Jim Hewin picked his satisfied way over the ramp's top and along the road below, toward the gap and the gap offices. He eyed the midnight stars with unseeing animal contentment, sluggishly at peace with the world.

A voice from the watchman's hut blurred upon his hearing. "Hey, where you going?" The man peered closer. "Where the hell have you been? The old man's been looking for hours——"

"I been right over in Hewintown."

"He wants you, now."

"What's up?" Reawakened briskness bristled in his tones.

"Bringing in them carloads of miners."

"Oh!"

"He's in the guard auto by the machine house. Better hump yourself."

Jim idled off, then changed his gait to a run as he heard the preliminary whirr of the engine. "Hai!" he shouted, as the lighted nose turned up the hill. "Hai! Wait! It's Jim!"

Tom Hewin made room for him on the front seat. "Take this rifle. Got your automatic?"

They joined the three other cars, ran on too far by the viaduct, and doubled back. The thin pop of fire-arms reached them, then the distant crackle of a volley. The men hunched together excitedly, blood tingling at the prospective ambuscade of the man-hunt.

The wash of the headlight on the tall pines beyond the cut located the engine.

"There!" came Tom's stabbing whisper.

The cars coursed to the curve, and turned parallel, facing the tracks. The angry glare of four searchlights burned against the black figures huddled above the stalled train.

The startled crowd eddied together, then scattered in headlong panic. Gunfire thunder and pelting lead poured from the rows of rifles toward the fleeing bodies.

Jim sprang out, crouched beside the searchlight, blazed away. He ran forward, stumbling against a pungently resinous stump. He rested his rifle on it to aim. Crack! The clumsy figure halted, raised wild arms grotesquely, fell spinning toward him. He caught up with the foremost guards, and stood with them for a volley across the narrow railroad gulch.

"Come on," boomed Huggins, the deputy sheriff in charge, running to the top of the cut.

Jim followed.

A wounded miner on the left trembled to his knees; his pistol aimed uncertainly at the man ahead. Jim's automatic plupped; the man's face butted against the rocky ground.

"Hey, there," Huggins bellowed, "Whatcher stop for?"

"We're goin' on," a gunman below shouted back. "We're goin' on, I say."

"Go on, then," he replied, disgustedly.

"Don'cher hear him, Ed?" to the engineer. "Go on, he says."

"Ain't I going?"

The whistle wailed against the sky, the gunmen piled on cowcatcher and carsteps. The train choked laboriously up toward the company depot at Hewintown.

"None left," said Tom reflectively, joining Huggins on the crest.

"A few," the other grinned casually, his arm indicating the awkward blotches against the searchlit hillside. "Go back," he called to another deputy, "phone from the gap for a truck to carry them stiffs to the main office. It's been a morgue afore."

The shaken eight in the shadows beyond the fill saw all of it. Dawson kept his hand beside Wilson. "No you don't," as the hothead raised the pistol again, when the train coughed its way toward them. "Wanter make us all swing?"

"We could manage a get-away——"

Dawson pushed him into the car; the rest crawled in, sobered, sorrowing, fiercely resentful.

"God! What a story!" whispered Brant, the reporter.

Jensen's big voice shook tearfully. "Shot 'em down like rats, the black-hearted bastards! If I'd a gun——"

"No, you wouldn't," said the big organizer savagely, squeezed beside the silent son of Paul Judson. "You can't lick 'em that way. It's the last thing.... They'd call out their soldiers—where'd we be then? Oh hell! If we can just hold all the boys together, we can make 'em come crawlin' to us——"

"Can you?" whispered Pelham.

"I ... don't ... know," an answer as low. "We'll try."

Brant dropped off to catch the last edition of his paper; the others, for their various home car-lines. Only McGue accompanied Dawson to the Mecca, to sleep armed beside him. Pelham noticed the gray warning of daybreak staining the east, before he pulled down his shade and adjusted his splitting head on the chill pillow, to writhe through somber dreams.

The careless truckmen, satisfied with their load of thirteen, overlooked the black body hurriedly flung against the ties of the switch track. It was one of the Lilydale children, berrying in the early grayness, whose frightened tongue brought Stella the answer to her long night of uncertainty.

The other Cole boys had gone off to work, sure that Babe would turn up somehow.... Stella got a man from the Judson stable to help her carry over the dewed body on an empty barrow.

Babe's funeral was simple. "Suffer little chillun tuh come untuh me," said Brother Adams unctuously, "fuh ob sech is de Kingdom ob Hebb'n." A second fresh earth mound disturbed the irregularity of the Zion Cemetery meadow, with the name "Cole" painted on the scantling driven beyond the head.

This first-hand contact with the bloody struggle made Pelham hurl himself with dynamic energy into the strikers' cause. Dawson used him to make the Board of Trade endorse the conflict. Flaring headlines in the Advertiser and the Times-Dispatch warned of a general strike, which would tie up the whole industrial machinery of Adamsville.

"They'll never do it," Dawson repeated pessimistically. "We can't dislodge that Pooley bunch. But this hot air helps."

The young mining inspector, as yet unassigned to his duty by the State, preached organization to the miners of Coalstock, Hazelton, Irondale, and Belle Mary mines; he never failed to wind up with a stirring appeal for unity on the political as well as the industrial field. "Strike at your jobs, when you must; strike at the polls every chance you get! Let's drive the scabs out of the city hall, out of the sheriff's office, out of the legislature! The government isn't going to leave you alone; why not make it your government?"

In hardened Democratic ears the brilliant insistence made little impression, although mining locals sprouted and flourished.

"He don't do any harm," Dawson confided to John McGue who had attached himself as the big man's private guard. "Let him spit fire if he wants to. My God, man! A state mining inspector as organizer! We'll have Paul Judson in the local yet!"

Sullenly the strikers held to their Hewintown homes, cowed by the armed guards from interfering with the spasmodic attempts of the convicts, negroes, and strike-breakers to keep the mine product up to normal. Formal notices of eviction came to them; but Ben Spencer reassured the disheartened committee. "They've got to follow the state law; that means delay. Tell the boys to sit steady till hell freezes over. They're sewed up."

Henry Tuttle rendered an exhaustive report upon the same matter to the managing committee of the directors. "We can go ahead, if you say——"

Paul Judson, at Judge Florence's nod, shook his decisive head. "Wait. We're not quite ready. When we are——"

After a thoughtful pause, the vice-president went on. "It's a good time to appropriate enough to outfit the State National Guard. We can't pay them directly, as the companies did in Colorado; the law's against that, Henry?"

The counsel nodded corroboration.

"But they'll appreciate new uniforms and guns.... You can never tell, you know.... I had a talk with Adjutant-General Rice last week; he approves heartily."

The matter was left to the vice-president, for action.

During these weeks of comparative inactivity, in spite of the details of strike work, Pelham found time to debate "Socialism the Remedy" with Burke Horton, an energetic lawyer-politician of near-radical views. The debate was the first of a newly opened community forum, under the auspices of Dr. Gulley's Free Congregation, which met in Edlin's Hall. The crowd was packed with Horton's followers, but the young Judson made his points tell.

This was one of the meetings to which Jane Lauderdale could go; she had followed every motion of Pelham's with her large, intimate eyes, from a wall seat to the right, not far from the platform. Continually his own eyes sought hers, to test the effectiveness of an argument, or to draw approbation and inspiration from the source that meant most to him. Whenever there had been opportunity, she had been in his strike audiences, a vivid, sparkling fountain of encouragement and enthusiasm. Pelham's watchfulness drew from his random hearers antagonism or sympathy, a groping for his meaning, a tardy stumbling after his flying feet; of her he drank cordial understanding and abounding love.

They left the hall together, and rode straight to her house. Lacking a home of their own, this house furnished an abiding-place for far-flung dreams and precious intimacies.

In her very restfulness he found a spur and a stimulus. Chin cupped in her down-turned fingers, seated in her favorite wicker chair, she mused above him, as he slouched on the rug at her feet.

"You were splendid to-night, boy; you're a cannibal at debating."

"I'd be sick of the whole bloody business," she smiled indulgently, "if it wasn't for you."

"Anyone would do just as well;" a denying finger caressed his hair possessively.

"Am I that unappreciative, Joan of Lauderdale?"

"Now you're poking fun. You don't deserve the taffy."

"It was only taffy?"

"I'm a good cook, you'll have to admit. No; you earned every word. I should think your father would have to be proud of you!"

"The oratorical prodigal ... whose far country is the heaven your slim oxfords print."

"Not even wings?"

"We are forging them together."

Hearty delights these hours with the vibrant girl always were; but they were not as heady and intoxicating as he had imagined love would be. Perhaps too heady, in another sense; there was a lack somewhere, he meditated ruefully, as his car picked its way past the guarded entrances to the entrenched mountain. A prodigal son, he had called himself; but this was one of those itching hours when he envied the erotic mire of the earlier vagrant. His body hungered morbidly for the barely sampled flesh pots of the Meade bungalow, the perilous soilure of Butler's Avenue.

Night's dead peacefulness was the only reality. The moon froze ramp building and sagging shack into silver immobility; there could be no hour when bleeding forms lurched and died on this eternal background. Day's conflicts were shadowy impossibility; he could not take further part in the fantastic strife that meant death and suffering; he was caught in the midnight spell of the silent world.

But a gush of warm-blooded hatred welled over him—hatred that turned this silver heaven into an iron-red hell. No; he was pledged fighter in the cause of the mountain that must be all men's. He was vaguely aware that this reborn fealty came from two mothering, radiant eyes, that watched his steps in light and darkness, and waited with shadowy arms to welcome him at war's end.

The morning's headlines obtruded on Paul Judson's attention, at his usual early breakfast. They caused no lightening of his accustomed frown. Uncertainly he fumed around the place. When he saw Pelham about to start for the city, he walked over and intercepted him.

"Your car woke us up at three last night."

"It was shortly after two when I got here."

"You'll agree with me that such hours are a bad influence on the boys. Your mother and I go to bed at ten. I can't have it."

Pelham did not answer, an ugly surge of anger up-boiling within him.

"It won't do for Hollis and Ned. It isn't decent. They're bound to imagine you are keeping bad company—of both sexes——"

The wrath boiled over. "Father! You know I've been busy speaking—last night was the debate—you know I've been busy——"

His father's mouth closed to a thin line, then opened. "I can't have it. They don't know what you do with your time; I am glad of that. You'll have to leave the mountain."

Pelham stood his ground against the menacing stare. "I shall be glad to." There was a blank wrench of anguish within him, at the thought of leaving the familiar home; the mere difficulties of moving and settling again loomed mountain-high. "Your suggestion that I am going with bad companions is trash, and you know it." He hesitated, then drove on. "I'll leave by Saturday."

Paul turned away. "It will be a good thing."

His soul stinging with the father's injustice, he waited until the other had gone in leisurely certainty down the hill, and went in to his mother. "I'm to leave the mountain next Saturday, mother."

"It's necessary, Pelham. You have distressed your father in so many ways, I cannot see anything else for you to do."

Hurt pride spoke within him. "He said my late hours set a bad example for the boys."

"Yes ... that too...."

The words crowded out. "He said that I was late because I was going with bad companions, when he knows that's a lie!"

"Pelham, you shall not speak that way of your father to me."

"Mother, you know I've been at meetings and debates; you know how straight I've been. If he'd had his way, I wouldn't have been," he added with heated significance.

"What do you mean?" The unrehearsed query came against her will.

"When I was visiting at the Meades, he advised me to go to Butler's Avenue, mother—to go to the Red Light district—to go to the women there. That was his fatherly advice to me!"

Her face assumed a Puritanic severity, an alien look; she masked the tumult of her heart with this outward symbol of incredulity. "I cannot believe you, Pelham."

This was not the first occasion in which he had detected Mary's mobile features solidified into a harsh and unreasoning insensibility to fact. Whenever he or one of the other children had cornered the mother into a situation demanding condemnation of Paul, this self-gorgonized expression hardened upon her; it hid any admission of surprise, any criticism of the husband, for the moment. And he had observed that it served a second function—persisted in, it gave time for the breach in the confidence in Paul to heal without apparent scar; henceforth she seemed to live in the self-imposed delusion that her husband had never been at fault. She would have held as a model wife the Red Queen, who had trained herself to believe six impossible things—presumably to her royal husband's advantage—before each breakfast.

Pelham had come to despise this obvious scouting of reality, this sentimentalizing which called facts what it would have them, not what they were. He retorted rather sharply, "There's no use not believing me. You know I am not lying; those were my father's words."

The smug overcast of unbelief became glacial; in serene security in her husband's impeccability, no matter what the facts might be, she turned toward the house. "I do not wish to have you discuss the matter any further." Then, a softer look in her eyes, she came back to where the son stood, and slipped an arm around his shoulder. "I'm doing this for your own best interest, mother's dearest boy; just as your father has decided in his wisdom that the time has come when you must leave the cottage."

There was a preliminary catch in her voice, affectionate, affecting, and not consciously affected. "God only knows, my son, how much I love you...." She did not say any more, as if with a moment's clarity of insight she doubted the appropriateness of the inevitable formula. She threw a half-puzzled glance at him, that seemed rather to survey herself through him, as she left off talking, passed up the steps, and through the screen door—for all the world as if to screen herself further from his, and perhaps her own, searching scrutiny.

Well, that was ended. Pelham prepared to move. He found a vacant room with Mrs. Hernandez, wife of a comrade. The outlook on symmetrical suburban homes, in a cheap section near the mountain's foot, was far different from the rolling vistas he had been so fond of; but at least his books and Sheff pictures reminded of the old place.

Jim Hewin, whose attentions to Diana continued, although without his first impetuous insistence, questioned the girl about the matter on one of their infrequent meetings under the dumb oaks on the crest. "Young Judson left home?"

"Last week."

"Squabbled with his old man?"

"I reckon so.... He just left." She continued listlessly to stare at the burning breath of the far furnaces.

At length her moping could not be ignored. "What's the matter, gal? What's on your mind?" He tried lightly to shake her out of her melancholy.

She responded weakly to his clumsy friendliness, her tongue locked as to its real trouble. She had come to-night to tell him; it seemed so easy, as she went over the matter in the cleared kitchen, waiting for the supper preparations to begin. She must tell him; he was entitled to know.

And now an icy self-disgust tied her. This man at her side—what could it mean to him, but a new peg for his obscene jokes? She had gone into this thing, at the last, willingly; she must see it through. It was not for him to guess at the faint unstirring life which her mad yielding had summoned within her.

She pretended to meet his mood, and left him sure that she had "got out of her spell." She cried herself and her hidden secret to sleep.

A spirit of lassitude lay over the mountain activities, with the departure of Pelham and the cumulative effect of drenched days of torrid July sunshine. The dusty mornings were dry and crackly, the sullen summer air clung within the house at night. Futile breezes spurted uncertainly, emphasizing the arid discomfort. Twice thunder clouds massed over the nervous swelter, but were swept on before they could spill their desired comfort. Dust-weighted leaves hung limp, shrubs sickened and browned; only the weeds pushed blatantly upward.

Paul came out early the second day of the spell. The weight of the weather was unbearable. It was as if heavy blankets of heat were continually drifting down from the blazing heaven, too piercingly hot to be drowsy; it was as if he walked through these thick palpable layers of living, seering fire ... like walking undersea of a vast liquid ocean of seething heat.

"You'd better get out of this," he announced shortly to Mary. "How would the Thousand Islands do?... The girls, and Ned too; his school doesn't open till late in September. Hollis had better stay with me; I need some help.... Shall I make reservations for Tuesday?"

Paul took Hollis with him, ten days later, for a run up to Washington connected with the delivery of steel to supply Allied orders, a mission in which all of his driving sympathies were enlisted. Nor was he out of key with his home city in this. Adamsville was one of the few Southern cities whose sympathies had been against the Central Powers from the beginning of the war. For the first two years the rest of the South fussed and thundered against English interference with the profitable pre-war cotton trade with Germany; an anti-English "freedom of the seas" became the day's slogan in the one section of the country where English blood still predominated. But the iron city never joined in this clamor; its spokesmen, its suave senators and publicists, could waive the blockaded deflection of cotton, when the iron and steel demands of the Entente doubled the output of the mineral region. As the warring months marched on, quick shipments commanded untold bonuses; as of old, where a man's purse was, there was his heart. For commercial and patriotic reasons the company fretted impotently at the continuance of the strike at this time, especially when rail congestion became serious throughout the country. Paul's trip was one of many that the metal magnates had to make, to keep the wheels running as smoothly as possible upon the twice interrupted tracks.

This trip left the mountain home in the care of old Peter, who stayed on in his cluttered servant's room behind the kitchen. Diana Cole came in to clean up once or twice a week. Jim Hewin's persistent curiosity about the movements of the Judsons found full answer in her.

Two days after the master's departure, Peter hitched up and drove into town, to bring out two boxes of books from the office, and some sacks of cotton seed meal and oats. He dawdled around from store to store, showing off his temporary responsibility and dignity. The hot hours passed; he found relief in the cool shade of a side of the ice factory, where frequent squabbles among intent young negro crap-shooters were referred to him for his ponderous adjustments.

Diana, late in the afternoon, brought a pan of peas out to the mended yellow rocker on the front porch of the Cole shack, and commenced popping the viscid spheres out of the parched pods. At length her hands slowed; she stared into the red sunset beyond Hillcrest Cottage on the hill across.

She was struck by the odd reflection of the fiery glow in the kitchen windows. It was as if the late sun shone clear through the house. She rose agitatedly to her feet, the peas littering the steps, the pan halting against the wilted morning-glory vines. "Maw!" she cried, panic in her voice. "Maw! Will! Come here——"

A thin shimmer of smoke jerked restlessly above the kitchen end of the big house. "That ain't—fire?"

"An' Mr. Paul an' ev'ybody gone!"

"Will," she turned hurriedly, "run to Hewintown—the men can save lots. I'll phone the Fire Department——"

She raced up the familiar road, her mind working feverishly. Far behind Stella panted. There had been no fire in the kitchen range since morning, when Peter cooked his own bacon and coffee. At noon it had been cold; she had seen it; Peter had started then for town.... Unless he had come back.

The sun had almost gone down; it was dark in the hall. She threw open the doors, and started frantically tugging at Miss' Mary's chiffonier and washstand. The men arrived, coatless, willing. They piled furniture around the big cedar north of the house. The heat of this burning wing became blistering; the things had to be moved down the road.

Diana remembered the telephoning.

"We got an alarm," a gruff voice scolded. "Engines ought to be there now."

Two neighbors from the base of the mountain came up, and began helping. Armed guards at the entrances to the estate kept many away; these watched the holocaust from beyond the gap, or from their own homes. Dried wooden walls flamed up against the dark sky like giant fireworks; massed smoke bellied and spit sparks as if the mountain vomited in fiery discomfort.

Someone led a group of helpers up to the dim door of the garret, crowded with carefully covered family treasures from Jackson days. The dusty packing-cases promised little. "Nothing here," he said, closing the door.

The north end was an oven now; the rescuers turned to the dining room, parlors, and the boys' rooms on the south.

Diana ran back to the closet where Miss' Mary's silver was locked. She left this to hurry to the window, and then the door.

Huggins, Jim Hewin, and a knot of guards stared at the hectic activity. "Hey, niggers," one called to Will Cole and another, who were steering the hall clock from the Jackson home through the door, "drop that clock. You can't steal Mr. Judson's things."

Will and the other reached the porch.

"Drop it, I say," rang out Jim's ugly voice, as he balanced his pistol tentatively. "You bastards, burnin' down the house, to steal the stuff!"

"That's a lie," Will called, shortly. Others took up the cry.

The guards raised menacing pistols.

A striker, his temper on fire from continuing irritations, dropped behind the nearest steps, levelled his pistol, and shot toward the armed group.

Diana ran out flying, shielding Will. "Don't shoot my brother, you scoundrels——"

Jim's pistol, carefully aimed at the black striker, crackled viciously. Tongues of flame spoke from the armed deputies.

"You plugged the gal," Huggins grinned casually, aiming again. "We got both coons."

The astounded citizens ran between the sudden murderous combatants. "This won't do!"

"The house is burning, while you're killing each other!"

The chemical engine swung around the southern curve of the road, jetting ineffectually against the greedy insanity of the flames. The strikers took up the four bodies, and carried them somberly to Hewintown, Stella Cole following, dry-eyed and shivering with uncomprehending hatred.

Pelham and Jane walked among the smouldering ruins the next day, their hearts bitter at the headlines which blamed the strikers for the burning. "There's no dirtiness they won't stoop to," he raged. "Hanging's too good for those editors."

When Paul Judson arrived, to what had been home, in answer to Mr. Kane's wire, it was to find that Tom Hewin, whose sub-contract still controlled this part of the estate, had begun removing the rich outcrop where the north end of the cottage had rested.

"This is outrageous, Hewin! We don't want this touched——"

"It's the contract, Mr. Judson. In section seven. I supposed——"

Paul left him, agonized at heart.

An injunction the next day stopped the theft of the outcrop, and removed the Hewins from their connection with the property and the strike.

Only Ed was left to his mother to arrange for the burial of Diana and Will. Neither of them knew, although Stella suspected, that there were three dead in the two graves.

---

XIX

Life at the Hernandez home had its definite compensations, Pelham found. A nearby garage held the indispensable car; and there was now no one to censor his comings and goings. As long as he slept on the mountain, Mary clung to this rÔle; the relief of the lifted restraint was immediate.

His mining inspector's badge gave him the run of the mountain property, although he was careful not to use it in direct union propaganda.

One afternoon late in August, Jim Hewin came up to him on a downtown avenue. "Howdy, Mr. Judson. Say," and the shifty eyes nervously agitated toward Pelham's face, "I could do you a good turn if I wanted to."

"What's that?"

"I got some dope you'd give a heap to know."

The other regarded him with suspicion. "What about, Hewin?"

"I know what the company's got up its sleeve. I can put you wise, all right. What's in it for me?" He waited, expectant.

Pelham choked down his disgust. "Not a cent. If you'd sell out my father, you'd sell us out as quickly." He walked off in impotent anger against the go-betweens seeking to fatten on the bitter struggle.

The local mining board assigned Pelham to the property he was most familiar with: either for that reason, or through a grim irony. As mining inspector, he secured access to all the books of the company. This gave him needed statistics for his report on the strike situation, and kept him busy, and, against his will, away from Jane, and the solace and spur of the hours with her.

The problem began to shape itself more clearly, now that he had become to a greater extent weaned from mountain and family. The whole opposition to the miners' demands was summed up and centered, in his mind, in that dominant personality of Paul Judson. Similarly he felt that he embodied the opposing forces. Without his presence, his thinking told him, the strike would have come just the same; but he knew that his cordial efforts had stiffened the fight of the workers more than they imagined.

It was a stake worth fighting for, that vast prone bulk overshadowing Adamsville, rich with the congealed essence of the ages. His father fought for himself, and for the group of spoilers who sought to bleed it for their selfish sakes. The son's cause was the cause of the people—of the toiling, inarticulate herd fettered by ignorance and immemorial adjustment to serfdom. Democracy against oppression—it was the real fight which the Adamsville press short-sightedly claimed was being waged over sea and sky and land against the war-mad encroachment of autocracy. The warring causes abroad were cloudy; the local situation was clear. So he told himself; and the parallel spoke strongly in his stirring speeches to the patient union fighters.

A new masterfulness radiated in his utterances. As a servant of the State, as well as a contender for the people, he was close to the tangled heart of the intricate struggle. He felt surer of himself than ever.

The mood of restrained audacity found itself cabined and confined in the irritation of mining statistics. The card for the University Club summer dance came opportunely; he went, too, through a perverse joy in embarrassing the good people of Adamsville by his disconcerting presence, and in studying their varied reactions to his new rÔle.

He joined the group in the grill, a little diffident as to his reception. Lane Cullom, unchanging adherent of old, caught him by both hands. "You darned stranger! What'll it be?"

Lane led him and Hallock Withers, a clubman Pelham knew casually, to one of the cosy benched tables. "Never forget that you're in the presence of His Honor the State Mining Inspector, Hal. He's a nut in politics, but he can play tennis."

"Haven't lifted a racket in four months."

The friend laid an affectionate hand on Pelham's flannels. "I brought a girl you've just got to meet, Pell! She's from New Orleans, and she is some trotter! Visiting the Tollivers——"

Pelham grimaced.

"Nothing like Nellie, don't worry! Her name is Louise Ree-sharr——"

"What in the world!"

Lane grunted defensively. "Something like that. Old New Orleans family, and all the rest——"

The prospect did not attract; but the girl did. She had an opulent fulness that stopped distinctly short of being plump. Her large eyes reminded him at once of Jane's, and then of his mother's; but there was an artistry about their seeming candor that seduced his fancy. The burst of red roses at her waist did not outshine the glow of her complexion; vivid dark brown hair sparkled with brilliants set in a quaint tortoise shell comb. Each of the unimportant details assumed significance as contributing to the totality of full-blown charm.

She laid a proprietary arm in his, as they passed through the rainbow glimmer of Oriental lanterns swaying between the lawn trees. "Is Adamsville always as deadly as this? New Orleans is bad enough—but this!"

His throaty chuckle answered her. "I assure you I don't know."

"You live here?"

"I'm not a clubman. Life's too busy."

"Sounds imposing. What do you do, besides dance and use those serious eyes?"

"That's all my regular vocation. At off times I play tennis, wave my hair in the breeze, and inspect mines."

"It's nice hair." She regarded it thoughtfully.

"You can pull it."

With amused tolerance she smoothed it, then yanked it suddenly.

"Ouch! I treasure that."

An egotistic restlessness urged him. He thought once or twice of Jane, as he monopolized this girl. By an emotional vagary he connected the other with the clipped and forbidden rigors of the mountain life, which he had divorced finally.

"How about dinner at the club to-morrow night, and the dance afterwards? Or a ride?"

"But I'm to go out to the James', at Meadow Valley. Are you going?"

"Ethel James'?... I haven't been asked."

"Would they include you? Could I suggest it? It's an informal affair. It'll break up early."

"I think it will be all right. She's here to-night.... We could have dinner first."

He found an infrequent sparkle in her conversation, a pretty froth of talk that pleased. But it was not for this that he sought her out. The urge to wander that the mountain had sown in his blood impelled him most of all. He felt his imagination inflamed by the stimulus of her presence, the vivid challenge of her eyes, the audacious invitation of her lips. He had met no woman hitherto who so invited love-making. She seemed a rounded vessel brimfull of soft airs and caressing modulations of speech, that promised more than the bare words warranted.

On the return from the James' country home, they shot ahead of the other cars, purring in poised flight down the smooth macadam of the county road. He turned off into the upward slope above Hazelton that led to the mountain; he regarded himself as its privileged showman. In front of the drowsy trimness of farm houses they pulsed, until at last he stopped the engine where the road rounded over a steep outcrop dropping a jagged hundred feet to the steep tree-y declivity below.

"There's a bench. It's a wonderful view," he said, his speech thickened—the old timidity at the moment when passion possessed him again struggling against his desire.

She took the seat he indicated. The cool whip of the breeze sprayed him with the faint suggestion of lilas that hung about her person. He tried to pull his senses from her overwhelming fascination.

"Isn't it wonderful?"

She nodded, lips apart, eyes starry. Discarding his shield of constraint, he turned swiftly on her, catching the filmy fabric covering her arms and bringing her face toward him.

Her voice was level, conventional. "You mustn't." She tried to squirm away.

"Yes!" He whispered his urgent triumph.

His lips avid from long self-denial, he blent with the wild sweetness of hers. She remained quiescent a moment, then sought to free herself. He clung to her, as if his life depended on retaining the warm rapture of her kiss. She thought he would never end.

At last she pulled away, a trifle dazed with the force of his passion. His lips fell lower, kissing her shoulder, her arm, the hand squeezing the taut ball of her handkerchief. As she took even this from him, he fell to his knees beside her, pressing long kisses on the handkerchief, any symbol to satisfy the aching hunger of his body.

She watched him in wonder. Her hand faltered out and pressed back the damp hair from his forehead. "You poor boy! You poor, starved boy!"

The paroxysm over, he sat at her feet, moodily watching the lower reaches of the valley. He realized the breach of faith with Jane; but there was a perverse part of him that rejoiced at the duplicity. The other love was chaste, beside this; after all, he could love more than one woman.... Should he stop with one wrenched rose, when the bush was on fire with red beauty?

Again he sat beside her. "You know, Louise," he urged tentatively, enough withdrawn from the scene to study her reaction to his conduct, "I've been straight with women.... You are the only girl I have kissed in a year."

It trembled on her tongue to say that he had made up for lost time; no, that would sound too flippant. "I know, I know," her answer rang rich with soft understanding.

It was the next night that she reverted to the matter, the fluent voluptuousness of her body still tingling from the harsh tenderness of his arms. "You're a funny boy.... What you said last night...."

"I said so much!"

Her thought could not be laughed away. "About your keeping straight, you know.... I have a friend—she only married last Mardi Gras—who always insisted she wanted a man who had had experience.... Girls have queer notions, haven't they?"

"I should think the girl would feel soiled ... that way. I should hate to have my mind filled, on my wedding night, comparing the wonderful girl I had won ... with ... other women I had had."

The perverse infidelity shook him again. "And yet I kiss." He turned the word into fact.

"There's no logic in it," he persisted, his body eased with the lip-contact. "Kissing shouldn't be wasted, any more than the rest. It's only a prelude to the more wonderful finale...."

"I enjoy the prelude," she temporized, in lazy content.

"And afterwards——" he breathed on his hand pausing fearfully on the tantalizing silken softness of her cool ankle, then straying with restrained gusto toward the edge of the lacy fabric above.

"No," she smiled. He solaced an obedient spirit with the touch of the denying lips.

The next afternoon he never forgot. They started early for Shadow Mountain, promising the Tollivers to return with mountain azalea, if it was still blooming. She dismissed this as an excuse.

Over the iron bridge curving above Shadow Creek's muddy bluster they hummed, and then up the hill. They left the car in the shade of a sandy lane, and clambered up the steep intricacies of sandstone, to a wide table-rock slipped from the hoary buttresses above. Beyond this were the azaleas.

The sun-splashed slope was a dizzy riot of the rosy blossoms. A fringe of the stocky shrubs curved over the jutting shelf of the rock, burning with timid pink blossoms at the crest of their blooming. A few of the individual flowers had passed maturity, and hung in the woodland wind, perilously pendent from the long pistils. Louise, rejoicing in the soft gray-green of her smock, lifted a big spray of the scented beauties and nested her face in them. A brown shimmer of hair caught on a nervy twig: Pelham undid it with unnecessary deliberation, and took pay for his chivalry.

They turned to the flowers. Uneven ripples of color spread from the gray rock's knees toward the blue crest horizon, a fragrant carpeting of pink and white and every modulation down to a deep ruby. To the right a veritable tree of speckled petals, frilled and dancing on airy feet in the sun-drizzle. A curveting breeze blew up a spray of flowery snow, dusting their footing. The farther blossoms seemed, by some trick of vision, a flowery fabric clinging veil-like above the gay green beneath. It was a restless pool of glowing color and odor.

From bush to bush they zigzagged, until her face was bowered in the bright sprays, and his fingers weary with whittling their stems. He took them from her, left her on the rock, and piled the flowers over the rear seat.

As he returned, his eyes rose restfully from her blossomed opulence to the lake of blooms. "There seem to be more here than before! They grow faster than we pick."

She made room for him beside her. Her head found a soft pillow in his coat; lazily she stretched her body on the natural couch of lichened firmness.

His lips burned greedily against the soft flush of her neck. He let his torch-like body rest half upon hers, for a long silence of tantalizing rapture. At length, repentant at the thought of Jane, he swung to a seat beside the other girl. In a moment he was conscious only of her, proud with an inner satisfaction in the man's rÔle he was sure he was playing; more strongly than either of these feelings, afraid—afraid of himself, afraid lest the urgent emotions writhing within him would drive control from him, and force him into a situation which would be, no matter its outcome, unsettling, disquieting....

Man's innate tendency to mate as freely as the vast mountain oaks, shaking their pollen broadcast on every breath of breeze, was in him; but this had been tamed and sublimated, by his mother's overfond molding, by her pricking desire to keep him hers and no other woman's as long as possible, into an ingrowing chastity, a morbidly re-fondled rejection of sex, except for the arm's-length wooing of Jane. But the very opulence of his flowering mountain spoke against this, urged an abandon to the fierce ecstasies of yielding and taking. The warring wills found a sanguine battle-ground within him. There was a throbbing zest in tantalizing himself, by postponing the inevitable necessity of some choice. He must think it out carefully; he could wait....

Shaking her skirts free of littering twigs, she rose. He was a puzzle. She steadied herself by his arm. "I like it here," she summed up softly.

The wild azalea filled the glassed sunroom of the Tollivers with a faint echo of the glory of the distant mountain.

---

XX

"What do you think of that, comrade Judson?" Mrs. Hernandez asked, pushing the morning paper over, and watching his expression closely.

The first sheet of the Times-Dispatch held a page-wide display headline, concerning a dynamiting conspiracy unearthed among the leaders of the strike. With furious amazement Pelham read of the finding of a bundle of the explosive sticks on the tracks just before a trainload of workers was to arrive, and of a heavy charge, its fuse lit, in an upper opening of the second ramp. Company guards, he read, had testified to seeing four strikers sneak down the gap, away from the entry. Wilson, Jensen, and two other active agitators were already in jail; other arrests were to follow. A two column editorial bitterly assailed the "un-American" laborers, and demanded the militia to end the reign of terror.

"It's a plant, I'm sure. They're aching for an excuse to bring on the soldiers."

"They got four of the boys," she reminded him.

"It's outrageous."

He hurried around to the strike headquarters. Ben Spence, Dawson, McGue, and four others broke off their tense discussion as he entered.

"Why didn't you phone me about this?"

Spence answered, his tone not too friendly. "Couldn't find you."

"We haven't seen you for a week, Mr. Judson," blared out Dawson. "We been readin' the social news, too. You've been busy."

"Yes.... I've been busy on my report." A flash of his father's acidity spoke in the tones. Then he asked more quietly, "What about bonds?"

"You can help there," Spence mollified him. "We've got most of 'em arranged for. When will your report go up?"

Pelham twisted forward on his chair. "It'll contain this latest plant. I'll finish this week. I suspected something of the kind." He told them of the offer made by Jim Hewin.

"It's an old stunt," said Dawson, unbending a little from his suspicion of "white-collar" meddling in labor troubles. "They ought to be ashamed to pull such stale gags. But here in the South——Those blackguardly uglies will swear any of us into jail."

"There's the jury," said Spence, a fighting flash in his eyes. "We can play a trick or two. Corporations ain't popular in Adamsville. Well, we'll get the boys out first."

The whole thing brought Pelham up sharply to his neglected work. He got one more maddeningly brief sight of Louise, before she continued her round of visits. "I'll be back, lover boy, around the holidays."

"How can I stand your being away?"

But the Tollivers were too close to permit his saying more.

Nursing his unsettling sense of guilt, until he was sure his face must publish the amorous errancy, he took himself to Jane on the accustomed Friday evening. She had not marked his absences, accepting the explanation that the report had kept him busied. To his wonderment, she was as dear and essentially desirable as ever; her range of attractiveness lay in ways so remote from Louise's red and feverish charm, that he sensed no conflict between them; he could love both wholly for their differing appeals.

Yet the evening was different, to him. The memory of intimate contacts with the brief love who had gone left a mental stigma upon his body; he was less willing than ever to touch Jane, or think of kissing her; she must be kept all the more congealed in icy protection. As defense against unnerving personal confidences, he had brought his report, which had begun to trouble him, to ask her help and counsel. "I'm afraid of it, Jane. You see, it goes all the way ... about my own father. It'll be bound to make trouble for him ... and me. I could have another inspector frame the final wording——"

"You back out! You must be a changeling some corporation elf has dumped off on me!"

"Don't tease. The thing bites too hard; it has nothing but teeth."

"Of course you'll make it! Give it here; we'll fix it so that it can masticate the toughest corporation board. What if it does make trouble? It's the truth...."

She went over the whole of it, toning down the vituperative rhetoric of the opening and conclusion, adding force to his presentation of facts. He was startled at her ability to vivify the abstractions symbolizing the red rage tearing apart city and mountain. Before she was done, he was re-converted to faith in his eloquent accusations.

At length it was finished. He saw that advance copies reached the papers on the day it was received by the governor. The Advertiser and the Times-Dispatch did not even mention it. But the ever-helpful Register more than made up for their censoring. The slashing indictment of the companies for their disregard of the protective laws, the startling story of their lobbies to defeat safety measures, even the account of his father's activity at the State Federation of Labor, with the advertisements in the Voice of Labor as exhibits, were given in full. This was a new frankness in Adamsville politics. From this Pelham passed to a treatment of starvation wages on the one hand, and prodigal salaries, surpluses and dividends on the other. He featured that the strike was for the enforcement of existing laws, and that the companies refused any arbitration. The conclusion recommended that the state enforce arbitration, or, if the companies could not be controlled, that the profiteering be ended by the state's taking over the mines and running them.

The lonely editorial voice of the Register backed up even the most radical demands of the document.

The answer of the companies came promptly. Both of the other papers broke silence by denouncing the report as dishonest propaganda, with a demand for the removal of the offending young hothead. They called again for the militia to end the disorder at the mines.

Pelham received a wire from Governor Tennant the same night, suspending him from the state's services under charges of misconduct in office. The two hostile papers gave the details, the next morning; his strike activities were set forth, and given as reasons for his dismissal.

"You'll get your hearing," Ben Spence told him, "but that'll be all. It's good-bye with you, my boy. And you've drawn just two pay checks!"

His father descended on him in proxy during the afternoon, in the person of Pratt Judson, who had run up from Jackson, at Paul's suggestion, after interviewing the governor, to act as intermediary. Pelham listened with ill grace to his uncle's suave attempts to cloud the matter.

"Bob Tennant is a friend of yours, as well as mine, Pelham. It would certainly hurt him to remove you; but what is he to do?"

"Does my father demand the removal?"

"You know better. He stood up for you, even against the whole board of directors. Family means a lot to Paul. But they're out for your scalp. You've played yourself into their hands."

"I don't see how," the boy repeated doggedly, curving a steel-edged ruler until it cracked alarmingly. "I don't see how."

"If you'd gotten anyone's advice, my boy, you would know that a state official can't take sides in such matters. You've actually served on the strike committees, haven't you?"

"Heretofore inspectors haven't failed to serve the companies. They weren't fired."

"Let's not beat around the bush. Here's the best that Tennant can do. The charges need never come up, if you don't kick up another row. The suspension can go for the present, and then in due course you can resign. Mary tells me you've wanted to take up advanced work in sociology. You know I'm not a rich man, Pelham; but I'll be willing, to pull you out of this hole, to stand the whole expense."

"Would you advise me to retreat under fire? Resign, with charges hanging over me?"

The portly uncle thought a minute. "They'll be withdrawn now, Pelham, if you'll agree to resign in six months, and take a vacation until then. There'll be nothing against you."

The ruler splintered abruptly, littering the ordered desk. "It's running away from a fight, Uncle Pratt, and you know it. I can't do it."

"Think of the family—a black mark like this——"

"I'm thinking of the miners ... of my duty to them and the people."

"We're practical men, Pelham. You know enough about politics to know that you're butting your head against a stone mountain."

"Then I'll butt, damn 'em! Talk straight, Uncle Pratt. Would you advise me to back out of a fight in the middle of it?"

The elder man grinned in defeated sympathy. "You're a young fool, Pelham. We've got to do this quickly, or it's too late. I could give you until to-morrow to think it over——"

"I don't need the time. This is the only answer I could make."

"Well, I'll tell Paul. If you ever get into a scrape of any kind——"

"I appreciate that, and I'll remember it."

The strike committee heard what had occurred within an hour, as far as Pelham's decision was concerned.

"Good boy!" said Spence. "Give 'em a run for their dirty money."

Serrano, an unofficial member of the group, broke in excitedly. "Why not run Judson as labor candidate for sheriff, and elect him? That's the best answer to make to the crooks! You'd run, wouldn't you?"

Pelham thought rapidly. It would at least give a wonderful chance for propaganda, even if they couldn't overcome the big odds against them. "I don't think we could win——"

"Win? We'd lick the lights out of 'em! Man, Adamsville's waking up! With the strike going on, you could beat out Dick Sumter hands down! Look how he's turned the sheriff's office over to the companies! Will you do it?"

There might be something in it; his heart expanded sharply from the excitement. He kept his voice level. "I'd be willing to, of course. What do you think of it, Ben?"

The cautious labor lawyer was not so enthusiastic. "You might do it, Judson. You'd have to have union labor entirely behind you——"

"We can make 'em endorse him!"

"Socialist and all?" quizzed Spence, smiling doubtfully.

"Sure! Think what it would mean to the strike, if we had the sheriff's office! We could enforce order then.... They'd have no chance to call out their brass-buttoned Willies."

"Well, it's a big chance."

The hearing at Jackson, the next week, was the cut-and-dried farce that Pratt Judson and Spence had predicted. The governor was friendly but firm. "It's my duty, Mr. Judson, as a servant of all the people, to remove you."

Jane, on fire with the idea of the campaign, caught his hand impulsively when he hurried back to tell her. "Don't mind it. We knew what they would do.... Now—show them!"

The thing moved slowly. There were countless obstacles. Pooley, Bowden, the regular machine, would not hear of it. An uproarious meeting of the Trade Council shoved through an endorsement. The leaders changed their talk then, but Pelham felt their hidden antipathy working against him. So far there had been no open announcement of the race, and it was now the last week of August.

"Ben Spence, you've got to put this thing over. Hire Arlington Hall—the socialist local will put up the money—and start it next Sunday afternoon."

"Hadn't we better wait until things are straightened out a bit——"

"We'll wait until election's over, then. We've waited three weeks now."

"All right. Dawson says he'll back you; he's worth a lot."

Then began first-hand knowledge of the detail of politics for Pelham. Even before the announcement meeting, the socialist local, in its haphazard groping for democracy, selected a committee to steer the campaign. They met in Pelham's office the next night.

Pelham mused over their faces, as they blundered down to business. Surely the most extraordinary group ever assembled to direct the political destinies of Adamsville! Serrano, a bricklayer, a loud voiced, commanding bulk of a man, who banged with the improvised gavel; Christopher Duckworth, pioneer in the Adamsville movement, an impecunious old architect who had had his name on the state ticket at every election for sixteen years; two machinists, fighting units of a fighting group, "Mule" Hinton and Henry Gup; the party's state secretary, Mrs. Ola Spigner, who had come up from her farm in Choctaw County, ever on hand for a fight; Phifer Craft, a failure as a commission merchant, and a deep theoretical student of Marx and Dietzgen; Abe Katz, spokesman of the tailors' union and the Arbeiter Ring; and his landlady, Mrs. Hernandez, invariable woman member on committees. They were not even leaders in their trades, except Serrano and perhaps Katz. Most were poor speakers or spoke not at all. But out of the ill-lit slums and lean cheap suburbs they had been flung together by a burning idealism for a greater world. They were the hands of a people's groping faith.

"I mofe we elect us a treasurer," said Abe Katz seriously. So began the business of the campaign.

Dawson, Ben Spence, even Bowden and the Bivens group dropped in at occasional meetings; but this faithful nucleus was always on hand, doing the real work. They mapped out the itinerary of speakers, got out the first literature, sent soliciting committees to the various unions for endorsement and funds, in fact directed the whole campaign.

Any of the comrades were willing to be broken in as chairmen of the meetings. The speaking at first fell heavily on Serrano, Duckworth, and Pelham himself; but gradually the liberal element of the city came into the fight. Dr. Gulley threw the support of his Free Congregation into the contest with the "County Ring," as represented by Sumter; near-radical lawyers, Will Tatum, Judge Deason, Harvey Cade, eager to oust the corporation toadies, were invaluable assistants; Lane Cullom's car was always at the call of the committee, and shared with Pelham's the duty of touring the rambling county roads to the further meetings.

The unique campaign drew crowds from the start. One night Pelham called for a show of hands of all the men present who were voters; the result was so astonishing, that he repeated the lesson again and again. In West Adamsville, filled with itinerant furnace workers, not one man in fifteen was a voter. In the country districts, about one in ten; in the city, slightly less. With the aid of Ben Spence, he looked up the question, and thereafter added a vigorous attack on the election laws to his onslaughts on the company-owned sheriff's office.

"Do you know what your servants down in Jackson did in 1902, when they framed the new Constitution? They told you it would take the vote from 'the niggers'; it took the vote from you white men as well. In New York, in Illinois, in most of the northern and eastern states, from eighteen to twenty-two per cent of the population vote; in Western suffrage states, up to thirty-five per cent. And in the South? Georgia has something like five per cent, this state four, and Mississippi only three and a half per cent! Half of the men in this state are white; six out of every ten of these have been disfranchised by that Constitution. The cumulative poll tax, which says you can't vote unless every poll tax since 1902 has been paid by the February before the election, the grandfather clause, giving votes to the southern slave-masters and not to the southern wage-slaves who make the state's wealth now, these have robbed you of your voice in the government. The southern laborer has been classed with children, women, negroes, and idiots—will you stand for it?"

The campaign, thanks to the Register's hearty support, began to alarm the politicians. Pat Donohoo, who controlled five saloons, and claimed to be able to deliver the Irish and Catholic vote, came in to see Pelham. "We know your father," he confided huskily. "Give me your word that you'll behave when you're elected, and I'll see that you get every Catholic and Irish vote in the county. We're out to teach Dick Sumter a lesson."

Pelham answered briskly. "Of course I'll behave. My platform says what I'll do, Donohoo. If your men want to vote for me, go to it. They'll get a square deal from me, I'll promise that."

"You see," he explained to the committee, "he's playing safe. No matter who's elected, he can claim the credit."

"Never trust them Catholics," said Mrs. Spigner, a devout propagandist for the Menace. "They're all Jesuits."

"He couldn't deliver anyhow," consoled Ben Spence.

The crafty lawyer made the labor support fairly solid, by promising liberal appointments to the State Federation crowd. Pelham did not know about this, and Spence did not imagine that the promises would have to be fulfilled.

For one of the meetings the candidate worked harder than usual. It had been old Duckworth's suggestion that a speaking be advertised for the corner across from the University Club, in the very heart of the "silk-stocking" district. The neighborhood was liberally posted, and the committee were on hand to cover the retreat of the speakers, if too much of a riot developed. To their surprise, the large crowd listened to Dr. Gulley's fervent appeals, to the withering sarcasm of Harvey Cade, and to Judson's vitriolic attack on the leisure class, with close and appreciative attention. One or two of the East Highlands boys hooted a few times, but a policeman routed them. The applause was as hearty here as at Hazelton or Irondale.

Pelham's opponent stirred himself tardily, and was careful not to answer the accurate broadside of charges flung at him by the deposed mining inspector. General attacks on socialism were much more popular than lame apologies for an unfair and one-sided administration; and the common charge that American socialism was pro-German was roared and ballyhooed by the political servants of the corporations, upon platforms opulently framed in bunting. Pelham laughed at this intense patriotism, suddenly discovered as an answer to the sheriff's anti-labor activities; but it made continual inroads upon his strength with the docile people. The tide wavered to and fro; the Register claimed four days before election that Judson's chances were better than even; the alarmed opposing sheets insisted that there was only one man in the race, and that the iron city would never tolerate a man who openly advocated free love, kaiserism, and the despotism of the mob.

The closing rally of the Democrats came on Saturday night, an old-fashioned whooping wind-up in the Lyric theater; Pelham covered five county meetings and two city ones during the same time. Monday night, while the opposing forces rested their public activities, occurred the Judson finale, at Main Park, in the rickety summer band-stand. The trampled green in the open heart of the city was black with intent and serious faces, whose throats cheered themselves hoarse over the hoarsened voice of their leader,—though his tones, roughened by night after night of straining open-air talking, could barely reach half of his crowd.

The final applause was given; the reporters rushed off with their copy; the squads of comrades and union men left with their wives and children for cheap scattered homes. Pelham took Jane back to the Andersons', to sit, glum and wholly exhausted, slumped against the back of the couch, until after two.

"Never mind, you dear old fighter," she insisted. "You've done more than anyone else could."

Tuesday, election day, was a hectic tumult of excitement for both sides. Lane Cullom insisted on driving Pelham in his car, proud of the reflected light that went to the faithful aid of the candidate. The relief of shooting along chill stretches of November road from polling-place to polling-place was indescribable.

At five the polls closed. Pelham, after a lunch-stand supper, sat in his half-dismantled headquarters, his finger upon the pulse of the wires that led to every part of the county.

The returns began. One by one the faithful precincts lifted Judson to a good lead, and increased it. Hazelton, West Adamsville, distant Coalstock, the mining boxes, all went well, more than neutralizing the early farming returns, which were four to one for Sumter. And then the totals grew evener, and wavered now one way, now another. The vocal vote was Judson's; the silent, unchangeable Democratic mass began to lend its weight to the incumbent. There was still a fighting chance. Counting at the city boxes proceeded with sickening slowness.

The last of the county returns was wired from distant Chinaberry Junction: Judson led by fifty-two votes! If the city had broken even, he would have it!

The jubilant comrades and strikers conscripted sudden parades of celebration; the corporations were licked! It would paralyze the companies to have the law-enforcers, their oldtime bulwark, turned against them!

Then, as if at the touch of a single lever, the thirteen big city boxes unloosed their flood of figures. First ward, Sumter, a hundred lead; eleventh, Sumter three hundred ahead; ninth, Sumter, two hundred more; fifth, eight hundred and eighty to the good for Sumter—this was the Highlands ward; not one lone box tallying for Judson. Within twenty minutes, enough of the returns were in to convince Pelham that the citizens of Bragg County had spoken in their freeborn majesty, and had chosen Richard Sumter sheriff by a majority of almost two to one.

The morning papers gave the corrected figures—8,450 to 4,281. The corporations still held the court house.

"It's really a victory," Mrs. Spigner, the state secretary, repeated with cheerless optimism, as Pelham drove her to the early mail train for Choctaw County. "You raised a socialist vote of six hundred something like six hundred per cent. You impatient youngsters, who think one election has any importance! Remember, comrade, it's all a part of the class struggle!"

At the end of a day of fatiguing post mortems and loquacious consolations, of noisy assurances that he had won, punctuating his dismemberment of the decapitated headquarters, he sought his real inspiriter, Jane. The city lay under a shimmer of thin November sunshine, that woke to dusky gold the tawny leaves flickering, at the chilly breeze's lash, upon motionless black boughs—that revealed pitilessly the feathery plumes of golden rod reaching over the sidewalk from the vacant lot beyond Andersons', plumes the season's slow alchemy had transmuted to insubstantial silver fragility, sifting into the reddish mold at the fingering of the spurts of ground wind. Pelham would have preferred a drizzling, cloud-heavy night sky, in which the decrepit cheerfulness of the late landscape, and he himself, could have been decently shrouded in isolating obscurity.

Jane gave him both her hands as he mounted the last step, reading, in the drawn corners of his mouth, and the heaviness beneath his eyes, the half-raised signals of surrender.

There was a flavor of bitterness in his first words. "It was really a victory, after all——"

"You've heard that enough to-day, I know. Don't try to talk: here, these cushions——" slipping them easily under his head, as a firm hand upon his shoulder soothed his protest. "Let yourself relax, all over. There."

Her eyes meditated between one of the chairs and the end of the couch beside him. She sat upon the couch.

The drowsy stillness, the moment's remoteness from the iron affairs of the racking city, the soft rustle of her dress, the gentle eddies of air that seemed scented by her presence, lulled and comforted. He reached for her hand, and laid it against his cheek, where it loitered, a cool solace, a gradual masterer of his undirected fancies.

The hours sagged by. There was little talk; that could wait. Not of his willing his mind began to embroider the miserly store of caresses he had asked or received from Jane; one by one the feverish moments with the other girl, purged into a less bodily ecstasy, recurred to him, with his own love's face and form holding their rightful place in his arms—translated memories which in their turn were embellished by a drugged imagination into warmer visionings of mutual surrender. Attempts to re-channel his thinking were unsuccessful; at last he let the wanton heart have its way.

Never had he needed a mother as now, Jane felt, as she bent her energy toward his tired spirit. He needed more than a mother; his feverish driving unrest would quiet, in arms that held him closer than a mother's might. The time had come for her to be mother to him, and something else. Winner or not, he was a hearty fighter ... decent.... Jane Lauderdale Judson ... the name meant something now; she had helped it mean something. A tired boy; her tired boy....

He looked up into her face at last. Her eyes, radiant with unspoken caresses, were a madonna's ... twin stars over a fretted sea; twin stars, in a heaven so near that he could reach and touch it. Unsteadied, he swung painfully to a seat beside her. Then, compelled by her dominant eyes, he turned and faced her in the shadowy hush. Unsteadily he put out his two arms, touching her lightly, fearfully, upon the shoulders, and lingering there. The pressure of his fingers drew her toward him; a pressure from no visible fingers pushed him inexorably toward her. He felt her breast touch him softly, and settle contentedly against him. He pressed his flushed face against the soft neck and the tendrils of her hair; his lips lay against her flesh, although he did not dare move them.

There was an unhurried rapture of stirless content. Half solaced for the moment, he released her; but his eyes could not leave hers, nor his face move far from her own.

Her clear voice came to him quietly, with the mellow reverberations of a gong touched in dusky stillness. "Stupid...." He could not read the half-closed eyes; he had to lean closer to make out the words. "Is that all?... Must I ask you?..."

His lips touched hers, closed upon them, clung there. A giddy faintness came with the long-withheld ardor; his eyes shut out sight, the other senses ceased for the moment—the frantic remnant of his will and consciousness seeking to make the moment perpetual. His own being seemed to flow out and into the other, he seemed to absorb from the vital contact all of the inestimable dearness that she meant to him. This consummation, devoutly unwished for so long, was for that reason in its realization doubly dear; it brought an ecstasy so brimming that for the time no other sensation found space to obtrude.

Too soon, to his heart, the ecstatic eternity ended. Suddenly ashamed of her daring in permitting the tardy rapture, not to think of inviting it, Jane drew back, releasing her tingling lips into a prim pucker of uncertainty. He sought her a second time, quickened to an arrogant sense of ownership of intangible wonders. Her protest reached him: "We shouldn't, Pelham dear...."

She found her lips too busied to frame more negative commandments, despite her unevenly ebbing struggles of protest.

At length his sense of protection returned; dizzily he leaned back, unstrung, and yet satisfied. The night noises pulsed a rhythm fuller, more harmoniously triumphant with soft surges of loving certainty, than he had ever felt; the pandering darkness was intimate and confidential. With the slowing of the unleashed leap of his blood, recollections of Louise Richard came, as he had once feared; but there was no conflict, no sense of soilure, in the unreal, remote fantasy of the former passion; only a sun-high glory and delight in this, as if the first had been the needed soil in which the plant of love could grow toward fulfillment.

Her ears caught his contented whisper. "What are a thousand defeats, Jane ... loved one ... when there is this at the end of the way?"

"At the beginning of our new way," she amended with sober joy.

"It wipes out all the irks and littlenesses.... Under all our veneer and varnish of culture, business, politics, we are man and woman ... male and female ... our souls as nakedly desirous as were the first two who mated.... Loved one!" It rendered him inarticulate, this delicious stirring up of the hidden deeps. It was for this, he was sure, that men and women had been molded; in this surrender they yielded themselves to the ageless currents of joy-bringing unity that created life, and continued it as life itself.

"I love your hair," she arranged it more to her liking. "It fretted your eyes, that last speech.... I wanted to kiss it away ... then."

---

XXI

Three weeks after the election, the cold set in. As if to compensate for the maddening torridity of July and August, the biting tail of a snowstorm lashed bleakly over Adamsville. The white flakes danced wildly along the exposed crest of the mountain, stinging summer-seasoned skins. Blasts whistled and shrieked, piling the chill drifts along the rutty streets of Hewintown, sifting through sacks roofing the gaps in the shack shingles.

Then a day of thaw, deepening the roads into a cold slushiness; and that night a downburst of rain and hail, that cased trees, shrubs, hill-paths in a glittering coating of ice. The brittle walks cut into feet whose shoes lacked soling, the slippery steeps flung weakened women and men against pointed rocks, adding to the already over-worked Charities the chill cruelties of winter.

"Where's your overcoat, Ben, in this weather?" Pelham asked Wilson, now out on bail, as they passed on the stiffened sidewalks.

"Ain't got none, Mr. Judson. An' the wife's down with the T. B., an' no blankets in the house."

"I've got an extra coat; come on in to the office.... I'll phone Miss Lauderdale about your people before we go to town."

"There's hundreds like us; you know charity can't stretch very far. What these boys need is justice."

Pelham marveled at the untaught vision that could broaden its individual suffering into universal understanding.

Wilson had not exaggerated the matter. The white plague gained on undernourished men, their lungs rotted with underground damp and dust; on anemic wives and mothers; on starved shadows of children and feebly crying babies.

Each death piled higher their sullen hatred of the company. The overcoated deputies boasted of their huge feeding, and treated with growing insolence the wives and daughters of the men. Powder was being laid for another explosion, in spite of Dawson's frantic efforts to keep the strikers steady.

A worried meeting of the directors of the companies was called to consider the continuing deadlock. "That man Dawson is the trouble," Paul announced briefly to the chairman. "Get rid of him, and the backbone of the strike is permanently dislocated. He's a born mischief-stirrer."

"Pity he can't be hung...."

"... Or tarred and feathered."

Judge Florence reminisced from the head of the table: "In '68 we knew what to do with such riff-raff."

"It can be handled," Dudley Randolph inserted blandly. "He isn't popular with many of the men, as it is. The local unions despise him. Let me have the matter ... investigated. He won't trouble us long."

"Good."

"Your son is a bit troublesome too, Mr. Judson," confessed Henry Tuttle. "Too bad he should be tangled up in it. This thing's got to be settled; with these new English orders, it's suicide for us to withhold any force that can stop this criminal strike."

Kane looked sideways at Paul Judson, who kept his eyes on the table. The satellite spoke up uncertainly. "I'll tell you something—privately—about him, that can stop his talking ... if we must use it."

Tuttle nodded, after a glance at the inscrutable downcast gaze of the vice-president.

"Is there anyone else?" said the chairman. "That lawyer, Spence?"

"No," said Tuttle, decidedly. "He's a lawyer; a lawyer thinks as his clients do," and he smiled acidly. "Bivens, of the Voice of Labor, Bowden, Pooley, employ him. He won't risk losing his livelihood ... or go further than they will."

"It's time, Henry," Paul addressed the corporation counsel, "to go ahead with our scheme. We've won the election; minor matters can be—er, investigated, or otherwise handled. But as long as the strike lasts, we are losing; our profit sheets show it. First your move, then ... the militia. I advised it long ago, you remember."

The meeting closed with the uncomfortable, and frequent, impression that, as usual, Paul Judson's sight alone had visioned correctly future troubles—and their remedies.

The last week of November saw the playing of the withheld card. Hurrying clerks of Tuttle and Mabry served on each houseowner the final notice of eviction, granted suddenly by County Judge Little.

Roscoe Little, one of the Jackson family of that name, held a perpetual lien on the judgeship because of his triumphant spinelessness. He had never been known to express a decided opinion on either side of a question; a weak-eyed hail-fellow-well-met, with a chin like the German crown prince, he spent his mornings ruling in favor of corporation attorneys, his afternoons absorbing comic weeklies and whiskey-and-sodas at the University Club. He was unmarried; facetious barristers insisted that he could not commit himself even in affairs of the heart.

There was nothing for the miners to do but move; the rifles of the augmented deputies were an unanswerable persuasion. A few miles up the valley the gray sandstone hill behind the mountain was undeveloped. Spence secured the land at a slight rental, and here tents and scrap-timber shacks did something to keep out the bitter winds of winter.

Pelham helped in the moving, as did many of the socialists. Old Peter came up to him in Hewintown the last day. "Mornin', Mr. Pelham."

"What you doing here, Peter?"

The ancient negro pointed with pride to the shined badge on his coat. "Dey done made me a deppity, dey is."

Pelham turned off.

"Mr. Pelham, ole Tom Cole done come back."

"Not dead yet?"

"You cain't kill 'im. Dey cut 'im open, but he growed back agin. He am powerful sickly, do'. De Ole Boy'll cotch him nex' time; he nacherally favors preachers."

"But not company deputies, Peter?"

The negro chuckled off; Pelham walked back with Dawson from the new shack village. The big organizer was thoroughly out of spirits. "It just ain't moving, Judson."

"What's especially wrong?"

"The negro question, for one thing."

"I know," Pelham said slowly. "Our white labor won't assimilate them, as the rest of the country's labor does to the most backward white races. They're a perpetual scab menace."

"Hell, yes," in sobered agreement. "Then, the South's general backwardness."

"That's natural, here. Our capitalists, some of the slave-owning blood, and all inheriting its attitude, feel less equality: they see labor still as their slaves. Ultimately this will help awaken our people; but now——"

"That's the hell of it; we ain't got the public with us. What with petty union squabbles, and all—it's a job to make a dent in a saint's patience."

"Any chance of a sympathetic strike?"

"What can you do with Bowden and these yellow pups?"

The enthusiasm of the workers, dragged down physically by the hard rigors, slipped lower and lower. Picketing continued, and each arrival of new trainloads of northern scabs threatened a break; but something of the original zest had gone.

Pelham, however, found a compensating zest, in which life overpaid him for the wintry gloom at strike headquarters. After a glum day with the dispirited leaders he could count upon a solace that overbalanced worry and sorrow; downhearted planning for the intransigent struggle gave way to warm-hearted dusk dreams of a future bent to heart's will; the mines and miners were deserted for Jane.

"It doesn't seem fair, dearest dear, for us to be so unreasonably happy, when Ben Wilson, and his tubercular wife, and all the rest, have so little...."

"Your father isn't a happy man."

"... No. He may have been as happy as we, once; fancy him as a young lover! There is a price for ambition centered in grasping things: the soul dries up and shrivels."

"Poor man!"

"This is the real wealth...."

He took her within his arms. At home in his kiss, her lips parted slightly within his, like a bud daring to offer its tenderest petals to the crush of the enveloping wind. When he let her go, he lay slack with delicious unrest.

Abruptly he sat up, a decisive ring in his voice. "I'm going to marry you, Jane."

"I had hoped so." She could not prevent the dimple from smiling within her rounded cheek.

"I mean—now!"

"To-night?"

"I'll get the license to-morrow, adorable child—and we can have Dr. Gulley, or the mayor——"

"Let's have His Honor! An Irish blessing isn't to be scoffed at, and the Free Tabernaclers, as rebels, are a bit pallid. 'The Courthouse Wedding'—how your mother will relish that!"

"They wouldn't come anyhow——"

"It isn't that; but they've gotten so used to your shocking them, that life would lose its savor if you couldn't achieve a fresh shock every month or two. I'm glad my new suit came——"

"As if that made any difference!"

"Ah, it will make a lot—to His Honor, for instance, and whatever reporters carry word of it to the society editresses. 'A dove-colored traveling suit,' they'll call it——"

"Wouldn't red be more appropriate?" he queried judiciously. "With the local en masse as best man, and the Suffrage Association as matron of honor——"

"Don't be horrid. I'll have Mrs. Anderson, and you can bring along your precious Lane Cullom, who is so sure that Nellie Tolliver would be much better for you."

"It's almost a Christmas wedding! We'll steal off for that week to Pascagoula and New Orleans we mentioned. We could take the Gulf Express to-morrow night—you have a time table; I brought it out last month, when we aircastled on honeymoons.... But just think, if you hadn't scorned the country club, you might have had either of the Birrell boys, or——"

"You angler! It's not too late.... No; I have the pick of the bunch."

"Jane, my ... wife." There was comfort and joy in the word.

Considering the matter alone, he was delighted he had dared the plunge. It was not easy, now, to prevent yielding to the watchful voices ever whispering to him, wakened by Dorothy Meade, refired by the rocketing affair with Louise, and now restirred by Jane herself. He had even wandered once or twice down Butler's Avenue and the furtive alleys behind, obsessed with red-lit imaginings of what went on behind those night-lighted windows. His aggressive purism had left him; love should be freely given and taken, he told himself. And it was to be his!

Odd that he had suggested New Orleans, when Louise Richard might be there.... It was a relief that that affair was dead.... This was to-day; the to-morrows were Jane's.

After his departure Jane located the time-table. She studied the formal details dreamily. To-morrow night, by this time, they would be.... And when they had passed this place, and that, what would they be saying? What doing?

The black and white schedule merited respect; it would time their first day ... night ... together.

She laid it aside with a blush; then, bidding her fancies behave, she read over the unemotional schedule until she knew it, appropriately, by heart.

Gulf Express		P. M.
Hazelton	"	8.07"
ADAMSVILLE	"	Ar. 8.20"

Exercising the best man's prerogative, Lane Cullom insisted upon having the abbreviated wedding party as his guests at a bridal dinner. The chef at the University Club grill lifted the covers promptly at six, in order that the Queen and Crescent's prized express might not have to cool its wheels in the new Union Station, waiting for the essential pair.

Lane, a satisfied fatigue relieving the crease in his brow, almost missed the first course. "I had to see that the eggnog was mixed properly, Pelham, before it was frozen,—soup or no soup."

The last delicious morsel melted upon their tongues; the host paid a final flying visit to the club's pantry, conscripting two pocketfuls of rice. "Now let's go!"

ADAMSVILLE

"

Lv. 8.30"

Jane leaned over the back railing of the observation platform, as the engine grunted a command to the wheels to take up their proletarian revolutions; the clanged gate quivered before her; her husband stood at her side. She leaned for a final finger-flutter to the two friends, peering at her out of the golden haze thrown by the big station lamps.

"Good luck," she called back. Her handful of the hailed rice, scooped desperately the last minute, was aimed badly; it baptized a bewildered family, chiefly children, still looking for the obtrusively obvious exit.

"Good luck," Pelham's deeper tones echoed hers.

The oiled switches, affectionately clearing the way for the long iron carriage and its coupling hearts, creaked beneath them, as the cars slid and jangled down the yards, between the furnacetown shanties, into the winter-shriven suburban streets. Jane's placid smile followed her man as he joined two of the comfortable chairs; her hands locked within his, her cheek rested against the warm roughness of his, her eyes watched the flying world curtsey and part behind them, then gradually coalesce into a welded and blurred oblivion. They were turning their backs upon the mountain her Pelham loved; not for good ... yes, for good, but not for all time.

West Adamsville

"

8.37"

The mountain was going with them; its inscrutable mass, off to the left, still followed, a protection and a reminder. What a boyish fancy of his, that it mothered him! Well, it could safely leave the task to her, Jane reflected; he was worth mothering—her first child.... A sudden freshet of tenderness lifted her arm around his shoulder.

This station they had just left—to think that its scattered home-lights held striving hearts who had followed her Pelham through the harsh campaign, and looked to him as children to their leader. And now he was hers, hers! And she would see to it that she kept him theirs.

Hers ... as she must be his. She dared to inch her fancies beyond their previous bounds. As a modern woman, she reminded herself, she knew from her reading the essential facts of mated life; but feelings were of different breed: words could not communicate unfelt emotions, they could only evoke memories of those formerly experienced. The emotional Atlantic lay before her.... To-night? She could not tell.

Coalstock

"

8.57"

"What are you thinking of, dear?" she asked.

"Geographically.... Reminiscing.... Bragg County ends in a few miles; my last speech, before the final one in Main Park, was in the Elks' Hall here."

She looked with added interest at the bare platform, the forlorn pair of station idlers, the morose baggage man trundling away a lone trunk. He looked up as they passed, started, took off his hat to the recent candidate.

"I like that man," she declared inconsequentially. "He knows you."

The glassed spaces of the observation platform were small defense against the subtle penetration of the winter night. The bland porter navigated down the car aisles, bundling steamer blankets, which radiated inward the body's waves of heat.

"The old life dead, the glad new one born," her husband mused aloud. "Except a man become as a little child again——For it is a heaven we plan."

"A democracy, not a kingdom, dear?"

"Never a kingdom, unless with a queen equally powered; and no subjects. The old subserviences are dying; with us they are dead. A real equality of mating; the slave-woman attitude gone forever, as we are laboring on the mountain to end the slave-man attitude."

"It is a friendly old universe, dear, to fling us together, on the uncertain upwhirl of the lassoed earth, to complement each other...."

"Blossom to blossom, bird to bird, man to woman," he paired.

"Jackson in two hours," he went on, after a pause.

Was he consciously making conversation, to keep her mind off of what must be the burden of its agitated thinking, the growing tumult stirred and heightened by the night's resistless progress toward their own intimate morning? She appreciated the diversion; soon he was deep in the rich memories of easy Jackson days.

Her mind twisted over other matters at the same time. Marriage meant so little to a man, compared to what it meant to a woman! Pelham, she believed, was chaste; he had told her so. There was no way of knowing. But love accomplished changed woman irrevocably. It seemed unfair. She re-breathed a silent prayer that she would not find him coarse ... even a little. It had been disillusioned Dorothy who had warned her that all men were.... Not her man.

Twice the porter had opened the door with suggestive obtrusiveness; it must be nearly eleven. Shivering with a disquiet almost unbearable, she responded to the caressing modulations in his voice, as he told of his childhood; even though its warmth was caused by recollections of other arms than her own. His deep affection for his mother, despite the occasional flippancy he used now, was no secret to the wife.

The whistle wailed rhythmically across the level stubble fields.

His face lit up. "That was Newtown we whizzed by; my father started it. Hideous place!" But the tone was affectionate.

Jackson

"

11.02"

He consulted his watch; they were running four minutes behind.

As the train picked up speed, his eyes bored the obscurity. "That dark place ... somewhere there is the road to Uncle Jimmy Barbour's farm. You'll see it all with me soon, dearest dear."

She looked ahead toward the darkness he indicated. Now they had plunged past it.

She heard the porter approach for the third time. Pelham's tone was a trifle uneven. "The stateroom's made up? Thanks very much. Will you call us in time for Pascagoula?"

Us!... Jane's heart thumped; she wondered if his ears could fail to hear it.

"Dearest," he said slowly, "will you go in?... I'll come in half an hour.... Will that be enough?"

Her reply was so low, she wondered if he could have heard. He held her to him for a moment, as if unhappy to lose one moment of her. And then she shut the door, and turned into the lighted isolation of the stateroom, soon to offer her to a panicky common publicity.

... She heard him open the outer door; her flurried fingers summoned the unbetraying darkness.

		A. M.
Lower Peachtree	"	4.10"

Jane stared out of the bare three inches of the misted window; she had raised the curtain that much. The train was gaining momentum again. The unbroken night sped by; only her imagination could give it form and life. The unbroken future lay ahead; drowsily she reflected that only her imagination, her shaping hand, could mold it to the heaven they both desired. Pelham was at last asleep ... her husband was asleep....

Her hand lowered the curtain again. Facing the chill blackness without the window, she tried to drowse off. At length she turned toward him, for the moment absent, yet still tangibly hers. She snuggled into the warmer place by his side, touching him to make sure he was still there.

MOBILE	"	Ar. 4.45"
MOBILE	"	Lv. 4.53"

There was no consciousness stirring in the breathing state-room, to note the stop and the few belated night-travelers for the western gulf region. But in their dreams these two, separated by sleep, were again united. There was a smile playing across Jane's cheek; and a deep content resting upon Pelham's face.

East Pascagoula

"

7.01"

Pelham sat on the edge of a chair, his face downcast in mock despair. "You make me feel so useless, Jane! Not even a dress to hook up the back——"

Altering a final hatpin, she smiled a query to him. "Is it on straight, beloved? The train wobbles so.... Dresses were hooked up the back ten years ago; of course, you've had practice on Mother Judson's.... Stand up a moment." With great gravity she readjusted his stick-pin. "There!"

He pulled her to the window. "Look—Back Bayou! Though it's really a pudgy finger of the gulf. And schooners ... this side.... Isn't it gorgeous?"

The train, perched on a spidery trestle, crawled high above the sloshing waves, broken by blackened oyster-bed stakes and a skiff slapping against the dismembered head of a narrow pier. Seabirds rose in glancing curves, the red face of the sun lit the waters on both sides of the three-masters tacking out beyond Horn Island. Abruptly the water was blotted out at the end of the bridge by stumpy sedge fields, stretching to a fringe of low pines framing the sparkling water beyond ... then trim white houses. The train slowed.

Pascagoula

"

7.13"

"Here we are," Pelham's joyful tones fathered the last of the luggage, laboriously lowered by the stout porter.

The husband beckoned the nearest hackman, a darky patriarch venerable as his grizzle-flanked steed. "The Ocean House, please."

Jane settled into Pelham's crescenting arm.

"We're here," he added fatuously. "Isn't it——"

"Glorious!"

They stared ahead together, to the sandy beach and the sun-glitter of the water.

---

XXII

Pascagoula and the gulf towns boast themselves, quite properly, as warm weather resorts. Jane, coming from a northern city, had never quite understood how Southerners could go further south for the summer; but the immediate sight of this resort in winter convinced her. Pascagoula in December was kin to Coney Island in March—a background built of flimsy, emptied by the chill; a tenantless shell, whose pleasure-seekers hibernated elsewhere, to more substantial shelter. It had its own incongruous charm for lovers, who never mourn at isolation.

There was a thoughtful delight in tempting the shaky remnants of wharves, broken and scattered by the whip-lash of the last equinoctial storms, and as yet not rebuilt. They visited by launch the breakwater islands, Horn Island with its fishing colony, Deer Island's populous turtle farms, and the lighthouses and dismantled fort upon the sandy spit called Ship Island. Here they walked a beach littered with curled conchs, horseshoe crab shells, and debris from the deeper waters washed up for a glassy-eyed view at the hitherto unseen sun.

By electric line they touched at Beauvoir for an afternoon—Beauvoir, as surely of the Old South as the decaying mansions at Jackson; a great-pillared white house back in a grove of giant leafless oaks. Its ample spaces and huge hand-hewn beams belonged less to the faded Confederate soldiers and their wives tenanting it than to its memories of Jefferson Davis, that passionate advocate of slavery, whose name is enshrined beside the warrior leaders of the buried cause.

"We can enjoy the firm beauty of the place—it is so alien, so remote," Jane meditated, as, her arm upon his shoulder, she turned Pelham for a last view at the mausoleum of gray hopes. "Like the Punic war; or the time-blotted conquests of the Incas, before the Spaniards came."

"Yes; their cause, with their time, has grown unreal. Slavery is almost prehistoric, with the modern battles upon us. Old Grandfather Judson knew Jeff Davis, and visited here.... Thank God the South didn't win!"

"Slavery would have died its natural death anyway."

"But union was worth while.... Isn't it, dearest?"

She pressed his arm appreciatively.

They spent the rest of the week in New Orleans. During these days his untried fantasies changed to reality, with the gradual knowledge of this lithe, lovely girl beside him, who had, by some freak of good fortune, given herself to him ... taken him for her mate. It was hard to avoid the rut of old phrasings of the ever-new relationship.

Out of the thick turmoil of the French Market and the gaudy fittings of the Hotel Iberville they found their way to the river, and wandered up its leisurely levee. The ancient lure of the sea spoke in the rank smell of drying nets and decaying barnacles on the tide-abandoned piles, of redolent fishing catboats and tarry roping. She curled behind him on a solitary bale of cotton awaiting belated shipment, staring out at the muddy water, and the tangled masts and rigging up and down stream.

"How would you like to sail the seven seas?" she asked idly. "Down this river, over the gulf and the Caribbean, and then out across the unroaded way of the world's ocean?" Watching him dust his feather-gray ash on a splintery beam, she shielded a lighted match to give new life to the moist brown mass packed within the bowl.

"With you along?"

"That would be yours to say. You must remain free, as I am; if love lasts, yes; if not——"

"And that very freedom, that modern marriage includes, adds preciousness to love; the danger of losing forges a stronger bond."

"Thus freedom involves a slavery greater, because voluntary. Where my heart is, I am content to serve," she smiled.

But something within her doubted how deep this shrining of freedom went. She had noticed, at last night's opera, an attractive girl in another box bow to her husband with provoking familiarity. "Louise Richard, a friend of Lane Cullom's," he had explained; "I met her in Adamsville." But ... her husband! If any woman presumed to get free with him, modernism would be flung aside for primitive emotions. Mating bred possession.... He was such a lover! She smiled a perverse thanksgiving that he was—a little—coarse. Love must be planted in the earth, to grow toward the stars.

Pelham's thought drove down a not dissimilar channel. Of course Jane was entitled to hold to her idea of freedom; there was little chance of her ever wanting to make it more than an idea. But let a man dare sneak into her affections, and there would be an immediate casualty list, which would not include a descendant of the Judsons. He was amused at the bloodthirsty throwback; nevertheless, he would do something.... His thought recurred to the sight of Louise Richard, between the acts at the theater; how incomparably superior Jane was! And yet.... Freedom in love had its compensations.... Louise had said something about revisiting Adamsville.... At once he put the half-formed fancy out of his mind; Jane was enough, now and henceforth.

He returned, at a tangent, to the former subject. "Just as you are free to remain skeptical about socialism, while I am of it."

"Not skeptical, Pelham; but.... Put it this way. It hasn't the overwhelming importance to me that it has to you. To me, woman's cause comes first; with suffrage an essential incident. I do see that socialism doesn't go to the roots of everything."

He exclaimed lazily, "Of course not! And I like, more and more, your idea, that floated hazily out one night—that geography lay beneath all the economic forces we socialists orate over."

"On behalf of my intelligence, I thank you," she teased.

"Silly! The idea is underneath Marx and the rest; but it hasn't been said clearly yet. I've dipped into more American history, these workless weeks; it fits amazingly there....

"This stuff the professors wax magniloquent over, that America was planned as a land of freedom! Mere fudge and fury! Who planned it free? The Spaniards, arrogant haters of the common people? The paternalistic French? The Dutch and Swedes, just as committed to autocracy?..."

"There were the 'freedom-loving Englishmen'...."

"Jamestown, settled by gold-hunting, venturesome gentlemen of King James' Court! So Maryland, and the Carolinas; with Georgia merely to give an opportunity for homeland failures to build a younger England, casted as the old. Plymouth, all of New England, except Rhode Island, wanted merely State Puritanism, under the old feudal system. Roger Williams was an exception; Penn's inner light saw a vision of ultimate democracy. But—two out of thirteen!"

"No, it wasn't planning that made democracy and freedom our spreadeagle catchwords," she agreed.

"It was the land," he took up the thread. "The land has expressed itself, and will express itself more magnificently in the future, in the achieved reality of those Fourth of July slogans. Pioneer hardships develop men equal in their labors and their needs; crude democracy thrives along civilization's frontiers. The restless Arabs, the migratory Israelites, grew brotherhood as self-protection. Europe's cramping strait-jackets could not fit empty miles of prairie, or stream and mountain and farm-land ready to mint gold when man's labor was poured on them."

"The idea helps clear history," she helped on the mood. "Protected Egypt and Babylon, guarded by desert and sea and swamp, grew a hot-housed tyranny because of their over-fertile rivers; somewhat as New Orleans here."

"To show the influence another way, I've often thought of this parallel. Compare the languages of Europe and America. The Eskimo, harshly explosive and guttural, corresponds to the Russian; the freezing air chops off the final syllable into a bark or cough. The dialects of the Iroquois and northern Algonquins are similar to the harshness of Teutonic and Scandinavian countries; the soft melodiousness of Spanish, French, Italian, is found in words like 'Miami,' 'Appalachicola,' 'Tuscaloosa,' 'Monongahela,' with their easy liquids and lazy final vowels. The country itself creates the language, the facial expressions, the bodies and habits of men."

"That's true—and new, to me. Of course it's a platitude that the little fragments of Greece, locked apart by mountain and sea, were themselves the cause preventing Greece from uniting into a great nation——"

"Just as the long western field of Italy fitted her to be a unifying world power."

She confessed, "I've since found the same idea expanded charmingly by Fairgrieve. Phoenicia and Israel were important because they were on the way connecting the Nile to the twin rivers——"

"The earth's hand is in it all. Great cities follow the rivers, or the newer streams of iron we call railroads; civilizations grow where differing cultures touch, as at the meeting of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Think what its location—sea-walled and sea-warmed—has made of the island miles of England!... Mountains breed freedom-lovers; my mountain made me."

"My thanks to it! It has stirred up trouble——"

"Yes." He continued slowly, "All we have been through in Adamsville—that was only the mountain speaking through its human mouthpieces. Our country's first democracy was squabbling competition; then came selfish coÖperation, for the few on top: trusts and monopolies. The hill's rich heart expresses that in the mining companies ... in my father. But it gives enough worth to the plain man to allow him to unite with his fellows, and mold this destructive selfishness into saner brotherhood, wider coÖperation—the labor movement, groping after democracy; I and the others are the mountain speaking in that. It is the prime mover, the hero and the villain, shifting us about at its will to express all that lies hidden in its rich interior."

"We must make it join the local.... I hope it favors suffrage."

"Joyful joker!"

"I like what you say about the vastness of America," she repeated.

"More than vastness. It has the proper balance of material that yields not too easily, so that an Egyptian race of slaves must follow; nor with such difficulty that it must remain like the backward Eskimos. Its men and women will be self-sure, mentally able to build democracy in industry, in government, in everything. What a world, when we grow up to our words—when classes blend into one class of worthy men and women——"

"Supermen?"

"Another way of saying it.... When exploitation is ended, when we produce for need and not profit, when a man's highest selfishness will be to serve all, not pile up a backyard hoard of gold. Call it socialism or what you please, it will come; it is self-planted by and in our soil. The mountain will win, in the long run, not for its despoiler, but for all of its red-handed, ore-stained children. Work will be distributed, life lengthened, wealth and joy evened——"

"A big program cut out for Mr. Pelham Judson!"

"Not for me, heavens, no! I can only do my little part. It will use me ... just as it has used poor Babe Cole, dead on the railroad track, or his brothers, dead in the explosion and the shooting; just as it uses even Dick Sumter, Henry Tuttle, incredible little Roscoe Little, whose judicial rompers are merely a materialization of the greed of the corporations. All of their rich thefts will be taken from them, when the scales have finally adjusted themselves...."

"Nice old earth!" She patted the post beside her affectionately. "Just like a big brown doggie! We think, and bother; and to it we are no more than irritations on its skin, or little insects bred of it there. Our stirring annoys it: Vesuvius and PelÉ, or an earthquake.... The old world sniffs and snuffles down the fenced sky, leashed to the sun, its rope always a little shorter.... And a good warm sleep to it at the end, before cold night sets in."

Pelham shook his head in despair. "You say it so much better than I—the final word...."

"Come on, if we're to take that trip to Lake Pontchartrain before night." She prodded him off the bale, linking a comradely arm within his. "You notice that woman's 'final' word, as always, is followed by man's lament that she says the last thing. No," as he sought to answer, "it needs no footnote. At least I have you to myself this week, before the mountain woos you from me again."

Tired by the flat miles of rice-fields, swamp-land, and bayou, they returned to the haven of the hotel. Pelham had the elevator wait while he secured an armful of local papers.

"Nothing from Adamsville," scanning the pages rapidly, unaware how the mountain still held him. "Nothing.... Here it is. Another fight, with the invariable demand for the militia."

"You don't think they'll——"

"I certainly hope not. That would cause a smash-up."

The week ended; the return began. Just above Lower Peachtree, they secured an early edition of the Times-Dispatch, and found that the strike shared first-page headlines with the elaborate plans for the iron city's semi-centennial. The attack was more serious than the out-of-town papers had reported. Two guards, three strike-breakers, and an uncertain number of strikers had been killed; John Dawson's indignant statement that the deputies had fired first, and without provocation, was smothered in the body of the story; while the front page heading quoted Judge Florence to the effect that the company saw no other way to stop bloodshed than by immediate presence of the soldiers. A hurried meeting of the Commercial Club backed up this demand.

"They'll try to wipe the boys out," groaned Pelham, bitterly. "They may have planted this fight, for an excuse. We must have won too many strike-breakers."

An inside page held an account of the conviction of Nils Jensen, Benjamin Wilson, Lafe Puckett and a negro named Moses Pike for attempting to dynamite the ramp opening.

"They're out for blood now," Pelham commented somberly, after reading the brief announcement.

"They won't get you for anything, dear?" she queried quickly.

"I don't believe so.... You never can tell."

On their arrival, he sent Jane home by taxi, and went at once to strike headquarters. Two men lay sleeping on a rug thrown into the corner, their faces gray and exhausted. A young miner, his arm bandaged, sat at the table with Spence and several others.

"Hello, Judson. Just in time for the big round," the lawyer greeted grimly.

They walked over to the window. "Two companies arrive to-night," Spence continued. "By to-morrow they'll proclaim martial law for the entire mountain district...." His tone grew shrilly significant. "That includes the place where the boys live now."

"What can we answer?"

The lawyer lifted wearied shoulders. "Do what we can. We won't quit, but——I saw what they did in '04, remember."

"No chance for justice from the soldiers? I know some of the boys in the local company——"

"My dear man, the company gave 'em new brass buttons, new rifles, new bullets! Where will they put those bullets, do you suppose? It's irony for you: most of the soldiers were once laborers; labor's money pays for their food and their rifles; and labor receives their fire. Of course, if we can avoid trouble——It's our only hope; we can win, if we can prevent a smash-up."

"What about Jensen?"

"I'm appealing; that'll tie it up for a year. But the cards are marked, and they are dealing."

Pelham escaped from the headquarters of suffering for a hurried trip out to the miners' tent settlement. On the way back, he saw in the state road ahead a familiar boyish figure; as he reached it, fourteen-year-old Ned turned and saw him.

"Hey, give us a lift, Pell!" The brother climbed in impetuously. "Didn't expect to see me, did you? Father's going to let me be a deputy, next year! Does the company let you use these roads?"

"This is a state road, Ned; it's as much mine as the company's."

"Gee, I thought they all belonged to the company! What do you know, Pell—Sue's getting married Friday!"

"So I read," rather crudely. "Is he a nice chap?"

"Fine as silk! His father's in the insurance business at Hartford—he has two yachts and an aeroplane—I'm going to visit them next summer——"

"You've gotten thick already, I see. I'm glad she's getting married."

"And what do you suppose!" Ned's eyes grew round and mysterious. "Tom Cole's really dead at last! He got pneumonia, and died in three days. The funeral was in Lilydale—Nell 'n' me went!"

"Nell and I."

"Anyhow, mother sent the most wonderful bunch of white roses you ever saw—all that were growing on the mountain. I helped pick 'em. And we're living in a wonderful big house in Glen Kenmore! Gee, you ought to see it!"

"Old Peter's still on the mountain?"

"Yes, an' he's going to teach me how to fiddle! Father said I could learn."

"Here's your company road, now," as they reached the Fortieth Street gap road. "Give my love to mother and the girls."

Another death occurred, announced by a simple wire to Pelham signed "Grandma." Thoughtfully he pulled out of a desk compartment the slim file, regretting the unanswered note on top. He studied soberly the careful letters, the slight tremble in the curves and capitals. To think that that deep-channeled hand could never form another line!

The Barbour homestead came back to him, a richly scented recollection. His little room, peach-petal sprays rubbing their silken invitation on the rain-specked panes ... the teetering climb on unsteady branches, to the succulent prize just within fingers' reach ... the shaded colonnade of the oak avenue before ... the smell of flowers: pansies and roses, begonias and the white sweetness of magnolia fuscata....

His nose breathed in the memory of the fragrance; and of the indescribably musty odor he associated with old age, a compound of pungent pennyroyal pillows, of kerosene, which grandfather always rubbed in his hands to warn off the mosquitoes, of lavender and rose leaves in sachet pads on the bureau.... A scent unmistakable, anciently sweet. All day his office was full of it.

He took the telegram home to Jane at supper. They were staying at the Andersons', until their own home, a small two-story house on Haviland Avenue, was ready to accept them.

Jane reread the brief message. "Of course, we'll both go, Pelham. I'd wanted so to meet your grandfather! He meant so much to you...."

"I thought we could go this spring to see them...."

He stopped with Jane at the Jackson Hotel, over-shadowed now by the new Lomax House; although Uncle Derrell had long ago sold his interest, to move out on the Greenville Road. Alf Barbour, who had been elected to the legislature, was as glad to see him as his uncle and aunt; and Lil, who had been married two years, proudly displayed her fat six-months-old bundle of joy for Jane's appreciation. These were all Barbours, Pelham thought in curious detachment, as he was; he was at home with them. He imagined the cold formality of Pratt Judson's big house, and rejoiced again at the kinder heritage predominant in his own blood.

Why, the grandparents had been almost a second father and mother to him. Undisturbed he went through the old house again—Paul was stopping at Pratt's—reliving the old days; grandmother's dear frail hands clutched tremulously at his sleeve. "You were always such a comfort to him, Pell...."

She fell in love with Jane, too. The girl set herself out to be sweet and considerate—to say nothing that might jar or ruffle the kindly unprogressiveness of the people.

"You have a lovely wife, Pell; like one of the Barbours," grandmother whispered lovingly.

When he repeated this to Jane, she answered, "And that is her highest praise.... It means a lot to me."

At the graveyard, his mother's black figure stumbled heavily beside her husband's stiff preoccupation. Son and father did not look once at each other; there was no recognition. But Mary came over beside her brother, and his quietly sobbing family, and held Pelham to her breast. "Mother's own big boy.... He was always so fond of you."

Then she did an unexpected thing. With a quick motion she turned to the younger woman beside him, and kissed her cheek. "I pray God you make my son happy," she whispered. "May he never be unhappy...." She cast a half-broken look back to where she had been. Sobbing heavily, she left them.

The slow echoes of "The Sweet By-and-By" ceased; the simple service ended. The horses stepped down the dirt road to their next task. Jane packed to return on the morning train.

Pelham, in answer to Uncle Jimmy Barbour's questions, went into a restrained discussion of his new beliefs.

"I don't understand all about socialism," the uncle finally decided, "but it seems to be, as you say, for the brotherhood of man. And surely that is following in the Master's footsteps."

"And I know Mary's boy wouldn't do anything we could be ashamed of," said Aunt Lotta, in soft certainty.

The simple trust moved him.

As he was leaving, Pelham took his aunt aside. "Don't let grandmother worry too much over—it," he said softly. "It's all so beautiful, and natural. If you believe in a heaven, you know he is happier there than here. Just as flowers blossom and die, just as the leaves stretch out their green leaves and then grow bare under winter skies, grow old, and die, while their place is taken by the younger saplings—it is all natural, and beautiful. We wouldn't want an endless day, or an eternal spring; there must come night and winter, that the new blossoming may follow."

"It is a lovely idea," Aunt Lotta said brokenly. "It will comfort mother."

Then he and Jane turned north again, to take up the unfinished labors at Adamsville—the hazard of losing the strike, and the delight of building their home together.

---

XXIII

The iron city interrupted its bitter struggle for an event of local magnitude. January 17th, 1917—Adamsville celebrated its semi-centennial! Fifty years since the first farm-shack had been built on the farm beside Ross's Creek: ten years of sleepy and indeterminate farm growth, with a forty year waking that had made it the third largest city in the oldest quarter of the country! Fifty years between old Thaddeus Ross's unhitching his single horse to begin plowing, and the creation of the billion-dollar Gulf Iron and Steel Corporation, with his great-grandson Sam Ross as president, and Judge Florence and Paul Judson on the board.

A "White Way" had been opened up both sides of the four main avenues, with five great white globes every thirty feet. Streamers of patriotic tri-colored lights lined the side streets, converging to a tapering pole in the center of Main Park—a vast pyramid of glitter and sparkle. Two new bandstands flashed back the twinkle from their shining woodwork; an ornate speakers' stand lifted above between them. Bunting draped the thoroughfares, the national emblem interwoven with the flags of France, England, Belgium, Russia, Japan, thickest over the court house and jail, the big retail houses, the offices of the mining and furnace companies, and the rambling cotton mills. Here the gay cloth framed the faces of women and children, busily bending, in the half gloom, above vast black machines—noisily weaving, in the human silence, cloth for more bunting.

The new Commercial Club building, a transplanted Greek temple, marble white, was to be dedicated, as part of the celebration. The gleaming symbol of adamantine prosperity was christened with champagne; the punch bubbled for gay members and wives, who applauded the eloquence of Dudley Randolph, the retiring president, as he relinquished the gavel to Paul Judson.

"This is the man who has saved Adamsville. I may be giving away a secret, but—we all know Paul Judson's backbone. But for it, we might have union miners swaggering down our avenues and boulevards. Instead, we have the militia, our sons under the waving banners of red and white and blue——" Frantic cheers submerged the rest of the sentence. "Mark my words: the time's coming when these law-defying strikers will feel the militia's iron insistence upon the majesty of the law!

"We can handle Adamsville; but that is not enough." His pulsing tones shook and trembled above their heads. "I want to see those same boys marching under that same flag, side by side with the tricolor of France and the Union Jack, against another autocracy greater than the domestic tyranny of the labor union carpet-bagger!" The shouts were whole-hearted, one veteran attempting the yodelled "Coo-ee" of the rebel yell.

"Let the rest of the South hang back," his strident tones shouted, "because of the loss of its cotton trade with Germany. We've got the iron and steel here to lay the rails straight down Unter den Linden, to forge the 42-centimeter guns that will blast the hated house of Hohenzollern into its home, the reddest sub-cellar of Hell! We demand that our country avenge the Lusitania—avenge the rape of Belgium—avenge the foul assault on the soul of civilization. And when her citizens speak, Columbia will not lag behind!"

There was a riot of joy as Paul Judson echoed the vigor of the old iron-master. "We have strangled the foe within," his clearly enunciated syllables stretched forth. "This undemocratic, anti-American principle of union-labor slavery, of a socialism sired by Prussian autocracy, and damned by all the forces of law and order throughout the world——" The reporters could not catch his next words.

"It is a time of prosperity for Adamsville. From the marble palaces of East Highlands to the poorest hovel in Scrubtown or Jones' Hill, we find a united citizenry stepping forth, 'Boost Adamsville' the motto shown on the button on every coat. Let us be united, to lead into the time when democracy has established its universal sway, under the flag that shines with the very stars of Heaven...."

"The old-time eloquence of the South," observed the editor of the Times-Dispatch approvingly, "has not left its gifted sons of to-day."

In the packed stuffiness of Arlington Hall, the miners' union held its meeting the same night, to hear the report from the strike committee and act on it. One matter came up first—the motion for the expulsion of Ed Cole from the union. It was John McGue's quick mind that had suspected the negro's treachery, it was he who had seen the actual transfer of the roll of bills from the covetous hands of Jim Hewin to the greedy negro's. Ed Cole, feeling behind him the hidden support of Jack Bowden and the old union crowd, defended himself with schooled dignity. But he could not explain away the money, and McGue's word was not doubted by the members. John Dawson, more age-scarred and mountain-like than ever, led the weary fight to purge the movement. The balloting was four to one for expulsion.

One ugly side-glance of hatred shot out of the negro's face as he left the hall, a look directed toward the corner where the radical unionists bunched. Then he disappeared.

And now, the real fight. The committee's report was short and definite. The company had refused to accede to the demands for unionization, even with a waiver of all other claims. The committee recommended that the strike be abandoned as lost, or fought out on the same plan, with the additional difficulty caused by the presence of the soldiers.

Bowden was on his feet, a vindictive snarl in his whole bearing. His eyes swept the crammed benches confidently. He was sure of this crowd.

"I ain't sayin' nothin' against John Dawson, and his runnin' of this strike. But it's failed. Even a blind man can see that. I been in conference—Bob Bivens, John Pooley an' me—with Mr. Kane, the company's adjustment man. He has given me this offer direct from headquarters." His look drove this remark straight at Dawson. "The company is willing to settle the matter"—every attention was frozen to the twisted frown of the weak figure erect in the center of the room—"take the men back, on the same terms as before, with the promise of a raise if there is any profit to make it from, laying aside the question of recognition for the future. And I move that resolution, and that the strike committee be discharged—instead of that bull the committee handed us."

"Second the motion!" Pooley's voice blended with a dozen others.

The floor swirled with demands for recognition. The chairman picked out the brawny bulk of Dawson, imperatively calling for the chance to reply. He understood the crisis, and strove to meet it.

"I've been a union man twenty-three years, and I never laid down on a fight yet!"

There was tumultuous applause from the Socialists and the more aggressive of the miners; but it came from a bare half of the hall.

"I'd lie down and die before I'd give up to a gang like that! Accept this dirty proposition which Jack Bowden brings to you—he offered the same thing six months ago, and you wouldn't listen to him—and you set back the union movement in Adamsville ten years. You'll admit you are licked off the map. I don't care whether you call the strike ended, and get into other work here or elsewhere, or keep on fighting—I'll stay here as long as there's any hope, I'll make the national keep me here....

"But don't lie down! They're licked now, and they know it, if you sit steady and don't let them provoke you to violence. You've won, unless——

"You know," he thundered suddenly, his hairy arm out-stretched toward the shrinking form of the local agent, "all of you know, that the curse of the American labor movement is the white-livered skunk that sells it out!"

There was wild applause at this, even from the other side of the house.

"I ain't namin' no names, but I say that self-appointed committee that's always runnin' in with offers from the company is treadin' slippery ground ... just like that nigger we fired out of here for takin' money from company men. It looks rotten—and, by God, no man can say that anything I ever did looks rotten! I call on you men to show 'em that Adamsville miners haven't a drop of quitters' blood in their veins!"

Ben Spence was on his feet, tightening his lips nervously. To keep in the good graces of the Socialists and radicals, and at the same time continue to represent the union in its legal affairs, required all of the tact that he possessed.

"Here, brothers, there ain't no use in calling names or showing hard feelings. All of us know what John Dawson's done for us—all of us know that Jack Bowden's been a faithful union man for more years than a horse has teeth."

There was a grin at this, and a weak rattle of applause, which encouraged him.

"If we can win by agreement, there's no use turning anything down cold. This offer from Mr. Kane may be just a feeler; maybe the company's ready now to do more. Why not instruct the strike committee, working with brothers Bivens, Pooley, and Bowden, to get in touch with the office again, and see if we can't get more out of them? I believe in using sense at all times. I move that."

There was a scowl on the faces of the Voice of Labor crowd as the motion was put, but, after all, Bowden reflected, it was at least a half victory. The motion was carried overwhelmingly, and the committee was instructed to act at once.

When he got to his room at the Mecca Hotel, tired and down-hearted, John Dawson stretched at once on the bed. The phone rang abruptly.

"It's for you, Mac," he called to McGue, who sat scratching his head over a game of solitaire on the greasy wash-stand top.

The shorter man hung up the receiver, puzzled. "It's from Mr. Brant, of the Register, he says—and he wants me to go over to Mr. Judson's office right away to see him on something important."

"I'm goin' to bed. See you when you come back." He skidded the huge shoes toward the side of the cheap oak bureau.

There was a knock on the door, a scant six minutes later. John Dawson, brain half asleep, his head screwed into the pillow, grumbled a "Come in!" and turned over slowly.

He sat up quickly, flinging his feet over the edge of the bed to the floor, as Ed Cole's ingratiating face came around the corner of the door.

"Well?" He sat up tensely. He wondered whether to reach for the pistol under his pillow, cursing the fact that McGue had gone. Then he reflected that this negro would never have courage enough to plan any harm.

"What do you want, Cole?"

"You ain' treat me right, Mr. Dawson," said the negro, who kept his hands in a shabby overcoat reaching to the ground. "Ah ain' took no money f'um dat Jim Hewin."

"Come around and see me to-morrow at headquarters. I'm in bed now." He pretended a yawn, still keenly alert.

"You done me dirt, Mr. Dawson. Ah ain' stan' fer dat f'um no man, white or black."

Dawson rose to his feet, and swayed menacingly on his bare toes. "I don't let nobody disturb me after I've gone to bed, Cole. Git out of here." His hand started working its way back along the sheeting.

The negro's startled eyes saw the slow motion; Dawson heard the chatter of his teeth.

"Ah'm—Ah'm gon'ter fix you, Mr. Dawson"—he raised the right hand, weighted with an ugly forty-five.

Dawson acted with all his speed. He threw himself toward the floor sideways, grasping his pistol as he fell. The gun in the hands of the negro roared, flamed; the smoke blinded Dawson's eyes, stung his nostrils. He fumbled with the trigger of his pistol.

Cole's foot shot out; the chair between them bounded grotesquely at him, crashing into his arm, spoiling his aim. He heard the pistol click again. He rose, aiming.

As he saw the direct flare of the hot breath toward him, his own pistol clicked impotently. At dizzy speed his mind traveled—should he try again, or swing the cylinder to the next shell?

How had the negro missed him at that distance?

Then came the sense of the terrific blow caving in his ribs, gutting its way throughout his inside. His huge face, which seemed to the negro to reach almost to the ceiling, gasped into a wrenched grimace of pain; the eyes closed, the mouth popped oddly open, like a frog's. An explosive intake of breath shivered horribly.

Ed Cole retreated in terror, aiming the pistol again, his eyes fascinated by the dark dampness spilling over the crumpled white nightgown. Then his eyes came back to the face.

Steadied against the wall, the wounded mountain that had been a man fumbled at the weapon. His fingers edged open spasmodically. The pistol clattered against the fallen chair.

The great paws reached out toward the negro's face; Cole could imagine their wide clutch rounding his neck. Then they doubled up abruptly, the big form swayed, the knees collapsed, the body crumpled upon the stained floor.

Throwing his pistol out of the window, Ed Cole ran for the stairs. Halfway down he stumbled, crashing noisily into the wooden railing. The clerk dozed, half-awake, trying to make up his mind whether the noise he had heard above called for an investigation or not. He jerked to his feet, his hand aimed for the drawer where his automatic was kept. Before he had reached it, the negro was in the street.

The clerk ran to the doorway, shouting unintelligibly.

Half a block away, two policemen lounging before the station had straightened at the first shot. They saw the running form almost as soon as they started for the hotel. A negro! "Hai! Stop there, you damn' nigger, or we'll shoot you——"

Ed halted, hands in the air. "Ah ain't done nothin'."

The second officer searched him, while the other kept the big automatic rubbed against his stomach. "Nothin' doin', Jim."

"What was that shot back there?"

Ed Cole's wits came back to him. "A white gen'lman, suh, he shot me, an' Ah shot back at him."

"I've a mind to kill you now. Let's give him twenty feet, Jim, then let him have it!"

Cole's arteries seemed frozen. "It was—it was dat union feller, suh—Mr. Dawson. He drawed a gun on me fu'st."

A peculiar look passed from one policeman to another, an expression significant with doubt. There was more in this than mere murder. "Come with us, nigger. If you try any tricks——" The pistol bored into his back.

"Lawd knows, boss," the whites of his eyes tumbled in desperation, "Ah ain' gwinter do no tricks."

The policemen, with two others who had come up, examined the room carefully. One phoned for the wagon, another located the pistol thrown into the littered lot beside.

"Ah was so scared," Cole admitted, his shifty eyes reassured by the attitude of the police, "Ah jus' th'owed dat gun anywhar."

The first officer picked up the weapon beside the chair, sprung the cylinder, and revealed the dented shell. He threw out the charge; each shell had been emptied.

"You say he shot at you first? Don't lie to me, nigger."

"Dat's de Lawd's trufe, sir. Ah ain' lie to no policeman."

Ed Cole was hurried off to the city lock-up, to await removal to the county jail, charged with murder in the first degree.

---

XXIV

Pelham and Jane came back from their trip to Jackson in a gentle mood. Death quiets the footfall and lowers the voice instinctively; their joy in the final preparation of the house on Haviland Avenue was unconsciously hushed.

He had his word about the various purchases; but his haphazard taste began to defer regularly to her sense of artistic home-making. The little clashes that came smoothed themselves away.

While she was superintending the unpacking of a treasured dinner set, her aunt's contribution, Pelham volunteered to hang the pictures on the living-room and study walls. She edged out to watch him, and interrupted at once, "Oh, never, never, Pelham! Pictures must be hung at eye-level."

Perturbed eyes met hers. "Ours hang near the ceiling, at home."

"They were probably larger. Mrs. Anderson taught me that. There.... And don't you agree now that my taste in wall paper is excellent? This gray oatmeal, as a background——"

"It is cool and lovely. I've grown up among flowers and curlicues."

They did not buy many things, Pelham's uncertain income being a chief cause. While with the company, he had lived up to his salary; from the few pay checks as state inspector he had not been able to lay aside a great sum. This, with a legacy kept untouched from college days, and an income that Jane had from her father's estate, put them beyond immediate worry; but there was no idle surplus for expensive furnishings. The election, as well as the wedding trip, had cut into his savings; and his present potboiling work—statistical researches for the United Charities reports—did not go very far, nor promise a future.

Remembering these facts, Jane's natural economy sought the less pretentious stores. The dining-room set and the bedroom furniture were substantial, but inexpensive for the taste they showed; the piano and bookcases were paid for on what Lily, the cook and maid-of-all-tasks, called "de extortion plan."

As she approved of the final placing of the pictures, Jane reflected with satisfaction on the fine showing their funds had made; and Pelham, his mind rather on the total shown by the bank's balance slip the first of the month, was glad that the bulk of the buying was ended.

Thoughtfully she studied the room. "That couch could stand two or three pillows.... I saw some ruby cretonne that would go wonderfully with that cover."

When she had purchased it and made it up, he had to admit that it was the most colorful spot in the house.

And what a colorful time those first days were! Many of the ordinary achievements toward the joint home brought positive ecstasy.

The puffed pride of those ruby cushions marked the end of the metamorphosis of the house into a home. "It's really presentable, now," she sighed contentedly, as she sat in their own chair, on their own porch of their own dwelling.

Pelham lounged back against her knee, studying the dark countenance of the mountain; somehow its spell had drawn toward it the face of the house, and the unlidded gaze of its blind-less front eyes. There was a pleasant rustle in his ears, as his wife bent over her sewing; Jane could not resist an occasional tingle of embarrassment at this preoccupation, in his presence, with the intimate mends in her garments. Would she ever dare mend his! What shameless and delightful publicity marriage entailed!

Abstractedly he thought over the outstanding raptures of these days. What simple stuff made the enduring pleasures! There was the thrill, for instance, when he had, with studied casualness, pulled out of his pocket the signed lease, for her inspection. What an unimportant thing, yet wearing somehow the grace of man's protecting, shelter-building rÔle! Then the zest of standing beside her while they chose furniture ... rugs, table, bedroom furniture.... The emotional exaltation had been immense. And the first meal they had had in the dining-room, with matter-of-fact Lily in and out in matter-of-fact fashion, and Jane across the white and silver expanse, her face softened by the soft lighting—these moments might become habitual, but the ecstasy of their first tasting had welded a permanent bond connecting the two. Added to this delight in things was the growing joy in each other—the day's cordial comradeships, the splendor of cool nights sacred to love, and reverent gray dawns in which he woke to watch the loveliness of her calm face asleep on the pillow's rumpled primness—these shook him with their intimate beauty.

"Tired, dear?" He put up his hands and caught hers.

"Not a bit. I sighed through sheer animal comfort, I think."

"You've earned a holiday—busy since morning with the house. Get your wraps; you don't choose the club—let's go up to the crest, and watch for Canopus.... If we're in luck, he'll be visible in a quarter of an hour."

They reached the vantage place; despite the fitful waverings of the horizon air, they saw the star's golden torch drag fierily over the tree-fretted heights of Shadow Mountain. There was a sullen reddish smolder over the face of this alien sun; but the brief glimpse of the burning visitant from southern skies was an unforgettable experience.

"If we could only watch it from the old top of the mountain."

"The old top, Pelham?"

He traced Nathaniel Guild's idea of the mighty sky-piercing ridge that had once united the iron strata of this crest and the West Adamsville one, with an overlap of sandstone whose grayed relics still crumbled in the small hills flanking the two iron ranges.

"It shrivels our puny importance, doesn't it, dear, to think of the former majesty of these hills!"

"We're as important to ourselves, Pelham."

Together in spirit they climbed the airy darkness that had been the old mountain; their fancies winged back to the shaken ages before man's weak restlessness hid in trees and caves, and came out into the open, to clear away and shape the forests, and split apart the everlasting hills for the malleable wealth hid within them.

But the ecstatic moods could not last forever. The graying embers of the strike re-won their efforts; the inevitable selfishnesses and littlenesses of life came in, to break the filmy web of romance and delight. Man can stay on the high peaks, whether of spirituality or intellect, of surging emotion or unstrung sentiment, but a little while; their rarefied atmosphere, the height of man's upward groping, will not sustain vigorous animal life. When such moments come, if we are in tune we pass into their magnetic sway whole-heartedly; let the little daily frets, the appetites and prejudices, be in control, and the height is unclimbed, the high emotion lifting another passes unnoticed over our stooping backs.

The two differing personalities found life together a perpetual welter of adjustment. Insofar as they were adaptable, these adjustments were easy; but neither his training, as a favored first son, nor her self-sure nature, helped cushion the continual shocks. Neither had reached the opinionated thirties, when inconsiderate habits have rutted too deeply to permit habitual considerateness; but the two determined wills had no easy task to come to agreement upon even small details of the home life.

Pelham's "picturesque" pipes, as he reminded her the unmarried Jane had always described them, showed a depraved tendency to roost wherever their master finished with them.

"But, darling, you must remember," she insisted, in affectionate exasperation. "Lily found one on the piano this morning; I barely moved the sugar bowl, and look at this table cloth! Your old ashes have made it simply filthy. The hall table's marked; your bureau——"

"I always mean to put 'em on the rack," he urged in contrition.

She sniffed distastefully, holding out the offender at the end of dainty fingers. "Here it is."

Again, he would become unreasonably exasperated when she insisted upon asking what meat he would prefer for dinner, when she had him to shop with her. "Mm-hmm, it's a lovely steak," he would agree abstractedly. "Yes, I like ham, too.... Or a roast. Darling, I don't care. Get anything."

She felt aggrieved at his callousness upon the momentous topic.

Upon other matters connected with eating he was not so unopinionated. "Just look here, Jane! Lily's douched the potatoes in fat again. You know that fried starch——"

"Yes, dear, I know ... by now. You needn't eat any; she'll bring some mashed ones for you."

He grinned surlily. "I'll try a few, Jane; I like them, though they're not good for me.... Another spoonful, please."

The country club was another viand of contention. Jane had never enjoyed the inconsequential chatter and watery flirtations that were its chief offer; Pelham found in them a forgetfulness from strike worries and the increasing financial problem.

The week after their sight of Canopus, he announced a determination to drop by for tennis with Lane Cullom, and the dinner afterwards.

"You may see Hollis; it's his spring holiday," his wife observed without inflection.

"I saw he was back. I don't mind, if he doesn't.... Sure you don't want to come? For dinner, or afterwards for a few minutes?"

"Dances are so boring, Pell."

"Once in a while I like 'em."

"I'll go next week, if you go then.... Don't make a scene with Hollis."

He jerked with needless viciousness at his belt. "Why make such an assumption? I'm not going to make a scene."

Her pen scratched raspingly over the businesslike letter-heads of the State Suffrage Association. "You almost had a fight with John Birrell, at the bowling tournament."

"You exaggerate everything, Jane. There was nothing like it——"

"You told me——"

"I told you, very plainly, that there would have been a fight, if we hadn't held in our tempers. He's a decent fellow; he's still sore about my mining report. The State is again investigating them."

She did not look up.

"Good-night, dear," planting an indecisive kiss on her hair.

"Good-night."

Probably Hollis would be in uniform, he reflected. The boy hadn't lost any time in joining the Yale Battery, when the President's initial break with Germany foreshadowed war.

Just after dinner, his brother Ned charged up. "Hell-o, Pell! Didn't expect to see me, did you? Father let me come, because Hollis was here."

"Aren't we the young sport!"

"There he is—Hey, Hollis! Here's Pell!"

The brother, fine-looking in his well-pressed khaki, came over unhurriedly. "Hello, Pelham. How you making out?"

"Oh, all right. I'm working for the United Charities, you know—Labor Legislation Committee."

"Still fooling with that socialist crew?"

"I'm still a member of the party, Hollis."

"You aren't a foreigner; why don't you get out?"

Pelham's eyes snapped. "Why not learn something about the movement, before you pass judgment on it?"

"You'll wake up soon. The heads of the movement are all pro-German; everybody says so. The government's liable to arrest 'em any minute."

The older brother grinned. "We won't quarrel about it."

"I don't care. I think it's outrageous, agitating against the government, when we may have war——"

Ned's bright eyes went from one to the other. "Pell's right, you don't know much about socialism, Hollis. I've been reading books at the library—it's great stuff!"

"Let father catch you!"

"I'm glad to see you back, anyhow," Pelham smiled. "Drop by the Charities building some morning and we'll talk over Sheff."

Hollis called, and the brothers had lunch together. Although the younger said nothing of it, Pelham could not help feeling the other's distaste at the dingy side-office in the Charities building where the older did his work now. And Pelham observed with a twinge of envy his brother's lavish order for the meal, his excessive tipping. Hollis planned nothing for the good of the world; money was his without asking; while in his own case....

Well, he did not need to worry yet. He was not making enough to support himself and Jane; but their fund was still sizable; and as soon as the strike uncertainty was over, he could get into something permanent. There was more cause for worry in the stagnation of the mine struggle. Thanks to the men's dogged persistence, production on the mountain was less than half normal. The companies could not hold out forever. Still, the inaction was wearing; he felt a restlessness against the whole fettering situation ... including the pestering details of the house on Haviland Avenue.

Other causes, unknown to him, egged on this unrest. The years of affection absorbed in his mother had so accustomed him to her that in his later loves he constantly looked for her characteristics, her most trifling traits. Jane was like her, in many ways; but he was discovering more ways in which she was dissimilar. Her directness, for one thing, was not the Barbour sweetness. And since she was not a reincarnation of Mary, and the door to the mountain was shut, not only by the present situation but by the rooted inhibition which forever banned his mother as the object of his man's affections, the deep imperative urged him forth again. He would be finally content, although he did not phrase it this clearly, with no less than perfection in woman—perfection to him meaning Mary; which is another way of saying that he could not be content. Thus he must still seek. The headstrong wildness of the mountain intensified the gipsying urge. Sooner or later, he felt vaguely, these forces would push him to some definite move. The uncertainty lay as to when, and in what direction, the outbreak would occur.

Opportunity never delays, when the strong heart demands it. A note from Louise told of her arrival in the city, and gave her phone number. First impulse was to ring her up at once; he had not realized how much he wanted to see her. He thought over the matter; there was no harm in one last ride.

He called up both women, alleging a visit to strike headquarters to one, and preempting the other for the afternoon. Just before three he claimed the New Orleans girl.

"Come on," he told her delightedly, holding her cool hands hidden in his. "It's too fine an afternoon to rust indoors."

A short while later he experimented diffidently. "You know, I'm married."

"Yes, Mr. Lover; I suppose I saw the lady in my city."

"Well?"

She mimicked his uncertainty. "Well?"

After all, what was the harm? Louise set certain strings in his nature ringing in response to her obvious lure, strings that Jane's finer person did not touch. Why should he cripple himself by denying a rounded development, a full self-expression to his nature?

The fresh majesty of these thoughts quite persuaded him; how could they have escaped mankind so long? He had never been taught that desire is the parthenogenetic parent of logic, the shaper of all intellectual decisions.

They swung aimlessly into the country club grounds, almost deserted this early in the afternoon. Up to the big billiard garret, the rough beams above, the window-seats in the gables, he took her.

"With a few more cushions——"

He lugged over an armful, and bent to nest them around her. The intangible sheath of the lilas surrounding her enwrapped him, mingled with the delicately acrid breath of her body, that unmistakable exhalation of feminine pores which summons the man as the drowsy odor of sweet clover draws the boisterous flight of the bee.

His throat choked, a tingling warmness washed throughout him.

"Don't ... you're——" Provocative fingers pushed him back.

The conventional protest died away. He kissed her fiercely, with a passionate brutality strange to his experience. Her fervor matched his; she gave herself enough to increase his desire, yet withheld wilfully with that simulation of the chase which blows up the flame to its maddest height. At length, the racking storm quiescent for a moment, he knelt weakly beside her, spin-drift battered by the inner surge of the tempest.

"I'm married," he parroted his earlier statement.

"I know——"

The stored-up frenzy shook him in restless helplessness, overcoming all restraints. "I'll leave Jane to-morrow, if you say.... Anything you want—There's nothing you can't have from me. Just say it—now—Hurt me some way——"

"I don't want to hurt you, you dear big silly boy. I love you."

He brought her head down until he could feel her parted teeth lightly touching his neck. "Hurt me ... kill me...."

An icy shiver of rapture gripped him as the tiny teeth tightened; as if the fangs of the serpent of forbidden love tentatively touched him, gloating in their power ... saving him for further sacrifice.

"There.... Are you satisfied, Mr. Lover?"

Curbing the tumult in his blood, he drew up a chair and faced her. "I ... we mustn't let this happen again, Louise ma cherie. Kisses ... and all ... I once said—do you remember?—are only the preludes to the finale of love. I am married; it won't hurt me; but you're—you're not."

Her hand rested lightly on his. "You aren't the first man who has ... loved me. You needn't worry about ... me."

Uncertainly his eyes searched the liquid deeps of hers. "Not the first?..."

She flushed unconsciously, returning his level look. Her words came slowly. "Why, no, inquisitive Mr. Lover. There was another man ... we intended to marry.... I'm glad, anyhow." The last three sentences came in soft haste; such frankness embarrassed her. She covered it, changing the theme. "It isn't fair to Jane——"

"Life isn't fair to any of us." His compelling gaze was put on to hide the fleeting emotion of inner timidity. "Where shall we...."

"Lydia Hasson isn't nearly as ... careful as the Tollivers. They're away a lot...."

She readjusted the pillows swiftly, as steps and scraps of conversation floated up the hollow shaft of the circular stairway. "Hadn't we better go?"

The Hassons were not at home, when he called two nights later; but their car might roll up any minute. "This is tantalizing, heart-love," he complained.

"It's something to have you here, anyway," as she cuddled deeper into the wide couch-swing behind the ferns on the wide railing. "We must be careful. If Lydia suspected——" Expressive eyes capped the meaning.

Jane had the Cades in for dinner, the next night; when Pelham arrived from the office, Harvey was entertaining the women with a nasal rendition of Judge Roscoe Little's mannerisms while enunciating a decision for both sides at once. The lawyer's welcome contrasted with some hidden constraint beneath Jane's tempered greeting. Throughout the meal and the talk afterwards he sensed that something was wrong. He could not quite make out what it was; perhaps it lay in his imagination.

His wife swished quickly inside, as the guests chugged away, leaving him to rearrange the porch chairs and follow more slowly. Something was up, that was clear.

She sat at her living-room desk, a litter of letters hurriedly pulled out before her. At his entrance, she raised frosty eyes to his. Without words she observed him. Disquieted by the confident, almost hostile stare, he sat heavily, clutching a handy magazine from the fresh pile beneath the reading lamp.

She did not speak. He exhaled noisily, and turned to the opening story.

"I met Lane Cullom this afternoon," she began in a moment, her voice leveled and restrained.

"What did he have to say?"

"He told me about ... about your driving with that Richard woman yesterday afternoon."

"Mmm.... Yes, she is a friend of Lane's. He introduced me, I believe."

Her eyes fired. "You said you were at strike headquarters."

"So I was, until I took a little run out Hazelton way. Then I came back and finished up my work," he lied recklessly.

"He saw you at Catawba. That's ten miles beyond Hazelton.... You didn't get back until midnight last night, Pelham."

"Why, I was here for supper! Then I had to go down town...."

"You were with Miss Richard again." She ventured a chance shot.

His jaw stiffened, the occasional look of childish petulance smoldering around his eyes. "What if I was? Do you expect me to be locked in by a keeper every night?"

"You never mentioned her ... except meeting her."

His mind squirmed. "We have so much else to talk about."

She pushed the disorder of letters backward with a gesture of irritation. "It was a risk marrying you. Every one said so; you had been splendid with me, but before that—you told me yourself—you'd switched from this girl to that.... You had something up with 'Thea Meade, I never asked what.... And the girls while you were in college, Nellie Tolliver and the rest. I never minded them; that was before I knew you. But this.... Do you think I have no shame, even if you haven't?"

"What a lot of side about nothing! Here I merely meet a young lady, take her riding, drop by to see her—what's wrong in that?"

Her low, tense indictment went on, partly to herself. "I always promised myself that I wouldn't marry a ladies' man. It isn't so much what you've done in this case, as the tendency," she continued illogically. "If everything was above-board, why didn't you tell me that you were with her yesterday afternoon and night?"

"Because it was my business, and not yours." His tones rose angrily. "Must I render an account to you for every minute of my time? Can't I have some self-respect left? Do you expect to keep me tied to your apron-strings all my life?"

"You needn't tell me, Pelham Judson, that you took her riding to show her the scenery. I know you better—by now. She made a few large eyes at you; you thought at once that you saw your soul-mate. Told her you were misunderstood at home, of course—that she could understand you." He failed completely to detect the scorn, intended to wither his defense.

"What if I did? It's true, isn't it? We get along finely on lots of things, Jane; but there are some things in which we can't agree."

"We both agree, I suppose, that the marriage agreement doesn't call for you to make love to other girls, when you are married to me. Of course, you kissed her——"

"What if I did?" His retort slipped from his lips too quickly; he wished at once that he had held it back. "There's surely no harm——"

"I won't dare hold up my head in her sight!"

"We're grown men and women, Jane. We're not old fogies. We realize, surely, that love can't be bought and sold, to be locked up forever in a marriage license. Love must be free; and when it comes——"

"You can have your 'love' as free as you wish, Pelham. Only, count me out of it." She rose, the commotion stirred by her quick motion setting the loose sheets flying, drifting to the new carpet they had been so proud of a week ago. Furious, she stooped to pick them up, her ire mounting as the unexpected enormity of his conduct became apparent.

"You talk like a fool, Jane. I haven't done anything——"

"I'll tell you what you've done. You've let a passing fancy for a woman make you forget that you're my husband. I won't share you with another woman, even if she will."

"Why, last night, when I came home, you were as loving——"

Her glance bayoneted him. "I've told you before of that Allie Durfield, the poor girl who'd ended up on Butler's Avenue. I've told you the bitterness with which she said, 'You engaged girls cause us the trouble. After your man's spent an evening with you, we pay for it.' I didn't understand her then; I do now. You spend the evening with this woman, then come home ... you call me loving! I wonder you can look me in the face!"

"You exaggerate everything, as usual. We haven't done a thing——"

"You've kissed her."

"That was nothing."

"It's this much. Either you give me your word now that you will not see her again, or—see only her ... and whoever else your fancy dictates. I'm through. I'll go back to Mrs. Anderson's and let you ... let you...." Her voice broke; she tumbled weakly, weeping and distraught, against the couch.

He was at her side in an instant. She rose, flinging the tears flying. "Keep away! How dare you touch me! I suppose you thought I'd cry and make up?... Will you give me your word?" There was a plaintive affection even through the sternness. "Dearest, we can't have our marriage on a rotten foundation."

He fumed to the front door and back, the discarded magazine rustling unnoticed upon the scattered letters. "I'll do anything in reason, Jane. But this is unreasonable, and you know it. You mustn't carry your penchant for running away from situations too far." She flushed at the reference. "I'll agree, of course, not to be unfaithful; but you can't choose whom I may and may not speak to. Common decency——It's ridiculous."

"We can't have a half-way marriage. This has gone too far.... Make your choice. You can't burn both ends of your candle...."

"Anything within reason, Jane."

"You'll promise, then?"

"No." The cruel monosyllable crushed the joy rising in her voice. "It's too ridiculous," he repeated.

There was a dangerous hush in her voice. "You understand the alternative? I leave to-morrow."

"If you're bound to be foolish, I can't stop you. I won't force you to stay here."

"I should say not!"

"You'll come to your senses soon enough. A good night's sleep will cure your tantrum."

Casually he jerked a match against the sole of his shoe. The sputtering head spun smokily into the carpet. He stamped it out, and lit another. Shielding the flame from the night breeze, he relit his pipe. When he looked up, she had left the room.

He knocked considerately on her door at breakfast time. A muffled voice told him that she had a headache, and was not coming out. Well, if she was going to act that way! She was bound to see the matter more reasonably. Probably she was ashamed now to admit that she had been wrong.

He was glad that he had only admitted one kiss....

Disturbed at the thought of the unfinished quarrel, he ran out unannounced to the house for lunch. Voluble Lily, her eyes rolling, informed him that Miss' Jane had left an hour before, and that her trunk had gone too. "An' she said dat you'ud know whar she had gone, Mr. Judson."

"That's all right, Lily. You needn't have supper for me to-night."

Angry with himself, with the inquisitive negro, with the fascination of Louise, which had precipitated this, most of all with headstrong Jane, he shot past the traffic policeman into the swirl of the city. He would show his wife that she couldn't keep him under her little finger!

---

XXV

The next day began the trial of Ed Cole, for the killing of John Dawson. Militia, equipped by profits from the mountain's wealth, guarded the courthouse; the strikers, realizing that their salvation lay in preventing an armed clash, ignored the provocative slurs and taunts of these guardians of order; but the glint of guns followed wherever they were, a continuing menace. Ben Spence had finally twisted a half-hearted consent from the county prosecutor to let him act with the State. "But they double-cross me every chance they get, Judson," he said as they walked to the county courthouse together. "That young Chippen, who is about as much of a lawyer as I am a South Sea Islander, is to handle the State's case—the youngest and poorest hanger-on around the county attorney's office. And against him, Dick Mabry, and Hilary, Leach, Pugh and Garfunkel!"

"They're a good criminal firm——"

"Best in the South. Darned fools, three of them; Tipton Leach is a lawyer. Darned crooks, all four. The company will do anything to get the nigger off. And 'Willy' Hawkes, Tuttle's old partner, holds this term!"

Spence took his seat beside Chippen, Pelham with a row of socialists just behind. Judge Hawkes entered with his usual nervous jerk, twitching his apologetic way to the raised bench. Richard Mabry, smiling in velvety assurance, bowed ostentatiously to His Honor; the defendant's table was otherwise empty. Deputies escorted in the negro, his face bright with a frightened interest, mixed with delight at his sudden importance, and confidence in the last whispered instructions of his lawyers, given half an hour before. The court-room filled rapidly; there was an uneasy rustle, a half-restrained chatter.

"Is the State ready to proceed?" came the case-weary accents from the bench.

"We are ready." Chippen's young voice wobbled uncertainly.

"The defendant ready?"

"If the Court please," in Mabry's meticulous accents, "my colleagues—in a moment——"

The judge leaned back, closing his eyes.

A sudden hush at the door. A stretching of necks from all the fringes of the room. Walking daintily, with a glaze of dignity which never lost its underwash of the furtive, came Meyer Garfunkel, youngest of the firm. Spence leaned forward to Pelham. "Biggest crook in six states! Does all their dirtiest jobs.... They always come in this way; it impresses the courthouse crowd."

The door swung again; a succession of breathless "There he is!"-es, as Colonel Lysander G. Pugh stamped heavily in, with his invariable atmosphere of busied haste, bowing affably left and right, his weathered broad-brim clutched beside his brief case.

Another shifting of interest. Tipton Leach, narrow-eyed, a permanent sneer around his mouth, walking slowly, speculatively. "He is the brains," continued Spence. "The corporations fear him like sin, in damage cases. He bleeds them and his clients indiscriminately. But he knows more law than all the local bench."

Last of all, preceded by his law clerk, Zebulun Hilary himself, his little red face, under the thinned mop of white hair, sticking out of his wide collar like a turtle's. "Over eighty, and indestructible! Even his conscience is asbestos."

There was a leisurely deliberation among the five counsel for the defendant. Five heads came together, five brains bent their scheming toward freeing the accused negro, ten eyes quivered with satisfaction at the prospect.

"Defendant ready?" The jaded judge roused himself to make this interjection.

Colonel Pugh rose in sallow majesty, his vulture eye sweeping the front half of the room in indiscriminate defiance of the court, the State, and, if necessary, the whole United States. Catch Lysander G. Pugh unready? Impossible! In precise affability his round tones rolled out. "The defendant is ready, if it please Your Honor." He sat down in complacent vindication.

An irrepressible ripple of appreciation quivered through the place. Here was a lawyer who knew how to law!

The plea of "not guilty" was entered; the panel of talesmen called from the jury room.

Spence leaned over to Pelham again. "First case since the Whitney scandal when all four have appeared together. They have the perfect system, Judson. Garfunkel does the second-story work; Leach knows enough law for all four of them; Zeb Hilary and Colonel Pugh get the business. They belong to everything—there isn't a lodge of any kind that they don't flock to. These two go into every political fight, one on one side, one on the other; they get 'em coming and going. It'll be a treat to hear them address the jury." He closed his eyes expressively. "Whew!"

Two men lounged in from the clerk's office and took their places at the defendant's table, as the selection of the jury began. Pelham watched their activity in bewilderment; as each name was called, they bent over long lists, and consulted with the lawyers while the talesmen were being examined. He noticed the deference with which their whispers were received.

At the first chance, he spoke to Spence again. "Who are those—more lawyers?"

Ben flashed him a sudden glance. "Don't you know 'Chicory' Jasper, and Bill Letcher? They're two of the company's 'jury strikers'—'jury fixers.' They have the dope on each man; interview them in advance, and all. If a man's ever said anything against a corporation, off he goes."

"But is that ... legal?"

"Supreme Court has ruled that it is." He turned back, to insist on Chippen's challenging a venireman who had worked in the company's office before getting state employment.

Three panels were exhausted, before twelve good men and true could be found who knew, Pelham judged from their answers, nothing whatever about unions or strikes; who had never heard of this strike; who did not read the papers. Eight were farmers from distant edges of the county, one was a bookkeeper as anemic as prosecutor Chippen himself, two were small business men, and the last a nondescript nonagenarian who called himself a "watchman."

Once the jury was chosen, the trial went swiftly enough. The State called the policemen, and made out a prima facie case against the negro. In answer to old Hilary's glib questions, the officers confessed that the negro had claimed self-defense; that Dawson's discarded pistol had an indented shell in it. McGue's evidence as to the fake telephone call helped; but the case for the State could have been stronger.

The defense evidently intended to take no risks. First they put on several of those present at the mass meeting when Dawson had denounced the negro, sympathizers with the Voice of Labor machine. Invariably these swore to the big strike leader's unreasonable anger against the expelled member. The radical union men in the room could hardly be restrained from hissing; but the testimony went in, and, Pelham noted, Spence's attack lacked some of his usual vigor. At last Cole himself was called. He gave his evidence with that easy circumspection that told to the initiated that he had been thoroughly coached. Nor could cross-examination twist any of his statements.

In rebuttal several of the sincerer strikers were put on; but this last minute recourse did not impress the jury.

The final speeches for the defense were masterly. Colonel Pugh led off, and in vulture-like gyrations pictured the incursion of this carpet-bagger from the North who had thrown good Adamsville men out of their jobs, and damaged all the business of the district; of his senseless persecution of this negro; of Cole's loyalty to the miners' union, and the death of his brothers on the mountain; and finally, of the negro's own act, a simple defense of the life which God gave him.

"They claim that this defendant received a bribe from a man then an ex-employee of the company. Who says so? One John McGue, who admits he is now under indictment in connection with this strike. There is no corroboration; Cole denies it, Jim Hewin, a deputy sheriff, denies it. Believe a jail bird against two witnesses like that? Why, they cannot even invent a motive to account for the fictitious presence of this fictitious money!...

"Are we to have it written down forever in the annals of Adamsville that a black man comes into our courts, and does not get justice? Will you make Ed Cole swing because of the color which his Creator imposed on him? Will you gentlemen be connivers at the legal lynching of an innocent man? Will your decision be that a white scoundrel can attempt to murder a negro, and that the negro must die for a man's first duty, self-protection?"

He ended with oratorical sky-rockets, and sank, seemingly exhausted, into the considerate arms of his legal twin brethren, Garfunkel and Leach.

Spence came next. When he reached the cause of the strike, his words rang convincingly; but the jury were unsympathetic to this. As he proceeded to the case before him, he tried to tear the careful web of evidence which backed up the negro's claim; the talesmen seemed impressed.

Zebulun Hilary's concluding speech for the negro found him in his most telling mood. He had been a leading pleader at the bar sixty years before; and the momentum of that stretch of time had multiplied his powers of persuasion until even Pelham had to confess his weird mastery of the emotions of men. He riddled the case for the State; there was no evidence to contradict the defendant's candid story. He pictured the desolate Cole home, now sought to be robbed of its last bread-winner; he wrung the hearts and the consciences of each juryman with powerful emotional onslaughts. When he finished, an acquittal, unless the last speaker could change the trend, seemed inevitable.

Chippen's lame summing up only made the case worse for the memory of John Dawson.

Pelham went out into the sunlight, Harvey Cade joining him. "It's sheer mockery of justice," came the lawyer's outraged outburst. "Lies, lies, lies! And Ben Spence soldiering on the job.... He represents the official union movement, remember."

"You don't think he would——" Pelham's honest horror was written all over his face.

"He could have done better. As for that Chippen, it's the rare case where he's smart enough to know that a 'not guilty' will help him more than a conviction. This is justice—in Adamsville!"

"And always so bad?"

"Why, our Supreme Court," went on the other bitterly, "has granted a new trial, because the letter 's' was left off the word 'defendants,' and again because an 'i' was omitted from 'malice.' In another case, where the indictment charged that 'A did embezzle from B his money,' the case was reversed, because the Court could not determine who the 'his' referred to. 'To make it refer to B,' said the learned court, 'would imply that the Grand Jury intended to charge A with a crime.' What an implication!... A leading magazine recently said that the criminal administration in this state is more scandalous than in any state in the union. It's unspeakable!"

The first edition of the Register was hot with headlines promising war. Pelham took a copy back to his desk in the Charities' Building, and, after navigating through excited cables of submarine sinkings, and profound announcements from minor Washington officials, found the brief mention of the local case. The jury had rendered the expected verdict of acquittal, after being out less than half an hour.

Pelham fumbled away the afternoon at his desk, self-disgusted and dispirited. The country was being sucked into the red whirlpool of war—a self-inflicted wounding of the white race amounting almost to race suicide. Labor everywhere had fought, before the conflict, to prevent its coming; but it was inherent in the spread of world-wide capitalism. Prussian militarism was a hateful contributing factor; but, if the Germans had been merely imperialists like the British, the conflict would have come just the same: labor's dumb impotence prevented the one saving force from effective prevention. The German socialists had been traitors to the international, except for scattered heroes like Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg; long local schooling in servitude had been too strong. The Allied comrades had not been much better, despite the facts that the British Labor Party promised continued agitation, and Italy and France were hopeful. Russia alone seemed firm: although the amazing news of the March Revolution had been followed by information that the new government contained more bourgeois than revolutionary elements....

And now the United States would come in. There would be defections among the socialists, of course; but Pelham prayed that the mass of the movement would stand untouched. "I'll stick," he muttered to himself. "If I'm alone.... But it won't be that bad."

His mind turned to the local situation. There was hope still, in the nucleus of fighting strikers—this latest judicial outrage would only increase their determination to defeat the company. But the election ... the death of Dawson ... the militia ... this decision ... Jane's leaving.... Things were in a mess.

Most bitterly of all he felt the strike situation. This conflict with his father had called out all the fighting vigor in his blood; win that, and he would have achieved something.... If only his mother could have seen the justice of the strikers' side, and come with him! That would have been a happy household, just he and his dear mother; no uncertain-tongued Jane, to scold at him for nothing, and embarrass his tangled affairs still further by leaving him without any cause,—certainly without any cause that she knew of. She was utterly unlike his mother, his turbulent wrath told him; cold, unsympathetic, un-understanding.... Sweet in a way, but not what he needed....

Well, he would see Louise to-night.

---

XXVI

On the way to the Hassons', he sought to solve the tangle of his domestic affairs.

He could not quite account for the errant streak in his blood, that drove him so joyfully toward the soft arms awaiting him. Surely he had an overplus of idealism.... Perhaps this was a part of it: of his endless search for perfection in woman ... for some woman, say, who held the magnificent sweetness his mother had received as the dear Barbour heritage. Louise had something of the understanding mother-spirit, that was the mountain's, that was his own mother's. And in turn the mountain wildness coursed in his blood; these had been his emotions, before he became its prodigal child.

The girl met him at the door, wide-eyed, a little wistful. "Well, Mr. Lover, you did come! Yesterday was lonely.... I have bad news; the folks have changed their plans; they'll be back, to-night.... We can take a ride, though."

His smiling lips straightened, but there was a dancing glow in his eyes. "Get your coat, girl," he said with affectionate curtness.

He turned from Highland Boulevard, the glitter of its lights reflected in the suave luster of the rain-damp pavement, into quieter, less-lighted Haviland Avenue. Into a darkened garage ran the car. Her eyes queried his. He pressed off the lights.

Over the cropped grass to the stone steps; inside the darkened porch he pulled out his keys, opened the door, led into the expectant hallway.

"Your ... home?"

"Jane is away," he said briefly.

The shades were pulled down carefully, a light lit. She sat, her eyes wide, on the hall couch, adjusting her skirts in the light. The dull gray paper brought out all of her ripe rosy loveliness; he paused, struck by the picture.... It was the couch on which he had last seen Jane sitting; a sardonic inner smile disturbed him.

"I don't feel that this is right, Pell—in her house——" Her deep eyes puckered in uncertainty.

Dominant lips closed her protest; she rested for a fleeting moment against him.

On the steps' landing he paused to point out tennis trophies gleaming against the dark woodwork.

Then they turned again, hand in hand, up the carpeted rounds to the dim silence above....

Before midnight he told her good-bye on the Hasson porch.

There were times, in the two weeks which followed, when Pelham viewed himself from without, with a definite disgust; when he realized that a furtive fraction of love could never make up for the big gap caused in the day's doings by the absence of Jane. Once Louise had to tease him out of this mood.

"I'm leaving you, Mr. Lover, on Wednesday.... Make my last three days pleasant."

He took her to the station. As they entered it, two cars disgorged another increment of the militia.

He rode to the first stop with her.

"You were a good lover," was her final praise. "Run down to the coast and see me sometime.... If you still want me."

---

XXVII

It was just after ten, in the dry heat of a July day six weeks later, when four of the deputies appeared on the road at the entrance to the miners' shack village, and started to enter. They were backed by a squad of the new Home Guard, who had come to help out the militia, now in process of gradual federalization.

"What d'ye want?" called out John McGue, the only committeeman at the moment in the informal town. Pelham, Joe Mullins, the new national organizer, and a committee were visiting the governor, to protest against two exceptionally brutal clubbings by the restlessly inactive guards. It was a hopeless trip, except as a protest.

"You hold things down, McGue," Mullins had told him. "It's coming, by God! They'll consent to arbitrate before the middle of August, or the federal government'll step in! Four new camps, man, in three weeks—they can't get any more men, either, for love or money. We've got 'em!"

Things were looking serious for the company. The Ed Cole verdict had reacted against it; defections from the ranks of the strike-breakers were frequent, and the output was hardly a third of that of the summer before the strike.

McGue wondered if the visit of the guards and militiamen had been timed to fit in with the absence of most of the strike leaders in Jackson. "What d'ye want?" he repeated.

"We got warrants for six men." The deputy—it was Huggins—started to walk on in; McGue kept his place.

"Get out of the way, there," Huggins warned him shortly.

"Gimme the names; we'll git the men fer you. No need to go trampling through people's houses and gardens, as you guards did last week."

"I'll give you nothin'."

The voices in dispute resounded down the vacant roads. Men, hungry men, their natures warped with the long unequal struggle, massed in a shifting background behind the rugged committeeman.

"Get out of my way, or I'll jug you too."

Silently McGue stepped aside. The crowd flattened back against the flimsy walls. The armed guards, grinning at one another, jostling and joking, penetrated deeper and deeper into the straggly irregularity of the settlement.

All at once Huggins caught sight of an undergrown, misshapen boy scowling from the back of the men and women. Pushing them aside, he shoved to the spot, the guards close behind. His hand gripped the boy's arm, until he winced.

"Hey—whatcher——"

"What's your name?"

"Aw, you lemme 'lone! I ain't done a thing."

"Take him, there." He shook the boy savagely. "Your name's McGuire, ain't it? Frank McGuire—I know you."

McGue came up again, holding in his irritation. "What do you want this boy for?"

"None of your damn' business! We got a warrant for him, see? You keep out, or——"

Several of the deputies in the rear clicked their hammers suggestively, snickering at the one-sided joke. A disturbed buzz wavered up and down the massed strikers. As Huggins turned up the wider road again, it grew in volume into a subdued stream of boohs, catcalls, hisses, low threats. He turned incautiously, facing them.

"Don't you follow me, you gutter trash, or I'll jug the lot of you!"

A weak satiric voice came from behind a house. "Aw, will you, though!"

McGue's eyes grinned; but his face remained set, as he doggedly kept pace with the head of the marching guards.

Two more men were taken in the same methodical fashion. The surging procession was now near the open center of the location, where a square had been left as a common, with the artesian well at one end.

Girls and women quietly replaced the men in the front line, jeering and cursing at the flushed faces of the soldiers, occasionally stumbling awkwardly against them. There was a scream as a soldier turned suddenly on a pretty red-haired girl, and caught her wrist. An old Irish virago beside clutched his shoulder and flung him sideways.

"Touch my daughter, you dirty bastard, and I'll tear your heart out!"

Huggins re-formed his men at the entrance to the square. There were only fifty soldiers in line; there were already several hundred of the tenters, and their number swelled constantly. Of course, they couldn't do anything.... He had his orders.

The stage was set for trouble. Over the heads of the women and girls, from the shelter of the nearest house, a rock whished—an apple-sized ore boulder from the iron heart of the hill. It crunched into one of the guards, square on his cheek. He grunted. An uncertain hand patted his dazed face. When he drew it away, it was smeared with blood; the stain widened over his collar and breast.

A second stone came from the opposite side. Then another ... another....

Two deputies fired wildly in the direction of the hidden throwers.

Out of the dissolving panorama of frightened strikers came a spurted crack, a spit of smoke. One of the deputies screamed, was supported, writhing terribly, by the men on either side of him. His head hung limp.

"Back to that building, there," boomed Huggins, pointing to the distributing store at the mountain end of the square.

The retreat began. The strikers eddied backward from the cleared place. From houses along the way unexpected bursts of rocks, an occasional shot, crashed into the close ranks of the law-enforcers.

Four or five revolvers puffed off to the left. A guard dropped his gun, shaking his hand in agony. The left third of the soldiers at a command raised their rifles, and blazed away at the infuriated welter of retreating humanity. A madhouse of screams, men and women running, two bodies settling onto the stained July grass....

Another volley, this toward the right.

"Take that, you——" screamed a deputy, as the startled face at a window was met by the blaze of a rifle. The woman hung swaying over the ledge; choking horribly, she trembled further and further out, dropped hideously upon the ground.

At the storehouse now. "Hey, you, get out of that," Huggins commanded the strikers' distributors.

"This is our——"

The sight of the rifles settled the matter. The two dead guards were stretched on the floor, the wounded were roughly bandaged. Huggins phoned the facts to the militia headquarters on the mountain.

"Said for us to wait here," he explained to the army lieutenant in charge. "It 'ud be suicide, trying to get out. For all we know, all them houses is full of strikers. There'll be two companies here inside of an hour. By God, we'll do for 'em this time!" His tone shook in fierce rapture—the man hunt was on!

The main bulk of the rifles covered the big open field in front; small parties watched toward west, south and north, to warn if any activity showed in the houses fifty feet away.

There was no water; the wounded cursed continually for it. Huggins sent a party, well protected, over to the well, seventy feet away, to bring back two bucketfuls. One of the detail was shot in the collar bone, but managed to make his way back with the bearers of the precious drink.

There was a shouting from in front. "Hey," came a voice, waving a white towel raised high on a clothes-pole. "Can we talk with your man in charge?"

It was Edward McGuire, the father of little hump-backed Frank, who had been arrested, but had slipped away in the disorderly retreat to the store. He had been selected as one of the older, more law-abiding of the miners, to bring the flag of truce.

"What d'ye want?" Huggins demanded belligerently. "Ain't no use to talk; I got a regiment comin' in half an hour, will clean up this whole damned nest of rats."

"Can I come closer?" called McGuire.

There was no answer. He came over to where the lieutenant of the guard stood, clutching the pole with its white symbol high above his head.

"Well?"

"Can we pick up those bodies out on the field? You can get any of your men there. We'll carry this flag, sir—one of 'em 's my son, I think."

The deputy beside Huggins stepped two feet forward. His revolver reversed, he brought it down with all his force on the undefended grizzled head. McGuire dropped in a heap.

All the while, down the dusty July road, Major Grinnell, of the State Guards, had double-quicked his men. They reached the railroad spur just out of sight of the shack village. Here he divided his force. The company automobiles, equipped with searchlights and machine guns, had gone by the county road to the eastern end of the colony, behind the sand ridge, to cut off possible retreat. The motley mass of deputies, mine guards and special police cut in after them, to work back with the machines. The militia marched above the camp, close to the store held by Huggins. After a fifteen minutes' wait, they proceeded in open formation, converging toward the common.

The strikers, stunned by the brutal killing of McGuire, swirled together beyond the well, hidden by the jerry-built shacks.

"We gotter rush 'em," "Micky" Ray insisted, weaving in and out of the perturbed herd, followed by several adherents as violent. "Damn it, why doncher rush 'em, before they sneak out?"

McGue confronted him again. "Still at it, you fool? They'd shoot us down like dogs——"

"They'll shoot us anyway. 'Fraid of 'em, are you, Johnny?" another taunted.

"We gotter rush 'em. Get your guns ready," commanded Ray. "All that aren't afraid, line up behind Bill there."

He turned his back to round up others. The line doubled on him, an excited commotion shaking it. He tried to break his way clear, to understand what they were saying.

"What the——"

"Aincher heard her?"

"Nellie seed 'em!"

"All the soldiers is come! They're right behind the store!"

"They're everywhere!"

"You see?" stormed McGue, shoving Ray to the side. "Everybody below the common."

They made the change. The militia assembled before the storehouse, extended their wings, beat down the open space and the lanes parallel with it. Undetermined, the strikers waited, poorly armed, but sheltered behind friendly walls.

Huggins' big voice came faintly. "Lay down your guns," he shouted. "The first man who shoots, we'll fire. Do you surrender?"

There was no answer.

"We'd better," insisted McGue, perspiring from heat and excitement. "They ain't got anything on us. You can't fight rifles with bare hands."

"Hell, no! You saw what they did to Ed McGuire. Let's kill the uglies——"

"Kill 'em!" Ray adopted a new slogan. "Kill 'em! Kill 'em, I says."

They wavered. The blistering sun beat fiercely on the metallic barrels of the menacing rifles.

A dreadful tumult of shots, shouts, indescribable noises, broke out in the rear. The shuddering sound of machine guns pelted whistling hail through the sparse tree leaves above.

Out of the blind turmoil came running figures, blaspheming in horrible rage. "They're there too!"

"It's another regiment!"

"They're killing everybody!"

The noise grew louder.

Major Grinnell halted at the head of his men. McGue, surrounded by a cowed hundred of the strikers, walked quietly out. "Do you want to arrest us?"

Methodically the houses and alleys were combed, until close to five hundred men, women and children had been herded into the trampled square. One by one they were marched before the guards and deputies; a hundred and nine were pointed out largely at random, as having had some part in the attack. The rest who were involved had slipped away between the two lines of attackers. Wailing and lamenting, the former were herded away into the overcrowded jails.

That night the militia encamped in the remains of the settlement. Fire had destroyed the western third of the houses, a fire which the soldiers made no attempt to put out.

Not a striker was permitted to enter the barred area.

Jim Hewin, back on duty as a sheriff's deputy, led one of the squads that scoured the surrounding woods the next morning for fugitives and bodies. "Hey, 'Red,'—they pipped somebody here," he explained.

It was the rocky road behind the settlement, which led above the wet-weather falls of the brook that eased away into Shadow Creek. The oasis of grass in the middle of the sandy road was darkly muddied by a mixture of dirt and blood. A cap, crumpled, the visor torn loose, lay in the clawed sand beside it.

"Red" Jones ran up. Hewin's quick eyes zigzagged eagerly. "Look, 'Red'—he went here!"

The trail of blood began again a few feet beyond the road. A heavy body had been dragged over succulent pokeberry plants: moist pithy leaves swung crushed, oozing their thick sap; dark berries lay mashed upon a soil purple with their blood.

They parted the sumach and haw bushes screening the falls.

The slimed slope of gray rocks was darkened by a muddy reddish trickle of water. It was a broken stretch of seventy feet to the green stagnancy below.

"Hey, 'Red'——" Jim's voice dropped; his shaking hand pointed to an awkward mass half way down the incline.

They slid cautiously, clutching the rough crag edges beside the water.

Caught in one of the shelf-flaws of the rock, his miner's shirt coagulated with blackened blood, his stained overalls soggy with the water, lay a dead negro.

Hewin turned the body over; his fingers shrank and slipped at the moist unpleasantness.

They peered into the dead face of Ed Cole. A clinging mould of leaves half obscured the deputy's badge on his greasy lapel.

Jim's eyes expanded. "Cole, you know—he shot John Dawson."

They regarded the face for a few minutes.

"Got any terbaccer, Jim?"

"Red" lit up his pipe.

"Guess we'll tote 'im back—down that way, huh?"

The dank and dripping bundle was carried and dragged through the scratching underbrush. When they reached the road at last, they rested it on a scaly-bark's littered knees.

Jim rubbed the sweat off from his forehead with his soaked sleeves. "Hell, he's heavy, ain't he? This'll do.... You see Huggins; he'll send a wagon." His hands pushed throughout his trousers pockets. "Did you gimme them matches back?"

---

XXVIII

Governor Tennant—his pet name among friends and enemies alike was "Whiskey-barrel Tennant"—dismissed the committee with a few curt platitudes about law and order. When they reached Adamsville, they found the shack colony sacked, the strikers and their dependents either jailed or scattered. The militia had done a thorough job.

Wearily Pelham dragged himself to the meeting at Arlington Hall.

Jack Bowden, of the local miners' organization, who always came like a bird of carrion at evil news, secured the floor, and moved that the strike committee be discharged and the strike settled on whatever terms could be secured. "They've bashed in our heads," he said vigorously. "Do we want 'em to cut our throats as well?"

There was no John Dawson to reply to him. From many groups of the strikers came discouraged support for the motion. Most of the old tried unionists saw nothing to be gained in wasting energy on a dead struggle.

"Makes mighty little difference now," Pelham whispered hopelessly to Serrano, seated in explosive agitation beside him.

"You'll never quit!"

"Not quit.... But start a newer fight, with some chance of winning it."

One violent industrial unionist demanded the floor, and pounded out that the strike must continue, with a general tie-up of every trade, organized and unorganized, in Adamsville.

"One big union!" he continued to shout, even after the ready ushers had pushed him into his seat.

"That's the sort of fool advice," Jack Bowden said, "that's lost this strike. For it is lost; and I'll tell you who's lost it. Not the company, nor Paul Judson's money, not his murdering gunmen; but——" and his lean arm pointed straight to Pelham, "but crazy radicals in and out of the union movement; lounge Socialists, lemonade trade-unionists, men who claim to be with us, but were born with scab hearts. It's them and their kind have led to this smash-up. And the sooner we reckernize it, the better!"

There was a tossing roar of applause at this. The crowd, Pelham grasped at once, was ready to quit, and only wanted someone to blame for the failure.

Nils Jensen, still under bond pending the decision of his case by the Supreme Court, answered the charge at once. "Men, brothers," his voice rang out, "I've been a miner, and a member of this local, for thirteen years. I don't know who is to blame, but I know who isn't—and that's the Socialists among us. We've fought, in the union and at the polls, day in, day out, while your old-fashioned unionists have been pulling down fat jobs under Democratic sheriffs,——" a hit at Pooley, who had been first deputy under the previous official. "I'm not in favor of going on now, if the crowd's ready to stop. I can get work, here or somewhere else, in or out of jail,——" There was a friendly smile at this. "I know that the war between our class and the Paul Judson class will go on until classes are ended. If you're to blame anybody, blame ignorant laborers, who can't see that scabbing against their fellows cuts their own throats, and betrays their wives and children. Blame the labor fakers, the crooked bunch who 'lead' you so that their pockets are lined for delivering your votes to the old parties, while you get nothing. And when Jack Bowden says that Comrade Pelham Judson, as good a socialist as any one of us, is a lounging lemonade socialist, with a scab heart, he lies, and he knows he lies!"

The chair's rappings were lost in the outcries. "Order!" "Order!" broke all over the hall. An uproar circled around Jensen and also Bowden; for a minute the meeting threatened to break into a riot.

Jack Bowden jumped up to the platform, a document waving over his head. "Brothers!... Brothers!... Let me answer him!" He paused, while they quieted. "I'll answer him. When I moved that the committee be discharged without thanks, I knew what I was doing. When I charged that 'Mister'" (with an ugly sneer) "Pelham Judson, son of the vice-president of the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Iron and Steel Company, was born with a scab heart, I knew what I was doing!"

Cries of "Shame!" "Shame!" "Throw him out!"

He kept his place. As he waved the mysterious document before their faces, the cries weakened; curiosity hushed them.

"One member of that committee, a man who had no right on it, for he had no union card——"

"As Paul Judson has!" Jensen cut in sharply, amid indignant demands to keep quiet.

"One member of that committee has been—a scab! As he may be a scab again, when he pleases to. I have here," he opened the paper, so that the large red seals were displayed to all, "—affidavits from Connecticut, proving that 'Mister' Pelham Judson, 'Comrade' Judson if brother Jensen wants to call him that, in October, 1913, in New Haven, acted as a scab during a strike of conductors and motormen on the New Haven Electric Company, and helped to break that strike. He's kept quiet about it; I can't. And I say that such a man should be kicked out of all affiliation with the labor movement, here or elsewhere!"

"It's not true," shrieked Jensen and a score of fervid socialists. One brawny Norwegian started for the platform. "I'll tear out dat dam' liar's tongue." The sergeant-at-arms pulled him back.

Pelham rose, pale and trembling.

The chair picked him out. "Does brother Judson desire the floor?"

There was an intent silence, as he stood, alone, surrounded by the hostile hundreds of the men and women he had fought for. He tried to begin.

Bowden walked across the platform, toward him. "Is it true, or not?"

Pelham's swollen tongue licked his lips. At length he spoke, quietly, yet so penetratingly that every syllable reached his audience. "I can explain——" he began.

"Is it true?" Bowden led the demand of hundreds of angered throats.

He faced them unflinchingly. "It is true. I can explain——"

The hooting and jeering broke with savage, almost bestial fury. Doggedly Pelham kept to his feet, in spite of the efforts of Serrano and others to drag him down. "This is terrible, comrade," whispered Serrano. "You'd better leave——"

At length Bowden got the eye of the chair again. "I move that we give five minutes to Mr. Judson to 'explain', as he calls it, his scabbing."

In simple language Pelham told of his training in a home dedicated to the fight against labor; of his acts at New Haven, while a college student; of his conversion to socialism and the cause of labor. He did not mention what it had cost him; a few remembered this. When he came to his New Haven experiences, the hissing began, swelled in volume. All of the chair's entreaties could not stop it.

"If you think, comrades, that my usefulness on this committee is over, I hereby resign. But I can assure you that nothing will shake my efforts in the cause for which I have fought, am fighting, and will continue to fight."

No eloquence could have moved them. The mass psychology of the meeting demanded a victim; here was one before them. The shrivelling strike months of turmoil and undernourishment had thrown them back into a lower, more barbarous state; their sense of justice was perverted from ultimate social equality and order into a primitive condemnation of the accursed thing that had brought them into this predicament. They were only too ready to throw a Jonah to the deep, as an expiatory sacrifice to the omnipotent god who doled out bi-weekly pay-envelopes. They were in a starving panic to get back to the skimpy flesh-pots of a darker Egypt.

It was moved and seconded that the resignation be accepted. An earburst of "ayes" were for the proposition; one or two scattering voices registered weak negatives.

"The motion is carried."

The sudden blow had crushed all opposition. The resolutions to end the strike were accepted without debate.

Jack Bowden, highly satisfied with the night's work, went over to the state office with Bob Bivens and John Pooley. "Reckon I better destroy that?" he grinned, handing a letter out to the big State president.

It was from Henry Tuttle, on the company's legal stationery, enclosing the affidavits relating to Pelham's activities in the New Haven strike.

The letter was burned, the ashes scattered.

The next afternoon's Register informed Pelham of the company's terms, which were to take back all except the ringleaders, some twenty in number—he noticed the names of Jensen and the committeemen heading it—at the old rate, with an agreement from each man binding him not to join the union. The strikers under arrest, continued the account, would be discharged in all probability, except in cases of serious nature.

The same paper contained the sparse outline of another story, which Pelham read with a growing horror.

At three-thirty the previous afternoon, an old man had entered the mining company's office, and asked for Paul Judson.

"What name?"

His watery blue eyes danced peculiarly beneath stringy white hair. "He doesn't know me. It's important."

"We must have your name."

Fumbling first on one foot, then the other, he eyed the uninterested clerk closely. At length he made up his mind. "My name is Duckworth—Christopher Duckworth, tell him. I've come about the settlement of the strike."

She marked down the name, snapping to the drawer. "He's out of town to-day."

"When does he return?"

"Maybe late this evening ... maybe not until to-morrow."

Suspicious old eyes searched her face. "Sure he isn't in?"

"I told you once, didn't I?"

"He may return to-day?"

"Maybe."

"I'll wait."

Passers in and out of the offices remembered his shoving a paper hurriedly into his pocket as they neared.

About an hour later, when the information clerk left for a few minutes, he rose, and started to open the door marked "Paul Judson: Private."

"Where you going?" an accounting clerk demanded, watching his unusual movements.

"Mr. Judson wants to see me."

"He isn't there."

He caught the old man roughly by the arm, as he tried to push past.

The enfeebled socialist retreated to the center of the room.

"Give him this," his quavering tones insisted, pushing a piece of paper into surprised hands.

The clerk looked up hurriedly, some warning of the unexpected, the dangerous, reaching him. His eyes caught the rusty glint of metal.

He jumped. At the same moment, the roar of the shot rattled the windows, acrid smoke swirled throughout the room, the old man's legs buckled up. He fell quietly to the floor; his shoes scraped the flooring once. He lay still.

The clerk read the note aloud, after the morgue had been phoned, and the body covered.

"To Paul Judson:

"This act is my punishment, for living on the earth your presence scars; a just God will punish you in another world.

"This act will bring home to your conscience your responsibility for murder:

"Murder of twenty-three miners in the mine explosion;

"Murder of John Dawson, and fifty innocent strikers, by the guns of your gunmen;

"Murder of your guards by your own acts;

"Murder of the bodies, hearts and souls of starving strikers. Murder of good in all people. Murder of justice in your courts.

"Murder of me, as a warning of what you deserve.

"Christopher Duckworth."

"Can you beat it?" the clerk whistled. "A plain nut."

"I seen how crazy he looked," said the information clerk. "Good thing he didn't miss an' hit you, Courtney."

A little stenographer fainted. One of the telephone operators discussed it with a chummy runner. "I wouldn't work here now, not if you paid me! It's awful bad luck."

"Gee, if I was afraid of stiffs!" he said, pityingly.

The scrubwomen grumbled at having to clean up the floor again. "Ought to be extra pay for this.... Bad enough to clean them floors once."

Paul Judson, returning from Jackson on the morning train, did not learn about the grim protest until he reached the office.

---