Хопкинс Адамс. Успех, 1 часть

Самюэ;ль Го;пкинс А;дамс — американский писатель, автор романа «A Revelry» о скандале в администрации президента Гардинга. Драма Адамса на эту же тему в США была запрещена в 1920-е. Википедия
Дата и место рождения: 26 января 1871;г., Дюнкерк, Нью-Йорк, США
Дата и место смерти: 16 ноября 1958;г., Бофорт, Южная Каролина, США
Дети: Кэтрин Адамс и Хестер Адамс
Образование: Колледж Гамильтон     Title: Success: A Novel
       
        Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams

       
        Release date: March 21, 2005 [eBook #15431]Most recently updated: December 14, 2020
        Language: English
       
       
   
       
            *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUCCESS: A NOVEL ***
       



Produced by Robert Shimmin, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.









                Success

                BY SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

             Author of "The Clarion," "Common Cause," etc.

                1921




CONTENTS

    PART I. ENCHANTMENT

   PART II. THE VISION

  PART III. FULFILLMENT




SUCCESS




PART I

ENCHANTMENT




CHAPTER I


The lonely station of Manzanita stood out, sharp and unsightly, in the
keen February sunlight. A mile away in a dip of the desert, lay the
town, a sorry sprawl of frame buildings, patternless save for the one
main street, which promptly lost itself at either end in a maze of
cholla, prickly pear, and the lovely, golden-glowing roseo. Far as the
eye could see, the waste was spangled with vivid hues, for the rare
rains had come, and all the cacti were in joyous bloom, from the scarlet
stain of the ocatilla to the pale, dream-flower of the yucca. Overhead
the sky shone with a hard serenity, a blue, enameled dome through which
the imperishable fires seemed magnified as they limned sharp shadows on
the earth; but in the southwest clouds massed and lurked darkly for a
sign that the storm had but called a truce.

East to west, along a ridge bounding the lower desert, ran the railroad,
a line as harshly uncompromising as the cold mathematics of the
engineers who had mapped it. To the north spread unfathomably a forest
of scrub pine and pi;on, rising, here and there, into loftier growth. It
was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin
steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments
of forest and desert, tree and cactus. A single, straggling trail
squirmed its way into the woodland. One might have surmised that it was
winding hopefully if blindly toward the noble mountain peak shimmering
in white splendor, mystic and wonderful, sixty miles away, but seeming
in that lucent air to be brooding closely over all the varied loveliness
below.

Though nine o'clock had struck on the brisk little station-clock, there
was still a tang of night chill left. The station-agent came out,
carrying a chair which he set down in the sunniest corner of the
platform. He looked to be hardly more than a boy, but firm-knit and
self-confident. His features were regular, his fairish hair slightly
wavy, and in his expression there was a curious and incongruous
suggestion of settledness, of acceptance, of satisfaction with life as
he met it, which an observer of men would have found difficult to
reconcile with his youth and the obvious intelligence of the face. His
eyes were masked by deeply browned glasses, for he was bent upon
literary pursuits, witness the corpulent, paper-covered volume under his
arm. Adjusting his chair to the angle of ease, he tipped back against
the wall and made tentative entry into his book.

What a monumental work was that in the treasure-filled recesses of which
the young explorer was straightway lost to the outer world! No human
need but might find its contentment therein. Spread forth in its
alluringly illustrated pages was the whole universe reduced to the
purchasable. It was a perfect and detailed microcosm of the world of
trade, the cosmogony of commerce _in petto_. The style was brief, pithy,
pregnant; the illustrations--oh, wonder of wonders!--unfailingly apt to
the text. He who sat by the Damascus Road of old marveling as the
caravans rolled dustily past bearing "emeralds and wheat, honey and oil
and balm, fine linen and embroidered goods, iron, cassia and calamus,
white wool, ivory and ebony," beheld or conjectured no such wondrous
offerings as were here gathered, collected, and presented for the
patronage of this heir of all the ages, between the gay-hued covers of
the great Sears-Roebuck Semiannual Mail-Order Catalogue. Its happy
possessor need but cross the talisman with the ready magic of a postal
money order and the swift genii of transportation would attend, servile
to his call, to deliver the commanded treasures at his very door.

But the young reader was not purposefully shopping in this vast
market-place of print. Rather he was adventuring idly, indulging the
amateur spirit, playing a game of hit-or-miss, seeking oracles in those
teeming pages. Therefore he did not turn to the pink insert, embodying
the alphabetical catalogue (Abdominal Bands to Zither Strings), but
opened at random.

"Supertoned Banjos," he read, beginning at the heading; and, running his
eye down the different varieties, paused at "Pride of the Plantation, a
full-sized, well-made, snappy-toned instrument at a very moderate price.
12 T 4031/4."

The explorer shook his head. Abovestairs rested a guitar (the Pearletta,
12 S 206, price $7.95) which he had purchased at the instance of Messrs.
Sears-Roebuck's insinuating representation as set forth in catalogue
item 12 S 01942, "Self-mastery of the Guitar in One Book, with All
Chords, Also Popular Solos That Can Be Played Almost at Sight." The
nineteen-cent instruction-book had gone into the fire after three days
of unequal combat between it and its owner, and the latter had
subsequently learned something of the guitar (and more of life) from a
Mexican-American girl with lazy eyes and the soul of a capricious and
self-indulged kitten, who had come uninvited to Manzanita to visit an
aunt, deceased six months previously. With a mild pang of memory for
those dreamy, music-filled nights on the desert, the youth decided
against further experiments in stringed orchestration.

Telescopes turned up next. He lingered a moment over 20 T 3513, a
nickel-plated cap pocket-glass, reflecting that with it he could discern
any signal on the distant wooded butte occupied by Miss Camilla Van
Arsdale, back on the forest trail, in the event that she might wish a
wire sent or any other service performed. Miss Camilla had been very
kind and understanding at the time of the parting with Carlotta, albeit
with a grimly humorous disapproval of the whole inflammatory affair; as
well as at other times; and there was nothing that he would not do for
her. He made a neat entry in a pocket ledger (3 T 9901) against the time
when he should have spare cash, and essayed another plunge.

Arctics and Lumberman's Overs he passed by with a grin as inappropriate
to the climate. Cod Liver Oil failed to interest him, as did the
Provident Cast Iron Range and the Clean-Press Cider Mill. But he paused
speculatively before Punching Bags, for he had the clean pride of body,
typical of lusty Western youth, and loved all forms of exercise. Could
he find space, he wondered, to install 6 T 1441 with its Scientific
Noiseless Platform & Wall Attachment (6 T 1476) in the portable house
(55 S 17) which, purchased a year before, now stood in the clearing
behind the station crammed with purchases from the Sears-Roebuck
wonderbook. Anyway, he would make another note of it. What would it be
like, he wondered, to have a million dollars to spend, and unlimited
access to the Sears-Roebuck treasures. Picturing himself as such a
Croesus, he innocently thought that his first act would be to take train
for Chicago and inspect the warehoused accumulations of those princes of
trade with his own eager eyes!

He mused humorously for a moment over a book on "Ease in Conversation."
("No trouble about conversation," he reflected; "the difficulty is to
find anybody to converse with," and he thought first of Carlotta, and
then of Miss Camilla Van Arsdale, but chiefly of the latter, for
conversation had not been the strong point of the passionate,
light-hearted Spanish girl.) Upon a volume kindly offering to teach
astronomy to the lay mind without effort or trouble (43 T 790) and
manifestly cheap at $1.10, he bestowed a more respectful attention, for
the desert nights were long and lonely.

Eventually he arrived at the department appropriate to his age and the
almost universal ambition of the civilized male, to wit, clothing.
Deeply, judiciously, did he meditate and weigh the advantages as between
745 J 460 ("Something new--different--economical--efficient. An all-wool
suit embodying all the features that make for clothes satisfaction. This
announcement is of tremendous importance"--as one might well have
inferred from the student's rapt expression) and 776 J 017 ("A
double-breasted, snappy, yet semi-conservative effect in dark-green
worsted, a special social value"), leaning to the latter because of a
purely literary response to that subtle and deft appeal of the
attributive "social." The devotee of Messrs. Sears-Roebuck was an
innately social person, though as yet his gregarious proclivities lay
undeveloped and unsuspected by himself. Also he was of a literary
tendency; but of this he was already self-conscious. He passed on to
ulsters and raincoats, divagated into the colorful realm of neckwear,
debated scarf-pins and cuff-links, visualized patterned shirtings, and
emerged to dream of composite sartorial grandeurs which, duly
synthesized into a long list of hopeful entries, were duly filed away
within the pages of 3 T 9901, the pocket ledger.

Footsteps shuffling along the right of way dispelled his visions. He
looked up to see two pedestrians who halted at his movement. They were
paired typically of that strange fraternity, the hobo, one being a
grizzled, hard-bitten man of waning middle age, the other a vicious and
scrawny boy of eighteen or so. The boy spoke first.

"You the main guy here?"

The agent nodded.

"Got a sore throat?" demanded the boy surlily. He started toward the
door. The agent made no move, but his eyes were attentive.

"That'll be near enough," he said quietly.

"Oh, we ain't on that lay," put in the grizzled man. He was quite
hoarse. "You needn't to be scared of us."

"I'm not," agreed the agent. And, indeed, the fact was self-evident.

"What about the pueblo yonder?" asked the man with a jerk of his head
toward the town.

"The hoosegow is old and the sheriff is new."

"I got ya," said the man, nodding. "We better be on our way."

"I would think so."

"You're a hell of a guy, you are," whined the boy. "'On yer way' from
you an' not so much as 'Are you hungry?' What about a little hand-out?"

"Nothing doing."

"Tightwad! How'd you like--"

"If you're hungry, feel in your coat-pocket."

"I guess you're a wise one," put in the man, grinning appreciatively.
"We got grub enough. Panhandlin's a habit with the kid; don't come
natural to him to pass a likely prospect without makin' a touch."

He leaned against the platform, raising one foot slightly from the
ground in the manner of a limping animal. The agent disappeared into the
station, locking the door after him. The boy gave expression to a
violent obscenity directed upon the vanished man. When that individual
emerged again, he handed the grizzled man a box of ointment and tossed a
packet of tobacco to the evil-faced boy. Both were quick with their
thanks. That which they had most needed and desired had been, as it
were, spontaneously provided. But the elder of the wayfarers was
puzzled, and looked from the salve-box to its giver.

"How'd you know my feet was blistered?"

"Been padding in the rain, haven't you?"

"Have you been on the hoof, too?" asked the hobo quickly.

The other smiled.

"Say!" exclaimed the boy. "I bet he's Banneker. Are you?" he demanded.

"That's my name."

"I heard of you three years ago when you was down on the Long Line
Sandy," said the man. He paused and considered. "What's your lay, Mr.
Banneker?" he asked, curiously but respectfully.

"As you see it. Railroading."

"A gay-cat," put in the boy with a touch of scorn.

"You hold your fresh lip," his elder rebuked him. "This gent has treated
us _like_ a gent. But why? What's the idea? That's what I don't get."

"Oh, some day I might want to run for Governor on the hobo ticket,"
returned the unsmiling agent.

"You get our votes. Well, so long and much obliged."

The two resumed their journey. Banneker returned to his book. A freight,
"running extra," interrupted him, but not for long. The wire had been
practicing a seemly restraint for uneventful weeks, so the agent felt
that he could settle down to a sure hour's bookishness yet, even though
the west-bound Transcontinental Special should be on time, which was
improbable, as "bad track" had been reported from eastward, owing to the
rains. Rather to his surprise, he had hardly got well reimmersed in the
enchantments of the mercantile fairyland when the "Open Office" wire
warned him to be attentive, and presently from the east came tidings of
Number Three running almost true to schedule, as befitted the pride of
the line, the finest train that crossed the continent.

Past the gaunt station she roared, only seven minutes late, giving the
imaginative young official a glimpse and flash of the uttermost luxury
of travel: rich woods, gleaming metal, elegance of finish, and on the
rear of the observation-car a group so lily-clad that Sears-Roebuck at
its most glorious was not like unto them. Would such a train, the
implanted youth wondered, ever bear him away to unknown, undreamed
enchantments?

Would he even wish to go if he might? Life was full of many things to do
and learn at Manzanita. Mahomet need not go to the mountain when, with
but a mustard seed of faith in the proven potency of mail-order miracles
he could move mountains to come to him. Leaning to his telegraph
instrument, he wired to the agent at Stanwood, twenty-six miles
down-line, his formal announcement.

"O. S.--G. I. No. 3 by at 10.46."

"O. K.--D. S.," came the response.

Banneker returned to the sunlight. In seven minutes or perhaps less, as
the Transcontinental would be straining to make up lost time, the train
would enter Rock Cut three miles and more west, and he would recapture
the powerful throbbing of the locomotive as she emerged on the farther
side, having conquered the worst of the grade.

Banneker waited. He drew out his watch. Seven. Seven and a half. Eight.
No sound from westward. He frowned. Like most of the road's employees,
he took a special and almost personal interest in having the regal train
on time, as if, in dispatching it through, he had given it a friendly
push on its swift and mighty mission. Was she steaming badly? There had
been no sign of it as she passed. Perhaps something had gone wrong with
the brakes. Or could the track have--

The agent tilted sharply forward, his lithe frame tense. A long drawn,
quivering shriek came down-wind to him. It was repeated. Then short and
sharp, piercing note on piercing note, sounded the shrill, clamant
voice.

The great engine of Number Three was yelling for help.




CHAPTER II


Banneker came out of his chair with a spring.

"Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!" screamed the strident voice.

It was like an animal in pain and panic.

For a brief instant the station-agent halted at the door to assure
himself that the call was stationary. It was. Also it was slightly
muffled. That meant that the train was still in the cut. As he ran to
the key and sent in the signal for Stanwood, Banneker reflected what
this might mean. Crippled? Likely enough. Ditched? He guessed not. A
ditched locomotive is usually voiceless if not driverless as well.
Blocked by a slide? Rock Cut had a bad repute for that kind of accident.
But the quality of the call predicated more of a catastrophe than a mere
blockade. Besides, in that case why could not the train back down--

The answering signal from the dispatcher at Stanwood interrupted his
conjectures.

"Number Three in trouble in the Cut," ticked Banneker fluently. "Think
help probably needed from you. Shall I go out?"

"O. K.," came the answer. "Take charge. Bad track reported three miles
east may delay arrival."

Banneker dropped and locked the windows, set his signal for "track
blocked" and ran to the portable house. Inside he stood, considering.
With swift precision he took from one of the home-carpentered shelves a
compact emergency kit, 17 S 4230, "hefted" it, and adjusted it, knapsack
fashion, to his back; then from a small cabinet drew a flask, which he
disposed in his hip-pocket. Another part of the same cabinet provided a
first-aid outfit, 3 R 0114. Thus equipped he was just closing the door
after him when another thought struck him and he returned to slip a coil
of light, strong sash-cord, 36 J 9078, over his shoulders to his waist
where he deftly tautened it. He had seen railroad wrecks before. For a
moment he considered leaving his coat, for he had upwards of three miles
to go in the increasing heat; but, reflecting that the outward and
visible signs of authority might save time and questions, he thought
better of it. Patting his pocket to make sure that his necessary
notebook and pencil were there, he set out at a moderate, even,
springless lope. He had no mind to reach a scene which might require his
best qualities of mind and body, in a semi-exhausted state.
Nevertheless, laden as he was, he made the three miles in less than half
an hour. Let no man who has not tried to cover at speed the ribbed
treacheries of a railroad track minimize the achievement!

A sharp curve leads to the entrance of Rock Cut. Running easily,
Banneker had reached the beginning of the turn, when he became aware of
a lumbering figure approaching him at a high and wild sort of
half-gallop. The man's face was a welter of blood. One hand was pressed
to it. The other swung crazily as he ran. He would have swept past
Banneker unregarding had not the agent caught him by the shoulder.

"Where are you hurt?"

The runner stared wildly at the young man. "I'll soom," he mumbled
breathlessly, his hand still crumpled against the dreadfully smeared
face. "Dammum, I'll soom."

He removed his hand from his mouth, and the red drops splattered and
were lost upon the glittering, thirsty sand. Banneker wiped the man's
face, and found no injury. But the fingers which he had crammed into his
mouth were bleeding profusely.

"They oughta be prosecuted," moaned the sufferer. "I'll soom. For ten
thousan' dollars. M'hand is smashed. Looka that! Smashed like a bug."

Banneker caught the hand and expertly bound it, taking the man's name
and address as he worked.

"Is it a bad wreck?" he asked.

"It's hell. Look at m'hand! But I'll soom, all right. _I_'ll show'm ...
Oh! ... Cars are afire, too ... Oh-h-h! Where's a hospital?"

He cursed weakly as Banneker, without answering, re-stowed his packet
and ran on.

A thin wisp of smoke rising above the nearer wall of rocks made the
agent set his teeth. Throughout his course the voice of the engine had,
as it were, yapped at his hurrying heels, but now it was silent, and he
could hear a murmur of voices and an occasional shouted order. He came
into sight of the accident, to face a bewildering scene.

Two hundred yards up the track stood the major portion of the train,
intact. Behind it, by itself, lay a Pullman sleeper, on its side and
apparently little harmed. Nearest to Banneker, partly on the rails but
mainly beside them, was jumbled a ridiculous mess of woodwork, with here
and there a gleam of metal, centering on a large and jagged boulder.
Smaller rocks were scattered through the _m;lange_. It was exactly like
a heap of giant jack-straws into which some mischievous spirit had
tossed a large pebble. At one end a flame sputtered and spread
cheerfully.

A panting and grimy conductor staggered toward it with a pail of water
from the engine. Banneker accosted him.

"Any one in--"

"Get outa my way!" gasped the official.

"I'm agent at Manzanita."

The conductor set down his pail. "O God!" he said. "Did you bring any
help?"

"No, I'm alone. Any one in there?" He pointed to the flaming debris.

"One that we know of. He's dead."

"Sure?" cried Banneker sharply.

"Look for yourself. Go the other side."

Banneker looked and returned, white and set of face. "How many others?"

"Seven, so far."

"Is that all?" asked the agent with a sense of relief. It seemed as if
no occupant could have come forth of that ghastly and absurd
rubbish-heap, which had been two luxurious Pullmans, alive.

"There's a dozen that's hurt bad."

"No use watering that mess," said Banneker. "It won't burn much further.
Wind's against it. Anybody left in the other smashed cars?"

"Don't think so."

"Got the names of the dead?"

"Now, how would I have the time!" demanded the conductor resentfully.

Banneker turned to the far side of the track where the seven bodies lay.
They were not disposed decorously. The faces were uncovered. The
postures were crumpled and grotesque. A forgotten corner of a
battle-field might look like that, the young agent thought, bloody and
disordered and casual.

Nearest him was the body of a woman badly crushed, and, crouching beside
it, a man who fondled one of its hands, weeping quietly. Close by lay
the corpse of a child showing no wound or mark, and next that, something
so mangled that it might have been either man or woman--or neither. The
other victims were humped or sprawled upon the sand in postures of
exaggerated _abandon_; all but one, a blonde young girl whose upthrust
arm seemed to be reaching for something just beyond her grasp.

A group of the uninjured from the forward cars surrounded and enclosed a
confused sound of moaning and crying. Banneker pushed briskly through
the ring. About twenty wounded lay upon the ground or were propped
against the rock-wall. Over them two women were expertly working, one
tiny and beautiful, with jewels gleaming on her reddened hands; the
other brisk, homely, with a suggestion of the professional in her
precise motions. A broad, fat, white-bearded man seemed to be informally
in charge. At least he was giving directions in a growling voice as he
bent over the sufferers. Banneker went to him.

"Doctor?" he inquired.

The other did not even look up. "Don't bother me," he snapped.

The station-agent pushed his first-aid packet into the old man's hands.

"Good!" grunted the other. "Hold this fellow's head, will you? Hold it
hard."

Banneker's wrists were props of steel as he gripped the tossing head.
The old man took a turn with a bandage and fastened it.

"He'll die, anyway," he said, and lifted his face.

Banneker cackled like a silly girl at full sight of him. The spreading
whisker on the far side of his stern face was gayly pied in blotches of
red and green.

"Going to have hysterics?" demanded the old man, striking not so far
short of the truth.

"No," said the agent, mastering himself. "Hey! you, trainman," he called
to a hobbling, blue-coated fellow. "Bring two buckets of water from the
boiler-tap, hot and clean. Clean, mind you!" The man nodded and limped
away. "Anything else, Doctor?" asked the agent. "Got towels?"

"Yes. And I'm not a doctor--not for forty years. But I'm the nearest
thing to it in this shambles. Who are you?"

Banneker explained. "I'll be back in five minutes," he said and passed
into the subdued and tremulous crowd.

On the outskirts loitered a lank, idle young man clad beyond the glories
of Messrs. Sears-Roebuck's highest-colored imaginings.

"Hurt?" asked Banneker.

"No," said the youth.

"Can you run three miles?"

"I fancy so."

"Will you take an urgent message to be wired from Manzanita?"

"Certainly," said the youth with good-will.

Tearing a leaf from his pocket-ledger, Banneker scribbled a dispatch
which is still preserved in the road's archives as giving more vital
information in fewer words than any other railroad document extant. He
instructed the messenger where to find a substitute telegrapher.

"Answer?" asked the youth, unfurling his long legs.

"No," returned Banneker, and the courier, tossing his coat off, took the
road.

Banneker turned back to the improvised hospital.

"I'm going to move these people into the cars," he said to the man in
charge. "The berths are being made up now."

The other nodded. Banneker gathered helpers and superintended the
transfer. One of the passengers, an elderly lady who had shown no sign
of grave injury, died smiling courageously as they were lifting her.

It gave Banneker a momentary shock of helpless responsibility. Why
should she have been the one to die? Only five minutes before she had
spoken to him in self-possessed, even tones, saying that her
traveling-bag contained camphor, ammonia, and iodine if he needed them.
She had seemed a reliable, helpful kind of lady, and now she was dead.
It struck Banneker as improbable and, in a queer sense, discriminatory.
Remembering the slight, ready smile with which she had addressed him, he
felt as if he had suffered a personal loss; he would have liked to stay
and work over her, trying to discover if there might not be some spark
of life remaining, to be cherished back into flame, but the burly old
man's decisive "Gone," settled that. Besides, there were other things,
official things to be looked to.

A full report would be expected of him, as to the cause of the accident.
The presence of the boulder in the wreckage explained that grimly. It
was now his routine duty to collect the names of the dead and wounded,
and such details as he could elicit. He went about it briskly,
conscientiously, and with distaste. All this would go to the claim agent
of the road eventually and might serve to mitigate the total of damages
exacted of the company. Vaguely Banneker resented such probable
penalties as unfair; the most unremitting watchfulness could not have
detected the subtle undermining of that fatal boulder. But essentially
he was not interested in claims and damages. His sensitive mind hovered
around the mystery of death; that file of crumpled bodies, the woman of
the stilled smile, the man fondling a limp hand, weeping quietly.
Officially, he was a smooth-working bit of mechanism. As an individual
he probed tragic depths to which he was alien otherwise than by a large
and vague sympathy. Facts of the baldest were entered neatly; but in the
back of his eager brain Banneker was storing details of a far different
kind and of no earthly use to a railroad corporation.

He became aware of some one waiting at his elbow. The lank young man had
spoken to him twice.

"Well?" said Banneker sharply. "Oh, it's you! How did you get back so
soon?"

"Under the hour," replied the other with pride. "Your message has gone.
The operator's a queer duck. Dealing faro. Made me play through a case
before he'd quit. I stung him for twenty. Here's some stuff I thought
might be useful."

From a cotton bag he discharged a miscellaneous heap of patent
preparations; salves, ointments, emollients, liniments, plasters.

"All I could get," he explained. "No drug-store in the funny burg."

"Thank you," said Banneker. "You're all right. Want another job?"

"Certainly," said the lily of the field with undiminished good-will.

"Go and help the white-whiskered old boy in the Pullman yonder."

"Oh, he'd chase me," returned the other calmly. "He's my uncle. He
thinks I'm no use."

"Does he? Well, suppose you get names and addresses of the slightly
injured for me, then. Here's your coat."

"Tha-anks," drawled the young man. He was turning away to his new duties
when a thought struck him. "Making a list?" he asked.

"Yes. For my report."

"Got a name with the initials I. O. W.?"

Banneker ran through the roster in the pocket-ledger. "Not yet. Some one
that's hurt?"

"Don't know what became of her. Peach of a girl. Black hair, big,
sleepy, black eyes with a fire in 'em. Dressed _right_. Traveling alone,
and minding her own business, too. Had a stateroom in that Pullman there
in the ditch. Noticed her initials on her traveling-bag."

"Have you seen her since the smash?"

"Don't know. Got a kind of confused recklection of seeing her wobbling
around at the side of the track. Can't be sure, though. Might have been
me."

"Might have been you? How could--"

"Wobbly, myself. Mixed in my thinks. When I came to I was pretty busy
putting my lunch," explained the other with simple realism. "One of Mr.
Pullman's seats butted me in the stomach. They ain't upholstered as soft
as you'd think to look at 'em. I went reeling around, looking for Miss
I. O. W., she being alone, you know, and I thought she might need some
looking after. And I had that idea of having seen her with her hand to
her head dazed and running--yes; that's it, she was running. Wow!" said
the young man fervently. "She was a pretty thing! You don't suppose--" He
turned hesitantly to the file of bodies, now decently covered with
sheets.

For a grisly instant Banneker thought of the one mangled
monstrosity--_that_ to have been so lately loveliness and charm, with
deep fire in its eyes and perhaps deep tenderness and passion in its
heart. He dismissed the thought as being against the evidence and
entered the initials in his booklet.

"I'll look out for her," said he. "Probably she's forward somewhere."

Without respite he toiled until a long whistle gave notice of the return
of the locomotive which had gone forward to meet the delayed special
from Stanwood. Human beings were clinging about it in little clusters
like bees; physicians, nurses, officials, and hospital attendants. The
dispatcher from Stanwood listened to Banneker's brief report, and sent
him back to Manzanita, with a curt word of approval for his work.

Banneker's last sight of the wreck, as he paused at the curve, was the
helpful young man perched on the rear heap of wreckage which had been
the observation car, peering anxiously into its depths ("Looking for I.
O. W. probably," surmised the agent), and two commercial gentlemen from
the smoker whiling away a commercially unproductive hiatus by playing
pinochle on a suitcase held across their knees. Glancing at the vast,
swollen, blue-black billows rolling up the sky, Banneker guessed that
their game would be shortly interrupted.

He hoped that the dead would not get wet.




CHAPTER III


Back in his office, Banneker sent out the necessary wires, and learned
from westward that it might be twelve hours before the break in the
track near Stanwood could be fixed up. Then he settled down to his
report.

Like his earlier telegram, the report was a little masterpiece of
concise information. Not a word in it that was not dry, exact,
meaningful. This was the more to the writer's credit in that his brain
was seething with impressions, luminous with pictures, aflash with odds
and ends of minor but significant things heard and seen and felt. It was
his first inner view of tragedy and of the reactions of the human
creature, brave or stupid or merely absurd, to a crisis. For all of this
he had an outlet of expression.

Taking from the wall a file marked "Letters. Private"-it was 5 S 0027,
and one of his most used purchases--he extracted some sheets of a
special paper and, sitting at his desk, wrote and wrote and wrote,
absorbedly, painstakingly, happily. Wind swept the outer world into a
vortex of wild rain; the room boomed and trembled with the
reverberations of thunder. Twice the telegraph instrument broke in on
him; but these matters claimed only the outer shell; the soul of the man
was concerned with committing its impressions of other souls to the
secrecy of white paper, destined to personal and inviolable archives.

Some one entered the waiting-room. There was a tap on his door. Raising
his head impatiently, Banneker saw, through the window already dimming
with the gathering dusk, a large roan horse, droopy and disconsolate in
the downpour. He jumped up and threw open his retreat. A tall woman,
slipping out of a streaming poncho, entered. The simplicity, verging
upon coarseness, of her dress detracted nothing from her distinction of
bearing.

"Is there trouble on the line?" she asked in a voice of peculiar
clarity.

"Bad trouble, Miss Camilla," answered Banneker. He pushed forward a
chair, but she shook her head. "A loosened rock smashed into Number
Three in the Cut. Eight dead, and a lot more in bad shape. They've got
doctors and nurses from Stanwood. But the track's out below. And from
what I get on the wire"--he nodded toward the east--"it'll be out above
before long."

"I'd better go up there," said she. Her lips grew bloodless as she spoke
and there was a look of effort and pain in her face.

"No; I don't think so. But if you'll go over to the town and see that
Torrey gets his place cleaned up a bit, I suppose some of the passengers
will be coming in pretty soon."

She made a quick gesture of repulsion. "Women can't go to Torrey's," she
said. "It's too filthy. Besides--I'll take in the women, if there aren't
too many and I can pick up a buckboard in Manzanita."

He nodded. "That'll be better, if any come in. Give me their names,
won't you? I have to keep track of them, you know."

The manner of the two was that of familiars, of friends, though there
was a touch of deference in Banneker's bearing, too subtly personal to
be attributed to his official status. He went out to adjust the
visitor's poncho, and, swinging her leg across the Mexican saddle of her
horse with the mechanical ease of one habituated to this mode of travel,
she was off.

Again the agent returned to his unofficial task and was instantly
submerged in it. Impatiently he interrupted himself to light the lamps
and at once resumed his pen. An emphatic knock at his door only caused
him to shake his head. The summons was repeated. With a sigh Banneker
gathered the written sheets, enclosed them in 5 S 0027, and restored
that receptacle to its place. Meantime the knocking continued
impatiently, presently pointed by a deep--

"Any one inside there?"

"Yes," said Banneker, opening to face the bulky old man who had cared
for the wounded. "What's wanted?"

Uninvited, and with an assured air, the visitor stepped in.

"I am Horace Vanney," he announced.

Banneker waited.

"Do you know my name?"

"No."

In no wise discountenanced by the matter-of-fact negative, Mr. Vanney,
still unsolicited, took a chair. "You would if you read the newspapers,"
he observed.

"I do."

"The New York papers," pursued the other, benignly explanatory. "It
doesn't matter. I came in to say that I shall make it my business to
report your energy and efficiency to your superiors."

"Thank you," said Banneker politely.

"And I can assure you that my commendation will carry weight. Weight,
sir."

The agent accepted this with a nod, obviously unimpressed. In fact, Mr.
Vanney suspected with annoyance, he was listening not so much to these
encouraging statements as to some unidentified noise outside. The agent
raised the window and addressed some one who had approached through the
steady drive of the rain. A gauntleted hand thrust through the window a
slip of paper which he took. As he moved, a ray of light from the lamp,
unblocked by his shoulder, fell upon the face of the person in the
darkness, illuminating it to the astounded eyes of Mr. Horace Vanney.

"Two of them are going home with me," said a voice. "Will you send these
wires to the addresses?"

"All right," replied Banneker, "and thank you. Good-night."

"Who was that?" barked Mr. Vanney, half rising.

"A friend of mine."

"I would swear to that face." He seemed quite excited. "I would swear to
it anywhere. It is unforgettable. That was Camilla Van Arsdale. Was she
in the wreck?"

"No."

"Don't tell me that it wasn't she! Don't try to tell me, for I won't
believe it."

"I'm not trying to tell you anything," Banneker pointed out.

"True; you're not. You're close-mouthed enough. But--Camilla Van
Arsdale! Incredible! Does she live here?"

"Here or hereabouts."

"You must give me the address. I must surely go and see her."

"Are you a friend of Miss Van Arsdale?"

"I could hardly say so much. A friend of her family, rather. She would
remember me, I am sure. And, in any case, she would know my name. Where
did you say she lived?"

"I don't think I said."

"Mystery-making!" The big man's gruffness had a suggestion of amusement
in it. "But of course it would be simple enough to find out from town."

"See here, Mr. Vanney, Miss Van Arsdale is still something of an
invalid--"

"After all these years," interposed the other, in the tone of one who
ruminates upon a marvel.

"--and I happen to know that it isn't well for--that is, she doesn't
care to see strangers, particularly from New York."

The old man stared. "Are you a gentleman?" he asked with abrupt
surprise.

"A gentleman?" repeated Banneker, taken aback.

"I beg your pardon," said the visitor earnestly. "I meant no offense.
You are doubtless quite right. As for any intrusion, I assure you there
will be none."

Banneker nodded, and with that nod dismissed the subject quite as
effectually as Mr. Horace Vanney himself could have done. "Did you
attend all the injured?" he asked.

"All the serious ones, I think."

"Was there a young girl among them, dark and good-looking, whose name
began--"

"The one my addle-brained young nephew has been pestering me about? Miss
I. O. W.?"

"Yes. He reported her to me."

"I handled no such case that I recall. Now, as to your own helpfulness,
I wish to make clear that I appreciate it."

Mr. Vanney launched into a flowery tribute of the after-dinner variety,
leaning forward to rest a hand upon Banneker's desk as he spoke. When
the speech was over and the hand withdrawn, something remained among the
strewn papers. Banneker regarded it with interest. It showed a blotch of
yellow upon green and a capital C. Picking it up, he looked from it to
its giver.

"A little tribute," said that gentleman: "a slight recognition of your
services." His manner suggested that hundred-dollar bills were
inconsiderable trifles, hardly requiring the acknowledgment of thanks.

In this case the bill did not secure such acknowledgment.

"You don't owe me anything," stated the agent. "I can't take this!"

"What! Pride? Tut-tut."

"Why not?" asked Banneker.

Finding no immediate and appropriate answer to this simple question, Mr.
Vanney stared.

"The company pays me. There's no reason why you should pay me. If
anything, I ought to pay you for what you did at the wreck. But I'm not
proposing to. Of course I'm putting in my report a statement about your
help."

Mr. Vanney's cheek flushed. Was this composed young hireling making
sport of him?

"Tut-tut!" he said again, this time with obvious intent to chide in his
manner. "If I see fit to signify my appreciation--remember, I am old
enough to be your father."

"Then you ought to have better judgment," returned Banneker with such
candor and good-humor that the visitor was fairly discomfited.

An embarrassing silence--embarrassing, that is, to the older man; the
younger seemed not to feel it--was happily interrupted by the advent of
the lily-clad messenger.

Hastily retrieving his yellow-back, which he subjected to some furtive
and occult manipulations, Mr. Vanney, after a few words, took his
departure.

Banneker invited the newcomer to take the chair thus vacated. As he did
so he brushed something to the floor and picked it up.

"Hello! What's this? Looks like a hundred-bucker. Yours?" He held out
the bill.

Banneker shook his head. "Your uncle left it."

"It isn't a habit of his," replied the other.

"Give it to him for me, will you?"

"Certainly. Any message?"

"No."

The newcomer grinned. "I see," he said. "He'll be bored when he gets
this back. He isn't a bad old bird, but he don't savvy some things. So
you turned him down, did you?"

"Yes."

"Did he offer you a job and a chance to make your way in the world in
one of his banks, beginning at ten-per?"

"No."

"He will to-morrow."

"I doubt it."

The other gave a thought to the bill. "Perhaps you're right. He likes
'em meek and obedient. He'd make a woolly lamb out of you. Most fellows
would jump at the chance."

"I won't."

"My name's Herbert Cressey." He handed the agent a card. "Philadelphia
is my home, but my New York address is on there, too. Ever get East?"

"I've been to Chicago."

"Chicago?" The other stared. "What's that got to do with--Oh, I see.
You'll be coming to New York one of these days, though."

"Maybe."

"Sure as a gun. A chap that can handle a situation like you handled the
wreck isn't going to stick in a little sand-heap like this."

"It suits me here."

"No! Does it? I'd think you'd die of it. Well, when you do get East look
me up, will you? I mean it; I'd like to see you."

"All right."

"And if there's anything I can do for you any time, drop me a line."

The sumptuous ripple and gleam of the young man's faultless coat,
registered upon Banneker's subconscious memory as it had fallen at his
feet, recalled itself to him.

"What store do you buy your clothes at?"

"Store?" Cressey did not smile. "I don't buy 'em at a store. I have 'em
made by a tailor. Mertoun, 505 Fifth Avenue."

"Would he make me a suit?"

"Why, yes. I'll give you a card to him and you go in there when you're
in New York and pick out what you want."

"Oh! He wouldn't make them and send them out here to me? Sears-Roebuck
do, if you send your measure. They're in Chicago."

"I never had any duds built in Chicago, so I don't know them. But I
shouldn't think Mertoun would want to fit a man he'd never seen. They
like to do things _right_, at Mertoun's. Ought to, too; they stick you
enough for it."

"How much?"

"Not much short of a hundred for a sack suit."

Banneker was amazed. The choicest "made-to-measure" in his Universal
Guide, "Snappy, fashionable, and up to the minute," came to less than
half of that.

His admiring eye fell upon his visitor's bow-tie, faultless and
underanged throughout the vicissitudes of that arduous day, and he
yearned to know whether it was "made-up" or self-confected.
Sears-Roebuck were severely impartial as between one practice and the
other, offering a wide range in each variety. He inquired.

"Oh, tied it myself, of course," returned Cressey. "Nobody wears the
ready-made kind. It's no trick to do it. I'll show you, any time."

They fell into friendly talk about the wreck.

It was ten-thirty when Banneker finished his much-interrupted writing.
Going out to the portable house, he lighted an oil-stove and proceeded
to make a molasses pie. He was due for a busy day on the morrow and
might not find time to take the mile walk to the hotel for dinner, as
was his general habit. With the store of canned goods derived from the
mail-order catalogue, he could always make shift to live. Besides, he
was young enough to relish keenly molasses pie and the manufacture of
it. Having concluded his cookery in strict accordance with the rules set
forth in the guide to this art, he laid it out on the sill to cool over
night.

Tired though he was, his brain was too busy for immediate sleep. He
returned to his den, drew out a book and began to read with absorption.
That in which he now sought release and distraction was not the _magnum
opus_ of Messrs. Sears-Roebuck, but the work of a less practical and
popular writer, being in fact the "Eve of St. Agnes," by John Keats.
Soothed and dreamy, he put out the lights, climbed to his living
quarters above the office, and fell asleep. It was then eleven-thirty
and his official day had terminated five hours earlier.

At one o'clock he arose and patiently descended the stairs again. Some
one was hammering on the door. He opened without inquiry, which was not
the part of wisdom in that country and at that hour. His pocket-flash
gleamed on a thin young man in a black-rubber coat who, with head and
hands retracted as far as possible from the pouring rain, resembled a
disconsolate turtle with an insufficient carapace.

"I'm Gardner, of the Angelica City Herald," explained the untimely
visitor.

Banneker was surprised. That a reporter should come all the way from the
metropolis of the Southwest to his wreck--he had already established
proprietary interest in it--was gratifying. Furthermore, for reasons of
his own, he was glad to see a journalist. He took him in and lighted up
the office.

"Had to get a horse and ride to Manzanita to interview old Vanney and a
couple of other big guys from the East. My first story's on the wire,"
explained the newcomer offhand. "I want some local-color stuff for my
second day follow-up."

"It must be hard to do that," said Banneker interestedly, "when you
haven't seen any of it yourself."

"Patchwork and imagination," returned the other wearily. "That's what I
get special rates for. Now, if I'd had your chance, right there on the
spot, with the whole stage-setting around one--Lordy! How a fellow could
write that!"

"Not so easy," murmured the agent. "You get confused. It's a sort of
blur, and when you come to put it down, little things that aren't really
important come up to the surface--"

"Put it down?" queried the other with a quick look. "Oh, I see. Your
report for the company."

"Well, I wasn't thinking of that."

"Do you write other things?" asked the reporter carelessly.

"Oh, just foolery." The tone invited--at least it did not
discourage--further inquiry. Mr. Gardner was bored. Amateurs who
"occasionally write" were the bane of him who, having a signature of his
own in the leading local paper, represented to the aspiring mind the
gilded and lofty peaks of the unattainable. However he must play this
youth as a source of material.

"Ever try for the papers?"

"Not yet. I've thought maybe I might get a chance sometime as a sort of
local correspondent around here," was the diffident reply.

Gardner repressed a grin. Manzanita would hardly qualify as a news
center. Diplomacy prompted him to state vaguely that there was always a
chance for good stuff locally.

"On a big story like this," he added, "of course there'd be nothing
doing except for the special man sent out to cover it."

"No. Well, I didn't write my--what I wrote, with any idea of getting it
printed."

The newspaper man sighed wearily, sighed like a child and lied like a
man of duty. "I'd like to see it."

Without a trace of hesitation or self-consciousness Banneker said, "All
right," and, taking his composition from its docket, motioned the other
to the light. Mr. Gardner finished and turned the first sheet before
making any observation. Then he bent a queer look upon Banneker and
grunted:

"What do you call this stuff, anyway?"

"Just putting down what I saw."

Gardner read on. "What about this, about a Pullman sleeper 'elegant as a
hotel bar and rigid as a church pew'? Where do you get that?"

Banneker looked startled. "I don't know. It just struck me that is the
way a Pullman is."

"Well, it is," admitted the visitor, and continued to read. "And this
guy with the smashed finger that kept threatening to 'soom'; is that
right?"

"Of course it's right. You don't think I'd make it up! That reminds me
of something." And he entered a memo to see the litigious-minded
complainant again, for these are the cases which often turn up in the
courts with claims for fifty-thousand-dollar damages and heartrending
details of all-but-mortal internal injuries.

Silence held the reader until he had concluded the seventh and last
sheet. Not looking at Banneker, he said:

"So that's your notion of reporting the wreck of the swellest train that
crosses the continent, is it?"

"It doesn't pretend to be a report," disclaimed the writer. "It's pretty
bad, is it?"

"It's rotten!" Gardner paused. "From a news-desk point of view. Any
copy-reader would chuck it. Unless I happened to sign it," he added.
"Then they'd cuss it out and let it pass, and the dear old pin-head
public would eat it up."

"If it's of any use to you--"

"Not so, my boy, not so! I might pinch your wad if you left it around
loose, or even your last cigarette, but not your stuff. Let me take it
along, though; it may give me some ideas. I'll return it. Now, where can
I get a bed in the town?"

"Nowhere. Everything's filled. But I can give you a hammock out in my
shack."

"That's better. I'll take it. Thanks."

Banneker kept his guest awake beyond the limits of decent hospitality,
asking him questions.

The reporter, constantly more interested in this unexpected find of a
real personality in an out-of-the-way minor station of the high desert,
meditated a character study of "the hero of the wreck," but could not
quite contrive any peg whereon to hang the wreath of heroism. By his own
modest account, Banneker had been competent but wholly unpicturesque,
though the characters in his sketch, rude and unformed though it was,
stood out clearly. As to his own personal history, the agent was
unresponsive. At length the guest, apologizing for untimely weariness,
it being then 3.15 A.M., yawned his way to the portable shack.

He slept heavily, except for a brief period when the rain let up. In the
morning--which term seasoned newspaper men apply to twelve noon and the
hour or two thereafter--he inquired of Banneker, "Any tramps around
here?"

"No," answered the agent, "Not often. There were a pair yesterday
morning, but they went on."

"Some one was fussing around the place about first light. I was too
sleepy to get up. I yipped and they beat it. I don't think they got
inside."

Banneker investigated. Nothing was missing from within the shack. But
outside he made a distressing discovery.

His molasses pie was gone.




CHAPTER IV


"To accomplish a dessert as simple and inexpensive as it is tasty,"
prescribes The Complete Manual of Cookery, p. 48, "take one cup of thick
molasses--" But why should I infringe a copyright when the culinary
reader may acquire the whole range of kitchen lore by expending
eighty-nine cents plus postage on 39 T 337? Banneker had faithfully
followed the prescribed instructions. The result had certainly been
simple and inexpensive; presumably it would have proven tasty. He
regretted and resented the rape of the pie. What aroused greater
concern, however, was the presence of thieves. In the soft ground near
the window he found some rather small footprints which suggested that it
was the younger of the two hoboes who had committed the depredation.

Theorizing, however, was not the order of his day. Routine and
extra-routine claimed all his time. There was his supplementary report
to make out; the marooned travelers in Manzanita to be looked after and
their bitter complaints to be listened to; consultations over the wire
as to the condition and probabilities of the roadbed, for the floods had
come again; and in and out of it all, the busy, weary, indefatigable
Gardner, giving to the agent as much information as he asked from him.
When their final lists were compared, Banneker noticed that there was no
name with the initials I.O.W. on Gardner's. He thought of mentioning the
clue, but decided that it was of too little definiteness and importance.
The news value of mystery, enhanced by youth and beauty, which the
veriest cub who had ever smelled printer's ink would have appreciated,
was a sealed book to him.

Not until late that afternoon did a rescue train limp cautiously along
an improvised track to set the interrupted travelers on their way.
Gardner went on it, leaving an address and an invitation to "keep in
touch." Mr. Vanney took his departure with a few benign and well-chosen
words of farewell, accompanied by the assurance that he would "make it
his special purpose to commend," and so on. His nephew, Herbert Cressey,
the lily-clad messenger, stopped at the station to shake hands and grin
rather vacantly, and adjure Banneker, whom he addressed as "old chap,"
to be sure and look him up in the East; he'd be glad to see him any
time. Banneker believed that he meant it. He promised to do so, though
without particular interest. With the others departed Miss Camilla Van
Arsdale's two emergency guests, one of them the rather splendid young
woman who had helped with the wounded. They invaded Banneker's office
with supplementary telegrams and talked about their hostess with that
freedom which women of the world use before dogs or uniformed officials.

"What a woman!" said the amateur nurse.

"And what a house!" supplemented the other, a faded and lined
middle-aged wife who had just sent a reassuring and very long wire to a
husband in Pittsburgh.

"Very much the ch;telaine; grande dame and that sort of thing," pursued
the other. "One might almost think her English."

"No." The other shook her head positively. "Old American. As old and as
good as her name. You wouldn't flatter her by guessing her to be
anything else. I dare say she would consider the average British
aristocrat a little shoddy and loud."

"So they are when they come over here. But what on earth is her type
doing out here, buried with a one-eyed, half-breed manservant?"

"And a concert grand piano. Don't forget that. She tunes it herself,
too. Did you notice the tools? A possible romance. You've quite a nose
for such things, Sue. Couldn't you get anything out of her?"

"It's much too good a nose to put in the crack of a door," retorted the
pretty woman. "I shouldn't care to lay myself open to being snubbed by
her. It might be painful."

"It probably would." The Pittsburgher turned to Banneker with a change
of tone, implying that he could not have taken any possible heed of what
went before. "Has Miss Van Arsdale lived here long, do you know?"

The agent looked at her intently for a moment before replying: "Longer
than I have." He transferred his gaze to the pretty woman. "You two were
her guests, weren't you?" he asked.

The visitors glanced at each other, half amused, half aghast. The tone
and implication of the question had been too significant to be
misunderstood. "Well, of all extraordinary--" began one of them under
her breath; and the other said more loudly, "I really beg--" and then
she, too, broke off.

They went out. "Ch;telaine and knightly defender," commented the younger
one in the refuge of the outer office. "Have we been dumped off a train
into the midst of the Middle Ages? Where do you get station-agents like
that?"

"The one at our suburban station chews tobacco and says 'Marm' through
his nose."

Banneker emerged, seeking the conductor of the special with a message.

"He is rather a beautiful young thing, isn't he?" she added.

Returning, he helped them on the train with their hand-luggage. When the
bustle and confusion of dispatching an extra were over, he sat down to
think. But not of Miss Camilla Van Arsdale. That was an old story,
though its chapters were few, and none of them as potentially eventful
as this intrusion of Vanneys and female chatterers.

It was the molasses pie that stuck in his mind. There was no time to
make another. Further, the thought of depredators hanging about
disturbed him. That shack of his was full of Aladdin treasures,
delivered by the summoned genii of the Great Book. Though it was secured
by Little Guardian locks and fortified with the Scarem Buzz alarm, he
did not feel sure of it. He decided to sleep there that night with his
.45-caliber Sure-shot revolver. Let them come again; he'd give 'em a
lesson! On second thought, he rebaited the window-ledge with a can of
Special Juicy Apricot Preserve. At ten o'clock he turned in, determined
to sleep lightly, and immediately plunged into fathomless depths of
unconsciousness, lulled by a singing wind and the drone of the rain.

A light, flashing across his eyes, awakened him. For a moment he lay,
dazed, confused by the gentle and unfamiliar oscillations of his
hammock. Another flicker of light and a rumble of thunder brought him to
his full senses. The rain had degenerated into a casual drizzle and the
wind had withdrawn into the higher areas. He heard some one moving
outside.

Very quietly he reached out to the stand at his elbow, got his revolver
and his flashlight, and slipped to the floor. The malefactor without was
approaching the window. Another flash of lightning would have revealed
much to Banneker had he not been crouching close under the sill, on the
inside, so that the radiance of his light, when he found the button,
should not expose him to a straight shot.

A hand fumbled at the open window. Finger on trigger, Banneker held up
his flashlight in his left hand and irradiated the spot. He saw the
hand, groping, and on one of its fingers something which returned a more
brilliant gleam than the electric ray. In his crass amazement, the agent
straightened up, a full mark for murder, staring at a diamond-and-ruby
ring set upon a short, delicate finger.

No sound came from outside. But the hand became instantly tense. It fell
upon the sill and clutched it so hard that the knuckles stood out,
white, strained and garish. Banneker's own strong hand descended upon
the wrist. A voice said softly and tremulously:

"Please!"

The appeal went straight to Banneker's heart and quivered there, like a
soft flame, like music heard in an unrealizable dream.

"Who are you?" he asked, and the voice said:

"Don't hurt me."

"Why should I?" returned Banneker stupidly.

"Some one did," said the voice.

"Who?" he demanded fiercely.

"Won't you let me go?" pleaded the voice.

In the shock of his discovery he had released the flash-lever so that
this colloquy passed in darkness. Now he pressed it. A girlish figure
was revealed, one protective arm thrown across the eyes.

"Don't strike me," said the girl again, and again Banneker's heart was
shaken within him by such tremors as the crisis of some deadly fear
might cause.

"You needn't be afraid," he stammered.

"I've never been afraid before," she said, hanging her weight away from
him. "Won't you let me go?"

His grip relaxed slightly, then tightened again. "Where to?"

"I don't know," said the appealing voice mournfully.

An inspiration came to Banneker. "Are you afraid of me?" he asked
quietly.

"Of every thing. Of the night."

He pressed the flash into her hand, turning the light upon himself.
"Look," he said.

It seemed to him that she could not fail to read in his face the
profound and ardent wish to help her; to comfort and assure an uneasy
and frightened spirit wandering in the night.

He heard a little, soft sigh. "I don't know you," said the voice. "Do
I?"

"No," he answered soothingly as if to a child. "I'm the station-agent
here. You must come in out of the wet."

"Very well."

He tossed an overcoat on over his pajamas, ran to the door and swung it
open. The tiny ray of light advanced, hesitated, advanced again. She
walked into the shack, and immediately the rain burst again upon the
outer world. Banneker's fleeting impression was of a vivid but dimmed
beauty. He pushed forward a chair, found a blanket for her feet, lighted
the "Quick-heater" oil-stove on which he did his cooking. She followed
him with her eyes, deeply glowing but vague and troubled.

"This is not a station," she said.

"No. It's my shack. Are you cold?"

"Not very." She shivered a little.

"You say that some one hurt you?"

"Yes. They struck me. It made my head feel queer."

A murderous fury surged into his brain. His hand twitched toward his
revolver.

"The hoboes," he whispered under his breath. "But they didn't rob you,"
he said aloud, looking at the jeweled hand.

"No. I don't think so. I ran away."

"Where was it?"

"On the train."

Enlightenment burst upon him. "You're sure--" he began. Then, "Tell me
all you can about it."

"I don't remember anything. I was in my stateroom in the car. The door
was open. Some one must have come in and struck me. Here." She put her
left hand tenderly to her head.

Banneker, leaning over her, only half suppressed a cry. Back of the
temple rose a great, puffed, leaden-blue wale.

"Sit still," he said. "I'll fix it."

While he busied himself heating water, getting out clean bandages and
gauze, she leaned back with half-closed eyes in which there was neither
fear nor wonder nor curiosity: only a still content. Banneker washed the
wound very carefully.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"My head feels queer. Inside."

"I think the hair ought to be cut away around the place. Right here.
It's quite raw."

It was glorious hair. Not black, as Cressey had described it in his
hasty sketch of the unknown I.O.W.; too alive with gleams and glints of
luster for that. Nor were her eyes black, but rather of a deep-hued,
clouded hazel, showing troubled shadows between their dark-lashed, heavy
lids. Yet Banneker made no doubt but that this was the missing girl of
Cressey's inquiry.

"May I?" he said.

"Cut my hair?" she asked. "Oh, no!"

"Just a little, in one place. I think I can do it so that it won't show.
There's so much of it."

"Please," she answered, yielding.

He was deft. She sat quiet and soothed under his ministerings.
Completed, the bandage looked not too unworkmanlike, and was cool and
comforting to the hot throb of the wound.

"Our doctor went back on the train, worse luck!" he said.

"I don't want any other doctor," she murmured. "I'd rather have you."

"But I'm not a doctor."

"No," she acquiesced. "Who are you? Did you tell me? You are one of the
passengers, aren't you?"

"I'm the station-agent at Manzanita."

For a moment she looked at him wonderingly. "Are you? I don't seem to
understand. My head is very queer."

"Don't try to. Here's some tea and crackers."

"I'm starved," she said.

With subtle stirrings of delight, he watched her eat the bit that he had
prepared for her while heating the water. But he was wise enough to know
that she must not have much while the extent of her injury was still
undetermined.

"Are you wet?" he inquired.

She nodded. "I haven't been dry since the flood."

"I have a room with a real stove in it over the station. I'll build a
fire, and you must take off your wet things and go to bed and sleep. If
you need anything you can hammer on the floor."

"But you--"

"I'll be in my office, below. I'm on night duty to-night," said he,
tactfully fabricating.

"Very well. You're awfully kind."

He adjusted the oil-stove, threw a warmed blanket over her feet, and
hurried to his room to build the promised fire. When he came back she
smiled.

"You are good to me! It's stupid of me--my head is so queer--did you say
you were--"

"The station-agent. My name is Banneker. I'm responsible to the company
for your safety and comfort. You're not to worry about it, nor think
about it, nor ask any questions."

"No," she agreed, and rose.

He threw the blanket around her shoulders. At the protective touch she
slipped her hand through his arm. So they went out into the night.

Mounting the stairs, she stumbled, and for a moment he felt the firm,
warm pressure of her body against him. It shook him strangely.

"I'm sorry," she murmured. And, a moment later, "Good-night, and thank
you."

Taking the hand which she held out, he returned her good-night. The door
closed. He turned away and was halfway down the flight when a sudden
thought recalled him. He tapped on the door.

"What is it?" asked the serene music of the voice.

"I don't want to bother you, but there's just one thing I forgot. Please
give me your name."

"What for?" returned the voice doubtfully.

"I must report it to the company."

"Must you?" The voice seemed to be vaguely troubled. "To-night?"

"Don't give a thought to it," he said. "To-morrow will do just as well.
I'm sorry to have troubled you."

"Good-night," she said again.

"Can't remember her own name!" thought Banneker, moved and pitiful.

Darkness and quiet were grateful to him as he entered the office. By
sense of direction he found his chair, and sank into it. Overhead he
could hear the soft sound of her feet moving about the room, his room.
Quiet succeeded. Banneker, leagues removed from sleep, or the hope of
it, despite his bodily weariness, followed the spirit of wonder through
starlit and sunlit realms of dream.

The telegraph-receiver clicked. Not his call. But it brought him back to
actualities. He lighted his lamp and brought down the letter-file from
which had been extracted the description of the wreck for Gardner of the
Angelica City Herald.

Drawing out the special paper, he looked at the heading and smiled.
"Letters to Nobody." He took a fresh sheet and began to write. Through
the night he wrote and dreamed and dozed and wrote again. When a sound
of song, faint and sweet and imminent, roused him to lift his
sleep-bowed head from the desk upon which it had sunk, the gray, soiled
light of a stormy morning was in his eyes. The last words he had written
were:

"The breast of the world rises and falls with your breathing."

Banneker was twenty-four years old, and had the untainted soul of a boy
of sixteen.




CHAPTER V


Overhead she was singing. The voice was clear and sweet and happy. He
did not know the melody; some minor refrain of broken rhythm which
seemed always to die away short of fulfillment. A haunting thing of
mystery and glamour, such mystery and glamour as had irradiated his long
and wonderful night. He heard the door open and then her light footsteps
on the stair outside. Hot-eyed and disheveled, he rose, staggering a
little at first as he hurried to greet her.

She stood poised on the lower step.

"Good-morning," he said.

She made no return to his accost other than a slow smile. "I thought you
were a dream," she murmured.

"No. I'm real enough. Are you better? Your head?"

She put a hand to the bandage. "It's sore. Otherwise I'm quite fit. I've
slept like the dead."

"I'm glad to hear it," he replied mechanically. He was drinking her in,
all the grace and loveliness and wonder of her, himself quite
unconscious of the intensity of his gaze.

She accepted the mute tribute untroubled; but there was a suggestion of
puzzlement in the frown which began to pucker her forehead.

"You're really the station-agent?" she asked with a slight emphasis upon
the adverb.

"Yes. Why not?"

"Nothing. No reason. Won't you tell me what happened?"

"Come inside." He held open the door against the wind.

"No. It's musty." She wrinkled a dainty nose. "Can't we talk here? I
love the feel of the air and the wet. And the world! I'm glad I wasn't
killed."

"So am I," he said soberly.

"When my brain wouldn't work quite right yesterday, I thought that some
one had hit me. That isn't so, is it?"

"No. Your train was wrecked. You were injured. In the confusion you must
have run away."

"Yes. I remember being frightened. Terribly frightened. I'd never been
that way before. Outside of that one idea of fear, everything was mixed
up. I ran until I couldn't run any more and dropped down."

"And then?"

"I got up and ran again. Have you ever been afraid?"

"Plenty of times."

"I hadn't realized before that there was anything in the world to be
afraid of. But the thought of that blow, coming so suddenly from
nowhere, and the fear that I might be struck again--it drove me." She
flung out her hands in a little desperate gesture that twitched at
Banneker's breath.

"You must have been out all night in the rain."'

"No. I found a sort of cabin in the woods. It was deserted."

"Dutch Cal's place. It's only a few rods back in."

"I saw a light from there and that suggested to my muddled brain that I
might get something to eat."

"So you came over here."

"Yes. But the fear came on me again and I didn't dare knock. I suppose I
prowled."

"Gardner thought he heard ghosts. But ghosts don't steal molasses pie."

She looked at him solemnly. "Must one steal to get anything to eat
here?"

"I'm sorry," he cried. "I'll get you breakfast right away. What will you
have? There isn't much."

"Anything there is. But if I'm to board with you, you must let me pay my
way."

"The company is responsible for that."

Her brooding eyes were still fixed upon him. "You actually are the
agent," she mused. "That's quaint."

"I don't see anything quaint about it. Now, if you'll make yourself
comfortable I'll go over to the shack and rustle something for
breakfast."

"No; I'd rather go with you. Perhaps I can help."

Such help as the guest afforded was negligible. When, from sundry of the
Sears-Roebuck cans and bottles, a condensed and preserved sort of meal
had been derived, she set to it with a good grace.

"There's more of a kick in tea than in a cocktail, I believe, when you
really need it," she remarked gratefully. "You spoke of a Mr. Gardner.
Who is he?"

"A reporter who spent night before last here."

She dropped her cracker, oleomargarine-side down. "A reporter?"

"He came down to write up the wreck. It's a bad one. Nine dead, so far."

"Is he still here?"

"No. Gone back to Angelica City."

Retrieving her cracker, the guest finished her meal, heartily but
thoughtfully. She insisted on lending a hand to the washing-up process,
and complimented Banneker on his neatness.

"You haven't told me your name yet," he reminded her when the last
shining tin was hung up.

"No; I haven't. What will you do with it when you get it?"

"Report it to the company for their lists."

"Suppose I don't want it reported to the company?'

"Why on earth shouldn't you?"

"I may have my reasons. Would it be put in the papers?"

"Very likely."

"I don't _want_ it in the papers," said the girl with decision.

"Don't you want it known that you're all right? Your people--"

"I'll wire my people. Or you can wire them for me. Can't you?"

"Of course. But the company has a right to know what has happened to its
passengers."

"Not to me! What has the company done for me but wreck me and give me an
awful bang on the head and lose my baggage and--Oh, I nearly forgot. I
took my traveling-bag when I ran. It's in the hut. I wonder if you would
get it for me?"

"Of course. I'll go now."

"That's good of you. And for your own self, but not your old company,
I'll tell you my name. I'm--"

"Wait a moment. Whatever you tell me I'll have to report."

"You can't," she returned imperiously. "It's in confidence."

"I won't accept it so."

"You're a most extraordinary sta--a most extraordinary sort of man. Then
I'll give you this much for yourself, and if your company collects pet
names, you can pass it on. My friends call me Io."

"Yes. I know. You're I.O.W."

"How do you know that? And how much more do you know?"

"No more. A man on the train reported your initials from your baggage."

"I'll feel ever so much better when I have that bag. Is there a hotel
near here?"

"A sort of one at Manzanita. It isn't very clean. But there'll be a
train through to-night and I'll get you space on that. I'd better get a
doctor for you first, hadn't I?"

"No, indeed! All I need is some fresh things."

Banneker set off at a brisk pace. He found the extravagant little
traveling-case safely closed and locked, and delivered it outside his
own door which was also closed and, he suspected, locked.

"I'm thinking," said the soft voice of the girl within. "Don't let me
interrupt your work."

Beneath, at his routine, Banneker also set himself to think; confused,
bewildered, impossibly conjectural thoughts not unmingled with
semi-official anxiety. Harboring a woman on company property, even
though she were, in some sense, a charge of the company, might be open
to misconceptions. He wished that the mysterious Io would declare
herself.

At noon she did. She declared herself ready for luncheon. There was
about her a matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation as natural, even
inevitable, which entranced Banneker when it did not appall him. After
the meal was over, the girl seated herself on a low bench which Banneker
had built with his own hands and the Right-and-Ready Tool Kit (9 T 603),
her knee between her clasped hands and an elfish expression on her face.

"Don't you think," she suggested, "that we'd get on quicker if you
washed the dishes and I sat here and talked to you?"

"Very likely."

"It isn't so easy to begin, you know," she remarked, nursing her knee
thoughtfully. "Am I--Do you find me very much in the way?'"

"No."

"Don't suppress your wild enthusiasm on my account," she besought him.
"I haven't interfered with your duties so far, have I?"

"No," answered Banneker wondering what was coming next.

"You see"--her tone became ruminative and confidential--"if I give you
my name and you report it, there'll be all kinds of a mix-up. They'll
come after me and take me away."

Banneker dropped a tin on the floor and stood, staring.

"Isn't that what you want?"

"It's evident enough that it's what _you_ want," she returned,
aggrieved.

"No. Not at all," he disclaimed. "Only--well, out here--alone--I don't
understand."

"Can't you understand that if one had happened to drop out of the world
by chance, it might be desirable to stay out for a while?"

"For _you_? No; I can't understand that."

"What about yourself?" she challenged with a swift, amused gleam. "You
are certainly staying out of the world here."

"This is my world."

Her eyes and voice dropped. "Truly?" she murmured. Then, as he made no
reply, "It isn't much of a world for a man."

To this his response touched the heights of the unexpected. He stretched
out his arm toward the near window through which could be seen the white
splendor of Mount Carstairs, dim in the wreathing murk.

"Lo! For there, amidst the flowers and grasses, Only the mightier
movement sounds and passes, Only winds and rivers, Life and death,"
he quoted.

Her eyes glowed with sheer, incredulous astonishment. "How came you by
that Stevenson?" she demanded. "Are you poet as well as recluse?"

"I met him once."

"Tell me about it."

"Some other time. We've other things to talk of now."

"Some other time? Then I'm to stay!"

"In Manzanita?"

"Manzanita? No. Here."

"In this station? Alone? But why--"

"Because I'm Io Welland and I want to, and I always get what I want,"
she retorted calmly and superbly.

"Welland," he repeated. "Miss I.O. Welland. And the address is New York,
isn't it?"

Her hands grew tense across her knee, and deep in her shadowed eyes
there was a flash. But her voice suggested not only appeal, but almost a
hint of caress as she said:

"Are you going to betray a guest? I've always heard that Western
hospitality--"

"You're not my guest. You're the company's."

"And you won't take me for yours?"

"Be reasonable, Miss Welland."

"I suppose it's a question of the conventionalities," she mocked.

"I don't know or care anything about the conventionalities--"

"Nor I," she interrupted. "Out here."

"--but my guess would be that they apply only to people who live in the
same world. We don't, you and I."

"That's rather shrewd of you," she observed.

"It isn't an easy matter to talk about to a young girl, you know."

"Oh, yes, it is," she returned with composure. "Just take it for granted
that I know about all there is to be known and am not afraid of it. I'm
not afraid of anything, I think, except of--of having to go back just
now." She rose and went to him, looking down into his eyes. "A woman
knows whom she can trust in--in certain things. That's her gift, a gift
no man has or quite understands. Dazed as I was last night, I knew I
could trust you. I still know it. So we may dismiss that."

"That is true," said Banneker, "so far as it goes."

"What farther is there? If it's a matter of the inconvenience--"

"No. You know it isn't that."

"Then let me stay in this funny little shack just for a few days," she
pleaded. "If you don't, I'll get on to-night's train and go on and--and
do something I'll be sorry for all the rest of my life. And it'll be
your fault! I was going to do it when the accident prevented. Do you
believe in Providence?"

"Not as a butt-in," he answered promptly. "I don't believe that
Providence would pitch a rock into a train and kill a lot of people,
just to prevent a girl from making a foo--a bad break."

"Nor I," she smiled. "I suppose there's some kind of a General Manager
over this queer world; but I believe He plays the game fair and square
and doesn't break the rules He has made Himself. If I didn't, I wouldn't
want to play at all!... Oh, my telegram! I must wire my aunt in New
York. I'll tell her that I've stopped off to visit friends, if you don't
object to that description as being too compromising," she added
mischievously. She accepted a pad which he handed her and sat at the
table, pondering. "Mr. Banneker," she said after a moment.

"Well?"

"If the telegram goes from here, will it be headed by the name of the
station?"

"Yes."

"So that inquiry might be made here for me?"

"It might, certainly."

"But I don't want it to be. Couldn't you leave off the station?"

"Not very well."

"Just for me?" she wheedled. "For your guest that you've been so
insistent on keeping," she added slyly.

"The message wouldn't be accepted."

"Oh, dear! Then I won't send it."

"If you don't notify your family, I must report you to the company."

"What an irritating sense of duty you have! It must be dreadful to be
afflicted that way. Can't you suggest something?" she flashed. "Won't
you do a _thing_ to help me stay? I believe you don't want me, after
all."

"If the up-train gets through this evening, I'll give your wire to the
engineer and he'll transmit it from any office you say."

Childlike with pleasure she clapped her hands. "Of course! Give him
this, will you?" From a bag at her wrist she extracted a five-dollar
bill. "By the way, if I'm to be a guest I must be a paying guest, of
course."

"You can pay for a cot that I'll get in town," he agreed, "and your
share of the food."

"But the use of the house, and--and all the trouble I'm making you," she
said doubtfully. "I ought to pay for that."

"Do you think so?" He looked at her with a peculiar expression which,
however, was not beyond the power of her intuition to interpret.

"No; I don't," she declared.

Banneker answered her smile with his own, as he resumed his dish-wiping.
Io wrote out her telegram with care. Her next observation startled the
agent.

"Are you, by any chance, married?"

"No; I'm not. What makes you ask that?"

"There's been a woman in here before."

Confusedly his thoughts flew back to Carlotta. But the Mexican girl had
never been in the shack. He was quite absurdly and inexplicably glad now
that she had not.

"A woman?" he said. "Why do you think so?"

"Something in the arrangement of the place. That hanging, yonder. And
that little vase--it's good, by the way. The way that Navajo is placed
on the door. One feels it."

"It's true. A friend of mine came here one day and turned everything
topsy-turvy."

"I'm not asking questions just for curiosity. But is that the reason you
didn't want me to stay?"

He laughed, thinking of Miss Van Arsdale. "Heavens, no! Wait till you
meet her. She's a very wonderful person; but--"

"Meet her? Does she live near here, then?"

"A few miles away."

"Suppose she should come and find me here?"

"It's what I've been wishing."

"Is it! Well, it isn't what I wish at all."

"In fact," continued the imperturbable Banneker, "I rather planned to
ride over to her place this afternoon."

"Why, if you please?"

"To tell her about you and ask her advice."

Io's face darkened rebelliously. "Do you think it necessary to tattle to
a woman who is a total stranger to me?"

"I think it would be wise to get her view," he replied, unmoved.

"Well, I think it would be horrid. I think if you do any such thing, you
are--Mr. Banneker! You're not listening to me."

"Some one is coming through the woods trail," said he.

"Perhaps it's your local friend."

"That's my guess."

"Please understand this, Mr. Banneker," she said with an obstinate
outthrust of her little chin. "I don't know who your friend is and I
don't care. If you make it necessary, I can go to the hotel in town; but
while I stay here I won't have my affairs or even my presence discussed
with any one else."

"You're too late," said Banneker.

Out from a hardly discernible opening in the brush shouldered a big
roan. Tossing up his head, he stretched out in the long, easy lope of
the desert-bred, his rider sitting him loosely and with slack bridle.

"That's Miss Van Arsdale," said Banneker.




CHAPTER VI


Seated in her saddle the newcomer hailed Banneker.

"What news, Ban? Is the wreck cleared up?"

"Yes. But the track is out twenty miles east. Every arroyo and barranca
is bank-high and over."

He had crossed the platform to her. Now she raised her deep-set, quiet
eyes and rested them on the girl. That the station should harbor a
visitor at that hour was not surprising. But the beauty of the stranger
caught Miss Van Arsdale's regard, and her bearing held it.

"A passenger, Ban?" she asked, lowering her voice.

"Yes, Miss Camilla."

"Left over from the wreck?"

He nodded. "You came in the nick of time. I don't quite know what to do
with her."

"Why didn't she go on the relief train?"

"She didn't show up until last night."

"Where did she stay the night?"

"Here."

"In your office?"

"In my room. I worked in the office."

"You should have brought her to me."

"She was hurt. Queer in the head. I'm not sure that she isn't so yet."

Miss Van Arsdale swung her tall form easily out of the saddle. The girl
came forward at once, not waiting for Banneker's introduction, with a
formal gravity.

"How do you do? I am Irene Welland."

The older woman took the extended hand. There was courtesy rather than
kindliness in her voice as she asked, "Are you much hurt?"

"I'm quite over it, thank you. All but the bandage. Mr. Banneker was
just speaking of you when you rode up, Miss Van Arsdale."

The other smiled wanly. "It is a little startling to hear one's name
like that, in a voice from another world. When do you go on?"

"Ah, that's a point under discussion. Mr. Banneker would, I believe,
summon a special train if he could, in his anxiety to get rid of me."

"Not at all," disclaimed the agent.

But Miss Van Arsdale interrupted, addressing the girl:

"You must be anxious, yourself, to get back to civilization."

"Why?" returned the girl lightly. "This seems a beautiful locality."

"Were you traveling alone?"

The girl flushed a little, but her eyes met the question without
wavering. "Quite alone."

"To the coast?"

"To join friends there."

"If they can patch up the washed-out track," put in Banneker, "Number
Seven ought to get through to-night."

"And Mr. Banneker in his official capacity was almost ready to put me
aboard by force, when I succeeded in gaining a reprieve. Now he calls
you to his rescue."

"What do you want to do?" inquired Miss Van Arsdale with lifted brows.

"Stay here for a few days, in that funny little house." She indicated
the portable shack.

"That is Mr. Banneker's own place."

"I understand perfectly."

"I don't think it would do, Miss Welland. It is _Miss_ Welland, isn't
it?"

"Yes, indeed. Why wouldn't it do, Miss Van Arsdale?"

"Ask yourself."

"I am quite capable of taking care of myself," returned the girl calmly.
"As for Mr. Banneker, I assume that he is equally competent. And," she
added with a smiling effrontery, "he's quite as much compromised already
as he could possibly be by my staying."

Banneker flushed angrily. "There's no question of my being compromised,"
he began shortly.

"You're wrong, Ban; there is," Miss Van Arsdale's quiet voice cut him
short again. "And still more of Miss Welland's. What sort of escapade
this may be," she added, turning to the girl, "I have no idea. But you
cannot stay here alone."

"Can't I?" retorted the other mutinously. "I think that rests with Mr.
Banneker to say. Will you turn me out, Mr. Banneker? After our
agreement?"

"No," said Banneker.

"You can hardly kidnap me, even with all the conventionalities on your
side," Miss Welland pointed out to Miss Van Arsdale.

That lady made no answer to the taunt. She was looking at the
station-agent with a humorously expectant regard. He did not disappoint
her.

"If I get an extra cot for the shack, Miss Van Arsdale," he asked,
"could you get your things and come over here to stay?"

"Certainly."

"I won't be treated like a child!" cried the derelict in exactly the
tone of one, and a very naughty one. "I won't! I won't!" She stamped.

Banneker laughed.

"You're a coward," said Io.

Miss Van Arsdale laughed.

"I'll go to the hotel in the town and stay there."

"Think twice before you do that," advised the woman.

"Why?" asked Io, struck by the tone.

"Crawly things," replied Miss Van Arsdale sententiously.

"Big, hungry ones," added Banneker.

He could almost feel the little rippling shudders passing across the
girl's delicate skin. "Oh, I think you're _loathly_!" she cried. "Both
of you."

Tears of vexation made lucent the shadowed depths of her eyes. "I've
never been treated so in my life!" she declared, overcome by the
self-pity of a struggling soul trammeled by the world's injustice.

"Why not be sensible and stay with me to-night while you think it all
over?" suggested Miss Van Arsdale.

"Thank you," returned the other with an unexpected and baffling change
to the amenable and formal "You are very kind. I'd be delighted to."

"Pack up your things, then, and I'll bring an extra horse from the town.
I'll be back in an hour."

The girl went up to Banneker's room, and got her few belongings
together. Descending she found the agent busy among his papers. He put
them aside and came out to her.

"Your telegram ought to get off from Williams sometime to-morrow," he
said.

"That will be time enough," she answered.

"Will there be any answer?"

"How can there be? I haven't given any address."

"I could wire Williams later."

"No. I don't want to be bothered. I want to be let alone. I'm tired."

He cast a glance about the lowering horizon. "More rain coming," he
said. "I wish you could have seen the desert in the sunshine."

"I'll wait."

"Will you?" he cried eagerly. "It may be quite a while."

"Perhaps Miss Van Arsdale will keep me, as you wouldn't."

He shook his head. "You know that it isn't because I don't want you to
stay. But she is right. It just wouldn't do.... Here she comes now."

Io took a step nearer to him. "I've been looking at your books."

He returned her gaze unembarrassed. "Odds and ends," he said. "You
wouldn't find much to interest you."

"On the contrary. Everything interested me. You're a mystery--and I hate
mysteries."

"That's rather hard."

"Until they're solved. Perhaps I shall stay until I solve you."

"Stay longer. It wouldn't take any time at all. There's no mystery to
solve." He spoke with an air of such perfect candor as compelled her
belief in his sincerity.

"Perhaps you'll solve it for me. Here's Miss Van Arsdale. Good-bye, and
thank you. You'll come and see me? Or shall I come and see you?"

"Both," smiled Banneker. "That's fairest."

The pair rode away leaving the station feeling empty and unsustained. At
least Banneker credited it with that feeling. He tried to get back to
work, but found his routine dispiriting. He walked out into the desert,
musing and aimless.

Silence fell between the two women as they rode. Once Miss Welland
stopped to adjust her traveling-bag which had shifted a little in the
straps.

"Is riding cross-saddle uncomfortable for you?" asked Miss Van Arsdale.

"Not in the least. I often do it at home."

Suddenly her mount, a thick-set, soft-going pony shied, almost unseating
her. A gun had banged close by. Immediately there was a second report.
Miss Van Arsdale dismounted, replacing a short-barreled shot-gun in its
saddle-holster, stepped from the trail, and presently returned carrying
a brace of plump, slate-gray birds.

"Wild dove," she said, stroking them. "You'll find them a welcome
addition to a meager bill of fare."

"I should be quite content with whatever you usually have."

"Doubted," replied the other. "I live rather a frugal life. It saves
trouble."

"And I'm afraid I'm going to make you trouble. But you brought it upon
yourself."

"By interfering. Exactly. How old are you?"

"Twenty."

"Good Heavens! You have the aplomb of fifty."

"Experience," smiled the girl, flattered.

"And the recklessness of fifteen."

"I abide by the rules of the game. And when I find myself--well, out of
bounds, I make my own rules."

Miss Van Arsdale shook her firmly poised head. "It won't do. The rules
are the same everywhere, for honorable people."

"Honorable!" There was a flash of resentful pride as the girl turned in
the saddle to face her companion.

"I have no intention of preaching at you or of questioning you,"
continued the calm, assured voice. "If you are looking for
sanctuary"--the fine lips smiled slightly--"though I'm sure I can't see
why you should need it, this is the place. But there are rules of
sanctuary, also."

"I suppose," surmised the girl, "you want to know why I don't go back
into the world at once."

"No."

"Then I'll tell you."

"As you wish."

"I came West to be married."

"To Delavan Eyre?"

Again the dun pony jumped, this time because a sudden involuntary
contraction of his rider's muscles had startled him. "What do you know
of Delavan Eyre, Miss Van Arsdale?"

"I occasionally see a New York newspaper."

"Then you know who I am, too?"

"Yes. You are the pet of the society column paragraphers; the famous
'Io' Welland." She spoke with a curious intonation.

"Ah, you read the society news?"

"With a qualmish stomach. I see the names of those whom I used to know
advertising themselves in the papers as if they had a shaving-soap or a
chewing-gum to sell."

"Part of the game," returned the girl airily. "The newcomers, the
climbers, would give their souls to get the place in print that we get
without an effort."

"Doesn't it seem to you a bit vulgar?" asked the other.

"Perhaps. But it's the way the game is played nowadays."

"With counters which you have let the parvenues establish for you. In my
day we tried to keep out of the papers."

"Clever of you," approved the girl. "The more you try to keep out, the
more eager the papers are to print your picture. They're crazy over
exclusiveness," she laughed.

"Speculation, pro and con, as to who is going to marry whom, and who is
about to divorce whom, and whether Miss Welland's engagement to Mr. Eyre
is authentic, 'as announced exclusively in this column'--more
exclusiveness--; or whether--"

"It wasn't Del Eyre that I came out here to marry."

"No?"

"No. It's Carter Holmesley. Of course you know about him."

"By advertisement, also; the society-column kind."

"Really, you know, he couldn't keep out of the papers. He hates it with
all his British soul. But being what he is, a prospective duke, an
international poloist, and all that sort of thing, the reporters
naturally swarm to him. Columns and columns; more pictures than a
popular _danseuse_. And all without his lifting his hand."

"_Une mariage de reclame_," observed Miss Van Arsdale. "Is it that that
constitutes his charm for you?"

Miss Van Arsdale's smile was still instinct with mockery, but there had
crept into it a quality of indulgence.

"No," answered the girl. Her face became thoughtful and serious. "It's
something else. He--he carried me off my feet from the moment I met him.
He was drunk, too, that first time. I don't believe I've ever seen him
cold sober. But it's a joyous kind of intoxication; vine-leaves and
Bacchus and that sort of thing 'weave a circle 'round him thrice'--_you_
know. It _is_ honey-dew and the milk of Paradise to him." She laughed
nervously. "And charm! It's in the very air about him. He can make me
follow his lead like a little curly poodle when I'm with him."

"Were you engaged to Delavan Eyre when you met him?"

"Oh, engaged!" returned the girl fretfully. "There was never more than a
sort of understanding. A _mariage de convenance_ on both sides, if it
ever came off. I _am_ fond of Del, too. But he was South, and the other
came like a whirlwind, and I'm--I'm queer about some things," she went
on half shamefacedly. "I suppose I'm awfully susceptible to physical
impressions. Are all girls that way? Or is that gross and--and
underbred?"

"It's part of us, I expect; but we're not all so honest with ourselves.
So you decided to throw over Mr. Eyre and marry your Briton."

"Well--yes. The new British Ambassador, who arrives from Japan next
week, is Carty's uncle, and we were going to make him stage-manage the
wedding, you see. A sort of officially certified elopement."

"More advertisement!" said Miss Van Arsdale coldly. "Really, Miss
Welland, if marriage seems to you nothing more than an opportunity to
create a newspaper sensation I cannot congratulate you on your
prospects."

This time her tone stung. Io Welland's eyes became sullen. But her voice
was almost caressingly amiable as she said:

"Tastes differ. It is, I believe, possible to create a sensation in New
York society without any newspaper publicity, and without at all meaning
or wishing to. At least, it was, fifteen years ago; so I'm told."

Camilla Van Arsdale's face was white and lifeless and still, as she
turned it toward the girl.

"You must have been a very precocious five-year-old," she said steadily.

"All the Olneys are precocious. My mother was an Olney, a first cousin
of Mrs. Willis Enderby, you know."

"Yes; I remember now."

The malicious smile on the girl's delicate lips faded. "I wish I, hadn't
said that," she cried impulsively. "I hate Cousin Mabel. I always have
hated her. She's a cat. And I think the way she, acted in--in
the--the--well, about Judge Enderby and--".

"Please!" Miss Van Arsdale's tone was peremptory. "Here is my place."
She indicated a clearing with a little nest of a camp in it.

"Shall I go back?" asked Io remorsefully.

"No."

Miss Van Arsdale dismounted and, after a moment's hesitancy, the other
followed her example. The hostess threw open the door and a beautiful,
white-ruffed collie rushed to her with barks of joy. She held out a hand
to her new guest.

"Be welcome," she said with a certain stately gravity, "for as long as
you will stay."

"It might be some time," answered Io shyly. "You're tempting me."

"When is your wedding?"

"Wedding! Oh, didn't I tell you? I'm not going to marry Carter Holmesley
either."

"You are not going--"

"No. The bump on my head must have settled my brain. As soon as I came
to I saw how crazy it would be. That is why I don't want to go on West."

"I see. For fear of his overbearing you."

"Yes. Though I don't think he could now. I think I'm over it. Poor old
Del! He's had a narrow escape from losing me. I hope he never hears of
it. Placid though he is, that might stir him up."

"Then you'll go back to him?"

The girl sighed. "I suppose so. How can I tell? I'm only twenty, and it
seems to me that somebody has been trying to marry me ever since I
stopped petting my dolls. I'm tired of men, men, men! That's why I want
to live alone and quiet for a while in the station-agent's shack."

"Then you don't consider Mr. Banneker as belonging to the tribe of men?"

"He's an official. I could always see his uniform, at need." She fell
into thought. "It's a curious thing," she mused.

Miss Van Arsdale said nothing.

"This queer young cub of a station-agent of yours is strangely like
Carter Holmesley, not as much in looks as in--well--atmosphere. Only,
he's ever so much better-looking."

"Won't you have some tea? You must be tired," said Miss Van Arsdale
politely.




CHAPTER VII


Somewhere within the soul of civilized woman burns a craving for that
higher power of sensation which we dub sensationalism. Girls of Io
Welland's upbringing live in an atmosphere which fosters it. To outshine
their rivals in the startling things which they do, always within
accepted limits, is an important and exciting phase of existence. Io had
run away to marry the future Duke of Carfax, partly through the charm
which a reckless, headlong, and romantic personality imposed upon her,
but largely for the excitement of a reckless, headlong, and romantic
escapade. The tragic interposition of the wreck seemed to her present
consciousness, cooled and sobered by the spacious peace of the desert,
to have been providential.

Despite her disclaimer made to Banneker she felt, deep within the placid
acceptances of subconsciousness, that the destruction of a train was not
too much for a considerate Providence to undertake on behalf of her
petted and important self. She clearly realized that she had had a
narrow escape from Holmesley; that his attraction for her was transient
and unsubstantial, a surface magnetism without real value or promise.

In her revulsion of feeling she thought affectionately of Delavan Eyre.
There lay the safe basis of habitude, common interests, settled liking.
True, he bored her at times with his unimpeachable good-nature, his easy
self-assurance that everything was and always would be "all right," and
nothing "worth bothering over."

If he knew of her escapade, that would at least shake him out of his
soft and well-lined rut. Indeed, Io was frank enough with herself to
admit that a perverse desire to explode a bomb under her imperturbable
and too-assured suitor had been an element in her projected elopement.
Never would that bomb explode. It would not even fizzle enough to alarm
Eyre or her family. For not a soul knew of the frustrated scheme, except
Holmesley and the reliable friend in Paradiso whom she was to visit; not
her father, Sims Welland, traveling in Europe on business, nor her aunt,
Mrs. Thatcher Forbes, in whose charge she had been left. Ostensibly she
had been going to visit the Westerleys, that was all: Mrs. Forbes's
misgivings as to a twenty-year-old girl crossing the continent alone had
been unavailing against Io's calm willfulness.

Well, she would go back and marry Del Eyre, and be comfortable ever
after. After all, liking and comprehension were a sounder foundation for
matrimony than the perishable glamour of an attraction like Holmesley's.
Any sensible person would know that. She wished that she had some older
and more experienced woman to talk it out with. Miss Van Arsdale, if
only she knew her a little better....

Camilla Van Arsdale, even on so casual an acquaintance, would have told
Io, reckoning with the slumbering fire in her eyes, and the sensitive
and passionate turn of the lips, but still more with the subtle and
significant emanation of a femininity as yet unawakened to itself, that
for her to marry on the pallid expectancies of mere liking would be to
invite disaster and challenge ruin.

Meantime Io wanted to rest and think.

Time enough for that was to be hers, it appeared. Her first night as a
guest had been spent in a semi-enclosed porch, to which every breeze
wafted the spicy and restful balm of the wet pines. Io's hot brain
cooled itself in that peace. Quite with a feeling of welcome she
accepted the windy downpour which came with the morning to keep her
indoors, as if it were a friendly and opportune jailer. Reaction from
the mental strain and the physical shock had set in. She wanted only, as
she expressed it to her hostess, to "laze" for a while.

"Then this is the ideal spot for you," Miss Van Arsdale answered her.
"I'm going to ride over to town."

"In this gale?" asked the surprised girl.

"Oh, I'm weather-proof. Tell Pedro not to wait luncheon for me. And keep
an eye on him if you want anything fit to eat. He's the worst cook west
of the plains. You'll find books, and the piano to amuse you when you
get up."

She rode away, straight and supple in the saddle, and Io went back to
sleep again. Halfway to her destination, Miss Van Arsdale's
woods-trained ear caught the sound of another horse's hooves, taking a
short cut across a bend in the trail. To her halloo, Banneker's clear
voice responded. She waited and presently he rode up to her.

"Come back with me," she invited after acknowledging his greeting.

"I was going over to see Miss Welland."

"Wait until to-morrow. She is resting."

A shade of disappointment crossed his face. "All right," he agreed. "I
wanted to tell her that her messages got off all right."

"I'll tell her when I go back."

"That'll be just as well," he answered reluctantly. "How is she
feeling?"

"Exhausted. She's been under severe strain."

"Oughtn't she to have a doctor? I could ride--"

"She won't listen to it. And I think her head is all right now. But she
ought to have complete rest for several days."

"Well, I'm likely to be busy enough," he said simply. "The schedule is
all shot to pieces, and, unless this rain lets up, we'll have more track
out. What do you think of it?"

Miss Van Arsdale looked up through the thrashing pines to the rush of
the gray-black clouds. "I think we're in for a siege of it," was her
pronouncement.

They rode along single file in the narrow trail until they emerged into
the open. Then Banneker's horse moved forward, neck and neck with the
other. Miss Van Arsdale reined down her uneasy roan.

"Ban."

"Yes?"

"Have you ever seen anything like her before?"

"Only on the stage."

She smiled. "What do you think of her?"

"I hardly know how to express it," he answered frankly, though
hesitantly. "She makes me think of all the poetry I've ever read."

"That's dangerous. Ban, have you any idea what kind of a girl she is?"

"What kind?" he repeated. He looked startled.

"Of course you haven't. How should you? I'm going to tell you."

"Do you know her, Miss Camilla?"

"As well as if she were my own sister. That is, I know her type. It's
common enough."

"It can't be," he protested eagerly.

"Oh, yes! The type is. She is an exquisite specimen of it; that's all.
Listen, Ban. Io Welland is the petted and clever and willful daughter of
a rich man; a very rich man he would be reckoned out here. She lives in
a world as remote from this as the moon."

"Of course. I realize that."

"It's well that you do. And she's as casual a visitant here as if she
had floated down on one moonbeam and would float back on the next."

"She'll have to, to get out of here if this rain keeps up," observed the
station-agent grimly.

"I wish she would," returned Miss Van Arsdale.

"Is she in your way?"

"I shouldn't mind that if I could keep her out of yours," she answered
bluntly.

Banneker turned a placid and smiling face to her. "You think I'm a fool,
don't you, Miss Camilla?"

"I think that Io Welland, without ill-intent at all, but with a period
of idleness on her hands, is a dangerous creature to have around. She's
too lovely and, I think, too restless a spirit."

"She's lovely, all right," assented Banneker.

"Well; I've warned you, Ban," returned his friend in slightly dispirited
tones.

"What do you want me to do? Keep away from your place? I'll do whatever
you say. But it's all nonsense."

"I dare say it is," sighed Miss Van Arsdale. "Forget that I've said it,
Ban. Meddling is a thankless business."

"You could never meddle as far as I'm concerned," said Banneker warmly.
"I'm a little worried," he added thoughtfully, "about not reporting her
as found to the company. What do you think?"

"Too official a question for me. You'll have to settle that for
yourself."

"How long does she intend to stay?"

"I don't know. But a girl of her breeding and habits would hardly settle
herself on a stranger for very long unless a point were made of urging
her."

"And you won't do that?"

"I certainly shall not!"

"No; I suppose not. You've been awfully good to her."

"Hospitality to the shipwrecked," smiled Miss Van Arsdale as she crossed
the track toward the village.

Late afternoon, darkening into wilder winds and harsher rain, brought
the hostess back to her lodge dripping and weary. On a bearskin before
the smouldering fire lay the girl, her fingers intertwined behind her
head, her eyes half closed and dreamy. Without directly responding to
the other's salutation she said:

"Miss Van Arsdale, will you be very good to me?"

"What is it?"

"I'm tired," said Io. "So tired!"

"Stay, of course," responded the hostess, answering the implication
heartily, "as long as you will."

"Only two or three days, until I recover the will to do something.
You're awfully kind." Io looked very young and childlike, with her
languid, mobile face irradiated by the half-light of the fire. "Perhaps
you'll play for me sometime."

"Of course. Now, if you like. As soon as the chill gets out of my
hands."

"Thank you. And sing?" suggested the girl diffidently.

A fierce contraction of pain marred the serenity of the older woman's
face. "No," she said harshly. "I sing for no one."

"I'm sorry," murmured the girl.

"What have you been doing all day?" asked Miss Van Arsdale, holding out
her hands toward the fire.

"Resting. Thinking. Scaring myself with bogy-thoughts of what I've
escaped." Io smiled and sighed. "I hadn't known how worn out I was until
I woke up this morning. I don't think I ever before realized the meaning
of refuge."

"You'll recover from the need of it soon enough," promised the other.
She crossed to the piano. "What kind of music do you want? No; don't
tell me. I should be able to guess." Half turning on the bench she gazed
speculatively at the lax figure on the rug. "Chopin, I think. I've
guessed right? Well, I don't think I shall play you Chopin to-day. You
don't need that kind of--of--well, excitation."

Musing for a moment over a soft mingling of chords she began with a
little ripple of melody, MacDowell's lovely, hurrying, buoyant
"Improvisation," with its aeolian vibrancies, its light, bright surges
of sound, sinking at the last into cradled restfulness. Without pause or
transition she passed on to Grieg; the wistful, remote appeal of the
strangely misnamed "Erotique," plaintive, solemn, and in the fulfillment
almost hymnal: the brusque pursuing minors of the wedding music, and the
diamond-shower of notes of the sun-path song, bleak, piercing, Northern
sunlight imprisoned in melody. Then, the majestic swing of ;se's
death-chant, glorious and mystical.

"Are you asleep?" asked the player, speaking through the chords.

"No," answered Io's tremulous voice. "I'm being very unhappy. I love
it!"

Bang! It was a musical detonation, followed by a volley of chords and
then a wild, swirling waltz; and Miss Van Arsdale jumped up and stood
over her guest. "There!" she said. "That's better than letting you
pamper yourself with the indulgence of unhappiness."

"But I want to be unhappy," pouted Io. "I want to be pampered."

"Naturally. You always will be, I expect, as long as there are men in
the world to do your bidding. However, I must see to supper."

So for two days Io Welland lolled and lazed and listened to Miss Van
Arsdale's music, or read, or took little walks between showers. No
further mention was made by her hostess of the circumstances of the
visit. She was a reticent woman; almost saturnine, Io decided, though
her perfect and effortless courtesy preserved her from being
antipathetic to any one beneath her own roof. How much her silence as to
the unusual situation was inspired by consideration for her guest, how
much due to natural reserve, Io could not estimate.

A little less reticence would have been grateful to her as the hours
spun out and she felt her own spirit expand slowly in the calm. It was
she who introduced the subject of Banneker.

"Our quaint young station-agent seems to have abandoned his
responsibilities so far as I'm concerned," she observed.

"Because he hasn't come to see you?"

"Yes. He said he would."

"I told him not to."

"I see," said Io, after thinking it over. "Is he a little--just a wee,
little bit queer in his head?"

"He's one of the sanest persons I've ever known. And I want him to stay
so."

"I see again," stated the girl.

"So you thought him a bit unbalanced? That _is_ amusing." That the
hostess meant the adjective in good faith was proved by her quiet
laughter.

Io regarded her speculatively and with suspicion. "He asked the same
about me, I suppose." Such was her interpretation of the laugh.

"But he gave you credit for being only temporarily deranged."

"Either he or I ought to be up for examination by a medical board,"
stated the girl poutingly. "One of us must be crazy. The night that I
stole his molasses pie--it was pretty awful pie, but I was starved--I
stumbled over something in the darkness and fell into it with an awful
clatter. What do you suppose it was?"

"I think I could guess," smiled the other.

"Not unless you knew. Personally I couldn't believe it. It felt like a
boat, and it rocked like a boat, and there were the seats and the oars.
I could feel them. A steel boat! Miss Van Arsdale, it isn't reasonable."

"Why isn't it reasonable?'

"I looked on the map in his room and there isn't so much as a mud-puddle
within miles and miles and miles. Is there?"

"Not that I know of."

"Then what does he want of a steel boat?"

"Ask him."

"It might stir him up. They get violent if you question their pet
lunacies, don't they?"

"It's quite simple. Ban is just an incurable romanticist. He loves the
water. And his repository of romance is the catalogue of Sears, Roebuck
and Co. When the new issue came, with an entrancing illustration of a
fully equipped steel boat, he simply couldn't stand it. He had to have
one, to remind him that some day he would be going back to the coast
lagoons.... Does that sound to you like a fool?"

"No; it sounds delicious," declared the girl with a ripple of mirth.
"What a wonderful person! I'm going over to see him to-morrow. May I?"

"My dear; I have no control over your actions."

"Have you made any other plans for me to-morrow morning?" inquired Miss
Welland in a prim and social tone, belied by the dancing light in her
eyes.

"I've told you that he was romantic," warned the other.

"What higher recommendation could there be? I shall sit in the boat with
him and talk nautical language. Has he a yachting cap? Oh, do tell me
that he has a yachting cap!"

Miss Van Arsdale, smiling, shook her head, but her eyes were troubled.
There was compunction in Io's next remark.

"I'm really going over to see about accommodations. Sooner or later I
must face the music--meaning Carty. I'm fit enough now, thanks to you."

"Wouldn't an Eastern trip be safer?" suggested her hostess.

"An Eastern trip would be easier. But I've made my break, and it's in
the rules, as I understand them, that I've got to see it through. If he
can get me now"--she gave a little shrug--"but he can't. I've come to my
senses."

Sunlight pale, dubious, filtering through the shaken cloud veils,
ushered in the morning. Meager of promise though it was, Io's spirits
brightened. Declining the offer of a horse in favor of a pocket compass,
she set out afoot, not taking the trail, but forging straight through
the heavy forest for the line of desert. Around her, brisk and busy
flocks of pi;on jays darted and twittered confidentially. The warm spice
of the pines was sweet in her nostrils. Little stirrings and rustlings
just beyond the reach of vision delightfully and provocatively suggested
the interest which she was inspiring by her invasion among the lesser
denizens of the place. The sweetness and intimacy of an unknown life
surrounded her. She sang happily as she strode, lithe and strong and
throbbing with unfulfilled energies and potencies, through the
springtide of the woods.

But when she emerged upon the desert, she fell silent. A spaciousness as
of endless vistas enthralled and, a little, awed her. On all sides were
ranged the disordered ranks of the cacti, stricken into immobility in
the very act of reconstituting their columns, so that they gave the
effect of a discord checked on the verge of its resolution into form and
harmony, yet with a weird and distorted beauty of its own. From a little
distance, there came a murmur of love-words. Io moved softly forward,
peering curiously, and from the arc of a wide curving ocatilla two wild
doves sprang, leaving the branch all aquiver. Bolder than his companions
of the air, a cactus owl, perched upon the highest column of a great
green candelabrum, viewed her with a steady detachment, "sleepless, with
cold, commemorative eyes." The girl gave back look for look, into the
big, hard, unwavering circles.

"You're a funny little bird," said she. "Say something!"

Like his congener of the hortatory poem, the owl held his peace.

"Perhaps you're a stuffed little bird," said Io, "and this not a real
desert at all, but a National Park or something, full of educational
specimens."

She walked past the occupant of the cactus, and his head, turning,
followed her with the slow, methodical movement of a toy mechanism.

"You give me a crick in my neck," protested the intruder plaintively.
"Now, I'll step over behind you and you'll _have_ to move or stop
watching me."

She walked behind the watcher. The eyes continued to hold her in direct
range.

"Now," said Io, "I know where the idea for that horrid advertisement
that always follows you with its finger came from. However, I'll fix
you."

She fetched a deliberate circle. The bird's eyes followed her without
cessation. Yet his feet and body remained motionless. Only the head had
turned. That had made a complete revolution.

"This is a very queer desert," gasped Io. "It's bewitched. Or am I? Now,
I'm going to walk once more around you, little owl, or mighty magician,
whichever you are. And after I've completely turned your head, you'll
fall at my feet. Or else..."

Again she walked around the feathered center of the circle. The head
followed her, turning with a steady and uninterrupted motion, on its
pivot. Io took a silver dime from her purse.

"Heaven save us from the powers of evil!" she said appreciatively.
"Aroint thee, witch!"

She threw the coin at the cactus.

"Chrr-rr-rrum!" burbled the owl, and flew away.

"I'm dizzy," said Io. "I wonder if the owl is an omen and whether the
other inhabitants of this desert are like him; however much you turn
their heads, they won't fall for you. Charms and counter-charms!... Be a
good child, Io," she admonished herself. "Haven't you got yourself into
enough trouble with your deviltries? I can't help it," she defended
herself. "When I see a new and interesting specimen, I've just _got_ to
investigate its nature and habits. It's an inherited scientific spirit,
I suppose. And he is new, and awfully interesting--even if he is only a
station-agent." Wherefrom it will be perceived that her thoughts had
veered from the cactus owl, to another perplexing local phenomenon.

The glaring line of the railroad right-of-way rose before her feet, a
discordant note of rigidity and order in the confused prodigality of
desert growth. Io turned away from it, but followed its line until she
reached the station. No sign of life greeted her. The door was locked,
and the portable house unresponsive to her knocking. Presently, however,
she heard the steady click of the telegraph instrument and, looking
through the half-open office window, saw Banneker absorbed in his work.

"Good-morning," she called.

Without looking up he gave back her greeting in an absent echo.

"As you didn't come to see me, I've come to see you," was her next
attempt.

Did he nod? Or had he made no motion at all?

"I've come to ask important questions about trains," she pursued, a
little aggrieved by his indifference to her presence.

No reply from the intent worker.

"And 'tell sad stories of the death of kings,'" she quoted with a fairy
chuckle. She thought that she saw a small contortion pass over his
features, only to be banished at once. He had retired within the walls
of that impassive and inscrutable reserve which minor railroad officials
can at will erect between themselves and the lay public. Only the broken
rhythms of the telegraph ticker relieved the silence and furnished the
justification.

A little piqued but more amused, for she was far too confident of
herself to feel snubbed, the girl waited smilingly. Presently she said
in silken tones:

"When you're quite through and can devote a little attention to
insignificant me, I shall perhaps be sitting on the sunny corner of the
platform, or perhaps I shall be gone forever."

But she was not gone when, ten minutes later, Banneker came out. He
looked tired.

"You know, you weren't very polite to me," she remarked, glancing at him
slantwise as he stood before her.

If she expected apologies, she was disappointed, and perhaps thought
none the less of him for his dereliction.

"There's trouble all up and down the line," he said. "Nothing like a
schedule left west of Allbright. Two passenger trains have come through,
though. Would you like to see a paper? It's in my office."

"Goodness, no! Why should I want a newspaper here? I haven't time for
it. I want to see the world"--she swept a little, indicating hand about
her; "all that I can take in in a day."

"A day?" he echoed.

"Yes. I'm going to-morrow."

"That's as may be. Ten to one there's no space to be had."

"Surely you can get something for me. A section will do if you can't get
a stateroom."

He smiled. "The president of the road might get a stateroom. I doubt if
anybody else could even land an upper. Of course I'll do my best. But
it's a question when there'll be another train through."

"What ails your road?" she demanded indignantly. "Is it just stuck
together with glue?"

"You've never seen this desert country when it springs a leak. It can
develop a few hundred Niagaras at the shortest notice of any place I
know."

"But it isn't leaking now," she objected.

He turned his face to the softly diffused sunlight. "To be continued.
The storm isn't over yet, according to the way I feel about it. Weather
reports say so, too."

"Then take me for a walk!" she cried. "I'm tired of rain and I want to
go over and lean against that lovely white mountain."

"Well, it's only sixty miles away," he answered. "Perhaps you'd better
take some grub along or you might get hungry."

"Aren't you coming with me?"

"This is my busy morning. If it were afternoon, now--"

"Very well. Since you are so urgent, I _will_ stay to luncheon. I'll
even get it up myself if you'll let me into the shack."

"That's a go!" said Banneker heartily. "What about your horse?"

"I walked over."

"No; did you?" He turned thoughtful, and his next observation had a
slightly troubled ring. "Have you got a gun?"

"A gun? Oh, you mean a pistol. No; I haven't. Why should I?"

He shook his head. "This is no time to be out in the open without a gun.
They had a dance at the Sick Coyote in Manzanita last night, and
there'll be some tough specimens drifting along homeward all day."

"Do you carry a gun?"

"I would if I were going about with you."

"Then you can loan me yours to go home with this afternoon," she said
lightly.

"Oh, I'll take you back. Just now I've got some odds and ends that will
take a couple of hours to clear up. You'll find plenty to read in the
shack, such as it is."

Thus casually dismissed, Io murmured a "Thank you" which was not as meek
as it sounded, and withdrew to rummage among the canned edibles drawn
from the inexhaustible stock of Sears-Roebuck. Having laid out a
selection, housewifely, and looked to the oil stove derived from the
same source, she turned with some curiosity to the mental pabulum with
which this strange young hermit had provided himself. Would this, too,
bear the mail-order imprint and testify to mail-order standards? At
first glance the answer appeared to be affirmative. The top shelf of the
home-made case sagged with the ineffable slusheries of that most popular
and pious of novelists, Harvey Wheelwright. Near by, "How to Behave on
All Occasions" held forth its unimpeachable precepts, while a little
beyond, "Botany Made Easy" and "The Perfect Letter Writer" proffered
further aid to the aspiring mind. Improvement, stark, blatant
Improvement, advertised itself from that culturous and reeking
compartment. But just below--Io was tempted to rub her eyes--stood
Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"; a Browning, complete; that inimitably
jocund fictional prank, Frederic's "March Hares," together with the same
author's fine and profoundly just "Damnation of Theron Ware"; Taylor's
translation of Faust; "The [broken-backed] Egoist"; "Lavengro" (Io
touched its magic pages with tender fingers), and a fat, faded, reddish
volume so worn and obscured that she at once took it down and made
explorative entry. She was still deep in it when the owner arrived.

"Have you found enough to keep you amused?"

She looked up from the pages and seemed to take him all in anew before
answering. "Hardly the word. Bewildered would be nearer the feeling."

"It's a queerish library, I suppose," he said apologetically.

"If I believed in dual personality--" she began; but broke off to hold
up the bulky veteran. "Where did you get 'The Undying Voices'?"

"Oh, that's a windfall. What a bully title for a collection of the great
poetries, isn't it!"

She nodded, one caressing hand on the open book, the other propping her
chin as she kept the clear wonder of her eyes upon him.

"It makes you think of singers making harmony together in a great open
space. I'd like to know the man who made the selections," he concluded.

"What kind of a windfall?" she asked.

"A real one. Pullman travelers sometimes prop their windows open with
books. You can see the window-mark on the cover of this one. I found it
two miles out, beside the right-of-way. There was no name in it, so I
kept it. It's the book I read most except one."

"What's the one?"

He laughed, holding up the still more corpulent Sears-Roebuck catalogue.

"Ah," said she gravely. "That accounts, I suppose, for the top shelf."

"Yes, mostly."

"Do you like them? The Conscientious Improvers, I mean?"

"I think they're bunk."

"Then why did you get them?"

"Oh, I suppose I was looking for something," he returned; and though his
tone was careless, she noticed for the first time a tinge of
self-consciousness.

"Did you find it there?"

"No. It isn't there."

"Here?" She laid both hands on the "windfall."

His face lighted subtly.

"It _is_ there, isn't it! If one has the sense to get it out."

"I wonder," mused the girl. And again, "I wonder." She rose, and taking
out "March Hares" held it up. "I could hardly believe this when I saw
it. Did it also drop out of a car window?"

"No. I never heard of that until I wrote for it. I wrote to a Boston
bookstore that I'd heard about and told 'em I wanted two books to cheer
up a fool with the blues, and another to take him into a strange
world--and keep the change out of five dollars. They sent me 'The Bab
Ballads' and this, and 'Lavengro.'"

"Oh, how I'd like to see that letter! If the bookstore has an ounce of
real bookitude about it, they've got it preserved in lavender! And what
do you think of 'March Hares'?"

"Did you ever read any of the works of Harvey Wheelwright?" he
questioned in turn.

"Now," thought Io, "he is going to compare Frederic to Wheelwright, and
I shall abandon him to his fate forever. So here's his chance ... I
have," she replied aloud.

"It's funny," ruminated Banneker. "Mr. Wheelwright writes about the kind
of things that might happen any day, and probably do happen, and yet you
don't believe a word of it. 'March Hares'--well, it just couldn't
happen; but what do you care while you're in it! It seems realer than
any of the dull things outside it. That's the literary part of it, I
suppose, isn't it?"

"That's the magic of it," returned Io, with a little, half-suppressed
crow of delight. "Are you magic, too, Mr. Banneker?"

"Me? I'm hungry," said he.

"Forgive the cook!" she cried. "But just one thing more. Will you lend
me the poetry book?"

"It's all marked up," he objected, flushing.

"Are you afraid that I'll surprise your inmost secrets?" she taunted.
"They'd be safe. I can be close-mouthed, even though I've been
chattering like a sparrow."

"Take it, of course," he said. "I suppose I've marked all the wrong
things."

"So far," she laughed, "you're batting one hundred per cent as a
literary critic." She poured coffee into a tin cup and handed it to him.
"What do you think of my coffee?"

He tasted it consideringly; then gave a serious verdict. "Pretty bad."

"Really! I suppose it isn't according to the mail-order book recipe."

"It's muddy and it's weak."

"Are you always so frank in your expression of views?"

"Well, you asked me."

"Would you answer as plainly whatever I asked you?"

"Certainly. I'd have too much respect for you not to."

She opened wide eyes at this. Then provocatively: "What do you think of
me, Mr. Banneker?"

"I can't answer that."

"Why not?" she teased.

"I don't know you well enough to give an opinion."

"You know me as well as you ever will."

"Very likely."

"Well, a snap judgment, for what it's worth.... What are you doing
there?"

"Making more coffee."

Io stamped her foot. "You're the most enraging man I ever met."

"It's quite unintentional," he replied patiently, but with no hint of
compunction. "You may drink yours and I'll drink mine."

"You're only making it worse!"

"Very well; then I'll drink yours if you like."

"And say it's good."

"But what's the use?"

"And say it's good," insisted Io.

"It's marvelous," agreed her unsmiling host.

Far from being satisfied with words and tone, which were correctness
itself, Io was insensately exasperated.

"You're treating me like a child," she charged.

"How do you want me to treat you?"

"As a woman," she flashed, and was suddenly appalled to feel the blood
flush incredibly to her cheeks.

If he noted the phenomenon, he gave no sign, simply assenting with his
customary equanimity. During the luncheon she chattered vaguely. She was
in two minds about calling off the projected walk. As he set aside his
half-emptied cup of coffee--not even tactful enough to finish it out of
compliment to her brew--Banneker said:

"Up beyond the turn yonder the right-of-way crosses an arroyo. I want to
take a look at it. We can cut through the woods to get there. Are you
good for three miles?"

"For a hundred!" cried Io.

The wine of life was potent in her veins.




CHAPTER VIII


Before the walk was over, Io knew Banneker as she had never before, in
her surrounded and restricted life, known any man; the character and
evolution and essence of him. Yet with all his frankness, the rare,
simple, and generous outgiving of a naturally rather silent nature
yielding itself to an unrecognized but overmastering influence, he
retained the charm of inner mystery. Her sudden understanding of him
still did not enable her to place him in any category of life as she
knew it to be arranged.

The revelation had come about through her description of her encounter
with the queer and attentive bird of the desert.

"Oh," said Banneker. "You've been interviewing a cactus owl."

"Did he unwind his neck carefully and privately after I had gone?"

"No," returned Banneker gravely. "He just jumped in the air and his body
spun around until it got back to its original relation."

"How truly fascinating! Have you seen him do it?"

"Not actually seen. But often in the evenings I've heard them buzzing as
they unspin the day's wind-up. During the day, you see, they make as
many as ten or fifteen revolutions until their eyes bung out. Reversing
makes them very dizzy, and if you are around when they're doing it, you
can often pick them up off the sand."

"And doesn't it ever make _you_ dizzy? All this local lore, I mean, that
you carry around in your head?"

"It isn't much of a strain to a practiced intellect," he deprecated. "If
you're interested in natural history, there's the Side-hill Wampus--"

"Yes; I know. I've been West before, thank you! Pardon my curiosity, but
are all you creatures of the desert queer and inexplicable?"

"Not me," he returned promptly if ungrammatically, "if you're looking in
my direction."

"I'll admit that I find you as interesting as the owl--almost. And quite
as hard to understand."

"Nobody ever called me queer; not to my face."

"But you are, you know. You oughtn't to be here at all."

"Where ought I to be?"

"How can I answer that riddle without knowing where you have been? Are
you Ulysses--"

"'Knowing cities and the hearts of men,'" he answered, quick to catch
the reference. "No; not the cities, certainly, and very little of the
men."

"There, you see!" she exclaimed plaintively. "You're up on a classical
reference like a college man. No; not like the college men I know,
either. They are too immersed in their football and rowing and too
afraid to be thought high-brow, to confess to knowing anything about
Ulysses. What was your college?"

"This," he said, sweeping a hand around the curve of the horizon.

"And in any one else," she retorted, "that would be priggish as well as
disingenuous."

"I suppose I know what you mean. Out here, when a man doesn't explain
himself, they think it's for some good reason of his own, or bad reason,
more likely. In either case, they don't ask questions."

"I really beg your pardon, Mr. Banneker!"

"No; that isn't what I meant at all. If you're interested, I'd like to
have you know about me. It isn't much, though."

"You'll think me prying," she objected.

"I think you a sort of friend of a day, who is going away very soon
leaving pleasant memories," he answered, smiling. "A butterfly visit.
I'm not much given to talking, but if you'd like it--"

"Of course I should like it."

So he sketched for her his history. His mother he barely remembered;
"dark, and quite beautiful, I believe, though that might be only a
child's vision; my father rarely spoke of her, but I think all the
emotional side of his life was buried with her." The father, an American
of Danish ancestry, had been ousted from the chair of Sociology in old,
conservative Havenden College, as the logical result of his writings
which, because they shrewdly and clearly pointed out certain ulcerous
spots in the economic and social system, were denounced as "radical" by
a Board of Trustees honestly devoted to Business Ideals. Having a small
income of his own, the ex-Professor decided upon a life of investigatory
vagrancy, with special reference to studies, at first hand, of the
voluntarily unemployed. Not knowing what else to do with the only child
of his marriage, he took the boy along. Contemptuous of, rather than
embittered against, an academic system which had dispensed with his
services because it was afraid of the light--"When you cast a light,
they see only the resultant shadows," was one of his sayings which had
remained with Banneker--he had resolved to educate the child himself.

Their life was spent frugally in cities where they haunted libraries,
or, sumptuously, upon the open road where a modest supply of ready cash
goes a long way. Young Banneker's education, after the routine
foundation, was curiously heterodox, but he came through it with his
intellectual digestion unimpaired and his mental appetite avid. By
example he had the competent self-respect and unmistakable bearing of a
gentleman, and by careful precept the speech of a liberally educated
man. When he was seventeen, his father died of a twenty-four hours'
pneumonia, leaving the son not so much stricken as bewildered, for their
relations had been comradely rather than affectionate. For a time it was
a question whether the youngster, drifting from casual job to casual
job, would not degenerate into a veritable hobo, for he had drunk deep
of the charm of the untrammeled and limitless road. Want touched him,
but lightly; for he was naturally frugal and hardy. He got a railroad
job by good luck, and it was not until he had worked himself into a
permanency that his father's lawyers found and notified him of the
possession of a small income, one hundred dollars per annum of which,
they informed him, was to be expended by them upon such books as they
thought suitable to his circumstances, upon information provided by the
deceased, the remainder to be at his disposal.

Though quite unauthorized to proffer advice, as they honorably stated,
they opined that the heir's wisest course would be to prepare himself at
once for college, the income being sufficient to take him through, with
care--and they were, his Very Truly, Cobb & Morse.

Banneker had not the smallest idea of cooping up his mind in a college.
As to future occupation, his father had said nothing that was definite.
His thesis was that observation and thought concerning men and their
activities, pointed and directed by intimate touch with what others had
observed and set down--that is, through books--was the gist of life. Any
job which gave opportunity or leisure for this was good enough.
Livelihood was but a garment, at most; life was the body beneath.
Furthermore, young Banneker would find, so his senior had assured him,
that he possessed an open sesame to the minds of the really intelligent
wheresoever he might encounter them, in the form of a jewel which he
must keep sedulously untarnished and bright. What was that? asked the
boy. His speech and bearing of a cultivated man.

Young Banneker found that it was almost miraculously true. Wherever he
went, he established contacts with people who interested him and whom he
interested: here a brilliant, doubting, perturbed clergyman, slowly
dying of tuberculosis in the desert; there a famous geologist from
Washington who, after a night of amazing talk with the young prodigy
while awaiting a train, took him along on a mountain exploration; again
an artist and his wife who were painting the arid and colorful glories
of the waste places. From these and others he got much; but not
friendship or permanent associations. He did not want them. He was
essentially, though unconsciously, a lone spirit; so his listener
gathered. Advancement could have been his in the line of work which had
by chance adopted him; but he preferred small, out-of-the-way stations,
where he could be with his books and have room to breathe. So here he
was at Manzanita. That was all there was to it. Nothing very mysterious
or remarkable about it, was there?

Io smiled in return. "What is your name?" she asked.

"Errol. But every one calls me Ban."

"Haven't you ever told this to any one before?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Why should I?"

"I don't know really," hesitated the girl, "except that it seems almost
inhuman to keep one's self so shut off."

"It's nobody else's business."

"Yet you've told it to me. That's very charming of you."

"You said you'd be interested."

"So I am. It's an extraordinary life, though you don't seem to think
so."

"But I don't want to be extraordinary."

"Of course you do," she refuted promptly. "To be ordinary is--is--well,
it's like being a dust-colored beetle." She looked at him queerly.
"Doesn't Miss Van Arsdale know all this?"

"I don't see how she could. I've never told her."

"And she's never asked you anything?"

"Not a word. I don't quite see Miss Camilla asking any one questions
about themselves. Did she ask you?"

The girl's color deepened almost imperceptibly. "You're right," she
said. "There's a standard of breeding that we up-to-date people don't
attain. But I'm at least intelligent enough to recognize it. You reckon
her as a friend, don't you?"

"Why, yes; I suppose so."

"Do you suppose you'd ever come to reckon me as one?" she asked, half
bantering, half wistful.

"There won't be time. You're running away."

"Perhaps I might write you. I think I'd like to."

"Would you?" he murmured. "Why?"

"You ought to be greatly flattered," she reproved him. "Instead you
shoot a 'why' at me. Well; because you've got something I haven't got.
And when I find anything new like that, I always try to get some of it
for myself."

"I don't know what it could be, but--"

"Call it your philosophy of life. Your contentment. Or is it only
detachment? That can't last, you know."

He turned to her, vaguely disturbed as by a threat. "Why not?"

"You're too--well, distinctive. You're too rare and beautiful a
specimen. You'll be grabbed." She laughed softly.

"Who'll grab me?"

"How should I know? Life, probably. Grab you and dry you up and put you
in a case like the rest of us."

"Perhaps that's why I like to stay out here. At least I can be myself."

"Is that your fondest ambition?"

However much he may have been startled by the swift stab, he gave no
sign of hurt in his reply.

"Call it the line of least resistance. In any case, I shouldn't like to
be grabbed and dried up."

"Most of us are grabbed and catalogued from our birth, and eventually
dried up and set in our proper places."

"Not you, certainly."

"Because you haven't seen me in my shell. That's where I mostly live.
I've broken out for a time."

"Don't you like it outside, Butterfly?" he queried with a hint of
playful caress in his voice.

"I like that name for myself," she returned quickly. "Though a butterfly
couldn't return to its chrysalis, no matter how much it wanted to, could
it? But you may call me that, since we're to be friends."

"Then you do like it outside your shell."

"It's exhilarating. But I suppose I should find it too rough for my
highly sensitized skin in the long run.... Are you going to write to me
if I write to you?"

"What about? That Number Six came in making bad steam, and that a
west-bound freight, running extra, was held up on the siding at Marchand
for half a day?"

"Is that all you have to write about?"

Banneker bethought himself of the very private dossier in his office.
"No; it isn't."

"You _could_ write in a way all your own. Have you ever written anything
for publication?"

"No. That is--well--I don't really know." He told her about Gardner and
the description of the wreck.

"How did you happen to do that?" she asked curiously.

"Oh, I write a lot of things and put them away and forget them."

"Show me," she wheedled. "I'd love to see them."

He shook his head. "They wouldn't interest you." The words were those of
an excuse. But in the tone was finality.

"I don't think you're very responsive," she complained. "I'm awfully
interested in you and your affairs, and you won't play back the least
bit."

They walked on in silence for a space. He had, she reflected, a most
disconcerting trick of silence, of ignoring quite without embarrassment
leads, which in her code imperatively called for return. Annoyance
stirred within her, and the eternal feline which is a component part of
the eternal feminine asserted itself.

"Perhaps," she suggested, "you are afraid of me."

"No; I'm not."

"By that you mean 'Why should I be'?"

"Something of the sort."

"Didn't Miss Van Arsdale warn you against me?"

"How did you know that?" he asked, staring.

"A solemn warning not to fall in love with me?" pursued the girl calmly.

He stopped short. "She told you that she had said something to me?"

"Don't be idiotic! Of course she didn't."

"Then how did you know?" he persisted.

"How does one snake know what another snake will do?" she retorted.
"Being of the same--"

"Wait a moment. I don't like that word 'snake' in connection with Miss
Van Arsdale."

"Though you're willing to accept it as applying to me. I believe you are
trying to quarrel with me," accused Io. "I only meant that, being a
woman, I can make a guess at what another woman would do in any given
conditions. And she did it!" she concluded in triumph.

"No; she didn't. Not in so many words. But you're very clever."

"Say, rather, that _you_ are very stupid," was the disdainful retort.
"So you're not going to fall in love with me?"

"Of course not," answered Banneker in the most cheerfully commonplace of
tones.

Once embarked upon this primrose path, which is always an imperceptible
but easy down-slope, Io went farther than she had intended. "Why not?"
she challenged.

"Brass buttons," said Banneker concisely.

She flushed angrily. "You _can_ be rather a beast, can't you!"

"A beast? Just for reminding you that the Atkinson and St. Philip
station-agent at Manzanita does not include in his official duties that
of presuming to fall in love with chance passengers who happen to be
more or less in his care."

"Very proper and official! Now," added the girl in a different manner,
"let's stop talking nonsense, and do you tell me one thing honestly. Do
you feel that it would be presumption?"

"To fall in love with you?"

"Leave that part of it out; I put my question stupidly. I'm really
curious to know whether you feel any--any difference between your
station and mine."

"Do you?"

"Yes; I do," she answered honestly, "when I think of it. But you make it
very hard for me to remember it when I'm with you."

"Well, I don't," he said. "I suppose I'm a socialist in all matters of
that kind. Not that I've ever given much thought to them. You don't have
to out here."

"No; you wouldn't. I don't know that _you_ would have to anywhere....
Are we almost home?"

"Three minutes' more walking. Tired?"

"Not a bit. You know," she added, "I really would like it if you'd write
me once in a while. There's something here I'd like to keep a hold on.
It's tonic. I'll _make_ you write me." She flashed a smile at him.

"How?"

"By sending you books. You'll have to acknowledge them."

"No. I couldn't take them. I'd have to send them back."

"You wouldn't let me send you a book or two just as a friendly memento?"
she cried, incredulous.

"I don't take anything from anybody," he retorted doggedly.

"Ah; that's small-minded," she accused. "That's ungenerous. I wouldn't
think that of you."

He strode along in moody thought for a few paces. Presently he turned to
her a rigid face. "If you had ever had to accept food to keep you alive,
you'd understand."

For a moment she was shocked and sorry. Then her tact asserted itself.
"But I have," she said readily, "all my life. Most of us do."

The hard muscles around his mouth relaxed. "You remind me," he said,
"that I'm not as real a socialist as I thought. Nevertheless, that
rankles in my memory. When I got my first job, I swore I'd never accept
anything from anybody again. One of the passengers on your train tried
to tip me a hundred dollars."

"He must have been a fool," said Io scornfully.

Banneker held open the station-door for her. "I've got to send a wire or
two," said he. "Take a look at this. It may give some news about general
railroad conditions." He handed her the newspaper which had arrived that
morning.

When he came out again, the station was empty.

Io was gone. So was the newspaper.




CHAPTER IX


Deep in work at her desk, Camilla Van Arsdale noted, with the outer
tentacles of her mind, slow footsteps outside and a stir of air that
told of the door being opened. Without lifting her head she called:

"You'll find towels and a bathrobe in the passageway."

There was no reply. Miss Van Arsdale twisted in her chair, gave one
look, rose and strode to the threshold where Io Welland stood rigid and
still.

"What is it?" she demanded sharply.

The girl's hands gripped a folded newspaper. She lifted it as if for
Miss Van Arsdale's acceptance, then let it fall to the floor. Her throat
worked, struggling for utterance, as it might be against the pressure of
invisible fingers.

"The beast! Oh, the beast!" she whispered.

The older woman threw an arm over her shoulders and led her to the big
chair before the fireplace. Io let herself be thrust into it, stiff and
unyielding as a manikin. Any other woman but Camilla Van Arsdale would
have asked questions. She went more directly to the point. Picking up
the newspaper she opened it. Halfway across an inside page ran the
explanation of Io's collapse.

BRITON'S BEAUTIFUL FIANC;E LOST

read the caption, in the glaring vulgarity of extra-heavy type, and
below;

_Ducal Heir Offers Private Reward to Dinner Party of Friends_

After an estimating look at the girl, who sat quite still with hot,
blurred eyes, Miss Van Arsdale carefully read the article through.

"Here is advertising enough to satisfy the greediest appetite for
print," she remarked grimly.

"He's on one of his brutal drunks." The words seemed to grit in the
girl's throat. "I wish he were dead! Oh, I wish he were dead!"

Miss Van Arsdale laid hold on her shoulders and shook her hard. "Listen
to me, Irene Welland. You're on the way to hysterics or some such
foolishness. I won't have it! Do you understand? Are you listening to
me?"

"I'm listening. But it won't make any difference what you say."

"Look at me. Don't stare into nothingness that way. Have you read this?"

"Enough of it. It ends everything."

"I should hope so, indeed. My dear!" The woman's voice changed and
softened. "You haven't found that you cared for him, after all, more
than you thought? It isn't that?"

"No; it isn't that. It's the beastliness of the whole thing. It's the
disgrace."

Miss Van Arsdale turned to the paper again.

"Your name isn't given."

"It might as well be. As soon as it gets back to New York, every one
will know."

"If I read correctly between the lines of this scurrilous thing, Mr.
Holmesley gave what was to have been his bachelor dinner, took too much
to drink, and suggested that every man there go on a separate search for
the lost bride offering two thousand dollars reward for the one who
found her. Apparently it was to have been quite private, but it leaked
out. There's a hint that he had been drinking heavily for some days."

"My fault," declared Io feverishly. "He told me once that if ever I
played anything but fair with him, he'd go to the devil the quickest way
he could."

"Then he's a coward," pronounced Miss Van Arsdale vigorously.

"What am I? I didn't play fair with him. I practically jilted him
without even letting him know why."

Miss Van Arsdale frowned. "Didn't you send him word?"

"Yes. I telegraphed him. I told him I'd write and explain. I haven't
written. How could I explain? What was there to say? But I ought to have
said something. Oh, Miss Van Arsdale, why didn't I write!"

"But you did intend to go on and face him and have it out. You told me
that."

A faint tinge of color relieved the white rigidity of Io's face. "Yes,"
she agreed. "I did mean it. Now it's too late and I'm disgraced."

"Don't be melodramatic. And don't waste yourself in self-pity. To-morrow
you'll see things clearer, after you've slept."

"Sleep? I couldn't." She pressed both hands to her temples, lifting
tragic and lustrous eyes to her companion. "I think my head is going to
burst from trying not to think."

After some hesitancy Miss Van Arsdale went to a wall-cabinet, took out a
phial, shook into her hand two little pellets, and returned the phial,
carefully locking the cabinet upon it.

"Take a hot bath," she directed. "Then I'm going to give you just a
little to eat. And then these." She held out the drug.

Io acquiesced dully.

Early in the morning, before the first forelight of dawn had started the
birds to prophetic chirpings, the recluse heard light movements in the
outer room. Throwing on a robe she went in to investigate. On the
bearskin before the flickering fire sat Io, an apparition of soft
curves.

"D--d--don't make a light," she whimpered. "I've been crying."

"That's good. The best thing you could do."

"I want to go home," wailed Io.

"That's good, too. Though perhaps you'd better wait a little. Why, in
particular do you want to go home?"

"I w-w-w-want to m-m-marry Delavan Eyre."

A quiver of humor trembled about the corners of Camilla Van Arsdale's
mouth. "Echoes of remorse," she commented.

"No. It isn't remorse. I want to feel safe, secure. I'm afraid of
things. I want to go to-morrow. Tell Mr. Banneker he must arrange it for
me."

"We'll see. Now you go back to bed and sleep."

"I'd rather sleep here," said Io. "The fire is so friendly." She curled
herself into a little soft ball.

Her hostess threw a coverlet over her and returned to her own room.

When light broke, there was no question of Io's going that day, even had
accommodations been available. A clogging lassitude had descended upon
her, the reaction of cumulative nervous stress, anesthetizing her will,
her desires, her very limbs. She was purposeless, ambitionless, except
to lie and rest and seek for some resolution of peace out of the tangled
web wherein her own willfulness had involved her.

"The best possible thing," said Camilla Van Arsdale. "I'll write your
people that you are staying on for a visit."

"Yes; they won't mind. They're used to my vagaries. It's awfully good of
you."

At noon came Banneker to see Miss Welland. Instead he found a curiously
reticent Miss Van Arsdale. Miss Welland was not feeling well and could
not be seen.

"Not her head again, is it?" asked Banneker, alarmed.

"More nerves, though the head injury probably contributed."

"Oughtn't I to get a doctor?"

"No. All that she needs is rest."

"She left the station yesterday without a word."

"Yes," replied the non-committal Miss Van Arsdale.

"I came over to tell her that there isn't a thing to be had going west.
Not even an upper. There was an east-bound in this morning. But the
schedule isn't even a skeleton yet."

"Probably she won't be going for several days yet," said Miss Van
Arsdale, and was by no means reassured by the unconscious brightness
which illumined Banneker's face. "When she goes it will be east. She's
changed her plans."

"Give me as much notice as you can and I'll do my best for her."

The other nodded. "Did you get any newspapers by the train?" she
inquired.

"Yes; there was a mail in. I had a letter, too," he added after a little
hesitation, due to the fact that he had intended telling Miss Welland
about that letter first. Thus do confidences, once begun, inspire even
the self-contained to further confidences.

"You know there was a reporter up from Angelica City writing up the
wreck."

"Yes."

"Gardner, his name is. A nice sort of fellow. I showed him some nonsense
that I wrote about the wreck."

"You? What kind of nonsense?"

"Oh, just how it struck me, and the queer things people said and did. He
took it with him. Said it might give him some ideas."

"One might suppose it would. Did it?"

"Why, he didn't use it. Not that way. He sent it to the New York Sphere
for what he calls a 'Sunday special,' and what do you think! They
accepted it. He had a wire."

"As Gardner's?"

"Oh, no. As the impressions of an eye-witness. What's more, they'll pay
for it and he's to send me the check."

"Then, in spite of a casual way of handling other people's ideas, Mr.
Gardner apparently means to be honest."

"It's more than square of him. I gave him the stuff to use as he wanted
to. He could just as well have collected for it. Probably he touched it
up, anyway."

"The Goths and Vandals usually did 'touch up' whatever they acquired, I
believe. Hasn't he sent you a copy?"

"He's going to send it. Or bring it."

"Bring it? What should attract him to Manzanita again?"

"Something mysterious. He says that there's a big sensational story
following on the wreck that he's got a clue to; a tip, he calls it."

"That's strange. Where did this tip come from? Did he say?"

Miss Van Arsdale frowned.

"New York, I think. He spoke of its being a special job for The Sphere."

"Are you going to help him?"

"If I can. He's been white to me."

"But this isn't white, if it's what I suspect. It's yellow. One of their
yellow sensations. The Sphere goes in for that sort of thing."

Miss Van Arsdale became silent and thoughtful.

"Of course, if it's something to do with the railroad I'd have to be
careful. I can't give away the company's affairs."

"I don't think it is." Miss Van Arsdale's troubled eyes strayed toward
the inner room.

Following them, Banneker's lighted up with a flash of astonished
comprehension.

"You don't think--" he began.

His friend nodded assent.

"Why should the newspapers be after her?"

"She is associated with a set that is always in the lime-light,"
explained Miss Van Arsdale, lowering her voice to a cautious pitch. "It
makes its own lime-light. Anything that they do is material for the
papers."

"Yes; but what has she done?"

"Disappeared."

"Not at all. She sent back messages. So there can't be any mystery about
it."

"But there might be what the howling headlines call 'romance.' In fact,
there is, if they happen to have found out about it. And this looks very
much as if they had. Ban, are you going to tell your reporter friend
about Miss Welland?"

Banneker smiled gently, indulgently. "Do you think it likely?"

"No; I don't. But I want you to understand the importance of not
betraying her in any way. Reporters are shrewd. And it might be quite
serious for her to know that she was being followed and hounded now. She
has had a shock."

"The bump on the head, you mean?"

"Worse than that. I think I'd better tell you since we are all in this
thing together."

Briefly she outlined the abortive adventure that had brought Io west,
and its ugly outcome.

"Publicity is the one thing we must protect her from," declared Miss Van
Arsdale.

"Yes; that's clear enough."

"What shall you tell this Gardner man?"

"Nothing that he wants to know."

"You'll try to fool him?"

"I'm an awfully poor liar, Miss Camilla," replied the agent with his
disarming smile. "I don't like the game and I'm no good at it. But I can
everlastingly hold my tongue."

"Then he'll suspect something and go nosing about the village making
inquiries."

"Let him. Who can tell him anything? Who's even seen her except you and
me?"

"True enough. Nobody is going to see her for some days yet if I can help
it. Not even you, Ban."

"Is she as bad as that?" he asked anxiously.

"She won't be any the better for seeing people," replied Miss Van
Arsdale firmly, and with that the caller was forced to be content as he
went back to his own place.

The morning train of the nineteenth, which should have been the noon
train of the eighteenth, deposited upon the platform Gardner of the
Angelica City Herald, and a suitcase. The thin and bespectacled reporter
shook hands with Banneker.

"Well, Mr. Man," he observed. "You've made a hit with that story of
yours even before it's got into print."

"Did you bring me a copy of the paper?"

Gardner grinned. "You seem to think Sunday specials are set up and
printed overnight. Wait a couple of weeks."

"But they're going to publish it?"

"Surest thing you know. They've wired me to know who you are and what
and why."

"Why what?"

"Oh, I dunno. Why a fellow who can do that sort of thing hasn't done it
before or doesn't do it some more, I suppose. If you should ever want a
job in the newspaper game, that story would be pretty much enough to get
it for you."

"I wouldn't mind getting a little local correspondence to do," announced
Banneker modestly.

"So you intimated before. Well, I can give you some practice right now.
I'm on a blind trail that goes up in the air somewhere around here. Do
you remember, we compared lists on the wreck?"

"Yes."

"Have you got any addition to your list since?"

"No," replied Banneker. "Have you?" he added.

"Not by name. But the tip is that there was a prominent New York society
girl, one of the Four Hundred lot, on the train, and that she's
vanished."

"All the bodies were accounted for," said the agent.

"They don't think she's dead. They think she's run away."

"Run away?" repeated Banneker with an impassive face.

"Whether the man was with her on the train or whether she was to join
him on the coast isn't known. That's the worst of these society tips,"
pursued the reporter discontentedly. "They're always vague, and usually
wrong. This one isn't even certain about who the girl is. But they think
it's Stella Wrightington," he concluded in the manner of one who has
imparted portentous tidings.

"Who's she?" said Banneker.

"Good Lord! Don't you ever read the news?" cried the disgusted
journalist. "Why, she's had her picture published more times than a
movie queen. She's the youngest daughter of Cyrus Wrightington, the
multi-millionaire philanthropist. Now did you see anything of that kind
on the train?"

"What does she look like?" asked the cautious Banneker.

"She looks like a million dollars!" declared the other with enthusiasm.
"She's a killer! She's tall and blonde and a great athlete: baby-blue
eyes and general rosebud effect."

"Nothing of that sort on the train, so far as I saw," said the agent.

"Did you see any couple that looked lovey-dovey?"

"No."

"Then, there's another tip that connects her up with Carter Holmesley.
Know about him?"

"I've seen his name."

"He's been on a hell of a high-class drunk, all up and down the coast,
for the last week or so. Spilled some funny talk at a dinner, that got
into print. But he put up such a heavy bluff of libel, afterward, that
the papers shied off. Just the same, I believe they had it right, and
that there was to have been a wedding-party on. Find the girl: that's
the stunt now."

"I don't think you're likely to find her around here."

"Maybe not. But there's something. Holmesley has beaten it for the Far
East. Sailed yesterday. But the story is still in this country, if the
lady can be rounded up.... Well, I'm going to the village to make
inquiries. Want to put me up again for the night if there's no train
back?"

"Sure thing! There isn't likely to be, either."

Banneker felt greatly relieved at the easy turn given to the inquiry by
the distorted tip. True, Gardner might, on his return, enter upon some
more embarrassing line of inquiry; in which case the agent decided to
take refuge in silence. But the reporter, when he came back late in the
evening disheartened and disgusted with the fallibility of long-distance
tips, declared himself sick of the whole business.

"Let's talk about something else," he said, having lighted his pipe.
"What else have you written besides the wreck stuff?"

"Nothing," said Banneker.

"Come off! That thing was never a first attempt."

"Well, nothing except random things for my own amusement."

"Pass 'em over."

Banneker shook his head. "No; I've never shown them to anybody."

"Oh, all right. If you're shy about it," responded the reporter
good-humoredly. "But you must have thought of writing as a profession."

"Vaguely, some day."

"You don't talk much like a country station-agent. And you don't act
like one. And, judging from this room"--he looked about at the
well-filled book-shelves--"you don't look like one. Quite a library.
Harvey Wheelwright! Lord! I might have known. Great stuff, isn't it?"

"Do you think so?"

"Do I think so! I think it's the damndest spew that ever got into print.
But it sells; millions. It's the piety touch does it. The worst of it is
that Wheelwright is a thoroughly decent chap and not onto himself a bit.
Thinks he's a grand little booster for righteousness, sweetness and
light, and all that. I had to interview him once. Oh, if I could just
have written about him and his stuff as it really is!"

"Why didn't you?"

"Why, he's a popular literary hero out our way, and the biggest
advertised author in the game. I'd look fine to the business office,
knocking their fat graft, wouldn't I!"

"I don't believe I understand."

"No; you wouldn't. Never mind. You will if you ever get into the game.
Hello! This is something different again. 'The Undying Voices.' Do you
go in for poetry?"

"I like to read it once in a while."

"Good man!" Gardner took down the book, which opened in his hand. He
glanced into it, then turned an inquiring and faintly quizzical look
upon Banneker. "So Rossetti is one of the voices that sings to you. He
sang to me when I was younger and more romantic. Heavens! he can sing,
can't he! And you've picked one of his finest for your floral
decoration." He intoned slowly and effectively:

"Ah, who shall dare to search in what sad maze Thenceforth their
incommunicable ways Follow the desultory feet of Death?"

Banneker took the book from him. Upon the sonnet a crushed bloom of the
sage had left its spiced and fragrant stain. How came it there? Through
but one possible agency of which Banneker could think. Io Welland!

After the reporter had left him, Banneker bore the volume to his room
and read the sonnet again and again, devout and absorbed, a seeker for
the oracle.




CHAPTER X


"Wouldn't you like to know when I'm going home?"

Io Welland looked up from beneath her dark lashes at her hostess with a
mixture of mischief and deprecation.

"No," said Miss Van Arsdale quietly.

"Ah? Well, I would. Here it is two full weeks since I settled down on
you. Why don't you evict me?"

Miss Van Arsdale smiled. The girl continued:

"Why don't I evict myself? I'm quite well and sane again--at least I
think so--thanks to you. Very well, then, Io; why don't you go home?"

"Instinct of self-preservation," suggested the other. "You're better off
here until your strength is quite restored, aren't you?"

The girl propped her chin in her hand and turned upon her companion a
speculative regard. "Camilla Van Arsdale, you don't really like me," she
asserted.

"Liking is such an undefined attitude," replied the other,
unembarrassed.

"You find me diverting," defined Io. "But you resent me, don't you?"

"That's rather acute in you. I don't like your standards nor those of
your set."

"I've abandoned them."

"You'll resume them as soon as you get back."

"Shall I ever get back?" The girl moved to the door. Her figure swayed
forward yieldingly as if she would give herself into the keeping of the
sun-drenched, pine-soaked air. "Enchantment!" she murmured.

"It is a healing place," said the habitant of it, low, as if to herself.

A sudden and beautiful pity softened and sobered Io's face. "Miss Van
Arsdale," said she with quiet sincerity; "if there should ever come a
time when I can do you a service in word or deed, I would come from the
other side of the world to do it."

"That is a kindly, but rather exaggerated gratitude."

"It isn't gratitude. It's loyalty. Whatever you have done, I believe you
were right. And, right or wrong, I--I am on your side. But I wonder why
you have been so good to me. Was it a sort of class feeling?"

"Sex feeling would be nearer it," replied the other. "There is something
instinctive which makes women who are alone stand by each other."

Io nodded. "I suppose so. Though I've never felt it, or the need of it
before this. Well, I had to speak before I left, and I suppose I must go
on soon."

"I shall miss you," said the hostess, and added, smiling, "as one misses
a stimulant. Stay through the rest of the month, anyway."

"I'd like to," answered Io gratefully. "I've written Delavan that I'm
coming back--and now I'm quite dreading it. Do you suppose there ever
yet was a woman with understanding of herself?"

"Not unless she was a very dull and stupid woman with little to
understand," smiled Miss Van Arsdale. "What are you doing to-day?"

"Riding down to lunch with your paragon of a station-agent."

Miss Van Arsdale shook her head dubiously. "I'm afraid he'll miss his
daily stimulant after you've gone. It has been daily, hasn't it?"

"I suppose it has, just about," admitted the girl. "The stimulus hasn't
been all on one side, I assure you. What a mind to be buried here in the
desert! And what an annoying spirit of contentment! It's that that
puzzles me. Sometimes it enrages me."

"Are you going to spoil what you cannot replace?" The retort was swift,
almost fierce.

"Surely, you won't blame me if he looks beyond this horizon," protested
Io. "Life is sure to reach out in one form or another and seize on him.
I told him so."

"Yes," breathed the other. "You would."

"What were you intending to do with him?"

There was a hint of challenge in the slight emphasis given to the query.

"I? Nothing. He is under no obligation to me."

"There you and he differ. He regards you as an infallible mentor." A
twinkle of malice crept into the slumbrous eyes. "Why do you let him
wear made-up bow ties?" demanded Io.

"What does it matter?"

"Out here, nothing. But elsewhere--well, it does define a man, doesn't
it?"

"Undoubtedly. I've never gone into it with him."

"I wonder if I could guess why."

"Very likely. You seem preternaturally acute in these matters."

"Is it because the Sears-Roebuck mail-order double-bow knot in polka-dot
pattern stands as a sign of pristine innocence?"

In spite of herself Miss Van Arsdale laughed. "Something of that sort."

Io's soft lips straightened. "It's rotten bad form. Why shouldn't he be
right? It's so easy. Just a hint--"

"From you?"

"From either of us. Yes; from me, if you like."

"It's quite an intimate interest, isn't it?"

"'But never can battle of men compare With merciless feminine fray'"--
quoted Io pensively.

"Kipling is a sophomore about women," retorted Miss Van Arsdale. "We're
not going to quarrel over Errol Banneker. The odds are too unfair."

"Unfair?" queried Io, with a delicate lift of brow.

"Don't misunderstand me. I know that whatever you do will be within the
rules of the game. That's the touchstone of honor of your kind."

"Isn't it good enough? It ought to be, for it's about the only one most
of us have." Io laughed. "We're becoming very serious. May I take the
pony?"

"Yes. Will you be back for supper?"

"Of course. Shall I bring the paragon?"

"If you wish."

Outside the gaunt box of the station, Io, from the saddle sent forth her
resonant, young call:

"Oh, Ban!"

"'Tis the voice of the Butterfly; hear her declare, 'I've come down to
the earth; I am tired of the air'"

chanted Banneker's voice in cheerful paraphrase. "Light and preen your
wings, Butterfly."

Their tone was that of comrades without a shade of anything deeper.

"Busy?" asked Io.

"Just now. Give me another five minutes."

"I'll go to the hammock."

One lone alamo tree, an earnest of spring water amongst the dry-sand
growth of the cactus, flaunted its bright verdency a few rods back of
the station, and in its shade Banneker had swung a hammock for Io.
Hitching her pony and unfastening her hat, the girl stretched herself
luxuriously in the folds. A slow wind, spice-laden with the faint, crisp
fragrancies of the desert, swung her to a sweet rhythm. She closed her
eyes happily ... and when she opened them, Banneker was standing over
her, smiling.

"Don't speak to me," she murmured; "I want to believe that this will
last forever."

Silent and acquiescent, he seated himself in a camp-chair close by. She
stretched a hand to him, closing her eyes again.

"Swing me," she ordered.

He aided the wind to give a wider sweep to the hammock. Io stirred
restlessly.

"You've broken the spell," she accused softly. "Weave me another one."

"What shall it be?" He bent over the armful of books which he had
brought out.

"You choose this time."

"I wonder," he mused, regarding her consideringly.

"Ah, you may well wonder! I'm in a very special mood to-day."

"When aren't you, Butterfly?" he laughed.

"Beware that you don't spoil it. Choose well, or forever after hold your
peace."

He lifted the well-worn and well-loved volume of poetry. It parted in
his hand to the Rossetti sonnet. He began to read at the lines:

"When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze After their life sailed by,
and hold their breath."

Io opened her eyes again.

"Why did you select that thing?"

"Why did you mark it?"

"Did I mark it?"

"Certainly, I'm not responsible for the sage-blossom between the pages."

"Ah, the sage! That's for wisdom," she paraphrased lightly.

"Do you think Rossetti so wise a preceptor?"

"It isn't often that he preaches. When he does, as in that sonnet--well,
the inspiration may be a little heavy, but he does have something to
say."

"Then it's the more evident that you marked it for some special reason."

"What supernatural insight," she mocked. "Can you read your name between
the lines?"

"What is it that you want me to do?"

"You mean to ask what it is that Mr. Rossetti wants you to do. I didn't
write the sonnet, you know."

"You didn't fashion the arrow, but you aimed it."

"Am I a good marksman?"

"I suppose you mean that I'm wasting my time here."

"Surely not!" she gibed. "Forming a link of transcontinental traffic.
Helping to put a girdle 'round the earth in eighty days--or is it forty
now?--enlightening the traveling public about the three-twenty-four
train; dispensing time-tables and other precious mediums of education--"

"I'm happy here," he said doggedly.

"Are you going to be, always?"

His face darkened with doubt. "Why shouldn't I be?" he argued. "I've got
everything I need. Some day I thought I might write."

"What about?" The question came sharp and quick.

He looked vaguely around the horizon.

"Oh, no, Ban!" she said. "Not this. You've got to know something besides
cactuses and owls to write, these days. You've got to know men. And
women," she added, in a curious tone, with a suspicion of effort, even
of jealousy in it.

"I've never cared much for people," he said.

"It's an acquired taste, I suppose for some of us. There's something
else." She came slowly to a sitting posture and fixed her questioning,
baffling eyes on his. "Ban, don't you want to make a success in life?"

For a moment he did not answer. When he spoke, it was with apparent
irrelevance to what she had said. "Once I went to a revival. A reformed
tough was running it. About every three minutes he'd thrust out his
hands and grab at the air and say, 'Oh, brothers; don't you yearn for
Jesus?'"

"What has that to do with it?" questioned Io, surprised and impatient.

"Only that, somehow, the way you said 'success in life' made me think of
him and his 'yearn for Jesus.'"

"Errol Banneker," said Io, amused in spite of her annoyance, "you are
possessed of a familiar devil who betrays other people's inner thoughts
to you. Success _is_ a species of religion to me, I suppose."

"And you are making converts, like all true enthusiasts. Tell, tell me.
What kind of success?"

"Oh, power. Money. Position. Being somebody."

"I'm somebody here all right. I'm the station-agent of the Atkinson and
St. Philip Railroad Company."

"Now you're trying to provoke me."

"No. But to get success you've got to want it, haven't you?" he asked
more earnestly. "To want it with all your strength."

"Of course. Every man ought to."

"I'm not so sure," he objected. "There's a kind of virtue in staying
put, isn't there?"

She made a little gesture of impatience.

"I'll give you a return for your sonnet," he pursued, and repeated from
memory:

"What else is Wisdom? What of man's endeavor Or God's high grace, so
lovely and so great? To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate. And shall not Loveliness be loved
forever?"

"I don't know it. It's beautiful. What is it?"

"Gilbert Murray's translation of 'The Bacchae.' My legal mentors had a
lapse of dry-as-dustness and sent it to me."

"'To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait,'" murmured the girl.
"That is what I've been doing here. How good it is! But not for you,"
she added, her tone changing from dreamy to practical. "Ban, I suspect
there's too much poetry in your cosmos."

"Very probably. Poetry isn't success, is it?"

Her face grew eager. "It might be. The very highest. But you've got to
make yourself known and felt among people."

"Do you think I could? And how does one get that kind of desire?" he
asked lazily.

"How? I've known men to do it for love; and I've known them to do it for
hate; and I've known them to do it for money. Yes; and there's another
cause."

"What is it?"

"Restlessness."

"That's ambition with its nerves gone bad, isn't it?"

Again she smiled. "You'll know what it is some day."

"Is it contagious?" he asked solicitously.

"Don't be alarmed. I haven't it. Not now. I'd love to stay on and on and
just 'breathe and wait,' if the gods were good."

'"Dream that the gods are good,'" he echoed. "The last thing they ever
think of being according to my reading."

She capped his line;

"We twain, once well in sunder, What will the mad gods do--'"

she began; then broke off, jumping to her feet. "I'm talking sheer
nonsense!" she cried. "Take me for a walk in the woods. The desert
glares to-day."

"I'll have to be back by twelve," he said. "Excuse me just a moment."

He disappeared into the portable house. When he rejoined her, she asked:

"What did you go in there for? To get your revolver?"

"Yes."

"I've carried one since the day you told me to. Not that I've met a soul
that looked dangerous, nor that I'd know how to shoot or when, if I
did."

"The sight of it would be taken as evidence that you knew how to use
it," he assured her.

For a time, as they walked, she had many questions to put about the tree
and bird life surrounding them. In the midst of it he asked her:

"Do you ever get restless?"

"I haven't, here. I'm getting rested."

"And at home I suppose you're too busy."

"Being busy is no preventive. Somebody has said that St. Vitus is the
patron saint of New York society."

"It must take almost all the time those people have to keep up with the
theaters and with the best in poetry and what's being done and thought,
and the new books and all that," he surmised.

"I beg your pardon; what was that about poetry and books?"

"Girls like you--society girls, I mean--read everything there is, don't
they?"

"Where do you get that extraordinary idea?"

"Why, from knowing you."

"My poor, innocent Ban! If you were to try and talk books and poetry,
'Shakespeare and the musical glasses,' to the average society girl, as
you call her, what do you suppose would happen?"

"Why, I suppose I'd give myself away as an ignoramus."

"Heaven save you for a woolly lambkin! The girl would flee, shrieking,
and issue a warning against you as a high-brow, a prig, and a hopeless
bore. They don't read books, except a few chocolate-cream novels. They
haven't the time."

"But you--"

"Oh, I'm a freak! I get away with it because I'm passably good-looking
and know how to dress, and do what I please by the divine right
of--well, of just doing it. But, even so, a lot of the men are rather
afraid of me in their hearts. They suspect the bluestocking. Let 'em
suspect! The market is plenty good enough," declared Io flippantly.

"Then you just took up books as a sort of freak; a side issue?" The
disappointment in his face was almost ludicrous.

"No." A quiet gravity altered her expression. "I'll tell you about me,
if you want to hear. My mother was the daughter of a famous classical
scholar, who was opposed to her marriage because Father has always been
a man of affairs. From the first, Mother brought me up to love books and
music and pictures. She died when I was twelve, and poor Father, who
worshiped her, wanted to carry out her plans for me, though he had no
special sympathy with them. To make things worse for him, nobody but
Mother ever had any control over me; I was spoiled and self-willed and
precocious, and I thought the world owed me a good time. Dad's business
judgment of human nature saved the situation, he thoroughly understood
one thing about me, that I'd keep a bargain if I made it. So we fixed up
our little contract; I was to go through college and do my best, and
after I graduated, I was to have a free hand and an income of my own, a
nice one. I did the college trick. I did it well. I was third in my
class, and there wasn't a thing in literature or languages that they
could stop me from getting. At eighteen they turned me loose on the
world, and here I am, tired of it, but still loving it. That's all of
me. Aren't I a good little autobiographer. Every lady her own Boswell!
What are you listening to?"

"There's a horse coming along the old trail," said Banneker.

"Who is it?" she asked. "Some one following us?"

He shook his head. A moment later the figure of a mounted man loomed
through the brush. He was young, strong-built, and not ill-looking.
"Howdy, Ban," he said.

Banneker returned the greeting.

"Whee-ew!" shrilled the other, wiping his brow. "This sure does fetch
the licker outen a man's hide. Hell of a wet night at the Sick Coyote
last night. Why wasn't you over?"

"Busy," replied Banneker.

Something in his tone made the other raise himself from his weary droop.
He sighted Io.

"Howdy, ma'am," he said. "Didn't see there was ladies present."

"Good-morning," said Io.

"Visitin' hereabouts?" inquired the man, eyeing her curiously.

"Yes."

"Where, if I might be bold to ask?"

"If you've got any questions to ask, ask them of me, Fred," directed
Banneker.

While there was nothing truculent in his manner, it left no doubt as to
his readiness and determination.

Fred looked both sullen and crestfallen.

"It ain't nothin'," he said. "Only, inquiries was bein' made by a gent
from a Angelica City noospaper last week."

"Somebody else meant," asserted Banneker. "You keep that in mind, will
you? And it isn't necessary that you should mention this lady at all.
Savvy, Fred?"

The other grunted, touched his sombrero to Io and rode on.

"Has a reporter been here inquiring after me?" asked Io.

"Not after you. It was some one else."

"If the newspapers tracked me here, I'd have to leave at once."

"They won't. At least, it isn't likely."

"You'd get me out some way, wouldn't you, Ban?" she said trustfully.

"Yes."

"Ban; that Fred person seemed afraid of you."

"He's got nothing to be afraid of unless he talks too much."

"But you had him 'bluffed.' I'm sure you had. Ban, did you ever kill a
man?"

"No."

"Or shoot one?"

"Not even that."

"Yet, I believe, from the way he looked at you, that you've got a
reputation as a 'bad man'?"

"So I have. But it's no fault of mine."

"How did you get it?"

"You'll laugh if I tell you. They say I've got a 'killer's' eye."

The girl examined his face with grave consideration. "You've got nice
eyes," was her verdict. "That deep brown is almost wasted on a man; some
girl ought to have it. I used to hear a--a person, who made a deep
impression on me at the time, insist that there was always a flaw in the
character of a person with large, soft brown eyes."

"Isn't there a flaw in every character?"

"Human nature being imperfect, there must be. What is yours; suppressed
murderousness?"

"Not at all. My reputation is unearned, though useful. Just before I
came here, a young chap showed up from nowhere and loafed around
Manzanita. He was a pretty kind of lad, and one night in the Sick Coyote
some of the old-timers tried to put something over on him. When the
smoke cleared away, there was one dead and six others shot up, and
Little Brownie was out on the desert, riding for the next place, awfully
sore over a hole in his new sombrero. He was a two-gun man from down
near the border. Well, when I arrived in town, I couldn't understand why
every one looked so queerly at my eyes, until Mindle, the mail-driver,
told me they were exactly like the hair-trigger boy's. Cheap and easy
way to get a reputation, isn't it?"

"But you must have something back of it," insisted the girl. "Are you a
good shot?"

"Nothing fancy; there are twenty better in town."

"Yet you pin some faith to your 'gun,'" she pointed out.

He glanced over his shoulder to right and left. Io jumped forward with a
startled cry. So swift and secret had been his motion that she hardly
saw the weapon before--PLACK--PLACK--PLACK--the three shots had sounded.
The smoke drifted around him in a little circle, for the first two shots
had been over his shoulder and the third as he whirled. Walking back, he
carefully examined the trunks of three trees.

"I'd have only barked that fellow, if he'd been a man," he observed,
shaking his head at the second mark.

"You frightened me," complained Io.

"I'm sorry. I thought you wanted to see a little gun-play. Out here it
isn't how straight you can shoot at a bull's-eye, but how quick you can
plant your bullets, and usually in a mark that isn't obliging enough to
be dead in line. So I practice occasionally, just in case."

"Very interesting. But I've got luncheon to cook," said Io.

They returned through the desert. As he opened the door of the shack for
her, Banneker, reverting to her autobiographical sketch, remarked
thoughtfully and without preliminary:

"I might have known there couldn't be any one else like you."




CHAPTER XI


Although the vehicle of his professional activities had for some years
been a small and stertorous automobile locally known as "Puffy Pete,"
Mr. James Mindle always referred to his process of postal transfer from
the station to the town as "teamin' over the mail." He was a frail,
grinny man from the prairie country, much given to romantic imaginings
and an inordinate admiration for Banneker.

Having watched from the seat of his chariot the brief but ceremonial
entry of Number Three, which, on regular schedule, roared through
Manzanita at top speed, he descended, captured the mail-bag and, as the
transcontinental pulled out, accosted the station-agent.

"What'd she stop for, Ban?"

"Special orders."

"Didn't say nothin' about havin' a ravin' may-ni-ac aboard, did theh?"

"No."

"Ban, was you ever in the State of Ohio?"

"A long time ago."

"Are Ohio folks liable to be loony?"

"Not more than others, I reckon, Jimmy."

"Pretty enthoosiastic about themselves, though, ain't theh?"

"Why, I don't know. It's a nice country there, Jimmy."

"There was one on Number Three sure thought so. Hadn't scarcely come to
a stop when off he jumps and waves his fins and gives three cheers for
it."

"For what?"

"Ohio. I'm tellin' you. He ramps across the track yippin' 'Ohio! Ohio!
Ohio!' whoopity-yoop. He come right at me and I says, 'Watch yehself,
Buddy. You'll git left.'"

"What did he say to that?" asked Banneker indulgently.

"Never looked at me no more than a doodle-bug. Just yelled 'Ohio!'
again. So I come back at him with 'Missourah.' He grabs me by the
shoulder and points to your shack. 'Who owns that little shed?' says he,
very excited. 'My friend, Mr. Banneker,' says I, polite as always to
strangers. 'But I own that shoulder you're leanin' on, and I'm about to
take it away with me when I go,' I says. He leaned off and says, 'Where
did that young lady come from that was standin' in the doorway a minute
ago?' 'Young lady,' Ban. Do you get that? So I says, 'You're lucky, Bud.
When I get 'em, it's usually snakes and bugs and such-like rep-tyles.
Besides,' I says, 'your train is about to forgit that you got off it,' I
says. With that he gives another screech that don't even mean as much as
Ohio and tails onto the back platform just in time."

Said Ban, after frowning consideration:

"You didn't see any lady around the shack, did you, Jimmy?"

"Not on your life," replied the little man indignantly. "I ain't had
anything like that since I took the mail-teamin' contract."

"How good time do you think Puffy Pete could make across-desert in case
I should want it?" inquired the agent after a pause.

The mail-man contemplated his "team," bubbling and panting a vaporous
breath over the platform. "Pete ain't none too fond of sand," he
confessed. "But if you want to _git_ anywhere, him and me'll git you
there. You know that, Ban."

Banneker nodded comradely and the post chugged away.

Inside the shack Io had set out the luncheon-things. To Banneker's eyes
she appeared quite unruffled, despite the encounter which he had
surmised from Jimmy's sketch.

"Get me some flowers for the table, Ban," she directed. "I want it to
look festive."

"Why, in particular?"

"Because I'm afraid we won't have many more luncheons together."

He made no comment, but went out and returned with the flowers. Meantime
Io had made up her mind.

"I've had an unpleasant surprise, Ban."

"I was afraid so."

She glanced up quickly. "Did you see him?"

"No. Mindle, the mail transfer man, did."

"Oh! Well, that was Aleck Babson. 'Babbling Babson,' he's called at the
clubs. He's the most inveterate gossip in New York."

"It's a long way from New York," pointed out Banneker.

"Yes; but he has a long tongue. Besides, he'll see the Westerleys and my
other friends in Paradiso, and babble to them."

"Suppose he does?"

"I won't have people chasing here after me or pestering me with
letters," she said passionately. "Yet I don't want to go away. I want to
get more rested, Ban, and forget a lot of things."

He nodded. Comfort and comprehension were in his silence.

"You can be as companionable as a dog," said Io softly. "Where did you
get your tact, I wonder? Well, I shan't go till I must.... Lemonade,
Ban! I brought over the lemons myself."

They lunched a little soberly and thoughtfully.

"And I wanted it to be festive to-day," said Io wistfully, speaking out
her thoughts as usual. "Ban, does Miss Camilla smoke?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Because if she does, you'll think it all right. And I want a cigarette
now."

"If you do, I'll _know_ it's all right, Butterfly," returned her
companion fetching a box from a shelf.

"Hold the thought!" cried Io gayly. "There's a creed for you! 'Whatever
is, is right,' provided that it's Io who does it. Always judge me by
that standard, Ban, won't you?... Where in the name of Sir Walter
Raleigh's ghost did you get these cigarettes? 'Mellorosa' ... Ban, is
this a Sears-Roebuck stock?"

"No. It came from town. Don't you like it?"

"It's quite curious and interesting. Never mind, my dear; I won't tease
you."

For all that Io's "my dear" was the most casual utterance imaginable, it
brought a quick flush to Banneker's face. Chattering carelessly, she
washed up the few dishes, put them away in the brackets, and then,
smoking another of the despised Mellorosas, wandered to the
book-shelves.

"Read me something out of your favorite book, Ban.... No; this one."

She handed him the thick mail-order catalogue. With a gravity equal to
her own he took it.

"What will you have?"

"Let the spirit of Sears-Roebuck decide. Open at random and expound."

He thrust a finger between the leaves and began:

"Our Special, Fortified Black Fiber Trunk for Hard Travel. Made of
Three-Ply Ven--"

"Oh, to have my trunks again!" sighed the girl. "Turn to something else.
I don't like that. It reminds me of travel."

Obedient, Banneker made another essay:

"Clay County Clay Target Traps. Easily Adjusted to the Elevation--"

"Oh, dear!" she broke in again. "That reminds me that Dad wrote me to
look up his pet shot-gun before his return. I don't like that either.
Try again."

This time the explorer plunged deep into the volume.

"How to Make Home Home-like. An Invaluable Counselor for the Woman of
the Household--"

Io snatched the book from the reader's hand and tossed it into a corner.
"Sears-Roebuck are very tactless," she declared. "Everything they have
to offer reminds one of home. What do you think of home, Ban? Home, as
an abstract proposition. Home as the what-d'you-call-'em of the nation;
the palladium--no, the bulwark? Home as viewed by the homing pigeon?
Home, Sweet Home, as sung by--Would you answer, Ban, if I stopped
gibbering and gave you the chance?"

"I've never had much opportunity to judge about home, you know."

She darted out a quick little hand and touched his sleeve. The raillery
had faded from her face. "So you haven't. Not very tactful of me, was
it! Will you throw me into the corner with Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck,
Ban? I'm sorry."

"You needn't be. One gets used to being an air-plant without roots."

"Yet you wouldn't have fitted out this shack," she pointed out shrewdly,
"unless you had the instincts of home."

"That's true enough. Fortunately it's the kind of home I can take along
when they transfer me."

Io went to the door and looked afar on the radiant splendor of the
desert, and, nearer, into the cool peace of the forest.

"But you can't take all this," she reminded him.

"No. I can't take this."

"Shall you miss it?"

A shadow fell upon his face. "I'd miss something--I don't know what it
is--that no other place has ever given me. Why do you talk as if I were
going away from it? I'm not."

"Oh, yes; you are," she laughed softly. "It is so written. I'm a
seeress." She turned from the door and threw herself into a chair.

"What will take me?"

"Something inside you. Something unawakened. 'Something lost beyond the
ranges.' You'll know, and you'll obey it."

"Shall I ever come back, O seeress?"

At the question her eyes grew dreamy and distant. Her voice when she
spoke sank to a low-pitched monotone.

"Yes, you'll come back. Sometime.... So shall I ... not for years ...
but--" She jumped to her feet. "What kind of rubbish am I talking?" she
cried with forced merriment. "Is your tobacco drugged with hasheesh,
Ban?"

He shook his head. "It's the pull of the desert," he murmured. "It's
caught you sooner than most. You're more responsive, I suppose; more
sens--Why, Butterfly! You're shaking."

"A Scotchman would say that I was 'fey.' Ban, do you think it means that
I'm coming back here to die?" She laughed again. "If I were fated to die
here, I expect that I missed my good chance in the smash-up. Fortunately
I'm not superstitious."

"There might be worse places," said he slowly. "It is the place that
would call me back if ever I got down and out." He pointed through the
window to the distant, glowing purity of the mountain peak. "One could
tell one's troubles to that tranquil old god."

"Would he listen to mine, I wonder?"

"Try him before you go. You can leave them all here and I'll watch over
them for you to see that they don't get loose and bother you."

"Absolution! If it were only as easy as that! This _is_ a haunted
place.... Why should I be here at all? _Why_ didn't I go when I should?
Why a thousand things?"

"Chance."

"Is there any such thing? Why can't I sleep at night yet, as I ought?
Why do I still feel hunted? What's happening to me, Ban? What's getting
ready to happen?"

"Nothing. That's nerves."

"Yes; I'll try not to think of it. But at night--Ban, suppose I should
come over in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, and call
outside your window?"

"I'd come down, of course. But you'd have to be careful about rattlers,"
answered the practical Ban.

"Your friend, Camilla, would intercept me, anyway. I don't think she
sleeps too well, herself. Do you know what she's doing out here?"

"She came for her health."

"That isn't what I asked you, my dear. Do you know what she's doing?"

"No. She never told me."

"Shall I tell you?"

"No."

"It's interesting. Aren't you curious?"

"If she wanted me to know, she'd tell me."

"Indubitably correct, and quite praiseworthy," mocked the girl. "Never
mind; you know how to be staunch to your friends."

"In this country a man who doesn't is reckoned a yellow dog."

"He is in any decent country. So take that with you when you go."

"I'm not going," he asserted with an obstinate set to his jaw.

"Wait and see," she taunted. "So you won't let me send you books?" she
questioned after a pause.

"No."

"No, I thank you," she prompted.

"No, I thank you," he amended. "I'm an uncouth sort of person, but I
meant the 'thank you.'"

"Of course you did. And uncouthness is the last thing in the world you
could be accused of. That's the wonder of it.... No; I don't suppose it
really is. It's birth."

"If it's anything, it's training. My father was a stickler for forms, in
spite of being a sort of hobo."

"Well, forms make the game, very largely. You won't find them
essentially different when you go out into the--I forgot again. That
kind of prophecy annoys you, doesn't it? There is one book I'm going to
send you, though, which you can't refuse. Nobody can refuse it. It isn't
done."

"What is that?"

Her answer surprised him. "The Bible."

"Are you religious? Of course, a butterfly should be, shouldn't she?
should believe in the release of the soul from its chrysalis--the
butterfly's immortality. Yet I wouldn't have suspected you of a leaning
in that direction."

"Oh, religion!" Her tone set aside the subject as insusceptible of
sufficient or satisfactory answer. "I go through the forms," she added,
a little disdainfully. "As to what I believe and do--which is what one's
own religion is--why, I assume that if the game is worth playing at all,
there must be a Judge and Maker of the Rules. As far as I understand
them, I follow them."

"You have a sort of religious feeling for success, though, haven't you?"
he reminded her slyly.

"Not at all. Just human, common sense."

"But your creed as you've just given it, the rules of the game and that;
that's precisely the Bible formula, I believe."

"How do you know?" she caught him up. "You haven't a Bible in the place,
so far as I've noticed."

"No; I haven't."

"You should have."

"Probably. But I can't, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming
from you."

"Because you don't understand what I'm getting at. It isn't religious
advice."

"Then what is it?"

"Literary, purely. You're going to write, some day. Oh, don't look
doubtful! That's foreordained. It doesn't take a seeress to prophesy
that. And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every
day. Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs. Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a
lot of the New. It has grown into our intellectual life until its
phrases and catchwords are full of overtones and sub-meanings. You've
got to have it in your business; your coming business, I mean. I know
what I'm talking about, Mr. Errol Banneker--_moi qui parle_. They
offered me an instructorship in Literature when I graduated. I even
threatened to take it, just for a joke on Dad. _Now_, will you be good
and accept my fully explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that
I have designs on your soul?"

"Yes."

"And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me
home and stay to supper? Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you."

"All right. I'll be glad to. What will you do between now and four
o'clock?"

"Prowl in your library and unearth more of your secrets."

"You're welcome if you can find any. I don't deal in 'em."

When Banneker, released from his duties until evening train time,
rejoined her, and they were riding along the forest trail, he said:

"You've started me to theorizing about myself."

"Do it aloud," she invited.

"Well; all my boyhood I led a wandering life, as you know. We were never
anywhere as much as a month at a time. In a way, I liked the change and
adventure. In another way, I got dead sick of it. Don't you suppose that
my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the reaction from that?"

"It sounds reasonable enough. You might put it more simply by saying
that you were tired. But by now you ought to be rested."

"Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?"

"If you don't stir, you'll rust."

"Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism."

She shot an impatient side-glance at him. "Either you're a hundred years
old," she said, "or that's sheer pose."

"Perhaps it is a sort of pose. If so, it's a self-protective one."

"Suppose I asked you to come to New York?"

Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a little at her own words,
foreseeing those mail-order-cut clothes and the resolute butterflyness
of the tie greeting her on Fifth Avenue.

"What to do?"

"Sell tickets at the Grand Central Station, of course!" she shot back at
him. "Ban, you _are_ aggravating! 'What to do?' Father would find you
some sort of place while you were fitting in."

'No. I wouldn't take a job from you any more than I'd take anything
else."

"You carry principles to the length of absurdity. Come and get your own
job, then. You're not timid, are you?"

"Not particularly. I'm just contented."

At that provocation her femininity flared. "Ban," she cried with
exasperation and appeal enchantingly mingled, "aren't you going to miss
me at all when I go?"

"I've been trying not to think of that," he said slowly.

"Well, think of it," she breathed. "No!" she contradicted herself
passionately. "Don't think of it. I shouldn't have said that.... I don't
know what is the matter with me to-day, Ban. Perhaps I _am_ fey." She
smiled to him slantwise.

"It's the air," he answered judicially. "There's another storm brewing
somewhere or I'm no guesser. More trouble for the schedule."

"That's right!" she cried eagerly. "_Be_ the Atkinson and St. Philip
station-agent again. Let's talk about trains. It's--it's so reliable."

"Far from it on this line," he answered, adopting her light tone.
"Particularly if we have more rain. You may become a permanent resident
yet."

Some rods short of the Van Arsdale cabin the trail took a sharp turn
amidst the brush. Halfway on the curve Io caught at Banneker's near
rein.

"Hark!" she exclaimed.

The notes of a piano sounded faintly clear in the stillness. As the
harmonies dissolved and merged, a voice rose above them, resonant and
glorious, rose and sank and pleaded and laughed and loved, while the two
young listeners leaned unconsciously toward each other in their saddles.
Silence fell again. The very forest life itself seemed hushed in a
listening trance.

"Heavens!" whispered Banneker. "Who is it?"

"Camilla Van Arsdale, of course. Didn't you know?"

"I knew she was musical. I didn't know she had a voice like that."

"Ten years ago New York was wild over it."

"But why--"

"Hush! She's beginning again."

Once more the sweep of the chords was followed by the superb voice while
the two wayfarers and all the world around them waited, breathless and
enchained. At the end, Banneker said dreamily:

"I've never heard anything like that before. It says everything that
can't be said in words alone, doesn't it? It makes me think of
something--What is it?" He groped for a moment, then repeated:

"'A passionate ballad, gallant and gay, Singing afar in the springtime
of life, Singing of youth and of love And of honor that cannot die.'"

Io drew a deep, tremulous breath. "Yes; it's like that. What a voice!
And what an art to be buried out here! It's one of her own songs, I
think. Probably an unpublished one."

"Her own? Does she write music?"

"She is Royce Melvin, the composer. Does that mean anything to you?"

He shook his head.

"Some day it will. They say that he--every one thinks it's a he--will
take Massenet's place as a lyrical composer. I found her out by
accidentally coming on the manuscript of a Melvin song that I knew.
That's her secret that I spoke of. Do you mind my having told you?"

"Why, no. It'll never go any further. I wonder why she never told me.
And why she keeps so shut off from the world here."

"Ah; that's another secret, and one that I shan't tell you," returned Io
gravely. "There's the piano again."

A few indeterminate chords came to their ears. There followed a jangling
disharmony. They waited, but there was nothing more. They rode on.

At the lodge Banneker took the horses around while Io went in.
Immediately her voice, with a note of alarm in it, summoned him. He
found her bending over Miss Van Arsdale, who lay across the divan in the
living-room with eyes closed, breathing jerkily. Her lips were blue and
her hands looked shockingly lifeless.

"Carry her into her room," directed Io.

Banneker picked up the tall, strong-built form without effort and
deposited it on the bed in the inner room.

"Open all the windows," commanded the girl. "See if you can find me some
ammonia or camphor. Quick! She looks as if she were dying."

One after another Banneker tried the bottles on the dresser. "Here it
is. Ammonia," he said.

In his eagerness he knocked a silver-mounted photograph to the floor. He
thrust the drug into the girl's hand and watched her helplessly as she
worked over the limp figure on the bed. Mechanically he picked up the
fallen picture to replace it. There looked out at him the face of a man
of early middle age, a face of manifest intellectual power, high-boned,
long-lined, and of the austere, almost ascetic beauty which the
Florentine coins have preserved for us in clear fidelity. Across the
bottom was written in a peculiarly rhythmic script, the legend:

"Toujours ; toi. W."

"She's coming back," said Io's voice. "No. Don't come nearer. You'll
shut off the air. Find me a fan."

He ran to the outer room and came back with a palm-leaf.

"She wants something," said Io in an agonized half-voice. "She wants it
so badly. What is it? Help me, Ban! She can't speak. Look at her
eyes--so imploring. Is it medicine?... No! Ban, can't you help?"

Banneker took the silver-framed portrait and placed it in the flaccid
hand. The fingers closed over it. The filmiest wraith of a smile played
about the blue lips.

An hour later, Io came out to Banneker waiting fearfully in the big
room.

"She won't have a doctor. I've given her the strychnia and she insists
she'll be all right."

"Don't you think I ought to go for the doctor, anyway?"

"She wouldn't see him. She's very strong-willed.... That's a wonderful
woman, Ban." Io's voice shook a little.

"Yes."

"How did you know about the picture?"

"I saw it on the dresser. And when I saw her eyes, I guessed."

"Yes; there's only one thing a woman wants like _that_, when she's
dying. You're rather a wonderful person, yourself, to have known. That's
her other secret, Ban. The one I said I couldn't tell you."

"I've forgotten it," replied Banneker gravely.




CHAPTER XII


Attendance upon the sick-room occupied Io's time for several days
thereafter. Morning and afternoon Banneker rode over from the station to
make anxious inquiry. The self-appointed nurse reported progress as
rapid as could be expected, but was constantly kept on the alert because
of the patient's rebellion against enforced idleness. Seizures of the
same sort she had suffered before, it appeared, but none hitherto so
severe. Nothing could be done, she told Io, beyond the administration of
the medicine, for which she had full directions. One day an attack would
finish it all; meantime, in spite of her power of self-repression, she
chafed at the monotony of her imprisonment.

In the late afternoon of the day after the collapse, while Io was
heating water at the fireplace, she heard a drawer open in the sick-room
and hurried back to find Miss Van Arsdale hanging to the dresser, her
face gray-splotched and her fingers convulsively crushing a letter which
she had taken from under lock. Alarmed and angry, the amateur nurse got
her back to bed only half conscious, but still cherishing her trove.
When, an hour later, she dared leave her charge, she heard the rustle of
smoothed-out paper and remained outside long enough to allow for the
reading. On her return there was no sign of the letter. Miss Van
Arsdale, a faint and hopeful color in her cheeks, was asleep.

For Banneker these were days of trial and tribulation. Added to the
anxiety that he felt for his best friend was the uncertainty as to what
he ought to do about the developments affecting her guest. For he had
heard once more from Gardner.

"It's on the cards," wrote the reporter, "that I may be up to see you
again. I'm still working, on and off, on the tip that took me on that
wild-goose chase. If I come again I won't quit without some of the wild
goose's tail feathers, at least. There's a new tip locally; it leaked
out from Paradise. ["The Babbling Babson," interjected the reader
mentally.] It looks as though the bird were still out your way. Though
how she could be, and you not know it, gets me. It's even a bigger game
than Stella Wrightington, if my information is O.K. Have you heard or
seen anything lately of a Beautiful Stranger or anything like that
around Manzanita?... I enclose clipping of your story. What do you think
of yourself in print?"

Banneker thought quite highly of himself in print as he read the
article, which he immediately did. The other matter could wait; not that
it was less important; quite the contrary; but he proposed to mull it
over carefully and with a quiet mind, if he could ever get his mind back
to its peaceful current again: meantime it was good for him to think of
something quite dissociated from the main problem.

What writer has not felt the conscious red tingle in his cheeks at first
sight of himself in the magnified personification of type? Here is
something, once himself, now expanded far beyond individual limits, into
the proportions of publicity, for all the world to measure and estimate
and criticize. Ought it to have been done in just that way? Is there not
too much "I" in the presentation? Would not the effect have been greater
had the method been less personal? It seemed to Banneker that he himself
stood forth in a stark nakedness of soul and thought, through those
blatantly assertive words, shameless, challenging to public opinion, yet
delightful to his own appreciation. On the whole it was good; better
than he would have thought he could do.

What he had felt, in the writing of it, to be jerks and bumps were
magically smoothed out in the finished product. At one point where the
copy-reader's blue pencil had elided an adjective which the writer had
deemed specially telling, he felt a sharp pang of disappointed
resentment. Without that characterization the sentence seemed lifeless.
Again, in another passage he wished that he had edited himself with more
heed to the just word. Why had he designated the train as "rumbling"
along the cut? Trains do not rumble between rock walls, he remembered;
they move with a sustained and composite roar. And the finger-wringing
malcontent who had vowed to "soom"; the editorial pencil had altered
that to "sue 'em," thereby robbing it of its special flavor. Perhaps
this was in accordance with some occult rule of the trade. But it
spoiled the paragraph for Banneker. Nevertheless he was thrilled and
elate.... He wanted to show the article to Io. What would she think of
it? She had read him accurately: it _was_ in him to write. And she could
help him, if only by--well, if only by being at hand.... But Gardner's
letter! That meant that the pursuit was on again, more formidably this
time. Gardner, the gadfly, stinging this modern Io out of her refuge of
peace and safety!

He wrote and dispatched a message to the reporter in care of the
Angelica City Herald:

Glad to see you, but you are wasting your time. No such person could be
here without my knowing it. Thanks for article.

That was as near an untruth as Banneker cared to go. In his own mind he
defended it on the ground that the projected visit would, in fact, be
time wasted for the journalist since he, Banneker, intended fully that
Gardner should not see Io. Deep would have been his disgust and
self-derision could he have observed the effect of the message upon the
cynical and informed journalist who, however, did not receive it until
the second day after its transmission, as he had been away on another
assignment.

"The poor fish!" was Gardner's comment. "He doesn't even say that she
isn't there. He's got to lie better than that if he goes into the
newspaper game."

Further, the reporter had received a note from the cowman whom Ban and
Io had encountered in the woods, modestly requesting five dollars in
return for the warranted fact that a "swell young lady" had been seen in
Banneker's company. Other journalistic matters were pressing, however;
he concluded that the "Manzanita Mystery," as he built it up
headline-wise in his ready mind, could wait a day or two longer.

Banneker, through the mechanical course of his office, debated the
situation. Should he tell Io of the message? To do so would only add to
her anxieties, probably to no good purpose, for he did not believe that
she would desert Miss Van Arsdale, ill and helpless, on any selfish
consideration. Fidelity was one of the virtues with which he had
unconsciously garlanded Io. Then, too, Gardner might not come anyway. If
he did Banneker was innocently confident of his own ability to outwit
the trained reporter and prevent his finding the object of his quest. A
prospective and possible ally was forecast in the weather. Warning of
another rainfall impending had come over the wire. As yet there was no
sign visible from his far-horizoned home, except a filmy and changeful
wreath of palest cloud with which Mount Carstairs was bedecked. Banneker
decided for silence.

Miss Van Arsdale was much better when he rode over in the morning, but
Io looked piteously worn and tired.

"You've had no rest," he accused her, away from the sick woman's
hearing.

"Rest enough of its kind, but not much sleep," said Io.

"But you've got to have sleep," he insisted. "Let me stay and look after
her to-night."

"It wouldn't be of any use."

"Why not?"

"I shouldn't sleep anyway. This house is haunted by spirits of unrest,"
said the girl fretfully. "I think I'll take a blanket and go out on the
desert."

"And wake up to find a sidewinder crawling over you, and a tarantula
nestling in your ear. Don't think of it."

"Ban," called the voice of Camilla Van Arsdale from the inner room,
clear and firm as he had ever heard it.

He went in. She stretched out a hand to him. "It's good to see you, Ban.
Have I worried you? I shall be up and about again to-morrow."

"Now, Miss Camilla," protested Banneker, "you mustn't--"

"I'm going to get up to-morrow," repeated the other immutably. "Don't be
absurd about it. I'm not ill. It was only the sort of knock-down that I
must expect from time to time. Within a day or two you'll see me riding
over.... Ban, stand over there in that light.... What's that you've got
on?"

"What, Miss Camilla?"

"That necktie. It isn't in your usual style. Where did you get it?"

"Sent to Angelica City for it. Don't you like it?" he returned, trying
for the nonchalant air, but not too successfully.

"Not as well as your spotty butterflies," answered the woman jealously.
"That's nonsense, though. Don't mind me, Ban," she added with a wry
smile. "Plain colors are right for you. Browns, or blues, or reds, if
they're not too bright. And you've tied it very well. Did it take you
long to do it?"

Reddening and laughing, he admitted a prolonged and painful session
before his glass. Miss Van Arsdale sighed. It was such a faint,
abandoning breath of regret as might come from the breast of a mother
when she sees her little son in his first pride of trousers.

"Go out and say good-night to Miss Welland," she ordered, "and tell her
to go to bed. I've taken a sleeping powder."

Banneker obeyed. He rode home slowly and thoughtfully. His sleep was
sound enough that night.

Breakfast-getting processes did not appeal to him when he awoke in the
morning. He walked over, through the earliest light, to the hotel, where
he made a meal of musty eggs, chemical-looking biscuits, and coffee of a
rank hue and flavor, in an atmosphere of stale odors and flies,
sickeningly different from the dainty ceremonials of Io's preparation.
Rebuking himself for squeamishness, the station-agent returned to his
office, caught an O.S. from the wire, took some general instructions,
and went out to look at the weather. His glance never reached the
horizon.

In the foreground where he had swung the hammock under the alamo it
checked and was held, absorbed. A blanketed figure lay motionless in the
curve of the meshwork. One arm was thrown across the eyes, warding a
strong beam which had forced its way through the lower foliage. He
tiptoed forward.

Io's breast was rising and falling gently in the hardly perceptible
rhythm of her breathing. From the pale yellow surface of her dress,
below the neck, protruded a strange, edged something, dun-colored,
sharply defined and alien, which the man's surprised eyes failed to
identify. Slowly the edge parted and flattened out, broadwise,
displaying the marbled brilliance of the butterfly's inner wings,
illumining the pale chastity of the sleeping figure as if with a
quivering and evanescent jewel. Banneker, shaken and thrilled, closed
his eyes. He felt as if a soul had opened its secret glories to him.
When, commanding himself, he looked again, the living gem was gone. The
girl slept evenly.

Conning the position of the sun and the contour of the sheltering tree,
Banneker estimated that in a half-hour or less a flood of sunlight would
pour in upon the slumberer's face to awaken her. Cautiously withdrawing,
he let himself into the shack, lighted his oil stove, put on water to
boil, set out the coffee and the stand. He felt different about
breakfast-getting now. Having prepared the arrangements for his
prospective guest, he returned and leaned against the alamo, filling his
eyes with still delight of the sleeper.

Youthful, untouched, fresh though the face was, in the revealing
stillness of slumber, it suggested rather than embodied something
indefinably ancient, a look as of far and dim inheritances, subtle,
ironic, comprehending, and aloof; as if that delicate and strong beauty
of hers derived intimately from the wellsprings of the race; as if
womanhood, eternal triumphant, and elusive were visibly patterned there.

Banneker, leaning against the slender tree-trunk, dreamed over her,
happily and aimlessly.

Io opened her eyes to meet his. She stirred softly and smiled at him.

"So you discovered me," she said.

"How long have you been here?"

She studied the sun a moment before replying. "Several hours."

"Did you walk over in the night?"

"No. You told me not to, you know. I waited till the dawn. Don't scold
me, Ban. I was dead for want of sleep and I couldn't get it in the
lodge. It's haunted, I tell you, with unpeaceful spirits. So I
remembered this hammock."

"I'm not going to scold you. I'm going to feed you. The coffee's on."

"How good!" she cried, getting to her feet. "Am I a sight? I feel
frowsy."

"There's a couple of buckets of water up in my room. Help yourself while
I set out the breakfast."

In fifteen minutes she was down, freshened and joyous.

"I'll just take a bite and then run back to my patient," she said. "You
can bring the blanket when you come. It's heavy for a three-mile
tramp.... What are you looking thoughtful and sober about, Ban? Do you
disapprove of my escapade?"

"That's a foolish question."

"It's meant to be. And it's meant to make you smile. Why don't you? You
_are_ worried. 'Fess up. What's happened?"

"I've had a letter from the reporter in Angelica City."

"Oh! Did he send your article?"

"He did. But that isn't the point. He says he's coming up here again."

"What for?"

"You."

"Does he know I'm here? Did he mention my name?"

"No. But he's had some information that probably points to you."

"What did you answer?"

Ban told her. "I think that will hold him off," he said hopefully.

"Then he's a very queer sort of reporter," returned Io scornfully out of
her wider experience. "No; he'll come. And if he's any good, he'll find
me."

"You can refuse to see him."

"Yes; but it's the mere fact of my being here that will probably give
him enough to go on and build up a loathsome article. How I hate
newspapers!... Ban," she appealed wistfully, "can't you stop him from
coming? Must I go?"

"You must be ready to go."

"Not until Miss Camilla is well again," she declared obstinately. "But
that will be in a day or two. Oh, well! What does it all matter! I've
not much to pack up, anyway. How are you going to get me out?"

"That depends on whether Gardner comes, and how he comes."

He pointed to a darkening line above the southwestern horizon. "If that
is what it looks like, we may be in for another flood, though I've never
known two bad ones in a season."

Io beckoned quaintly to the far clouds. "Hurry! Hurry!" she summoned.
"You wrecked me once. Now save me from the Vandal. Good-bye, Ban. And
thank you for the lodging and the breakfast."

Emergency demands held the agent at his station all that day and
evening. Trainmen brought news of heavy rains beyond the mountains. In
the morning he awoke to find his little world hushed in a murky light
and with a tingling apprehension of suspense in the atmosphere. High,
gray cloud shapes hurried across the zenith to a conference of the storm
powers, gathering at the horizon. Weather-wise from long observation,
Banneker guessed that the outbreak would come before evening, and that,
unless the sullen threat of the sky was deceptive, Manzanita would be
shut off from rail communication within twelve hours thereafter. Having
two hours' release at noon, he rode over to the lodge in the forest to
return Io's blanket. He found the girl pensive, and Miss Van Arsdale
apparently recovered to the status of her own normal and vigorous self.

"I've been telling Io," said the older woman, "that, since the rumor is
out of her being here, she will almost certainly be found by the
reporter. Too many people in the village know that I have a guest."

"How?" asked Banneker.

"From my marketing. Probably from Pedro."

"Very likely from the patron of the Sick Coyote that you and I met on
our walk," added the girl.

"So the wise thing is for her to go," concluded Miss Van Arsdale.
"Unless she is willing to risk the publicity."

"Yes," assented Io. "The wise thing is for me to go." She spoke in a
curious tone, not looking at Banneker, not looking at anything outward
and visible; her vision seemed somberly introverted.

"Not now, though," said Banneker.

"Why not?" asked both women. He answered Io.

"You called for a storm. You're going to get it. A big one. I could send
you out on Number Eight, but that's a way-train and there's no telling
where it would land you or when you'd get through. Besides, I don't
believe Gardner is coming. I'd have heard from him by now. Listen!"

The slow pat-pat-pat of great raindrops ticked like a started clock on
the roof. It ceased, and far overhead the great, quiet voice of the wind
said, "Hush--sh--sh--sh--sh!", bidding the world lie still and wait.

"What if he does come?" asked Miss Van Arsdale

"I'll get word to you and get her out some way."

The storm burst on Banneker, homebound, just as he emerged from the
woodland, in a wild, thrashing wind from the southwest and a downpour
the most fiercely, relentlessly insistent that he had ever known. A
cactus desert in the rare orgy of a rainstorm is a place of wonder. The
monstrous, spiky forms trembled and writhed in ecstasy, heat-damned
souls in their hour of respite, stretching out exultant arms to the
bounteous sky. Tiny rivulets poured over the sand, which sucked them
down with a thirsting, crisping whisper. A pair of wild doves, surprised
and terrified, bolted close past the lone rider, so near that his mount
shied and headed for the shelter of the trees again. A small snake,
curving indecisively and with obvious bewilderment amidst the growth,
paused to rattle a faint warning, half coiled in case the horse's step
meant a new threat, then went on with a rather piteous air of not
knowing where to find refuge against this cataclysm of the elements.

Lashing in the wind, a long tentacle of the giant ocatilla drew its
cimeter-set thong across Ban's horse which incontinently bolted. The
rider lifted up his voice and yelled in sheer, wild, defiant joy of the
tumult. A lesser ocatilla thorn gashed his ear so that the blood mingled
with the rain that poured down his face. A pod of the fishhook-barbed
cholla drove its points through his trousers into the flesh of his knee
and, detaching itself from the stem, as is the detestable habit of this
vegetable blood-seeker, clung there like a live thing of prey, from
barbs which must later be removed delicately and separately with the
cold steel. Blindly homing, a jack-rabbit ran almost beneath the horse's
hooves, causing him to shy again, this time into a bulky vizcaya, as big
as a full-grown man, and inflicting upon Ban a new species of
scarification. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. He rode on, knees
tight, lines loose, elate, shouting, singing, acclaiming the storm which
was setting its irrefragable limits to the world wherein he and Io would
still live close, a few golden days longer.

What he picked from the wire when he reached it confirmed his hopes. The
track was threatened in a dozen places. Repair crews were gathering.
Already the trains were staggering along, far behind their schedule.
They would, of course, operate as far as possible, but no reliance was
to be placed upon their movements until further notice. Through the
night traffic continued, but with the coming of the morning and the
settling down of a soft, seeping, unintermittent pour of gray rain, the
situation had clarified. Nothing came through. Complete stoppage, east
and west. Between Manzanita and Stanwood the track was out, and in the
other direction Dry Bed Arroyo was threatening. Banneker reported
progress to the lodge and got back, soaked and happy. Io was thoughtful
and content.

Late that afternoon the station-agent had a shock which jarred him quite
out of his complacent security. Denny, the operator at Stanwood, wired,
saying:

Party here anxious to get through to Manzanita quick. Could auto make
upper desert?

No (clicked Banneker in response). Describe party.

The answer came back confirming his suspicion:

Thin, nice-spoken, wears goggles, smokes cork-tips. Arrived Five from
Angelica held here.

Tell impossible by any route (instructed Banneker). Wire result.

An hour later came the reply:

Won't try to-night. Probably horse to-morrow.

Here was a problem, indeed, fit to chill the untimely
self-congratulations of Banneker. Should the reporter come in--and come
he would if it were humanly possible, by Banneker's estimate of him--it
would be by the only route which gave exit to the west. On the other
side the flooded arroyo cut off escape. To try to take Io out through
the forest, practically trackless, in that weather, or across the
channeled desert, would be too grave a risk. To all intents and purposes
they were marooned on an island with no reasonable chance of
exit--except! To Banneker's feverishly searching mind reverted a local
legend. Taking a chance on missing some emergency call, he hurried over
to the village and interviewed, through the persuasive interpretation of
sundry drinks, an aged and bearded wreck whose languid and chipped
accents spoke of a life originally far alien to the habitudes of the
Sick Coyote where he was fatalistically awaiting his final attack of
delirium tremens.

Banneker returned from that interview with a map upon which had been
scrawled a few words in shaky, scholarly writing.

"But one doesn't say it's safe, mind you," had warned the shell of
Lionel Streatham in his husky pipe. "It's only as a sporting offer that
one would touch it. And the courses may have changed in seven years."

Denny wired in the morning that the inquiring traveler had set out from
Manzanita, unescorted, on horseback, adding the prediction that he would
have a hell of a trip, even if he got through at all. Late that
afternoon Gardner arrived at the station, soaked, hollow-eyed, stiff,
exhausted, and cheerful. He shook hands with the agent.

"How do you like yourself in print?" he inquired.

"Pretty well," answered Banneker. "It read better than I expected."

"It always does, until you get old in the business. How would you like a
New York job on the strength of it?"

Banneker stared. "You mean that I could get on a paper just by writing
that?"

"I didn't say so. Though I've known poorer stuff land more experienced
men."

"More experienced; that's the point, isn't it? I've had none at all."

"So much the better. A metropolitan paper prefers to take a man fresh
and train him to its own ways. There's your advantage if you can show
natural ability. And you can."

"I see," muttered Banneker thoughtfully.

"Where does Miss Van Arsdale live?" asked the reporter without the
smallest change of tone.

"What do you want to see Miss Van Arsdale for?" returned the other, his
instantly defensive manner betraying him to the newspaper man.

"You know as well as I do," smiled Gardner.

"Miss Van Arsdale has been ill. She's a good deal of a recluse. She
doesn't like to see people."

"Does her visitor share that eccentricity?"

Banneker made no reply.

"See here, Banneker," said the reporter earnestly; "I'd like to know why
you're against me in this thing."

"What thing?" fenced the agent.

"My search for Io Welland."

"Who is Io Welland, and what are you after her for?" asked Banneker
steadily.

"Apart from being the young lady that you've been escorting around the
local scenery," returned the imperturbable journalist, "she's the most
brilliant and interesting figure in the younger set of the Four Hundred.
She's a newspaper beauty. She's copy. She's news. And when she gets into
a railroad wreck and disappears from the world for weeks, and her
supposed fianc;, the heir to a dukedom, makes an infernal ass of himself
over it all and practically gives himself away to the papers, she's big
news."

"And if she hasn't done any of these things," retorted Banneker, drawing
upon some of Camilla Van Arsdale's wisdom, brought to bear on the case,
"she's libel, isn't she?"

"Hardly libel. But she isn't safe news until she's identified. You see,
I'm playing an open game with you. I'm here to identify her, with half a
dozen newspaper photos. Want to see 'em?"

"No, thank you."

"Not interested? Are you going to take me over to Miss Van Arsdale's?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Why should I? It's no part of my business as an employee of the road."

"As to that, I've got a letter from the Division Superintendent asking
you to further my inquiry in any possible way. Here it is."

Banneker took and read the letter. While not explicit, it was
sufficiently direct.

"That's official, isn't it?" said Gardner mildly.

"Yes."

"Well?"

"And this is official," added Banneker calmly. "The company can go to
hell. Tell that to the D.S. with my compliments, will you?"

"Certainly not. I don't want to get you into trouble. I like you. But
I've got to land this story. If you won't take me to the place, I'll
find some one in the village that will. You can't prevent my going
there, you know."

"Can't I?" Banneker's voice had grown low and cold. A curious light
shone in his eyes. There was an ugly flicker of smile on his set mouth.

The reporter rose from the chair into which he had wetly slumped. He
walked over to face his opponent who was standing at his desk. Banneker,
lithe, powerful, tense, was half again as large as the other; obviously
more muscular, better-conditioned, more formidable in every way. But
there is about a man, singly and selflessly intent upon his job in hand,
an inner potency impossible to obstruct. Banneker recognized it;
inwardly admitted, too, the unsoundness of the swift, protective rage
rising within, himself.

"I don't propose to make trouble for you or to have trouble with you,"
said the reporter evenly. "But I'm going to Miss Van Arsdale's unless
I'm shot on the way there."

"That's all right," returned the agent, mastering himself. "I beg your
pardon for threatening you. But you'll have to find your own way. Will
you put up here for the night, again?"

"Thanks. Glad to, if it won't trouble you. See you later."

"Perhaps not. I'm turning in early. I'll leave the shack unlocked for
you."

Gardner opened the outer door and was blown back into the station by an
explosive gust of soaking wind.

"On second thought," said he, "I don't think I'll try to go out there
this evening. The young lady can't very well get away to-night, unless
she has wings, and it's pretty damp for flying. Can I get dinner over at
the village?"

"Such as it is. I'll go over with you."

At the entrance to the unclean little hotel they parted, Banneker going
further to find Mindle the "teamer," whom he could trust and with whom
he held conference, brief and very private. They returned to the station
together in the gathering darkness, got a hand car onto the track, and
loaded it with a strange burden, after which Mindle disappeared into the
storm with the car while Banneker wired to Stanwood an imperative call
for a relief for next day even though the substitute should have to walk
the twenty-odd miles. Thereafter he made, from the shack, a careful
selection of food with special reference to economy of bulk, fastened it
deftly beneath his poncho, saddled his horse, and set out for the Van
Arsdale lodge. The night was pitch-black when he entered the area of the
pines, now sonorous with the rush of the upper winds.

Io saw the gleam of his flashlight and ran to the door to meet him.

"Are you ready?" he asked briefly.

"I can be in fifteen minutes." She turned away, asking no questions.

"Dress warmly," he said. "It's an all-night trip. By the way, can you
swim?"

"For hours at a time."

Camilla Van Arsdale entered the room. "Are you taking her away, Ban?
Where?"

"To Miradero, on the Southwestern and Sierra."

"But that's insanity," protested the other. "Sixty miles, isn't it? And
over trailless desert."

"All of that. But we're not going across country. We're going by water."

"By water? Ban, you _are_ out of your mind. Where is there any
waterway?"

"Dry Bed Arroyo. It's running bank-full. My boat is waiting there."

"But it will be dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Io, you mustn't."

"I'll go," said the girl quietly, "if Ban says so."

"There's no other way out. And it isn't so dangerous if you're used to a
boat. Old Streatham made it seven years ago in the big flood. Did it in
a bark canoe on a hundred-dollar bet. The Arroyo takes you out to the
Little Bowleg and that empties into the Rio Solano, and there you are!
I've got his map."

"Map?" cried Miss Van Arsdale. "What use is a map when you can't see
your hand before your face?"

"Give this wind a chance," answered Banneker. "Within two hours the
clouds will have broken and we'll have moonlight to go by.... The
Angelica Herald man is over at the hotel now," he added.

"May I take a suitcase?" asked Io.

"Of course. I'll strap it to your pony if you'll get it ready. Miss
Camilla, what shall we do with the pony? Hitch him under the bridge?"

"If you're determined to take her, I'll ride over with you and bring him
back. Io, think! Is it worth the risk? Let the reporter come. I can keep
him away from you."

A brooding expression was in the girl's deep eyes as she turned them,
not to the speaker, but to Banneker. "No," she said. "I've got to get
away sooner or later. I'd rather go this way. It's more--it's more of a
pattern with all the rest; better than stupidly waving good-bye from the
rear of a train."

"But the danger."

"_Che sar;, sar;_," returned Io lightly. "I'll trust him to take care of
me."

While Ban went out to prepare the horses with the aid of Pedro, strictly
enjoined to secrecy, the two women got Io's few things together.

"I can't thank you," said the girl, looking up as she snapped the lock
of her case. "It simply isn't a case for thanking. You've done too much
for me."

The older woman disregarded it. "How much are you hurting Ban?" she
said, with musing eyes fixed on the dim and pure outline of the girlish
face.

"I? Hurt him?"

"Of course he won't realize it until you've gone. Then I'm afraid to
think what is coming to him."

"And I'm afraid to think what is coming to me," replied the girl, very
low.

"Ah, you!" retorted her hostess, dismissing that consideration with
contemptuous lightness. "You have plenty of compensations, plenty of
resources."

"Hasn't he?"

"Perhaps. Up to now. What will he do when he wakes up to an empty
world?"

"Write, won't he? And then the world won't be empty."

"He'll think it so. That is why I'm sorry for him."

"Won't you be sorry a little for me?" pleaded the girl. "Anyway, for the
part of me that I'm leaving here? Perhaps it's the very best of me."

Miss Van Arsdale shook her head. "Oh, no! A pleasantly vivid dream of
changed and restful things. That's all. Your waking will be only a
sentimental and perfumed regret--a sachet-powder sorrow."

"You're bitter."

"I don't want him hurt," protested the other. "Why did you come here?
What should a girl like you, feverish and sensation-loving and
artificial, see in a boy like Ban to charm you?"

"Ah, don't you understand? It's just because my world has been too
dressed up and painted and powdered that I feel the charm of--of--well,
of ease of existence. He's as easy as an animal. There's something about
him--you must have felt it--sort of impassioned sense of the gladness of
life; when he has those accesses he's like a young god, or a faun. But
he doesn't know his own power. At those times he might do anything."

She shivered a little and her lids drooped over the luster of her
dreaming eyes.

"And you want to tempt him out of this to a world where he would be a
wretched misfit," accused the older woman.

"Do I? No; I think I don't. I think I'd rather hold him in my mind as he
is here: a happy eremite; no, a restrained pagan. Oh, it's foolish to
seek definitions for him. He isn't definable. He's Ban...."

"And when you get back into the world, what will you do, I wonder?"

"I won't send for him, if that's what you mean."

"But what _will_ you do, I wonder?"

"I wonder," repeated Io somberly.




CHAPTER XIII


Silently they rode through the stir and thresh of the night, the two
women and the man. For guidance along the woods trail they must trust to
the finer sense of their horses whose heads they could not see in the
closed-in murk. A desultory spray fell upon them as the wind wrenched at
the boughs overhead, but the rain had ceased. Infinitely high,
infinitely potent sounded the imminent tumult of the invisible Powers of
the night, on whose sufferance they moved, tiny, obscure, and unharmed.
It filled all the distances.

Debouching upon the open desert, they found their range of vision
slightly expanded. They could dimly perceive each other. The horses drew
closer together. With his flash covered by his poncho, Banneker
consulted a compass and altered their course, for he wished to give the
station, to which Gardner might have returned, a wide berth. Io moved up
abreast of him as he stood, studying the needle. Had he turned the light
upward he would have seen that she was smiling. Whether he would have
interpreted that smile, whether, indeed, she could have interpreted it
herself, is doubtful.

Presently they picked up the line of telegraph poles, well beyond the
station, just the faintest suggestion of gaunt rigor against the
troubled sky, and skirted them, moving more rapidly in the confidence of
assured direction. A very gradual, diffused alleviation of the darkness
began to be felt. The clouds were thinning. Something ahead of them
hissed in a soft, full, insistent monosonance. Banneker threw up a
shadowy arm. They dismounted on the crest of a tiny desert clifflet, now
become the bank of a black current which nuzzled and nibbled into its
flanks.

Io gazed intently at the flood which was to deliver her out of the hands
of the Philistine. How far away the other bank of the newborn stream
might be, she could only guess from the vague rush in her ears. The
arroyo's water slipped ceaselessly, objectlessly away from beneath her
strained vision, smooth, suave, even, effortless, like the process of
some unhurried and mighty mechanism. Now and again a desert plant,
uprooted from its arid home, eddied joyously past her, satiated for once
of its lifelong thirst; and farther out she thought to have a glimpse of
some dead and whitish animal. But these were minor blemishes on a great,
lustrous ribbon of silken black, unrolled and re-rolled from darkness
into darkness.

"It's beckoning us," said Io, leaning to Banneker, her hand on his
shoulder.

"We must wait for more light," he answered.

"Will you trust yourself to _that_?" asked Camilla Van Arsdale, with a
gesture of fear and repulsion toward the torrent.

"Anywhere!" returned Io. There was exaltation in her voice.

"I can't understand it," cried the older woman. "How do you know what
may lie before you?"

"That is the thrill of it."

"There may be death around the first curve. It's so unknown; so secret
and lawless."

"Ah, and I'm lawless!" cried Io. "I could defy the gods on a night like
this!"

She flung her arms aloft, in a movement of sweet, wild abandon, and, as
if in response to an incantation, the sky was reft asunder and the moon
rushed forth, free for the moment of the clutching clouds, fugitive,
headlong, a shining Maenad of the heavens, surrounded by the rush and
whirl that had whelmed earth and its waters and was hurrying them to an
unknown, mad destiny.

"Now we can see our way," said Banneker, the practical.

He studied the few rods of sleek, foamless water between him and the
farther bank, and, going to the steel boat which Mindle had brought to
the place on the hand car, took brief inventory of its small cargo.
Satisfied, he turned to load in Io's few belongings. He shipped the
oars.

"I'll let her go stem-first," he explained; "so that I can see what
we're coming to and hold her if there's trouble."

"But can you see?" objected Miss Van Arsdale, directing a troubled look
at the breaking sky.

"If we can't, we'll run her ashore until we can."

He handed Io the flashlight and the map.

"You'll want me in the bow seat if we're traveling reversed," said she.

He assented. "Good sailorwoman!"

"I don't like it," protested Miss Van Arsdale. "It's a mad business.
Ban, you oughtn't to take her."

"It's too late to talk of that," said Io.

"Ready?" questioned Banneker.

"Yes."

He pushed the stern of the boat into the stream, and the current laid it
neatly and powerfully flat to the sheer bank. Io kissed Camilla Van
Arsdale quickly and got in.

"We'll wire you from Miradero," she promised. "You'll find the message
in the morning."

The woman, mastering herself with a difficult effort, held out her hand
to Banneker.

"If you won't be persuaded," she said, "then good--"

"No," he broke in quickly. "That's bad luck. We shall be all right."

"Good luck, then," returned his friend, and turned away into the night.

Banneker, with one foot in the boat, gave a little shove and caught up
his oars. An unseen hand of indeterminable might grasped the keel and
moved them quietly, evenly, outward and forward, puppets given into the
custody of the unregarding powers. Oars poised and ready, Ban sat with
his back toward his passenger, facing watchfully downstream.

Leaning back into the curve of the bow, Io gave herself up to the
pulsing sweep of the night. Far, far above her stirred a cosmic tumult.
The air might have been filled with vast wings, invisible and incessant
in the night of wonders. The moon plunged headlong through the clouds,
now submerged, now free, like a strong swimmer amidst surf. She moved to
the music of a tremendous, trumpeting note, the voice of the unleashed
Spring, male and mighty, exulting in his power, while beneath, the
responsive, desirous earth thrilled and trembled and was glad.

The boat, a tiny speck on the surface of chaos, darted and checked and
swerved lightly at the imperious bidding of unguessed forces, reaching
up from the depths to pluck at it in elfish sportiveness. Only when Ban
thrust down the oar-blades, as he did now and again to direct their
course or avoid some obstacle, was Io made sensible, through the jar and
tremor of the whole structure, how swiftly they moved. She felt the
spirit of the great motion, of which they were a minutely inconsiderable
part, enter into her soul. She was inspired of it, freed, elated,
glorified. She lifted up her voice and sang. Ban, turning, gave her one
quick look of comprehension, then once more was intent and watchful of
their master and servitor, the flood.

"Ban," she called.

He tossed an oar to indicate that he had heard.

"Come back and sit by me."

He seemed to hesitate.

"Let the boat go where it wants to! The river will take care of us. It's
a good river, and so strong! I think it loves to have us here."

Ban shook his head.

"'Let the great river bear us to the sea,'" sang Io in her fresh and
thrilling voice, stirring the uttermost fibers of his being with
delight. "Ban, can't you trust the river and the night and--and the mad
gods? I can."

Again he shook his head. In his attitude she sensed a new concentration
upon something ahead. She became aware of a strange stir that was not of
the air nor the water.

"Hush--sh--sh--sh--sh!" said something unseen, with an immense effect of
restraint and enforced quiet.

The boat slewed sharply as Banneker checked their progress with a
downthrust of oars. He edged in toward the farther bank which was quite
flat, studying it with an eye to the most favoring spot, having selected
which, he ran the stern up with several hard shoves, leapt out, hauled
the body of the craft free from the balked and snatching current, and
held out a hand to his passenger.

"What is it?" she asked as she joined him.

"I don't know. I'm trying to think where I've heard that noise before."
He pondered. "Ah, I've got it! It was when I was out on the coast in the
big rains, and a few million tons of river-bank let go all holds and
smushed down into the stream.... What's on your map?"

He bent over it, conning its detail by the light of the flash which she
turned on.

"We should be about here," he indicated, touching the paper, "I'll go
ahead and take a look."

"Shan't I go with you?"

"Better stay quiet and get all the rest you can."

He was gone some twenty minutes. "There's a big, fresh-looking split-off
in the opposite bank," he reported; "and the water looks fizzy and
whirly around there. I think we'll give her a little time to settle. A
sudden shift underneath might suck us down. The water's rising every
minute, which makes it worth while waiting. Besides, it's dark just
now."

"Do you believe in fate?" asked the girl abruptly, as he seated himself
on the sand beside her. "That's a silly, schoolgirl thing to say, isn't
it?" she added. "But I was thinking of this boat being there in the
middle of the dry desert, just when we needed it most."

"It had been there some time," pointed out Banneker. "And if we couldn't
have come this way, I'd have found some other."

"I believe you would," crowed Io softly.

"So, I don't believe in fate; not the ready-made kind. Things aren't
that easy. If I did--"

"If you did?" she prompted as he paused.

"I'd get back into the boat with you and throw away the oars."

"I dare you!" she cried recklessly.

"We'd go whirling and spinning along," he continued with dreams in his
voice, "until dawn came, and then we'd go ashore and camp."

"Where?"

"How should I know? In the Enchanted Canyon where it enters the
Mountains of Fulfillment.... They're not on this map."

"They're not on any map. More's the pity. And then?"

"Then we'd rest. And after that we'd climb to the Plateau Beyond the
Clouds where the Fadeless Gardens are, and there..."

"And there?"

"There we'd hear the Undying Voices singing."

"Should we sing, too?"

"Of course. 'For they who attain these heights, through pain of upward
toil and the rigors of abstention, are as the demigods, secure above
evil and the fear thereof.'"

"I don't know what that is, but I hate the 'upward toil' part of it, and
the 'abstention' even more. We ought to be able to become demigods
without all that, just because we wish it. In a fairy-tale, anyway. I
don't think you're a really competent fairy-tale-monger, Ban."

"You haven't let me go on to the 'live happy ever after' part," he
complained.

"Ah, that's the serpent, the lying, poisoning little serpent, always
concealed in the gardens of dreams. They don't, Ban; people don't live
happy ever after. I could believe in fairy-tales up to that point. Just
there ugly old Experience holds up her bony finger--she's a horrid hag,
Ban, but we'd all be dead or mad without her--and points to the
wriggling little snake."

"In my garden," said he, "she'd have shining wings and eyes that could
look to the future as well as to the past, and immortal Hope for a
lover. It would be worth all the toil and the privation."

"Nobody ever made up a Paradise," said the girl fretfully, "but what the
Puritan in him set the road with sharp stones and bordered it with
thorns and stings.... Look, Ban! Here's the moon come back to us.... And
see what's laughing at us and our dreams."

On the crest of a sand-billow sprawled a huge organ-cactus, brandishing
its arms in gnomish derision of their presence.

"How can one help but believe in foul spirits with that thing to prove
their existence?" she said. "And, look! There's the good spirit in front
of that shining cloud."

She pointed to a yucca in full, creamy flower; a creature of unearthly
purity in the glow of the moon, a dream-maiden beckoning at the gates of
darkness to a world of hidden and ineffable beauty.

"When I saw my first yucca in blossom," said Banneker, "it was just
before sunrise after I had been riding all night, and I came on it
around a dip in the hills, standing alone against a sky of pearl and
silver. It made me think of a ghost, the ghost of a girl who had died
too young to know womanhood, died while she was asleep and dreaming
pale, soft dreams, never to be fulfilled."

"That's the injustice of death," she answered. "To take one before one
knows and has felt and been all that there is to know and feel and be."

"Yet"--he turned a slow smile to her--"you were just now calling
Experience bad names; a horrid hag, wasn't it?"

"At least, she's life," retorted the girl.

"Yes. She's life."

"Ban, I want to go on. The whole universe is in motion. Why must we
stand still?"

They re;mbarked. The grip of the hurrying depths took them past crinkly
water, lustrously bronze in the moonlight where the bank had given way,
and presently delivered them, around the shoulder of a low,
brush-crowned bluff, into the keeping of a swollen creek. Here the going
was more tricky. There were shoals and whirls at the bends, and plunging
flotsam to be avoided. Banneker handled the boat with masterly address,
easing her through the swift passages, keeping her, with a touch here
and a dip there, to the deepest flow, swerving adroitly to dodge the
trees and brush which might have punctured the thin metal. Once he cried
out and lunged at some object with an unshipped oar. It rolled and sank,
but not before Io had caught the contour of a pasty face. She was
startled rather than horrified at this apparition of death. It seemed an
accessory proper to the pattern of the bewitched night.

Through a little, silvered surf of cross-waves, they were shot, after an
hour of this uneasy going, into the broad, clean sweep of the Little
Bowleg River. After the troubled progress of the lesser current it
seemed very quiet and secure; almost placid. But the banks slipped by in
an endless chain. Presently they came abreast of three horsemen riding
the river trail, who urged their horses into a gallop, keeping up with
them for a mile or more. As they fell away, Io waved a handkerchief at
them, to which they made response by firing a salvo from their revolvers
into the air.

"We're making better than ten miles an hour," Banneker called over his
shoulder to his passenger.

They shot between the split halves of a little, scraggly, ramshackle
town, danced in white water where the ford had been, and darted onward.
Now Banneker began to hold against the current, scanning the shores
until, with a quick wrench, he brought the stern around and ran it up on
a muddy bit of strand.

"Grub!" he announced gayly.

Languor had taken possession of Io, the languor of one who yields to
unknown and fateful forces. Passive and at peace, she wanted nothing but
to be wafted by the current to whatever far bourne might await her. That
there should be such things as railway trains and man-made schedules in
this world of winds and mystery and the voice of great waters, was hard
to believe; hardly worth believing in any case. Better not to think of
it: better to muse on her companion, building fire as the first man had
built for the first woman, to feed and comfort her in an environment of
imminent fears.

Coffee, when her man brought it, seemed too artificial for the time and
place. She shook her head. She was not hungry.

"You must," insisted Ban. He pointed downstream where the murk lay
heavy. "We shall run into more rain. You will need the warmth and
support of food."

So, because there were only they two on the face of the known earth,
woman and man, the woman obeyed the man. To her surprise, she found that
she was hungry, ardently hungry. Both ate heartily. It was a silent
meal; little spoken except about the chances and developments of the
journey, until she got to her feet. Then she said:

"I shall never, as long as I live, wherever I go, whatever I do, know
anything like this again. I shall not want to. I want it to stand
alone."

"It will stand alone," he answered.

They met the rain within half an hour, a wall-like mass of it. It
blotted out everything around them. The roar of it cut off sound, as the
mass of it cut off sight. Fortunately the boat was now going evenly as
in an oiled groove. By feeling, Io knew that her guide was moving from
his seat, and guessed that he was bailing. The spare poncho, put in by
Miss Van Arsdale, protected her. She was jubilant with the thresh of the
rain in her face, the sweet, smooth motion of the boat beneath her, the
wild abandon of the night, which, entering into her blood, had
transmuted it into soft fire.

How long she crouched, exultant and exalted, under the beat of the
storm, she could not guess. She half emerged from her possession with a
strange feeling that the little craft was being irresistibly drawn
forward and downward in what was now a suction rather than a current. At
the same time she felt the spring and thrust of Banneker's muscles,
straining at the oars. She dipped a hand into the water. It ridged high
around her wrists with a startling pressure. What was happening?

Through the uproar she could dimly hear Ban's voice. He seemed to be
swearing insanely. Dropping to her hands and knees, for the craft was
now swerving and rocking, she crept to him.

"The dam! The dam! The dam!" he shouted. "I'd forgotten about it. Go
back. Turn on the flash. Look for shore."

Against rather than into that impenetrable enmeshment of rain, the glow
dispersed itself ineffectually. Io sat, not frightened so much as
wondering. Her body ached in sympathy with the panting, racking toil of
the man at the oars, the labor of an indomitable pigmy, striving to
thwart a giant's will. Suddenly he shouted. The boat spun. Something low
and a shade blacker than the dull murk about them, with a white,
whispering ripple at its edge, loomed. The boat's prow drove into soft
mud as Banneker, all but knocking her overboard in his dash, plunged to
the land and with one powerful lift, brought boat and cargo to safety.

For a moment he leaned, gasping, against a stump. When he spoke, it was
to reproach himself bitterly.

"We must have come through the town. There's a dam below it. I'd
forgotten it. My God! If we hadn't had the luck to strike shore."

"Is it a high dam?" she asked.

"In this flood we'd be pounded to death the moment we were over. Listen!
You can hear it."

The rain had diminished a little. Above its insistence sounded a deeper,
more formidable beat and thrill.

"We must be quite close to it," she said.

"A few rods, probably. Let me have the light. I want to explore before
we start out."

Much sooner than she had expected, he was back. He groped for and took
her hand. His own was steady, but his voice shook as he said:

"Io."

"It's the first time you've called me that. Well, Ban?"

"Can you stand it to--to have me tell you something?"

"Yes."

"We're not on the shore."

"Where, then? An island?"

"There aren't any islands here. It must be a bit of the mainland cut off
by the flood."

"I'm not afraid, if that's what you mean. We can stand it until dawn."

A wavelet lapped quietly across her foot. She withdrew it and with that
involuntary act came understanding. Her hand, turning in his, pressed
close, palm cleaving to palm.

"How much longer?" she asked in a whisper.

"Not long. It's just a tiny patch. And the river is rising every
minute."

"How long?" she persisted.

"Perhaps two hours. Perhaps less. My good God! If there's any special
hell for criminal fools, I ought to go to it for bringing you to this,"
he burst out in agony.

"I brought you. Whatever there is, we'll go to it together."

"You're wonderful beyond all wonders. Aren't you afraid?"

"I don't know. It isn't so much fear, though I dread to think of that
hammering-down weight of water."

"Don't!" he cried brokenly. "I can't bear to think of you--" He lifted
his head sharply. "Isn't it lightening up? Look! Can you see shore? We
might be quite near."

She peered out, leaning forward. "No; there's nothing." Her hand turned
within his, released itself gently. "I'm not afraid," she said, speaking
clear and swift. "It isn't that. But I'm--rebellious. I hate the idea of
it, of ending everything; the unfairness of it. To have to die without
knowing the--the realness of life. Unfulfilled. It isn't fair," she
accused breathlessly. "Ban, it's what we were saying. Back there on the
river-bank where the yucca stands. I don't want to go--I can't bear to
go--before I've known ... before...."

Her arms crept to enfold him. Her lips sought his, tremulous,
surrendering, demanding in surrender. With all the passion and longing
that he had held in control, refusing to acknowledge even their
existence, as if the mere recognition of them would have blemished her,
he caught her to him. He heard her, felt her sob once. The roar of the
cataract was louder, more insistent in his ears ... or was it the rush
of the blood in his veins?... Io cried out, a desolate and hungry cry,
for he had wrenched his mouth from hers. She could feel the inner man
abruptly withdrawn, concentrated elsewhere. She opened her eyes upon an
appalling radiance wherein his face stood out clear, incredulous, then
suddenly eager and resolute.

"It's a headlight!" he cried. "A train! Look, Io! The mainland. It's
only a couple of rods away."

He slipped from her arms, ran to the boat.

"What are you going to do?" she called weakly. "Ban! You can never make
it."

"I've got to. It's our only chance."

As he spoke, he was fumbling under the seat. He brought out a coil of
rope. Throwing off poncho, coat, and waistcoat, he coiled the lengths
around his body.

"Let me swim with you," she begged.

"You're not strong enough."

"I don't care. We'd go together ... I--I can't face it alone, Ban."

"You'll have to. Or give up our only chance of life. You must, Io. If I
shouldn't get across, you may try it; the chances of the current might
help you. But not until after you're sure I haven't made it. You must
wait."

"Yes," she said submissively.

"As soon as I get to shore, I'll throw the rope across to you. Listen
for it. I'll keep throwing until it strikes where you can get it."

"I'll give you the light."

"That may help. Then you make fast under the forward seat of the boat.
Be sure it's tight."

"Yes, Ban."

"Twitch three times on the rope to let me know when you're ready and
shove out and upstream as strongly as you can."

"Can you hold it against the current?"

"I must. If I do, you'll drift around against the bank. If I don't--I'll
follow you."

"No, Ban," she implored. "Not you, too. There's no need--"

"I'll follow you," said he. "Now, Io."

He kissed her gently, stepped back, took a run and flung himself upward
and outward into the ravening current.

She saw a foaming thresh that melted into darkness....

Time seemed to have stopped for her. She waited, waited, waited in a
world wherein only Death waited with her.... Ban was now limp and
lifeless somewhere far downstream, asprawl in the swiftness, rolling a
pasty face to the sky like that grisly wayfarer who had hailed them
silently in the upper reach of the river, a messenger and prophet of
their fate. The rising waters eddied about her feet. The boat stirred
uneasily. Mechanically she drew it back from the claim of the flood. A
light blow fell upon her cheek and neck.

It was the rope.

Instantly and intensely alive, Io tautened it and felt the jerk of Ban's
signal. With expert hands she made it fast, shipped the oars, twitched
the cord thrice, and, venturing as far as she dared into the deluge,
pushed with all her force and threw herself over the stern.

The rope twanged and hummed like a gigantic bass-string. Io crawled to
the oars, felt the gunwale dip and right again, and, before she could
take a stroke, was pressed against the far bank. She clambered out and
went to Banneker, guiding herself by the light. His face, in the feeble
glow, shone, twisted in agony. He was shaking from head to foot. The
other end of the rope which had brought her to safety was knotted fast
around his waist.... So he would have followed, as he said!

Through Io's queer, inconsequent brain flitted a grotesque conjecture:
what would the newspapers make of it if she had been found, washed up on
the river-bank, and the Manzanita agent of the Atkinson and St. Philip
Railroad Company drowned and haltered by a long tether to his boat, near
by? A sensational story!...

She went to Banneker, still helplessly shaking, and put her firm, slight
hands on his shoulders.

"It's all right, Ban," she said soothingly. "We're out of it."




CHAPTER XIV


"Arrived safe" was the laconic message delivered to Miss Camilla Van
Arsdale by Banneker's substitute when, after a haggard night, she rode
over in the morning for news.

Banneker himself returned on the second noon, after much and roundabout
wayfaring. He had little to say of the night journey; nothing of the
peril escaped. Miss Welland had caught a morning train for the East. She
was none the worse for the adventurous trip. Camilla Van Arsdale, noting
his rapt expression and his absent, questing eyes, wondered what
underlay such reticence.... What had been the manner of their parting?

It had, indeed, been anti-climax. Both had been a little shy, a little
furtive. Each, perhaps feeling a mutual strain, wanted the parting over,
restlessly desiring the sedative of thought and quiet memory after that
stress. The desperate peril from which they had been saved seemed a
lesser crisis, leading from a greater and more significant one; leading
to--what? For his part Banneker was content to "breathe and wait." When
they should meet again, it would be determined. How and when the
encounter might take place, he did not trouble himself to consider. The
whole universe was moulded and set for that event. Meantime the glory
was about him; he could remember, recall, repeat, interpret....

For the hundredth time--or was it the thousandth?--he reconstructed that
last hour of theirs together in the station at Miradero, waiting for the
train. What had they said to each other? Commonplaces, mostly, and at
times with effort, as if they were making conversation. They two! After
that passionate and revealing moment between life and death on the
island. What should he have said to her? Begged her to stay? On what
basis? How could he?.... As the distant roar of the train warned them
that the time of parting was close, it was she who broke through that
strange restraint, turning upon him her old-time limpid and resolute
regard.

"Ban; promise me something."

"Anything."

"There may be a time coming for us when you won't understand."

"Understand what?"

"Me. Perhaps I shan't understand myself."

"You'll always understand yourself, Io."

"If that comes--when that comes--Ban, there's something in the book,
_our_ book, that I've left you to read."

"'The Voices'?"

"Yes. I've fastened the pages together so that you can't read it too
soon."

"When, then?"

"When I tell you ... No; not when I tell you. When--oh, when you must!
You'll read it, and afterward, when you think of me, you'll think of
that, too. Will you?"

"Yes."

"Always?"

"Always."

"No matter what happens?"

"No matter what happens."

"It's like a litany." She laughed tremulously.... "Here's the train.
Good-bye, dear."

He felt the tips of slender fingers on his temples, the light, swift
pressure of cold lips on his mouth.... While the train pulled out, she
stood on the rear platform, looking, looking. She was very still. All
motion, all expression seemed centered in the steady gaze which dwindled
away from him, became vague ... featureless ... vanished in a lurch of
the car.

Banneker, at home again, planted a garden of dreams, and lived in it,
mechanically acceptant of the outer world, resentful of any intrusion
upon that flowerful retreat. Even of Miss Van Arsdale's.

Not for days thereafter did the Hunger come. It began as a little
gnawing doubt and disappointment. It grew to a devastating, ravening
starvation of the heart, for sign or sight or word of Io Welland. It
drove him out of his withered seclusion, to seek Miss Van Arsdale, in
the hope of hearing Io's name spoken. But Miss Van Arsdale scarcely
referred to Io. She watched Banneker with unconcealed anxiety.

... Why had there been no letter?...

Appeasement came in the form of a package addressed in her handwriting.
Avidly he opened it. It was the promised Bible, mailed from New York
City. On the fly-leaf was written "I.O.W. to E.B."--nothing more. He
went through it page by page, seeking marked passages. There was none.
The doubt settled down on him again. The Hunger bit into him more
savagely.

... Why didn't she write? A word! Anything!

... Had she written Miss Van Arsdale?

At first it was intolerable that he should be driven to ask about her
from any other person; about Io, who had clasped him in the Valley of
the Shadow, whose lips had made the imminence of death seem a light
thing! The Hunger drove him to it.

Yes; Miss Van Arsdale had heard. Io Welland was in New York, and well.
That was all. But Banneker felt an undermining reserve.

Long days of changeless sunlight on the desert, an intolerable glare.
From the doorway of the lonely station Banneker stared out over leagues
of sand and cactus, arid, sterile, hopeless, promiseless. Life was like
that. Four weeks now since Io had left him. And still, except for the
Bible, no word from her. No sign. Silence.

Why that? Anything but that! It was too unbearable to his helpless
masculine need of her. He could not understand it. He could not
understand anything. Except the Hunger. That he understood well enough
now....

At two o'clock of a savagely haunted night, Banneker staggered from his
cot. For weeks he had not known sleep otherwise than in fitful passages.
His brain was hot and blank. Although the room was pitch-dark, he
crossed it unerringly to a shelf and look down his revolver. Slipping on
overcoat and shoes, he dropped the weapon into his pocket and set out up
the railroad track. A half-mile he covered before turning into the
desert. There he wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, and after that
groped his way, guarding with a stick against the surrounding threat of
the cactus, for his eyes were tight closed. Still blind, he drew out the
pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and threw it, whirling high and far,
into the trackless waste. He passed on, feeling his uncertain way
patiently.

It took him a quarter of an hour to find the railroad track and set a
sure course for home, so effectually had he lost himself.... No chance
of his recovering that old friend. It had been whispering to him, in the
blackness of empty nights, counsels that were too persuasive.

Back in his room over the station he lighted the lamp and stood before
the few books which he kept with him there; among them Io's Bible and
"The Undying Voices," with the two pages still joined as her fingers had
left them. He was summoning his courage to face what might be the final
solution. When he must, she had said, he was to open and read. Well ...
he must. He could bear it no longer, the wordless uncertainty. He lifted
down the volume, gently parted the fastened pages and read. From out the
still, ordered lines, there rose to him the passionate cry of protest
and bereavement:

"............................Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of my
door Of individual life I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my
hand Serenely in the sunshine as before, Without the sense of that which
I forbore--Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part
us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double. What I do And
what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And
when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine And sees within
my eyes the tears of two."

Over and over he read it with increasing bewilderment, with increasing
fear, with slow-developing comprehension. If that was to be her farewell
... but why! Io, the straightforward, the intrepid, the exponent of fair
play and the rules of the game!... Had it been only a game? No; at least
he knew better than that.

What could it all mean? Why that medium for her message? Should he write
and ask her? But what was there to ask or say, in the face of her
silence? Besides, he had not even her address. Miss Camilla could
doubtless give him that. But would she? How much did she understand? Why
had she turned so unhelpful?

Banneker sat with his problem half through a searing night; and the
other half of the night he spent in writing. But not to Io.

At noon Camilla Van Arsdale rode up to the station.

"Are you ill, Ban?" was her greeting, as soon as she saw his face.

"No, Miss Camilla. I'm going away."

She nodded, confirming not so much what he said as a fulfilled suspicion
of her own. "New York is a very big city," she said.

"I haven't said that I was going to New York."

"No; there is much you haven't said."

"I haven't felt much like talking. Even to you."

"Don't go, Ban."

"I've got to. I've got to get away from here."

"And your position with the railroad?"

"I've resigned. It's all arranged." He pointed to the pile of letters,
his night's work.

"What are you going to do?"

"How do I know! I beg your pardon, Miss Camilla. Write, I suppose."

"Write here."

"There's nothing to write about."

The exile, who had spent her years weaving exquisite music from the
rhythm of desert winds and the overtones of the forest silence, looked
about her, over the long, yellow-gray stretches pricked out with hints
of brightness, to the peaceful refuge of the pines, and again to the
naked and impudent meanness of the town. Across to her ears, borne on
the air heavy with rain still unshed, came the rollicking, ragging
jangle of the piano at the Sick Coyote.

"Aren't there people to write about there?" she said. "Tragedies and
comedies and the human drama? Barrie found it in a duller place."

"Not until he had seen the world first," he retorted quickly. "And I'm
not a Barrie.... I can't stay here, Miss Camilla."

"Poor Ban! Youth is always expecting life to fulfill itself. It
doesn't."

"No; it doesn't--unless you make it."

"And how will you make it?"

"I'm going to get on a newspaper."

"It isn't so easy as all that, Ban."

"I've been writing."

In the joyous flush of energy, evoked under the spell of Io's
enchantment, he had filled his spare hours with work, happy, exuberant,
overflowing with a quaint vitality. A description of the desert in
spate, thumb-nail sketches from a station-agent's window, queer little
flavorous stories of crime and adventure and petty intrigue in the town;
all done with a deftness and brevity that was saved from being too
abrupt only by broad touches of color and light. And he had had a
letter. He told Miss Van Arsdale of it.

"Oh, if you've a promise, or even a fair expectation of a place. But,
Ban, I wouldn't go to New York, anyway."

"Why not?"

"It's no use."

His strong eyebrows went up. "Use?"

"You won't find her there."

"She's not in New York?"

"No."

"You've heard from her, then? Where is she?"

"Gone abroad."

Upon that he meditated. "She'll come back, though."

"Not to you."

He waited, silent, attentive, incredulous.

"Ban; she's married."

"Married!"

The telegraph instrument clicked in the tiny rhythm of an elfin
bass-drum. "O.S. O.S." Click. Click. Click-click-click. Mechanically
responsive to his office he answered, and for a moment was concerned
with some message about a local freight. When he raised his face again,
Miss Van Arsdale read there a sick and floundering skepticism.

"Married!" he repeated. "Io! She couldn't."

The woman, startled by the conviction in his tone, wondered how much
that might imply.

"She wrote me," said she presently.

"That she was married?"

"That she would be by the time the letter reached me."

("You will think me a fool," the girl had written impetuously, "and
perhaps a cruel fool. But it is the wise thing, really. Del Eyre is so
safe! He is safety itself for a girl like me. And I have discovered that
I can't wholly trust myself.... Be gentle with him, and make him do
something worth while.")

"Ah!" said Ban. "But that--"

"And I have the newspaper since with an account of the wedding.... Ban!
Don't look like that!"

"Like what?" said he stupidly.

"You look like Pretty Willie as I saw him when he was working himself up
for the killing." Pretty Willie was the soft-eyed young desperado who
had cleaned out the Sick Coyote.

"Oh, I'm not going to kill anybody," he said with a touch of grim
amusement for her fears. "Not even myself." He rose and went to the
door. "Do you mind, Miss Camilla?" he added appealingly.

"You want me to leave you now?"

He nodded. "I've got to think."

"When would you leave, Ban, if you do go?"

"I don't know."

On the following morning he went, after a night spent in arranging,
destroying, and burning. The last thing to go into the stove, 67 S 4230,
was a lock of hair, once glossy, but now stiffened and stained a dull
brown, which he had cut from the wound on Io's head that first, strange
night of theirs, the stain of her blood that had beaten in her heart,
and given life to the sure, sweet motion of her limbs, and flushed in
her cheeks, and pulsed in the warm lips that she had pressed to his--Why
could they not have died together on their dissolving island, with the
night about them, and their last, failing sentience for each other!

The flame of the greedy stove licked up the memento, but not the memory.

"You must not worry about me," he wrote in the note left with his
successor for Miss Van Arsdale. "I shall be all right. I am going to
succeed."




PART II

THE VISION




CHAPTER I


Mrs. Brashear's rooming-house on Grove Street wore its air of
respectability like a garment, clean and somber, in an environment of
careful behavior. Greenwich Village, not having fully awakened to the
commercial advantages of being a _locale_, had not yet stretched between
itself and the rest of New York that gauzy and iridescent curtain of
sprightly impropriety and sparkling intellectual naughtiness, since
faded to a lather tawdry pattern. An early pioneer of the Villager type,
emancipated of thought and speech, chancing upon No. 11 Grove, would
have despised it for its lack of atmosphere and its patent conservatism.
It did not go out into the highways and byways, seeking prospective
lodgers. It folded its hands and waited placidly for them to come. When
they came, it pondered them with care, catechized them tactfully, and
either rejected them with courteous finality or admitted them on
probation. Had it been given to self-exploitation, it could have boasted
that never had it harbored a bug or a scandal within its doors.

Now, on this filmy-soft April day it was nonplussed. A type new to its
experience was applying for a room, and Mrs. Brashear, who was not only
the proprietress, but, as it were, the familiar spirit and incarnation
of the institution, sat peering near-sightedly and in some perturbation
of soul at the phenomenon. He was young, which was against him, and of a
winning directness of manner, which was in his favor, and extremely good
to look at, which was potential of complications, and encased in
clothing of an uncompromising cut and neutral pattern (to wit; No. 45 T
370, "an ideal style for a young business man of affairs; neat,
impressive and dignified"), which was reassuring.

"My name is Banneker," he had said, immediately the door was opened to
him. "Can I get a room here?"

"There is a room vacant," admitted the spirit of the house unwillingly.

"I'd like to see it."

As he spoke, he was mounting the stairs; she must, perforce, follow. On
the third floor she passed him and led the way to a small, morosely
papered front room, almost glaringly clean.

"All right, if I can have a work-table in it and if it isn't too much,"
he said, after one comprehensive glance around.

"The price is five dollars a week."

Had Banneker but known it, this was rather high. The Brashear
rooming-house charged for its cleanliness, physical and moral. "Can I
move in at once?" he inquired.

"I don't know you nor anything about you, Mr. Banneker," she replied,
but not until they had descended the stairs and were in the cool, dim
parlor. At the moment of speaking, she raised a shade, as if to help in
the determination.

"Is that necessary? They didn't ask me when I registered at the hotel."

Mrs. Brashear stared, then smiled. "A hotel is different. Where are you
stopping?"

"At the St. Denis."

"A very nice place. Who directed you here?"

"No one. I strolled around until I found a street I liked, and looked
around until I found a house I liked. The card in the window--"

"Of course. Well, Mr. Banneker, for the protection of the house I must
have references."

"References? You mean letters from people?"

"Not necessarily. Just a name or two from whom I can make inquiries. You
have friends, I suppose."

"No."

"Your family--"

"I haven't any."

"Then the people in the place where you work. What is your business, by
the way?"

"I expect to go on a newspaper."

"Expect?" Mrs. Brashear stiffened in defense of the institution. "You
have no place yet?"

He answered not her question, but her doubt. "As far as that is
concerned, I'll pay in advance."

"It isn't the financial consideration," she began loftily--"alone," she
added more honestly. "But to take in a total stranger--"

Banneker leaned forward to her. "See here, Mrs. Brashear; there's
nothing wrong about me. I don't get drunk. I don't smoke in bed. I'm
decent of habit and I'm clean. I've got money enough to carry me.
Couldn't you take me on my say-so? Look me over."

Though it was delivered with entire gravity, the speech provoked a tired
and struggling smile on the landlady's plain features. She looked.

"Well?" he queried pleasantly. "What do you think? Will you take a
chance?"

That suppressed motherliness which, embodying the unformulated desire to
look after and care for others, turns so many widows to taking lodgers,
found voice in Mrs. Brashear's reply:

"You've had a spell of sickness, haven't you?"

"No," he said, a little sharply. "Where did you get that idea?"

"Your eyes look hot."

"I haven't been sleeping very well. That's all."

"Too bad. You've had a loss, maybe," she ventured sympathetically.

"A loss? No.... Yes. You might call it a loss. You'll take me, then?"

"You can move in right away," said Mrs. Brashear recklessly.

So the Brashear rooming-house took into its carefully guarded interior
the young and unknown Mr. Banneker--who had not been sleeping well. Nor
did he seem to be sleeping well in his new quarters, since his light was
to be seen glowing out upon the quiet street until long after midnight;
yet he was usually up betimes, often even before the moving spirit of
the house, herself. A full week had he been there before his fellow
lodgers, self-constituted into a Committee on Membership, took his case
under consideration in full session upon the front steps. None had had
speech with him, but it was known that he kept irregular hours.

"What's his job: that's what I'd like to know," demanded in a tone of
challenge, young Wickert, a man of the world who clerked in the
decorative department of a near-by emporium.

"Newsboy, I guess," said Lambert, the belated art-student of thirty-odd
with a grin. "He's always got his arms full of papers when he comes in."

"And he sits at his table clipping pieces out of them and arranging them
in piles," volunteered little Mrs. Bolles, the trained nurse on the top
floor. "I've seen him as I go past."

"Help-wanted ads," suggested Wickert, who had suffered experience in
that will-o'-the-wisp chase.

"Then he hasn't got a job," deduced Mr. Hainer, a heavy man of heavy
voice and heavy manner, middle-aged, a small-salaried accountant.

"Maybe he's got money," suggested Lambert.

"Or maybe he's a dead beat; he looks on the queer," opined young
Wickert.

"He has a very fine and sensitive face. I think he has been ill." The
opinion came from a thin, quietly dressed woman of the early worn-out
period of life, who sat a little apart from the others. Young Wickert
started a sniff, but suppressed it, for Miss Westlake was held locally
in some degree of respect, as being "well-connected" and having
relatives who called on her in their own limousines, though seldom.

"Anybody know his name?" asked Lambert.

"Barnacle," said young Wickert wittily. "Something like that, anyway.
Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he's some sort of a Swede."

"Well, I only hope he doesn't clear out some night with his trunk on his
back and leave poor Mrs. Brashear to whistle," declared Mrs. Bolles
piously.

The worn face of the landlady, with its air of dispirited motherliness,
appeared in the doorway. "Mr. Banneker is a _gentleman_," she said.

"Gentleman" from Mrs. Brashear, with that intonation, meant one who, out
of or in a job, paid his room rent. The new lodger had earned the title
by paying his month in advance. Having settled that point, she withdrew,
followed by the two other women. Lambert, taking a floppy hat from the
walnut rack in the hall, went his way, leaving young Wickert and Mr.
Hainer to support the discussion, which they did in tones less discreet
than the darkness warranted.

"Where would he hail from, would you think?" queried the elder. "Iowa,
maybe? Or Arkansas?"

"Search me," answered young Wickert. "But it was a small-town carpenter
built those honest-to-Gawd clothes. I'd say the corn-belt."

"Dressed up for the monthly meeting of the Farmers' Alliance, all but
the oil on his hair. He forgot that," chuckled the accountant.

"He's got a fine chance in Nuh Yawk--of buying a gold brick cheap,"
prophesied the worldly Wickert out of the depths of his metropolitan
experience. "Somebody ought to put him onto himself."

A voice from the darkened window above said, with composure, "That will
be all right. I'll apply to you for advice."

"Oh, Gee!" whispered young Wickert, in appeal to his companion. "How
long's he been there?"

Acute hearing, it appeared, was an attribute of the man above, for he
answered at once:

"Just put my head out for a breath of air when I heard your kind
expressions of solicitude. Why? Did I miss something that came earlier?"

Mr. Hainer melted unostentatiously into the darkness. While young
Wickert was debating whether his pride would allow him to follow this
prudent example, the subject of their over-frank discussion appeared at
his elbow. Evidently he was as light of foot as he was quick of ear.
Meditating briefly upon these physical qualities, young Wickert said, in
a deprecatory tone:

"We didn't mean to get fresh with you. It was just talk."

"Very interesting talk."

Wickert produced a suspiciously jeweled case. "Have a cigarette?"

"I have some of my own, thank you."

"Give you a light?"

The metropolitan worldling struck a match and held it up. This was on
the order of strategy. He wished to see Banneker's face. To his relief
it did not look angry or even stern. Rather, it appeared thoughtful.
Banneker was considering impartially the matter of his apparel.

"What is the matter with my clothes?" he asked.

"Why--well," began Wickert, unhappy and fumbling with his ideas; "Oh,
_they_'re all right."

"For a meeting of the Farmers' Alliance." Banneker was smiling
good-naturedly. "But for the East?"

"Well, if you really want to know," began Wickert doubtfully. "If you
won't get sore--" Banneker nodded his assurance. "Well, they're jay. No
style. No snap. Respectable, and that lets 'em out."

"They don't look as if they were made in New York or for New York?"

Young Mr. Wickert apportioned his voice equitably between a laugh and a
snort. "No: nor in Hoboken!" he retorted. "Listen, 'bo," he added, after
a moment's thought. "You got to have a smooth shell in Nuh Yawk. The
human eye only sees the surface. Get me? And it judges by the surface."
He smoothed his hands down his dapper trunk with ineffable complacency.
"Thirty-eight dollars, this. Bernholz Brothers, around on Broadway. Look
it over. That's a cut!"

"Is that how they're making them in the East?" doubtfully asked the
neophyte, reflecting that the pinched-in snugness of the coat, and the
flare effect of the skirts, while unquestionably more impressive than
his own box-like garb, still lacked something of the quiet distinction
which he recalled in the clothes of Herbert Cressey. The thought of that
willing messenger set him to groping for another sartorial name. He
hardly heard Wickert say proudly:

"If Bernholz's makes 'em that way, you can bet it's up to the
split-second of date, and _maybe_ they beat the pistol by a jump. I
bluffed for a raise of five dollars, on the strength of this outfit, and
got it off the bat. There's the suit paid for in two months and a pair
of shoes over." He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed
trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre
fretwork. "Like me to take you around to Bernholz's?"

Banneker shook his head. The name for which he sought had come to him.
"Did you ever hear of Mertoun, somewhere on Fifth Avenue?"

"Yes. And I've seen Central Park and the Statue of Liberty," railed the
other. "Thinkin' of patternizing Mertoun, was you?"

"Yes, I'd like to."

"Like to! There's a party at the Astorbilt's to-morrow night; you'd
_like_ to go to that, wouldn't you? Fat chance!" said the disdainful and
seasoned cit. "D'you know what Mertoun would do to you? Set you back a
hundred simoleons soon as look at you. And at that you got to have a
letter of introduction like gettin' in to see the President of the
United States or John D. Rockefeller. Come off, my boy! Bernholz's 'll
fix you just as good, all but the label. Better come around to-morrow."

"Much obliged, but I'm not buying yet. Where would you say a fellow
would have a chance to see the best-dressed men?"

Young Mr. Wickert looked at once self-conscious and a trifle miffed, for
in his own set he was regarded as quite the mould of fashion. "Oh, well,
if you want to pipe off the guys that _think_ they're the whole thing,
walk up the Avenue and watch the doors of the clubs and the swell
restaurants. At that, they haven't got anything on some fellows that
don't spend a quarter of the money, but know what's what and don't let
grafters like Mertoun pull their legs," said he. "Say, you seem to know
what you want, all right, all right," he added enviously. "You ain't
goin' to let this little old town bluff you; ay?"

"No. Not for lack of a few clothes. Good-night," replied Banneker,
leaving in young Wickert's mind the impression that he was "a queer
gink," but also, on the whole, "a good guy." For the worldling was only
small, not mean of spirit.

Banneker might have added that one who had once known cities and the
hearts of men from the viewpoint of that modern incarnation of Ulysses,
the hobo, contemptuous and predatory, was little likely to be overawed
by the most teeming and headlong of human ant-heaps. Having joined the
ant-heap, Banneker was shrewdly concerned with the problem of conforming
to the best type of termite discoverable. The gibes of the doorstep
chatterers had not aroused any new ambition; they had merely given point
to a purpose deferred because of other and more immediate pressure.
Already he had received from Camilla Van Arsdale a letter rich in
suggestion, hint, and subtly indicated advice, with this one passage of
frank counsel:

If I were writing, spinster-aunt-wise, to any one else in your position,
I should be tempted to moralize and issue warnings about--well, about
the things of the spirit. But you are equipped, there. Like the
"Master," you will "go your own way with inevitable motion." With the
outer man--that is different. You have never given much thought to that
phase. And you have an asset in your personal appearance. I should not
be telling you this if I thought there were danger of your becoming
vain. But I really think it would be a good investment for you to put
yourself into the hands of a first-class tailor, and follow his advice,
in moderation, of course. Get the sense of being fittingly turned out by
going where there are well-dressed people; to the opera, perhaps, and
the theater occasionally, and, when you can afford it, to a good
restaurant. Unless the world has changed, people will look at you. _But
you must not know it_. Important, this is!... I could, of course, give
you letters of introduction. "_Les morts vont vite_," it is true, and I
am dead to that world, not wholly without the longings of a would-be
_revenant_; but a ghost may still claim some privileges of memory, and
my friends would be hospitable to you. Only, I strongly suspect that you
would not use the letters if I gave them. You prefer to make your own
start; isn't it so? Well; I have written to a few. Sooner or later you
will meet with them. Those things always happen even in New York.... Be
sure to write me all about the job when you get it--

Prudence dictated that he should be earning something before he invested
in expensive apparel, be it never so desirable and important. However,
he would outfit himself just as soon as a regular earning capacity
justified his going into his carefully husbanded but dwindling savings.
He pictured himself clad as a lily of the field, unconscious of
perfection as Herbert Cressey himself, in the public haunts of fashion
and ease; through which vision there rose the searing prospect of thus
encountering Io Welland. What was her married name? He had not even
asked when the news was broken to him; had not wanted to ask; was done
with all that for all time.

He was still pathetically young and inexperienced. And he had been badly
hurt.




CHAPTER II


Dust was the conspicuous attribute of the place. It lay, flat and
toneless, upon the desk, the chairs, the floor; it streaked the walls.
The semi-consumptive office "boy's" middle-aged shoulders collected it.
It stirred in the wake of quiet-moving men, mostly under thirty-five,
who entered the outer door, passed through the waiting-room, and
disappeared behind a partition. Banneker felt like shaking himself lest
he should be eventually buried under its impalpable sifting. Two hours
and a half had passed since he had sent in his name on a slip of paper,
to Mr. Gordon, managing editor of the paper. On the way across Park Row
he had all but been persuaded by a lightning printer on the curb to have
a dozen tasty and elegant visiting-cards struck off, for a quarter; but
some vague inhibition of good taste checked him. Now he wondered if a
card would have served better.

While he waited, he checked up the actuality of a metropolitan newspaper
entrance-room, as contrasted with his notion of it, derived from motion
pictures. Here was none of the bustle and hurry of the screen. No brisk
and earnest young figures with tense eyes and protruding notebooks
darted feverishly in and out; nor, in the course of his long wait, had
he seen so much as one specimen of that invariable concomitant of all
screen journalism, the long-haired poet with his flowing tie and neatly
ribboned manuscript. Even the office "boy," lethargic, neutrally polite,
busy writing on half-sheets of paper, was profoundly untrue to the
pictured type. Banneker wondered what the managing editor would be like;
would almost, in the wreckage of his preconceived notions, have accepted
a woman or a priest in that manifestation, when Mr. Gordon appeared and
was addressed by name by the hollow-chested Cerberus. Banneker at once
echoed the name, rising.

The managing editor, a tall, heavy man, whose smoothly fitting cutaway
coat seemed miraculously to have escaped the plague of dust, stared at
him above heavy glasses.

"You want to see me?"

"Yes. I sent in my name."

"Did you? When?"

"At two-forty-seven, thirty," replied the visitor with railroad
accuracy.

The look above the lowered glasses became slightly quizzical. "You're
exact, at least. Patient, too. Good qualities for a newspaper man.
That's what you are?"

"What I'm going to be," amended Banneker.

"There is no opening here at present."

"That's formula, isn't it?" asked the young man, smiling.

The other stared. "It is. But how do you know?"

"It's the tone, I suppose. I've had to use it a good deal myself, in
railroading."

"Observant, as well as exact and patient. Come in. I'm sorry I misplaced
your card. The name is--?"

"Banneker, E. Banneker."

Following the editor, he passed through a large, low-ceilinged room,
filled with desk-tables, each bearing a heavy crystal ink-well full of a
fluid of particularly virulent purple. A short figure, impassive as a
Mongol, sat at a corner desk, gazing out over City Hall Park with a rapt
gaze. Across from him a curiously trim and graceful man, with a strong
touch of the Hibernian in his elongated jaw and humorous gray eyes,
clipped the early evening editions with an effect of highly judicious
selection. Only one person sat in all the long files of the work-tables,
littered with copy-paper and disarranged newspapers; a dark young giant
with the discouraged and hurt look of a boy kept in after school. All
this Banneker took in while the managing editor was disposing, usually
with a single penciled word or number, of a sheaf of telegraphic
"queries" left upon his desk. Having finished, he swiveled in his chair,
to face Banneker, and, as he spoke, kept bouncing the thin point of a
letter-opener from the knuckles of his left hand. His hands were fat and
nervous.

"So you want to do newspaper work?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I think I can make a go of it."

"Any experience?"

"None to speak of. I've written a few things. I thought you might
remember my name."

"Your name? Banneker? No. Why should I?"

"You published some of my things in the Sunday edition, lately. From
Manzanita, California."

"No. I don't think so. Mr. Homans." A graying man with the gait of a
marionnette and the precise expression of a rocking-horse, who had just
entered, crossed over. "Have we sent out any checks to a Mr. Banneker
recently, in California?"

The new arrival, who was copy-reader and editorial selecter for the
Sunday edition, repeated the name in just such a wooden voice as was to
be expected. "No," he said positively.

"But I've cashed the checks," returned Banneker, annoyed and bewildered.
"And I've seen the clipping of the article in the Sunday Sphere of--"

"Just a moment. You're not in The Sphere office. Did you think you were?
Some one has directed you wrong. This is The Ledger."

"Oh!" said Banneker. "It was a policeman that pointed it out. I suppose
I saw wrong." He paused; then looked up ingenuously. "But, anyway, I'd
rather be on The Ledger."

Mr. Gordon smiled broadly, the thin blade poised over a plump, reddened
knuckle.

"Would you! Now, why?"

"I've been reading it. I like the way it does things."

The editor laughed outright. "If you didn't look so honest, I would
think that somebody of experience had been tutoring you. How many other
places have you tried?"

"None."

"You were going to The Sphere first? On the promise of a job?"

"No. Because they printed what I wrote."

"The Sphere's ways are not our ways," pronounced Mr. Gordon primly.
"It's a fundamental difference in standards."

"I can see that."

"Oh, you can, can you?" chuckled the other. "But it's true that we have
no opening here."

(The Ledger never did have an "opening"; but it managed to wedge in a
goodly number of neophytes, from year to year, ninety per cent of whom
were automatically and courteously ejected after due trial. Mr. Gordon
performed a surpassing rataplan upon his long-suffering thumb-joint and
wondered if this queer and direct being might qualify among the
redeemable ten per cent.)

"I can wait." (They often said that.) "For a while," added the youth
thoughtfully.

"How long have you been in New York?"

"Thirty-three days."

"And what have you been doing?"

"Reading newspapers."

"No! Reading--That's rather surprising. All of them?"

"All that I could manage."

"Some were so bad that you couldn't worry through them, eh?" asked the
other with appreciation.

"Not that. But I didn't know the foreign languages except French, and
Spanish, and a little Italian."

"The foreign-language press, too. Remarkable!" murmured the other. "Do
you mind telling me what your idea was?"

"It was simple enough. As I wanted to get on a newspaper, I thought I
ought to find out what newspapers were made of."

"Simple, as you say. Beautifully simple! So you've devised for yourself
the little job of perfecting yourself in every department of journalism;
politics, finances, criminal, sports, society; all of them, eh?"

"No; not all," replied Banneker.

"Not? What have you left out?"

"Society news" was the answer, delivered less promptly than the other
replies.

Bestowing a twinkle of mingled amusement and conjecture upon the
applicant's clothing, Mr. Gordon said:

"You don't approve of our social records? Or you're not interested? Or
why is it that you neglect this popular branch?"

"Personal reasons."

This reply, which took the managing editor somewhat aback, was accurate
if not explanatory. Miss Van Arsdale's commentaries upon Gardner and his
quest had inspired Banneker with a contemptuous distaste for this type
of journalism. But chiefly he had shunned the society columns from dread
of finding there some mention of her who had been Io Welland. He was
resolved to conquer and evict that memory; he would not consciously put
himself in the way of anything that recalled it.

"Hum! And this notion of making an intensive study of the papers; was
that original with you?"

"Well, no, not entirely. I got it from a man who made himself a bank
president in seven years."

"Yes? How did he do that?"

"He started by reading everything he could find about money and coinage
and stocks and bonds and other financial paper. He told me that it was
incredible the things that financial experts didn't know about their own
business--the deep-down things--and that he guessed it was so with any
business. He got on top by really knowing the things that everybody was
supposed to know."

"A sound theory, I dare say. Most financiers aren't so revealing."

"He and I were padding the hoof together. We were both hoboes then."

The managing editor looked up, alert, from his knuckle-tapping. "From
bank president to hobo. Was his bank an important one?"

"The biggest in a medium-sized city."

"And does that suggest nothing to you, as a prospective newspaper man?"

"What? Write him up?"

"It would make a fairly sensational story."

"I couldn't do that. He was my friend. He wouldn't like it."

Mr. Gordon addressed his wedding-ring finger which was looking a bit
scarified. "Such an article as that, properly done, would go a long way
toward getting you a chance on this paper--Sit down, Mr. Banneker."

"You and I," said Banneker slowly and in the manner of the West, "can't
deal."

"Yes, we can." The managing editor threw his steel blade on the desk.
"Sit down, I tell you. And understand this. If you come on this
paper--I'm going to turn you over to Mr. Greenough, the city editor,
with a request that he give you a trial--you'll be expected to
subordinate every personal interest and advantage to the interests and
advantages of the paper, _except_ your sense of honor and fair-play. We
don't ask you to give that up; and if you do give it up, we don't want
you at all. What have you done besides be a hobo?"

"Railroading. Station-agent."

"Where were you educated?"

"Nowhere. Wherever I could pick it up."

"Which means everywhere. Ever read George Borrow?"

"Yes."

The heavy face of Mr. Gordon lighted up. "Ree-markable! Keep on. He's a
good offset to--to the daily papers. Writing still counts, on The
Ledger. Come over and meet Mr. Greenough."

The city editor unobtrusively studied Banneker out of placid,
inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about
theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the
Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the
technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found
himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off
and directions to report on the first of the month.

As the day-desk staff was about departing at six o'clock, Mr. Gordon
sauntered over to the city desk looking mildly apologetic.

"I practically had to take that young desert antelope on," said he.

"Too ingenuous to turn down," surmised the city editor.

"Ingenuous! He's heir to the wisdom of the ages. And now I'm afraid I've
made a ghastly mistake."

"Something wrong with him?"

"I've had his stuff in the Sunday Sphere looked up."

"Pretty weird?" put in Mallory, gliding into his beautifully fitting
overcoat.

"So damned good that I don't see how The Sphere ever came to take it.
Greenough, you'll have to find some pretext for firing that young
phenomenon as soon as possible."

Perfectly comprehending his superior's mode of indirect expression the
city editor replied:

"You think so highly of him as that?"

"Not one of our jobs will be safe from him if he once gets his foot
planted," prophesied the other with mock ruefulness. "Do you know," he
added, "I never even asked him for a reference."

"You don't need to," pronounced Mallory, shaking the last wrinkle out of
himself and lighting the cigarette of departure. "He's got it in his
face, if I'm any judge."

Highly elate, Banneker walked on springy pavements all the way to Grove
Street. Fifteen a week! He could live on that. His other income and
savings could be devoted to carrying out Miss Camilla's advice. For he
need not save any more. He would go ahead, fast, now that he had got his
start. How easy it had been.

Entering the Brashear door, he met plain, middle-aged little Miss
Westlake. A muffler was pressed to her jaw. He recalled having heard her
moving about her room, the cheapest and least desirable in the house,
and groaning softly late in the night; also having heard some lodgers
say that she was a typist with very little work. Obviously she needed a
dentist, and presumably she had not the money to pay his fee. In the
exultation of his good luck, Banneker felt a stir of helpfulness toward
this helpless person.

"Oh!" said he. "How do you do! Could you find time to do some typing for
me quite soon?"

It was said impulsively and was followed by a surge of dismay. Typing?
Type what? He had absolutely nothing on hand!

Well, he must get up something. At once. It would never do to disappoint
that pathetic and eager hope, as of a last-moment rescue, expressed in
the little spinster's quick flush and breathless, thankful affirmative.




CHAPTER III


Ten days' leeway before entering upon the new work. To which of scores
of crowding purposes could Banneker best put the time? In his offhand
way the instructive Mallory had suggested that he familiarize himself
with the topography and travel-routes of the Island of Manhattan.
Indefatigably he set about doing this; wandering from water-front to
water-front, invading tenements, eating at queer, Englishless
restaurants, picking up chance acquaintance with chauffeurs, peddlers,
street-fakers, park-bench loiterers; all that drifting and iridescent
scum of life which variegates the surface above the depths. Everywhere
he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had
given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men
and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration
of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger
was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set
down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but
destined to future uses. Mallory, himself no mean connoisseur of the
tumultuous and flagrant city, would perhaps have found matter foreign to
his expert apprehension could he have seen and translated the pages of 3
T 9901.

Banneker would go forward in the fascinating paths of exploration; but
there were other considerations.

The outer man, for example. The inner man, too; the conscious inner man
strengthened upon the strong milk of the philosophers, the priests, and
the prophets so strangely mingled in that library now stored with
Camilla Van Arsdale; exhilarated by the honey-dew of "The Undying
Voices," of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne's supernal rhythms,
which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite
appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there,
hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke
for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even
laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such
side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like
irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing for the body?

Watch the clubs, young Wickert had advised. Banneker strolled up Fifth
Avenue, branching off here and there, into the more promising side
streets.

It was the hour of the First Thirst; the institutions which cater to
this and subsequent thirsts drew steadily from the main stream of human
activity flowing past. Many gloriously clad specimens passed in and out
of the portals, socially sacred as in the quiet Fifth Avenue clubs,
profane as in the roaring, taxi-bordered "athletic" foundations; but
there seemed to the anxious observer no keynote, no homogeneous
character wherefrom to build as on a sure foundation. Lacking knowledge,
his instinct could find no starting-point; he was bewildered in vision
and in mind. Just off the corner of the quietest of the Forties, he met
a group of four young men, walking compactly by twos. The one nearest
him in the second line was Herbert Cressey. His heavy and rather dull
eye seemed to meet Banneker's as they came abreast. Banneker nodded,
half checking himself in his slow walk.

"How are you?" he said with an accent of surprise and pleasure.

Cressey's expressionless face turned a little. There was no response in
kind to Banneker's smile.

"Oh! H'ware you!" said he vaguely, and passed on.

Banneker advanced mechanically until he reached the corner. There he
stopped. His color had heightened. The smile was still on his lips; it
had altered, taken on a quality of gameness. He did not shake his fist
at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous
Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a
lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac's threat in his own terms.

"I reckon I'll have to lick this town and lick it good before it learns
to be friendly."

A hand fell on his arm. He turned to face Cressey.

"You're the feller that bossed the wreck out there in the desert, aren't
you? You're--lessee--Banneker."

"I am." The tone was curt.

"Awfully sorry I didn't spot you at once." Cressey's genuineness was a
sufficient apology. "I'm a little stuffy to-day. Bachelor dinner last
night. What are you doing here? Looking around?"

"No. I'm living here."

"That so? So am I. Come into my club and let's talk. I'm glad to see
you, Mr. Banneker."

Even had Banneker been prone to self-consciousness, which he was not,
the extreme, almost monastic plainness of the small, neutral-fronted
building to which the other led him would have set him at ease. It gave
no inkling of its unique exclusiveness, and equally unique
expensiveness. As for Cressey, that simple, direct, and confident soul
took not the smallest account of Banneker's standardized clothing, which
made him almost as conspicuous in that environment as if he had entered
clad in a wooden packing-case. Cressey's creed in such matters was
complete; any friend of his was good enough for any environment to which
he might introduce him, and any other friend who took exceptions might
go farther!

"Banzai!" said the cheerful host over his cocktail. "Welcome to our
city. Hope you like it."

"I do," said Banneker, lifting his glass in response.

"Where are you living?"

"Grove Street."

Cressey knit his brows. "Where's that? Harlem?"

"No. Over west of Sixth Avenue."

"Queer kind of place to live, ain't it? There's a corkin' little suite
vacant over at the Regalton. Cheap at the money. Oh!-er-I-er-maybe--"

"Yes; that's it," smiled Banneker. "The treasury isn't up to bachelor
suites, yet awhile. I've only just got a job."

"What is it?"

"Newspaper work. The Morning Ledger."

"Reporting?" A dubious expression clouded the candid cheerfulness of the
other's face.

"Yes. What's the matter with that?"

"Oh; I dunno. It's a piffling sort of job, ain't it?"

"Piffling? How do you mean?"

"Well, I supposed you had to ask a lot of questions and pry into other
people's business and--and all that sorta thing."

"If nobody asked questions," pointed out Banneker, remembering Gardner's
resolute devotion to his professional ideals, "there wouldn't be any
news, would there?"

"Sure! That's right," agreed the gilded youth. "The Ledger's the
decentest paper in town, too. It's a gentleman's paper. I know a feller
on it; Guy Mallory; was in my class at college. Give you a letter to him
if you like."

Informed that Banneker already knew Mr. Mallory, his host expressed the
hope of being useful to him in any other possible manner--"any tips I
can give you or anything of that sort, old chap?"--so heartily that the
newcomer broached the subject of clothes.

"Nothin' easier," was the ready response. "I'll take you right down to
Mertoun. Just one more and we're off."

The one more having been disposed of: "What is it you want?" inquired
Cressey, when they were settled in the taxi which was waiting at the
club door for them.

"Well, what _do_ I want? You tell me."

"How far do you want to go? Will five hundred be too much?"

"No."

Cressey lost himself in mental calculations out of which he presently
delivered himself to this effect:

"Evening clothes, of course. And a dinner-jacket suit. Two business
suits, a light and a dark. You won't need a morning coat, I expect, for
a while. Anyway, we've got to save somethin' out for shirts and boots,
haven't we?"

"I haven't the money with me" remarked Banneker, his innocent mind on
the cash-with-order policy of Sears-Roebuck.

"Now, see here," said Cressey, good-humoredly, yet with an effect of
authority. "This is a game that's got to be played according to the
rules. Why, if you put down spot cash before Mertoun's eyes he'd faint
from surprise, and when he came to, he'd have no respect for you. And a
tailor's respect for you," continued Cressey, the sage, "shows in your
togs."

"When do I pay, then?"

"Oh, in three or four months he sends around a bill. That's more of a
reminder to come in and order your fall outfit than it is anything else.
But you can send him a check on account, if you feel like it."

"A check?" repeated the neophyte blankly. "Must I have a bank account?"

"Safer than a sock, my boy. And just as simple. To-morrow will do for
that, when we call on the shirt-makers and the shoe sharps. I'll put you
in my bank; they'll take you on for five hundred."

Arrived at Mertoun's, Banneker unobtrusively but positively developed a
taste of his own in the matter of hue and pattern; one, too, which
commanded Cressey's respect. The gilded youth's judgment tended toward
the more pronounced herringbones and homespuns.

"All right for you, who can change seven days in the week; but I've got
to live with these clothes, day in and day out," argued Banneker.

To which Cressey deferred, though with a sigh. "You could carry off
those sporty things as if they were woven to order for you," he
declared. "You've got the figure, the carriage, the--the
whatever-the-devil it is, for it."

Prospectively poorer by something more than four hundred dollars,
Banneker emerged from Mertoun's with his mentor.

"Gotta get home and dress for a rotten dinner," announced that gentleman
cheerfully. "Duck in here with me," he invited, indicating a sumptuous
bar, near the tailor's, "and get another little kick in the stomach. No?
Oh, verrawell. Where are you for?"

"The Public Library."

"Gawd!" said his companion, honestly shocked. "That's a gloomy hole,
ain't it?"

"Not so bad, when you get used to it. I've been putting in three hours a
day there lately."

"Whatever for?"

"Oh, browsing. Book-hungry, I suppose. Carnegie hasn't discovered
Manzanita yet, you know; so I haven't had many library opportunities."

"Speaking of Manzanita," remarked Cressey, and spoke of it,
reminiscently and at length, as they walked along together. "Did the
lovely and mysterious I.O.W. ever turn up and report herself?"

Banneker's breath caught painfully in his throat.

"D'you know who she was?" pursued the other, without pause for reply to
his previous question; and still without intermission continued: "Io
Welland. _That_'s who she was. Oh, but she's a hummer! I've met her
since. Married, you know. Quick work, that marriage. There was a dam'
queer story whispered around about her starting to elope with some other
chap, and his going nearly batty because she didn't turn up, and all the
time she was wandering around in the desert until somebody picked her up
and took care of her. You ought to know something of that. It was
supposed to be right in your back-yard."

"I?" said Banneker, commanding himself with an effort; "Miss Welland
reported in with a slight injury. That's all."

One glance at him told Cressey that Banneker did indeed "know something"
of the mysterious disappearance which had so exercised a legion of busy
tongues in New York; how much that something might be, he preserved for
future and private speculation, based on the astounding perception that
Banneker was in real pain of soul. Tact inspired Cressey to say at once:
"Of course, that's all you had to consider. By the way, you haven't seen
my revered uncle since you got here, have you?"

"Mr. Vanney? No."

"Better drop in on him."

"He might try to give me another yellow-back," smiled the ex-agent.

"Don't take Uncle Van for a fool. Once is plenty for him to be hit on
the nose."

"Has he still got a green whisker?"

"Go and see. He's asked about you two or three times in the last coupla
months."

"But I've no errand with him."

"How can you tell? He might start something for you. It isn't often that
he keeps a man in mind like he has you. Anyway, he's a wise old bird and
may hand you a pointer or two about what's what in New York. Shall I
'phone him you're in town?"

"Yes. I'll get in to see him some time to-morrow."

Having made an appointment, in the vital matter of shirts and shoes, for
the morning, they parted. Banneker set to his browsing in the library
until hunger drove him forth. After dinner he returned to his room,
cumbered with the accumulation of evening papers, for study.

Beyond the thin partition he could hear Miss Westlake moving about and
humming happily to herself. The sound struck dismay to his soul. The
prospect of work from him was doubtless the insecure foundation of that
cheerfulness. "Soon" he had said; the implication was that the matter
was pressing. Probably she was counting on it for the morrow. Well, he
must furnish something, anything, to feed the maw of her hungry
typewriter; to fulfill that wistful hope which had sprung in her eyes
when he spoke to her.

Sweeping his table bare of the lore and lure of journalism as typified
in the bulky, black-faced editions, he set out clean paper, cleansed his
fountain pen, and stared at the ceiling. What should he write about? His
mental retina teemed with impressions. But they were confused,
unresolved, distorted for all that he knew, since he lacked experience
and knowledge of the environment, and therefore perspective. Groping, he
recalled a saying of Gardner's as that wearied enthusiast descanted upon
the glories of past great names in metropolitan journalism.

"They used to say of Julian Ralph that he was always discovering City
Hall Park and getting excited over it; and when he got excited enough,
he wrote about it so that the public just ate it up."

Well, he, Banneker, hadn't discovered City Hall Park; not consciously.
But he had gleaned wonder and delight from other and more remote spots,
and now one of them began to stand forth upon the blank ceiling at which
he stared, seeking guidance. A crowded corner of Essex Street, stewing
in the hard sunshine. The teeming, shrill crowd. The stench and gleam of
a fish-stall offering bargains. The eager games of the children,
snatched between onsets of imminent peril as cart or truck came whirling
through and scattering the players. Finally the episode of the trade
fracas over the remains of a small and dubious weakfish, terminating
when the dissatisfied customer cast the delicacy at the head of the
stall-man and missed him, the _corpus delicti_ falling into the gutter
where it was at once appropriated and rapt away by an incredulous,
delighted, and mangy cat. A crude, commonplace, malodorous little street
row, the sort of thing that happens, in varying phases, on a dozen
East-Side corners seven days in the week.

Banneker approached and treated the matter from the viewpoint of the
cat, predatory, philosophic, ecstatic. One o'clock in the morning saw
the final revision, for he had become enthralled with the handling of
his subject. It was only a scant five pages; less than a thousand words.
But as he wrote and rewrote, other schemata rose to the surface of his
consciousness, and he made brief notes of them on random ends of paper;
half a dozen of them, one crowding upon another. Some day, perhaps, when
there were enough of them, when he had become known, had achieved the
distinction of a signature like Gardner, there might be a real
series.... His vague expectancies were dimmed in weariness.

Such was the genesis of the "Local Vagrancies" which later were to set
Park Row speculating upon the signature "Eban."




CHAPTER IV


Accessibility was one of Mr. Horace Vanney's fads. He aspired to be a
publicist, while sharing fallible humanity's ignorance of just what the
vague and imposing term signifies; and, as a publicist, he conceived it
in character to be readily available to the public. Almost anybody could
get to see Mr. Vanney in his tasteful and dignified lower Broadway
offices, upon almost any reasonable or plausible errand. Especially was
he hospitable to the newspaper world, the agents of publicity; and, such
is the ingratitude of the fallen soul of man, every newspaper office in
the city fully comprehended his attitude, made use of him as convenient,
and professionally regarded him as a bit of a joke, albeit a useful and
amiable joke. Of this he had no inkling. Enough for him that he was
frequently, even habitually quoted, upon a wide range of windy topics,
often with his picture appended.

With far less difficulty than he had found in winning the notice of Mr.
Gordon, Banneker attained the sanctum of the capitalist.

"Well, well!" was the important man's greeting as he shook hands. "Our
young friend from the desert! How do we find New York?"

From Banneker's reply, there grew out a pleasantly purposeless
conversation, which afforded the newcomer opportunity to decide that he
did not like this Mr. Vanney, sleek, smiling, gentle, and courteous, as
well as he had the brusque old tyrant of the wreck. That green-whiskered
autocrat had been at least natural, direct, and unselfish in his grim
emergency work. This manifestation seemed wary, cautious, on its guard
to defend itself against some probable tax upon its good nature. All
this unconscious, instinctive reckoning of the other man's
characteristics gave to the young fellow an effect of poise, of
judicious balance and quiet confidence. It was one of Banneker's
elements of strength, which subsequently won for him his unique place,
that he was always too much interested in estimating the man to whom he
was talking, to consider even what the other might think of him. It was
at once a form of egoism, and the total negation of egotism. It made him
the least self-conscious of human beings. And old Horace Vanney,
pompous, vain, the most self-conscious of his genus, felt, though he
could not analyze, the charm of it.

A chance word indicated that Banneker was already "placed." At once,
though almost insensibly, the attitude of Mr. Vanney eased; obviously
there was no fear of his being "boned" for a job. At the same time he
experienced a mild misgiving lest he might be forfeiting the services of
one who could be really useful to him. Banneker's energy and
decisiveness at the wreck had made a definite impression upon him. But
there was the matter of the rejected hundred-dollar tip. Unpliant,
evidently, this young fellow. Probably it was just as well that he
should be broken in to life and new standards elsewhere than in the
Vanney interests. Later, if he developed, watchfulness might show it to
be worth while to....

"What is it that you have in mind, my boy?" inquired the benign Mr.
Vanney.

"I start in on The Ledger next month."

"The Ledger! Indeed! I did not know that you had any journalistic
experience."

"I haven't."

"Well. Er--hum! Journalism, eh? A--er--brilliant profession!"

"You think well of it?"

"I have many friends among the journalists. Fine fellows! Very fine
fellows."

The instinctive tone of patronage was not lost upon Banneker. He felt
annoyed at Mr. Vanney. Unreasonably annoyed. "What's the matter with
journalism?" he asked bluntly.

"The matter?" Mr. Vanney was blandly surprised. "Haven't I just said--"

"Yes; you have. Would you let your son go into a newspaper office?"

"My son? My son chose the profession of law."

"But if he had wanted to be a journalist?"

"Journalism does not perhaps offer the same opportunities for personal
advancement as some other lines," said the financier cautiously.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"It is largely anonymous." Mr. Vanney gave the impression of feeling
carefully for his words. "One may go far in journalism and yet be
comparatively unknown to the public. Still, he might be of great
usefulness," added the sage, brightening, "very great usefulness. A
sound, conservative, self-respecting newspaper such as The Ledger, is a
public benefactor."

"And the editor of it?"

"That's right, my boy," approved the other. "Aim high! Aim high! The
great prizes in journalism are few. They are, in any line of endeavor.
And the apprenticeship is hard."

Herbert Cressey's clumsy but involuntary protest reasserted itself in
Banneker's mind. "I wish you would tell me frankly, Mr. Vanney, whether
reporting is considered undignified and that sort of thing?"

"Reporters can be a nuisance," replied Mr. Vanney fervently. "But they
can also be very useful."

"But on the whole--"

"On the whole it is a necessary apprenticeship. Very suitable for a
young man. Not a final career, in my judgment."

"A reporter on The Ledger, then, is nothing but a reporter on The
Ledger."

"Isn't that enough, for a start?" smiled the other. "The station-agent
at--what was the name of your station? Yes, Manzanita. The station-agent
at Manzanita--"

"Was E. Banneker," interposed the owner of that name positively. "A
small puddle, but the inhabitant was an individual toad, at least. To
keep one's individuality in New York isn't so easy, of course."

"There are quite a number of people in New York," pointed out the
philosopher, Vanney. "Mostly crowd."

"Yes," said Banneker. "You've told me something about the newspaper
business that I wanted to know." He rose.

The other put out an arresting hand. "Wouldn't you like to do a little
reporting for me, before you take up your regular work?"

"What kind of reporting?"

"Quite simple. A manufacturing concern in which I own a considerable
interest has a strike on its hands. Suppose you go down to Sippiac, New
Jersey, where our factories are, spend three or four days, and report
back to me your impressions and any ideas you may gather as to improving
our organization for furthering our interests."

"What makes you think that I could be useful in that line?" asked
Banneker curiously.

"My observations at the Manzanita wreck. You have, I believe, a knack
for handling a situation."

"I can always try," accepted Banneker.

Supplied with letters to the officials of the International Cloth
Company, and a liberal sum for expenses, the neophyte went to Sippiac.
There he visited the strongly guarded mills, still making a feeble
pretense of operating, talked with the harassed officials, the gang-boss
of the strike-breakers, the "private guards," who had, in fact,
practically assumed dominant police authority in the place; all of which
was faithful to the programme arranged by Mr. Vanney. Having done so
much, he undertook to obtain a view of the strike from the other side;
visited the wretched tenements of the laborers, sought out the sullen
and distrustful strike-leaders, heard much fiery oratory and some veiled
threats from impassioned agitators, mostly foreign and all tragically
earnest; chatted with corner grocerymen, saloon-keepers, ward
politicians, composing his mental picture of a strike in a minor city,
absolutely controlled, industrially, politically, and socially by the
industry which had made it. The town, as he came to conceive it, was a
fevered and struggling gnome, bound to a wheel which ground for others;
a gnome who, if he broke his bonds, would be perhaps only the worse for
his freedom. At the beginning of the sixth day, for his stay had
outgrown its original plan, the pocket-ledger, 3 T 9901, was but little
the richer, but the mind of its owner teemed with impressions.

It was his purpose to take those impressions in person to Mr. Horace
Vanney, by the 10 A.M. train. Arriving at the station early, he was
surprised at being held up momentarily by a line of guards engaged in
blocking off a mob of wailing, jabbering women, many of whom had
children in their arms, or at their skirts. He asked the ticket-agent, a
big, pasty young man about them.

"Mill workers," said the agent, making change.

"What are they after?"

"Wanta get to the 10.10 train."

"And the guards are stopping them?"

"You can use your eyes, cantcha?"

Using his eyes, Banneker considered the position. "Are those fellows on
railroad property?"

"What is it to you whether they are or ain't?"

Banneker explained his former occupation. "That's different," said the
agent. "Come inside. That's a hell of a mess, ain't it!" he added
plaintively as Banneker complied. "Some of those poor Hunkies have got
their tickets and can't use 'em."

"I'd see that they got their train, if this was my station," asserted
Banneker.

"Yes, you would! With that gang of strong-arms against you."

"Chase 'em," advised Banneker simply. "They've got no right keeping your
passengers off your trains."

"Chase 'em, ay? You'd do it, I suppose."

"I would."

"How?"

"You've got a gun, haven't you?"

"Maybe you think those guys haven't got guns, too."

"Well, all I can say is, that if there had been passengers held up from
their trains at my station and I didn't get them through, _I_'d have
been through so far as the Atkinson and St. Philip goes."

"This railroad's different. I'd be through if I butted in on this mill
row."

"How's that?"

"Well, for one thing, old Vanney, who's the real boss here, is a
director of the road."

"So _that_'s it!" Banneker digested this information. "Why are the women
so anxious to get away?"

"They say"--the local agent lowered his voice--"their children are
starving here, and they can get better jobs in other places. Naturally
the mills don't want to lose a lot of their hands, particularly the
women, because they're the cheapest. I don't know as I blame 'em for
that. But this business of hiring a bunch of ex-cons and--Hey! Where are
you goin'?"

Banneker was beyond the door before the query was completed. Looking out
of the window, the agent saw a fat and fussy young mother, who had
contrived to get through the line, waddling at her best speed across the
open toward the station, and dragging a small boy by the hand. A lank
giant from the guards' ranks was after her. Screaming, she turned the
corner out of his vision. There were sounds which suggested a row at the
station-door, but the agent, called at that moment to the wire, could
not investigate. The train came and went, and he saw nothing more of the
ex-railroader from the West.

Although Mr. Horace Vanney smiled pleasantly enough when Banneker
presented himself at the office to make his report, the nature of the
smile suggested a background more uncertain.

"Well, what have you found, my boy?" the financier began.

"A good many things that ought to be changed," answered Banneker
bluntly.

"Quite probably. No institution is perfect."

"The mills are pretty rotten. You pay your people too little--"

"Where do you get that idea?"

"From the way they live."

"My dear boy; if we paid them twice as much, they'd live the same way.
The surplus would go to the saloons."

"Then why not wipe out the saloons?"

"I am not the Common Council of Sippiac," returned Mr. Vanney dryly.

"Aren't you?" retorted Banneker even more dryly.

The other frowned. "What else?"

"Well; the housing. You own a good many of the tenements, don't you?"

"The company owns some."

"They're filthy holes."

"They are what the tenants make them."

"The tenants didn't build them with lightless hallways, did they?"

"They needn't live there if they don't like them. Have you spent all
your time, for which I am paying, nosing about like a cheap magazine
muckraker?" It was clear that Mr. Vanney was annoyed.

"I've been trying to find out what is wrong with Sippiac. I thought you
wanted facts."

"Precisely. Facts. Not sentimental gushings."

"Well, there are your guards. There isn't much sentiment about them. I
saw one of them smash a woman in the face, and knock her down, while she
was trying to catch a train and get out of town."

"And what did you do?"

"I don't know exactly how much. But I hope enough to land him in the
hospital. They pulled me off too soon."

"Do you know that you would have been killed if it hadn't been for some
of the factory staff who saved you from the other guards--as you
deserved, for your foolhardiness?"

The young man's eyebrows went up a bit. "Don't bank too much on my
foolhardiness. I had a wall back of me. And there would have been
material for several funerals before they got me." He touched his
hip-pocket. "By the way, you seem to be well informed."

"I've been in 'phone communication with Sippiac since the regrettable
occurrence. It perhaps didn't occur to you to find out that the woman,
who is now under arrest, bit the guard very severely."

"Of course! Just like the rabbit bit the bulldog. You've got a lot of
thugs and strong-arm men doing your dirty work, that ought to be in
jail. If the newspapers here ever get onto the situation, it would make
pretty rough reading for you, Mr. Vanney."

The magnate looked at him with contemptuous amusement. "No newspaper of
decent standing prints that kind of socialistic stuff, my young friend."

"Why not?"

"Why not! Because of my position. Because the International Cloth
Company is a powerful institution of the most reputable standing, with
many lines of influence."

"And that is enough to keep the newspapers from printing an article
about conditions in Sippiac?" asked Banneker, deeply interested in this
phase of the question. "Is that the fact?"

It was not the fact; The Sphere, for one, would have handled the strike
on the basis of news interest, as Mr. Vanney well knew; wherefore he
hated and pretended to despise The Sphere. But for his own purposes he
answered:

"Not a paper in New York would touch it. Except," he added negligently,
"perhaps some lying, Socialist sheet. And let me warn you, Mr.
Banneker," he pursued in his suavest tone, "that you will find no place
for your peculiar ideas on The Ledger. In fact, I doubt whether you will
be doing well either by them or by yourself in going on their staff,
holding such views as you do."

"Do you? Then I'll tell them beforehand."

Mr. Vanney privately reflected that there was no need of this: _he_
intended to call up the editor-in-chief and suggest the unsuitability of
the candidate for a place, however humble, on the staff of a highly
respectable and suitably respectful daily.

Which he did. The message was passed on to Mr. Gordon, and, in his large
and tolerant soul, decently interred. One thing of which the managing
editor of The Ledger was not tolerant was interference from without in
his department.

Before allowing his man to leave, Mr. Vanney read him a long and
well-meant homily, full of warning and wisdom, and was both annoyed and
disheartened when, at the end of it, Banneker remarked:

"I'll dare you to take a car and spend twenty-four hours going about
Sippiac with me. If you stand for your system after that, I'll pay for
the car."

To which the other replied sadly that Banneker had in some manner
acquired a false and distorted view of industrial relations.

Therein, for once in an existence guided almost exclusively by
prejudice, Horace Vanney was right. At the outset of a new career to
which he was attuning his mind, Banneker had been injected into a
situation typical of all that is worst in American industrial life, a
local manufacturing enterprise grown rich upon the labor of underpaid
foreigners, through the practice of all the vicious, lawless, and
insidious methods of an ingrown autocracy, and had believed it to be
fairly representative. Had not Horace Vanney, doubtless genuine in his
belief, told him as much?

"We're as fair and careful with our employees as any of our
competitors."

As a matter of fact there were, even then, scores of manufacturing
plants within easy distance of New York, representing broad and generous
policies and conducted on a progressive and humanistic labor system. Had
Banneker had his first insight into local industrial conditions through
one of these, he might readily have been prejudiced in favor of capital.
As it was, swallowing Vanney's statement as true, he mistook an evil
example as a fair indication of the general status. Then and there he
became a zealous protagonist of labor.

It had been Mr. Horace Vanney's shrewd design to show a budding
journalist of promise on which side his self-interest lay. The weak spot
in the plan was that Banneker did not seem to care!




CHAPTER V


Banneker's induction into journalism was unimpressive. They gave him a
desk, an outfit of writing materials, a mail-box with his name on it,
and eventually an assignment. Mr. Mallory presented him to several of
the other "cubs" and two or three of the older and more important
reporters. They were all quite amiable, obviously willing to be helpful,
and they impressed the observant neophyte with that quiet and solid
_esprit de corps_ which is based upon respect for work well performed in
a common cause. He apprehended that The Ledger office was in some sort
an institution.

None of his new acquaintances volunteered information as to the
mechanism of his new job. Apparently he was expected to figure that out
for himself. By nature reticent, and trained in an environment which
still retained enough of frontier etiquette to make a scrupulous
incuriosity the touchstone of good manners and perhaps the essence of
self-preservation, Banneker asked no questions. He sat and waited.

One by one the other reporters were summoned by name to the city desk,
and dispatched with a few brief words upon the various items of the
news. Presently Banneker found himself alone, in the long files of
desks. For an hour he sat there and for a second hour. It seemed a
curious way in which to be earning fifteen dollars a week. He wondered
whether he was expected to sit tight at his desk. Or had he the freedom
of the office? Characteristically choosing the more active assumption,
he found his way to the current newspaper files. They were like old
friends.

"Mr. Banneker." An office boy was at his elbow. "Mr. Greenough wants
you."

Conscious of a quickened pulse, and annoyed at himself because of it,
the tyro advanced to receive his maiden assignment. The epochal event
was embodied in the form of a small clipping from an evening paper,
stating that a six-year-old boy had been fatally burned at a bonfire
near the North River. Banneker, Mr. Greenough instructed him mildly, was
to make inquiries of the police, of the boy's family, of the hospital,
and of such witnesses as he could find.

Quick with interest he caught up his hat and hurried out. Death, in the
sparsely populated country wherefrom he hailed, was a matter of
inclusive local importance; he assumed the same of New York. Three
intense hours he devoted to an item which any police reporter of six
months' standing would have rounded up in a brace of formal inquiries,
and hastened back, brimful of details for Mr. Greenough.

"Good! Good!" interpolated that blandly approving gentleman from time to
time in the course of the narrative. "Write it, Mr. Banneker! write it."

"How much shall I write?"

"Just what is necessary to tell the news."

Behind the amiable smile which broadened without lighting up the
sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something.
As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every
germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile
began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam. Three
fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and
ran through a dozen newspapers. He was seeking a ratio, a perspective.
He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son
of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return he tore up
all that he had written, and substituted a curt paragraph, without
character or color, which he turned in. He had gauged the value of the
tragedy accurately, in the light of his study of news files.

Greenough showed the paragraph (which failed to appear at all in the
overcrowded paper of next morning) to Mr. Gordon.

"The new man doesn't start well," he remarked. "Too little imaginative
interest."

"Isn't it knowledge rather than lack of interest?" suggested the
managing editor.

"It may come to the same thing. If he knows too much to get really
interested, he'll be a dull reporter."

"I doubt whether you'll find him dull," smiled Mr. Gordon. "But he may
find his job dull. In that case, of course he'd better find another."

Indeed, that was the danger which, for weeks to follow, Banneker
skirted. Police news, petty and formal, made up his day's work. Had he
sought beneath the surface of it the underlying elements, and striven to
express these, his matter as it came to the desk, however slight the
technical news value might have been, would have afforded the watchful
copy-readers, trained to that special selectiveness as only The Ledger
could train its men, opportunity of judging what potentialities might
lurk beneath the crudities of the "cub." But Banneker was not crude. He
was careful. His sense of the relative importance of news, acquired by
those weeks of intensive analysis before applying for his job, was too
just to let him give free play to his pen. What was the use? The "story"
wasn't worth the space.

Nevertheless, 3 T 9901, which Banneker was already too cognoscent to
employ in his formal newsgathering (the notebook is anathema to the
metropolitan reporter), was filling up with odd bits, which were being
transferred, in the weary hours when the new man sat at his desk with
nothing to do, to paper in the form of sketches for Miss Westlake's
trustful and waiting typewriter. Nobody could say that Banneker was not
industrious. Among his fellow reporters he soon acquired the melancholy
reputation of one who was forever writing "special stuff," none of which
ever "landed." It was chiefly because of his industry and reliability,
rather than any fulfillment of the earlier promise of brilliant worth as
shown in the Sunday Sphere articles, that he got his first raise to
twenty dollars. It surprised rather than gratified him.

He went to Mr. Gordon about it. The managing editor was the kind of man
with whom it is easy to talk straight talk.

"What's the matter with me?" asked Banneker.

Mr. Gordon played a thoughtful tattoo upon his fleshy knuckles with the
letter-opener. "Nothing. Aren't you satisfied?"

"No. Are you?"

"You've had your raise, and fairly early. Unless you had been worth it,
you wouldn't have had it."

"Am I doing what you expected of me?"

"Not exactly. But you're developing into a sure, reliable reporter."

"A routine man," commented Banneker.

"After all, the routine man is the backbone of the office." Mr. Gordon
executed a fantasia on his thumb. "Would you care to try a desk job?" he
asked, peering at Banneker over his glasses.

"I'd rather run a trolley car. There's more life in it."

"Do you _see_ life, in your work, Mr. Banneker?"

"See it? I feel it. Sometimes I think it's going to flatten me out like
a steam-roller."

"Then why not write it?"

"It isn't news: not what I see."

"Perhaps not. Perhaps it's something else. But if it's there and we can
get a gleam of it into the paper, we'll crowd news out to make a place
for it. You haven't been reading The Ledger I'm afraid."

"Like a Bible."

"Not to good purpose, then. What do you think of Tommy Burt's stuff?"

"It's funny; some of it. But I couldn't do it to save my job."

"Nobody can do it but Burt, himself. Possibly you could learn something
from it, though."

"Burt doesn't like it, himself. He told me it was all formula; that you
could always get a laugh out of people about something they'd been
taught to consider funny, like a red nose or a smashed hat. He's got a
list of Sign Posts on the Road to Humor."

"The cynicism of twenty-eight," smiled the tolerant Mr. Gordon. "Don't
let yourself be inoculated."

"Mr. Gordon," said Banneker doggedly; "I'm not doing the kind of work I
expected to do here."

"You can hardly expect the star jobs until you've made yourself a star
man."

Banneker flushed. "I'm not complaining of the way I've been treated.
I've had a square enough deal. The trouble is with me. I want to know
whether I ought to stick or quit."

"If you quit, what would you do?"

"I haven't a notion," replied the other with an indifference which
testified to a superb, instinctive self-confidence. "Something."

"Do it here. I think you'll come along all right."

"But what's wrong with me?" persisted Banneker.

"Too much restraint. A rare fault. You haven't let yourself out." For a
space he drummed and mused. Suddenly a knuckle cracked loudly. Mr.
Gordon flinched and glared at it, startled as if it had offended him by
interrupting a train of thought. "Here!" said he brusquely. "There's a
Sewer-Cleaners' Association picnic to-morrow. They're going to put in
half their day inspecting the Stimson Tunnel under the North River.
Pretty idea; isn't it? Suppose I ask Mr. Greenough to send you out on
the story. And I'd like a look at it when you turn it in."

Banneker worked hard on his report of the picnic; hard and
self-consciously. Tommy Burt would, he knew, have made a "scream" of it,
for tired business men to chuckle over on their way downtown. Pursuant
to what he believed Mr. Gordon wanted, Banneker strove conscientiously
to be funny with these human moles, who, having twelve hours of freedom
for sunshine and air, elected to spend half of it in a hole bigger,
deeper, and more oppressive than any to which their noisome job called
them. The result was five painfully mangled sheets which presently went
to the floor, torn in strips. After that Banneker reported the picnic as
he saw, felt, and smelt it. It was a somber bit of writing, not without
its subtleties and shrewd perceptions; quite unsuitable to the columns
of The Ledger, in which it failed to appear. But Mr. Gordon read it
twice. He advised Banneker not to be discouraged.

Banneker was deeply discouraged. He wanted to resign.

Perhaps he would nave resigned, if old Mynderse Verschoyle had not died
at eight o'clock on the morning of the day when Banneker was the
earliest man to report at the office. A picturesque character, old
Mynderse, who had lived for forty-five years with his childless wife in
the ancient house on West 10th Street, and for the final fifteen years
had not addressed so much as a word to her. She had died three months
before; and now he had followed, apparently, from what Banneker learned
in an interview with the upset and therefore voluble secretary of the
dead man, because, having no hatred left on which to center his life, he
had nothing else to live for. Banneker wrote the story of that hatred,
rigid, ceremonious, cherished like a rare virtue until it filled two
lives; and he threw about it the atmosphere of the drear and divided old
house. At the end, the sound of the laughter of children at play in the
street.

The article appeared word for word as he had written it. That noon Tommy
Burt, the funny man, drawing down his hundred-plus a week on space, came
over and sat on Banneker's desk, and swung his legs and looked at him
mournfully and said:

"You've broken through your shell at last."

"Did you like it?" asked Banneker.

"Like it! My God, if I could write like that! But what's the use! Never
in the world."

"Oh, that's nonsense," returned Banneker, pleased. "Of course you can.
But what's the rest of your 'if'?"

"I wouldn't be wasting my time here. The magazines for me."

"Is that better?"

"Depends on what you're after. For a man who wants to write, it's
better, of course."

"Why?"

"Gives him a larger audience. No newspaper story is remembered overnight
except by newspaper men. And they don't matter."

"Why don't they matter?" Banneker was surprised again, this time rather
disagreeably.

"It's a little world. There isn't much substance to it. Take that
Verschoyle stuff of yours; that's literature, that is! But you'll never
hear of it again after next week. A few people here will remember it,
and it'll help you to your next raise. But after you've got that, and,
after that, your lift onto space, where are you?"

The abruptly confidential approach of Tommy Burt flattered Banneker with
the sense that by that one achievement of the Verschoyle story he had
attained a new status in the office. Later there came out from the inner
sanctum where sat the Big Chief, distilling venom and wit in equal parts
for the editorial page, a special word of approval. But this pleased the
recipient less than the praise of his peers in the city room.

After that first talk, Burt came back to Banneker's desk from time to
time, and once took him to dinner at "Katie's," the little German
restaurant around the corner. Burt was given over to a restless and
inoffensively egoistic pessimism.

"Look at me. I'm twenty-eight and making a good income. When I was
twenty-three, I was making nearly as much. When I'm thirty-eight, where
shall I be?"

"Can't you keep on making it?" asked Banneker.

"Doubtful. A fellow goes stale on the kind of stuff I do. And if I do
keep on? Five to six thousand is fine now. It won't be so much ten years
from now. That's the hell of this game; there's no real chance in it."

"What about the editing jobs?"

"Desk-work? Chain yourself by the leg, with a blue pencil in your hand
to butcher better men's stuff? A managing editor, now, I'll grant you.
He gets his twenty or twenty-five thousand if he doesn't die of
overstrain, first. But there's only a few managing editors."

"There are more editorial writers."

"Hired pens. Dishing up other fellows' policies, whether you believe in
'em or not. No; I'm not of that profession, anyway." He specified the
profession, a highly ancient and dishonorable one. Mr. Burt, in his gray
moods, was neither discriminating nor quite just.

Banneker voiced the question which, at some point in his progress, every
thoughtful follower of journalism must meet and solve as best he can.
"When a man goes on a newspaper I suppose he more or less accepts that
paper's standards, doesn't he?"

"More or less? To what extent?" countered the expert.

"I haven't figured that out, yet."

"Don't be in a hurry about it," advised the other with a gleam of
malice. "The fellows that do figure it out to the end, and are honest
enough about it, usually quit."

"You haven't quit."

"Perhaps I'm not honest enough or perhaps I'm too cowardly," retorted
the gloomy Burt.

Banneker smiled. Though the other was nearly two years his senior, he
felt immeasurably the elder. There is about the true reporter type an
infinitely youthful quality; attractive and touching; the eternal
juvenile, which, being once outgrown with its facile and evanescent
enthusiasms, leaves the expert declining into the hack. Beside this
prematurely weary example of a swift and precarious success, Banneker
was mature of character and standard. Nevertheless, the seasoned
journalist was steeped in knowledge which the tyro craved.

"What would you do," Banneker asked, "if you were sent out to write a
story absolutely opposed to something you believed right; political, for
instance?"

"I don't write politics. That's a specialty."

"Who does?"

"'Parson' Gale."

"Does he believe in everything The Ledger stands for?"

"Certainly. In office hours. For and in consideration of one hundred and
twenty-five dollars weekly, duly and regularly paid."

"Outside of office hours, then."

"Ah; that's different. In Harlem where he lives, the Parson is quite a
figure among the reform Democrats. The Ledger, as you know, is
Republican; and anything in the way of reform is its favorite butt. So
Gale spends his working day poking fun at his political friends and
associates."

"Out West we'd call that kind of fellow a yellow pup."

"Well, don't call the Parson that; not to me," warned the other
indignantly. "He's as square a man as you'll find on Park Row. Why, you
were just saying, yourself, that a reporter is bound to accept his
paper's standards when he takes the job."

"Then I suppose the answer is that a man ought to work only on a
newspaper in whose policies he believes."

"Which policies? A newspaper has a hundred different ones about a
hundred different things. Here in this office we're dead against the
split infinitive and the Honest Laboring Man. We don't believe he's
honest and we've got our grave doubts as to his laboring. Yet one of our
editorial writers is an out-and-out Socialist and makes fiery speeches
advising the proletariat to rise and grab the reins of government. But
he'd rather split his own head than an infinitive."

"Does he write anti-labor editorials?" asked the bewildered Banneker.

"Not as bad as that. He confines himself to European politics and
popular scientific matters. But, of course, wherever there is necessity
for an expression of opinion, he's anti-socialist in his writing, as
he's bound to be."

"Just a moment ago you were talking of hired pens. Now you seem to be
defending that sort of thing. I don't understand your point of view."

"Don't you? Neither do I, I guess," admitted the expositor with great
candor. "I can argue it either way and convince myself, so far as the
other fellow's work is concerned. But not for my own."

"How do you figure it out for yourself, then?"

"I don't. I dodge. It's a kind of tacit arrangement between the desk and
me. In minor matters I go with the paper. That's easy, because I agree
with it in most questions of taste and the way of doing things. After
all The Ledger _has_ got certain standards of professional conduct and
of decent manners; it's a gentleman's paper. The other things, the
things where my beliefs conflict with the paper's standards, political
or ethical, don't come my way. You see, I'm a specialist; I do mostly
the fluffy stuff."

"If that's the way to keep out of embarrassing decisions, I'd like to
become a specialist myself."

"You can do it, all right," the other assured him earnestly. "That story
of yours shows it. You've got The Ledger touch--no, it's more individual
than that. But you've got something that's going to stick out even here.
Just the same, there'll come a time when you'll have to face the other
issue of your job or your--well, your conscience."

What Tommy Burt did not say in continuation, and had no need to say,
since his expressive and ingenuous face said it for him, was, "And I
wonder what you'll do with _that_!"

A far more influential friend than Tommy Burt had been wondering, too,
and had, not without difficulty, expressed her doubts in writing.
Camilla Van Arsdale had written to Banneker:

... I know so little of journalism, but there are things about it that I
distrust instinctively. Do you remember what that wrangler from the _Jon
Cal_ told Old Bill Speed when Bill wanted to hire him: "I wouldn't take
any job that I couldn't look in the eye and tell it to go to hell on
five minutes' notice." I have a notion that you've got to take that
attitude toward a reporting job. There must be so much that a man cannot
do without loss of self-respect. Yet, I can't imagine why I should worry
about you as to that. Unless it is that, in a strange environment one
gets one's values confused.... Have you had to do any "Society"
reporting yet? I hope not. The society reporters of my day were either
obsequious little flunkeys and parasites, or women of good connections
but no money who capitalized their acquaintanceship to make a poor
living, and whom one was sorry for, but would rather not see. Going to
places where one is not asked, scavenging for bits of news from butlers
and housekeepers, sniffing after scandals--perhaps that is part of the
necessary apprenticeship of newspaper work. But it's not a proper work
for a gentleman. And, in any case, Ban, you are that, by the grace of
your ancestral gods.

Little enough did Banneker care for his ancestral gods: but he did
greatly care for the maintenance of those standards which seemed to have
grown, indigenously within him, since he had never consciously
formulated them. As for reporting, of whatever kind, he deemed Miss Van
Arsdale prejudiced. Furthermore, he had met the society reporter of The
Ledger, an elderly, mild, inoffensive man, neat and industrious, and
discerned in him no stigma of the lickspittle. Nevertheless, he hoped
that he would not be assigned to such "society news" as Remington did
not cover in his routine. It might, he conceived, lead him into false
situations where he could be painfully snubbed. And he had never yet
been in a position where any one could snub him without instant
reprisals. In such circumstances he did not know exactly what he would
do. However, that bridge could be crossed or refused when he came to it.




CHAPTER VI


Such members of the Brashear household as chose to accommodate
themselves strictly to the hour could have eight o'clock breakfast in
the basement dining-room for the modest consideration of thirty cents;
thirty-five with special cream-jug. At these gatherings, usually
attended by half a dozen of the lodgers, matters of local interest were
weightily discussed; such as the progress of the subway excavations, the
establishment of a new Italian restaurant in 11th Street, or the calling
away of the fourth-floor-rear by the death of an uncle who would perhaps
leave him money. To this sedate assemblage descended one crisp December
morning young Wickert, clad in the natty outline of a new Bernholz suit,
and obviously swollen with tidings.

"Whaddya know about the latest?" he flung forth upon the coffee-scented
air.

"The latest" in young Wickert's compendium of speech might be the
garments adorning his trim person, the current song-hit of a vaudeville
to which he had recently contributed his critical attention, or some
tidbit of purely local gossip. Hainer, the plump and elderly accountant,
opined that Wickert had received an augmentation of salary, and got an
austere frown for his sally. Evidently Wickert deemed his news to be of
special import; he was quite bloated, conversationally. He now dallied
with it.

"Since when have you been taking in disguised millionaires, Mrs.
Brashear?"

The presiding genius of the house, divided between professional
resentment at even so remotely slurring an implication (for was not the
Grove Street house good enough for any millionaire, undisguised!) and
human curiosity, requested an explanation.

"I was in Sherry's restaurant last night," said the offhand Wickert.

"I didn't read about any fire there," said the jocose Hainer, pointing
his sally with a wink at Lambert, the art-student.

Wickert ignored the gibe. Such was the greatness of his tidings that he
could afford to.

"Our firm was giving a banquet to some buyers and big folks in the
trade. Private room upstairs; music, flowers, champagne by the case. We
do things in style when we do 'em. They sent me up after hours with an
important message to our Mr. Webler; he was in charge of arrangements."

"Been promoted to be messenger, ay?" put in Mr. Hainer, chuckling.

"When I came downstairs," continued the other with only a venomous
glance toward the seat of the scorner, "I thought to myself what's the
matter with taking a look at the swells feeding in the big restaurant.
You may not know it, people, but Sherry's is the ree-churchiest place in
Nuh Yawk to eat dinner. It's got 'em all beat. So I stopped at the door
and took 'em in. Swell? Oh, you dolls! I stood there trying to work up
the nerve to go in and siddown and order a plate of stew or something
that wouldn't stick me more'n a dollar, just to _say_ I'd been dining at
Sherry's, when I looked across the room, and whadda you think?" He
paused, leaned forward, and shot out the climactic word, "Banneker!"

"Having his dinner there?" asked the incredulous but fascinated Mrs.
Brashear.

"Like he owned the place. Table to himself, against the wall. Waiter
fussin' over him like he loved him. And dressed! Oh, Gee!"

"Did you speak to him?" asked Lambert.

"He spoke to me," answered Wickert, dealing in subtle distinctions. "He
was just finishing his coffee when I sighted him. Gave the waiter haffa
dollar. I could see it on the plate. There I was at the door, and he
said, 'Why, hello, Wickert. Come and have a liquor.' He pronounced it a
queer, Frenchy way. So I said thanks, I'd have a highball."

"Didn't he seem surprised to see you there?" asked Hainer.

Wickert paid an unconscious tribute to good-breeding. "Banneker's the
kind of feller that wouldn't show it if he was surprised. He couldn't
have been as surprised as I was, at that. We went to the bar and had a
drink, and then I ast him what'd _he_, have on _me_, and all the time I
was sizing him up. I'm telling you, he looked like he'd grown up in
Sherry's."

The rest of the conversation, it appeared from Mr. Wickert's spirited
sketch, had consisted mainly in eager queries from himself, and
good-humored replies by the other.

Did Banneker eat there every night?

Oh, no! He wasn't up to that much of a strain on his finances.

But the waiters seemed to know him, as if he was one of the regulars.

In a sense he was. Every Monday he dined there. Monday was his day off.

Well, Mr. Wickert (awed and groping) _would_ be damned! All alone?

Banneker, smiling, admitted the solitude. He rather liked dining alone.

Oh, Wickert couldn't see that at all! Give him a pal and a coupla lively
girls, say from the Ladies' Tailor-Made Department, good-lookers and
real dressers; that was _his_ idea of a dinner, though he'd never tried
it at Sherry's. Not that he couldn't if he felt like it. How much did
they stick you for a good feed-out with a cocktail and maybe a bottle of
Italian Red?

Well, of course, that depended on which way was Wickert going? Could
Banneker set him on his way? He was taking a taxi to the Avon Theater,
where there was an opening.

Did Mr. Banneker (Wickert had by this time attained the "Mr." stage)
always follow up his dinner at Sherry's with a theater?

Usually, if there were an opening. If not he went to the opera or a
concert.

For his part, Wickert liked a little more spice in life. Still, every
feller to his tastes. And Mr. Banneker was sure dressed for the part.
Say--if he didn't mind--who made that full-dress suit?

No; of course he didn't mind. Mertoun made it.

After which Mr. Banneker had been deftly enshrouded in a fur-lined coat,
worthy of a bank president, had crowned these glories with an impeccable
silk hat, and had set forth. Wickert had only to add that he wore in his
coat lapel one of those fancy tuberoses, which he, Wickert, had gone to
the pains of pricing at the nearest flower shop immediately after
leaving Banneker. A dollar apiece! No, he had not accepted the offer of
a lift, being doubtful upon the point of honor as to whether he would be
expected to pay a _pro rata_ of the taxi charge. They, the assembled
breakfast company, had his permission to call him, Mr. Wickert, a goat
if Mr. Banneker wasn't the swellest-looking guy he had anywhere seen on
that memorable evening.

Nobody called Mr. Wickert a goat. But Mr. Hainer sniffed and said:

"And him a twenty-five-dollar-a-week reporter!"

"Perhaps he has private means," suggested little Miss Westlake, who had
her own reasons for suspecting this: reasons bolstered by many and
frequent manuscripts, turned over to her for typing, recast, returned
for retyping, and again, in many instances, re-recast and re-retyped,
the result of the sweating process being advantageous to their literary
quality. Simultaneous advantage had accrued to the typist, also, in a
practical way. Though the total of her bills was modest, it constituted
an important extra; and Miss Westlake no longer sought to find solace
for her woes through the prescription of the ambulant school of
philosophic thought, and to solve her dental difficulties by walking the
floor of nights. Philosophy never yet cured a toothache. Happily the
sufferer was now able to pay a dentist. Hence Banneker could work,
untroubled of her painful footsteps in the adjoining room, and
considered the outcome cheap at the price. He deemed himself an exponent
of enlightened selfishness. Perhaps he was. But the dim and worn
spinster would have given half a dozen of her best and painless teeth to
be of service to him. Now she came to his defense with a pretty dignity:

"I am sure that Mr. Banneker would not be out of place in any company."

"Maybe not," answered the cynical Lambert. "But where does he get it? I
ask you!"

"Wherever he gets it, no gentleman could be more forehanded in his
obligations," declared Mrs. Brashear.

"But what's he want to blow it for in a shirty place like Sherry's?"
marveled young Wickert.

"Wyncha ask him?" brutally demanded Hainer.

Wickert examined his mind hastily, and was fain to admit inwardly that
he had wanted to ask him, but somehow felt "skittish" about it.
Outwardly he retorted, being displeased at his own weakness, "Ask him
yourself."

Had any one questioned the subject of the discussion at Mrs. Brashear's
on this point, even if he were willing to reply to impertinent
interrogations (a high improbability of which even the hardy Wickert
seems to have had some timely premonition), he would perhaps have
explained the glorified routine of his day-off, by saying that he went
to Sherry's and the opening nights for the same reason that he prowled
about the water-front and ate in polyglot restaurants on obscure
street-corners east of Tompkins Square; to observe men and women and the
manner of their lives. It would not have been a sufficient answer;
Banneker must have admitted that to himself. Too much a man of the world
in many strata not to be adjustable to any of them, nevertheless he felt
more attuned to and at one with his environment amidst the suave
formalism of Sherry's than in the more uneasy and precarious elegancies
of an East-Side Tammany Association promenade and ball.

Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.

He was not climbing. To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be
surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that
sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the
beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an
impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical
deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have
found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that
matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social
status, breed respectively the toady and the snob. He had no complex at
all. He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a
thing, a simplex. Relative status was a matter to which he gave little
thought. He maintained personal standards not because of what others
might think of him, but because he chose to think well of himself.

Sherry's and a fifth-row-center seat at opening nights meant to him
something more than refreshment and amusement; they were an assertion of
his right to certain things, a right of which, whether others recognized
or ignored it, he felt absolutely assured. These were the readily
attainable places where successful people resorted. Serenely determined
upon success, he felt himself in place amidst the outward and visible
symbols of it. Let the price be high for his modest means; this was an
investment which he could not afford to defer. He was but anticipating
his position a little, and in such wise that nobody could take exception
to it, because his self-promotion demanded no aid or favor from any
other living person. His interest was in the environment, not in the
people, as such, who were hardly more than, "walking ladies and
gentlemen" in a _mise-en-sc;ne_. Indeed, where minor opportunities
offered by chance of making acquaintances, he coolly rejected them.
Banneker did not desire to know people--yet. When he should arrive at
the point of knowing them, it must be upon his terms, not theirs.

It was on one of his Monday evenings of splendor that a misadventure of
the sort which he had long foreboded, befell him. Sherry's was crowded,
and a few tables away Banneker caught sight of Herbert Cressey, dining
with a mixed party of a dozen. Presently Cressey came over.

"What have you been doing with yourself?" he asked, shaking hands.
"Haven't seen you for months."

"Working," replied Banneker. "Sit down and have a cocktail. Two, Jules,"
he added to the attentive waiter.

"I guess they can spare me for five minutes," agreed Cressey, glancing
back at his forsaken place. "This isn't what you call work, though, is
it?"

"Hardly. This is my day off."

"Oh! And how goes the job?"

"Well enough."

"I'd think so," commented the other, taking in the general effect of
Banneker's easy habituation to the standards of the restaurant. "You
don't own this place, do you?" he added.

From another member of the world which had inherited or captured
Sherry's as part of the spoils of life, the question might have been
offensive. But Banneker genuinely liked Cressey.

"Not exactly," he returned lightly. "Do I give that unfortunate
impression?"

"You give very much the impression of owning old Jules--or he does--and
having a proprietary share in the new head waiter. Are you here much?"

"Monday evenings, only."

"This is a good cocktail," observed Cressey, savoring it expertly.
"Better than they serve to me. And, say, Banneker, did Mertoun make you
that outfit?"

"Yes."

"Then I quit him," declared the gilded youth.

"Why? Isn't it all right?"

"All right! Dammit, it's a better job than ever I got out of him,"
returned his companion indignantly. "Some change from the catalogue suit
you sported when you landed here! You know how to wear 'em; I've got to
say that for you.... I've got to get back. When'll you dine with me? I
want to hear all about it."

"Any Monday," answered Banneker.

Cressey returned to his waiting potage, and was immediately bombarded
with queries, mainly from the girl on his left.

"Who's the wonderful-looking foreigner?"

"He isn't a foreigner. At least not very much."

"He looks like a North Italian princeling I used to know," said one of
the women. "One of that warm-complexioned out-of-door type, that
preserves the Roman mould. Isn't he an Italian?"

"He's an American. I ran across him out in the desert country."

"Hence that burned-in brown. What was he doing out there?"

Cressey hesitated. Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did
not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked
onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat. "He was in the
railroad business," he returned cautiously. "His name is Banneker."

"I've been seeing him for months," remarked another of the company.
"He's always alone and always at that table. Nobody knows him. He's a
mystery."

"He's a beauty," said Cressey's left-hand neighbor.

Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray,
and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful
unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion. Miss Forbes was
a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion.
Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a
safe bulwark, she preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of
conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently
discreet for self-preservation. Also she had a keen little brain, a
reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive of important
trifles.

"In the West, Bertie?" she inquired of Cressey. "You were in that big
wreck there, weren't you?"

"Devil of a wreck," said Cressey uneasily. You never could tell what
Esther might know or might not say.

"Ask him over here," directed that young lady blandly, "for coffee and
liqueurs."

"Oh, I say!" protested one of the men. "Nobody knows anything about
him--"

"He's a friend of mine," put in Cressey, in a tone which ended that
particular objection. "But I don't think he'd come."

Instantly there was a chorus of demand for him.

"All right, I'll try," yielded Cressey, rising.

"Put him next to me," directed Miss Forbes.

The emissary visited Banneker's table, was observed to be in brief
colloquy with him, and returned, alone.

"Wouldn't he come?" interrogated the chorus.

"He's awfully sorry, but he says he isn't fit for decent human
associations."

"More and more interesting!"--"Why?"--"What awful thing has he been
doing?"

"Eating onions," answered Cressey. "Raw."

"I don't believe it," cried the indignant Miss Forbes. "One doesn't eat
raw onions at Sherry's. It's a subterfuge."

"Very likely."

"If I went over there myself, who'll bet a dozen silk stockings that I
can't--"

"Come off it, Ess," protested her brother-in-law across the table.
"That's too high a jump, even for you."

She let herself be dissuaded, but her dovelike eyes were vagrant during
the rest of the dinner.

Pleasantly musing over the last glass of a good but moderate-priced
Rosemont-Geneste, Banneker became aware of Cressey's dinner party filing
past him: then of Jules, the waiter, discreetly murmuring something,
from across the table. A faint and provocative scent came to his
nostrils, and as he followed Jules's eyes he saw a feminine figure
standing at his elbow. He rose promptly and looked down into a face
which might have been modeled for a type of appealing innocence.

"You're Mr. Banneker, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I'm Esther Forbes, and I think I've heard a great deal about you."

"It doesn't seem probable," he replied gravely.

"From a cousin of mine," pursued the girl. "She was Io Welland. Haven't
I?"

A shock went through Banneker at the mention of the name. But he
steadied himself to say: "I don't think so."

Herein he was speaking by the letter. Knowing Io Welland as he had, he
deemed it very improbable that she had even so much as mentioned him to
any of her friends. In that measure, at least, he believed, she would
have respected the memory of the romance which she had so ruthlessly
blasted. This girl, with the daring and wistful eyes, was simply
fishing, so he guessed.

His guess was correct. Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes's easy
code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish
curiosity. Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively
romance with which vague gossip had credited her, after her return from
the West; Esther Forbes had gathered it in, gossamer thread by gossamer
thread, and was now hoping to identify Banneker in its uncertain
pattern. Her little plan of startling him into some betrayal had proven
abortive. Not by so much as the quiver of a muscle or the minutest
shifting of an eye had he given sign. Still convinced that he was the
mysterious knight of the desert, she was moved to admiration for his
self-command and to a sub-thrill of pleasurable fear as before an
unknown and formidable species. The man who had transformed
self-controlled and invincible Io Welland into the creature of moods and
nerves and revulsions which she had been for the fortnight preceding her
marriage, must be something out of the ordinary. Instinct of womankind
told Miss Forbes that this and no other was the type of man to work such
a miracle.

"But you did know Io?" she persisted, feeling, as she afterward
confessed, that she was putting her head into the mouth of a lion
concerning whose habits her knowledge was regrettably insufficient.

The lion did not bite her head off. He did not even roar. He merely
said, "Yes."

"In a railroad wreck or something of that sort?"

"Something of that sort."

"Are you awfully bored and wishing I'd go away and let you alone?" she
said, on a note that pleaded for forbearance. "Because if you are, don't
make such heroic efforts to conceal it."

At this an almost imperceptible twist at the corners of his lips
manifested itself to the watchful eye and cheered the enterprising soul
of Miss Forbes. "No," he said equably, "I'm interested to discover how
far you'll go."

The snub left Miss Forbes unembarrassed.

"Oh, as far as you'll let me," she answered. "Did you ride in from your
ranch and drag Io out of the tangled wreckage at the end of your lasso?"

"My ranch? I wasn't on a ranch."

"Please, sir," she smiled up at him like a beseeching angel, "what did
you do that kept us all talking and speculating about you for a whole
week, though we didn't know your name?"

"I sat right on my job as station-agent at Manzanita and made up lists
of the killed and injured," answered Banneker dryly.

"Station-agent!" The girl was taken aback, for this was not at all in
consonance with the Io myth as it had drifted back, from sources never
determined, to New York. "Were you the station-agent?"

"I was."

She bestowed a glance at once appraising and flattering, less upon
himself than upon his apparel. "And what are you now? President of the
road?"

"A reporter on The Ledger."

"Really!" This seemed to astonish her even more than the previous
information. "What are you reporting here?"

"I'm off duty to-night."

"I see. Could you get off duty some afternoon and come to tea, if I'll
promise to have Io there to meet you?"

"Your party seems to be making signals of distress, Miss Forbes."

"That's the normal attitude of my friends and family toward me. You'll
come, won't you, Mr. Banneker?"

"Thank you: but reporting keeps one rather too busy for amusement."

"You won't come," she murmured, aggrieved. "Then it _is_ true about you
and Io."

This time she achieved a result. Banneker flushed angrily, though he
said, coolly enough: "I think perhaps you would make an enterprising
reporter, yourself, Miss Forbes."

"I'm sure I should. Well, I'll apologize. And if you won't come for
Io--she's still abroad, by the way and won't be back for a
month--perhaps you'll come for me. Just to show that you forgive my
impertinences. Everybody does. I'm going to tell Bertie Cressey he must
bring you.... All right, Bertie! I wish you wouldn't follow me up
like--like a paper-chase. Good-night, Mr. Banneker."

To her indignant escort she declared that it couldn't have hurt them to
wait a jiffy; that she had had a most amusing conversation; that Mr.
Banneker was as charming as he was good to look at; and that (in answer
to sundry questions) she had found out little or nothing, though she
hoped for better results in future.

"But he's Io's passion-in-the-desert right enough," said the irreverent
Miss Forbes.

Banneker sat long over his cooling coffee. Through haunted nights he had
fought maddening memories of Io's shadowed eyes, of the exhalant,
irresistible femininity of her, of the pulses of her heart against his
on that wild and wonderful night in the flood; and he had won to an
armed peace, in which the outposts of his spirit were ever on guard
against the recurrent thoughts of her.

Now, at the bitter music of her name on the lips of a gossiping and
frivolous girl, the barriers had given away. In eagerness and
self-contempt he surrendered to the vision. Go to an afternoon tea to
see and speak with her again? He would, in that awakened mood, have
walked across the continent, only to be in her presence, to feel himself
once more within the radius of that inexorable charm.