Sixty miles southeast of the mountain drowsed the town of Jackson, sinew of the old South as surely as Adamsville was brawn of the new. Gettysburg and even Appomattox had said their words before the earliest Ross had squared the logs for the first shanty over Ross Creek, from which the iron city grew; and at that time Jackson had already counted its half century.

It lay in the crotch where the river forked. Protected by water on two sides, and by open barrens on the third, its location had attracted wandering Cherokees into building here their huts and log stockades, until guarded Tallulah became the Indian heart of the region. The persistent seeping of pioneer migration from the eastern seaboard eddied around it; the white interloper treated here with the native, coveted the prosperous red fortress, and made it his own. Its name was changed later to that of the popular hero who drove back the redcoats from the rich levees of New Orleans, and scattered before him the redskins of the palmettoed peninsula at the southeast land's end. When the young nineteenth century brought statehood, bustling Jackson became the capital. It is hard for those who remember Jackson, or Charleston, or Richmond, in the sleepy glamor of their later years, to think of these as uncouth pioneer clearings: but such was their beginning. The first town hall in Jackson was a blockhouse, and more than once the straggly strings of huts at the split of the river, which constituted the settlement, had seen marauding Indians repelled from its main street.

Political dignity transfigured the village out of its buckskin and bowie-knife existence, into a leisurely civic siesta. Governors and legislators peopled its walks; pillared mansions grew at the heads of long avenues of water oak. The hilly barrens and sedgy river-fields were combed into ordered rows of large-bladed corn and stocky cotton bushes. Slavery came early, and the slave quarters stretched behind the mansions and in the parched treeless opens. The anomalous shanties of the poor whites sprang like fungoids on outlying poor lands, and bunched near the river pier, where the fussy side-wheelers, the Tallulah and the Southern Star, churned the muddy water, eager to paddle away past swampland and sandy waste to the gulf. Idling negroes sprawled along the pier, and on the bales before gin and compress; vehement orators in the Capitol fisted their defiance to the dastardly Liberty Men coiled like vipers in the arid North. The heavy pour of the sun, and the formal courtesy of the lords of the dark soil and the dark soul, mellowed the manner of the place, shaped it into that unhealthy beauty and charm men call the Old South.

One of the earliest white settlers had been a Potomac planter, Derrell Judson. His vigorous descendants had grown up with the town, and left their touch upon the whole somnolent section. There was a disused Judson's Landing three miles up stream, and a ramshackle Judsontown on the Greenville Road to the southwest. Two of the family had been mayors of the village; there had been a wartime lieutenant-governor, and at least one congressman, with a proud host of lesser officials. None of the family had meant more to Judson eyes than a grandson of the early settler, Judge Tom Judson, whose flashing spirit had broken from his last year at college, in the troubled early spring of '61, to enter the gray cavalry. A year later, a captain now, he had hurled himself in daily desperate charges against the imperturbable Army of the Potomac, following his beloved Stonewall. At last an exploding shell carried off an arm, and with it his military usefulness to the Confederacy. When he walked weakly out of the hospital, two years later, the cause had become too hopeless for his capable direction to be of value.

With the war's end came the order, signed by his own governor, calling for emancipation. In front of the weather-etched pillars of the portico, Judge Judson lined up his slaves, and dismissed them from servile happiness into precarious freedom. Close beside him were his three sons, Derrell, Pratt, and Paul, the eldest only six; their young minds were black with tearful rage against the "damn Yankees" who were causing the exile of the loved negroes. The black faces were grimed with tears; this changed social condition seemed nothing but a calamity to the well-tended household.

Many of the slaves could not be persuaded to leave. Old Isaac, the coachman, hung onto the reins until he dropped dead at the cemetery, one broiling Decoration Day. Aunt Jane, who superintended the cooking, dared "them Bureau-ers" to meddle around her kitchen. The younger negroes gradually straggled away; but their places were filled with servants as well known to the family. The masters' attitude toward them, as might have been expected, remained almost the same as during "slavery times."

The judge built out of the empty days an enviable practice of law, and trained one son to aid him in this. The three brothers gradually took their father's place in Jackson living; and at the beginning of the last decade of the century, they were essential to the well-ordered existence of the community. The Jackson Hotel, where the present Derrell Judson had succeeded an uncle, had been the center of the town's visiting life for fifty years. The time-specked shingle, "Judson & Judson, Practitioners in All Courts of Law and Equity," still hung above a run-down office entrance, where Pratt Judson kept the firm name in use, although there had been no partner for more than fifteen years. The youngest brother, Paul, had graduated from the State University at Greenville the year of his father's death. With an initiative tendency unpromised by his blood, he determined to lead off into a new line, deciding upon real estate, through a belief in the physical expansion of the river town.

Two doors from the Judson house was the Barbour "city" place. It was during the solemn painfulness of his father's funeral that Mary Barbour first impressed herself upon the sorrowing youngest son's imagination. They had been boy and girl together; in those days they had decocted frequent mud confections with Pratt, and Jack Lamar and Cherokee Ryland. But the girl had grasped a rare chance to attend an art school in Philadelphia, just after Paul started to college; and now, after the absence, he found her grown into a new and surprising grace of person. There was a hint of shy primitive beauty in her irregular features. The hair was chestnut, and as straight as an Indian's; the eyes possessed that quality of sympathetic comprehension that spoke the mother-soul. His heart, emptied by the gap of his father's absence, needed a new object to cling to; and she was attractive, obvious, and near.

Mary Barbour had already admired Paul with an artist's aloof gaze; she saw in him a tall, black-eyed young beau, the best shot in the Jackson Grays, the invariable cotillion leader. Now she began to know him as the ardent lover as well. With characteristic determination, he elbowed all tentative rivals out of the way. The girl found herself escorted with gallant insistence everywhere by this headstrong and heartstrong wooer; dances, picnics, gossiping church suppers,—for eleven months his attendance delighted heart-coupling minds in the little town.

One cool June night he caught her hands within his, in the honey-suckled dimness of the Barbour side-porch.

"Mary, dearest, dearest,——" His assurance deserted him for a moment, his throat gulped. He clung to the relaxed fingers. "We—we've waited——" he paused lamely, then finished assertively, "It's been long enough!"

A caressing smile went with her answer. "It's not a year, Paul,—mother was engaged almost four."

"I can take care of you now," he urged with affectionate crispness. "We've had enough of this, honey. You fix the date—to-night!" His arms bound her closer.

"Paul—you hurt——"

"Then do as I say," he laughed, triumphantly passionate.

He won her answer.

The wedding helped christen the new Baptist Church. The systematic sweetness of the honeymoon included a flashed glimpse of Mammoth Cave, and a short stay at Niagara. Upon the return followed eager days and nights in which she was allowed to grow into his plans. He discussed his projects fully with her, taking her to see the houses, lots, and subdivisions from which their living was chiefly derived. She marveled at his ceaseless energy. Drive, drive, drive,—in a fading community dozing in the enervating aroma of decaying days: no wonder he succeeded so well! The business constantly broadened in importance and scope.

Mary had her plans and dreams too,—intimate visions that left small room for the old desires toward artistic success; and these she soon shared with Paul. The husband was anxious that the first baby should be a boy. He had not tired of his grinding work; but he had begun to realize that the slowly maturing schemes would inevitably open out further opportunities; business was a never ending, slowly widening game. He could, of course, confine his activities to the simple beginnings. But he realized that this could only mean that some one else would take advantage of what he had started; and he wanted to keep his fingers clamped upon the pulse of it all. The time would come when a son who could fit into his visionings would be an invaluable aid.

The days plodding toward the birth, when Mary walked, more and more alone, down the narrowing road to the ultimate taut gate of motherhood, made the warm-eyed bride even dearer to him. It seemed so unfair, this voluntary tempting of death required of the woman—there were hours when he hated himself for the summoning of the ancient curse upon woman, and would have put himself in pledge to recall the irrevocable act. The dragging schedule of pain should somehow be altered. But the thought of the tiny son on his insensate way was a consolation.

The elaborate layette, with ample contributions from friends and relatives, was threaded with tiny blue ribbons; the baby's arrival, like a human alkali on litmus-paper, changed the significant shade to pink. Eleanor, his first born, gradually claimed her father's regard; but, although Paul never referred to it, the perversion of his hopes was a tremendous disappointment.

The second girl, Susan, followed two short years later. By this time the father had pushed into the management of the Jackson Street Railway, and had seen to it that the persistent dummy duly puffed and creaked through Newtown, a cheap suburb he had plotted out around the cotton mill to the north. Absorption in this scarcely left him time to regret the second daughter; he accepted the fact as a matter of course; he did not waste regret upon a thing he could not change.

Then came Pelham, the first boy. Mary never forgot the days of packed happiness when she sang over his crinkly head, in the creaky yellow rocker that had been her mother's. They had been waiting for him so long,—the father was so boyishly happy and proud of the wrinkled pink bundle that her mother put in his arms for a precious moment, even before Mary had seen her son,—somehow making a man child seemed a big achievement. And he had been her boy from the first; the fourth baby, fat little Hollis, never touched her strung heart chords as did the earlier son.

They were indeed lovely children, Mary was fond of telling herself. But they were a constant drain upon her time and attention, and upon Paul's bank account. Sheer desire to accomplish had driven him at first; with the coming of the boys, he had to buckle down for their sakes.

The renewed vigor of his enterprise lengthened the reach of his dealings. Among the real estate men throughout the state who measured themselves against him, he found none shrewder or more alert than an Adamsville operator, old Nathaniel Guild. This man, interested in some state grants, stopped at the Jackson Hotel while the legislature was in session, and thus met Paul. The local operator felt the calculating scrutiny of the other during all of an all-day barbecue and junket taken by the law-makers at Tallulah Shoals. Evidently satisfied at last, on the ride in the elder man leaned over, and said with hesitating gravity, "You've been to Adamsville?"

"Why, yes.... Not only pleasure trips; we handle lots out Hazelton way."

Guild waved this aside. "An excrescence. Have you noticed the mountain—the one west of the city?"

"Recently I've only been there on business——"

The gray eyes narrowed and sparkled. "I'm talking business. There's land for sale there, that will quadruple in value in ten years. The development must be in that direction,—that is, for the first-class residence section. I've got a little to invest; I want some one to go in with me. What do you say?"

"I like to watch my money. I'm tied up here——"

"Come to the iron city: it needs iron men." Appraising admiration spoke in his glance. "I think you'd fit. Why, man, Jackson hasn't added a thousand people in forty years; Adamsville has fifty thousand now, to your five."

The idea startled Paul. Leave Jackson! It was one thing for Dr. Ryland to go away, or the Lamar boys, or even Judge Roscoe Little and Borden Crenshaw. They were comparative newcomers; the earliest Crenshaw dated back only sixty years. But the Judsons were a Jackson fixture: his place was here. His black eyes clouded uncertainly; at that, he might invest a little....

The other's words continued; "... chance of a lifetime. It's big!"

"When can we look it over?" A spurt of eagerness spoke in the tone.

"Come up next week.... Bring Mrs. Judson?"

"I doubt if she could make it."

"You'll come?"

"Ye-es. I may bring the eldest boy."

After dinner he told Mary of the conversation. "We couldn't pull up stakes, I'm afraid. Anyway, Pelham will enjoy the trip. How about it, son?"

"Oh, father!" The bright-eyed face was expressive enough.

Her consent was assumed, Mary noticed, as had been her husband's custom for the last few years.

He did not tell her how his mind kept recurring to the other suggestion that Guild had made. If he were ever to leave Jackson, the time had come. The state capital stood still. Adamsville, founded since the war, already crowded New Orleans as the commercial center of the gulf region. Judge Little had moved his law office there; at least a dozen prominent Jacksonians were prospering in the iron city. The iron city! He could find room to stretch his visions there!

Nathaniel Guild stayed over and made the trip with the two Judsons. It was a tiresome journey for all of them; at length, his attention worn out with the dizzying panorama of the sunset hills, the boy's head nodded forward on his hands, his eyes closed, his breathing became deep and regular.

Some time later, the father reached over and shook the sleeping boy kindly by the shoulder. "Wake up, Pelham,—Adamsville!"

The tired child straightened quickly, showering a drizzle of cooled cinders from Paul's linen duster, tucked around him. "Are we there?"

"Just about.... I'm afraid it's too dark to see the mountain. These are the furnace yards.... Watch for the coke ovens!"

Pelham needed no urging.

The train was slowing. The heavy coaches bumped over uneven places in the roadbed. There was a subdued hissing scream where wheel met track.

At first he could make out nothing through the window. The light from the smelly kerosene lamps above fell on the dull sides of freight cars; he could see only a vague darkness between them.

Abruptly the string of cars ended. Beyond a wide open space he saw sinister black buildings, grotesque, bulging with vast tanks. Above, a trellis-work of ladders ended in ungainly smokestacks that crowded the sky. Suddenly a burst of flame, a piercing tongue of reds and yellows, broke from the top of one of the wider tanks. Dense smoke and steam shot out. The whole yard was washed in a red glare.

"Charging the furnace," Paul said. He was as thrilled as his son at the sight.

Guild, in the window corner, shriveled still farther into his seat, his lined face crackling with pleasure, as he observed the boy's intense astonishment.

Pelham did not answer his father. He greedily absorbed every sharp detail of the burning picture. The metallic buildings seemed made of flame. The occasional windows just passed flickered redly,—as if the night, within and without, were on fire. The light dimmed, burned brightly for a moment, then startlingly went out. The vacant night was blacker than ever.

Dim thoughts struggled within the mind of the child,—clouded fancies of the mouth of hell, the pit of eternal burning and damnation.

Then, as the train ground to a standstill, again the night flared brilliantly. The tracks glowed like pulsing, living gold. Just beyond the third pair, and parallel to them, ran a long mound, hardly higher than the train. Every few feet leaping fire twisted up from it. The smell of the smoke stung his nostrils.

A man with a lantern ran shouting past the window, and disappeared; his face was coal-smeared, red, horrible, in the sudden glow. The boy shuddered. There were black figures standing around the fire holes. Three or four were dumping a squat-bellied car into one of them. The waiting train was stiflingly warm. It must be frightfully hot above the fire! Those devils there emptying cargoes of lost souls into the brimstone pits,—surely they could not be men!

"Coke ovens," explained the father.

Pelham pressed his nose more tightly to the pane.

The other man drew out his bulky wallet, and was lost in the intricacies of some creased maps. Paul Judson pointed here, there, upon their surfaces, arguing vehemently. The boy paid no attention to any of it.

This was his first sight of the iron city. He never forgot it....

The mountain, when they reached it the next morning, was marvelously different. The steam dummy passed the last house, and the negro shacks sprawling beyond, and began to puff and cough up the steep slope.

It was May, and the boy's dreamy fancies were caught and tangled in the green vistas that endlessly opened and closed on both sides of the track. Below the fill on the town side a succession of heavy-fruited blackberry bushes ran close to the tracks. The broad leaves and waxen flowers of the May-apple carpeted unexpected clearings. A shapeless negress, four babies clutching her skirts, balanced her heavy basket on her head, and blinked stolidly at them.

At last they struck the level gap road, and the end of the dummy line just beyond.

Pelham gathered wild flowers, as they climbed up to the northern crest of the gap. They were for his mother, if they could be induced to last until night. On the top overlooking the wide valley he found a convenient rise of rock steps, shaped out of the solid iron ore; while his father and Mr. Guild talked and pointed, he sat down, fanning himself with his sailor....

The men strolled back, Paul's face flushed. He gestured impetuously from the elevation to the citied valley below. "A magnificent chance, Nathaniel. Your mountain grips me."

"It'll take a long time, remember. Don't go off half-cocked."

"The thing's here before my eyes!"

"Adamsville won't really touch the mountain for ten years. It's good ... fine residence property, but.... That's the Crenshaw land, just beyond. They have four eighties; they run all the way to this road." The heads bent over the map again.

"We've simply got to take it all," Paul reiterated.

Guild's familiar cautions and objections came forth again. "Not that I wouldn't like to, but...."

"That's all you can see in it, then?" Paul asked finally.

"Frankly, it's all I can put in anything now."

"I'm going into it hard. How will this do? We'll take half of this eighty together, and the nearest Crenshaw one. I'll buy the rest of this and the Crenshaw land, and the Logan place on the south.... I can raise it somehow. Pratt will help me.... It will be first mortgage."

With this settled, they circled down to the gap, and back by dummy to the Great Southern Hotel.

On the way down to the dummy station, Paul picked a dogwood blossom. It was still fresh in his lapel when he and his son arrived at the pillared home in Jackson.

Pelham's flowers of the morning had withered; his moist clenched fingers had reluctantly abandoned most of them on the seat of the tardy Dixie Flier. But the limp remains in his grimy handkerchief he carried into his mother's room, and left on her dresser.

The boy was asleep when she found them. After pausing above a half-emptied scuttle, she arranged them in a small green vase, and replaced them in the bedroom. All night their quiet odor upset the ordered room with a word of wilder life.

---

III

Paul Judson came back from that trip on fire with the mountain. On the creased blue-print he traced for Mary the outlines of the sections and quarter-sections, wooing her interest, a thing he had long ceased to do. His pencil shaded the curving paths to the crest, and aimlessly roughed in a design for a house; this he eyed from several angles. "Guild agrees that this would be the best location for a home."

Her mind pieced out the half-uttered wish. "Not for us, Paul!"

"Mm ... maybe."

"But—to leave Jackson!"

He grew argumentative, with an expansive selflessness. "It's only fair to the children to give them the wider chance. There are nice people in Adamsville ... big people."

Her every objection was met by an urgent answer; she resigned herself at last to his insistent determination. Sometimes, lately, she had felt a little afraid of this masterful husband, the incarnation of courtesy away from home, the slave-driver with his family. His father had been the same type, as Paul had once reminded her. It stirred in his blood; Derrell and Pratt, the older brothers, had ordered him around, as a boy, as dictatorially as if he were a negro; he, in turn, had bossed the neighboring children, and the servants. "Bred in the bone," Mary had once said to her mother. "He can cover it; he can't change it."

On occasion, he was considerate and tender; but if there was work to be done, he attacked it with impetuous ferocity. Negroes, children, even his wife, became tools to be picked up, used, and laid down as quickly. In her heart Mary resented the attitude, even while defending it to her family.

It was in this mood that he plunged at the acquisition of the mountain lands, and the planning of the new house. Mary found little of the chummy spirit that had warmed the first few married years; instead, the hold that the hill had taken upon his imagination intensified his usual dominance. Adamsville, the mountain, called him. He had a recurring, varying vision of the iron city brought to the feet of the mountain; of country estates climbing up to his crest home, overlooking the whole city, the state, the South. He saw himself filling coveted public offices.... The shifting details spurred his determination. With the mountain his, he could do anything, be anything.... He gave slack rein to these fancies; for he knew that man spent more hours upon these preparatory visions, desire-spun solitaire conversations and imaginary victories, than upon any other activity: even sleep was filled with a continuation of the day's longings, altered but unmistakable. He would differ from the usual man in that he would drive or bend to completion these airy plannings.

His secret dreams he shared with no one. Mary may have suspected their existence, from his silent spells of brow-knitted thought, but he denied her the confidence her cordial sympathy had hoped for. His desire blueprinted the future unassisted.

At times he sought to weigh this push that quickened his nature. He began to think of himself as one of the iron men out of whom the New South was being forged, painfully but surely. He was a Judson in all of it; but he possessed, more than the rest, a driving ambition too strong to be satisfied with the unfruitful life of a Southern aristocrat. Changing conditions were rapidly eliminating this impossible and antiquated incongruity. He was more than a Judson. His nature reacted away from the typical Southern vices, which neither of his brothers had escaped. He was continent, even in drinking. The endless object lesson that had been given him by his crotchetty old father, who toward the last drank himself into a daily querulousness, was not lost on the son. Paul rarely took even a toddy; and the clear mind that this gave should be of value in whatever harsh, lean years might follow.

All of his energy went toward the mountain. It was Mary whose embroidering fancy christened the new home "Hillcrest Cottage," on her one visit to the place, just before the completion of the interior. Beyond this, she found her counsel unheeded in the designing, even in the complicated arrangements for the moving.

What a time is moving! A self-willed chaos to familiar routines and associations, an involuntary revisiting of dead hours and buried sensations. It brings an endless plowing up of forgotten once-hallowed trifles, which the fond heart would fain reject, but can not; it is a rooted and ample world fitted into packing cases, hustled and baled into temporary death. The old life was and is not, the new life is still to begin. It warns of the shaky foundations beneath rooted habitudes; and at the same time calls forth adventure and daring in the soul of man.

Such thoughts thronged Paul Judson's mind, in disjointed sequence, as his busy steps took him through the large littered rooms of the family mansion. He wore his old garden shoes, stained by grass and lime, scuffed by cinders: a pair of carefully patched brown woolen trousers, the lower half of a once prized suit; and a blue-figured shirt, turned to a V at the neck, with a green paint blotch on one side which strenuous laundryings had not been able to efface. A wall mirror gave him a passing reflection of himself; he smiled as he pictured what would have been his father's horror at such ungentlemanly garb. Boxes of books, ropes for the extra trunks, piles of straw for the china—all these must be arranged under his eyes. He packed the fragile Haviland and the shaped fish set, used only on unusual occasions, with his own hands. He knew negroes; you couldn't trust them with a thing.

He looked irritably under lumped old quilts, piles of table linen, and cloth-shielded pictures. "Mary!" he demanded, sharply.

"Yes, dear?" She dropped what she had been doing at once.

A free hand gestured nervously. "The hammer—I had it just a moment ago."

An experienced gaze interrogated the room. It was the ninth call for that hammer since breakfast had been cleared away.

Just beyond the door an empty packing-case gaped. She put her hand on the missing implement, cached within it.

The troubled line left his forehead. "We'll take the pictures next," he said curtly, bending again to his task.

Mary Judson stood watching his efficient activity. She had stayed unnoticed at his elbow nearly all the morning, to anticipate these calls. He continued hammering energetically, unconscious of her observation.

He straightened his still youthful shoulders a moment, to lift a stack of heavy books from the mantel. Paul Judson, as she loved best to remember him, furnished the food for her musings; they dwelt in haphazard inconsecutiveness upon his erect figure at the head of the Decoration Day line of his company, upon his ardent face bending over tiny Pelham's crib, upon his wry expression yesterday while she bandaged a cut wrist; then to the alien admiration her kindly brother felt for the husband's driving vitality.

"Mary, did you get those quilts to cover the piano?" His crisp query broke into her thoughts.

With a start, "On the cherry table, dear."

A contented mumble reached her; evidently the mislaid coverings had been found.

She stirred herself, and called the girls, Eleanor and Sue. "Will you bring father the pile of pictures on my dresser, children?"

They skipped quietly up the stairs.

In a few moments they chattered back through the dining-room, where Mary was adjusting the linen into a cedar chest. Sue stumbled over a corner of the carpet; several unframed photographs slipped out of her arms. Her father looked up impatiently. She recovered them in a moment, and spread them on the bare table.

"Mother, this is me, isn't it? 'N' this is Pelham, 'n' the baby picture is Hollis—isn't it, mother? Nell says it's Pell too."

"That's Hollis, children. Hurry: your father is waiting; he's ready to pack them."

The girls reluctantly went on, arguing over the identity of a befrizzed, balloon-sleeved aunt.

She heard her eldest son in the kitchen now, asking Aunt Sarah if she too were going to the new home. Sarah had been her mammy, and had taken care of all four of the children.

The rich black voice laughed hugely at the question. "Is I gwine? Is Aunt Sarah gwine? Is you gwine! Better ask yer maw if she gwineter take you. Whar Mis' Mary Barbour goes, I goes!"

Pelham persisted, "But Aunt Jane isn't goin'."

Precise Sue took him up at once. "Of course she isn't. Aunt Jane's very, very old, Pell. She's 'mos' a hunderd. Aren't you, Aunt Jane?"

The aged cook snorted contemptuously. "What I is, I is, Miss Susie. I'se gwine ter yer Uncle Derrell's, I is."

The children gazed open-eyed. "Are you goin' to cook for him 'n' Aunt Eloise?" asked Pelham.

"Sho' I is, honey! Dey gotter have mah cookin', Mister Derrell he says."

The noise of the creaking wagons drawn up at the side door claimed the children's attention. They ran out to watch the first loading, hoping to be allowed to help.

Paul followed briskly, thoroughly at home as an executive, issuing his orders with precision. His active mind ranged even at this absorbing moment. Well, he was leaving a slate wiped clean! All of the Jackson investments had turned out finely; he has sold the real estate to advantage, so as to cover a large part of the mountain purchase money. The street railway stock he was still carrying; its regular income furnished a safe fund to fall back upon.

After the last load had been urged away, he walked with Mary through the echoing emptiness.

"We've been happy here, Paul," she observed quietly.

"Mm ... yes. Did that box of books in the spare room go with the last load?"

He hurried up to make sure.

Mary saw the children into their heavy wraps—it was unusually chilly for a Jackson October—and young Ike drove them down to the Great Southern station in the old carriage. It had been sold to Shanley's Livery Stable—it would hardly be the thing in Adamsville; but the wife had had her way for once more, due to Paul's expansive satisfaction at the smooth-running plans, and they were to make their last trip as citizens of Jackson in the accustomed conveyance.

When they became settled in the train, Pelham retold to the sisters the story of his trip to the mountain. They had never seen it, and his colorful narrative fascinated. Mary listened attentively, adding an occasional touch.

Paul went forward into the smoking car. The Dixie Flier was a political exchange for the state, just before the legislature met. There was always some one to listen, though usually unconvinced, to his insistence on the future prosperity of this dormant section. Mary heard his nervous, energetic laugh sound out, when the train stopped at some crossroads station to pick up a giggling group of ginghamed farm-girls and stooped country elders.

The children were quiet now. Across the aisle the baby lay with his head in Nell's lap; Sue was stretched out on the seat facing them, flushed cheek pillowed on cindery hand, brown eyes closed. Pell sat beside his mother, his dreamy face pressed against the smudged car pane, watching the flickering landscape sway by.

They were beautiful ... her children. But the cost to her ambitions had been heavy. Her vague dreams of a career, cherished while she was at art school, had been shoved far into the future. She realized, with a sigh, that she could never overtake them. Perhaps some one of the children,—perhaps the little son at her side,—would show the same talent; in him she might realize her own hid longings.

It hurt her to leave the quiet home town she had always known and loved, for the restless, youthful city, big with the future. It was the second time that she had felt wholly uprooted from her former life. Home days with Paul and his urging aggressiveness were vastly different from the placid, considerate atmosphere of the old Barbour plantation. There, a sharp word had been unknown. Her kindly, courtly father, the sweet quiet mother, the gay-hearted brothers and sisters,—there was an unbridgeable chasm between these and the push of her married life.

And now again a change....

Paul had a grasp of things, a will to shove his way over all obstacles, a single-ideaed vision of a high goal, that, she believed, could not fail to win for him the success that he sought. She sometimes wondered if the gentler bringing-up that had been hers would not have been better for the children. But that could not happen. They, she, were to be a part of the swell, the hurried, assertive course of Adamsville. She was glad she would be there to guard her little ones: they would need all she could do.

A long whistle woke her from her reverie. She looked out; the dusk had softened the countryside until it was a dull blur, shot with irregular streaky lights.

Her husband shouldered briskly back from the smoking car. "This is Hazelton, Mary," he said eagerly. "Adamsville next!"

---

IV

The Judsons blended easily into the life on the mountain.

Paul took it upon himself to plan and arrange all the details of the new home. Mary found her wishes unconsulted, when furniture was to be placed or purchased.

Much of the furnishings of the Jackson house he used in the new "Hillcrest Cottage." The dining-room suite, with its stately, ornate sideboard and carved chairs, was rearranged in the bay-windowed corner room, overlooking the long vista of Bragg Valley. The diners looked out on the pigmy furnace smokestacks punctuating the dun smoke-mist. The children's rooms, the three chief bedrooms, and the living-room furniture remained unaltered.

Upon the other things, Paul put down his foot. The library set, its antique bookcases and desks curling up toward the ceiling, must be relegated to the attic. The mahogany and bird's-eye maple suite, which had furnished the spare bedroom, must accompany it. The family portraits, the china heirlooms, and the odd judge's musty home library, in the same crates in which they had come from Jackson, were pushed into the odd-shaped angles of the twilight garret. These had no place in the elaborate simplicity of a country home.

The study and library were fitted up afresh in dull quartered oak, with sectional bookcases. New porch chairs and lounges for the wide verandas, Persian rugs for the rooms where the old carpets would not suffice, he listed, viewed, and finally purchased. Mary's heart ached these days as she realized how she had been pushed out of his living.

The phone rang one afternoon. "I'm sending out a rug for the library, Mary. Abramson's promised to get it there before five."

"Did you look at the one at Hooper's I told you about?"

"We'll talk about that when I get home." He rang off sharply.

Mary had it spread out before he arrived. It was a beauty, she thought ruefully; but it must have cost a mint. And it didn't go too well with the new bookcases and desk.

Paul reached home a little early, tired and cross from a big deal that had hung fire for ten days. "Well, how do you like it?"

"It's a lovely piece of goods. How much was it? The tag was off."

He walked in to observe it, altering its angle slightly. "It's just what we wanted. I think we'll have another for the parlor, too." He ignored her anxious eyes, and she did not press the question.

On Sundays Nathaniel Guild usually dropped in, for a stroll over the place, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee at seven.

There was so much they must plan together; this could be done only on the ground. Paul, of course, was living on the mountain, and his share in the land was much the larger; but both were interested in the projected development, the wide boulevards curving with the contour of the ground, the advantageous grouping of sites naturally adapted to sloping lawns and well-placed residences.

"You see, Nate, every shrub I set out, every walk we put in, every flight of steps, will increase the value, when we put it on the market."

"Waiting a few years,——"

"Now's the time to begin. Adamsville is spreading fast; it's course is bound to be this way. East Highlands is the residence section now——"

"I see Mrs. Friedman's building on Haviland Avenue——"

"And three new houses to go up on East Thirtieth!"

"... It'll take a lot of money." His eyes roamed reflectively over the gray, jagged outcrop, almost concealed by a tangle of grape and blackberry vines and rangy sumach bushes.

Paul tugged vindictively at a nettle that had encroached upon the path winding up to the house,—he carried his garden gloves for just such purposes. "It'll be cleared before next summer,—all this half of it."

On weekday mornings the master of the mountain was up earlier, hoeing the flower beds that frilled the verandas, and seeing to the setting out of trees and vines. After seven o'clock, he superintended the gangs of negro laborers who were filling and grading the gap road, and the extensions that bent down to the railroad spur on the west.

At times, that first winter, there were more than forty workmen remolding the mountain's resisting face. Quartz blasted from the quarry above the tracks, on the Logan land, made a permanent roadbed. The winter's settling would have it ready for the final surface of dirt after the spring rains. The negroes worked for a dollar a day; and Paul often observed disgustedly, after inspection of the day's work, that four-fifths of the job had been done before eight-thirty, when he left for the office in the city.

Pelham, just beyond his ninth birthday, found his spare time provided for. He spent his afternoons and Saturdays assisting in the overseeing of the grading. His father believed in getting him to work young. The mountain would be his some day,—his and his brother's and sisters',—it was none too soon to begin now to learn its problems.

When not at school, he was started in, before six o'clock, at weed-picking. Nell and Sue, and even the baby, could help here, when the work was near the house. In order to give a material incentive, the children were paid one cent a bucket for the weeds. Their earnings were banked with their mother, who kept the accounts in a little red book, an object of especial reverence to the involuntary depositors.

Pelham was especially sharp at locating the big weeds, their roots matted with moist earth, and spreading fan-like over the rocks never far below the surface. Five or six of these, and his bucket was full. Then he would lie on his back, dreaming, his body registering, through the blue cotton pants and thin shirt, each rock and hump on the ground. He followed the clouds sailing, like misty Argoes, over the placid blue sea of sky; he watched the crimson-capped woodpeckers tapping industriously at a nearby oak or hickory trunk, or the bouncing flight of flickers from clump to clump of bluegum and white-gum, or the distant descending spirals of a lazy buzzard, answering some noisome summons to a hidden and hideous feast.

"How you gettin' 'long, Pell? My second bucket's full, an' Susie's almost finished."

He would reluctantly carry his weeds to the pile, and go back to the work and his dreaming.

He was a problem to his energetic father. He would start industriously enough, but the day's toll always fell far below what was expected. The parents had many conferences over him.

"I don't know what to make of the boy, Mary. I never used to loaf like Pelham does. He's as bad as a nigger."

"He's only a boy, Paul."

"He's got to learn to work."

The mother sighed.

The son received ten cents a week for keeping the bedrooms supplied with coal. Several nights he had been routed out of bed, and made to stumble down to the coalhouse, while his father impatiently held the lantern, to do the neglected task. He was perpetually losing things. Hammers, saws, dewed in the morning grass, a saddle that he had forgotten to hang up,—these would furnish damning indictments of his carefulness.

To teach him responsibility, the three newly-purchased crates of Leghorns were put in his charge. Many a time a dried water-trough or a suspiciously pecked-up chicken-run, its last grain of corn consumed, brought him into trouble. Perhaps he had spent the afternoon whittling a dagger, or carefully cleaning an old horse-skull discovered under the green valley pines. He was very proud at the idea of possessing the chickens, and grew fond of them; but remembering to attend to them was a very different matter.

"I don't never have any time for myself, mother," he would complain, after a scene with Paul. "The Highland boys don't have to work all the time."

"Your father is very busy, Pell; if you don't help him, who will?"

Continued repetition of these negligences caused tingling reminders to be applied to the boy. Paul hated to whip his son; he almost despised himself for causing suffering to a smaller human; but what was he to do? Pelham grew familiar with the feel of his father's belt; and still did not, or could not, change his ways.

He could hardly remember when there had not been some friction between them. Consciously and unconsciously he patterned himself after his father in many things. Paul was jolly and companionable, whenever he wished to be; he was an unusually clean representative of a class that prided itself upon its chivalry and courage. These traits the boy followed.

Then, too, his father had shown him inordinate attention, as the first son, ever since his birth. This masculine approval, added to the adulation of adoring women relatives, exalted his already high opinion of himself, made him selfishly demand more than his share.

His mother's love, for instance,—there were times when he wanted to feel he had all of it. When his father was off on business trips, he became, young as he was, the head of the house. It fretted him to be reduced again to a humble subordinate position.

He could sleep in Mary's room, when Paul was away; this privilege he lost on the return. He hardly realized how this tinged his thoughts with dislike of the father. The parents had a vast, almost a godlike, part in his life,—as in the lives of all children. Whatever daily good or ill he received, came primarily from them; his own efforts counted only as they pleased or displeased the deities. What he did not receive, he blamed upon his father; and he often dwelt upon the happy home life should Paul die, or disappear. He could earn a living for mother, and make a loving home for her....

These things created an unseen and growing breach between the two.

When he first came to Adamsville, Paul had had to go out and make business for himself. He had allied himself to James Snell, a fidgety, pushing real estate operator who was familiar with the newcomer's success in Jackson. "The Snell-Judson Real Estate and Development Company" came into existence; Paul joined the Commercial Club, the Country Club, and met here as many people as he could. Before the winter was over, he found his hands full. Perpetual application to the complications of real estate problems throughout the county was wearing; which made him less liable than ever to put up with Pelham's shortcomings. As the spring grew on, and the matter did not mend, he called his son into his room early one morning. "You left the cow-gate unlatched last night, Pelham."

The boy sensed the gravity of his father's tone, and grew at once apprehensive. "I thought I shut it, father——"

"Peter had to spend an hour looking for them, this morning. This is the second time in a week."

The boy became voluble. "The other time, father, you know I told you——"

"Yes, you told me. You're always telling me. Did you take that scythe down to be sharpened yesterday?"

"I meant to—I'll take it this afternoon, sure."

"You'll take it before you go to school this morning."

"Father,—if I'm tardy,——"

"You can explain to Professor Gloster you made yourself late."

The boy's lip pouted; a whimper trembled behind it.

"Twice this week you've failed to hoe the spring garden. Do you know who watered your chickens last night?"

Pelham was silent. The list was growing too large to explain away, apt as he had become in excuses.

"I had a talk with your mother yesterday." The father sat on the edge of his bed, his eyes down, thumping a yard-stick against his left thumb.

So it was going to be the yard-stick! That wouldn't hurt,—not like the belt, or a hickory switch, anyway. Pelham began to frame his voice for the proper mingling of crying and entreaty. The more you seemed to be hurt, the less you got. Only, you had to take the first two or three quietly, or father would see through you.

The elder walked over to the bureau, and placed the measure beside the rose-shears and the spraying can. No, it was not going to be the yard-stick. The boy looked furtively around; there was no other weapon in sight.

Paul continued, "Your conduct bothers your mother as much as it does me. We don't know what to do with you. You're almost ten now ... old enough to be trusted. You know you can't be. Your mother thinks I ought to give you another chance. I promised her I would." His tones grew crisper, more biting. "I know what's the matter with you. You're dog mean. You think you can impose on me. I know it. And I'll have no more of this slovenly work-dodging around my place."

He had worked himself into a rage, by this time; but his tones were icily cold and correct. "This confounded laziness has got to stop. It's your job to stop it, do you hear? And if you don't do it within a week,—you know I mean what I say,—I'll thrash you every morning, until you do!"

He rose menacingly. Pelham shrank from him.

"I'm not going to touch you,—this morning. I promised your mother I wouldn't. But this is a last warning."

For the first few days, the son's conduct was unimpeachable. He attended strictly to his duties, and accomplished all of them passably. But one afternoon, he stopped at the foot of the hill to play ball with the East Highland boys, and entirely forgot to leave an order for linseed oil and chicken-feed at the food store near the livery stable. When Saturday came, he worked irritably around the tomato plants until eleven o'clock. Then he sneaked off to Shadow Creek with some boys from the Gloster School. He was back by four, and tried desperately to finish his tasks by nightfall; but several were forgotten entirely. When no punishment followed, he grew careless again.

Paul was detained at the office Monday night. Just before eleven, the telephone's tinkle aroused Mary. "Coming right away, dear."

With a start she wondered if Pelham's tasks had been performed. She made the rounds. Not a thing done! Skuttles empty, water-trough unfilled, and the hungry chickens pecking desperately among the hard pebbles in the run, after her light had aroused them. There would be time for her to do them, if she hurried....

She had hardly finished washing coal-grime and cracked cornmeal from her hands, when Paul's call sounded in front.

Through the opened front door came his faint voice. "Come down to the steps, Mary." She caught up the lantern, and picked her way down to him.

"I told that boy to oil these hinges, sure, this afternoon. And look at that pile of trash,—he hardly touched it. Here's the shovel. He hasn't done a single chore since I left the mountain."

Mary lighted the way back to the house, thoroughly upset.

Two mornings later, Paul called the boy. "Come into my room, Pelham." The boy followed, a sick feeling at his stomach.

His father twisted a hand within Pelham's shirt-collar, and snapped off his own belt. The loose end of the belt danced and stung against the boy's bare legs. His father's words came to him brokenly and explosively. "Pay no attention to what I say.... Your confounded negligence.... Continually soldiering on me. You're mean as gar-broth."

By this, Pell gave way entirely. The agonizing pain burnt his bare calves, and radiated up his legs. He punctuated the blows with sobbing explanations, and promises never to let it happen again. At the intensity of the pain, he tried to intercept the blows with his hands. Half of the time the lashings left red welts on his wrists and arms, and one stroke caught a little finger, twisting it back until he was sure it was broken.

"I'll teach you to impose on your father.... You won't obey me, will you?..."

At last it was over, and Pelham crumpled, sobbing and shuddering, against the footboard of the bed.

"Go down to the chicken-house, and attend to your work," his father ordered him. Paul Judson, torn with anger and self-disgust, turned back to the boy. "I'm going to thrash you every morning for a month. Maybe that will do you some good."

After a few minutes, gulping down the stinging memories and black bitterness against what he felt was rank injustice, Pelham limped out to his duties. As he watered the hens, and scattered cracked corn before the fuzzy yellow balls scratching around them, waves of self-pity flooded him. He wept into the chicken-trough and into his handkerchief, until it was a damp salt-smelly wad.

Morning after morning this kept up. Now it was in his own room, his father's, the stable, or by the spring duck-houses; now a slipper, a shingle, the hated belt, or a freshly cut withe. Once it was the stable broom, which broke over his back at the second stroke,—that morning the whipping ended abruptly. He wept, pleaded, excused himself, begged to have another chance; nothing could shake the stern will of his father, and the merciless schedule of pain.

Mary tried to keep busy at some place where she could not hear his cries. But they pursued her from room to room.

Pelham wore his stockings to school,—they hid the old bruises, and the fresh welts. Night after night he cried himself to sleep. And the mother, stealing in to see the children safely in bed, would feel all the agony seared on her heart, at the sight of the tear-channeled boyish cheeks. She worried and brooded over the favorite son, until bluish depressions pouched beneath her eyes, and a hard look came into them as they followed her husband around his home tasks. He, in turn, became boisterously loud-spoken, and made a vast amount of noise stamping on the halls and porches. It was a gruesome three weeks for all.

At the end of this period, Pelham could stand it no longer. He kissed his mother good night, clinging around her neck and pressing passionate kisses upon her lips,—it would be the last time he would ever receive this parting kiss, he told himself. Then he knotted up, in an old sweater, his clean shirts and a change of underclothes, three handkerchiefs, his stamp album, and "Grimm's Fairy Stories," and hid them under the bed. To-morrow he would leave home forever.

While his mother was seeing to the breakfast table, he slipped into her room, his eyes still red from the morning's session with his father. He unlocked her drawer, and took out of her purse the three one dollar bills he found. On the red book, he knew, he was entitled to more than eight dollars, but this would do. He slipped in a note he had written the night before, and hid the bulging sweater in a rock beside the front path.

Walking to school with Nell, he pledged her to silence and then told her he was going to run away that afternoon.

"That's wicked, Pell." Her wide eyes were horror-filled.

"Would you let them whip you every day of your life?" He turned on her fiercely.

"Where are you going?"

"To Jackson, or Columbus, or somewhere,—anything to get away from here. You'll look after my little chickies, won't you, sister?"

She promised.

The girls were dismissed for lunch at twelve, and as Pelham had only half an hour, their mother usually met them at the big gate, and walked back to the house with them. Nell waited till Sue had run ahead, then betrayed the morning's confidence with maternal conscientiousness.

Mary went at once to her drawer,—she guessed how Pelham had gotten funds. She put on her hat and hurried in to the office, carrying with her the boy's note.

Her lips were set, and her voice difficult to control, when she faced her husband across the bevelled glass that covered his desk. "Read this, Paul," handing him the crumpled message.

It was written painstakingly in the boy's unformed upright script, a youthful imitation of his father's distinctive hand:

"Dearest mother:—

I can not stand any moar whipings. Hollis can have my things wen he growes up. I will come back as soon as father is ded.

Affexionately your son,
Pelham Judson."

Before he had time to comment, the mother spoke. "You know I advised against this—this brutal, cold-blooded punishment of my son. This is what has come of it."

"Where is he?——"

She bit her lip to keep from crying. "He's gone; he may be dead, for all I know. He told Nell he might go to Jackson...."

"I'll go down to the station. He can't leave before the 4:17."

"Promise me you won't whip the baby any more...." Her voice shook, in spite of herself. "I'll go with you."

He shook his head. "I'll study it out.... I'd better go alone."

At the far end of the waiting-room,—it lacked half an hour to train-time,—he saw at once the slight figure. Pelham had invested in a bag of bananas, and was disconsolately eating the second. As he saw his father's figure approaching, he wilted weakly back in the seat.

"Going away, Pelham?"

"Yes, sir."

He was surprised at the lack of interest in his father's voice.

The older man sat down beside him, and spoke carefully. "As soon as you want to leave home, Pelham, you may. If you're going to Jackson, or anywhere else, father'll be glad to write on and see that you get a job of some kind. But you are pretty small to be starting out now."

The boy choked a wordless assent.

"I think you'd better come home to-night, and think over the matter. If you want to go to-morrow, I'll be glad to help."

Pelham rose obediently, clutching the draggled bundle, and slipped a confiding hand into his father's. Nothing was said about the whippings; they ceased.

---

When summer came, Pelham spent his vacation at Grandfather Barbour's home. He made the journey alone, in the conductor's care.

Joyfully he hopped out at the station, and drove up the leisurely oak avenue to the big house. He had his own cool little room again, fragrant with the honeysuckle blossoms beneath the window, and the scent of peach blossoms from the near end of the orchard.

Every summer that he could remember, he had spent with these adored grandparents. Edward Barbour and his young wife had come to Jackson two decades after the first Judson. At first their home had been only a large bedroom and dining-room. Then a porch had been added, and two more rooms to the south, where the orchard began now. The first pantry had been the piano box, connected by a shed to the kitchen and back porch. The north wing had followed, and the upstairs,—until now the sectional house fitted so well into the trees and vines, that it seemed to have sprouted and grown as easily and naturally as they.

His cousins, Alfred, his own age, and Lil, a year younger, came up every day while he stayed here; Uncle Jimmy's house was visible beyond the last pear tree, down nearer the Greenville Road.

There were strawberries in the garden, big luscious fruit soppy with the dew and gleaming like scarlet Easter eggs in the damp leaves.

He learned to help old Dick harness up the buggy, or watched 'Liza spurt the warm creamy milk pattering into the wide-mouthed pails.

After breakfast, Grandma let him trowel in the pansy or salvia beds,—her flowers were the talk of the neighbors,—and she gave him a little bed of his own, where portulacca, larkspur, sticky petunias, star-flowered cypress vines, and rose-geranium and heliotrope slips formed a crowded kaleidoscope of shape and color.

There were other occupations for restless mind and fingers. His father might have laughed at his sewing, and openly despised him for it. But Grandmother took time from her embroidery to teach him the briar-stitch and cat-stitch, and the quick decoration of the chain. His mother kissed the grimed, badly embroidered pansy and wild-rose squares that were folded into his occasional happy notes.

On rainy days the children played indoors. Spools,—was there ever such a house for spools! Grandmother had been saving them since the war. Endless cigar boxes rattled with spools of all sizes, big red linen thread ones, handy middle-sized ones, baby silk-twist bobbins. These were emptied upon the sitting-room floor: houses, trains, forts, whole cities flourished in the narrow boundaries of the rag carpet. Grandfather kept crayons, scissors, and a store of old Scribners' and Harpers', which were his without pleading. And parchesi boards, and backgammon—the place was a paradise to the boy.

He delighted in long rambles with his grandfather. The old gentleman, after the war, had combined managing his small farm with running the main village store in Jackson. He had long given up the latter; his simple, honest Christian methods of dealing with his neighbors had been supplanted by more up-to-date ethics, although the store's old name was preserved.

The two visited the corn and cotton fields behind the house, the level swards of the pebbly river, the solemn privetted walks throughout the cemetery. Here generations of dead Jacksonians restfully scattered into the prolific, dusty mother that gave them birth.

Pelham learned much on these walks,—the birds, trees, stories of dead heroes, episodes of the war, and the stirring times when the raiders had overrun the village. Grandmother had hidden two brothers, one wounded, for weeks in her cellar, all unknown to the Northern visitors who forced themselves upon her. The boy absorbed indiscriminately the accumulated store of eighty years of active life.

After supper, the sweet-faced grandmother would slip a knitted wrap over his shoulders, and walk out with him in the great oak-surrounded square before the house. She taught Pelham how to find the North Star, from the bottom of the Big Dipper; and then the Little Dipper, that had been twisted back until the Milky Way spilled from it. He learned to recognize the big Dragon waddling across the summer heavens, and many of the dwellers in the strange skyey menagerie. These were days and nights of wonder and beauty.

He longed to stay here forever, away from the acidity of his father's commands, and the ever-present fear of the belt. But as the autumn came, he wept his farewells and went back.

Until his return from that first absence at Jackson, he did not realize how the mountain had claimed him. He maintained a mild, glowing regard for the grandparents' plantation; it was free from the irksome paternal irritations that scarred his home days. But its appeal did not go down to the deepest parts of him.

With the mountain it was different. Not merely Hillcrest Cottage, although he felt bound to every board and stone of it; not even merely the Forty Acres, the family name for the fenced, pathed, and parked half of the original eighty on which the house stood; but the whole mountain, its rises and unexpected hollows, and the thicketed valleys that drooped sharply away toward the East,—he responded to all of these. The rest of the Judsons had taken the cottage and the Forty as their home. But this was only a small part of home to the eldest son.

The mountain became his castle, his playground, his haven of refuge, the land of his fancy. He was its child, and it was his mother.

He got along better with his father that winter. Diligent application to his school work and his tasks at home was the price of liberty on the mountain. Two weekday afternoons, and Sunday after midday dinner, were allowed him. He filled every minute of these respites.

The little Barbour cousins spent Thanksgiving week with the children. Pelham showed them all the treasured spots on the mountain. To them, even the walk up the hill was an adventure, as they explored the long sloping dummyline road, through stiff palisades of golden rod and Flora's paint-brush, the stalks silver-dusty from the nipping November winds, and ready to scatter at the tentative poking of a rotting stick, or the breath of a skimmed stone.

One wonderful picnic they had to Shadow Creek, before the relatives returned home. All drove over in a wagon to the deserted mill dam, Aunt Sarah, grumbling her good-humored threats to return to Jackson and leave "dis mountain foolishness," riding along to mind the children. Jimmy learned the first few swimming strokes in the cool, brownish pond; Pelham and the older girls had long been going in regularly with their father, and were fast becoming expert.

A baby came in April,—another boy, named Edward after Mary's father. This kept the mother from joining their rambles, so it was necessary for Pelham to devise the games without her resourceful assistance.

Here the boy's impelling imagination, added to his knowledge of fairy stories, came to his aid. All the myth-creating urge of the past moved in him. He peopled the varied crests and valleys with these volatile companions, visible only in the dusk out of the corner of a friendly eye. The V-shaped slope from the gap to the railroad was Dwarfland; Hollis was their prince. Crenshaw Hill, clear to the Locust Hedge, was Yellow Fairyland; a chum, Lane Cullom, a year older than Pelham, assumed leadership over these beings. Black-haired Nell, when she could be got to play, was the princess of the Black Fairies, whose haunts were in the outcrop before Hillcrest Cottage. Sue was anything needed to complete the story,—a mere mortal, the queen of the moon-fairies, or of the rock gnomes. Pelham, himself, in crimson outing flannel cloak, was the king and lord of the Red Fairies. They were the real spirits of the mountain, and of fire, and came in their red chariots down the flaming lanes of the sunset sky, to battle for their dispossessed heritage against all the forces of night and darkness.

The fights were not all bloodless. On one of these assaults, as he charged with brittly reed lances up the precipitous quartz quarry, he stumbled and drove a stiff bit of stubble into a nostril. It bled furiously, until his stained handkerchief was the hue of his crimson mantle. But even the three stitches which the doctor took were only an incident in the noble warfare.

The endless sieges, ambuscades, tourneys and adventures filled volumes—literally volumes; for Pelham wrote, on folded tablet paper, a history of the fairy occupation of the mountain, copiously illustrated with pencil and crayon. It was one of the regrets of his later years that this history had disappeared completely; even its details vanished from his memory.

Always he directed the sports. They varied with his invention; spear-tilting at barrel hoops around the circle of the daisy bed, bow and arrow warfare at Indian enemies hulking and skulking behind pokeberry bushes, cross-country running to Shadow Creek and back, when he became interested in this at the high school,—these were only a few of the games.

His name-giving had a curiously permanent effect. Dwarfland never lost the title he gave it, nor Billygoat Hill, where he and Lane surrounded a patriarchal billy and almost caught him.

When his father became busied with planning the subdivision of the mountain lands, to throw them upon the market, the imitative boy divided Crenshaw Hill into "Coaldale the Second." He borrowed, without permission, enough deeds and mortgages from the real-estate office to run his city for a year, and acted as seller, probate judge, and clearing gang. The streets, two feet wide, were carefully walled from the lots by the loose outcrop stones. There was a hotel, a court house, a furnace, and multiplying homes and stores.

Finally the sisters and brother lost interest, since only Pelham could untangle the intricacies of the allotments. It was all cleared away three years later by a real clearing gang, although this part of the hill continued to be called Coaldale Second.

The mountain was a lonely place for children, after all. Even though Lane braved the temporary isolation, and the girls occasionally had spend-the-day parties at the cottage, it was usually deserted except for Pelham and his imaginary companions.

He learned all of its moods. There was the plentiful springtime, when it blossomed a flood of unexpected beauty. Rich summer brought blackberries, dewberries, and hills rioting with azalea and jasmine. Autumn furnished muscadines by the creek beds, hydrangeas, and the sudden glory of changing leaves. Winter was a black-boughed multiplication of the hilly vistas.

The boys lived in dog-tents several summers. Old Peter built them a tree house in a big oak near a fallen wild cherry tree; when they slept here, the floor rocked and swung all night; they were like sailors buoyed upon a sea of restless leaves. Thus the nights revealed the mountain as personally and intimately as the days.

This close contact with it had another effect. It cut Pelham off effectually from the city boys, and forced him to a high degree of self-reliance, both as to body and mind. The wiry legs toughened, the arms grew long and able to swing him from bough to bough of the big trees, the shoulders spread strongly apart. His surplus energy was transmuted into an adaptable, powerful body.

Greater than this was the other effect. He felt safe, with the mountain as ally; not even his father could touch him, in its secret haunts. An unconscious sense of self-completeness, a rooted belief in his own and every person's liberty, became an integer of his faith.

Thus he grew away from all other people, except his mother. To her he was drawn closer, particularly when her relationship with Paul grew strained. This had been especially obvious after the birth of Ned, the fifth baby; the father had had sharp words with Mary about it.

"It was all right for Mother Barbour to have six; people had more children then. Two of them died, anyhow. It's different now."

"But, Paul,——" The calloused injustice of it silenced her.

He watched her averted face. "I see Mamie Charlton's getting divorced. Jack got tired of her and her eternal children. I saw her the other day.... She's getting old. Too many children responsible for it."

She flinched dumbly before his brutality.

He spoke savagely, through clenched teeth. "It's your fault. You ought to be more careful."

Her womanhood rose in rebellion. "Any time you're tired of me, Paul,——"

"It's easy to talk." He laughed abruptly. "And since the business is doing so well, there are always younger women,——"

He did not finish—her look silenced him.

With no woman to confide in, Mary turned to her son, rather than to the girls. His whole horizon was filled with love for her mellow brown-eyed beauty, and for the mothering mountain that came to stand for her in his fancies.

On the walks with his father, Paul's mind was filled with thoughts of the planned development of the land for residential purposes, while Pelham was busied with fantasies of fairies and knightly escapades. Father and son were continually jarring over little things; the estrangement widened.

"I think we'll continue the gap road as an avenue to the railroad tracks. Logan Avenue, we'll call it. Mr. Guild thinks that would be a good place."

"Down Dwarfland?"

The father was plainly irritated. "'Dwarfland' ... what poppycock! Why can't you get your head down to business, Pelham?"

He would meekly smother his wandering imagination, and listen to long monologues about grading, restricted allotments, and similar boring topics.

The father's sympathy went no further than to approve, in the boy, the things which the man himself liked. His son should naturally take to those things which the father cared for. Fishing trips to Pensacola or beyond Ship Island, which Pelham enjoyed more for the novelty of scenes and faces than for the tedious sport, called forth Paul's gusty admiration when the boy succeeded in holding to a game mackerel, or in a skillful handling of spade fish or mullet. The boy's undistinguished prowess in swimming and tennis, his fumbling success with a shotgun after bull-bats or meadow larks, were magnified in the father's eyes.

The pleasures that Pelham devised for himself were scoffed at. The imaginative reliving of knightly days or frontier activities was as distasteful to Paul's matter-of-fact mind as the embroidering at Grandmother Barbour's. The boy's collecting craze found no response in the parent; when the haphazard interest in tobacco tags, street-car transfers and marbles gave way to a real absorption in stamps, that consumed the son's spare money and time voraciously, Paul issued a ukase on the subject. "Get rid of them. Collect money, as I do, if you want to collect anything."

Pelham rehashed his arguments. "They teach you geography, and history...."

"They're trash; cancelled stamps, worth nothing."

"People pay lots for some stamps."

"You've got something else to think about. Sell 'em, or give 'em away; get rid of 'em. You understand?"

Pelham finally sold them to a local barber, from whom he had bought many of the unused South American specimens. "Sure, I buy 'em," Mr. Lang smiled. He went through the scanty pages, repeating all his stock jokes: "You're a guy, and a pair of guys," as Uruguay and Paraguay were reached, being his favorite. "They're not worth much to me. Tell you what, I give you thirty-two dollars."

The boy had to be content with this.

Less than a year later, he surreptitiously bought back the collection for forty, keeping them concealed in a corner of the attic.

The third summer brought weekly target practice upon the mountain. This grew out of a lynching at nearby Coaldale, following a brutal assault upon a white miner's wife by a negro. The Judson arsenal contained three rifles, several shot guns, and half a dozen revolvers; they were all put into use in the hollow behind Crenshaw Hill. The girls of course took part, and Mary, a good shot, thereafter carried her pistol in her handbag whenever she went to the foot of the hill. An exaggerated account of this spread among the negroes; only the boldest vagrant would think a second time of daring the unerring gunfire of the Judsons.

This constant reminder of the danger to women, from men, drove the boy's mind to consider this problem. Pelham had matured slowly; his mother had been his chief sweetheart, as long as he could remember. But the association with girls at the new Highlands High School made the matter more personal to him. With eager avidity he took to whatever reading he could find upon the subject. There were pages in his presentation Bible, and in an old "Lives of the Popes," that were creased and yellowed from his frequent reading.

Occasional newspaper stories moved him strangely. He lay awake almost all of one night, on the canvas cot in a tent near the crest, going over the details of one of these accounts that he had torn out of a paper and kept folded up in his purse. It was from some upstate village,—and the house servants of the mistress had aided in the attack upon her. What would he have done if he had been near? Usually he portrayed himself as the rescuer, nobly driving off the wicked assailants. But infrequent gusts of emotion colored his fancies differently: he saw himself successively in the rÔle of each of the participants. He particularly dwelt upon the woman's part. If he were only a girl now,—His body warmed at vague visions of surrender.

He was a clean boy, in the main, bodily and mentally. His mother had impressed purity upon him, as a thing to be always striven for; and he had implicitly followed her, as far as he was able. This conversation with Mary was connected, although he did not know it, with an incident that had happened at Jackson on one of his earlier visits there, when Aunt Lotta, Jimmy's mother, had found him under the porch hammock with Lil—two babies beginning to scorch their untaught fingers at the bigger fires of life.

There had been no punishment for this. Aunt Lotta had merely told the children that only common boys and girls were naughty. This had been enough.

Several years afterwards, when the cousins had visited the mountain,—Pelham was hardly ten at the time,—his mind had been somewhat disturbed by the loose talk of the bragging East Highlands boys. He had discussed it with Lil on the comfortable pampas grass above the chert quarry not far from the cottage.

"You know, Lil, all the boys and girls we know do these things.... Think how bad I would feel, if I were with a girl, and didn't know how! If we could find out ... together...."

"I suppose it would be all right, Pell."

That, however, was all that had come of it.

Now he had reached his last year at the high school. His marks had been good, particularly in mathematics and English Literature. It had long been assumed that he was to go to college, and fit himself to assist his father's business in civil or mining engineering. He wanted to go to the state university, but Paul's larger plans included a northern education; after much balancing of catalogue advantages, Sheffield Scientific School, at Yale, was decided upon.

Most of this summer too was spent at the grandparents' place; but he came home early, to help his mother get his things ready for the longer separation.

The last night, before his departure, when Mary came in for the customary kiss, they conversed restrainedly at first. Soon she was crying, and he was sobbing as if his throat would break.

"Mother's little boy! I don't know who I will turn to, when you're so far away."

"It won't be for long, mother. And I'll write all the time."

He went to sleep finally, his head pillowed upon her breast, as when he had been her baby, her only son.

She could not go to the station to see him off,—there was so much to be done on the mountain; but he held her tightly against him for a long, long hug and kiss, and walked bravely away.

He sat down on the big stone by the dummy gap-gate. A racking tendency to cry tore at his throat. He was a man, going out into the world of men. He beat the rock with clenched hands.

He was not bidding good-by to his mother, and the mountain. He shut them from him when he went to sleep each night; in the morning they were his again. This was only a longer separation. He was going north not to leave them, but to make himself a better son of his mother, a better son of the mountain. He would return, and then,—

One of his youthful magic rites came to him. Standing on his toes, facing the mountain,—stretching to his full height, with head thrown back and hands spread above his head, he posed, a taut, slim figure, poised beneath climbing tree-trunks of gray, and the leafy clouds above them. For a long moment the world stood still for him. This was his farewell and his benediction.

He slung his raincoat over his shoulder, adjusted the tennis racket and shiny suit-case in his left hand, and passed through the gate.

---

VI

The temporary heroic mood, that had marked his departure from the mountain, wilted on the long railroad journey. He was very lonely at first, in New Haven. The town was dead and deserted, as he took the entrance exams. In the interval of uncertain waiting, he brought out his disused stamp album, and spent solitary evenings rearranging every stamp in the book.

With the next week, he began to feel at home. Every train vomited a riot of eager boys,—recent alumni back for the opening fun, self-conscious upper classmen, timid beginners like himself. The excitement of making new friends, and learning the immemorial lore of Yale, pulled him out of his shell of seclusion. He became one of the crowd, an atom swirling through unaccustomed channels of a fresh social body.

He grew at once into Sheff's boisterous feeling of superiority over the placid, plugging Academic grinds. He snorted when compulsory chapel was mentioned. Why, he would be a junior next year, when these staid classical freshmen would be mere sophomores. That was what Sheff did to a fellow!

His letters home were full of imposing details, gathered at second hand. There was no place like this in the world!

The first big night came,—the night of the Sheff Rush. Pelham felt a peculiar interest in it. He was not very athletic, although in wrestling, as in cross-country work, he was above the average. And this occasion was sacred to the wrestlers.

His wrestling pictures, dating from Adamsville days, had been properly admired by his room-mate, Neil Morton, a strapping, likable Texan, who had prepped at Hill. Pelham, a mere graduate of a city high school, could not expect to be ranked with the products of Lawrenceville, Taft, Hill and St. Paul's.

After the heavy-weights and middles had been annexed by the juniors, there was a lull. No freshman light-weight could be located.

Neil rose to his feet. His yearling bellow rang over the heads of the crowd. "Judson! Try Judson, here!"

Another group was singing out, "Claxton! Claxton! We want Claxton!"

Others near him joined Morton's cry. "Judson! Pell Judson!"

Claxton did not materialize.

The new crew captain squatted under the nearest torch, and peered at the group. "Judson there?"

Pelham, protesting and nervously laughing, was shoved forward, stripped by the big Y'd team men, and edged into his corner. He found himself facing Ted Schang, of last year's wrestling squad, one of the promising light-weights of the University.

The derisive juniors gobbled their war cry. "Go it, Teddy boy! At 'im! Eat up the dam' frosh!"

Teddy ate him up, the first fall, by a swift half Nelson, and a quicker recovery when Pelham tried to turn over and wriggle out.

"Yea 'Twelve! Kill 'im!"

In the brief rest, he ground his fingers into his palms, and determined to show what 'Thirteen could do. He was the crest of the class wave for the moment; an aching loyalty shook him.

This time he was more cautious. The team sub was confident now, and left a careless opening, which Pelham seized at once. After a long, tough tussle he won; but this left him winded; so that the third fall, and the match, went to the upper classman. But he had won one fall; and he was a figure in his class from that night.

His mother was inordinately proud of the boy's participation. Her elaboration of his night-letter home, which she wrote to her sister, fell later into his hands, and he shook delightedly over it. "Think of the honor, Lotta! Selected from all of Yale to represent his school on the opening week, and landing the second fall in the whole University! We are surely proud that God has given us such a strong, manly son. Paul is very pleased, and is sending him a check for fifty. Jackson can show those Yankees something yet."

Paul's pride showed in more definite and characteristic fashion. He had a story run in the Times-Dispatch, and the Evening Register; Pelham's picture headed the account, which stressed the fact that he was a product of the local high school, "the son of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Judson, of Hillcrest Cottage, and a grandson of Judge Thomas F. Judson, the distinguished jurist of Jackson." All these things advertised the family, and the business.

Neil Morton was frankly critical. "Do they do that sort of thing in Adamsville often, sonny? Why didn't your old man run his own cut too, and a picture of home sweet home, with the Judson family grouped around a lawn-mower in the front yard? Pass her over!"

But Pelham shame-facedly held on to it; and both clippings were later pasted into his scrap-book.

At the end of a hard year, Pelham, fully three inches taller, counted the days before he got home to his mother and the mountain.

He enjoyed the mountain as never before, in the summer following. At New Haven, his had been the subordinate lot of the hundreds like himself. Only unusual qualities could hold the top there; and he, younger than most in his class, was far from the envied heights. Once these younger sons scattered to their home cities and villages, their importance grew amazingly. Adamsville held young Judson to be in a fair way of becoming the biggest man in the northern university.

His home became an appendix to the Country Club, as the festive center of the younger crowd. The tennis courts were never out of use; sport frocks and flannel trousers peopled them from eleven till dusk fell. Along the bridle paths leading to the road and beyond, the leaves were set dancing by laughing couples; benches and rustic seats beneath flowering rhododendrons, beside the winding lanes of the Forty Acres, invited languorous love-making. And after a brisk session of men's doubles, the pool which Hollis had urged and finally constructed, below the chilly chalybeate spring behind the cottage, was better than all the club showers in the world.

Both of the sisters were popular. Nell danced well, and never lacked eager escorts. Sue, on the contrary, had no outstanding good feature. Her brown hair was somewhat sandy, her nose turned up a trifle, and she was not as quick-witted as the other Judsons. But the girls realized she was safe; there was no fear she would annex any of their suitors, and she shared the confidences of at least half a dozen best friends at all times.

Early in the summer, Pelham was paired with one of these intimates, Virginia Moore. The girl was tall and slim, almost gawky. Her habit was to serve a direct overhand ball, then permit her partner to win the point. Her caustic tongue made her generally disliked; but he found this an alluring novelty, after the insipid small talk of the others.

When the set was over, he led her to his chosen rock seat carved out of the outcrop beyond the gap. The talk became personal, Virginia shrewdly deferring to his superior masculinity, with flattering attention.

At last his stumbling tongue blurted out, "V-virginia, do you want to wear my frat pin?"

She hesitated, and smiled encouragingly.

He blushed under his heavy tan. "We can only give it to mother, or sister, or—or—or the girl we ... we're engaged to."

"Well, we're not related." She twisted a spray of hydrangea into her hair.

He unpinned the black enameled symbol, his heart jumping violently, and moved closer. With a pretty gesture, she indicated where he should place it.

The cool fragrance of her made him giddy. One loose strand of hair brushed against his forehead, causing him to tingle and tickle all over.... He wanted to bruise her against his body, as on mad moonlit nights he had flung himself around some rough-barked oak on the summit. Ignorant that girls, not in books, at times felt such emotions, he affixed the pin with impersonal decorum. Then he slid to the ground beside her feet, and stared against the burning sunset.

When the sun dropped back of his hill, he rose gropingly. It was hard to phrase some things; he was desperately anxious not to appear ridiculous in her eyes. Yet, unless all of his reading was wrong, something more was expected of a man in love.

"I—I ought to kiss you, if we're engaged."

She closed her eyes, docilely.

He held her lithe cool body, and he felt the rapture of brushing his lips against her own.

He led the way down the path, exaggeratedly attentive.

For the remainder of the brief summer he spent every spare moment with the girl,—mornings on the courts, long afternoon walks, whispering evenings in the rock seat. He would come home after a day with her, and lie, tumbling sleeplessly on his bed, living over the delicious last moments spent with her, and elaborating intenser fantasies of love-making. Her eyes obsessed him; they were like his mother's.

Another friendship marked the summer. Old Nathaniel Guild did not come to the place as often as before; the winter had been hard on him, and the steep paths were often too much for his frail strength. As Paul was kept close to his desk, it was the son who accompanied Guild on his infrequent rambles over the grounds, and the rougher land beyond the fence.

"You notice the tilt of these outcrop rocks, Pelham?" he asked, one afternoon. "They slant forty degrees on this hill, and forty-four beyond Logan Avenue, on the other hill. Last week I was over beyond West Adamsville; all of these strata are there; only they angle to the west, instead of to the east, as here. Like this."

He diagrammed roughly on a sheet in his note book.

"Here are the two Ida veins,—the big veins here; here is the soft hematite under them, and a thin harder vein. Then comes bedrock, and under it a heavy clay deposit. Above the Ida vein there was quartz,—the same quartz we take from the back of the place. Now, on the west part of town,"—he indicated with sweep of his hand the hazy distance beyond the furnaced city,—"there the same strata were once. But the erosion has gone further. There is only a trace of the quartz, and the three top veins. Only a few thin streaks of the bottom hard ore are there. Even the bedrock has been washed off some of the hills...."

Pelham nodded.

"If we could have gotten hold of that iron too!... All gone, all washed away."

"How does it happen that the strata are the same?"

Nathaniel looked at him sharply from under bushy gray eyebrows. He turned again to the paper, and continued the two lines until they met, high above what was now Adamsville.

"Wait.... This point is the sand hills,—there to the east. There are more of them beyond the West Highlands range. See,——" and a firm stroke of the pencil continued their lines until they arched above the former peak.

Pelham watched the moving pencil, fascinated.

"Was the mountain ever like that?"

"The rocks are absolute proof. This valley,"—he gestured toward the city,—"was once the hidden center of the hill."

"... How long ago?"

Nathaniel chuckled gently. "Ah, that's beyond us. Hundreds of thousands of years, maybe."

Somehow this made the mountain more real to Pelham. Though he might climb, under the midnight stars, to the highest crag on Crenshaw Hill, he was just at the beginning of what had once been the peak. He fancied he could trace its towering crown, blacker than the surrounding blackness, lifting up to the sky and the sparkling stars.

What a fleeting second of time, to the mountain, were the eighteen laborious years that meant so much to him! This hill would continue to jut toward the clouds when the last trace of man's restless activity had crumbled into dusty forgetfulness.

He formed the habit of circling up to these crags, after a night at the club or the park with Virginia. They supplied the needed solitude for his crammed fancies. Some nights, after he had been with her, his body would burn like a torch. The pelting passion that shivered throughout him frightened him. He needed the mountain and the stars to calm him for bed. Love was becoming an overmastering torrent; it threatened to upset his whole equilibrium.

His father got wind of the affair, through some chance comment. He went straight to the point with the boy. "You're seeing a lot of that Moore girl, Pelham."

"Yes, sir.... I like her."

"L. N. Moore has four daughters, all unmarried. He is worth about twenty-five thousand dollars. That's all they will get."

"I—I hadn't ever thought about that, father."

"You've got to think about it. Here Tom Dodge's children have married millions—every one of them. Sarah married Jack Lamar; he owns the steel works. The boys connected with the Vanderventer and the O'Ryan money. There's an intelligent family."

Pelham got hot all over. He muttered something about not marrying for money.

"Who wants you to marry for money?" his father interrupted. "The Dodge crowd managed to fall in love with folks who had money. It's a big difference. I'm going to leave the girls well fixed; they ought to marry well. I want you to keep your eyes open."

The talk left a bad taste in Pelham's mouth.

Even though his mother did not care for Virginia as much as he had thought she would, his attentions continued until vacation ended, and he returned to the muggy northern city.

Nell responded to the open life almost as fully as Pelham. Hollis was busy at school, and Sue preferred staying with her mother; so the older sister frequently had her favorite mare saddled, and covered fifteen miles before she turned the horse loose in the spring lot.

Paul was on the mountain frequently, mornings and afternoons; Hillcrest Subdivision had at last been put upon the market. Most of the work fell on his shoulders; his roadster buzzed up and down the avenues, displaying the place to prospective purchasers. The lower lots sold well from the start. After six months, the investment had almost paid for itself, with less than an eighth of the land disposed of.

In the early spring, Nathaniel came to Paul with a proposition to take the land off the lists as residence property, until the iron could be mined.

"As soon as we sell any of the crest places, it will be too late. Now's the time; we can form our own mining corporation, and sell to South Atlantic Steel. Ore's reached the highest point in twelve years. It will mean a fortune, Paul, and the land will be just as good after the iron's out."

Paul was set against the plan at first. There was more ready money in the other; it would spoil the face of the subdivision; they didn't know the ropes.

The older man was insistent. "It'll mean money—big money. We can't overlook a shot like this."

He went over the suggestion for Mary's benefit; she too protested. "Why, Mr. Guild, the mountain's our home; it would be dreadful to spoil it. What would happen to the cottage?"

Paul cut in, shortly; his mind was quickened by opposition of any kind; and the chance for a quiet public dominance of his wife was not to be overlooked. "We don't intend to touch this part of it, Mary.... I'll tell you, Nate; we'll go over it with Ross and Sam Randolph. If there's as much in it as you say, we can't afford to neglect it."

After the visitor had gone, he walked out to the front, and stared at the red smudges that marked the furnaces and rolling mills. When Mary joined him, a wrap thrown around her shoulders, he was chewing the end of an unlighted cigar. She laid her hand on his arm.

"Paul, dear, you weren't angry at what I said at supper?"

"Of course not. Women can't be expected to look on a business matter as men do."

She shrank from the implied rebuke. "You—you aren't serious about this mining, are you?"

He waved toward the dark foot of the hill with the cigar. "D'ye know what we cleared from the bottom of the Crenshaw lands, Mary, on these first sales?"

She was silent.

"Our share was ninety thousand dollars! And the place didn't cost fifty."

"I'm sorry to see any of it go, Paul. It would make such a wonderful home for our children—when they're grown up and married, and have their own little homes within reach——"

He crushed the cigar beneath his heel. "You're much too sentimental, sometimes, Mary. The children wouldn't thank me to hold on to the land, when I can get a hundred and ten a foot for inside lots."

"We have all the money we can possibly use now, Paul. You must have made a hundred and fifty thousand this year——"

"That hardly touches it."

"It makes me afraid, sometimes—our having so much, when so many people have so little. If we could just keep Hillcrest as it is——"

"We haven't anything," he answered sharply. "Jack Lamar and his brother came here just before I did; they've five million apiece. And God only knows how much Russell Ross has made out of iron. He's in with that South Atlantic Steel bunch; he could sell out for twenty-five millions to-morrow, I verily believe.... I'd be lucky to get a million."

She stubbornly returned to what was on her mind. "And now you are willing to take this wonderful estate you have worked over for ten years, and throw it away, because Russell Ross has more money than you! Think what the Rosses were."

"My father wouldn't have wiped his shoes on them. And any one of them could buy out Jackson three or four times now. This mountain—if it's handled right—it will simply mint money. It will be a mountain of gold."

She shuddered. "Paul——"

"I can imagine what you would say, if I hadn't made what I have out of it. You spend what I make quickly enough."

"I save everywhere I can——"

"Oh, you, and the place, and the girls; and it costs a lot to keep Pelham going. We need every cent of it. I tell you, this mountain is worth millions! And I won't stop until I've gotten every red cent out of it."

It was in that mood that he went to the conference with the iron men.

One Sunday morning, when the negotiations had been carried over until the next week, Nathaniel's housekeeper phoned that the old man had died shortly before daybreak. Paul took charge of the funeral, saw to the shipping of the body to the Ohio home, and turned the matter over to the lawyers for the estate.

Within a month he had secured his partner's interest in the whole property, and was the sole owner of the mountain.

"If we do mine," he told Mary, "Pelham's mining engineering course will make him the man for the place. He'll get Nate's share, if he's worth it."

In June Snell and Judson threw open another large subdivision, in a cheaper suburb near Hazelton, and Mr. Snell's incapacity put the burden of this on Paul's shoulders. Further plans for Hillcrest were laid over until he could find time to take them up again.

---

VII

The day after the next Thanksgiving, Paul, excited and jubilant, drove up the graveled path to the side door of Hillcrest. "Read those," he pushed three papers into Mary's hands, as she rose from the veranda rocker.

Her eyes blurred, so that she had to take off her glasses, as, sick at heart, she realized what the documents were. Her husband spread them out on her lap, explaining rapidly. "This is the certificate of incorporation of the Mountain Mining Company. Here's my contract with them—I hold fifty-one per cent of the stock, counting twenty shares in your name and one in Pelham's, so we retain the controlling interest—which provides the terms for the taking out of the ore. This last is a carbon of the letter I got off to the boy this morning, giving all the details."

She had lost her fight after all. "The cottage," she whispered, "how long now before we must leave it?"

He slapped a pointing finger at the center of the second paper. "Section seven—here it is—we won't move at all! This part of the mountain is not to be touched, until all the rest is mined. As long as the house stands, we're safe." He smiled, in conscious self-approval.

She raised dimmed eyes. "That's good of you, Paul. It hurts me to see any of it disturbed.... I suppose you could do nothing else."

Refolding the sheets, he slipped them into an envelope with enthusiastic finality. "The thing grows bigger and bigger every time I go over it. If it pans out, we can buy Adamsville! I said a mountain of gold, remember.... Ground will be broken in the spring. We'll put Tow Hewin in charge of it now—he's the man poor Nate spoke of—and when Pelham comes back in June, he can put his M. E. degree right into harness.... God! It means millions!"

"You're sure the cottage is safe? It would break my heart to think we'd have to give it up. It's such a splendid home for the children——"

He pushed out his lips. "It is a lovely place, Mary; but you've gotten rooted here. By the way, I'll wire to St. Simon's Island to-night for rooms for you and the girls for the summer. It will be a fine change. The children can go, too. Pelham and I will stay on the job here."

Her lips trembled; leave before Pelham came—not see him all summer?...

The son's reply was an enthusiastic endorsement of the affair. He had gone over the plan with his father on the previous holiday, before returning to take a year's graduate work, and the enterprise appealed to his imagination. It was sacrilege, in a way—like disemboweling a parent for the money that could be made out of it. But what an invitation to his trained activity! A marvelous chance to show what he was made of.

He explained the project to Neil Morton, who had also returned for graduate work, after a summer's practical experience in a Wyoming smelter.

Neil twisted his shoulders comfortably into the dingy Morris chair. "Your mountain makes me weary, Pell. Morning, noon ... night. You'd think it was the only ore proposition in the country."

Pelham flushed, but unchecked finished his sentence. "It'll be the biggest plant in the whole South yet."

Neil grinned. "When the Adamsville papers get through with it, I suppose it will."

Pelham abruptly changed the subject. "I met one nice girl last week end, Neil—you would have liked her. Her father's Professor North at Cambridge, and she's full of all sorts of crazy notions. Ruth is a suffragette; wanted to vote, or run for governor, or something."

"Shocking," his friend remarked languidly. He was used to Pelham's reactions.

"Tried to convert me."

There was silence for a few moments, then Neil straightened up in his chair. "Do you realize, Pelham, that in Wyoming, where I summered, women have voted for over thirty years? Why, the mayor of one of the mining towns is a mother who has raised eleven children! Crazy notions, indeed."

Pelham looked disturbed. "They must be bad women, if they vote. Who ever heard of a decent lady mixing up with politics? Think of my mother, or yours, Neil; would you be willing to have her mingle with negroes and common riff-raff at the polls?"

The other exploded at this. "She does! Mother's the best little stump speaker in the county! And Polly's been to two conventions already."

Pelham lighted a handy cigarette. "I always said that Texans were batty."

"What did you do to your suffragist, anyhow?"

"Oh, she had too much coin for my simple taste. If father learned about her, he couldn't talk anything else.... Not for mine!"

A rattle of knocks on the door broke off the discussion. Several graduate students pushed into the room. "Hello, Judson. Going out for supper, Neil?"

He stretched himself up, and reached for a cap. "Pell and I were just about to prowl down to Heublein's."

"Come on, then."

As they crossed Chapel Street, the rubber-lunged news-boys were shouting, "All about the big strike! Street car men to quit to-morrow!"

Pelham purchased a smudgy sheet. While the waiter was double-quicking their orders, all eyes were directed at the leading story.

"Look at this," Ralph Jervis, one of the classmates, pointed insistently, "the president of the road says he'll break the strike with college men. Let's take a week off, and be blooming motormen!"

A spectacled Senior dissented at once. "It wouldn't be the thing, fellows. Those strikers may be in the right, for all we know."

Jervis howled his disgust. "That's what comes of joining the Socialist Study Club! Falkhaven's a regular anarchist. Why, it's a great idea! Are you on, Neil?"

"Sure!" The Texan roused himself to answer briskly. "If Pell'll come too."

"I'm for it," Pelham assented quietly.

The constant deference and affection displayed toward his big-hearted roommate hurt him, against his will. For all his ability in studies and on the mat, Pelham was not popular. He had never been accepted in the higher circles of Sheff life, the Colony and Cloister groups; and he in turn held himself aloof from the run of the class.

He was a thorough-going snob, for all his talk of democracy. Anywhere in the South, which held the finest people in the country, a Judson would be known and recognized, and given his proper place. These Yankees, no matter how nice they might be personally, were Republicans; in the South, only negroes and turncoats belonged to that party. At meetings of the Southern Club, he had seconded the resolution asking that negro students be provided with a separate gymnasium and eating hall. It had furnished a week's laugh to the University; hot-headedly, he resented this. He felt that the leading men held him merely on tolerance; he shrank in upon himself.

This feeling of isolation was not entirely unwelcome. He had become used to it in his mountain days. Here it had driven him to the College Library, where he had mastered all its bulky volumes on mining and kindred phases of engineering. He branched from these into higher mathematics, until he could stump his instructor on the fourth dimension. The previous Christmas holiday, he had turned to modern European drama, and had covered what he could find in an amazing short time; although it was not easy to stomach such plays as "The Weavers," and some of Shaw's dramatic maunderings.

His college loyalty, and class loyalty, in the social sense, continued at a high pitch; and he was among the first to arrive at the office of the New Haven Electric, and to sign up for strike-duty.

He spent an intense morning learning the mechanism of the car—it was not difficult, for a good driver; and he knew automobiles thoroughly.

He was put at a controller on the Savin Rock run, with a halfback for his conductor, and two guards furnished by a Newark agency to aid the uniformed policemen in preserving order through the rioting poorer districts.

The resort was reached, and the return made, in a tiresomely unexciting manner. On the second trip out, a crowd had gathered near the turn by the switching yards, which shouted epithets at the green crew.

"They're a bunch uh mouthin' blackguards, mate," the cheek-scarred guard on the front platform observed with alcoholic familiarity. He dodged a spattering tomato flung jeeringly by a tiny Irishwoman. "All they does is shoot off their mouth."

Pelham found the guard's nearness the main irritation of the ride.

When they neared the same corner on the run in, two women stepped into the street. He slowed the car. They suddenly turned back to the sidewalk. He urged the speed up two notches.

A wagon had been backed across the track. "Clear that off, there." The driver was evidently too asleep, or drunk, to heed.

"You move it," he ordered the guard.

As the man stepped down uneasily, the rush began. Out of the cheap lodging houses and dingy side entrances flooded shouting men, women, children. Bricks, garbage, old bottles thumped against the car sides.

"Better not stop, Judson," the green conductor's shout reached him. "It'll be hot in a minute."

The guard struggled with the heads of the horses. A whirling broom-handle from the sidewalk knocked him against the wheels. He let go the bits, uncertainly.

"Kill the dam' scabs!"

"To hell with 'em!"

"Yah, scabs! Kill the college scabs!"

Pelham swung the heavy switch key dangerously close to the heads of the rioters near the footboard. "Shove off that wagon, there. We're going through."

The horses backed protestingly. The iron rod leapt toward the shrinking crowd. The track was cleared.

Baffled, they surged across the rails in front; car windows were smashed, a turmoil boiled on the rear steps, where policeman and conductor battled with the more incautious attackers. The second guard sneaked off down the alley.

Three or four boarded the front steps. A shrieking woman in the lead caught Pelham's arm. He felt himself dragged toward the door. The swiftness of it dazed him; he could not hit a woman.

"Naw yer don't!" The guard woke up, tore loose the woman with bullying arms. "This rough stuff don't go!" He threw her back into the crowd. An Italian bent at Pelham's feet; a shiny blade snaked toward his leg. He cracked the man's shoulders with the switch key; the knife rang on the cobbles.

Pelham toed the bell vigorously. The car started with a jerk. The front caught one fleeing obstructor, throwing him sideways. Infuriated jeers and howls came from women and children forced aside. A brick splintered the glass at his right, just missing his head. He broke through, and came into the center of the town.

A dispatcher took charge, placed him on a quieter run, and laid off the Savin Rock line for the day.

He compared experiences with the others at supper. Jervis was in the hospital, with a stove-in rib; Neil's ear wore a bandage; others were laid up wholly or partly. Two of the strikers had been shot in an open battle near the station, and a guard killed; the hospitals were filled with minor injuries. The casualty list beat football, they agreed; and it was better sport!

By the next day, the streets were more orderly. Police reserves patrolled the focal spots, with orders to shoot to kill; mobmen were clubbed on the slightest provocation, and arrested wholesale for vagrancy. The station wagons clanged throughout the streets all day. Pelham went back to his first run; there was no further tie-up.

He was switched later to the line Neil was on. This route pushed far into the country, and through the depressing filth of a mill suburb. Jeering lanes of factory men and women lined the roadway; most of them, Pelham judged from the chatter, must be Polacks. There was one persistent group centered around the tail of a cart. Here a woman gesticulated fiercely beneath a red banner.

A stooping giant of a man, six feet three at least, turned from the speaker's words to shake his fist at the approaching car and scream profanely at its driver. "You lousy scab! You dam' thief!"

Pelham, secure in reliance on the bluecoat beside him, stopped the car. "You're a liar," he said shortly. "Go on about your work, instead of swearing at peaceful citizens."

The man sputtered in frenzy. "This was my run, you——" The profanity spilled recklessly. "Stealing the bread out of working men's mouths, you white-livered scab!"

Pelham turned quickly. "Why don't you arrest that man, officer?"

The protector looked at him coolly; he spat deliberately over the railing. "Fer what? He's only telling the truth. You are a scab, now, ain't you?" He scolded the enraged striker. "Go on, Jimmy. Cool off somewhere. That ain't no way to talk to a motorman from the Yaleses college, that ain't. You don't wanter get run in."

The man cursed himself out of their sight. Pelham drove in more thoughtfully.

Paul, when he learned of it, was not too proud of his son's performance. There was no use in getting one's head cracked unnecessarily, he wrote. But he was as pleased as Pelham at the successful crushing of the strike, which came with startling quickness after the men had been out five days. The union officials made some agreement with the company, and vanished to Boston. Some of the men were taken back, some were not. Sheff resumed its normal placidity.

"Your life is too valuable, Pelham," said his father's letter, "to risk in direct contact with the white trash that gather when a strike is declared. Some of the men on the mountain are just as worthless and discontented. We know how to handle them here....

"You might visit Senator Todd Johnson when you pass through Washington. He is a good man to keep in touch with.

"Mary and the two youngest got off to St. Simon's Island yesterday. The girls follow on Monday. That will leave us to keep the work up during the summer.

"The first report shows 291 tons from the Forty this month, and nearly as much from the other property. We're getting started slowly.

"I shall be glad when you get back and down to work."

Pelham took the first train South, after commencement was over.

---

VIII

"Well, young man, ready to go to work?"

"This morning, father."

Paul took up the extra slack in his belt. "Oh, we won't rush you. You'd better take the first week off and visit the Barbours. They're getting pretty old, Pelham; they'll appreciate it."

"All right, sir."

Paul stopped to examine a badly-hung gate, sagging weakly away from its post. "I'll fire that lazy Peter, if he doesn't 'tend to these hinges better. A cow could push through and eat up five hundred dollars' worth of shrubs before your mother caught on.... We'll have you meet some of the men."

They came up behind a stubby, middle-aged Irishman, loudly ordering a group of white workers who were timbering the newest mine entrances. "D'ye want the whole mountain to fall on you? Jam it under that slide rock, man."

At the father's hail he turned genially. "Mornin', Mr. Judson."

"This is the son I was telling you about. Pelham, this is Tom Hewin, who keeps things moving in the mines."

"Pleased to meet you, sir." There was a servile hump to his shoulders; a deprecating instability in his glance greeted the boy. "Hey, Jim." A youth of Pelham's age, an uncertain smile dancing from his eyes, advanced from the overalled workers. "This is my boy, sir. I'm learnin' him to be a boss miner too." Hewin's flattened thumb pointed to Pelham. "Want me to put him to work, sir?"

"He'll report next Monday."

Tom scratched a bristly head. "They'll be plenty for you to do, sir."

"How's that drain in Number 11, Tom?"

Pelham admired his father's vigorous handling of the varying questions. His own opinion was asked about one matter, as they inspected the cut-ins of the ramp cleaving Crenshaw Hill. He backed up Hewin's solution; the facile superintendent promptly flattered the young man's grasp of the problem.

As they walked back to breakfast, Paul shared a further insight into the human element of the work. "Yes, he's a good man to have there. He directed one of the Birrell-Florence mines for two years; quit in some row or other. He doesn't get along too well with his men. I don't trust him; he'll pad the rolls, and undermark the weights, every chance you give him. He'd steal from the niggers and miners, and from me as well, if I'd let him. That's one of the reasons I'll be glad to have you on the job.... He gets things done."

"What will I do, father?"

"You're to be his assistant; he'll keep you busy. Fifty a week, to begin with. When you're worth more, we'll increase it."

Pelham's mind played around the conversation all during the trip to Jackson that followed. It was not just what he had fancied, he told himself, staring at the green hump-backed hills along the road. Why should he not be head of the operations? But that could come; he must show his worth first.

There was a persistent shock of disappointment in the amount he was to receive. It was hardly respectable. His allowance since junior year had been five thousand.... Well, he could make it do.

His self-complacency returned at the grandparents'. Jimmy, who had still a year in law school, was dazzled by the Sheff product; Lil, who had rounded into ample, magnolia-like beauty, capitulated devoutly. The old people's loving pride warmed him; but its flavor cloyed. He was glad at the end of the week to return his attention to the mountain.

Hewin found the boy quick at observation, and a good listener; the contact evidently suited the Irishman immensely. Now was the chance, he decided, to solidify himself with the Judsons. Pelham became familiar with every detail of the work. He ended with a confused impression that the bustling superintendent had either done every stroke with his own battered hands, or had devised and inspired it.

"They're good workers," he concluded, marveling at the patent energy.

"They'd better be."

With such a spirit, anything was possible. It was only later that he realized that this was surface activity; that the leisurely gait of negroes and whites alike quickened only when the boss was in sight.

The first ramp lay to the north of the house, through what was still called "Coaldale the Second;" the second, on the Logan land south of the gap, was put into his especial care. He bent over blueprints and calculations, verifying what had been planned. Careless bits of figuring were corrected; he found one plot of openings contrary to all reason.

"Your number two will collide with the entry above, Mr. Hewin. Look—it ought to be opposite five, here."

Tom studied the diagram from all angles, then laid it down. "Figurin' ain't everything, Mr. Judson. You've got to know your ground. Bring along them maps."

They mounted above the level where the negroes were timing their pick strokes with a wailing improvised chant, reminiscent of cotton field spirituals.

"See that flaw? All your figgers don't take no account of it. We cut in below here, then bend in to the left. This way.... When I was with the Birrell-Florence folks, we went right in under a flaw. The dam' timbers slipped one day, an' we lost four mules, as well as half a dozen niggers. You got to know your ground."

Pelham straightened the line a trifle, corrected the figures, and the cutting went on. The third month showed a marked improvement over the second.

Gradually he noticed that, while there was a great show of deep mining with the first ramp and the delayed second one, the main vigor was bent to the easier dislodging of the outcrop.

He studied the agreements, measured the cleared areas carefully, and carried his discoveries to Paul.

The father took the matter up with Hewin. "How far have you gone to the north, past the mouth of the ramp?"

"About four hundred feet, sir."

"Measure it."

The tape showed five hundred forty.

"By the agreement, you couldn't go beyond four hundred and twenty feet, with eight ramp openings."

"Them damn' niggers must a moved the stob I put in. We won't go no further."

The outcrop-scraping continued fifty feet, before another opening was made.

World-unsettling events were happening, during the weeks when this minor dispute disturbed the serenity of relations on the mountain between owner and contractors. The same day that Pelham reported the repeated trespass on the easy outcrop, the startled papers told of the vaster trespass across the convenient miles of Belgium, which was bitterly contesting the gray-green flood of alien soldiers. The father turned from the headlines to discuss, with caustic vigor, the annoyance nearer home.

"There's no way to stop it, Pelham. They'll rob the surface, no matter what the contract reads. It's so much cheaper to get at ... lazy scoundrels! It 'ud take six years in court to settle it. Meanwhile, the mine would be locked up tighter than a barrel."

"You could get damages."

"Not a cent ... not solvent. Keep your eye on them; we'll play them along. Bad as this war promises to be, somebody's liable to need our iron. Prices must boost; the Hewin contract will hold our cost down. We won't lose."

There were few minds in Adamsville, at this time, that saw even this much connection between the remote struggle and placid home affairs.

In the spring, the third ramp was cut—half a mile to the north, beyond the crest of Crenshaw Hill, through a row of trees called the Locust Hedge. North of its base, on a wide bowl-like opening, the shacks and stockades for certain convict miners were built. Paul's bid for two hundred of the State long termers had been successful; these were isolated near the extreme end of the Crenshaw property, and kept at the deeper mining in the third series of entries.

Nearer Hillcrest, the underbrushed ridge at the foot of the higher peak was cleared, and houses were built for workers who did not live in Adamsville, or Lilydale, the negro settlement saddling the low Sand Mountains. A prong of the mountain shielded the Judson home from this shack town; otherwise the screams, shots, and general disorder around pay days would have driven away the family. "Hewintown" was the railroad's designation for the flag station below it; "Hewin's Hell Hole" was its usual title.

Here Tom Hewin brought the three hundred miners from Pennsylvania, after he had discharged several gangs who fretted under the talk of union agitators.

Pelham helped erect the larger frame houses for the commissary, the office, and the overseers' homes. Frequently he idled through the two settlements, and tried in awkward fashion to understand the personal side of the workers. They answered civilly questions about their work; when he tried to go further, they drew back, surly and distrustful. He could not understand this wall of reserve.

One weazened grouch, Hank Burns, who had been a miner for forty years, tried to account for it. "Why should they trust you, Mr. Judson? They know you think they're dogs."

"But I don't!"

"Ain't you the owner's son? And a superintendent to boot. What should you have to do with such as us?"

Pelham gave way to a gust of pique. "That's a silly way to look at it."

Hank shook his head sagely. "Silly or not, Mr. Judson, how else can they look at it? You—or your paw—hires 'em, don't he? You can fire 'em too, if you don't like their talk. I hear some of 'em say, the other day, you was snoopin' 'round to spot union men. They know better than to talk."

The other shook his head, puzzled. "You talk to me."

"I ain't got no folks I've got to keep goin'. If I'm fired, I'm fired. 'Twon't be the first time. 'N' I don't shoot off my mouth any too much, either. Your job is to keep 'em workin', an' pay 'em what you got to. Their job is to get what they can. That's all there is to it."

"The good of the mines is their good."

The old man chuckled noiselessly. "I ain't never seen it, if it is. You want what you can get, they want what they can get. You can't both have it...."

This was all Pelham could learn from him; it was as far as he could get.

Tom Hewin stayed on the job at all times. His son, Jim, every two or three months, broke loose for a half-drunk. He was too crafty to drink to the point where he lost control of himself; but he would become mean and quarrelsome. He made a habit of disappearing at these times for a couple of days.

"Jim sick again?" Pelham would ask, curious to piece out what he knew of the doings of these inferior folks.

Tom would lower at the absent son. "I used to whale his hide off for it, Mr. Judson. He's big enough to lick me now. He don't do no harm; an' I never seed him really intoxercated. He makes good money; he'll be a boss miner yet, even with this here foolin'. Booze an' women.... Every young man has to shoot off steam now an' then. They can't fool you, can they, now?" He leered in low camaraderie. "You been there yourself, eh? Don't tell me!"

Pelham was sure that he would not.

What with his work and reading, Pelham would have been content to remain a recluse on the mountain. Paul drove this out of his head at once. "Join the University Club as soon as you can; we'll make your salary two fifty a month, and you can afford the Country Club also. Circulate; it's good advertising. We'll keep the hill going somehow."

The first taste led to more; soon he was a regular part of the life at the clubs. Frequently he would knock off at four, while the other workers were still at their jobs, to clean up and whizz over the hills for a sharp match of doubles, or an energetic foursome.

He could not manage a thrill of regret at the news that the sweetheart of a few summers back, Virginia Moore, was to be married in October. There was a new crop of debutantes, and most of the girls of his college days still put themselves out to attract him. For a few months he rushed Nellie Tolliver, a brilliant hand at auction; but he tired of her stiff preoccupation with the narrow limits of gossiping small talk.

One of his sister Nell's friends, Dorothy Meade, was more to his liking. She had come from some level of Washington social life, to marry Lyman Meade, the local representative of the Interstate Power Company. Lyman went his own easy way, and she hers. Chic, with an orderly aureole of fluffy gold hair, sparkling gray eyes and a perpetual display of more of her shoulders and breast than the lax club convention permitted, her only difficulty was in repelling admirers.

Saturdays were the regular dinner nights at the Country Club; Dorothy was the final fluffy attraction that turned Pelham into an invariable attender. He annexed himself to the lively group that ringed her on these occasions, to the amusement of her gayer admirers.

"Here's Dots, poaching on the bassinet preserve!" some professional bachelor, his head innocent alike of hair and illusions, would indict.

"First childhood or second, why should I discriminate?" Her cheerful offensive routed the covetous critics.

Dorothy's young moth was at least persistent. Her attractive bungalow dominated the hilly head of a by-street near the links, and Pelham formed the habit of dropping in for Sunday suppers. She was good to her maids, preparing and serving herself the crisp salad mysteries and froth-crowned desserts.

"Can't I help some way?"

Her eyes would twinkle adorably. "Mamma's helpful boy! Here, let me put this apron on you!"

He could feel her voluble fingers whisper to him, as they shaped the knot; she would stand close before him, to see that the linen badge of utility hung evenly from his stretched shoulders. This disturbed the regularity of his heart-beats; but then, she was Lyman's wife, reflected Pelham. When the husband was present, he smiled enviously at the timid and satisfied adoration that Pelham's efforts to conceal published the more.

Despite all of his reading, Dorothy's marriage made her, in his brown adolescent eyes, wholly intangible. She could not have been guarded more effectually by the Chinese Wall, or a thicket of fire, with a paralyzed Siegfried moping without. Her liberal hints encountered an adamant obtuseness; he was not linguist enough, in her case, to read correctly frankly provocative pouts, slanted glances, even her gipsying fingers, that brushed his like the kiss of wind-wedded blossoms. These and more became substance of his erotic fancies; but the world of fantasy and of reality, in this case, he knew could never blend.

His amorous stupidity often exasperated her.

One night she yielded a narrow seat for him on the porch-swing, an openly demanded tÊte-À-tÊte, although the cushions on the stone steps and the settles within were warm with gossiping friends. "You're always so mournful when you're with me, Pelham."

"Oh, Mrs. Meade!" She tied his tongue when it came to repartee.

"Oh, Mr. Judson," she mimicked fretfully; then affirmed with decision, "you must meet Jane Lauderdale. She's about your tempo."

His eyes widened apprehensively; Dorothy's caprices were sometimes alarming. "Who's she?"

"The most serious little soul I know ... and the dearest. You'll like her, when you meet her."

"When?"

"Planning to desert me already, sir! I'll have you for a month yet; she's away."

"I'm satisfied; it's your lead;" he dropped with some gracefulness into the parlance of auction bridge.

The time came when she took the lead. The crowd were noisy at the piano one night, when Dorothy turned to him, in the tiny butler's pantry, laying her piled platter on a shelf behind his head. Lifting her chin, she said provokingly, "Don't you want to kiss me, Pelham?"

The suggestion plunged him under a quick disquieting flood of emotion. One of his precious ideals citadeling womanhood crumbled with intuitive rapidity. A warm inner lash flushed his neck and cheeks. Beyond this betrayal, which was of short duration, he showed no sign of this delicious incarnation of his remotely fantasied passion, this focalizing on the solid earth of an ethereal hunger and its satisfaction.

His arms rounded her; he brought his lips down to her level; her own, moist and cool, opened within his. The ecstatic sensation closed his eyes.

She slapped him lightly on the cheek. "That's enough, now, you big boy!"

All that evening he kept his eyes on her, and managed a pilfered caress just before leaving.

Her eyes laughed at him. "Do you know, Pelham, I'm not sure I'll wish you on Jane, after all!"

He began to time his visits to the Meade house so that they found Lyman away. One cool dusk—Lyman was in Philadelphia for the week—he veered carefully to something that was worrying him. "Nell—my sister—swears that the crowd are talking about us, Dorothy."

"Wants to wean you?" She laughed mellowly, the fluffy crown of curled gold dancing, as if sharing the mirth. "They've talked about Lyman for years, now; it hasn't slowed him. I like you far too much, boy dear, to give you up for idle tongues."

"I hate to have them mention you." He twitched restlessly. "You know what you're doing to me, Dorothy. I've been straight ... so far. You're setting me on fire. This is a slippery hill to keep straight on; I might skid."

"Meaning?" She achieved two passable smoke rings—the effort after them was her chief motive in smoking—and idly planned a gown, tinted like the furnace-glowing sky, with twined gray smoke-wreaths in couples and trios—grouped figures that blent into one, then idly drifted apart.

"Kissing's only excuse is as a prelude to love's physical finale," he answered straightly. The dusk hid her wry face, as he continued, "Lyman's in the way. You say you still love him."

"Yes...." She paraphrased, with a show of pondering, something she had read in a showy woman's magazine. "He can't help being what he is. None of us can change the material, though we may alter the pattern, or dye the goods.... Much good that would do."

"The lady turned philosopher!" His hand caressed her fluffy short sleeve caressingly. "So ... you won't take me for a lover."

"Hardly," she laughed with sober hunger, grieving at youth's lack of subtlety.

"You're setting me on fire," he repeated with somber relish. "You'll drive me to some other woman, or ... women. You'll lose me either way; you wouldn't want me then; and I——this can't last always."

"I'll run the risk, boy."

The street quieted, as the late cars from the club droned away into the mist-damp distance. As Pelham turned on his lamps for the homeward run, he saw that the great summer triangle had swung from the east to the sunset horizon; Vega's white beauty, dragging near the western hills, was smudged by the unsleeping breath of those squat furnaces and coke ovens, whose pauseless task was to transmute the riven ore into iron sows and pigs—the first step in the alchemy that transformed the skeleton of the mountain into a restless trickle of gold, urging itself into the overfull vaults of his father. Paul slept now, as the son would soon sleep; but those furnaces, and their parched servitors eternally feeding the hungry mouths of fire, did not sleep. Some tortuous filament of thought brought him back to Dorothy, and the flaming furnace that she had helped light within him ... which did not sleep. With all of the scorching rapture which her surface surrender yielded, he wondered if it would not have been better if he had not met her.... There were once three men in another fiery furnace; but they had walked out, unsinged. He knew himself well enough to be sure that he had no salamander blood; was he strong enough to tempt the break from the charring spell? Well, there was time to think of that again.

When he reached the highest crest, Vega still hung over the sullen glow of a furnace throat; but the smudge had grown darker.

The next morning his father, who seemed gifted with the ability to pierce unerringly to whatever weighed on the son's desires, went into the subject with him. "This isn't criticism, Pelham; it's an attempt to help you steer clear of any mess. Particularly with a married woman. It sounds—nasty."

The son was indignant. "There's been nothing improper. I've taken a few Sunday suppers there——"

"Of course, of course." Pelham knew these dry tones. "It doesn't pay. I ought to have talked with you before. It's easy for a young man, particularly with good financial prospects, to get roped in by some woman, married or unmarried.... Sometimes he has to pay well to get out."

"That's ridiculous, about ... about ..."

"It doesn't pay, visiting one woman," Paul continued, in matter-of-fact tones. "Young Little almost had to marry one of the telephone operators at the Stevens Hotel. His father loosened up five thousand to get rid of her. I haven't any money to waste on your foolishness."

There was a silent interval.

"If you must have a woman—I passed through the stage myself, like all young men—don't you fool with the half-decent kind. You'd better go right down to Butler's Avenue, and pay your money down for what you get. There's less chance of diseases—they have medical inspection. And it avoids a serious mix-up."

Pelham's face went white. "I don't need that kind of advice. I've kept straight so far; I intend to keep so, until I'm married. Money couldn't pay me to go there."

The older man exhaled noisily. "Remember what I said."

A swelling white rage choked the boy's voice. "Does—does mother know that you went to—such places?"

Paul turned sharply. "Of course not. There are some things women are supposed to know nothing about."

That was the end of the discussion.

Pelham gradually decreased the frequency of his visits; but he still managed precious afternoons with her in his car, and occasional evenings, which left him irritatingly disturbed. He wanted to see more of her, and knew that he should see less; he was eager even to hear her name mentioned at home, but embarrassed if it was.

"Listen, Nell," he interposed to his sister, when he was helping to draw up the list of guests for a summer fÊte the girls planned. "You used to be pretty fond of Mrs. Meade."

"Not much! You can't have your Dorothy here."

Pelham was exasperated with the whole lot—always excepting his mother. His long confidences with her had begun when he was a child, and still were a pleasure and a panacea. One of these talks gave aid to his bewilderment about Dorothy, although she was not mentioned. It had started inconsequentially with a discussion of little Ned's conduct, and dipped into many topics. In the course of it, he promised to sound both the brothers on their attitude toward girls, and the annoying problem of sex.

"You can do much more with the boys than I, Pelham. They'll listen to an older brother, where they wouldn't listen to their mother."

Lovingly he patted the smooth flush of her cheek, delighting in the shy wildrose beauty of her face. His fingers crept from this to the straight chestnut folds of her hair, longing to stroke its unbound cascades, and let them curtain his face, as she had done when he was a little boy in bed; as she still sometimes did.

Then he answered her. "I listened to you, mother. It was your words and your wishes that have kept me straight."

"And, please God, they will always keep my own dear son the finest, cleanest, purest man in the world."

Pelham was wholly under the spell of Mary's idealistic phrases, her sugary circumlocutions and romantic evasions of annoying facts. She had found it impossible to meet Paul's brutal logic with her ill-trained feminine inconsecutiveness; the course she took was an acceptance couched in some inoffensive generality or platitude, with a sentimentalized deity as authority for her stand. Paul pierced through the unmeaning glamor; but the children did not. When things went smashing, contrary to her plans and wishes, somehow God willed it ... a convenient, kindly-disposed arranger, unless Paul's vigorous planning took precedence. Her thirty-nine connubial articles could be summed up in one: Paul could not be wrong, in the children's eyes; her wifely duty bound her to wholesale support, even of his errors or occasional unfairnesses. "He is your father, remember," blanketed everything. "God only knows how much I love you," was her unfruitful solace to them. And she did love them, and gave of her best for them, except where fealty to Paul, who came immovably first, intervened.

This prayer of hers for the son's purity continued to ward off the imperative temptations that nearness to Dorothy, or thoughts of Butler's Avenue, spread around him. It fell on his ears now with all of the old power.

He sat, rubbing her hand against his cheek, staring off to the distant vagueness that was Shadow Mountain. The dun clouds along the horizon had obscured its outline; the sky to the south was a sickly copper. Above it pulsed and banded a tumult of smoke gray clouds; the eastern horizon was a slate blue, rapidly darkening. A far rumble of muttered thunder was followed by the vivid glare of sheet lightning, which brought into sharp relief the serrated crest of the distant hills.

Suddenly out of the dull sky came a quick spatter of big drops. She slipped from her son's embrace, and went in to see to windows and doors.

He moved a lazy flanneled leg further from the edge of the porch, where the splashing drops bounced inward.

There was a short lull. He rose, as a white tongue of fire forked its way toward the near summit of Shadow Mountain, followed immediately by a deafening pattering rattle of thunder.

Hurrying in from the front porch, his mother met him, a strained look in her eyes. "There's a storm coming, Pell. Your father's on the way home. I hope it doesn't catch him."

Pelham moved idly into the library. Out of the side window he could see the approaching wall of misty rain, blotting out the familiar outlines of trees, the negro cottage beyond the spring depression, the spring buildings, the outhouses. How quiet, how unerring and irresistible its course!

The marching fusillade of drops touched the side of the barn, and darkened it ominously: from a soft gray it shaded swiftly to a rain-drenched black. Now it menaced the house itself; now the impartial advance of the shrapnel, in slanting crystal lines, brought the house beneath its unrelenting fire.

Pelham switched on the light, and pulled out an unread volume of Stevenson. His fingers loafed over the leaves, as he listened to the persistent drive of the storm.

---

IX

The rain exhausted its ammunition during the night; a clear truce followed. The bright green cleanliness of leaves, the reburnished brilliance of golden-glow and flaming canna, showed the hill heartened by the hours of storm.

But there was nothing morning-minded in Pelham's soul, as he irked over the day's details at the mines. All that he had to do seemed mechanical, inconsequential; the planning had been done already—his admirable rÔle was that of a cog, touching off other cogs to their diverse tasks in the vast mechanism that was disemboweling the mountain,—the mothering mountain, that had once been pal and parent to him. Less than a cog, indeed—for the other cogs held him as alien; he could not share their lives nor their thoughts, nor was he one of the final beneficiaries, no matter what the miners might think.

He knew, too, that his father was becoming as alien to him as these miners held that the son was to them. Pelham was wrapped up in the minutiÆ of the mining; and this was a book in which Paul had covered only the first simple chapters. Again, the son's reading at the northern college, and the intangible outlook acquired there, opened vistas that Paul could not share; and in those matters where the two wills came into direct touch, such as marrying "where money was," and relationship with women, they were pole-distant apart. The son, in his youthful restlessness, was at outs with the whole situation; he was bored with it, as he was with the young concerns of his brothers, the chatter of Nell and Sue, and the immeasurable vapidity of Nellie Tolliver, Lane Cullom, Dorothy Meade, the whole group of Adamsville's stale, unprofitable friends, young and old. There was, of course, his mother ... and the mountain; but she was part and parcel of Paul's existence, too; and the mountain seemed strangely uncommunicative and passive, these days, as if waiting for him to make the break, to take an affirmative step needed to quicken his thinking and being.

The insipid promise of the afternoon's fÊte, for instance—were his days to be an unending vista of such chatter, and trivial preening and strutting of visionless girls and young men? Dorothy offered more than that; yet he was singularly at odds with himself over her. To be burnt by a fire he could not touch: to chain himself, a voluntary Tantalus, before perilous sweets just out of reach—an admirable rÔle! It was in his own hands to end it; and since Paul's advice about Butler's Avenue did not condemn the thing that he shrank from in Dorothy's case, he was repelled by the remembrance that he had ever considered ending the purity that Mary had held him to.

After all, his sisters' fÊte would be better than that.

But when he had carefully dressed for it, and was immersed in its shallow flippancy, he reacted the other way. Lettuce sandwiches and lemonade!—Good God! Determined to dodge the rest of it, he sidled around to the garage, and sneaked out his car. When the fresh crest breeze sprayed over his face, he pressed on the accelerator, and only slowed with the turn into the road to the city.

At his arrival before the darkened Meade bungalow, two voices reached him from Dorothy's lit boudoir. His feet scraped slowly up the steps; after two thoughtful feints, he pushed the bell. There was distaste already at what lay before him; life offered no new way out.

"Turn the porch switch, Pelham," Dorothy called from above. "Read the papers.... We'll be down soon."

So she even assumed his presence!

The swinging door was pushed outward, a short while after he had balanced himself on the extreme edge of the swinging couch. A girl stepped out and walked over to him. He rose conventionally.

"I'm Jane Lauderdale," she said, in a voice of pleasing, bell-like quality. "'Thea told me to amuse you, until she's ready. You are Mr. Judson?"

As their minds clashed in preliminary conversational skirmishing, some sense of her restful loveliness came to him. It was her eyes that spoke most clearly—those lighted windows in the spirit's comely house. Jane's eyes were a deep, swimming brown, with an effect of largeness and roundness, as if she looked upon the irregular march of the hours with the unfeigned naÏvetÉ of a child—a semblance heightened by a starlike radiance of the eyes themselves and the long shielding eyelashes. They seemed less to stand off and inspect him, than to reach out and envelop him, bringing him within their substance. Despite the difference of shape, they held the same deep liquidity of his mother's eyes.

The whole face, he fancied, was that of a mother—a madonna. The live brown hair was smoothed back from a high forehead, with the simplicity of a Grecian maiden; there was just a hint of pallor in her complexion, whose whisper of lack of health was negatived by glowing cheeks and sparkling face. It was not the typically thin-visaged Italian madonna; it was this sublimated into an ampler shapeliness of feature. The voice was clear and direct, with the lingering overtones of a gong quietly tapped in still dusk. Her presence was restful, comforting, and at the same time embodied an unmistakable challenge to his own nature and worthiness.

The impression of childish naÏvetÉ, he soon found, must not be stretched too far; her vision was astonishingly clear and comprehending, with a definiteness that at times almost amounted to dogmatism.

Her mention of long-time friendship for "'Thea" gave something to inquire about. "You'll be at her table Saturday evening?"

"At the club, you mean? I hardly think so," and she smiled softly.

"Don't you dance?"

"Yes.... But not often. To be quite frank, the people one meets at the country club are rather banal ... even Dorothy's friends."

"Thank you! That's a touch. Perhaps you bridge."

"Sometimes I make a fourth; but cards are very easy to get absorbed in, to the point of obsession, don't you think?"

"I suppose so; if you take them that seriously. Are you fond of golf, or tennis?"

A charming precision was in her answers, as if they had been framed before. "Tennis suits the strenuous adolescent; golf, the bay-windowed corporation head. One is behind me; the other I pray never to become. I don't love corporations," she smiled. The smile covered her preliminary judgment; his questions were banal, almost gauche; but what could one expect of a worshiper of Dorothy?

What did the girl like, anyhow? These were sure-fire topics with all the rest Pelham knew.... Perhaps the Post, on the table nesting her arm. "Are you enjoying the latest Chambers' story? I don't think it's up to 'The Danger Mark'—though, of course, Chambers'——"

"I enjoyed part of the opening—you know, the dry-goods inventory—the lingerie part. It's informative: a Sears-Roebuck for the Broadway shops. But—beyond that!"

"What are you interested in?" Inability to pigeon-hole her among the feminine types he was used to called forth this poverty-stricken directness.

"I'm interested in what you are doing, Mr. Judson, ever since 'Thea mentioned it." Her straightforward eyes lit up for the first time.

"She's done nothing but sing your praises for the last few weeks." He rose in fatuous gracefulness to her opening.

The frank eyes measured him coolly. "What interested me was your work. You have charge of the mining at your father's place, haven't you?"

A bit dazed by the sudden shift, he told his connection with the management.

Her nod of satisfaction puzzled him. "I've always wanted to learn something of the other half of the story; I know the miners' side, from work with the United Charities. And I've been studying reports, until a sheer excess of wrath made me lay them aside."

What odd reading for a girl! "How did you happen to take that up?"

"Mrs. Anderson has me on her Labor Legislation Committee." She smiled gently, the eyelids nearing one another in unconscious grace. "I tried to interest 'Thea in it; one meeting tired her out."

He had a fleeting vision of volatile Nell or finicky Sue reading a mining report. Evidently this Miss Lauderdale was something of a person. Of course, it wasn't exactly a woman's work, unless her charm earned it as a unique prerogative.

A contented smile lengthened his lips. "We treat our miners pretty well, in this state."

"Yes, that is the general impression. I wonder if you've gone into the matter very thoroughly?" She was coolly critical; he felt a bit shriveled under her friendly gaze. "The South is backward, in some things; but it's waking up. You went to Harvard, didn't you?"

"Yale Sheff."

"Oh, that's better. I have a brother prepping at Laurenceville; he'll go to Sheff or Massachusetts Tech."

"Better, you say? Just how?"

"Yale at least talks about democracy." Her phrases were astonishingly direct, her intonations warm and enthusiastic.

"Did you go to college?" Pelham wondered.

She shrugged ever so slightly. "No; a finishing school—Ogontz. Don't mention it, please. Tell me something of your work."

Her leading questions were beginning to reveal his blundering vacuity about labor conditions on the mountain, when Dorothy fluffed out. Her sharp eyes noticed at once his sheepish interest. "Jane's been boring you with a discussion of the labor question, foreign and domestic, I'm sure! I can't convert her. She'll worm everything you know out of you in half an hour, I warn you."

Pelham agreed, a bit chagrined. "Yes.... She was just telling me what I didn't know about my men."

Jane's lips curved open into a smile, friendly and somehow approving. "You'll learn, I think."

Dorothy yawned in intimate boredom, "An apt pupil, no doubt.... I thought this was the day of the great fÊte, Pelham."

"It is," he smiled. "They are at this moment enjoying lemonade and lettuce sandwiches."

Dorothy looked puzzled; Jane's cheeks crinkled appreciatively.

The older woman turned to the girl with ruffled rudeness. "Stay on for supper, Jeanne?"

The other shook her head. "I must run along. Choir practice to-night," with a mischievous dimple.

"Religious all of a sudden?"

"The rector flourishes in my spiritual presence."

"How is his new reverence?"

Her mouth twisted piquantly. "Mushy.... Nice boy, though. Coming by to-morrow?"

"Between three and four."

"So long.... Good night, Mr. Mine Superintendent."

Pelham convoyed her to the steps, doubly unwilling to let her go, as he reflected on her fresh charm, and the blind alley of the other woman's amorousness. "I enjoyed our talk, Miss Lauderdale. Could the course continue?"

"I'm always glad to have a human being to talk to. I'm staying with the Andersons; the number's in the phone book."

Thoughtfully he returned to the porch, and a cretonned wicker chair, ignoring the message of the partly-occupied couch.

Inquisitive gray eyes watched him. "Do you like her?"

"Oh, so-so. She seems intelligent."

"Men never do like Jeanne," she assured him, with a complacent rippling gesture of her flounced body. "She's a dear, but too dreadfully serious. Doesn't like dancing, and all——" waving vaguely in the direction of the club.

"Tell me something about her."

"There isn't much. Jeanne—I love the French twist, don't you?—Jeanne's a queer, dear girl, Pelham; always busy with labor committees, or something as uplifting and tiresome."

"I've never heard of her, except from you. Is she kin to the Andersons?"

"Oh, no; her people are northern. She was living with an aunt in Philadelphia; tired of her, and skipped out. Another of her modern notions.... She's intelligent; but, then, brains don't marry,—they go to Congress. Or is it the other way? Anyhow, Lyman says that I have no brains." She smiled provocatively.

This time he came, in answer to her pouting, unworded bidding. He was heartily glad, as apparently eager arms gave her the desired harborage, that the other girl was by now blocks away.

A day or two later he telephoned, and on Friday evening came by the Anderson house at eight.

"I'll be down in a minute," she called from the top of the balustrade.

The Andersons were away for the month, he recalled. With a pleasant restlessness, he prowled around the cosy living-room, and finally selected a library book on the table. It was by a favorite author; but the title, "A Modern Utopia," was new to him. He was into the second chapter when she appeared.

"What a remarkable Wells book!"

She smiled at the enthusiasm. "You don't mind walking, do you?... It's stuffy inside."

"No indeed. Just a moment." He jotted a memorandum of the volume on a handy envelope back.

For all the quiet grace of her face, he noticed that Jane fitted into his stride naturally—and he was a good walker. Instinctively they turned up the hill; the height beyond reached out an irresistible invitation.

Her face drew his eyes as inevitably as the mountain drew their feet. The face had sparkled on the Meade porch; but the brisk fingering of the night breeze woke it to a positive radiance. When she turned her eyes upon him, their radiant lashes enclosed darker heavens than those above, framing two stars brighter than Vega.

"Tell me about yourself," he urged. "Dorothy said you had 'run away' from your aunt——"

"Sounds like a naughty little girl, doesn't it? It wasn't quite that bad, though."

"Think of running away to Adamsville!"

"It is an 'H' of a place——" She looked quizzically at him; his smile reassured her. "I believe in that kind of hell. But it's nothing, compared to what I left." Her lips closed decidedly.

He would not drop the subject. "Your aunt was a doctor, wasn't she? And a politician?"

"So you are determined to slice to the skeleton. Yes, she's a doctor, runs her own hospital, and as much of the rest of the city as she can. She had the running habit, Mr. Judson; and, the first few years I was with her, she ran me too ... and then ran me away." Unwilling lips locked, as if unhappy at the recollection.

"Just why?"

The words were picked carefully. "She wanted me to live as her echo—parrot her likes and dislikes, accept every limping bias as final truth. My mother was the same type." He fancied that the eyes shone more lustrously; but they were turned away. This topic, of the conflict between the girl and her parents, stirred him to a disquieting curiosity, avid for all the details, the hows and the whys; as if the answers held some clew that he sought for.

She answered the question that he refrained from asking. "Yes, she's alive; I left her, to go and live with Auntie. The thing sounds unbelievable, and ridiculous; but she wanted to keep me forever at the age of thirteen and a half. Father was dead, and she looked young; a grown daughter was something to explain away. Why, she would have kept me in knee skirts if the neighbors hadn't talked.... When she married again, I left."

"Are those the only times you ran away?" he smiled the query.

She pointed to the red scowl in the north, where some startled furnace had opened its giant eye beneath the cloudy mirror of the heavens. "Isn't it marvelous!... Did I ever run away before? I believe when I was four I got tired of home—we were living in Indiana then—packed my rag doll and the puppy into my baby-carriage, and started out.... They caught me before I had gone a block."

He watched the vacant sky. The red glare had abruptly died. "You should see the view from our crest—Crenshaw Hill.... I almost ran away, once. I got as far as the railroad station." He detailed the weeks of punishment that had preceded his attempted escape.

"Your father must be a brute!" The contagious sympathy that shook her tones moved him.

"He's really nice.... His viewpoint is old-fashioned."

"Old fashioned! It's paleolithic. No wonder you ran away."

"He figured that I was his son—accent on the 'his.' He has the idea still."

She stared moodily at the dark blankness of the mountain, then swung beside him on a slender coping at the head of a little park lost in a bend of the highland boulevard.

"That's the trouble with the whole family system," she reflected slowly. "Parents never realize that children grow up. Why not go to the other extreme, and assume that the child has an individuality from the start?"

"You like children?" Something in his thoughtful tone threw a shadow of embarrassment over both, intimate and strangely agreeable.

"Yes.... Very much."

The talk strayed gently to less personal matters. The moon-glow from a street lamp drizzling through gray-green leaves fell upon her shoulder; the smooth meeting, at the nape of her neck, between shining chestnut hair and glowing flesh caught and held his attention; he wanted to lean over and kiss it—harshly—as he would have kissed Dorothy. What would this girl do? What would she say? She did not dislike him, evidently; and he found her not only holding a deeper, more restful physical charm than the other woman, but also possessed of a mental kinship that he met for the first time in the other sex. Why, at times her impressions seemed even maturer than his own. How could his thoughts dare to link inch-deep Dorothy and this girl together!... But a kiss? No, he had done enough of casual loving; he would keep Jane's body inviolate even from the touch of his lips, until they were ready for the final mating.... Why not, if she would have him? What pitiful things, beside her, had been pert-tongued Virginia, Nellie Tolliver, and the rest! A madonna in face, a woman worthy of all life's adorations.... How astonishing was life, that had flung them together, when he might have missed this dearest hour that he had yet known!

Jane's thoughts, too, were busier than her words. He was attractive, she had at once decided, when measured beside the superficial trousered creatures, "positively not grasshoppers," that smirked their way through Adamsville society; but he was young, very young, in his ideas—his brain still swimming in the haze of third-hand opinions which his father had inherited from slave-wealthy forbears. Men cherished easy mental ruts grooved by the unprogressive centuries; pioneering paths were only for the few. Pelham Judson looked hopeful; no more. Yet there was a distinguishing, cordial charm in his courtesy; it was not all lip-service. Poor kid! With a father like Paul Judson, and a mother swathed in old prejudices like a Memphian mummy in binding cerements—how could he be expected even to see beyond his fortuitous rut? The brief age of miracles had passed. But he was a nice boy; and with a different mother.... Perhaps she could do a little mothering herself; but she must be careful not to let him take her too seriously; or take her at all, she smiled to herself. She had boasted to Dorothy that her husband must be progressive, or pliable; Pelham seemed neither.

And yet he would not make such a bad appearance. Clean looking, athletic, and the son of a Judson—he would not have to be explained away or apologized for. It would be a positive charity to keep him out of the clutches of the usual Adamsville girl, her brain a fricassee of bridge scores and dancing dates. She smiled lazily as she reflected that he would take to mothering; his curly hair begged to be smoothed and tousled. Well, she would give it a yank or two; it would serve Dorothy right.

While their words skimmed jerkily above the subjects in which they were really interested, and their thoughts weighed, appraised, and at times depreciated, more deeply, an even more underlying, more ancient set of forces were at work. Eyes talk a language that thoughts would deny; certain proximities bind closer than the unthinking iron to the insensate magnet; above and below speech and meditation, unseen selves meet, measure, and mate, dragging tardy consciousness into situations it thinks are of its planning. These calls and greetings date back of life's long blundering on the harsh land, back to the life-cradling sea: they speak with the unconscious weight of slow millenniums of mindless love. They are kin to the cord that binds the falling apple to the earth, the earth to the sun, the sun to the far starry outposts of the visible universe, and it to the invisible majesty beyond. The infinite pull of material attraction does not sleep: nor do these forces tire of their ancient tasks. Love, rooted deep in life, and born of older ties, does not cease its endless search, its tenacious intangible clasp of what it needs to round its unique need into a blent ecstasy.

There are those who deny romance to a love kin to gravitation and issue of insect matings. They are this far right, that romance is a late by-blow of the ageless creative hunger.

Pelham took Jane back conscientiously shortly after eleven. They had not mentioned the mining situation. The silent hours after their parting were full of the subtle working of those hidden forces whose power they had begun to feel, there upon the narrow coping above the little park.

---

X

The next morning, Pelham put in a requisition at the library for the book he had commenced. Within the week he received it.

It was thrilling reading—setting at war, in each chapter, his keen mind, which approved at once of its unanswerable insight, and his emotions and prejudices, which balked and struggled against the shattering, one by one, of their ancient idols. It was slow reading: he would finish a chapter, the greater part of him ready to scoff at its conclusions, which must be based upon sophistries; and then, to detect the latent fallacies, he would go over it at once, and find that the rereading merely riveted the intellectual effect the first perusal had produced.

And yet his emotions did not lag far behind his mental acceptance. He saw again, and more clearly, that he had come to a parting of the paths in his thinking and being; the past months had inevitably brought him to this. What did other people think of these matters, if they knew of them at all? What would his father think? Again and again he told himself that Paul must accept these obvious, scintillating conclusions from undeniable premises; but a deeper voice, which yielded a sterner satisfaction, reminded that the economic upset—the socialism—expounded here was in direct opposition to all that his father incarnated. The chasm that had split him from Paul was no new thing; it bedded in childhood antipathies, in petty, intangible causes, in dislike at the elder's uneven rigor of discipline, in a deep-seated resistance against being molded to fit the father's pattern, rather than according to his own leanings.

If his father would come with him, well and good; if not, the son at least would be intellectually honest, and right!

There was no doubt in his mind but that Mary, the essence of motherly understanding, would go with him in these new ways.

He finished the rereading with a sense of physical exhaustion, as if the inner conflicts had shaken his bodily balance. With this was a false sense that these must have always been his thoughts—the things that had seeded and sprouted just below his consciousness. How could he have overlooked them so long? The obvious explanation, that they had not been there, did not occur; and he would have denied it, if it had been called to his attention.

A night's tossing wakefulness induced a different mood. The spirit-tiring reading became unreal and inconclusive; he had strayed off after a marsh-light dancing over the morbid swamps of his emotional imagination. Further reading would purge this from his system.

The librarian obligingly pointed out the rest of the scanty shelf-end of socialist books. Ah, these would correct his wandering! There were Engel's "Origin of the Family," a treatise by Bax that he could not unravel, a rebound "Communist Manifesto," Blatchford's "Merrie England," the first volume of "Capital," in the Swan Sonnenschein edition. Eliminating the Bax book, he began to go conscientiously through the others; the task opened into a joyful journey. The persuasive structure that Wells had erected found buttresses and foundations. There was no longer room for carping or delay—he was convinced; more than that, he was stirred by an inner storm, he heard an evangelical trumpeting such as must have overwhelmed Saul in the blinding reproach along the road to Damascus, he acknowledged a lashing command to spend himself for the splendid achievement of this immense dream, nay, this reality that was even now inevitably growing and strengthening throughout the whole man-sown planet.

He sent in an order for these books, and many others referred to. His mind was in a glorified glamor of dynamic thinking.

Was it possible that people could still be unaware of these vast truths? In college he had had two courses in classical economy; but the subjects had left his mind more bewildered than before. Now a vast searchlight cut apart the darkness; the hazy night was as definite as day.

He tried to simplify to himself what he had learned.

Wealth—all wealth—was the product of labor. That, and nothing else.

Rent, interest, profit—labor, human labor, produced them. It was not the land, or money, or factories; it was the toilers, sweating at their tasks, who made all of these, and who received for their toil a miserly fragment. Land, left idle, produced nothing; even natural products were worthless until man's fathering work gave them value. Money—gold calved no golden offspring, bills spawned no further bills as interest. Factories and machines produced nothing, until man's sweat and blood were poured out over them. Labor was the producer of everything; in justice, all should belong to labor.

War itself, modern, "civilized" war, was a poison exuded by world-greedy capitalism. The withheld product of labor could not be obtained by the needy toilers, nor consumed by the overfed masters; thus backward foreign markets were a necessity, to get rid of the product the system confiscated and prohibited at home. Out of this grew clashing imperialisms, and wars ... like this present one.

And here was a vast body of men—he reread Jack London's "Revolution" to get the marvelous figures again—throughout every country in the world, with a future planned upon unchangeable, irresistible economic laws, striving everywhere to bring about economic justice and permanent peace. And he had stayed out of it so long!

Slaves had gone, and serfs had gone, but the wage-slaves, the slaves of the machines, these remained. They must be their own Lincoln, and free themselves; their own Christ, redeeming their posterity.... Kings had gone; money kings must go.

He had called himself a Democrat: by God, he would be a real one!

Some intuition sent him again to "The Food of the Gods"; after rereading it, the inner excitement drove him out of restricting walls to the ampler stretches of the night.... This, then, the flash came, was the key to Wells' cryptic symbolism! The food of Hercules—the Heraklaphorbia—this was an intellectual food, an idea, that raised men to a height eight times higher than their fellows. He felt his own head in the clouds. He had tasted of the food; he felt a sense of bodily elation, as he pondered in the starry silence of the crest, high above the sleeping city—a sensation of physical magnificence, as if his body towered already above his father's, his mother's, the miners'.

The world of men was asleep, sodden, dead to the splendor of the truth that shone brilliantly throughout it. He felt kin to the stars, the night, the vast mountain that sustained him. The full force of the newspaper verse that he had clipped some days before, and carried around with him, held his mind; he had grown into its mood. The lines obtruded themselves in fragmentary fashion:

And then toward the end,

This was the boisterous rebel speech, this the message that they had been trying so long to tell him. This was the answer to his soul-hunger for an answer to life's unresting questionings.

Men, women, children—the iron city, the world—staggered blindly on, pulled here and there by vast laws which they did not guess. There was enough and to spare for all; there was plenty, plenty, only for the taking, for all of the children of men. There could be, if men would but have it, God's kingdom upon earth.... He felt a strange sense of reverence. Life was sweet to him, it had given him the answer to these things.

The following Friday—it was the fourth time he had seen Jane, and the third evening with her—he tacked the talk around to this theme that had so grown upon him in these brief iconoclastic days. The drowsy throb of his motor left the mountain far behind; shot over the creaking wooden bridge that unbarred Shadow Creek, traversed the graveyard glimmer of the moon-mottled sandstone above Shadow Mountain, and now purred and loitered through a further farm-broken valley, nosing toward the East, where the stars rose.

"You know, Jane, I finished that Wells book ... the one I saw first on your table."

"You liked it?" He could feel a smile in the quiet query.

A playful accusation answered her. "You didn't tell me to read it!"

"I knew you would find it for yourself."

He thought this over. "That was better. Tell me, Jane: are you a socialist?"

"Mm ... yes, of course; all sensible people are."

"A member of the party?"

"I've never joined, though I've heard Kate O'Hare, and some of the local 'comrades' speak. And I went to the Debs meeting last fall."

So she was a socialist—one of the despised, reviled believers in the newer, finer creed! He had guessed it all along; the certainty as to it had played some part in the pleasure at his own mental choice. Out of a joyed heart he announced, "I'm going to join—at once! I met a member of the Adamsville local—a Mr. Duckworth——"

"I've met him,—an architect, isn't he? A dear old type!"

"That's the one. He has my application card."

"My dear boy! You're much too precipitate. You ought to read—and think—a lot first."

When she heard his achievements, she had to confess that what he had read already exceeded her desultory knowledge.

"But what will your father think of you!"

Pelham meditated, and spoke out of a divided mind. "He thinks pretty straight. And he likes Wells. I'm going to talk it over with him."

"Here's to a pleasant session! I envy you your courage, Pelham. What Auntie didn't say to me! Even Mrs. Anderson shrugs at my opinions. She's thoroughly bourgeois—charity, labor laws, factory reforms are as far as she dares contemplate." A little smile curved her cheek bewitchingly, as the brilliance of her large eyes caressed him approvingly. "Anything's bourgeois that we socialists don't like, you know."

She went on, after an intimate moment of pondering. "Let me tell you what we are trying to do, first. Mrs. Anderson's committee wants the state to pass a decent mining law. We're behind the rest of the country now in safeguards for miners; and our limping laws aren't observed. The Board of Trade has endorsed the new law, but the state labor federation has played off. Meet those men.... Most of the union bosses are crooks, you know."

"I know the other side says that——" His tone was incredulous.

"There are crooks in both camps, Pelham. Just watch John Pooley and his gang! And, while you talk to the redoubtable Paul J., see what he thinks about our mining bill."

"It's such a little thing, Jane, with socialism to fight for!"

She nodded her head, with a charming echoey dogmatism. "Big movements go forward by little things.... What's the time?"

The radium face of his watch made his own expression fall. "I'm afraid we must turn back, dear lady.... I'll sound my father, and let you know."

His mother, the next morning, casually began to cross-examine him concerning his sudden friendship for the girl. He had not seen Dorothy, he reflected with a start, for two weeks now; Jane had told him that the Meades were leaving for the summer, perhaps to be gone the next year as well. He hardly minded. Dorothy was a closed alley; she did not think,—and even if he had loved her, he could not have married her. But this girl....

"Jane's splendid, mother. I like her immensely."

"Mother knows her, Pelham. She is undeniably clever. She spoke at the State Federation of Women's Clubs in favor of our joining the National. Clever, but very ... young. There are negro clubs in the National, you know. Don't you remember, dear, I told you how I defeated the resolution?"

"I don't remember your mentioning her."

"She made the speech just after mine. She said, 'I am sure that Mrs. Judson, if she met her negro mammy in heaven, would be glad to see her.' And I answered, 'Yes; when I meet her, I expect to say, "Mammy Sarah, how are you? And how are all your folks?" I wouldn't say, "Well, Mrs. Sarah Barbour, what is your opinion of the present state of the drama, and the influence of Kant and Schelling upon American philosophy?"' It floored her. The resolution was defeated."

"I don't see anything so awful in it."

"But—negro clubs, Pelham!"

He waived the point. "She is clever."

Mary pursed her lips. "Her ideas seem ... radical. That's bad enough, in a man; in a woman, it's inexcusable. It gets her talked about."

"People talk about Jane Addams, and Sara Bernhardt."

"There is a difference. I hope mother's boy won't see too much of such a woman.... You haven't mentioned Nellie Tolliver in some time."

"Nellie's head doesn't hold anything except bridge and the club."

"Mrs. Tolliver is a member of the Highland Study Circle, with me, Pelham. Nellie is a dear, sweet girl. Any woman would be proud to have her for a daughter."

Pelham yawned brutally. "Hollis is coming along, mother.... I'm not bothering about marriage yet."

Conquering a bothersome timidity, he sounded his father upon the proposed law, and his recent reading. Paul saw through the timid questionings at once, and answered cautiously. "It won't do you any harm to read that stuff. We all pass through it. Twenty-five years ago, your mother and I read Bellamy's 'Looking Backward,' and liked it. Of course such things can't be taken too seriously."

At the mention of the mining law, the father snorted. "So that's what that Lauderdale girl has been up to! You'll find, Pelham, that Mrs. Anderson is something of a busybody. As that law is framed now, it would bankrupt every mine operator in the State within a year."

"But the principle of the thing——"

"The principle is admirable. But don't you bother about such generalities. You'd better get your mind down to the problems of the mountain; there's enough to be done here to keep your ingenuity exercised."

Jane's chummy note answered his scrawled report of the conversation. "And you might tell him that T. L. G.—'That Lauderdale Girl'—gives him her regards. He likes the principle, does he? I think we've got Governor Tennant on our side, although he's pretty close to your father's crowd. Once the law is passed, we'll make all the mine operators sit up straight! Until Friday night, then...."

---

XI

While Paul was dictating, in sharp, short sentences, the answers to the batch of mail marked "Mining," two cards were brought in to him.

"John Pooley,
President State Federation of Labor."

"R. E. L. Bivens,
Editor, The Adamsville Voice of Labor."

His eyes crinkled into a smile, although the mouth remained a hard fixed line. Pelham must see this pair of blood-suckers at work; that would open the boy's eyes to the dry rot in the practical working out of his labor theorizing.

No, he would see them alone. Perhaps he could get at the son indirectly.

"Send Mr. Kane in."

The company's advertising manager opened the private door as the two labor leaders were adjusting themselves complacently into ample chairs.

"What can I do for you, Pooley?"

"We called to see about the convention special of the Voice, sir. Wouldn't you like a half-page write-up for the company, or yourself? The half is only seventy-five dollars.... It'll go where it'll do lots of good, sir."

Paul directed his gaze to the wheezing, balloon-like figure of the editor. "Has Kane given you enough advertising, Bivens?"

The puffed, greedy face smiled ingratiatingly. "Mr. Kane's been very good to us, sir. At least a quarter of a page weekly."

"How has the Voice of Labor made out?"

"It's made out—that's about all, Mr. Judson. Print paper's gone so high, that only the advertisements has made it go. We expect this special will net a neat sum."

He jingled the Woodmen's emblem at the end of a thick gold chain, thoroughly satisfied with the world. There was an Odd Fellows' button on his coat—fraternal orders strengthened his appeals for the paper.

"Pooley, how do you stand on this mining law down at Jackson?"

The lanky president of the State Federation twisted his lame leg more comfortably under him, and leaned forward, gesticulating diplomatically. "It's both good and bad, Mr. Judson. Some of the boys is very strong for it. But I seen an editorial against it in the Times-Dispatch last week. I figured you might not be for it."

Paul cut through the verbal knot. "How will the Federation go?"

The other shook his head. "No telling. There's a few of them Socialists is delegates—they're for anything to stir up trouble; but nobody pays much attention to them. Then there is others. It'll be pretty even."

"How would you feel if I took the front and back pages, Bivens?"

"That would be fine for both of us, sir."

"Coming out editorially against that law?"

He wheezed deferentially. "It has some bad flaws, sir. I figured on a write-up against it."

"Make it strong, and I'll take the two pages."

Bivens consulted with the other representative of labor. His eager eyes shone greedily. "How would you like us to put you down, Mr. Judson, for the main speech of the convention? 'Proper Legal Safeguards in Mining,' or something like that?... You know, the front and back pages is more expensive. Say five hundred for the two."

Paul watched their well-fed, ever-hungry faces with mental nausea. "All right."

"You'll make the speech?"

He nodded. "Don't forget the editorial."

As they rose, he lifted his check book with studied obviousness. "If those Socialists make trouble, find out what they want. If another advertisement will handle them——" He did not end the sentence.

He stared after their retreating figures. The spokesmen of labor! A herd of dumb, worthless brutes, led by pig-eyed greed! Promising material to have any say as to the destinies of a country!... Well, Pelham would learn.

Paul had a busy month of it. The mining was beginning to pay at last. Two hundred more convicts, more than a hundred negro workers, had been added to the force in the third ramp; its output had begun to exceed the other two.

After he had purchased the ore lands lying on both sides of the former holding, he called Sam Ross, Dudley Randolph, and the Birrell-Florence representatives into conference. Randolph was the only one who held out, when a pool was proposed to cover prices and wages.

"I don't have trouble with my men, Judson; I don't want any. I'm with you in theory, but I can't see any advantage to me in that proposition."

Paul then opened his alternate plan. The working out of the details took two weeks, but the result was the incorporation of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company. Paul Judson's salary as managing vice-president was fifty thousand, in addition to what the dividends would bring.

He figured up the value of his stock. Unless it depreciated, he could get out—now—with five million dollars! And this was only the mining rights. He could afford to let Pelham play with a few fool notions, when things broke this way!

On his next conference with the son over progress at the works, well-planned hints gave Pelham the opening to learn of the invitation from John Pooley, and the father's acceptance. "Of course, my opinions don't go as far as yours——"

"I didn't expect that. But this is great news! You'll come out for the new bill, after all?"

"With necessary practical modifications. I'm studying it out now."

Pelham repeated enthusiastically, "It's splendid news!"

At his first opportunity he phoned down to Jane an insistent plea for that afternoon. "You'll have to see me, lady dear; I've something important to tell you."

Was there ever a girl to whom these words, from even a passable lover, or, for that matter, a possible one, did not bring the fluttering fantasy of what woman has been so long taught to consider the one important something that she is to hear? This thought came first to Jane; then, smiling at her overstayed fraction of thinking, she promised the afternoon.

She was on the porch when his wheels slid to a standstill at the curb; he was beside her before she was well out of her chair. "The most amazing thing, Jane!" as urgent fingers levitated her into the seat beside him. "Dad's coming our way!"

Something of his flaring enthusiasm heightened her reply. "You can't be serious! I'd as soon expect Auntie to be a convert!" Her mothering eyes searched his face anxiously. "You aren't teasing me?"

"Indeed not! He's to speak at the state labor convention himself, in favor of proper mining regulations. It's great, Jane! I wouldn't have believed it of him!"

Her mobile lips curved doubtfully. "For your sake, I hope you're right, Pelham. But—how can he? Why, boy, he's on the other side—he must be! How could he line up with our ideas, when it would take money out of his own pocket? Miracles don't happen, I'm afraid. I wish——" She sighed. There was something to admire, almost love, in his hearty zeal over the amazing convert; he was so boyish, so peltingly trustful!

"I'm for it, remember. And I'm his son." Her unsympathetic unbelief widened his gaze.

Her fingers brushed his arm in a fleet unspoken caress. "You're a good boy, Pelham. I haven't gotten over my wonder at you. But—you're pulling against him, in all of this, remember."

"He's decent." Real pain spoke here; his own doubts of the father gave an obstinate tinge to his reception of her objections.

A cynical sureness hardened the eyes for a moment. "Nobody's decent, when his pocket-book's affected." A merry laugh parted her lips. "How unfeeling you must find me! Let's pray I'm entirely wrong. Why not get a look at his speech, before he delivers it?" Incredulous, hope-against-hope eagerness flickered in her face.

This Pelham at once agreed to do. There was some ground for Jane's hesitancy, he reflected; most men, given Paul's position, would have been permanently intractable. But his father, after all, was different.

He could hardly let her go back for supper, although she had promised. A dizzying intemperance drove on his tongue. "I wish I could keep you, now that I have you here," and his eyes dwelt upon her alluring shapeliness; her gaze was intently busied with the panorama of uninspired villas. "You don't know what knowing you has meant to me, Jane. I was in the dumps over the whole business...."

"It's mutual, Pelham. The iron city has chiefly solid iron headpieces, I think. You were a rare find."

He chuckled. "You make the thing too intellectual, at that. I assure you that I wouldn't offer to elope with a suffrage tract, or a skirted treatise on socialism. My offer holds good, if you're willing." Playfully he increased the speed.

"Lauderdale isn't Barkis," she temporized. "Have you known me four weeks, or five?"

"So romance perishes, as the lady grows arithmetical! Love can't be weighed on the iceman's scales."

"Nor can mental dynamite blast it out, Mr. Miner. Modern marriage isn't a thing to venture lightly. Love's blindness was once thought a blessing——"

"It's often a mercy," he slipped in.

"To-day's surgery is curing the blindness. It's all right to mate as birds do, if people could part as easily. But when a heart must be pledged, not only to honeymoon days, but to the petty irks, and the tedious astronomical study of the skyhigh cost of living——It needs reflection."

"You might give me a croÛton of comfort. The especial heart I sit beside isn't pledged elsewhere, I hope?"

"Now, really——"

"That's not asking too much."

"It is," the lips pursed grimly. "It's pledged, alas, to the Uplift of the Underdog, the Castigation of the Capitalist Canine, the Manufacture of the Millennium, the Fashioning of the Future's Fascinating Feminism——"

"Enough, enough! But to no single heart," in pleading insistence.

"Nor to no married one neither," she laughed.

"Content, i' faith! Now you may go home to single blessedness and that supper you thoughtlessly promised to grace." But Pelham wondered, more than once, whether the girl's last light retort had hidden a dig at his friendship with Dorothy. Well, Jane had said less than he deserved, at that.

The convention came closer and closer; and still Paul had not had time to prepare the speech, when the son made his requests. The work at the third ramp, and the planning of an opening on the newly purchased crests beyond, kept Pelham's hands exceptionally busy, so that he did not find much time to wonder at his failure to see the expected address.

Three days before the convention, Jane met him with a worried face. "Something's rotten in the environs of the iron Copenhagen, Pelham. I learned about it from comrade Hernandez. One of the few socialist delegates, a Birrell-Florence miner named Jensen—I don't think you've met him—has been offered a direct bribe to oppose the mining bill. Somebody's busy, that's sure."

"That does sound discouraging. Let's go over your mining reports, so that I can get the facts straight. I ought to understand the situation, at least."

They went over the figures together. He began to visualize what the class struggle meant, here in the quiet, placid South. There had been four large mine explosions in the state the year before, the one at Flagg Mines killing a hundred and ninety-two——"And all of it useless, Pelham! The simplest mine safeguards——"

"The owners can't know of them!"

She shut her lips. "They cost something. Every cent cuts down profits. It's cheaper to kill men."

"It's horrible!" In dejected impotence he clenched his hands. The unemotional rows of figures began to acquire a breathing significance. His vivid imagination pictured mangled forms, the bursting hell of explosions, the isolated horror of lonely accident and death, the pallid faces of starving mothers and babies, staining the broad margins of the cheap white paper.

She looked up from the pamphlets, her brows creased. Pelham smothered an impulse to kiss away the slight gravure of worry. "The West, bad as it is in some things, at least has modern laws and safeguards." An unmeant accusation drove in her tones. "The creaky old laws here are not even followed! When was the last inspection of your mines?"

"More than a month ago. The inspector wasn't very thorough, I noticed. They were pronounced safe."

"It ought to be done weekly, at least, beside a daily inspection by your forces. Gas can collect in the coal mines, flaws and cracks in the roofing anywhere—only close inspection will do.... And, then, think of the wages paid here! Can a man live—decently, I mean, so that he can send his children to school, and all, on what you pay? And Judge Florence gets seventy-five thousand salary—outside of his dividends."

"My father gets fifty."

"It's compulsory starvation and death for the ones who really produce the wealth.... We'll see what the convention does."

Pelham missed the opening sessions; but Jane gave him reports of the meetings she witnessed, supplemented by what Hernandez and Jensen told him. It was a heated gathering. Big John Pooley was accused outright of dishonest accounting, by one violent structural iron worker. The oily eloquence of Robert E. Lee Bivens smoothed this over. Each of the administration officials—"the boodle gang," as the noisy radical minority called them—was flayed; the editor of the Voice of Labor received an especial lashing from Jensen, who charged him with deliberately selling out labor's paper to the corporations.

The machinery rolled smoothly. All protests were tombed in safely packed committees.

At last came the final night, with Paul's speech, and consideration of the mining bill afterward, as the only unfinished business.

Pooley, using his gavel vigorously, secured general quiet. He spoke of the honor paid by having as their distinguished visitor the wide-awake vice-president of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company. "Every act in his life marks Paul Judson as a friend of labor. Many of you do not know that he holds a union card—the printers elected him to honorary membership more than a year ago. He is one of us. His problems are our problems. He is turning the splendid force of his intellect to a solution of the labor question which will help employer and employee alike. A gentleman of sterling integrity, a leader among leaders——" The fulsome eulogy continued for a quarter of an hour.

Jane, who sat beside Pelham, sniffed audibly at most of the speech. He had asked his mother to go with them; but she had been too busy planning a dance at the country club, which Paul was giving for Sue, to take the evening off. He would have Jane to look after, his mother reminded him.

The boy was irritated at his companion's attitude. The glamor of the situation, with his father as the recognized champion of labor, fitted smoothly into his own rebellious dreams. With this support, he could achieve his rosiest plannings.

Paul rose to speak, alert, dignified, commanding.

He paid tribute to the audience, and to the hosts of labor they represented. They were particularly fortunate, he said, in their leadership; under the sane, conservative guidance of such men they were sure to reflect credit on the city, the state, the entire South.

"I believe in you. I believe in the work you are doing. You are the brawn and the backbone of our free white Anglo-Saxon democracy, the flower of the world's peoples. And the backbone"—he smiled embracingly—"is as necessary as the head; the brawn is as essential as the brain.

"There are some—socialists, anarchists, or whatever you choose to call them—who are working for a body without a head, brawn without a brain. You can find such bodies in the morgue. The decapitated socialist state is a corpse."

There was a burst of applause at this. Pelham went chill all over, as he realized how unpopular socialism would be made to appear. And—his father speaking!

"We have passed, as a people, out of the black gloom, our heritage from a red war of brother against brother, into the golden sunshine of a new day, a day of prosperity and plenty, an hour of progress and enlightenment. While the rest of the world is torn with war, peace is upon us; our products, sold to the warring world, assure an unprecedented prosperity to us. Beware lest the evil counselor, the plausible deceiver, the wily plotter creep in, and our ears lend attention to his seductive tones! This is no time for the disorganizer. We, as well as you, are fighting for the best things of life—peace, freedom, and the welfare of every one, capitalist and laborer alike, and a whole-souled, complete understanding and brotherhood between all of us!"

The applause was noisily demonstrative. One delegate, who had attended too many sub-conventions in various bars, started down the aisle to shake the hand of "brother Judson." The vigorous pilotage of two ushers steered him into the safer harbor of the street.

After the interruption, Paul turned to his topic. "I favor state mining regulation—and the stricter the better, always conserving the full liberty of the individual to make his free contract. That present joke at Jackson—that so-called mining law, which would bankrupt every mine owner, and drive into unemployment and starvation every mine employee in the state—I know that none of you can be so blind to your own interest as to favor it.

"I hope that you will go on record as favoring a sane, reasonable law—one protecting your employer's profit, so that your wages will be safe."

He branched into a technical discussion of the flaws of the law, emphasizing what labor would lose in every case if the proposed changes were made. There were growls of dissent from some quarters—even Pelham, sick at heart, hissed one of his statements; but the applause overwhelmed the disagreement. Benignant John Pooley, seated at the speaker's right, led the handclapping at every pause.

"It's up to you," Paul's tones sharpened, grew crisper. "You have it in your power to go on record against it, or for it. If against it, you assure a continuation of the present helpful and hopeful laws—not perfect, by any means, but laws which will be constantly bettered by an intelligent legislature, representative of the whole people. Or you can favor it—and thereby favor, instead of prosperity and progress, bankruptcy for the owners, spiritual bankruptcy for its supporters, and, worse than all, a wide-spread business depression, which will force capital elsewhere, slow down and stop the wheels of industry, drive the storekeepers out of business, and drag your own wives and families into want, poverty, ultimate degradation and death.

"The smoke from those mining settlements and furnace stacks upon the mountain above our iron city is the symbol of life—life for all of us. It is the pillar of smoke by day, the cloud of fire by night. This bill"—and he pointed an imperative finger first at the chairman, and then over the audience—"this bill will clear the sky of that smoke, and leave those mines and furnaces to rot and rust into scrap-iron. Take your choice. I believe that you cannot fail to take the wise, the sane, the brotherly, the prosperous way, for all of us, for Adamsville and the nation."

Before he could settle into his chair, and while the applause thundered at its fullest, Jensen was on his feet, shouting a demand that the chair recognize him. Pooley blandly motioned him again and again into his seat. The applause persisted.

"A question, Mr. Chairman! A question, Mr. Chairman!"

The president could ignore him no longer. "Delegate Jensen."

"Will the speaker answer a question?"

Paul, suave and collected, smilingly consented.

"Isn't it a fact that"—Jensen's voice choked in his throat, in his mad eagerness to make his point—"that the mine safeguards here are behind every state in the union? That the men are paid less, and suffer more accidents? How can there be harmony between capital and labor? Don't we both want the same thing?" His words crowded over each other; his growing incoherence was unintelligible to most of the audience. He waved a pamphlet at the speaker. "I have in my hand the latest federal mining report——"

"Aw, hire a hall, Swedey!" an ugly-faced satellite of Pooley's cut in.

The audience laughed, releasing tense feelings.

"I will do my best to answer the questions," Paul began. He picked up a paper from the desk before him. "I have here the report referred to. It is a fact that the monetary wage here is slightly lower than in most states. But the purchasing price of money is almost twice that in some Western states."

There was some applause at this.

Paul went on. "As to safeguards, that bill takes away your chief safeguard—your job."

He sat down. The jubilant audience calloused their hands noisily.

The district delegate of the miners, Jack Bowden, rose gracefully. "Isn't it also a fact, Mr. Judson, that the Birrell-Florence mines have recently installed safety devices not required by the law?"

Paul did not know it, but he bowed agreeably. "So I have understood."

Pelham writhed. Even after his father's manifestly unfair speech, he had expected intellectual honesty from him. He had dodged both parts of Jensen's question. Surface brilliancy—but the questions were still unanswered. The intense disappointment in his father wracked him with physical pain.

As she felt Pelham's body commence to rise, Jane's hand clenched his arm. "Don't do it; it will only make a scene. Let's leave."

Ignoring the pleading grasp, he rose unsteadily. Against the walls of his chest his heart pounded irregularly; he feared for a flashed instant that it would burst its way out, and he would fall dead. Gripping the seat ahead more tightly, he found his voice. "Mr. Speaker——"

Paul looked at him, for the moment surprised and displeased. The cautious smile reappeared faintly.

"About this question of wages. Isn't it a fact that, the smaller the dividends, the larger the wages? Both come from the same fund, the wealth produced; doesn't the prosperity of one cut against the prosperity of the other? So that, for labor to get its full product, profit must be abolished, and coÖperation introduced?"

There was a gasp of surprise from the few in the audience who recognized the pale figure as the speaker's son. A scattering rattle of applause shook parts of the crowd.

Paul moistened his lips, and explained: "The questioner asks, will not labor's prosperity come when profit has been abolished, and coÖperation substituted. There is something to be said for that as an air-spun theory. It has never worked in practice. We—all of us—must feed on our daily bread, not on economic theories," he finished with crisp decisiveness.

There was a generous hand at this.

Pelham's quiet words to Jane whistled between clenched teeth. "All untrue, all unfair. A thing cannot be good in theory and bad in practice. Something is wrong with a theory, if it does not take into account all facts, all reality. He can't even think honestly!"

She squeezed his hand in the darkness.

In dazed agony he sat—his father had left unperceived by the stage exit—while the delegates, their discussion carefully guided by the administration machine, voted, three to one, against the mining law on which he and Jane had built such hopeful fancies.

The summer stars hung muddily above the western horizon when he ran his car into the garage, and slipped quietly up to his room.

The rest of the Cottage was dark.

---

XII

Pelham avoided his father the next week. The son came late to breakfasts, his father did not return for luncheon, and in the evenings Pelham dropped by one of the clubs for dinner.

He simply could not face the parent. They had passed, several times, on the place; they had spoken politely. But Pelham felt that this was only a courteous truce. Their ways of thinking were irreconcilable; what he regarded as his father's intellectual dishonesty, plus his own open opposition at the federation meeting, brought the conflict to a head at last.

His father was pledged, soul and brain, to things as they were. He was deaf to the call of progress, blind to what was imminent in the world around him, Pelham's emotionalized thinking told him. Paul was a Democrat, as grandfather Judson had been; he would remain one, even though he must see that the tariff issue was an outworn ruse, and that the states' rights question had been wiped out bloodily fifty years before. He was a capitalist; he would remain one, as long as a sleepily tolerant public opinion permitted this criminality in its midst.

Yes, criminality! Property was theft; Pelham was glad to find, in his new favorite, "Erewhon," an insistent echo of Proudhon's declaration. The lands, the waters, and their products shaped by labor's hands, must belong to labor, to the people; no whitewashing by legal titles could make the robbery justifiable. Capitalist industry, in which his father played a growing part, was symbolized by the employer's fingers, like a legitimatized sneak-thief's, perpetually in the laborer's pocket-book. It was all the worse that accepted morality, law, even the church, pronounced it righteous. And his father was irretrievably part and parcel of it.

Pelham took it up with his mother, in one forlorn attempt to win her backing. She checked sharply his criticism of Paul. "He is your father, Pelham. He is older, knows more, than you. I cannot listen to you."

A sense of shame prevented the son's turning to Jane. He saw her once or twice; but she had been so right, he so wrong, about his father, that he could not feel at ease with her, until the sting of the disappointment wore off. Pelham was ashamed to go to her; he went, instead, to the clubs.

Dorothy was away; but he made out. On the night of Sue's dance, he delayed until almost midnight, in order to avoid his parents. He had worked late that afternoon, and had walked afterwards through the new portion of Hewintown that lay on both sides of the railroad track. The drabness, the noisome poverty, even in new shacks, depressed him immeasurably; his disgust at the utter inartistry had long been dulled.

As he paused at the bottom of the steps to the dancing floor, the shocking contrast unsteadied him. There, where the workers lived, all was bleak want; here, where the drones celebrated, all was plenteous riot.

The curving lines of dazzling gowns, where Lane Cullom led an elaborate figure—the shimmer of jewels, the gross powdered bosoms of the chaperones, the smug smartness of the men—what a pitiable travesty of pleasure! Festooned flowers, deferential service, barbaric, subtly lascivious music—this waste would have fed those workers for years! These were not brilliant nor creative people—merely average humanity, whom the spin of the unfair wheel had swung to the top, to fling broadcast the stolen blood-toll of underpaid, underfed, underwise grubbers.

An overdressed, overperfumed matron brushed down the steps, and gushingly pushed her simpering daughter at him. An indecent exposure, as of a woman whose charms were on sale—his mind leapt to a miner's widow, holding by the hand her anemic, sunken-eyed daughter, who had stopped him and begged for work that afternoon—any work, to keep life in her daughter's body. And this waste!

Shaking off the depressed mood, he submerged his moralizing nature, and lashed himself into a hearty share in the pleasure-making. The unhealthy intoxication caught and held him; he danced and philandered with an abandon foreign to his nature. He felt that his part in the revel dirtied him. Once started, he hurled himself almost hysterically into the soiling gayety.

He had told Tom Hewin he might be late the next morning, despite the rush caused by wartime orders; it was after four when he went to bed. A troubled dream bridged his passage from sleep to waking.

He dreamt that he was flying—a common beginning of his dreams. He had powerful, sullen red wings, that beat against the gusty waves of wind, and swirled him up and forward out of the misty valley shadows toward the lean black peak of a solitary hill. Here a figure cowered—for a moment he fancied it was Jane. It turned frightened eyes up to his—no, it was his mother. He crept into her embrace.

All at once he was aware of an approaching darkness flying between him and the twinkling valley lights at an unbelievable depth below. The darkness took form as a vast black flyer mounting toward him. He unwound his mother's arms from his neck. Dimly he knew that it was a time of war, and those twinkling lights were the eyes of vast munition factories, packed with explosives.

In a slanting drop he shot toward the black figure. He did not see the face; but he knew it for his father. Lower and lower he and the black figure circled, until the night activity below could almost be made out. He avoided two beating rushes of the black wings. He grappled with the enemy.

He felt his arms pressing outward the fierce talons that sought to grasp him, his hands straining against the pulsing throat. Back, back, back he pressed—then with a mighty effort released, and flung the other, wheeling like a thrown stick, straight into the factory of death below.

Desperately his wings beat upward. A wide-tongued flash of fire bit into the night, there was a crash as if the earth burst apart.

Still half asleep, he sat up in bed. The roar rang in his ears. The house shook; fragments of window pane tinkled on the floor.

Out of bed he jumped, avoiding the broken glass, still uncertain what was dream, what reality.

Somewhere outside he heard a negro's frightened scream, and the sound of running steps.

He pulled on a shirt and a pair of working trousers, and knotted his shoe-strings. As he ran down the hall, Hollis, his tones shaking, was speaking to the doctor on the wire.

On reaching the back porch, a peculiar smell struck his nostrils—just a suggestion of a heavy odor that he knew at once. The dead fumes of dynamite—could they be blasting that close to the house? An overcharge, perhaps?

Over the sink his mother bent, washing the blood from the arm of the cook, Diana. "What's the matter, mother?"

She turned an alarmed face to his. "The glass cut her arm—nothing serious. Hollis is phoning the doctor." As he came closer, she whispered, "Artery."

"Can I help?"

She looked white and worried. "You'd better go to the mine, Pelham. It's an explosion, I think."

"Which way?"

"Sounded very close—that first ramp, perhaps——"

He went for the car; it would be quicker, and it might be needed.

As he cut through the gap, on the road just under the summit in front, parallel to the old dummy line, he noticed that the gap workings, and the second ramp, were deserted. The road turned sharply to the north, circling the long squat storehouse. He slowed mechanically, as a quick side squint caught the group on the steps: McArdle, the clerk, his anemic face, under the sparse scrub of beard, flushed from his emotional exertion, hectoring the dozen frightened negroes in front of him.

"What's wrong, Mac?"

The white man cursed the panicky negroes, the explosion, his job which kept him tied to the building.... "I can't get 'em to go back, Mr. Judson, the——" He was off again.

"Leave the store, come on with me——" He snapped open the door of the car.

"Got to watch the phone. The hospitals are sending doctors——"

"It's that bad?"

Pelham turned on the power again, and turned up the front of the hill. The air was clear here of the sickly odor that had reached the house—the wind swept this slope clear of the reminder of what lay beyond. Just before the ramp buildings showed beyond the trees, it came to him again—the stabbing, strangling odor of exploded dynamite. The tendency to nausea twisted his face into grotesque inhumanity; he held his breath as well as he could, and shoved on.

Now he had a view of the head of the ramp, and the shacks on both sides. His first impression was that it looked strangely usual: same houses, same isolated scrags of trees, all the familiar slopes and rises. A cloudy, half-hysterical belief fought within him that nothing had happened; surely exploding death and stifling horrors had not torn this kindly hill, these humble workers!

His vision cleared. The shacks were not the same; there was only a torn dilapidation on the farther side of the opening, only the vacuous shells of buildings stood on the nearer side. Horror visible, a wavering fog of dust and gray-smoky vapor, hovered over the top of the ramp. The huddling activity of the figures grouping and scattering above the opening, this was all unusual.

Running the car against a mound of red earth, he climbed clumsily out. His legs trod an unreal soil; it was as if he had forgotten how to articulate their use. The hurrying men descending the artificial slope did not notice him; they were intent on what was below.

On the third level he passed four figures lying parallel, motionless, dreadfully relaxed. He pressed his hands madly against his face, to clear the dust from his eyes, the punishing ache from his nostrils. He stopped, unable to proceed; dead men even this high up! One of the men shuddered, raised himself sideways. He saw that they were merely resting, recovering. The rescue work must be going on, then! He hurried lower.

Here was Tom Hewin, eyes bloodshot, a blackened bandage bulging out from his forehead. "You too?"

Hewin came closer, peering emptily into Pelham's face. He muttered something.

"What's 'at?"

"Hell." The manager held to his arm, as a rock to cling to, and, walking painfully, led him down the cluttered ramp, deeper into the dizzying mist. Every few feet he stopped to shout disjointed explanations or profanity into Pelham's ear. Grotesque shapes appeared suddenly, flowed both sides of them, were gone. Flickering lanterns bobbed horribly around the entrances; they stumbled over two prone figures, their wavering lantern lights sputtering out, like star-headed deities fallen and expiring. Wild bursts of imaginative activity rocked Pelham's perceptions; there was nothing real in the whole thing. The only living creatures were himself and this shrunken, dirtied being who shouted in his ear, descending ever into a darkening pit.

"It got them convicts...." The story stopped, as they picked their way carefully around two uniformed internes desperately applying a pulmotor to a body flat on old sacking. There was another body behind, and four tall, tired negroes drooped on their feet, waiting to be sent again into the stifling danger. "Everybody in six ... maybe eight. I counted eighteen." He took a moment off to scream commands at a foreman, who nodded humbly, and led his men back into the opened mountain intestine called entry six. "Eight is choked up with rocks. They wasn't many in eight. Niggers, maybe."

"They're digging in?"

"They got into six. Working on eight—the whole mountain's caved down."

"What did it?"

"Overcharge—damn' carelessness—God knows. At this time of all others—the damn' fools! I told them men that roofin' was cracked—an' then they overcharge! The damn'——"

"Shall I take eight?"

"I've got Gahey there. See the clerk at the bottom; he's got the dope. Wire the State Mining Commission. We've notified the hospitals and the Red Cross. I've sent for the Birrell-Florence rescue corps; dunno what good it'll do. See Dockery; he's day clerk." Hewin shoved him on, and stumbled aside.

The air was clearer in the corrugated iron building at the bottom. The lights were lit, and their sallow glimmer equalled the dimness without. Pelham went at the job quickly—Dockery, cool and collected, spread the facts before him. He followed on the ramp map; Dockery explained lucidly. "In this workway there were thirteen men, Mr. Judson; ten negroes here; and here, and here ... I figure about twenty-five killed, unless some are alive in eight."

The human magnitude of the thing focussed within him. He gripped himself tightly, and sent off a preliminary wire to the mining commission. It was after two when he got away from the office, to direct the temporary care of the bodies which had been carried to the storehouse in the nearer edge of Hewintown.

He saw Jane Lauderdale at the other end of the long drab room, busily directing the emergency workers the United Charities had sent. Deaf to the questions of the company doctor at his side, he stood for a long moment. Jane put her arms under the shoulders of a broken old negress—mother or wife—clinging to one still body on a blanket-covered packing case, and handed her tenderly to another of the girls. He caught one full glance at the woman's face, ravaged with a life's hard unhappiness, printed now with this vaster dumb suffering. The sharp clear brilliance of Southern sunshine drove in parallel golden bars from a western window. Outside, the gay blue of early summer, the beauty and joy; within, this man-made house of death.

Jane did not see him. He returned to the grim task of providing for what new bodies were borne into the temporary morgue.

He could not find time to think; here was all that he could do.

---

XIII

The morning's mail included one letter of importance for Pelham. It was a form announcement of a directors' meeting of the mining company, at ten.

Judge Florence was calling the group to order, when Pelham arrived. The young mining engineer took one comprehensive look around the massive directors' table, a plate-glass-covered stretch centering the sumptuous gray office. Slowly he let himself into the one vacant chair. Paul Judson sat next to the head; Henry Tuttle, of Tuttle and Mabry, general counsel for the corporation, was talking earnestly to him. Kane, one of Judson's directors, was grouped with two of the younger men from the other interest. Sam Ross, John and Stephen Birrell, Randolph, Pelham nodded to each in turn: their faces seemed to him carved into a new heartless savagery,—a huddled group of soul-squeezing masters of men.

As general manager, Paul reported briefly the facts of the accident, with evidence, gathered by company detectives, that the blow-up originated in a miner's criminal carelessness in seriously overcharging in number six entry. This was due to wilful misunderstanding of the company's haste to get out iron, to take advantage of war prices; haste, but not carelessness, was demanded.

Two of the fourteen in the entry most affected were still alive; one had given his deposition at the hospital, telling of the conversation between the miner and his foreman immediately preceding the explosion, in which the dead miner had boasted of the overheavy charge.

"There are, according to the latest reports," Paul concluded, "twenty-two dead, and about thirty injured in greater or less degree. Spence and Jacks have filed already the first damage suits. If we pay these claims, it will cost the company from a quarter of a million to a million dollars. Since the company is not at all responsible, I recommend that we make no settlement whatever." His thin lips lifted together, and contracted. He sat down.

"Can you give us the legal side, Henry?" Jeremiah Florence had lifted Henry Tuttle from Choctaw Falls to Adamsville, and started him on the driving career that made him the worst-feared corporation lawyer in this part of the South. He regarded him now with fatherly admiration.

Tuttle rose lankly, his thin watery eyes staring with fixed impassivity. His voice was soft and malleable; he was never hurried, never vehement; he possessed a tact that caught the idea of the more creative type, then carried it to unerring completion. "Paul's suggestion would hold, if we decided to follow it. There is no liability in this state for such an accident; it would be a different matter if the legislature had passed that additional liability act last fall. That is the legal side."

He took his feet more slowly in answer to the chairman's second question. "Public policy? That is perhaps different. It might be well to make some sort of settlement. It's never hard to buy off Spence and Jacks; three or four hundred apiece—a thousand at the most—they'd keep half, or more——"

John Birrell, the older of the two boys, who retained much of the implacable push that had carried old Stephen Birrell to the headship of the local mining industry, spoke sharply from his seat. "I agree with Mr. Judson. This is no time to yield; ore's high enough to pay for any unpleasantness. Give them an inch, they'll demand the whole plant. They were restless before, in our mines as well as the Judson; even the furnaces report union talk. This is the chance to step on the whole matter."

Three or four expressions of similar vigor were too much for Pelham. He took the floor unsteadily; the glances bent on him were curious, almost pitying. The table's circle had read of the pass with his father at the labor convention; there was an uneasy titillating expectancy as to how much of a fool he would make of himself, how long he could hang on to the fringes of business, while he nourished a sprouting radicalism.

"I represent only two shares as a stockholder," he began painstakingly. "I am only one director. But I wonder if you gentlemen know what you are doing. Thirty of your workers lie seriously injured; twenty-two families are deprived of their bread-winners through an accident not their fault, but yours; yours, and other mining employers' who have fought all safety legislation, even as late as last week——" His eye caught a side glimpse of his father's unperturbed profile, as he rolled an unlighted cigar around the rim of his teeth. "It is not enough to say that these were convicts, or negroes; many were hired white workers. I don't know how well you have the law sewed up; but every idea of justice entitles them to full settlement. Any other decision would be an outrage."

The aged chairman, while disavowing any sympathy with the spirit of the young man's remarks, wondered if a proper regard for public opinion would not dictate some middle course. The younger Birrell sided with him, as did Sam Ross, Tuttle, and several others. At length Paul Judson was asked again for his opinion.

"Gentlemen, you understood what I said before. I have told you what you must do—refuse to pay one cent to any claimant, no matter how strongly the claim is pressed. Any other course, in the long run, will be suicide. Unless you want ultimate bankruptcy, you will treat this as a business matter." He gathered into a portfolio the papers before him. "I have some matters to attend to. I have shown you how to handle the matter. You can call me in for a vote."

The discussion veered and twisted after his abrupt departure; but Pelham could not fail to see, even through his disgust, how his father's insistent advice, no matter how unpleasantly phrased, dominated the group. The driver of men is never popular; and Paul Judson's keen, aggressive mind drove them against their wills. Within an hour a resolution embodying his idea was put and carried with only the son's dissenting vote.

The Times-Dispatch contained a report of the meeting, and an interview with Paul Judson stressing the legal side of the situation. An editorial referred to the disaster as one of the necessary casualties of industrial growth, paid tribute to the company's promise of further safety devices, and hung on an attack on the "forces of unrest that sought to make capital of the accident, to aid their insidious unAmerican propaganda."

Pelham was puzzled by this wording, until he came across Jane, who had charge of the relief work among the victims' families. Her large eyes sparkled with a light of warfare, as she fell into step beside him, among the poor-ridden shanties of Hewintown. "You hadn't heard? Why, it's all over town now, Pell. There's a big meeting at Arlington Hall at seven-thirty to-night, to discuss the accident—and a strike!"

"Fine! It had to come—the radical unionists were just waiting the chance."

"Will you take me?"

"You couldn't keep us away."

They arrived early, but the crowd had come earlier. Only by taking stage seats were they able to get in at all. When the son of the owner of the mine was recognized, there was slight hissing, and scattered handclapping from a few Socialists. Jensen came over quietly to Pelham, his eyes dancing. "Your application's gone through, my boy; Hernandez has your red card in his pocket."

They shook hands silently. Now, Pelham realized, he was a recognized member of the red-bannered army, who were leading man into his promised earthly heritage.

Michael Serrano, who presided, plunged into the thing that had brought them there. "I'm a bricklayer by trade, as you all know. The bricklayers have made me president of their local four times. I'm called the 'reddest of the red.' If this murderous mine accident doesn't make all of you reds too, then you aren't fit for anything but to be murdered!"

The crowd stamped approval. They had come in fighting spirit; the proper key had been hit from the start.

"Now, if ever, is your chance to win your rights. The papers have been slobbering of wartime profits on ore; the reckless haste to line their pockets was the real cause of this explosion for which the worthy directors of your mines are responsible. They can't afford a shutdown now; this is your hour to win!"

Turning from the applause, he introduced Ben Spence as "a labor lawyer, with a union card in place of a heart." Spence and Jacks were the regular federation attorneys, and Spence was quite close to Pooley and Bivens; but he always professed a near-socialism that captivated his hearers in Labor Day addresses. He passed from a humorous opening into an indictment of the mining corporations that brought the hot crowd clamoring to their feet, with wild shouts of "Go to it, Ben! Eat 'em up!"

The next few speeches scattered. Pelham wondered if the mass desire would evaporate without action. Serrano saw the drift, and walked over to where the son of Paul Judson sat drinking in the wild-mouthed denunciation of his father's rapacity and cold-heartedness. "I'm going to call on you, comrade."

"You have to?"

The chairman nodded. "You give 'em hell. I'll sound 'em out first. These regular unionists—pfui!" He spat in scorn, and went back to his splintered gavel.

Jack Bowden, of the Miners', tied up with the Big Pooley gang, finished his inconclusive remarks. At once Serrano's orotund Italian voice shot out into the crowd. "Now you've heard what you're getting. And you've heard what you're entitled to. How many miners are in this crowd? Raise your hands."

Amid general neck-stretching, the hands went up—almost a third of the vociferous audience. There was a rattle of applause at the good showing.

"Are you going to stand being treated as dirt, or will you act like men? How many of you miners vote strike? Let's hear your voices!"

The shout of approval showed how avid they were for some direct expression of their accumulated resentment. Bowden, a worried look on his face, rose to protest; the ecstatic chairman waved him down.

"I'm going to do an unusual thing. I'm going to call on one of your employers to tell what he really thinks about you. I call on Comrade Pelham Judson, assistant manager of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company."

There was no applause. Pelham, tremendously alone, walked down to the front of the big platform. His mind registered random impressions—the faded tawdriness of the cheap bunting below the dirty footlights, the smell of fetid cigars and pipes, bulging necks above dirty unstarched collars, the fierce resentment and shining hunger for better things flaring in the eyes just below him. The irresistible contrast with the suave gray fittings of the directors' room flooded him.

He summoned all his knowledge of speaking, and stood silent, his eyes ranging the vast pit and the jammed galleries.

"Fellow laborers—comrades——" His voice choked. "Many of you know how I think about this. What happened two days ago on that red mountain I love was murder—definite, systematized murder. The danger has always been known; and when every effort to wipe out that danger by law has been fought, and the deaths occur, I call that deliberate murder!"

There was a startled pelt of applause in one corner of the room. It did not spread; the others were too interested, too surprised, to pass judgment.

"What ought you to do? Your referendum will decide. If I were in your places, there is only one thing I could do—and that is, strike! Strike against the company, and me—yes! Strike for the enforcement of the weak-kneed mining law, and for a better one! Strike for more pay, shorter hours, and your organization! Fight back! Unite"—his long, tense arms reached out, and drew in together in a clenching grasp—"bring together your force as one man, and there is no power in the world that can stand against you!"

This was familiar. They howled agreement.

"There are two ways you must strike. Part of the blame lies with that legislature at Jackson. You elected them; you can retire 'em. Strike politically. Unite at the polls—there'll be a labor ticket, the socialist ticket, for every office—drive it home to victory! Then you will have laws which would make such an explosion an impossibility!"

There were a few mock groans from the Voice of Labor crowd, but the majority still sat silent.

"You have a quicker weapon, on the industrial field—a strike. We've all read the announcement of the company's action; my vote was the only one against it at the directors' meeting. You must strike to teach your masters what they can't do! Strike for justice to the thirty men maimed and crippled in the cause of profits! Strike for the twenty-three families who are the worst sufferers from this hell. Yes, twenty-three, Mr. Chairman; I received phone word that Hank Burns died of his injuries at six-thirty to-night." There was a faintly rising moan of anger at this. "If you unite, as I believe you will, there is no power in the world that can stop you!"

He went back to his seat, trembling, his forehead moist with frigid sweat. Jane's rapturous hands caught his; he felt fully repaid.

The meeting broke up in an uproar of enthusiasm.

As he started for the Andersons' with Jane, the mad spell of a June moon-bright night caught and tortured him, until it was pain to think of letting her go. The cool darkness rushed by on both sides. Out of the crevasses of big buildings they passed into the more open stretches of low urban homes. The country club road invited; they slid over gentle rises until they had their fill of tree rustle and moon shimmer. Against the sky they traced the soft outlines of the swan and the lyre swung to the East over the dull rose glow of unsleeping furnaces; but the persistent flood from the moon dulled even Vega to a mild glimmer. At length the car whirred up the last hill, and stopped in front of the darkened house where she was to sleep.

There was so much to be said. The beauty of the night was throat-catching, and lifted them away from the hectic scene at Arlington Hall, and the bitter fight that to-morrow must bring. He felt her full sympathy with the attitude he must take; her first hand-grasp, as he took his seat after the speech, told him that. His hand, as the car waited before her house, lingered fearfully against hers; an electric current snapped between the two.

His fancy played fitfully with fantasies that started with his lifting that warm dear hand to his kiss ... then the yielding lips ... then the mutual surrender. But like a scourge memory listed over to him the mouths he had kissed, youthfully, poignantly, casually.... No, he had done with that. This must be no mere union of bodies; love should begin with a pure communion of kindred spirits. A kiss, a caress—these were the soft persuasive preludes to the swelling finale of mating; cheapen them, wear out their springbud freshness, and the blossom of mated love must remain stunted, like a frost-warped dogwood flower,—must henceforth be soiled, like a draggled pear-blossom mired by an April downpour. Hereafter he would hold his lips—and keep hers—inviolate, virginal; the miraculous event of love consummated should not be fouled by recollections of squandered embraces, of cheap philanderings.

The desire to touch and conquer the hand beside his almost overpowered him, despite his ascetic musing. Spasmodically he pulled his hand away. A force stronger than his will brought it slowly back, until it shivered against hers.

Quietly, with restrained and schooled abandon, his words breathed out. "Jane ... dear ... dearer—dearest——"

Her intuitive eyes read the words that were coming, before his own mind framed them. A sudden blossoming of joy surged within her, so great for a moment that it prevented speech; then, panic-stricken, she wished to postpone the inevitable question, to delay the rapture, to flee away, with the words unspoken, for just a little longer to consider the matter.... She said nothing of this; her silence, blent into the silence of the mountain at the end of the rise before them, was voluble with another message than delay or hesitation.

An agony of doubt racked him. Hadn't he been mistaken all along? Wouldn't she laugh at him, for his presumption in reading even toleration in her eyes, that radiated indifferently upon things unworthy, like himself, and worthy alike? Would he dare go on? He must—even if her laugh shattered the iridescent sphere of his hopes.

An impassioned eagerness to get the words out made his tone forced and unnatural. "Will you have me, Jane? Will you love me—a little? I know I've no right to speak—my affairs are so tangled, and all——"

Then she raised her arm, until the hand was above his head; and her fingers touched his hair gently, caressingly, soothingly.

"Jane...." His voice was rich with reverent unbelief.

"Pelham dear——"

In excess of happiness, he caught the hand beside him almost to his lips; and then, instead, pressed it against his breast, against his heart.

His laugh was almost incoherent. "I was so afraid you'd say 'no.'"

The light shone only on her averted cheek. "I was so afraid ... you wouldn't ask me!"

"Silly girl! When every infinitesimal part of me aches and cries out to you! I can't believe yet that you've said yes."

"Yes," in joyous affection.

"And I will aim a lifetime toward making you glad you've said it!"

"I'll always be glad, no matter what comes."

"I've got to let you go now—it must be almost three.... And I'm not going to kiss you, even now, dearest—dearest—dearest! I'll say it all night to myself; I'll never use another word——"

"Well, hardly ever," she amended prettily.

"When we can be married, then you'll let me kiss you. And don't put me off too long!"

He fingered the wheel thoughtfully; why let her out at all? No, he must help protect her now.

"Good night, Jane ... dearest mine."

"Good-night ... my man."

His car sliced the friendly night that lay heavy on the hill road. He whirled up the great half circle to the crest far to the east of the cottage, and muffled the engine at the highest point. To his left, too far away to be distinguished except as an irregular blackness against the softer gray of the valley behind, lay the black peak of Crenshaw Hill, the fatal shattered entries beyond it, the mourning shacks of Hewintown near it. There was no light in them. Behind was the blur of Shadow Valley, and the endless diminishing rollers of hills sloping slowly to the salt gulf monotonous miles away. Before him lay Adamsville, almost asleep; the symmetrical criss-cross of lights, like a vast checker-board blending into the far distance, caught his imagination. His heart sang aloud with his own happiness—an emotion so overcoming, that he forced himself to think of lesser topics, to regain mental balance before returning to the rapture of Jane again....

The iron city, an iron checker-board of lights.... The will-less men moved here and there by great hands hidden in the opposing darknesses—by capital's sleek and pudgy paw, by labor's grimed and toil-stained fingers: behind these, moved by the greater mastery of the forces of nature; by the mountain, and the iron grip it embodied; by the touch of the golden god that was to-day its master. A futile game, for the poor pawns ... where one in a thousand became king; and kingship brought no joy, but only division and unrest. The blasted, furnace-punished ore was material for the painful alchemy that made it gold: more than this, the miners themselves, the stooped laborers, the slatternly starved wives, the thin children, the corpses lifted from the ruptured bowels of the hill, to a final scattering in some cheap pine house of decay—all these were part of the horrid modern alchemy that made them gold for his father's sake. That he had ever been a part of it! Well, with Jane his, he was through with the old horrors....

Jane ... with an effort he brought his mind again to the scene before him. The sleeping homes of the iron city, black in the darkness before him! Each of those tiny houses held situations, problems, as complex as that storm that must soon break over the cottage beyond the mining section. They were all asleep, gathering strength for fresh outbreaks of hatred and love.

What if they never woke? What if the sleep became a merciful finality, sponging out the aimless unrest men called life? Who could say which would be better?

For him, his problems simplified, glorified now by what Jane had said to-night, life, with all its zest and joyous restlessness, was infinitely preferable.

He must go on; he must make the complete break with his father, and soon. It was a perilous thing, this going alone; but he knew that he was able to do it, just as he had once roamed alone the hidden reaches of the mountain.

He stood out from his car, to be nearer to the mountain. It was an instinctive action he could not have explained. The soft strength of the soil rose through him; he felt refreshed. It was not only battlefield, but the cause of the struggle; it was the prize to be won by the angry puppets its iron strings pulled here and there. There was no other course he could follow; he felt a calm certainty that the mountain, the great dark mother with its bleeding iron heart of red, understood this, and was wholly in accord with it. The mountain understood it—and a dearer, nearer heart, his from henceforth.

He slept at length peacefully.

Paul Judson pushed the next morning's paper over to Mary without words, his stiff forefinger indicating the part he wished her to read. It was an account of the previous night's meeting, featuring a florid write-up of Pelham's emotional outburst.

She finished it without comment.

Her husband looked at her evenly. "There has never been any insanity in either side of the family, or I would think Pelham came by this naturally."

"He isn't a fool, Paul."

"Where does he think this will end? It's bad enough when we are united against the perpetual unrest of the ignorant mob. But to have my son turn against all that his ancestors fought for!"

Mary watched him thoughtfully. "You two cannot pull together, Paul. Why not help him get somewhere else?"

"You mean——"

"You mentioned that Governor Tennant wanted to do you a favor, and suggested Pell as mining inspector, or something. Wouldn't that straighten out this situation?"

Paul looked at her doubtfully. "One of us has to make the break. Of course, he'll make trouble wherever he is. But he is my son. A thing like that might make him behave."

Finishing his coffee, he pushed his chair back raspingly over the hardwood floor. Over in the boys' wing he called Ned. "Will you tell Pelham I would like to speak to him?"

Father and eldest son walked quietly out over the untouched portion of the outcrop before the house. "You don't want me to discuss with you the unusual line of activity you have taken up, Pelham...."

"It is only fair to tell you, father, that I have joined the socialist party."

"You don't intend to remain with the mining company."

Pelham gulped. This was what it must mean.

"I can get Bob Tennant to appoint you a State Mining Inspector. You can live on the salary."

"There is no work I would rather do.... Of course, I can not change my ideas."

"We'll regard it as settled. I'll wire him this morning."

Two days later, Pelham received the notification of the appointment, just before Spence, the labor lawyer, had him on the phone. The young mine-operator at once shared his information.

"That's splendid, Judson! I've got news too—the referendum was eight to one for strike—and the national's wired that John Dawson's on the way! Big John Dawson—now for some fireworks!"

This was progress, with a vengeance! Pelham was free at last of the company; the revolution—at least in Adamsville—was heartily on its way. With Jane's spirit backing him, and always beside him, he felt that this hectic week had justified itself. Now for the triumphant clash!

---

XIV

John Dawson, organizer of the National Federation of Miners, picked his way through the raw grayness of the Union Depot, in the muscle-cramped crowd that came in on the day coaches of the 5:10, until he reached the station itself. His eyes picked out the hesitant clot of four men off to one side. "You the committee?"

Serrano introduced them briefly: Jack Bowden, state agent of the miners; Ben Wilson and John McGue, of the strike committee. Dawson clenched each hand in a vast paw, then beckoned them away from his two grips. "Wait a minute." His alert eyes sieved the crowd. "See them two boys in gray hats? They've followed me all the way from Wilmington. Hope they've had a nice trip; I do love detectives...." He motioned them away. "Naw, I carry my own." Adjusting the two big valises carefully, he smiled, "Let's move."

They went out through the truck entrance, and across the gusty avenue, clanging with cars filled with early workers. Depot idlers stared at the group; the tall heavy-loaded man in the center would hold attention anywhere.

Serrano stopped half a block away, at a flamboyant entrance displaying "Mecca Hotel" in dirty white letters above. The clerk, a limp young man without a collar, shoved over the tobacco-stained page. Dawson signed it, forming each letter painstakingly. They walked up one flight to the room.

Dawson looked around critically.

"Biggest room they have. They'll put in the other two beds to-day."

"Some of the boys may have to spend the night here. I'm glad it's near the station, if any quick getaway has to be made." The organizer smiled, his lips curling back over big front teeth; there was something disquieting and unsmiling in the look.

Serrano got rid of the rest of the committee, and went into an elaborate detail of the situation.

Dawson was able to help him out. "You'll find I know the land pretty well. I worked three years in the West Adamsville mines; they ran me out in the strike of '04. Who can you count on?"

He listened attentively, checking certain names in a thick yellow notebook.

"I know this Jack Bowden kind. We find 'em all over. In West Virginia we amputated a bunch like that. We've got 'em in Chicago, Indianapolis, New York.... Give 'em a few days, and they'll show yellow; then it's easy to fire 'em. Bowden looked fishy. These labor tin Jesuses make me sick! Better than anybody else, and sold out in advance. Who's this Judson?"

The energetic bricklayer told of the recent convert, and the Arlington Hall meeting.

"He can talk? We'll use him. But you can't trust them fellows too far. I'm not a socialist, you know; don't believe in voting worth a damn. Never got nowhere, never will get nowhere. But in a strike, they help."

They went over the morning paper. "Mmm—only a few hundred out——What's the straight goods?"

"Over five hundred from the Judson mines, six fifty from the Birrell-Florence, and about four hundred others from the mines on either side. We haven't touched West Adamsville yet, or Irondale. If only the furnaces could be called out...."

"Won't come. We can try; but mine strikes don't get 'em. No organization. These men all joined?"

"Joined or joining."

"This says scabs from Pittsburgh.... No law to stop 'em?"

"Ben Spence, our lawyer, says there isn't. In the last street-car strike we tried the law; the courts wouldn't enforce it."

"How do the boys feel?"

"They want to fight like hell. They'll stop the scabs."

"Got to be careful there. That sort of thing is dynamite; it blows both ways. Company won't hear the committee?"

"Young Judson's father's the reason. Says he won't allow a union man in his shop hereafter. No committees, nor nothing."

"Let's see the place."

They walked from the end of the car line. The roads through the property had been made city streets, when Hillcrest Addition was thrown open to the public, and the party could not be stopped. Dawson paused to shake hands with the groups of pickets on the various cross roads. He had a personal word for each, and a concentrated way of getting the details he needed out of the incoherent members of the working body.

Joined by Ben Wilson and several of the pickets, they passed into the company estate, and by the entrances to the gap drifts and the second ramp. Only a few negroes were at work in the gap; it was not until the second big slope that the white workers appeared. Dawson looked a question at stocky Wilson, hardly up to his vest pocket.

"Convicts. Almost three hundred of them."

"Any niggers go out?"

"Half a dozen. You met one, Ed Cole, picketing by Thirtieth Street."

A red-faced Irishman walked out of a knot of workers and greeted the tall organizer. "Hello, Dawson. Remember me?"

"Your mug's familiar. Lemme see—your name's Hewin, ain't it?"

The superintendent grinned. "You ought to remember it. You beat hell out of me in the Coalstock strike for staying on as foreman."

"Scab then, eh, and still at it." Dawson's tolerance had a touch promising danger.

"That's what you'd call it. I'm in charge here. Mind your own business, or I'm not the one who'll get beat up this time." He turned with grinning ugliness and climbed back to the opening.

They cut over to the railroad track, and entered Hewintown by the back way. Dawson studied the land carefully. "That's the way they'd bring the train from Pittsburgh, of course. And that's a pretty narrow cut beyond that dinky little house. Who lives there?"

"Mr. Judson, the vice-president."

"This ain't no place for a mine-owner."

Dawson's comment on the shack town was a string of profanity. "Even in West Virginia they had better dumps than those! I wouldn't let my pig live there. Company houses, as always."

"Yes."

"This crew out?"

"All but two or three. The convict stockade is on the next hill; the niggers live in Adamsville, or in Lilydale, over yonder." His pudgy fingers pointed through the trees to the south.

They passed company detectives and guards, in clusters of two or three, at every corner. "These always here?"

"Most of them new."

"We'll help 'em earn their money.... Take me by number three, and the hospital you mentioned. I want to see it all."

They were not allowed to go down this ramp; guards with shotguns refused to allow any ingress. "You might get blowed up too, buddy."

Serrano left them, to pass around the word of the meeting that night. Dawson listened to the vivid hatred of the company all the way down the hill. A vigorous nod punctuated his opinion. "That's what they are; a bunch of lousy murderers. It's no worse here than other places; you've got to fight for what you get, anywhere. Pretty bunch of uglies here already! And when they try to run in Pittsburgh scabs——" He did not finish.

The momentum of the strike grew day by day. Most of the papers continued unfriendly; but the Register, which made a point of claiming to stand for the man in the shop as well as the man in the office, insisted that public sentiment was with the strikers, especially because of the recent memory of the accident horror.

The packed meetings in Arlington Hall were reported favorably in this paper; and they were emotional successes. John Dawson was not a graceful speaker; but his harsh bellow meant business, and his imperative magnetism shone through the awkwardest gesturings. Bowden contributed suave appeals, and Big John Pooley, the state president, took the floor the second night to remind that organized labor stood behind their efforts. "I am sure," he boasted, "that you will win, and even sooner than you expect. You have the companies practically beaten now."

Serrano turned to Dawson, puzzled. "What's he getting at, with that stuff?"

The enormous organizer looked at him searchingly. "If you watch a snake hole, you're liable to see the snake crawl out sooner or later."

During the rest of Pooley's speech, the huge organizer, head sprawled back against the wall, chin upraised, studied the speaker with a hungry intentness, as if investigating for that weak spot he had found every man to possess. The bricklayer chairman phrased and rephrased to himself his introduction for the next speaker, one of the negro miners. It was always risky, this opening the union doors to the black workers. Of course, as a socialist Serrano always urged it, arguing that labor's only safety lay in having this convenient surplus labor force within its own ranks, as protection against black scabbing; but there was some division in the local about it, and the southern unionist took slowly to the idea; occasional revivals of racial intolerance, based upon dislike of sharing work with the darker cousin, split unions and federations, delaying solidified strength for years and decades.

Pooley ended with lame vehemence; and the voice of the Italian chairman thundered another plea for labor's unity, introducing a black man to show that no boundaries of nation or race counted in the centuries' long battle. "I'm going to call on Will Cole to speak to you. Will is a black man, who was in Number Eight entry when the dynamite murder took place. His dead comrades talk to you through his living lips. Come on, Will, tell us why you don't look for a pay check this week."

They laughed at the rude jesting at the invariable boomerang effect of their sole weapon of protest—a laugh that quieted to respect, as the grimy overalled negro was urged up the side steps and to the center of the stage. His eyes blinked at the dazzle of the lighting until the whites showed; his shoulders hunched deprecatingly. He could not speak to them as man to man, that he knew; the difference in color was ever in his mind, and in his audience's.

"Ah'm only a nigger," he began diffidently. "You-all white folks don't want niggers in yo' unions, you-all don't want us to wu'k whar you do. Some er you don't lak us havin' our own union. An' niggers is crazy too; Ah kaint make dat wu'thless gang in number two come out, nohow.

"But Ah come out. You-all know Jim Cole was in Number Six when de mine oxploded; you-all know he's dead now. Ah live on dat mountain, same as Mister Judson. Dere ain't no more reason why me 'n' mah brudder should a got killed in dem mines dan why he should'a. Ah done jined dis union, an' Ah'll die befo' Ah'll scab. An' any scab dat comes mah way had better have his ears all aroun' his haid!"

They chuckled at the conclusion, but it made its effect. "When you all unite, white and black, you can snap your fingers at all the Paul Judsons in the world!" Serrano never lost a chance to drive home a point.

Next afternoon's headlines promised the arrival of a trainload of workers during the night. This lent an added air of uncertainty to the meeting following. Dawson's pleas to the men to hold fast, to convert the scabs with arguments, not bricks, were as strong as ever; but despite the ample audience, even he was a little upset by the fact that the whole Bowden-Pooley crowd were absent from their stage seats.

When he got around to Machinists' Hall later in the same evening, for the conference over the next day's activities, he found the state labor organization present in full force. The ornate double rows of mahogany-stained chairs, arranged in a hollow diamond shape, to accommodate the fraternities that met in the hall, with raised seats at the four points of the diamond for the officers, were half filled with the Pooley followers. Dawson called the meeting to order.

Jack Bowden rose, spit carefully into the shiny brass cuspidor, placed there to preserve the long-haired red carpet, and began. "Men, the strike is won! We've been in consultation with Mr. Judson and Mr. Kane, and the whole thing is to be called off to-morrow morning! They agree to consider every one of our demands, provided only we don't insist on the demand for unionization. We can't win, with this trainload of detectives and workers from up north; I think we're lucky to beat 'em this way." He turned to Dawson. "You've done mighty fine work, John Dawson; and the state treasury of the mining union will be glad to foot your bill comin' here and goin' back."

Dawson was out of the chair, his throat palpitating, almost too choked to get out a word. "I've been waiting for you and your kind to show your hands, Bowden. I'm glad you've done it this soon. Did Mr. Judson say he would grant all demands, except unionization?"

Pooley shifted his lame leg, and spoke up. "Mr. Kane it was we talked to to-night."

Dawson's clear-thrown tones fired the next question at him. "Did Mr. Kane promise to grant every demand, except only unionization?"

"He said they'd consider 'em. It's the best——"

"It's nothing, and you know it! Fire me and the real union men who are making the trouble, and turn the whole thing over to you yellow-livered double-dealers—a fine way to run a strike! With us gone, and the strike broken, then your Mr. Kane, who isn't even a boss, would agree to consider the demands. Are you damned fools, or plain ordinary crooks?"

He paused for a moment. Bowden started to reply, but was checked by fear of injury, as Dawson took one tremendous step toward him. Pelham Judson, seated to the right, caught his eye. "If that there Judson's son had spilled this soft-soap, I could get it; you might expect it from he and his class." Pelham winced at the scorn. "But you—a union card dirtied in your pocket, you, a Judas to your kind—you got no place in a room with decent men."

Pooley tried to bolster up Bowden's pallid protest, blustering, "You look here, Dawson. The State Federation of Labor——"

"Damn the State Federation of Labor! If any organization, labor or otherwise, stands in the way of our beatin' a fight, we'll smash it! We're going to win, do you get me? You keep out. As for you, Bowden——" He came close to the local agent, bending down from his towering six feet and a half to bring his face near the other's. "You better get out, before I have the national office down on your neck. This is final: from now on, you stay out. We'll run the strike without any talk from you. Go back and tell your Mr. Kane that there's a bunch here he can't double cross, or buy out! Now git!"

Three times the suave agent started to speak. His fingers wandered uncertainly up and down the shiny buttons of his fancy vest, his eyes glanced away from the brutal dominance in the huge face before him. At last he turned to Pooley. "Goin', John?"

Pooley noted the cringe, and his nostrils lifted slightly. He spoke definitely. "There's no hard feelin' about this, Dawson? You understand that——"

"Yes, I understand." The sudden burst of anger had gone; there was a vast patience in every syllable. "I understand; you needn't explain." He turned dispassionately to the others. "Now, boys, what's the reports for to-day?"

The work was finally done; they started out. At the door they were stopped by half a dozen newspaper men, who had been held up by the doorman until the conference was over. "Anything special for to-morrow, Mr. Dawson?"

The big miner grinned amicably. "You might say everything's coming our way. With twenty two hundred men out, and five of the mines stopped, things are lookin' up."

The reporter for the Advertiser pushed out a question. "Did you advise violence in stopping these workers from the North?"

"Good God, no, man! That's the very thing I'm fighting against. You heard me—in every speech. We're law abiding. If there's any lawbreaking to be done, let the companies do it." He smiled grimly. "They're itching for us to give 'em an excuse to bring on the militia, as they did in '04, when they massacred the miners. They'll fail; we'll fight within the law."

He scribbled vigorously. "Is it true you were driven out of Montana and West Virginia, and almost lynched in Michigan?"

Dawson's neck swelled, his eyes smouldered. "Yes, it's true, every bit of it. And I was driven out of this state in '04. I expect it in my business. You might say things is changing, and it may be Mr. Paul Judson who's driven out next time."

There was a chorus of appreciation from the committee.

"I guess that's all."

One reporter—it was Charley Brant, of the Register—called Pelham aside. "Gotten any word from the mountain recently ... to-night?"

"No; why?"

"That trainload of workers is arriving; there's trouble, rioting or something."

"Are you sure?" Excitement blazed in his face. "Tell John Dawson so."

He called him over at once.

"We got a phone message from a man on the ground. It's on the mineral line, halfway between Mr. Judson's house and the viaduct, if you know where that is. Our man said it was serious."

"I'm going." Dawson sliced his words off briskly.

"Use my car; it's quicker," snapped Pelham.

Jensen, McGue, Dawson, and the reporter got inside; two others of the committee hung to the running boards.

Pelham drove at top speed out the Thirty-Eighth Street road, and circled around the crest. "I know the place," he explained. "We'd better come up from behind, if anything's doing. They might stop us."

He turned from the county road to a cool country lane cutting through tall long-leaf pine, in the middle of Shadow Valley. The car's lights danced unreally on the crowding trunks ahead, the wheels slipped and skidded over the sprinkling of carpeting needles. He whisked to the right, and took the hill toward the mountain. They had heard no noise as yet.

Up a gravelly hogback to a level a hundred feet from the tracks,—and they were in the midst of it. The uncertain rumble from men massed blackly in front of and all around the stalled engine's headlight, broke over them; they saw the train, somber and illy lit, stopped midway of the deep cut through the next chert hill—an ideal place for an ambuscade.

They heard single voices, broken by the spurty wind. Then the men in front of the car dissolved, into the blackness on both sides of the track. Now they could see the piled mound of huge stones, cross ties, tree trunks, which had stopped the engine. Close below the headlight was a moving shadow they finally made out as company men, they could not tell how many. The red gleam of the headlight on dull metal shone on the far side. Before the mound of rocks and stumps two men still stood.

"Get off that track," the words came clearer now, from one of the men just below the headlight. "Or we shoot."

It happened so quickly that they hardly had time to get out of the car. A voice came from one of the two upon the track, the pleasant, velvety richness of a negro voice. "Ah reckon Ah kin walk on dis track ef Ah wants to."

"You black——"

He did not finish. From the deeper shadow below the tender, two rifles popped together, with a thin hollow noise, like playthings. There was a shrieking medley from all sides. For one instant, etched black against the light thrown by the unwinking eye of the engine, the two figures stood. One of the negroes plunged wildly to the side, clattering and tumbling down the seventy foot fill to the bottom of the sharp declivity. The other stood alone, a black break on the lighted area. He screamed once like a kicked dog. He slid to the ground. His body huddled across a rail.

"God!" Dawson exploded. Tumbling out of the car, they started pelting toward the track.

They stopped, still thirty feet from the lighted area, as half a dozen men plunged toward them, scattering to the safety of the woods. One came at them—Ben Wilson, who should have been with the committee.

"For God's sake, don't go there—they're shooting to kill——"

Dawson caught him by the collar, shook him bitterly. "What hell of a mess is this! We've got to stop it——"

Wilson made a gesture of hopeless exultation, touched with something sublime. "You can't stop it now!"

Dawson stared at him in amazement.

The cries became louder, from all around the motionless train; they looked back. Protected by the guns under the headlights, a line of hesitating men were cursed forward to where the obstacle lay crudely across the tracks. The leader of the guards, rifle cached on his left forearm, pointed this way and that.

The reluctant line of workers burrowed into the mound. Boulders of ore, a broken wagon, old cross-ties were pulled out and sent bounding into the seventyfoot gulley, each starting a rocketing train of pebbles and rocks after it. The front row of gunmen had moved silently forward, and menaced the threatening darkness.

Suddenly there was a shock of breaking glass, and a herd scream from the front car just behind the tender. A cloudburst of stones rained against the length of the train from the gap's crests on both sides. Windows were caved in, rocks bounced noisily off the roof, there were gulped outcries from the penned men inside the cars. At a command, the rifles flared wildly toward the tops of the cut.

Wilson pulled out a pistol, dropped to his knees, aimed carefully at the leader of the gunmen, standing awkwardly in the exposing glare.

Dawson jerked the pistol from his hand, and sent the man tottering sideways. "Not that way."

The track was cleared now. Even the first negro's body was laid hurriedly on the south-bound rail. But the wild bombardment of the train had had its effect. The bewildered engineer started backing into the gap, in whose deeper shadows the reinforced strikers had further advantage.

One boulder, two-thirds the height of a man, was sent lumbering down, gathering momentum. It leapt against the side of a car; for a moment the car tottered. The head gunman, seeing his men deserted by the train, stumbled down the cross-ties toward it.

"Hey, stop! Damn you, stop, I say!"

His voice cracked; he began again.

It was a rout for the company forces, a clear victory for the strikers.

Then with a whirr like giant mechanical wings the belated guard automobiles, four of them, swung around the curving crest of the road fifty feet behind and above the cut. The trees and underbrush had been cleared for just this purpose. The huge searchlights, one to each car, wavered, then poured their blinding flood on the dark gap summits.

"Oh, God! The deppities——"

The light itself seemed to stagger those who had been triumphant in the dark. They diverged sharply from the point of advantage. Those on the far side cleared back toward the east. Those on the near side halted uncertainly for a fatal second, before they ran toward the two ends of the cut.

"Let 'em have it!"

An intermittent sheet of flame broke from the guard automobiles. The defenseless workers stopped and tumbled grotesquely. To Dawson's horrified imagination it seemed that more than a dozen lay flat and twitching in the hellish flare of the searchlights.

"Come on!"

"Got 'im, Jim!"

"Take that, you damned——"

With savage yells the new attackers, firing whenever they saw a moving target, covered the slope, and halted above the train.

"Hey, there," bellowed the man in the lead, addressing the train crew below. "Whatcher stop for?"

"We're going on."

"Why 'n' cher go on, then?" he parroted in irritation.

The whistle wailed, the engine and cars shuddered forward toward Hewintown. The first attack was over.

"Well," Dawson led the way back to the low gray car hidden in the shadows. "Hell's loose this time!"

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