supply that was kept for the fire horses. The town drunkard, when the marshal got him, was treated as well as the fire horses; and this is more than may be said in larger towns than Hardiston.

At the left-hand side of the building there was an entrance hall, through which one passed to reach the stairs that led up to the council chamber. In the middle of this square hallway hung a rope, with a knot on the end. This rope disappeared through a hole in the ceiling. If you pulled it in the proper fashion, the bell in the steeple began a chattering, staccato beat like the clanging of a gong. This was the fire bell; and when it rang the fire chief came from his feed store across the street, and the firemen came from the bakery, and the hardware store, and the blacksmith shop where they worked; and the fat fire horses—they doubled in the street-cleaning department—came on the gallop from their abandoned wagons in the streets. Then everybody got into harness of one kind or another and went to the fire.

Everybody in town wanted to ring that fire bell. Any one who discovered a fire and reached the fire house with the news was privileged to do it. There was a tradition that a boy once tried to ring the bell and was jerked clear off the floor by the rebound after his first tug at the rope. This added to the wonder and the mystery of it. The boys used to hang around the doorway, watching this rope, and occasionally fingering it in a gingerly way, and wishing a fire would start somewhere so that they might see the bell rung.

It was through this hall where the rope hung that the people of Hardiston crowded to see Wint inaugurated. They went up the worn, wooden stairs into the council chamber, and they packed themselves in on the benches in the rear of the room. This was not only the council chamber; it was the seat of the Mayor’s court. There was an enclosure, surrounded by a railing. When some of the bigger, or perhaps it was only the braver, men of the town came in, they sat inside this railing, tilting their chairs back against it, with a spittoon drawn within easy range. The crowd came early; and they talked in cheerfully loud tones while they waited. One by one the aldermen drifted in, the new ones and the old. And Marshal Jim Radabaugh was there; and the clerk and the other officials arrived and took their places within the enclosure. They were carelessly matter of fact, as though the inauguration of a new Mayor was an everyday matter. The boys, perched on the window sills, whistled, and giggled, and then subsided into frightened silence to watch with staring eyes.

Amos Caretall had let Wint sleep as late as possible this morning. Wint needed the sleep, and Congressman Caretall made it his business to study the needs of his fellow men. His Congressional creed, which he summarized upon occasion, was as simple as that. “If a bill’s aimed to make you folks at home here more comfo’table, I’m for it,” he would say. “If it ain’t, I’m against it; and that’s all the way of it with me.” So he let Wint sleep this morning until the last minute, then shook him into wakefulness.

Even then, Wint might have thrown the whole thing over but for that whistle. He was sick and sore, his head hurt, and his eyes could not bear even the dim light of his bedroom. He told Amos he would not go through with it, that he would not be inaugurated. Then the whistle blew, and when Amos said it would be a part of his powers as Mayor to stop that plagued whistle if he wanted to, the idea struck Wint’s sense of humor. He grinned, and decided there was something in being Mayor, after all, and climbed unsteadily out of bed.

After the tub of cold water which Amos had waiting for him, he felt better. After old Maria Hale’s breakfast—fried eggs, and country-cured ham, and three cups of strong coffee—he felt better still. But he was not yet himself. Physically, he was acutely comfortable, blissfully comfortable. His legs and his arms felt warm; they tingled. His head did not hurt; it was merely numb. It was true that his tongue was furry and thick, so that he had to talk very carefully when he talked at all; but save for this precision of speech, there was no mark on him of the night before. He was young enough to recover quickly, his cheeks were red, his eyes were lazily clear.

But it was not to be denied that his head was numb. He was in something like a daze when he went out with Amos and started toward the fire-engine house. The day was bright and warm for the season, and the sun was cheerful. Wint enjoyed the walk. But he had to keep his eyes shut much of the time. The light hurt them. When he heard Amos speak to some one they passed, he also spoke. When Amos talked to him, he answered. But his answers were idle and unconsidered; he was too comfortable to think.

They went up some stairs after a while, and Wint understood that they had arrived. He heard people talking all together, and then one at a time. Men said things, and Amos nudged him, and he made replies. He could hear what others said to him. They mumbled hurriedly, as though over some too-familiar formula. There was nothing particularly impressive, or dignified, in the proceedings. The light from the windows at the back of the room hurt Wint’s eyes, so he still kept them half shut. The people before him were merely black shadows, silhouetted against this glare. He could not see who any of them were.

After a time, some one—it sounded like a small boy—yelled: “Speech!” And others took up the cry, and Amos nudged Wint. So Wint stood up again and said with that careful precision which the condition of his tongue demanded: “I’ve nothing to say. I’ll let what I do, do the talking for me.”

That seemed to be satisfactory. Every one cheered, so that the noise hurt his ears. Then he sat down. A moment later, every one got up, and he got up, and they all began to crowd around him, and to crowd toward the door. Somebody came up and shook hands with Wint, and he recognized the voice of V. R. Kite. He had never liked Kite; the man was like a foul bird. A buzzard. The idea pleased Wint. He said cheerfully:

“To hell with you, you old buzzard.”

He heard Amos chuckle, somewhere near him. Every one else stood very still. So Wint strode past Kite to the stairs, and Amos followed him, and Peter Gergue followed Amos. They went back home to Amos’s house. Once, on the way, Wint asked:

“That all there is to it?”

Amos said: “Land, no, that’s just the beginning.”

Wint chuckled. He was beginning to enjoy himself. But he was very sleepy. When they got home, he went to bed and slept till dinner was ready, and he slept all the afternoon, and he went to bed for the night as soon as supper was done.

Amos had been thinking he ought to get back to Washington. He was glad Wint went off to bed, because there were two or three matters he wanted to attend to. One of these matters had to do with Jack Routt. Amos was not sure of his ground in that direction, but he had his suspicions. He sent for Peter Gergue after supper, and Gergue came quickly at the summons. They sat down before the coal fire, and Peter filled his pipe in careful imitation of Amos, and the two men smoked together in silence for a space, while Amos considered what to say.

Peter was one of those unfortunate men who do not like silences. This put him at a disadvantage before Amos, who could be silent indefinitely. It was Amos’s chief superiority over Peter, and it gave the Congressman his mastery over the man. This night as always, it was Peter who spoke first. He puffed at his pipe, and he said:

“Well, Amos, you’ll be gittin’ back to Washin’ton.”

Amos turned his head, tilted it on one side, and squinted at Peter. “I guess so,” he agreed.

“Thought you’d be going,” said Peter. “Wint’ll miss you.”

“Do you think he’ll know he misses me?” Amos asked.

“If he did,” said Peter, “he wouldn’t admit it.”

The Congressman nodded. “Wint’s a cur’ous cuss. Peter.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a nice boy—give him a chance.”

“We-ell, he’s got his chance.”

“What’s he going to do with it, Peter?”

Gergue rummaged through his black hair thoughtfully. “Guess that depends on what he’s let do with it. Somebody come along and tell him he ought to make a good Mayor, and he’ll make a bad one, just to show he can’t be bossed.”

“That’s right.” Amos agreed. He considered, grinned to himself. “You know, Pete, if we could get Kite to sign on as Wint’s guide, philosopher, and friend. Wint’d do all right.”

Gergue considered, and he chuckled. “Sure. If he went contrary to what Kite said. And he would. Wint’s always on the contrary-minded side of a thing.”

“Now why is that?” Caretall asked.

“That’s because he’s who he is, I sh’d say.”

Amos puffed deep at his black pipe. “Trouble is,” he commented, “Kite wouldn’t take the job. Not after what Wint handed him to-day. You heard that?”

Gergue grinned widely. “Yeah. The old buzzard. Say, that surely does hit Kite. The way he holds his head. I’d always thought of a turkey, but I guess a buzzard does it too. Like he was always looking over a wall.”

“What I’d like to see,” said Amos, “is some one that would guarantee to give Wint bad advice.”

“We-ell,” Peter told him, “I can do some of that.”

“Trouble is, there’s others will tell him to do the right thing.”

“You talk like James T. Hollow,” said Gergue. “Always trying to do what’s right.”

“I wonder,” said Amos casually, “whether them that tell him to keep straight figure he’ll do what they say?”

Peter understood that there was something back of the question; he studied Amos’s impassive face. Then he thought for a minute, and nodded his head.

“You mean Jack Routt,” he said.

“Yes,” the Congressman agreed.

Peter considered. “I don’t quite know about Jack,” he said. “He lets on to be Wint’s friend. But he don’t help Wint any. Jack’s got a way of telling Wint to do a thing that works the opposite every darned time.”

“I’ve a notion,” said Caretall, “that if Routt was to tell Wint to take care of his health, say, Wint’d go shoot himself, just to be different.”

“That’s right,” Gergue agreed; and the two men sat for a time without speaking, their pipes bubbling, the smoke drifting upward lazily.

“Question is,” said Caretall at last, “what are we going to do about it?” Gergue made no comment, and Amos asked: “What do you think, Peter?”

“I don’t see through Routt,” said Gergue. “I don’t see what he’s got on his mind.”

“Looks to me that he’s plain ornery,” Amos suggested.

“I guess that’s right.”

“But that don’t get us anywheres. I’d like to have him let Wint alone.”

“He’d ought to.”

“How can we make him let Wint alone?” Amos asked.

Peter considered that, fingers rummaging about the back of his head. “Routt’s looking for something,” he said. “Maybe he wants to be prosecuting attorney. Or something. I don’t know.”

“He never will be,” said Amos.

“I guess that’s right.”

“Not as long as I can swing any votes here.”

“Question is,” said Peter, “whether he knows you feel that way.”

“No,” Amos told him. “He don’t know.”

Peter looked sidewise at Amos. “He might be bought,” he suggested. “Or he might be scared. I don’t know. He may be yellow. If he is, you could scare him.”

Amos’s pipe went out, and he rapped it into his palm and treasured the charred crumbs to prime his next smoke. “Peter,” he said thoughtfully, “I’d like to see Jack. To-night.”

Gergue was a good servant. He got up at once. “All right, Amos,” he said.

Caretall went with him to the door. “I’m taking the noon train, to-morrow,” he told Gergue.

“I’ll be there,” said Peter.

Amos shut the door behind him and went back to the fire. He sat there for a while, considering. Then he went out into the hall and called Agnes. She was in her room; and she came running down, very gay and pretty in a blue-flowered kimono, her hair down her back in a golden braid. Amos looked at her thoughtfully. There was always a wistful question in his eyes when he looked at Agnes. He met her at the foot of the stairs, and he asked:

“Agnes, how’d you like to go to Washington?”

Now the girl had gone to Washington one winter with Amos. And she had not liked it. Amos was just a small-town Congressman, one of scores. And his daughter was just a pretty girl, and nothing more. Amos was a small toad in that big puddle; Agnes had found herself not even a tadpole. And—that did not please Agnes. Here in Hardiston, she was the daughter of the biggest man in town; and she was the prettiest girl in town, some said. At least, they told her so. Jack Routt, and some of the other boys.

“I wouldn’t like it at all, dad,” she told Amos laughingly. “Washington is a dead old place beside Hardiston.”

“I’m thinking of taking you,” Amos said, watching her with something like sorrow in his eyes.

“I haven’t any clothes,” she protested. “I’m not ready, at all. I’d rather not go, dad.”

“I’d rather you would,” he repeated gently.

She pouted. “Why? You’re always away. I’d never see you. I’d have nothing to do at all. I—”

“I’d rather not leave you and Wint alone here. Wouldn’t be just the thing,” her father insisted gently.

She laughed. “You funny old daddy. We’d have Maria for chaperon.”

“Wouldn’t be just the thing,” Amos said again.

“I’m not going to eat Wint,” she protested, half angry. “We get along beautifully.”

“Guess you’d better go along with me,” Amos told her.

She stamped her foot. “Dad, I don’t want to.”

Amos jerked a forefinger up the stair, head on one side, eyes steady. “Run along and pack, Agnes,” he said. “Won’t be much time in the morning.”

Agnes began to cry. Amos watched her for a moment, watched her bowed head, and a load seemed to settle on the man’s big shoulders. He turned back to the sitting room without a word. After a while, he heard her run up the stairs, every pound of her little feet scolding him, as a bird scolds.

Amos filled his pipe and began to smoke again.

Jack Routt came late. While he waited, Amos had smoked two pipes to the last bubble. When Jack knocked, he got up lumberingly and went to the door to let the young man in. “Come in,” he said curtly. “Hang up your things.”

He went back and sat down before the fire, and Jack Routt joined him there. Amos looked up at him sidewise. “Sit down, Routt,” he said. “Take a chair. Any chair.”

Routt sat down. “Gergue said you wanted to see me,” he reminded Amos.

“Yes,” Amos agreed. “I told him to tell you.”

“Came as soon as I could,” said Routt.

“That’s all right,” said Amos. “I wasn’t in a hurry. I’m hardly ever in any hurry. Things come, give them time.” The colloquialisms had fallen from his speech. Amos talked as well as any one when he chose; when he was with Hardiston folks, he talked as they talked. Routt was a college man.

Routt fidgeted in his chair. He had always been somewhat afraid of Amos. He wondered what the Congressman wanted now, but Amos did not tell him. He just sat, staring at the fire, smoking. Like Gergue, Routt was driven to break the silence.

“What did you want with me, Amos?” he asked.

Amos spat into the fire. “Wanted to talk things over, Jack,” he said. “I’m going to Washington to-morrow.”

“I’ve been expecting you’d go back.”

“Well, I’m going.”

Another silence, while Routt moved uneasily. At last he said: “You put Wint over, all right.”

“Yes,” Amos agreed. “I put him over.” He looked at Routt then, with eyes unexpectedly keen. “Think he’ll make a good Mayor, do you?”

“Well,” said Routt slowly, “he’ll be all right if he lets the booze alone.”

Amos caught Routt’s eyes and held them commandingly. “Jack,” he said, “I want you to let Wint alone.”

Routt asked angrily: “Me? What do you mean?”

“I don’t want you giving him any advice, and I don’t want you getting him drunk. I want you to let him alone. Is that clear?”

Routt protested: “I’m the best friend Wint’s got.”

“You’re the worst enemy he’s got,” said Amos. “And you know it.”

“You can’t say that,” Routt pleaded.

Amos did not let go the other man’s eyes. “You got Wint drunk, day before election,” he said. “You got him drunk last night. Routt, don’t you do that again.”

“I got him drunk? Good Lord, Congressman, Wint’s a grown man. I’m not his keeper.”

“I made you his keeper, before election,” said Amos. “I told you to keep him straight. You didn’t do it. You got him drunk. Now I tell you, let him alone.”

“I tried to keep him from drinking,” Routt urged.

“You said to him, ‘Don’t you drink, Wint. It ain’t good for you. You can’t stand it.’ So he drank, to show you he could stand it. Just as you knew he would.” Amos got up with a swiftness surprising in that slow-moving man. He said harshly: “Routt, get your hat and get out. And mind what I say. You let Wint alone.”

Some men would have sworn at Amos, some would have defied him. Routt was the sort to promise anything. He said, with an assumption of straightforward frankness:

“Why, of course, if you say so, I’ll keep away from him.”

“See that you do,” said Amos. “Now—good night.”

When the door closed behind Routt, Amos stood for a minute in the hall, thinking. “Now I wonder,” he asked himself. “Will he do it? Was he scared enough to keep hands off? I wonder, now.”

Routt, half a block away, was grinning without mirth. “Damn him,” he said to himself. “Him and Wint too. I’ll....”

He wondered just what he had best do; and before he reached home, he had decided to go and see V. R. Kite.

Congressman Caretall and Agnes took the noon train, next day. Wint went with them to the station, and Amos had a last word for him.

“Don’t you get the idea I’ve left you on your own, Wint,” he said. “You’ll need help. Things’ll come up. When they do, don’t you try to stand on your own feet. Just write me—or telegraph. And I’ll come, or tell you what to do.

“You’ll run into trouble. Don’t you try to fight it alone. Just you call on me.”

Then the train pulled out. Wint watched it go; and when it rounded the curve and disappeared beyond the electric-light plant, he grinned.

“Run to you when I need help, will I, Amos?” he asked good-naturedly, under his breath. “I guess not. You’ve left me alone. And I’m going to stand on my own hind legs. On my own two feet, by God!”

He turned and went swiftly back uptown.

CHAPTER II
JOAN TO WINT

THE months of that winter passed quietly in Hardiston. The excitement of the election was not forgotten; the drama of Wint’s choice as Mayor became one of the stories to be told about the stoves on cold home-keeping days. But Wint himself was no longer an object of curious interest; he was just the Mayor. An inconsiderable figure in the town. There had been Mayors in the past, and there would be again. Never amounted to much, one way or another. Hardiston went along just the same; the winters were just as cold, the summers just as hot, the rains just as wet, the sun just as warm.

Hardiston is infamous for its winters and for its summers. In the spring or in the fall there is no lovelier spot. In the spring, apple blossoms clothe the hills; in the fall the woods are great splashes of flame against the dull green of the fields. But in winter the mercury drops far below zero, and climbs forty degrees in half a day. The snow comes tempestuously, eight, ten, twelve inches of it; and it melts as quickly as it comes. The roads turn into mud at the first snow; they remain mud till the increasing heat of the northing sun bakes them to dust. On Monday, every water pipe in town freezes tight; on Tuesday, violets bloom in sheltered corners about the houses. On a cold morning, adventurous boys skate on the film of ice that forms on streams and ponds; but by noon the ice is unsafe, and some one has broken through, and by mid-afternoon, it is freezing hard again.

This winter in Hardiston was like all others. The new Mayor stuck strictly to business. Jack Routt let him alone. When boys were arrested for misdemeanor, or children of a larger growth for more pretentious wrongs, they were brought before Wint and he passed sentence upon them, marveling that he, Wint Chase, should be passing judgment on his fellow man. At first, this feature of his work shamed him; later it awed him, and made him look into his own heart and ask whether he were fit for such a rÔle. He tried to make himself fit.

To act as judge of the Mayor’s court and to preside at council meetings comprised the bulk of Wint’s official duties. They took only a fraction of his time. When the electric-light plant went out of commission with a broken cylinder head, Wint had to do the explaining; when a sewer became stopped up, he had to see that it was opened; when the old project for a sewage-disposal plant came up on its annual burst of life, he had to consider it. When Ned Howell filed his regular yearly suit for damages done to his pasture by overflow from the sewage-filled creek, Wint had to attend court and testify. But—there was time on his hands and to spare. He did not know what to do with himself.

He did not undertake any crusades. A certain diffidence, in these first months, restrained him. He was not sure of his ground; he was not sure of himself. V.R. Kite’s underlings continued to peddle their wares, and the Mayor’s court had to deal, now and then, with one of Kite’s bibulous customers. Wint dealt with them, but he did not dig for the root of the evil, to tear it out. Matters in Hardiston went on much as they had in the past. Men rose, did their day’s work, ate, and went to bed again. Women likewise. The annual Chautauqua lecture course began and was finished; Number Four theatrical companies came to town with Broadway attractions, played one-night stands, and departed as they had come. The moving-picture houses had new films every day, and the same audiences day after day. The dramatic teacher in the high school organized a pageant, and it was presented to the eyes of admiring parents in the Rink. The high school played basket ball, the women played bridge, the men played poker of a night. Now and then the Masons or the Knights of Pythias gave a dance. The preachers preached sermons in which they tried to prove there was nothing the matter with the churches. The schools developed their annual scandal over the discharge of a school-teacher. There were the regular rumors of a new factory that was to come to town; and the rumors fell through in the regular way. Now and then a baby was born, now and then there was a wedding, now and then there was a funeral.

Wint stuck to his guns, and the world rolled majestically and interminably on.

When Wint took hold of his job, he wondered what there was for him to do. Dick Hoover told him. Dick was a lawyer, in with his father, who had the biggest practice in town. He showed Wint where to look, in the statute books, for the duties of a Mayor. Wint was surprised to discover that laws were simple, everyday things, having to do with life as it was lived. One day when he went to Dick’s office to look up a statute, the book he sought was in use. To kill time, he took down a volume of Blackstone and peered into it curiously. He discovered that Blackstone said water was a “movable, wandering thing,” and the description fascinated him. He read on....

The more law he read, the more interested he became. In January, he asked Dick Hoover if it were possible to study law in leisure hours. Hoover told him it was not only possible, it was easy. The end of January saw Wint putting in his spare time on calfskin-bound volumes of which each page was one-third reading matter and two-thirds footnotes. The first day he picked up a book of cases was marked with a red letter on his mental calendar. He found these cases as interesting as fiction.

He began to read law systematically. Dick Hoover’s father was interested, helped him. The elder Hoover told Wint’s father one day:

“Chase, your boy is going to make a lawyer before he’s through.”

The senior Chase looked at Hoover, half minded to resent the fact that his son had been mentioned in his presence. But—the old wound was healing. Men no longer took occasion to remind him of last fall’s election with a jeer in their eyes. His conditional alliance with Kite had languished, because Wint had made no move to make the town dry. Chase hated Amos Caretall as ardently as ever; but he could not hate his son. That is not the way with fathers. He loved Wint; he had been, for some time, secretly proud of him.

He said to Hoover: “He’s smart enough, if he sticks to it.”

“He’s sticking,” Hoover told Wint’s father.

Winthrop Chase, Senior, nodded indifferently, hiding the light in his eyes. “He never stuck to anything before,” he said, and turned away.

He thought of telling Wint’s mother, that night, but did not do so. When he spoke of Wint to her, it precipitated one of her endless remarks. They wearied him. But he had to tell some one, so he told Hetty Morfee, when he went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Hetty was washing dishes at the time, and she stopped with a plate in one hand and a dish-rag in the other, and listened, and said with a cheerful wistfulness in her voice:

“Wint’s smart, sir. You’ll be proud of him.”

Chase was proud of him, but he would not admit it to himself, much less to Hetty.

“He’s smart enough,” he told her. “But he’s ... He’s....”

He turned abruptly and went out of the kitchen without saying what Wint was, and Hetty looked after him with understanding in her smile. Then her face became still and somber again. There was growing in Hetty’s eyes a certain unhappy light. A desperate fashion of unhappiness, which no one was sufficiently interested to notice. She was not so cheerful as she used to be. And there was a helplessness about her.

Word of Wint’s new industry spread slowly through Hardiston. It was Dick Hoover himself who told Joan of it. Dick was a Mason, and he took Joan to a Masonic dance one night. She spoke of Wint. “I have heard that he is studying law,” she said. “Is it true?”

So Dick told her. “True as Gospel,” he said. “And he’s darned quick to pick it up, too. The principles.... Of course, it will take time. But I’d just as soon have him try a case for me now, as some of these....”

He went on enthusiastically. Hoover was always enthusiastic about things. He was an extremist. His friends were the finest chaps in the world, his enemies were the least of created things. But he had few enemies. People liked him, and he liked people. Joan liked him; liked him particularly this evening because he talked to her of Wint.

Joan Arnold was, in a way of speaking, a girl to tie to. There was a peculiar steadfastness in her. She was a little taller than Wint, and she was habitually grave and quiet, especially when she was with him. In his presence she had always been faintly abashed and reticent as a girl is apt to be in the presence of a man she cares for. Joan had always cared for Wint. In spite of the fact that she was a year or two his junior, they had played together as children: and they had grown up together. When they were little children, they fought as only good friends can fight. When they were a little older, Wint scorned her because she was a girl. A year or so later, she scorned Wint because she was at the age when girls resolve to have a career and never marry at all. But in their late teens, they were devoted to each other, so that the mothers of the town smiled when they passed by, and nodded to each other, and whispered, with the delight women take in such matters, that they were a nice-looking couple together. Wint’s short, sturdy strength matched well the girl’s slightly larger stature and her quiet poise.

The first passage of affection between them had come when she was eighteen, when he went away to college. Before that they had been much together, but none save the most casual words had passed between them. The night before Wint went away, he went to see her. He was feeling adventurous and heroic and important as a boy does feel when he leaves home for the first time. He talked vastly, of big things he meant to do, of his dreams. She thrilled to his dreams with the half of her that was still child; she smiled at his enthusiasm with the half that was already woman. They were sitting on the porch of her home. There were locust trees about the veranda. They sat in a two-seated swing, facing each other, Wint leaning toward her earnestly.

He became melancholy, and she comforted him softly. He did not want to go away, he said. She told him he would be happy. The movement of the swing made him lean toward her. There was a moon, and the September evening was warm, and the very air seemed trembling in a rhythm that beat upon them both.

When he got up to go, she got up at the same time, and the swing lurched and threw them together. Ineptly, he kissed her, fumblingly, on the cheek. She did not move, she trembled where she stood. He took her awkwardly in his arms, as though afraid she would break, and kissed her cheek again. He rubbed his cheek against hers. She looked at him with wide eyes, lips a little parted, and he kissed her lips. They were cool, unused to kisses.

The months thereafter, till Wint was expelled from college, passed smoothly with them. Too smoothly, too placidly. They wrote short, broken letters; they saw each other when Wint came home. They thought they were very happy; yet each was conscious of a lack in their happiness. There was no fire in it, none of the exquisite anguish of love. They missed this, without knowing what they missed. All went too well with them.

Joan wept on her pillow when he was expelled, but she did not let him see her weep. She reassured him. There was an unsuspected strength in her. Women are full of these surprises. They are indescribably dainty creatures, habitually clad in fabrics like gossamer, seeming light as air and fit to vanish at a breath, who reveal—in a bathing suit, for instance—a surprising physical solidity. It was so, spiritually, with Joan. She was so quiet and so still that Wint, if he had thought at all, would have supposed she was a simple girl and nothing more; but in the revelations of his disaster, she showed a poise and a power which heartened him immensely, and made him a little afraid of her. She was a tower of strength for him to lean upon, a miracle of understanding and of sympathy.

He had expected her to be shocked and revolted at the shame of his expulsion; she was simply sorry for him, and loved him none the less. Wint knew, then, how much he loved her. There is nothing that so inspires love in a man as to find himself beloved. This is the conceit of the creature!

Joan had told Wint that she was done with him, when the story of his drunken sleep in the Weaver House went abroad through Hardiston. But—she had done it for his sake. She thought there was good in him. How could she love him else? She thought it might come out if he had to fight; she thought his very stubbornness might save him. Joan had no illusions about Wint. She knew he was prideful and stubborn. But—she loved him. And so had told him she would have no more of him. With a reservation in her heart....

Thus what Dick Hoover told her made Joan happy; happier than Hoover could possibly guess. Another girl would have cried herself to sleep with happiness that night, but Joan was not given to tears. She lay awake for a long time, thinking....

Three or four days later, she met Wint on the street. They had met thus, often, for Hardiston is a small place. But heretofore they passed with a word, unsmiling. This time, Wint would have passed her in that fashion; but Joan stopped and spoke to him.

“Wint,” she said.

He had been sick with hunger for a word from her for weeks. He stopped as though she had struck him, and his cheeks burned red as fire. He could not have spoken, for his life. He stood, hat in hand, face crimson, staring at her.

Joan knew what she wished to say. “I want you to know that I am proud of you, Wint,” she said.

His impulse was to laugh, to reject her friendliness. The old Wint, stiff with pride, would have done this. But the old Wint was gone; or at least, he was going. This Wint who stood before Joan tried to find something to say, but all he found to say to her was:

“Oh!”

Joan smiled at him. “There was a time when I wouldn’t have dared say this, Wint,” she said. “But I do dare now. Stick to the fight, Wint. This is what I want to say.”

He said, sullen in his embarrassment: “I’m going to.”

“There was a time when you were not going to—just because I—your friends—told you to stick.”

Wint looked away from her. “Well, that’s all right,” he told her uncomfortably.

“There’s never any harm in having friends, Wint, and taking their advice,” she said.

The old impatience burst out for a moment. “Don’t preach,” he said harshly.

“I’m not going to preach.” She was afraid she had spoiled it all. But he reassured her, hot with shame at his own decency.

“It’s all right, Joan,” he said. “I know you mean to help. I’ll try.”

“Do try,” she echoed softly.

He nodded, and she watched him, and at last added:

“I’d like to have you come to see me some time.”

He hesitated, then he said swiftly: “All right. Some time. Good-by!”

He jerked his head in farewell and hurried away as though he were afraid of her. Joan watched him go, and she pressed her hand to her lips as though to still them.

CHAPTER III
ROUTT TO KITE

WHEN Wint left Joan, after their encounter on the street, he was walking in a daze. He stumbled, his head was down, his eyes were blank. He was stunned and humbled; and after he had left her, he began to feel defiant. He thought of words with which he could have crushed her and silenced her. Presuming to forgive him, to praise him. What right had she to do that anyway? He ought to have laughed at her.

Not that Wint did not love Joan. He did; but he was still, at this time, a boy and nothing more. And he had rather more than a boy’s usual measure of stubborn contrariness in him. When his father, and his mother, and Joan, and every one else he cared for had bade him mend his ways, he had refused to mend them, and the thing had been a scandal on every tongue in Hardiston. When, in like fashion, father and mother and Joan bade him go to the dogs, whither he seemed surely bound, he had braced himself, fought a good fight, begun to make good. Now Joan was telling him he had made good, that he was all right. He had a reckless desire to go to the devil, forthwith, to prove her wrong.

He had met Joan at the corner by the Star Company’s furniture store, an institution that was always holding fire sales and closing-out sales without either fires before or actual closings after. Their talk there together had not gone unremarked. Every one in town would know of it within the day. When they separated, Joan went away from town toward her home, and Wint went up Broadway toward the Court House. Not that he knew where he was going. But he had to go somewhere.

There were only one or two places in Hardiston to go to when you did not know where to go. You might go to the Smoke House, and shake dice for a cigar, or drop a nickel in the slot machine and see how your luck was running. Or you might drop in at the Post Office in the idle hope that a special train had come along with a letter for you since the last regular mail was sorted into the boxes. Or you might stop at one of the newspaper offices. The editors were always willing to talk, and there were usually two or three others there before you.

Wint headed, somewhat aimlessly, for the Post Office. But when he passed down Main Street, B. B. Beecham, editor of the Journal, called Wint in to look at proofs of some city printing. Wint always got on well with B. B. The editor never preached, he never seemed to have any particular interest in the wrong-doings of other people, he attended to his own business and let you attend to yours. A square-built man, with a big barrel of a chest and stocky shoulders, and a strong, amiable countenance. Wint went in at his hail; and B. B. got the proofs for him, and Wint began to look them over. B. B. chunked up the fire in the little round iron stove that had seen so many years of service it was disintegrating. It was bound together with wire to hold it together; and there were holes in the front of it through which the fire could be seen. The stovepipe went up at an angle like that of the leaning tower of Pisa, then made a back-handed elbow turn and ran along in a hammock of wire braces to disappear into the wall. B. B. thrust a bit of wood in through the door, down into the fire, twisted it upward, breaking up the clotted coals and ashes. Then he put on more coal, and shut the door, and the fire roared up the chimney. Wint was going over the proofs, figure by figure. They had to do with bids on a sewer contract. B. B. sat down at his desk with his back to Wint and busied himself with something.

B. B.’s desk was a roll top, its pigeonholes frazzly with letters and papers jammed into them to the bursting point. The desk itself was littered with newspapers and notes and notebooks and scratch pads made out of old order blanks. There was an old iron inkwell, a tin box full of pins, a pencil or two. In a little hexagonal glass bottle at one side, a newly hatched humming bird which had fallen from the nest and been killed was preserved in alcohol. Not so large as a bumblebee, and not nearly so impressive. For paper weight, B. B. used a witch ball, taken from the stomach of a steer that Ned Howell had butchered. A round, smooth, yellowish thing, with a hole picked in to show the hair inside. It was as big as a small orange, and looked not unlike one, save that the yellow was dull and muddy. On top of the desk were books, a big hornet’s nest, an ear of corn. There was a curiously marked squash on the open iron safe in the corner; and in the rear of the office a stand-up desk and a smaller one at which a person might sit were littered with the miscellany of B. B.’s business.

While Wint was looking over the proofs, an old darky came in from the street. A ragged old man.... Wint knew him. He lived down the creek in a log cabin, and caught catfish, and farmed a plot of ground. His hat was battered, his coat was too big for him, his trousers slumped about his slumping shoes. His name was John Marshum. He took off his hat and looked around the ceiling of the office uneasily, as though he expected it to fall, and Wint and B. B. said hello to him, and he said:

“Howdy.”

B. B. asked: “Is there anything I can do for you?”

The old negro gulped, and said: “I’d like tuh borry a paper and a pencil, ef you please.”

B. B. gave him what he asked for, and the old man sat down at the desk in the back of the room, and bit his tongue, and gnawed the pencil, and began to write with infinite pains, slowly, the sweat bursting out of him with the effort. Wint and B. B. went on with their affairs.

After a while, the old fellow got up and crossed to B. B. and held out the product of his effort. “Heah’s a paper for you, suh,” he said. When B. B. took it, the old man hurried awkwardly out of the door and disappeared.

B. B. read the paper and chuckled, and Wint asked: “What is it?” The editor handed it to him, and he read the scrawl aloud:

“‘John Marshum was a very plesint vister at this office Thursdy.’”

Wint laughed good-naturedly. “The poor old clown. Wants his name in the paper. You ought to put it in, just to make him feel good.”

“I’m going to,” said B. B. “Old John’s one of my best friends in the county. He’s been a subscriber twelve years, and always paid up. You’d be surprised to know how many don’t pay up. And you’d be surprised how many people come in, just as he did, to get their names in the paper. I don’t suppose you ever thought of that.”

Wint passed the corrected proofs over to B. B. “One or two mistakes,” he said, and the editor sent the proofs up for correction. “What do you do with the darned fools?” Wint asked. “Tell them advertising space costs money?”

B. B. looked surprised. “No, I print their names. That’s what the paper’s for—to print people’s names. It makes them feel proud of themselves, and that’s good for them. It’s one way of helping them along, doing them good.”

Wint grinned. “Never did me any particular good to see my name in print,” he said. “Usually made me mad.”

“It wasn’t the fact that they printed your name that made you mad. It was what they printed about you.”

“Maybe so,” Wint admitted. “I didn’t see that it was any of their business.”

“That’s the way the city dailies are run,” B. B. agreed. “But a country weekly is a different proposition. I never print anything that will make any one mad. Not if I can help it. Not even a joke. A joke on a man’s no good unless he can appreciate it himself.”

Wint eyed B. B. and remarked thoughtfully: “I remember, when they stuck me in as Mayor, you didn’t print the fact that my father was a candidate.”

“No,” B. B. agreed.

“I supposed that was because you and my father are—allies in politics and such things.”

“No,” said B. B. “I try not to print things that will hurt people. Mr. Chase felt badly about that.”

“I don’t blame him,” said Wint slowly. “You know I had nothing to do with it.” He had never talked so freely to any one as he was accustomed to talk to B. B. There was some strain in the editor that invited confidences. He knew as many secrets as a doctor.

“Yes, I know,” he said.

“You know,” Wint went on, abruptly, “people are funny, B. B.”

“Yes.”

“I’m funny, myself.”

B. B. laughed in a friendly way. “Like the old Quaker who said to his wife: ‘All the world is a little queer save thee and me, my dear; and even thee are at times a little queer.’”

“No,” said Wint, smiling. “I include myself. I’m queer.”

B. B. said nothing. Wint started to go on, but the words were not in him. He had a curious, sudden impulse to ask B. B. about his father; this impulse was like homesickness. But he fought it back. His jaw set stubbornly. His father had thrown him out. That was enough; he didn’t ask to be kicked twice.

When B. B. saw that Wint was not going on, he spoke of something else. Then Ed Howe, one of Caretall’s men, dropped in and cut a slice from a plug and filled his pipe in the Caretall fashion: and Wint listened to Ed and B. B. talk for a while before he got up and took himself away. He had found some measure of reassurance in his talk with B. B., not because of anything that had been said, but simply because B. B. was a reassuring man. A strong man. A strong man, and a wise man, with open eyes—and an optimist. Not all men who seem to see clearly are optimists.

In front of the Post Office, Wint ran into Jack Routt. Routt had been out of town for a month or so on a business trip, and Wint had seen little of him since Amos went away. He was glad to see Jack, and said so. They shook hands, and Wint bought Routt a cigar. Routt studied Wint curiously. He wondered if it were true that Wint was keeping straight and doing well. And to find out, he asked laughingly:

“Been over to see Mrs. Moody lately, old man?”

Mrs. Moody was that virago who managed the Weaver House, that woman of the hideously beautiful false teeth. Wint flushed uncomfortably at mention of her. “No-o,” he said hesitantly.

“That’s the boy,” said Routt. “You keep away from her. You let the stuff alone. You can’t monkey with it, the way some fellows can, old man.”

And he watched Wint. There had been a time when this word would have acted as a challenge, when Wint would have snapped at the bait. But—Wint hesitated, he considered, he shook himself a little and said quietly:

“I guess you’re right, Jack.”

“You bet I’m right,” said Routt.

Wint nodded. “Yes,” he agreed.

When they separated, Routt went to his office and sat down with his feet on his desk to consider. And—he scowled. Matters were not going well with him. It did not suit him for Wint to keep straight. It did not suit him to lie supine under Amos Caretall’s injunction to let Wint alone. The Congressman’s command had irked him more than once, and more than once he had thought of V. R. Kite in that connection, and thought of going to Kite. He had a fairly definite idea that Amos would never help him along politically, and Kite might be able to. And—he remembered the word Wint had fastened on Kite on the day of his inauguration. He had called Kite a buzzard, and others had taken it up. The name seemed to fit; it tickled the sense of humor of Hardiston folks. But it did not tickle V. R. Kite. Kite ought to be ready to take means to crush Wint. And—that would please Routt. He had held off thus long in the belief that Wint would be his own ruin. He began to doubt this, now. It might be necessary to do something.

Routt was of mean stuff, small and tawdry. He had been what Hardiston called a mean boy, a trouble-maker. He had an infinite capacity for hate, a curious shrewdness that enabled him to fasten on another’s weakest point. As boys, he and Wint had fought once. They fought over Joan, because Routt teased her till she cried. Wint had whipped him, though Routt was the taller and the heavier of the two. Routt had never forgotten that; but Wint forgot it as soon as the incident was over. Wint forgot, and Routt remembered. Circumstances threw them much together; they grew up as friends; Routt behaved himself; people decided that he had outgrown his meanness. Wint liked him, did not distrust him, accepted him for what he seemed—a friend.

But Jack Routt was nobody’s friend. Sometimes, when he was alone, you might have seen this in his face. It was so now, as he thought of Wint; his countenance was twisted and distorted and malignant. In later years, it was to bear the marks of these secret and rancorous moments for any eye to see. Indelible and unmistakable. But just now Routt knew how to smile, how to be a good fellow....

He brought his feet down from the desk with a bang. He got up and reached for his hat. He had made up his mind; he would go and see Kite.

Kite was in town. Routt knew he would find the man in the Bazaar, the town’s five and ten cent store. He went that way, but as he reached the place, Peter Gergue came along the street and Routt went past without entering. Just as well Gergue should not know that he was seeing Kite. Gergue would tell Amos. When Gergue had disappeared, Routt went back and turned into the Bazaar. Kite’s desk was in the back of the store, but Kite was not in sight. The little man might be hidden behind the desk. One of the girls who clerked in the store—her name was Mary Dale, and she was a pretty, simple little thing—asked Routt what he wanted, and he stopped to talk to her for a moment. Routt liked pretty girls. He asked her if Kite was in, and she said he was at his desk, so Routt went back that way. He drew up a chair to face the little man, and Kite cocked his head on his thin neck, and tugged at his side whiskers. “Howdo, Routt,” he said.

“Morning,” Routt rejoined. “How’s tricks, Kite?”

“All right.” Kite looked suspicious. Routt offered him a cigar, which Kite declined. Jack lighted it himself, then said idly:

“Well, I just got back.”

“Been away?”

“Yes. Columbus.”

“Oh!”

“I see Wint hasn’t closed down on you yet,” Routt drawled.

Kite flushed angrily. “Of course not. Why should he? He’s no fool.”

“I said he hadn’t shut down on you—yet,” Routt repeated, and he emphasized the last word.

“He likes his drop now and then, same as another man.”

“Hasn’t been taking many drops lately, has he?”

“I’m not his guardian. How do I know? Long as he lets me alone.”

Routt grinned. “I heard he didn’t let you alone, day he was inaugurated. Called you a buzzard, didn’t he?”

“The man was drunk.”

“Name’s kind of stuck, though. A darned, rotten thing like that will stick.”

Kite was trying to keep calm, but he was an irascible little man. He snapped at Routt: “What do I care for names? They break no bones.”

“Well, that’s so,” Routt agreed good-naturedly.

“Long as he lets me alone, I’m satisfied,” Kite said again.

Routt nodded. “How long do you figure he’ll let you alone?” he asked.

Kite’s temper got away from him. “By God, he’d better let me alone!” He banged a clenched fist on the table. Routt drawled:

“Don’t get excited.”

“I’m n-not excited,” Kite stammered. “But he’ll let me alone. He don’t dare to bother me. Why, Routt, if he tries anything, I’ll—I’ll get out of town. I won’t live in the place. I’ll take my money out of the dirty little hole.”

“We-ell,” said Routt, “you could do that, of course. That would suit him. He’d get his own way, then. You could get out. Or you might fight him.”

“Fight him?” Kite snapped. “I’ll fight him to the last dollar.” He controlled himself with an effort. “But he’s not going to start anything. I know him. He’s inoffensive. A boy.”

“Amos Caretall is no boy,” Routt reminded him. “And Amos is backing him.”

Kite remembered that Winthrop Chase, Senior, had told him this same thing; had warned him that Amos meant to use Wint to clean up the town. He and Chase had made an alliance on that basis. If Wint tried a crusade, they would go after Amos together, and hang his hide on the fence. They had sworn that together.... Now Routt was saying the same thing. He had been feeling fairly secure; he and Chase had made no move. Chase had wanted him to start a back fire against Amos, but Kite had been ready to let well enough alone.... Now Routt ... Routt was one of Caretall’s men. He would be likely to know what the Congressman planned. Kite demanded angrily:

“What makes you think Amos is planning anything? He and I understand each other.”

Routt laughed. “Amos would double cross his best friend and call it a joke,” he said amiably. “You know that. Didn’t he double cross Chase?”

“Sure. I helped him,” said Kite defiantly.

“Next thing,” Routt told him, “he’ll double cross you.”

Kite leaned across and gripped Routt by the arm. “What makes you say that? You and Amos are together.”

“We were,” said Routt, “but I told him a few things he didn’t like. I’m no particular friend of Amos.”

Kite said: “I’m not either. But as long as he plays fair with me, I’ll play fair with him.”

“What if he don’t?”

“I’ll smash him.”

“You can’t smash Amos,” said Routt, “but you can hurt him.”

“How?”

“Smash young Wint.”

Kite snorted. “Pshaw! Wint’s a boy.”

“He’s growing up. One of these days, he’s going to send for Jim Radabaugh and tell him to clean up the town....”

“By God, if he does,” Kite swore, “I’ll tear him all to pieces.”

Routt got up. “When you start in to do that,” he said, “send for me. I might be able to help.”

“I won’t need any help to rip Wint Chase wide open.”

“You send for me,” said Routt insistently.

“All right. I’ll send for you.”

“I’ll be here,” Routt promised. When he went out through the store, he stopped and told Mary Dale she was the prettiest girl in town. Mary was pleased. She knew he didn’t mean it; she was simple enough, if you like; but she knew there were probably other girls just as pretty as she was. Nevertheless, she was glad Jack had told her she was pretty. She thought it meant he was pleased with her.

As a matter of fact, it only meant that he was pleased with himself. But that was a thing Mary Dale could not be expected to understand.

CHAPTER IV
WINT TO JOAN

WINT had lived very comfortably that winter, in Amos Caretall’s home, with old Maria Hale to take care of him. In the beginning, when Amos went away, he had protested at this arrangement. He told Amos he would go to a hotel, to a boarding house, hire a room somewhere.... He said he would not impose on Amos by living on his bounty.

Amos laughed at him and said Wint would not be living on any one’s bounty. “I aim to charge you board and keep,” he said. “And that’s velvet for me, because I’d keep the house going anyway. Got to, to keep old Maria. If I ever let go of her, somebody’d grab her in a minute.”

Wint knew it was Amos’s habit to keep the house open and Maria in it, even when he and Agnes were both away; so he accepted the proposition. The board which Amos required him to pay was nominal; and Wint wanted to pay more. Amos shook his head.

“First thing you want to learn, Wint, is never to pay a man more than he asks, for anything. He’ll think you’re a blamed fool.”

So Wint had been comfortable. Maria knew how to cook, she kept the house neat, she picked up after Wint’s disorderliness. And she mothered Wint as her kind know how to do.

He was comfortable, but he was lonely, desperately lonely. Wint was a convivial young man. He liked to be with people. He had never been much in his own exclusive company. Some one said that it is not good for man to be alone; but it is equally true that it is not good for a man never to be alone. Solitude is good for the soul. It gives an opportunity for a certain amount of thought, for taking stock of one’s self. If every one could be persuaded to an hour’s solitary self-consideration each day, the world would be bettered thereby. It is hard to deceive yourself. Wint found out the truth of this in his solitary evenings that winter. He found himself forced to face facts, and face them squarely; he found himself forced to recognize his own mistakes.

Thus his loneliness did him no harm; but it did make him uncomfortable. The fact that he was much alone resulted from two or three circumstances and causes. His father had cast him out; so he saw his father and mother not at all. And he had been accustomed to see them every day, all his life. It is true there had usually been little pleasure for him in these encounters. His father’s harshness, his mother’s garrulous tongue had irked and angered him. They had worked at cross-purposes, as families are apt to do. There had been little obvious sympathy and understanding between them. Nevertheless, Wint found that he missed them; that he missed his father’s overbearing accusations, and he missed his mother’s interminable talk. Once or twice, when he met her on the street, he stopped to talk with her; and he took a certain comfort from the flow of breathless reproaches which poured out upon him at these times. Mrs. Chase was as unhappy that winter as a mother must be when her son is set apart from her; but she was loyal to her husband, and reproached Wint for his disloyalty.

Wint missed Joan, too. He missed her enormously. There was never any doubt that Joan was half the world to him. He had longed for her desperately at times; he had wanted to go and abase himself before her. But he would not; he was strong enough to keep to his own path. And Joan kept to hers.

The fact that Wint and Joan were thus at odds made Wint an awkward figure in any group of young people, because Joan was almost sure to be there. He knew this as well as any one. So when Dick Hoover asked him to go to the dances, he refused because Joan would be there; and when Elsie Jenkins asked him to a card party, he refused again, and for the same reason. But he did not tell Dick and Elsie what this reason was. As a consequence, people stopped asking him to the festivities of Hardiston, and Wint was left solitary.

Solitary, and lonely. He was so lonely, that night of Elsie’s party, that he walked past her house for the sheer, hungry joy of looking in through her windows at the throng inside. He often walked about the town in the evenings, thus. Sometimes it was to pass Joan’s home.... And he did a deal of thinking, and of wondering; and he made a resolution or two....

When Joan spoke to him, asked him to come and see her, Wint experienced a strange revulsion of feeling. He was unhappy, and he told himself he would never go; and he went uptown and dropped in on B. B. Beecham and had that innocuous and idle talk with the editor, which never touched on his troubles at all. Nevertheless, Wint emerged from the Journal office in a more cheerful frame of mind. People were apt to be more cheerful, and more optimistic, and more resolved, after talking with B. B. This was one of the virtues of the man.

Wint decided, after leaving B. B., that he would go and see Joan. Some time.... He decided he would not be in any hurry about it. Next month, perhaps, or next week, or in a day or two....

As might have been expected, the end of it was that he went to see her that night. For Wint was still half boy, with a boy’s impatience; and he had been lonely for Joan for so long. After supper, with the long evening before him, and nothing to do, he thought of going to Joan. He swore he wouldn’t go; but he wanted to, so badly. Why shouldn’t he? She had asked him. He wouldn’t and he would, and he wouldn’t and he would....

In the end, he decided to walk out to her home and see if he could see her, through the window. There was snow on the ground, it was fairly cold. He bundled up in overcoat and cap and filled a pipe and lighted it, and set out. He would just walk past the house, come back another way, go to bed.... That would do no harm.

But even while he tried to tell himself this was what he meant to do, he knew that he would not come back without seeing Joan—if the thing were possible. And when he got to the house, he saw that it was possible. The shades were up at the sitting-room window; he could see her, reading before the fire. She was alone.

So Wint went reluctantly up the walk from the street, and he hesitated at the steps, and then he went up the steps, stamping, and knocked at the door. He heard Joan stirring, inside. Then the door opened, and Joan was there before him. The light behind her shone through her hair; her eyes were dark and steady.

The light fell on his face, and she said quietly: “Hello, Wint. I’m—glad you came.”

Wint took off his cap, and held it in his hand. She thought he looked very like a boy. He said nothing; and Joan moved a little to one side and bade him come in. He went in, like a man walking in his sleep, and she shut the door behind him. Wint stood in the hall as though he did not know what to do. He wanted to run; but the door was shut.

She said: “Take off your coat.” So he did, and laid it on a chair in the hall, and put his cap on top of it. Joan told him to come into the sitting room; and he said huskily:

“All right.”

So they went in and sat down together before the fire. And Wint wished he had not come. He crossed his legs one way, then he crossed them the other. He folded his arms, he folded his hands in his lap, he cleared his throat, he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He did not look at Joan; but Joan watched him, and by and by she smiled a little, and her smile seemed like a caress upon his bent head.

Wint said abruptly: “Your people all right?”

“Yes,” Joan told him.

He muttered angrily that that was good; and silence fell upon them again. He twisted in this silence, like a caterpillar on a pin. He was immensely relieved when Joan spoke at last.

“What shall we talk about, Wint?” she asked steadily. “Do you want to talk about your—fight? What are you doing?”

“No,” he said dourly, staring at the fire.

Joan watched him, not resenting his sullenness, because she had understanding. After a little, she said gently: “I saw your mother the other day.”

Wint shot a quick glance at her. He could not help it. “That so?” he asked.

Joan nodded, and she smiled a little wistfully. “Yes. She misses you. She and your father....”

“They haven’t told me so,” said Wint morosely.

“Have you talked with them?” she asked.

“No. My father—” For the life of him, he could not stifle the choke in his voice. “No, I haven’t,” he said.

“You couldn’t, of course,” she agreed, and she looked at him sidewise. “Of course, if you went to them, your father would think you were trying to make up. You couldn’t do that.” There was an anxiety in her eyes; the anxiety of the experimenter. Wint went by contraries. Joan knew quite clearly what she wanted; she wanted him to go to his father. Was this the way to lead him to make the first move?

She was frightened at what she had done when he looked at her angrily. “See here,” he said, “do you want me to go to him? Do you think I ought to?” She was so frightened that she could not speak; but she nodded. Wint barked at her:

“Then why don’t you say so? I’m sick of having people make me do things by telling me not to.”

“I wasn’t trying to—make you do it, Wint,” she said; and she was almost pleading.

“You were; and you know it,” he told her flatly. “Weren’t you, now? Secretly trying to make me....”

Joan could not lie to him. “Y-Yes,” she said.

“Then come out with it,” Wint demanded; and he got up and stamped about the room, and words burst from him. “Joan,” he exclaimed, “I’ve been a fool, and I know it. Am one still, I suppose. Hate to be preached to and told what I must do, and mustn’t. You know that. Result is, I’m always in trouble. Jack Routt, best friend I’ve got, does me more harm than my worst enemy—just trying to keep me straight. I’ve always known it, in a way. Knew I was a fool. But I’ve been just contrary enough to refuse to be preached to. That’s the way I’m made. Only, for God’s sake, don’t you start trying to manage me.” He hesitated, groping for words, and his voice was suddenly weary and lonely as he said: “You ought to be able to talk straight to me, Joan.”

She did not answer for a moment; then she said simply: “I’m sorry, Wint. I was wrong.”

That took the wind out of him. He had hoped she would argue with him. He wanted an argument, wanted a hot combat of words; he was full of things that he wanted to say. To show her.... Justify himself to her. But you can’t argue with a person who agrees with you. He sat down as abruptly as he had risen, and stared again at the fire.

Joan asked, after a time: “Are you sure Jack Routt is really your friend, Wint?”

“Of course,” he said, looking at her. “Why not? What do you mean?”

“I don’t like him.”

He laughed. “A girl never likes a man’s friends. Jack’s all right. He’s a prince.”

“Is he?”

“Sure he is.”

Joan said no more about Routt. She spoke of other things, trivial things; and for an hour she and Wint managed to talk easily enough without touching on forbidden ground. It was not till he got up to go that they spoke seriously again. She had helped him on with his coat. At the door, he faced her; and he asked:

“Joan, d’you really think I ought to—patch things up at home?”

She answered him straightforwardly: “Yes, Wint.”

He looked past her, eyes thoughtful; and at last he held out his hand. “Well, good night,” he said. “Maybe I will.”

They shook hands, and he went out and tramped swiftly back to Amos’s house. There was a bounding elation in him; his head was among the stars.

CHAPTER V
WINT GOES HOME

WINT had thought of going to his father before he talked with Joan. He had tried advances now and then. Once he met the elder Chase on the street and stopped to talk with him, but his father passed by with a curt word of greeting. Another time, he saw Chase in the Journal office and went in. Chase and B. B. Beecham were talking together; but when Wint came in, his father got up and departed. Wint had said:

“Don’t let me drive you away. I just happened in.”

But the senior Chase said: “I was going, anyway,” and he went.

These incidents had roused the old resentment in Wint, but they had hurt him more than they had angered him. And the hurt persisted, while the resentment died. He found excuses for his father. He blamed himself; and he thought of ways of approaching the older man with some hope of success, and discarded them one by one.

Seeing Joan gave him new confidence in himself. She had let him come to see her; his father could do no less. Wint had no illusions as to Joan. He understood that she wanted to help him, wanted to be proud of him; but he understood also that he was on probation. He had not proved himself, in her eyes. That must come with time. They had talked frankly enough together; but—they had merely shaken hands at parting. That was all; that was all he had any right to expect. He could wait—and work—for the rest.

It was much that she had asked him to come to her. It meant that he was no longer outcast in her eyes; and the realization of this gave him new self-respect. It was this very self-respect that enabled him to humble himself to his father. A man can be servile without being self-respecting; but self-respect and true humility are synonyms. Each implies a true self-appraisal. Wint was a man, doing his work among men. He was also his father’s son; and it was as a son that he went to his father at last.

He found the elder Chase at home one evening. He had made sure that his father would be at home; but he was glad, when he got there, to find that his mother had gone next door. His mother could not understand; and no one else could talk much when she was about. Wint smiled when he thought of her; then his lips steadied. There was need for talk between his father and himself.

His father came to the door; and when he saw Wint, he stared at him coldly, and did not invite him to come in. Wint, with a sudden twinge of sorrow, saw that his father had changed and grown older in these last months. It seemed to Wint that his hair was thinner; there were new lines in his face; and his old benevolent condescension toward the world at large was gone. Wint said quietly:

“I want to come in and talk with you if I may.”

Chase hesitated, even then; but—he had been lonely as Wint had been lonely. He stepped to one side and said: “Very well.” Wint went in, and his father shut the door, and bade Wint come into the room off the hall that served him as library, and office, and den. He did not tell Wint to take off his coat, so Wint kept it on. Chase sat down at his desk, Wint took a chair facing him. He did not know how to begin.

Chase said: “Well, what is it you want?”

Wint hesitated, then he smiled a little wistfully; and he said: “I want to be—friends with you again.”

His father abruptly looked away from him. Without looking at Wint, he asked:

“Why?”

Wint’s right hand moved in a curious, appealing way. “Isn’t it natural for a son to—want to be friends with his father, sir?” he suggested.

Chase said harshly: “I told you, once, that I no longer counted you my son.”

“Those things don’t go by what we want, sir,” Wint urged. “I—am your son. And you’re my father.”

“Have you acted as a son should?” Chase asked coldly.

“No,” said Wint, without palliation of the finality of the word, and Chase looked—and was surprised.

“You’ve realized it, have you?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was one thing Chase wanted to do; and it made him feel ridiculous and ashamed of himself to want to do it. What he wanted to do was to take Wint in his arms. And both of them grown men! He shook his head, as though to brush this sentimental desire away. Foolishness! The young rip had made a laughingstock out of him. Yet here he was, ready to give in at a word.

He said: “I suppose Amos sent you.”

Wint bit his lips, and his face set faintly; but his voice was quiet enough when he answered. “No, sir,” he said.

“You tell Amos,” Chase exclaimed, “that you can’t pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him. And he’ll be more anxious to get around me later on than he is now. Tell him that for me.”

Wint shook his head slowly. “Amos didn’t send me,” he said again.

“Thought Amos told you everything to do?” his father asked. “Haven’t got a mind of your own, have you?”

“Yes,” Wint told him. “Yes, I think I have.”

Chase considered, not looking at his son. He could not look at Wint and still hold himself together. After a while he asked:

“Well, what do you want? You haven’t told me what you want.”

“I want to be friends.”

Chase flung that aside with a swift gesture. “I mean, what do you want to get out of me?”

“Nothing.”

His father got up, glared down at Wint angrily. “Don’t think I’m a fool, Wint,” he said, in a rush of words. “You made me look like one, but I’m not. You linked up with Caretall to make a jackass out of me; you went out of your way to shame me by your own shamelessness. I kicked you out with your tail between your legs, as I should have done long before. Now you come whining home again. Don’t try to tell me you’re not after something. I know you are. If you don’t want to say what it is, don’t. That’s your business. But don’t try to make me a fool.”

Wint had sworn to keep his temper; and he did. But he got to his feet with a swift, silent movement that startled his father. And when Chase broke off, Wint said steadily:

“I’ve told you the truth. It’s true I misbehaved—badly. You have a right to be angry with me. It’s true I did not know Caretall planned to stick me in over your head. You know that’s true. As far as the rest of it goes ... I came here to-night just to tell you that I’m sorry for—the things I did. And I want you to know I’m sorry. You’re my father. I’d like to have the right to come to you for advice; and I’d like to come to you for friendship, if nothing more. That’s all. I’ve come.” He turned toward the door. “I’ve come, and I’ll go.”

When Wint turned toward the door, his father’s heart leaped as though it would choke him. He wanted to cry out to Wint not to go; he did cry out:

“Wait!”

Wint stopped and looked at him.

“Haven’t you given me a right to think—to mistrust you?” the older man challenged.

“Yes,” said Wint.

“You’ve shamed me; and you’ve come near breaking your mother’s heart.”

Wint found it hard to speak; and when he did speak, he said more than he had meant to say. “I want to make amends, sir,” he told his father.

“There are some hurts that can’t be mended,” said Chase inexorably.

Wint nodded; his shoulders slumped a little, and he would have turned again to the door. “I’ve said all I can say,” he explained, “so I guess I’d better go.”

Chase shook his head. “See here, Wint,” he said. “Listen.” There was not yet friendliness in his voice; but there was a neutral quality that held Wint. “Listen,” said Chase. “I’ve learned some things, too, Wint. It’s only fair to say that I can see, now, I was a—bumptious father. And I’ve not changed. I’m too old to change. Probably there were ways where I wronged you. I don’t doubt it.”

“No,” said Wint. “You were always decent to me.”

“A father can be—decent to his son, without playing fair with him,” said his father. “A father can—give things to his son, and at the same time rob him of better things by the giving.”

“You did your part, sir.”

Chase hesitated, eyes on the floor. “I did my best for you, Wint,” he said. “I think I always meant to do what was—best for you. Did you always try to do what was best for me?”

“No,” said Wint.

“I don’t like our being at outs any better than you do,” Chase went on. “It looks bad; and it’s hard on your mother—and on me. Perhaps on you, too.”

Wint said nothing. He was thinking that his father’s thinning hair and lined face proved that the older man had—found it hard to be at outs with his son. He was ready to go a long ways to make it up to Winthrop Chase, Senior.

His father said abruptly, as though summarizing what had gone before:

“If you want to come home, Wint, I’ve no objection.”

Wint had not thought of this possibility, and he said so. “I did not come for that,” he told the older man. “I—just came to tell you, what I have told you.”

“I’m willing to accept what you say at face value,” said his father. “I understand you’ve—kept sober. I understand you’re studying. I’m ready to let you prove yourself.”

Wint smiled with quick satisfaction. “That’s a good deal for you to offer me, sir,” he said frankly.

“If you want to come home, you can.”

“I hadn’t thought of that till you spoke. I don’t know what to—”

“Your mother would like to have you here,” said Chase huskily, “if you care to come.” It was as near a plea as he could bring himself.

Wint nodded with quick decision. “All right, sir,” he said. “I’d like to come. I’ll bring my stuff to-morrow.”

They shook hands abruptly, with a curt word that hid their feelings. “Good night,” said Chase, and Wint said good night, and his father closed the door behind him.

Wint felt, while he walked back to Amos Caretall’s house, as though he had been stripped of a load, had been cleansed, had been made whole. The world had never looked so clean and bright to him before.

A few minutes after he left his home, Mrs. Chase came back from the neighbor’s. She saw at once that something had happened; there was a change in her husband. He was flushed, and his eyes were shining. She asked:

“Why, what’s the matter with you? Has anything happened? Is there anything wrong? You know, I said to-night, I told Mrs. Hullis, that I just had a feeling something was going to happen. I told Mrs. Hullis I just knew things were going to go wrong. Oh, it does look like we have more trouble all the time.”

“Wint is coming home, Margaret,” said her husband.

Poor, garrulous mother! For once she was shocked dumb. Her eyes widened, and she dabbed at them with her hand, as though a cobweb had stuck across them. She turned white, and she seemed to shrink and grow old. And she sat down slowly in the straight, uncomfortable chair she always used, and put her worried old head down in her arms and cried.

Chase touched her shoulder, awkwardly comforting her.

“It’s all right, mother,” he said. “He’s coming home.”

But Mrs. Chase didn’t say anything. She just sat there, quietly crying. The tears wet through her sleeve till she felt them damp upon her arm.

CHAPTER VI
A WORD AS TO HETTY

PETER GERGUE wrote to Amos that Wint had gone home; and Amos got a letter from Wint with the same news, the same day. Wint’s letter was straightforward, a little embarrassed. “I want you to know,” he wrote, “that my father and I have fixed things up. I am living at home again. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate your kindness. But I thought I ought to go home if they were willing to have me, and they were.”

Peter wrote more at length. Gergue, uncouth to look upon and rude of speech, was nevertheless an educated man, and a well-read man. There was nothing bizarre about his letters. He wrote that Wint and his father had come together. “From what I hear, Wint went home and told Chase he was sorry, and so on,” Gergue continued. “I guess Chase took on some, at that; but he came around. He’s wrapped up in Wint, you know, and always was. This has been a good thing for him. He’s human now. He’s not such a darned fool. Chase, I mean. If you don’t look out, Chase will give you a run for your money yet.

“Wint’s all right, too. Hasn’t touched a drop, far as I can find out, since you left. He’s studying law with old Hoover, and working at the job of being Mayor. Not setting the world on fire, either. Just the routine. Town’s as wet as ever, and looks like it will go on being. I guess Wint is worried for fear folks will laugh at him if he starts a clean-up. Or maybe he doesn’t want to. Or maybe he hasn’t thought about it.

“He and Routt don’t run around together much. Jack’s been away. I wrote you about that. He’s back now. Acts same as ever. Mary Dale told me he was in to see old Kite one day, and Kite went up in the air. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. She thinks Jack is made and handed down. Maybe he is. I wonder what he wanted to go and see old V. R. Kite for?

“Kite was sore at you, right after election. Some one told him you was going to have Wint clean up the town. He made talk that he’d hang your hide if you did. But he got over that. He’s lying quiet. Doing a good business, too, I should say. There were seven drunks in Wint’s court last week.

“I asked Chase if he figured to run against you next fall. He said he was out of active politics. Active, he said.

“Guess you’ve seen about the new city government law. Means we’ll have to vote for Mayor again, this fall, instead of a year from now. You figure to run Wint? I guess he’d take it. I guess he’s just getting rightly interested in the job.

“See the session’s likely to end along in May. You figure to come home then?”

Amos read these letters, read Wint’s twice, and smiled at it; then re-read Peter Gergue’s. That night at their hotel he told Agnes that Wint had gone to his own home. “Guess you’d better go back and keep Maria company,” he said.

He half expected her to protest. Agnes seemed to be having a good time in Washington; she was very gay and much abroad. Jack Routt had stopped off for three or four days, during his absence from Hardiston, and she and Jack had been constantly together while he was in town. Also, there had been other amiable young men, before and after Jack. So Amos thought Agnes was enjoying herself, and hesitated to suggest her going home. But he made up his mind, before he spoke, that she should go. Amos never got into an argument unless he intended to win. This habit had established for him a certain reputation for infallibility.

But—Agnes did not protest. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m sick of this stupid old place.”

Amos, head on one side, squinted at her humorously. “Well, there are some stupid things done here, anyways,” he agreed. “When’ll you put out for Hardiston?”

She planned to get some clothes. “I’ll be along in May,” Amos told her. “Guess you and Maria can go it alone till then.”

Agnes was sure they could.

In Hardiston, Wint’s home-going was a nine days’ wonder. People made comments according to their own hearts. Some were glad, some were amused, some were caustic. The only one to whom Wint offered any explanation was old Maria Hale. The old negress loved him like a son; she was sorry to see him go. There were tears in her eyes when she told him so; they ran down her black cheeks, like drops of ink upon that blackness. It is easy to speak openly of simple, human emotions to such folks as old Maria. Wint said to her: “I want to go home to my father and mother. And they want me. I’m going to make it up to them for some of the things I’ve done.” He would not have said as much as that to any other person in the world. But there was no sense of strangeness in saying it to the old colored woman.

She bobbed her withered head, and smiled through her tears, and cried:

“Da’s right, Miste’ Wint. Yore mammy ’nd pappy shore got to be proud o’ you, boy.”

“I hope so, Maria,” he told her, and she patted his shoulder.

“’Deed and dey will.”

When he left the house, she came to the door and told him he must come, now and then, and let her cook him a good supper; and he must come and see her. She would be lonely, in that big house, without no white folks around, she said. Wint promised to come; and she waved her blue gingham apron after him as he went down the street.

Muldoon was with him, scampering around him and about; and old Maria, watching Wint and the dog, said to herself as they disappeared:

“Shore will miss dat boy; but ol’ M’ria ain’t going to pester herself about not seeing dat dog.”

She objected to Muldoon because he shed hairs on the rugs. But she had tolerated him for Wint’s sake. Muldoon thoroughly understood her feelings; he used to sit with his head on one side and bark at her while she brushed up those tawny hairs and scolded at him. She declared he was laughing at her. More than once, Wint had been forced to make peace between them.

Muldoon did not seem surprised that they were going home; he took it quite as a matter of course. In fact, it is doubtful whether he noticed the change at all. Home, to Muldoon, was where Wint was. For that is the way of the dog.

So Wint went home, and Hardiston talked it over. V. R. Kite was glad to hear it. It meant, he decided, that Wint had shifted allegiance from Amos to his father; and while Kite had always mistrusted the elder Chase, he felt they had a common bond in their mutual antagonism toward Amos. Kite, in the last few months, had conceived a new respect for Winthrop Chase, Senior. “Chase,” he was accustomed to say, “is a man of sense. Yes, sir; a man of sense.”

Joan was glad; she found occasion to tell Wint so, simply and without elaboration. Wint said awkwardly: “Yes, I’m glad too. I guess it’s better.” And they never mentioned the change again. James T. Hollow, the little man whom Caretall had put up for Mayor against Chase, resented Wint’s move. “It’s desertion,” he told Peter Gergue. “He is deserting Congressman Caretall; and after all the Congressman has done for him. It’s not the right thing to do, Peter.”

Gergue spat, and rummaged through his hair. “Can’t always do what’s right,” he said.

“I’m afraid Amos will resent this,” Hollow went on. Peter said he shouldn’t wonder.

“If he does object, guess he’ll know how to show it,” he remarked. And Hollow agreed, and added admiringly that Amos always seemed to know just the right thing to do.

The Hardiston Sun and the Journal were both friendly to Winthrop Chase, Senior; so Skinner and B. B. Beecham made no comment on Wint’s change of residence. But the semi-weekly Herald, which was an outcast with its hand against every man, politically speaking, said, under a headline: “The Prodigal Returns,” that Wint, “whose break with the elder Chase dates from the election, when Senior was made a laughingstock before the state, has returned to the parental rooftree. Please omit fatted calves.”

Sam O’Brien, the fat restaurant man, told Ned Bentley it was a good thing. “Young Wint’s a fine lad,” he said. “And he’s on the right track. Does no good, never, to break with your blood and kin.”

Thus each took his own point of view. It was a poor citizen of Hardiston who had nothing to say about the matter, except that those most concerned had nothing to say at all.

The actual home-coming was simple and undramatic. Wint sent his trunk out during the day after his talk with his father. In the late afternoon of that day, he happened to drop in at the Post Office for the late mail, and met his father there. They greeted each other casually; and Wint asked:

“On your way home?”

“I have to stop at the bakery.”

“I’ll go along,” said Wint. And he did, while people stared with all their eyes. Old Mrs. Mueller, the comfortable little woman who owned the bakery, and who was always associated in Wint’s mind with the delicious fragrance of newly baked bread, lifted both hands at sight of them together, then dropped her hands abruptly and wiped them on her apron and served them without a word. Before the door closed behind them, they heard her, behind the screen in the rear of the shop, volubly telling some one the news.

Wint and his father walked home without speaking once upon the way. They were both acutely embarrassed and uncomfortable. It was a relief to them both when they got to the house and Mrs. Chase met them in the hall. Chase dropped his hand on his son’s shoulder—the involuntary touch, like a caress, brought the tears to Wint’s eyes—and he said:

“Here’s Wint, mother.”

So Wint took his mother in his arms, and she hugged him, hard. “I knew you’d c-c-c-come home, Wint,” she told him, through her sobs. “I was telling Mrs. Hullis, only the other day, that I’d—that I was just sure you’d come home some—”

“I’ve come, mother,” said Wint.

“I knew you’d come, too. I told father there wasn’t anything in you that would—I told him you’d be sorry, that you’d come and tell him so. Your father’s a good man, Wint. He’s tried to—”

Chase broke in. People who wished to say anything to her always had to break in on Mrs. Chase. He said: “Is supper ready, mother? Wint’s hungry, and so am I.”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “It’s all ready. Hetty’s made two big pies, Wint. Apples, with cinnamon in them. Thick, the way you like them. Some of our apples, from the big Sheep’s Nose tree in the back yard. They’ve kept wonderful this winter. We haven’t lost hardly any; and they’re as juicy—”

“Lead me to ’em,” said Wint cheerfully. “Is Hetty a good cook?”

“She’s fine,” his mother assured him. “Hetty’s a fine girl. I never had a harder worker. She don’t seem right happy, sometimes; but she does her work, and that’s all a body has a right to ask. She—”

Hetty herself came to the dining-room door, then, and told them that supper was ready. Wint said: “Hello, Hetty,” and shook hands with her. She said:

“Hello, Wint.” The old note of reckless courage and good nature was gone from her voice; and when he saw her more clearly, in the lighted dining room, he saw his mother was right. Hetty did not look happy. Her eyes were tired; and there were shadows beneath them. Her face was thinner, too. He thought she did not look well. During supper, while she waited upon them, he told her so. “You’ve been working too hard, Hetty. You don’t look like yourself.”

She said, with a twisted smile, that she was all right. There was a harsh note in her voice. It disturbed Wint; but he said no more. During the succeeding days and weeks, he grew accustomed to her changed appearance. He no longer thought of it.

In mid-April, Jack Routt came out to the house one night to see Wint. The visit seemed casual enough. He said he had thought he would drop in for a smoke and a talk. He came early, only a few minutes after supper, and Hetty was clearing away the supper dishes. When she heard his voice in the hall, she stood very still for a moment, looking that way. Wint did not see her. Routt laid aside his hat, and then he saw Hetty, and he called to her:

“Hello, Hetty.”

She said evenly: “Hello, Jack.”

Then Routt and Wint went up to Wint’s room, and Hetty stood very still where she was for a little time, before she went on with her work.

Upstairs, Routt was saying: “I’d forgotten Hetty was working for you.”

“Yes,” said Wint.

Routt lighted a cigarette. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

Wint nodded. “Not as pretty as she was in school. Remember what a picture she used to be, hair in a braid, and those cream-red cheeks of hers?”

“Guess I do,” Routt agreed warmly. He looked at Wint and grinned. “Don’t know that I’d want her living in the same house with me,” he said.

“Why not?” Wint asked.

“Damned bad for my peace of mind.”

Wint flushed. He was a curiously clean, innocent chap in some ways. He felt a little ashamed by the mere existence of the thought which had prompted Routt’s covert suggestion. “I’m glad you dropped in, Jack,” he said. “Good to see you here again. Like old times.”

If he had been less busy with the work of his office, and with his study, Wint might have thought more about Hetty during the next few weeks. But—he didn’t. They saw each other daily, and once or twice he realized that she was not as good-natured as she had been. There were times when she was sullen.... For the most part, however, he did not think of her at all.

Now and then he had short letters from Amos. Dry, friendly letters, with some impersonal advice sprinkled through them. In the third week in May, Amos wrote that he would come home, arriving the Thursday following. Wint was glad he was going to see Amos again. He had gone to Amos’s house once or twice for the suppers Maria loved to cook for him, but when Agnes came home, he gave that up. Agnes bored him. She was too vivacious. Joan was quieter, calmer, infinitely strengthening and strong.... Jack Routt was seeing a good deal of Agnes, he knew. Routt seemed no longer bent on the wooing of Joan, though he had told Wint, months ago, that he meant to go in and win. Wint joked him, one day, about this, and Routt said frankly:

“You and she have made up. I’m not the sort of a chap that trespasses. When I see I’ve no chance, I know how to make the best of things.”

Wint thought that was straightforward and decent in Routt.

Amos was to come home on the afternoon train, Thursday. Wednesday evening, Wint spent at home. Chase and Wint’s mother went upstairs early to bed, but Wint was busy with a case book from Hoover’s office, and remained downstairs, the book open on the table, the lamp beside him.

He did not realize that time was passing. Wint had a certain faculty for concentration; and the dead quiet of the sleeping house allowed him to enclose himself in the world of his thoughts. He heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but the matter he was reading. He did not hear the clock strike midnight, and one o’clock.

But in the end he did hear some one come up on the back porch. That would be Hetty, coming home. He knew she had gone out for the evening. Listening to her step, he wondered what time it was, and looked at the clock and saw that it was within twenty minutes of two in the morning.

“Great Scott!” he said, half aloud. “As late as that?” And then, curiously, “What’s Hetty doing out this time of night?” He listened; and he could hear no more footsteps, but he did catch the murmur of a man’s voice. Indistinguishable.... Then Hetty’s in a harsh, mirthless laugh. He got up abruptly and went out toward the kitchen. He could not have told what impulse sent him.

When he opened the door, Hetty was standing on the porch, facing him. There was no one with her. Wint said: “Alone, Hetty? Time you were getting in.” He was good-natured.

She looked at him, and he saw that she was flushed, and her eyes were reddened, and her mouth was open. Her hair was a little dishevelled. She looked at him, and laughed, and said loosely:

“Oh, you Wint. Wint’s caught me. Joke on me.”

He saw that she had been drinking, and he was inexpressibly sorry and disturbed. Not that he was a stranger to drink; not that he frowned upon it from high, moral grounds. But—Hetty had been so beautiful, and so youthful, and so gay. She was so hideously soiled now. He was not disgusted; he was infinitely sorry for her.

Hetty laughed crackingly. “Poor ol’ Wint. ’Member when you came home so? Hetty put Wint t’ bed. Now Wint’ll have to put Hetty to bed. Mus’n’t let Chase know, Wint. He’s a moral man.”

Wint said gently: “Of course not, Hetty.” He took her arm. “Come in.”

She was unsteady on her feet; and it seemed hard for her to keep her eyes open. He was afraid she would drop in a sodden slumber before he could get her upstairs. This fear haunted him during the moments that followed; it marked them in his memory. He was never going to be able to forget this business of helping Hetty slowly up the back stairs, and up to her third-floor room. It was only a matter of minutes; but they were fearfully long. And he was afraid she would go to sleep; and he was afraid she would laugh. Once he heard the laughter coming, in her throat, in time to press his hand over her mouth; and he could never forget the feeling of her loose, working lips beneath his hand. He was sweating and sick.

He got her to her room without turning on the lights. He got her to the bed and she lay down and seemed instantly asleep. He started for the door; and she called him back.

“Shame, Wint,” she said mournfully. “Ain’t going to take off my shoes? I took off your shoes, Wint. I took off your shoes.”

She wore low shoes, little more than pumps. He thanked his fates for that, while his fingers fumbled for the laces. A tug loosed the knots, the slippers came off easily. Hetty was snoring before he was done, and he left her so.

He could hear her snoring, after he got out into the hall. It seemed to him his father, asleep in the front of the house on the second floor, must hear. He went down from the third floor to the second on tiptoe with excruciating care. And on down the back stairs to put out the lights, and put away his book, and come back up to his own bed.

He could not sleep for a long time. He was obsessed by a strange and persistent feeling of responsibility for Hetty. It was as though he felt himself to blame for this thing that had come to her.

Jack Routt would have laughed at such a state of mind; but it was very real to Wint.

CHAPTER VII
ORDERS FOR RADABAUGH

WINT had a talk with his father next morning; that is to say, the morning of the day Amos was to come home. He told the elder Chase that Amos was coming.

Chase nodded. “I heard so,” he agreed.

“I want you to understand my relations with him,” said Wint.

There was a time when the older man would have said that a son of his could have no relations with Amos Caretall. But Winthrop Chase, Senior, had been learning wisdom, and a certain tolerance. Also, he had no wish to lose Wint again. He told himself this was because Wint’s mother was growing old, would miss him.

“Well,” he said, “what are they?”

Wint had been dreading what his father would say; he had been afraid of anger, of abuse. He was immensely relieved at the older man’s tone.

“Simply this,” he said. “He put me where I am. That was tough on you; but I think it has been good for me. It’s a strange thing to have the feeling that you can give men orders which they must obey; and that you have a—a sort of control over them. Dad, do you realize that I have to send men to jail every little while? It’s a pretty serious thing to send a man to jail, when you know you ought to be in jail yourself, in a way. I’ve done some thinking about it; so you see, it’s been good for me. It never hurts a man to think.

“The whole thing is, Amos has done me a good turn, sir. I can’t help feeling grateful to him. Can’t help feeling he’s been a good friend to me. And—I want to be friends with him. And I want you to know there’s no disloyalty to you in this friendship.”

Chase considered for a little; then he said quietly: “You know, Amos played false with me. Deceived me—deliberately. And tricked me.”

“I know it,” said Wint. “It was politics; and in a way, it was dirty politics. But—he’s been square with me.”

“I’m not sure,” said Chase, “that the whole business has not turned out pretty well, for you. For your sake, I’m not sorry.” His voice stirred and quickened. “But by Heaven, Wint, Amos is no friend of mine! And some day I mean to break him.”

Wint said: “That’s all right. It’s a fair game between you. But I don’t want you to think I’m taking sides with him.”

“What are you going to do?” Chase asked.

“I thought of meeting his train,” Wint told him. “And—he asked me to have supper with them to-night, to talk things over. I thought I would.”

“Suppose I tell you not to?”

Wint said wistfully: “I hope you won’t, sir, because—I’m going to.”

Chase nodded. “I suppose so,” he agreed. “Well, Wint—you’re a grown man. I shall not try to treat you—like a boy. Not again. I’m leaving it to you, Wint.”

Wint said quickly: “I’m glad.” He got up and, without either’s suggestion, they shook hands, and looked into each other’s eyes for a moment.

“All right,” said Chase. “I’ll tell your mother not to expect you for supper.”

“Try to make her understand, will you?”

His father smiled. “Your mother doesn’t always understand,” he said. “But—she loves you, Wint.”

“I know....”

He hesitated, wondering whether he should tell his father about Hetty. She had been sullen, avoiding his eyes, when she served breakfast. His father, or his mother, had a right to know.

Yet Wint could not bring himself to tell them. There would be no charity in them for the girl. And Wint had an infinite deal of tolerance for her. Give her a chance. He would not tell them. Not yet, at least. It could wait for a while.

He was conscious of a need to tell some one. Not for the sake of betraying Hetty, but to find some balm for his own soul. That sense of responsibility persisted; he could not analyze it, but he could not shake it off. A strangely haunting feeling, this.... It troubled him acutely. His thoughts dwelt on it all that day.

There was a drunken man in the Mayor’s court that morning. An old man. Wint knew him. He was that man who had embraced Wint in the office of the Weaver House, on the morning after the election. The incident seemed to have happened infinitely long ago; yet it was horribly vivid in Wint’s memory still. The man had treated him like a boon companion, a good, understanding comrade. He had assumed a fellowship between them; the fellowship of drink. The shame of it was that his assumption had been justified....

The man reminded Wint of the incident, this day in court. He was miserably sober when they brought him in, miserably sober, and trembling to be drunk again. “Don’t be hard on a fellow, your Honor,” he pleaded with Wint. “You know how it is. You remember. That day; day after you was elected. You’re a good pal, Mayor, your Honor. Don’t go to be too hard on a man.”

He had been in court before; Wint had fined him, had sent him to jail. The futility of these measures came home crushingly to Wint just now. The man was not helped by them; he was as bad as ever. Worse, perhaps. A revolt against this whole system of punishment boiled up in Wint. He said, without considering:

“All right. Try to let it alone. Get out.”

Young Foster, the city solicitor, looked surprised and pained as though Wint had insulted him. Marshal Jim Radabaugh grinned good-naturedly. The man himself crowded up to Wint’s desk with his thanks, and poured them out, and at last whispered humbly:

“You haven’t got a dime to give a man, have you, Mayor, your Honor? I’m shaking for a drink. You know how that is. Just a dime, your Honor.”

Wint gave him a quarter, and Foster said: “Well, I’ll be damned!” The man went out, calling blessings on Wint’s head. Foster demanded: “What’s the idea, anyway, Wint? He’s a common souse.”

“I’m sick of sending him to jail,” said Wint hotly. “I’m not going to do it any more. What good does it do?”

“Keeps him sober, anyway. You as good as told him to go and get drunk again.”

“Well, let him,” said Wint. “What else is there for him to do?”

“Go to work.”

“He looks fit for work, doesn’t he?”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Yes,” said Wint, “whose fault is it? Whose fault that he is what he is? Whose fault that he can buy a drink in a dry town? Whose fault is it, Foster, anyway?”

Foster laughed. “Well, what’s the answer?”

Wint leaned back in his chair, eyes down, considering. He was thinking of Hetty; he could not help it. And the end of his thinking was this. He looked at Marshal Jim Radabaugh, and said evenly:

“Mister marshal, don’t arrest any more men in Hardiston for being drunk unless they—commit other crimes.” There was a bite in the last word.

But Jim Radabaugh only grinned and said: “All right, you’re boss.”

Foster started to protest. Wint asked: “Any more cases?”

“No. But damn it all, Wint! Listen—”

“I don’t want to listen,” Wint told him. “I’m through. Court’s adjourned. Don’t—”

“You’re turning the town over to the bums,” Foster protested.

“They can’t run it any worse,” said Wint, and took his hat and departed. Foster swore. Marshal Jim Radabaugh strolled up to the Bazaar to tell V. R. Kite this interesting news.

Wint met Amos at the train, and Amos shook him by the hand and looked him in the eye and nodded with good-natured approval. “Coming home for supper?” he asked.

“Surely. I wouldn’t miss Maria’s supper.”

“You might say you wouldn’t miss us, too,” Agnes reminded him, clinging to her father’s arm. “Mightn’t he, dad?”

“Say it, Wint,” Amos suggested. “Only way to have peace in the family.”

So they let Agnes have her way, and she made the most of it. Peter Gergue came for supper, too; and Agnes sat at one end of the table, presiding over the coffee urn with a pretty assumption of the rÔle of matron. She did most of the talking. The men were too busy with Maria’s fried chicken. But afterward, when they were done, Amos and Peter and Wint went into the sitting room, and Agnes said she wasn’t going to sit and listen to them talk politics. She was going to the moving-picture show. Amos told her to run along. He and Peter shaved their plugs of tobacco, and crumbled the slices, and filled their pipes; and Wint grinned at the exactness with which Peter copied Amos’s procedure. He had filled his own pipe in more conventional fashion, from his pouch, and was smoking while they were still rubbing the sliced tobacco between their palms.

When the pipes were all going, Amos, as was his custom, sat in silence, waiting for some one else to speak first. Wint imitated him. And Gergue, who did not like silences, said at last:

“Well, Amos, you’re home.”

“Looks that way,” Amos agreed.

“Hardiston ain’t changed.”

“No, Hardiston don’t change.”

“Same old town.”

“Yeah, same old town.”

Silence settled down upon them again. Wint was thinking of Hetty. She had been in his mind all day; she and the miserable man who had faced him in the court that morning. They were somehow linked in his thoughts; linked in a fashion that accused him. Accused him, Wint Chase, of responsibility for them. He groped for understanding, trying to guess why this was so.

Amos, abruptly, looked at Peter Gergue. “Pete,” he said, “I want to talk to Wint.”

Peter got up instantly. “Why, sure, Amos,” he agreed. “I got to see some men, anyways.”

“Be in your office in the morning?” Amos asked.

“Guess likely.”

“I’ll drop in.”

Peter nodded, and Amos went with him to the door. When he came back, Wint was still sitting, nursing his pipe. Amos looked at him, sat down, looked at Wint again; and at last asked:

“We-ell, Wint, how’s tricks?”

Wint said, after a little consideration, that he guessed tricks were all right.

“Like being Mayor?”

“It’s—sobering,” Wint told him. “It’s a good deal of a job. For me.”

“Tell you,” said Amos. “Any job’s a good deal of a job; if a man takes it serious.”

Wint laughed. “Shouldn’t wonder if I took this too seriously,” he said.

“Can’t be done,” Amos reassured him. “Any man that has to look out for other men has a serious job.”

Wint said nothing to that. He was wondering if it were a part of his job to look out for Hetty, and that drunken man of the court.

“That’s what being Mayor amounts to,” Amos remarked. “Found it so, haven’t you?”

Wint stirred in his chair. “Amos,” he said, “a thing happened last night. I feel like telling you about it. Don’t need to ask you not to pass it on.”

Amos tilted his head on one side, squinting at Wint wisely. “That’s all right,” he said. “Tell on.”

The permission relieved Wint immensely; he felt as though he had been loosed from bondage. He told, in a swift rush of words, the story of Hetty. How she had come home last night. He went on, told about the man in court that day. He told Amos what had happened, what he had done, the order he had given Radabaugh.

Amos looked at him curiously. “Told Jim that, did you?”

“Yes.”

“What did Foster say?”

Wint grinned. “Said he’d be damned.”

“I reckon not,” Amos decided, after a moment’s thought. “He won’t be. He’s all right.”

“He thought I was foolish. I suppose I was.”

Amos said slowly: “Depends on why you did it, Wint. Depends on what was in your mind.”

That set Wint thinking again, trying to decide just what had been in his mind. Amos smoked steadily, not looking at Wint at all. At last he said again:

“Yes, sir, Wint. Depends what was in your mind.”

Wint assented thoughtfully. “I suppose so,” he said.

Amos tried waiting in silence for him to go on; but Wint was busy thinking; he beat Amos at his own game without knowing it. He drove Caretall to ask:

“What was in your mind, Wint?”

The boy groped for words; he flushed uneasily, as though afraid of being laughed at. “Well,” he said, “I had a fool sort of a feeling that I was to blame.”

Amos nodded slowly. “Well,” he said, “that’s what I meant—in a way—when I said you had a job that meant taking care of folks. Hetty, and that old rip—they’re folks, like any one else, like as not.”

“Yes, they are,” Wint agreed.

“Taking care of them; that’s your job, Wint. Maybe that just means fining them, and sending them to jail.”

“I tell you I won’t do that again,” Wint exclaimed. “I told you the order I gave Jim Radabaugh.”

“We-ell,” said Amos slowly. “That’s all right. Far as it goes. Might go farther.”

“Farther? How?” Wint demanded. “What can I do?”

“I hadn’t anything pa’ticular in mind,” Amos said carelessly. “Hadn’t a thing in mind.” He looked at Wint sidewise. Wint’s face was white with the intensity of his thought. Amos said slowly: “Looks like a shame to have drunk folks around in as pretty a town as Hardiston.”

“A shame?” Wint cried. “It’s damnable.”

“Guess most folks don’t like it,” Amos reminded him. “Town voted dry. Guess that shows most folks wanted it to be dry, don’t it?”

“I suppose it does,” Wint agreed. Amos looked at him; and Wint moved abruptly in his chair, and his eyes began to flame. The puzzle cleared; he began to understand. He began to understand himself, his own thoughts, his feeling that he was to blame for—Hetty. He began to understand, and his lips set. He said, half aloud: “By God, it means a fight! A hell of a fight in Hardiston.”

“Fight?” Amos asked casually, as though he were thinking of something else. “I like a fight, I’d like to see a good one.” And he added, after a moment: “I might take a hand; if it weren’t a private fight, or something.”

Wint sat forward in his chair, looked around the room. “Where’s the telephone?” he asked.

“Telephone?” said Amos. “Why, in the hall.”

Wint got up and went swiftly out into the hall. Amos listened; and he smiled, with a twinkling anticipation in his eyes. He heard Wint ask the operator to locate Jim Radabaugh and get him on the ’phone. Then Wint came back and stood in the doorway, waiting while she signaled for the marshal with the red light that was set on a pole in the heart of the town. Amos did not turn around to look at Wint. Wint did not move.

After a while, the ’phone rang twice. “That’s us,” said Amos, still without turning. “Our ring is two.”

Wint went to the ’phone. Radabaugh, at the other end, said: “This is the marshal. Who’s talking?”

“Wint. Mayor Chase.”

“Oh! All right, Mister Mayor. What’s on your mind?”

Wint said evenly: “I’ve instructions for you. If you are willing to carry them out, all right. If not, resign, and I’ll fill your place to-morrow.”

“You’re the boss,” said Radabaugh amiably. “I do what you say.”

“Either do what I say or resign,” said Wint again. “I want you to get busy and break up the liquor business in Hardiston.”

There was a long silence, and Wint heard the marshal whistle softly under his breath. Then Radabaugh asked:

“In earnest?”

“Absolutely. I want the town cleaned up. I want it bone dry. Will you take the job? Or quit?”

“Why,” said Radabaugh, “I’ll just naturally take the job. I’ve been a-wishing I had something to do.”

Wint spoke a word or two more, hung up, and came back to Amos. He sat down without speaking. After a little, Amos asked, looking at Wint sidewise:

“Going through with it?”

“Yes,” said Wint. There was more resolution in the simple word than there would have been in lengthier protestations.

“We-ell, all I can say,” Amos drawled, “is that this here is going to make an awful difference to V. R. Kite.”

It did: a difference to Kite, and to Wint’s father, and to Jack Routt; and a difference to Wint himself. A difference to Hardiston, too.

When Wint went home, at ten o’clock, the word was already humming around the town.

END OF BOOK THREE