STILL JIM

STILL JIM

By HONORÉ WILLSIE

Author of

"The Heart of the Desert," Etc.

A. L. BURT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS  ·  NEW YORK

Published by Arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company

Copyright, 1915, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

Copyright, 1914, 1915, by
The Ridgway Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

STILL JIM

CHAPTER I

THE QUARRY

Little Jim sat at the quarry edge and dangled his legs over the derrick pit. The derrick was out of commission because once more the lift cable had parted. Big Jim Manning, Little Jim's father, was down in the pit with Tomasso, his Italian helper, disentangling the cables, working silently, efficiently, as was his custom.

Little Jim bit his fingers and watched and scowled in a worried way. He and his mother hated to have Big Jim work in the quarry. It seemed to them that Big Jim was too good for such work. Little Jim wanted to leave school and be a water boy and his father's helper. Big Jim never seemed to hear the boy's request and Little Jim kept on at school.

The noon whistle blew just as the cable was once more in running order. Little Jim slid down into the pit with his father's dinner bucket and sat by while his father ate.

Big Jim Manning was big only in height. He was six feet tall, but lean. He was sallow and given to long silences that he broke with a slow, sarcastic drawl that Little Jim had inherited. Big Jim was forty-five years old. Little Jim was fourteen; tall and lean, like his father, his face a composite of father and mother. His eyes were large and a clear gray. Even at fourteen he had the half sweet, half gay, wholly wistful smile that people watched for, when he grew up. His hair was a warm leaf brown, peculiarly soft and thick. Little Jim's forehead was the forehead of a dreamer. His mouth and chin were dogged, persistent, energetic.

When he was not in school, Jim never missed the noon hour at the quarry. He had his father's love for mechanics. He had his father's love for law and order making, the gift to both of their unmixed Anglo-Saxon ancestry. When Big Jim did talk at the noon hour, it was usually to try to educate his Italian and Polish fellow workmen to his New England viewpoint. Little Jim never missed a word. He adored his father. He was profoundly influenced by the dimly felt, not understood tragedy of his father's life and of the old New England town in which he lived.

Big Jim spread a white napkin over his knee and poured a cup of steaming soup from the thermos bottle. Tomasso broke off a chunk of bread and took an onion from one pocket and a piece of cheese from another. Big Jim and 'Masso, as he was called, working shoulder to shoulder, day by day, had developed a sort of liking for each other in spite of the fact that Big Jim held foreigners in utter contempt.

"Why did you come to America, anyhow, 'Masso?" drawled Big Jim, waiting for his soup to cool.

'Masso gnawed his onion and bread thoughtfully. "Maka da mon' quick, here; go backa da old countra rich."

"What else?" urged Big Jim.

'Masso looked blank. "I mean," said Big Jim, "did you like our laws better'n yours? Did you like our ways better?"

'Masso shrugged his shoulders. "Don' care 'bout countra if maka da mon'. Why you come desa countra?"

Big Jim's drawl seemed to bite like the slow gouge of a stone chisel.

"I was born here, you Wop! This very dirt made the food that made me, understand? I'm a part of this country, same as the trees are. My forefathers left comfort and friends behind them and came to this country when it was full of Indians to be free. Free! Can you get that? And what good did it do them? They larded the soil with their good sweat to make a place for fellows like you. And what do you care?"

'Masso, who was quick and eager, shook his head. "I work all da time. I maka da mon. I go home to old countra. That 'nough. Work alla da time."

Big Jim ate his beef sandwich slowly. Little Jim, chin in palm, sat listening, turning the matter over in his mind. His father tried another angle.

"What started you over here, 'Masso? How'd you happen to think of coming?"

'Masso understood this. "Homa, mucha talk 'bout desa landa. How ever'boda getta da mon over here. I heara da talk but it like a dream, see? I lika da talk but I lika my own Italia, see? But in olda countra many men work for steamship compana. Steamship compana, they needa da mon', too, see? They talk to us mucha, fixa her easy, come here easy, getta da job easy, see? Steamship men, they keepa right after me, so I come, see?"

Big Jim lighted his pipe. "Tell Mama that was a good dinner, Jimmy," he said. "I haven't got anything personal against you, 'Masso," he went on. "You're a human being like me, trying to take care of your family. I suppose you can't help it that Italians as a class are a lawless lot of cut-throats. You certainly are willing workers. But I'd like to bet that if we'd shut the doors after the Civil War and let those that was in this country have their chance, this country would have a wholesomer growth than it has now. I'll bet if they had fifty men in this quarry like me instead of a hundred like you, it would turn out twice the work it does now."

"But Dad, they say you can't get real Americans to do this kind of work," said Little Jim.

"Deal with facts, Jimmy; deal with facts," drawled his father. "I'm working here. Will Endicott, John Allen, Phil Chadwick are all day laborers. Our forefathers founded this government and this town. What's happened to it and to us? It's too late for us older men to do much. But you kids have got to think about it. What's happened to us? What's happened to this old town? I want you to think about it."

Little Jim took the dinner bucket and started for home. His father had not been talking on a topic new to the Mannings or to the Mannings' friends. Little Jim had been brought up to wonder what was the matter with his breed, what had happened to Exham. Little Jim's forefathers had once held in grant from an English king the land on which the quarry lay. His grandfather had given it up. Farm labor was hard to get. The mortgage had grown heavier and heavier. The land all about was being bought up by Polish and Italian hucksters who lived on what they could not sell and whose wives and children were their farm hands. Grandfather Manning could not compete with this condition.

Big Jim had gone to New York City in his early twenties. He had had a good high school education and was a first-class mechanic. But somehow, he could not compete. He was slow and thoroughgoing and honest. He could not compete with the new type of workman, the man bred to do part work. When Little Jim was five, the Mannings had come back to Exham, with the hope of somehow, sometime, buying back the old farm.

Little Jim passed the old farmhouse slowly. It was used for a storehouse for quarry supplies now. Yet it still was beautiful. Two great elms still shaded the wide portico. The great eaves still sheltered many paned windows. The delicate balustrade still guarded the curving staircase. The dream of Little Jim's life was to live in that great, hospitable mansion.

He passed with a boy's deliberation down the long street that led toward the cottage where the Mannings now lived. The street was heavily shaded by gigantic elms. It was lined on either side by fine Colonial houses, set in gardens, some of which still held dials and bricked walks; wide, deep gardens some of which still were ghostly sweet. But the majority of the mansions had been turned into Italian tenement houses. The gardens were garbage heaps. The houses were filthy and disheveled. The look of them clutched one's heart with horror and despair, as if one looked on a once lovely mother turned to a street drabble.

Little Jim looked and thought with a sense of helpless melancholy that should not have belonged to fourteen. When he reached the cottage, his mother, taking the bucket from him, caught the look in the clear gray eyes that were like her own. She had no words for the look. Nevertheless she understood it immediately. Mrs. Manning was nervous and energetic, with the half-worried, half-wistful face of so many New England women.

"Jimmy," she said, "Phil Chadwick just whistled for you. He went to the swimming hole."

The words were magic. They swept that intangible look from Jim's face and left it flushed and boyish.

"Gee!" he exclaimed, "he's early today. Can I have my dinner right off?"

"Yes," replied his mother, "but remember not to go in until three o'clock. I'm sure I don't see what keeps all you boys from dying! And how you can stand the blood suckers and turtles up there in that mud hole! Goodness! Come, dear, I've cooled off your soup so you can hurry. I knew you'd want to."

Will Endicott dropped in at the Mannings' that evening. Will was a short, florid man, younger than Big Jim. Little Jim, his hair still damp and his fingers wrinkled from water soak, laid down his Youth's Companion. Usually when Will Endicott came there were some lively discussions on the immigration question and the tariff. Even had Little Jim wanted to talk, he would not have been allowed to do so. Among the New Englanders in Exham the old maxim still obtained, "Children are to be seen and not heard." But Little Jim always listened eagerly.

Endicott looked excited tonight. But he had no news about the tariff.

"There's a boy at my house!" he exclaimed. "He just came. Nine pounds! Annie is doing fine."

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Manning, while Big Jim shook Will's hand solemnly. "Oh, goodness! I didn't know—Why I thought tomorrow—Well, I guess I'll go right over now. Goodness——" and still exclaiming, she hurried out into the summer dusk.

"That's great, Will!" said Big Jim. "I wish I could afford to have a dozen. But they cost money, these kids. I suppose you'll be like me, never be able to afford but the one."

"He's awful strong," said Will, abstractedly. "To hear him yell, you'd think he was twins. Looks like me, too. Red as a beet and fat."

"Must be a beauty," said Big Jim. "That Wop that works with me has seven children about a year apart. Doesn't worry him at all. He just moves into a cheaper place, cuts down on food and clothes and takes another one out of school and sets him to work. They're growing up like Indians, lawless little devils. A fine addition to the country! I was reading the other day that by the law of averages a man has got to have four children to be pretty sure of his line surviving. And it said that we New Englanders have the smallest birth rate in the civilized world except France, which is the same as ours. And we've got the biggest proportion of foreigners of any part of America now, up here."

Will came out of the clouds for a moment. "I've been telling you that for years. What's the matter with us, anyhow?"

Big Jim shrugged his shoulders. "All like you and me, I suppose. If we can't give a child a decent chance, we won't have 'em. And these foreigners have cut down wages so's we can hardly support one, let alone two."

Endicott rose. "I just happened to think. I'm going to borrow Chadwick's scales and weigh him again. They're better than mine."

Big Jim chuckled and filled his pipe. Then he sighed. "We've got to go, Jimmy. The old New Englander is as dead as the Indian. We are has-beens."

"But why?" urged Little Jim. "I don't feel like a has-been. What's made us this way? Why don't you and the rest do something?"

"You'd have to change our skins," replied his father, "to make us fight these foreigners on their own level. I'm going to bed. No use waiting for Mama. There's a hard day ahead in the quarry tomorrow. That break set us back on a rush order. The boss was crazy. I told him as I told him forty times before that he'd have to get a new derrick, but he won't. Not so long as he's got me to piece and contrive and make things do.

"I tried to talk 'Masso and the rest into striking for it today, but they don't care anything about the equipment. It's something bigger than I can get at. It isn't only this quarry. It's everywhere I work. Always these foreigners are willing to work in such conditions as we Americans can't stand. Everywhere twenty of 'em waiting to undercut our pay. And the big men bank on this very thing to make themselves rich. You'd better go after your mother, Jimmy. This village ain't safe for a woman after dark the way it was before the Italians came. I'm going to bed."

The next night at supper Big Jim was very silent. When he had eaten his slice of cake he said in his slow way, "No more cake for a while, I guess, Mama."

Mrs. Manning looked up in her nervous, startled manner.

"What's the matter, Jim?"

"Well, I went with my usual kick to the boss about the derrick and he told me to take it or leave it. That work was slacking up so he'd decided on a ten per cent. cut in wages. I don't know but what I'd better quit and look for something else."

"Oh, no, no!" exclaimed Mrs. Manning. She had been through many, many periods of job hunting since her marriage. "Keep your job, Jim. Next week is September and winter will be here before we know it. We'll manage somehow."

"I'll not go to school," cried Little Jim. "I'll get a job. Please, Dad, let me!"

"You'll stay in school," replied Big Jim in his best stone chisel drawl, "as long as I have strength to work. And if I can send you through college, you'll go. Don't you ever think of anything, Jimmy, but that you are to have a thorough education? If anything happens to me you are to get an education if you have to sweep the streets to do it. That's the New England idea. Educate the children at whatever cost. I had a high school education and you'll have a college course if I live. And if I don't live, get it for yourself. I'll have another cup of tea, please, Mama."

"Well, it makes me sick!" exclaimed Little Jim with one of his rare outbursts of feeling, "to have you and mama working so hard and me do nothing but feed the chickens and chop wood. I'll give up the Youth's Companion, anyhow."

Mrs. Manning looked horrified. The Companion was as much a family institution as the dictionary. "How do you think you are going to be really educated, Jimmy, unless you read good things? Your father and I were brought up on the Companion and you'll keep right on with it. I'll get cheaper coffee, Papa, and we can give up cream. Ten per cent. That will make a difference of twenty cents a day. I'll turn my winter suit."

"I'll give up tobacco for a while," said Big Jim. "I was thinking about it, anyhow. It's got so it bites my tongue. I don't need any new winter things, but Jimmy's got to look decent. My father would turn over in his grave if he thought I couldn't keep the last Manning dressed decent. Maybe we ought to give up this cottage, Mama. The Higgins cottage is pretty good but it hasn't got any bathroom."

"If you think I'm going to let Jimmy grow up without a bathroom, you're mistaken," replied Mrs. Manning. "I've got a chance to send jelly and preserves to Boston and I'm going to do it. Don't worry, Papa. We'll make it."

When Little Jim took his father's dinner to him the next day, 'Masso's boy Tony was sharing 'Masso's lunch. His face was dust smeared.

"I gotta job," announced Tony.

'Masso nodded. "He bigga kid now. Not go da school any more. Boss, he giva da cut. I bringa da Tony, getta da job as tool boy. Boss, he fire da Yankee boy. Tony, he work cheaper."

"He's too small to work," said Big Jim. "You'd ought to keep him in school and give him a chance."

"Chance for what?" asked 'Masso.

"Chance to grow into a decent American citizen," snarled Big Jim with the feeling he had had so often of late, the sense of having his back to the wall while the pack worried him in front.

Tony looked up quickly. He was a brilliant faced little chap. "I am an American!" he cried. "I'll be rich some day."

Big Jim looked from 'Masso's child to his own. Then he looked off over the browning summer fields, beyond the quarry. There lay the land that his fathers had held in grant from an English king. But the fields that had built Big Jim's flesh and blood were dotted with Italian huts. The lane in which Big Jim's mother had met his father, returning crippled from Antietam, was blocked by a Polish road house.

Little Jim didn't like the look on his father's face. He spoke his first thought to break the silence.

"Can't I stay for a while, Dad, and watch you load the big stones?"

"If your mother won't worry and you'll keep out of the way," answered Big Jim, rising as the whistle blew.

To industry, the cheapest portion of its equipment is its inexhaustible human labor supply. It was Big Jim who was sufficiently intelligent to keep demanding a new derrick. It was Big Jim who was adept in managing the decrepit machinery and so it was he who was sent to the danger spots, he having the keenest wits and the best knowledge of the danger spots.

Little Jim, sitting with his long legs dangling over the derrick pit, watched his father and 'Masso tease the derrick into swinging the great blocks to the flat car for the rush order.

The thing happened very quickly, so quickly that Little Jim could not jump to his feet and start madly down into the pit before it was all over. The great derrick broke clean from its moorings and dropped across the flat car, throwing Big Jim and 'Masso and the swinging block together in a ghastly heap.

It took some time to rig the other derrick to bear on the situation. Little Jim dropped to the ground and managed to grip his father's hand, protruding from under the débris. But the boy could not speak. He only sobbed dryly and clung desperately to the inert hand.

At last Big Jim and 'Masso were laid side by side upon the brown grass at the quarry edge. 'Masso's chest was broken. The priest got to him before the doctor. Had 'Masso known enough, before he choked, he might have said:

"It doesn't matter. I have done a real man's part. I have worked to the limit of my strength and I shall survive for America through my fertility. What I have done to America, no one knows."

But 'Masso was no thinker. Before he slipped away, he only said some futile word to the priest who knelt beside him. 'Masso never had gotten very far from the thought of his Maker.

Big Jim, lying on the border of the fields where his fathers had dreamed and hoped and worked, looked hazily at Little Jim, and tried to say something, but couldn't. Once more the sense of having his back to the wall, the pack suffocating him, closed in on him, blinded him, and merged with him into the darkness into which none of us has seen.

Had Big Jim been able to clarify the chaos of thoughts in his mind and had he had a longer time for dying, he might have done the thing far more dramatically. He merely rasped out his life, a bloody, voiceless, broken thing on the golden August fields, with his chaos of thoughts unspoken.

He might, had things been otherwise, have seen the long, sad glory of humanity's migrations; might have caught for an unspeakable second a vision of that never ceasing, never long deflected on-moving of human life that must continue, regardless of race tragedy, as long as humans crave food either for the body or the soul. He might have seen himself as symbolizing one of those races that slip over the horizon into oblivion, unprotesting, only vaguely knowing. And seeing this thing, Big Jim might have paused and looking into the face of the horde that was pressing him over the brim, he might have said:

"We who are about to die, salute thee!"

But Big Jim was not dramatic. Little Jim never knew what his father might have said. Instinct told the boy when the end had come. His dry sobs changed to the abandoned tears of childhood as he ran down the street of elms and besotted mansions to tell his mother.

CHAPTER II

Jimmy stood beside his mother. He was taller than she. Suddenly, with boyish awkwardness, he pulled the sobbing little woman to him and leaned his young cheek on her graying hair.

"Mama, I'll make myself into a darned college professor, if you just won't cry!" he whispered.

For several days after the funeral, Jim wandered about the house and yard fighting to control his tears when he came upon some sudden reminder of his father; the broken rake his father had mended the week before; a pair of old shoes in the wood shed; one of his father's pipes on the kitchen window ledge. The nights were the worst, when the picture of his father's last moments would not let the boy sleep. It seemed to Jim that if he could learn to forget this picture a part of his grief would be lifted. It was the uselessness of Big Jim's death that made the boy unboyishly bitter. He could not believe that any other death ever had been so needless. It was only in the years to come that Jim was to learn how needlessly, how unremittingly, industry takes its toll of lives.

Somehow, Jim had a boyish feeling that his father had had many things to say to him that never had been said; that these things were very wise and would have guided him. Jim felt rudderless. He felt that it was incumbent on him to do the things that his father had not been able to do. Vaguely and childishly he determined that he must make good for the Mannings and for Exham. Poor old Exham, with its lost ideals!

It was in thinking this over that Jim conceived an idea that became a great comfort to him. He decided to write down all the advice that he could recall his father's giving him, and when his mother became less broken up, to ask her to tell him all the plans his father might have had for him.

So it was that a week or so after her husband's death, Mrs. Manning found one of Jim's scratch pads on the table in his room, with a carefully printed title on the cover:

MY FATHER'S ADVICES TO ME.

After she had wiped the quick tears from her eyes, she read the few pages Jim had completed in his sprawling hand:

"My father said to me, 'Jimmy, never make excuses. It's always too late for excuses.'

"He said, 'A liar is a first cousin to a skunk. There isn't a worse coward than a liar.'

"He said to me, 'Don't belly-ache. Stand up to your troubles like a man.'

"My father said, 'Hang to what you undertake like a hound to a warm scent.'

"He said to me, 'Life is made up of obeying. What you don't learn from me about that, the world will kick into you. The stars themselves obey a law. God must hate a law breaker.'

"My father said, 'Somehow us Americans are quitters.'

"My mother said my father said, 'I want Jimmy to go through college. I want him to marry young and have a big family.'

"The thing my father said to me oftenest lately was, 'Jimmy, be clean about women. Some day you will know what I mean when I say that sex is energy. Keep yourself clean for your life work and your wife and children.'"

Mrs. Manning read the pages over several times, then she laid the book down and stood staring out of the window.

"Oh, he was a good man!" she whispered. "He was a good man! If Jimmy could have had him just two years more! I don't know how to teach him the things a man ought to know. A boy needs his father.——Oh, my love! My love——"

Down below, Jim was leaning on the front gate. His chum, Phil Chadwick, was coming slowly up the street. The boys had not been near Jim since the funeral. Jim had become a person set apart from their boy world. No one appreciates the dignity of grief better than a boy, or underneath his awkwardness has a finer way of showing it. Phil's mother, to his unspeakable discomfort, had insisted now that he go call on Jim.

Phil, his round face red with embarrassment, approached the gate a little sidewise.

"Hello, Still!" he said casually.

"Hello, Pilly!" replied Jim, blushing in sympathy.

There was a pause, then said Phil, leaning on the gate, "Diana's got her pups. One's going to be a bulldog and two of 'em are setters. U-u-u—want to come over and see 'em and choose yours?"

Jim's face was quivering. It was his father who had persuaded his mother that Jim ought to have one of Diana's pups. Mrs. Manning felt toward dogs much as she might have toward hyenas.

"I—I—guess not today, Pilly!"

Another long pause during which the lads swung the gate to and fro and looked in opposite directions. A locust shrilled from the elm tree. Finally Phil said:

"Still, you gotta come up to the swimming hole. It'll do you good. He—he'd a wanted you to—to—to do what you could to cheer up. Come on, old skinny. Tell your mother. We'll keep away from the other kids. Come on. You gotta do something or you'll go nutty in your head."

Jim turned and went into the house. His mother forestalled his request.

"If Phil wants you to go swimming, dear, go on. It will do you good. Don't stay in too long."

Jim and Phil walked up the road to the old Allen place. They climbed the stile into a field where the aftermath of the clover crop was richly green and vibrating with the song of cricket and katydid. The path that the boys followed had been used in turn by Indian and Puritan. The field still yielded an occasional hide scraper or stone axe.

There was a pine grove at the far edge of the field. In the center of the grove was the pond that had for centuries been the swimming pool for boys, Indian and white. Ground pine and "checkerberry" grew abundantly in the grove. Both boys breathed deep of the piney fragrance and filled their mouths with pungent "checkerberry" leaves. The path, deep worn by many bare feet, circled round the great pines to the clearing where the pond lay. It was black with the shadows of the grove where it was not blue and white in mirroring the September sky. Lily pads fringed the brim. Moss and a tender, long grass grew clear to the water's edge.

Several boys were undressing near the ancient springboard. They looked embarrassed and stopped their laughter when they saw Jim. He and Phil got into their swimming trunks quickly and followed each other in a clean dive into the pool. They swam about in silence for a time and then landed on the far side and lay in the sun on moss and pine needles.

The beauty and sweetness of the place were subtle balm to Jim. And surely if countless generations of boy joy could leave association, the old swimming hole should have spoken very sweetly to Jim. The swimming hole was a boy sanctuary. The water was too shallow for men. Little girls were not allowed to invade the grove except in early spring for trailing arbutus. The oldest men in Exham told that their grandfathers, as boys, had sought the swimming hole as the adult seeks his club.

Jim looked with interest at his legs. "I've got six. How many have you, Pilly?"

Phil counted the brown bloodsuckers that clung to his fat calves. "Seven. Mean cusses, ain't they."

Jim worked with a sharp edged stone, scraping his thin shanks. "You've got fat to spare. They've had enough off of me today."

"I remember how crazy I was first time they got on me. Felt as if I had snakes." Phil rooted six of the suckers off his legs and paused at the seventh. "He's as skinny as you are, Still. I'll give him two minutes more to finish a square meal."

The two boys lay staring out at the pond.

"Have you gotta go to work, Still?" asked Phil.

"Yes," replied Jim. "Mother says I can't, though."

Phil waited more or less patiently. His mates had long since learned that Jim's silences were hard to break.

"But I'm going to get a job in the quarry as soon as I can keep from getting sick at my stomach every time I see a derrick."

"My dad says your—he—he always planned to send you through college," said Phil.

Jim nodded. "I'll get through college. See if I don't. But I won't let my mother support me. I've got a lot of things to finish up for him."

"What things?" asked Phil.

"Well," Jim hesitated for words, "he worried a lot because all the real Americans are dying off or going, somehow, and he always said it was us kids' business to find out why. That's the chief job."

"I don't see what you can do about it," said Phil. "That's a foolish thing to worry about. Why——"

A boy screamed on the opposite side of the pond. It was so different from the shouts and laughter of the moment before that Jim and Phil jumped to their feet. Across the swimming hole a naked boy was dancing up and down, screaming hysterically,

"Take 'em off! Take 'em off! Take 'em off!"

"It's the new minister's kid, Charlie," laughed Phil. "The fellows have got the bloodsuckers on him. Ain't he the booby? Told me he was fifteen and he's bigger'n you are. Screams like a girl."

Jim stood staring, his hand shielding his gray eyes from the sun. Across the pond, the boys were doubled up with laughter, watching the minister's son writhe and tear at his naked body. Suddenly, Jim shot round the edge of the pond, followed by Phil. A dozen naked boys hopped joyfully around the twisting Charlie. They were of all ages, from eight to sixteen.

When Jim ran up to the new boy, his mates shouted: "Don't butt in, now, Jim. Don't butt in. He's a darned sissy."

Jim did not reply. Charlie was considerably larger than he. He had a finely muscled pink and white body, liberally dotted now with wriggling brown suckers. This was a familiar form of hazing with the Exham boys. There was a horror in a first experience with the little brown pests that usually resulted in a mild form of hysteria very pleasing to the young spectators. But Charlie was in an agony of loathing, far ahead of anything the boys had seen.

As Jim ran up, Charlie struck at him madly and the boys yelled in delight. Jim turned on them.

"Shut up!" he shouted. "Shut up now!"

Thin and tall, his boyish ribs showing, his damp hair tossed back from his beautiful gray eyes that were now black with anger, Jim dominated the crowd. There was immediate silence, broken only by Charlie's wild sobs.

"Take 'em off! Take 'em off!"

"He's going to have a fit!" exclaimed Phil.

Charlie's lips were blue and foam flecked. Again as Jim approached him, the minister's boy planted a blow on his ribs that made Jim spin.

"Charlie!" cried Jim. "Shut up!"

The same peculiarly commanding note that had silenced his mates pierced through Charlie's hysteria. He paused for a moment, and in that moment Jim said, "Hold your breath and they can't draw blood. I'll have 'em off you in a second."

"C-c-can't they?" sobbed Charlie.

"Hold your breath and I'll show you," said Jim. "Here, Phil, take hold."

As they stripped the squirming suckers, Jim kept a hand on Charlie's arm. "Can you fight, kid?" he asked. "You've got muscle. You'd better lick the fellow that started this on you or you'll never hear the end of it."

The blue receded from the older boy's lips. He had a fine, sensitive face. "I can fight," he replied. "But I fight fellows and not snakes or worms."

Jim nodded as he pulled off the last sucker. Then he turned to the boys, his hand still on Charlie's arm. He spoke in his usual drawl:

"They's a difference between hazing a fellow and torturing him. Some mighty gritty people can't stand snakes or suckers. You kids ought to use sense. Who started this?"

The biggest boy in the crowd, Fatty Allen, answered: "I did. And if your father hadn't just died I'd lick the stuffing out of you, Still, for butting in."

A shout of derision went up from the boys. Jim's lips tightened. "You lick the new kid first," he answered, "then tackle me. Get after him, Charlie!"

Charlie, quite himself again, leaped toward Fatty and the battle was on.

There had been, unknown to the boys, an interested spectator to this entire scene. Just as Charlie's screams had begun, a heavy set man, ruddy and well dressed, with iron gray hair and black lashed, blue eyes, had paused beside a pine tree. It was a vividly beautiful picture that he saw; the pine set pool, rush and pad fringed, and the naked boys, now gathered about the struggling two near the ancient springboard. One of the smaller boys, moving about to get a better view of the battle, came within arm reach of the stranger, who clutched him.

"Who's this boy they call Still?" he asked. "Stand up here on this stump. I'll brace you."

The small boy heaved a sigh of ecstasy at his unobstructed view. "It's Still Jim Manning. His father just got killed. He's boss of our gang."

"But he's not the biggest," said the stranger.

"Naw, he ain't the biggest, but he can make the fellows mind. He don't talk much but what he says goes."

"Can he lick the big fellow?"

"Who? Fatty Allen? Bet your life! Still's built like steel wire."

"What did he start this fight for?" asked the man.

"Aw, can't you see they'd never let up on this new kid after he bellered so, unless he licked Fatty? Gee! What a wallop! That Charlie kid is going to lick whey out of Fatty."

"So Still is boss?" mused the stranger. "Could he stop that fight, now?"

"Sure," answered the child, "but he wouldn't."

"We'll see," said the stranger. He crossed over to the ring of boys and touched Jim on the shoulder. "I want to speak to you, Manning."

Jim looked at the stranger in astonishment, then answered awkwardly, "Can you wait? I've got to referee this fight."

"You will have to come now," said the man. "Your mother said to come back at once, with me."

Jim walked into the ring, between the two combatants. "Drop it, fellows. I've got to go home. We'll finish this fight tomorrow. Fatty can tackle me then, too."

There were several protests but Fatty had had enough. He was glad of the opportunity to dive into the pond. One after the other the boys ran up the springboard until only Jim and the stranger were left. The man walked back into the grove and in a moment Jim, in his knickerbockers and blouse, joined him.

"I'm glad to see you can obey, as well as boss, me boy," said the man. "Your mother says you don't know that a few days ago she advertised in the N. Y. Sun for a position as housekeeper. I liked the ad and came up to see her. I'm a lawyer in New York, a widower. I like your mother. She's a lady to the center of her. But when she told me she had a boy your age, I felt dubious. She wanted to send for you but I insisted on coming meself. I wanted to see you among boys. Me name is Michael Dennis."

Jim flushed painfully. "I don't want my mother to work like that. I can support her."

"I'm glad that you feel that way, me boy. But on the other hand, you're not old enough to support her the way she can support herself and you, too."

"I'll never let my mother support me!" cried Jim.

"What can you do to prevent it?" asked Mr. Dennis. "Wouldn't you like to live in New York?"

Jim hesitated. Dennis put his hand on Jim's shoulder. "I like you, me boy. I never thought to want another child about me house. Come, we'll talk it over with your mother."

Jim followed into the cottage sitting room, where his mother eyed the two anxiously.

"I thought something must have happened," she said. "Did you have trouble finding the pond?"

Mr. Dennis smiled genially. "Not a bit! I was just getting acquainted with your boy. He's quite a lad, Mrs. Manning, and I'm going to tell you I'll be glad to have him in me house. Now I'll just tell you what me house is like and what we'll have to expect of each other."

After an hour's talk Dennis said: "I will give you fifty dollars a month and board and lodging for the lad."

Mrs. Manning flushed with relief. Jim, who had not said a word since coming into the house, spoke suddenly in his father's own drawl:

"I don't want anyone to give me my keep. I'll take care of the furnace and do the work round the house you pay a man to do, and if that isn't enough to pay for keeping me, I'll work for you in your office Saturdays."

Mr. Dennis looked at the tall boy keenly, then said whimsically, "Well, I thought you'd been smitten dumb."

"He's very still, Jim is, except when he's fearfully worked up. All the Mannings are that way," said his mother.

Mr. Dennis nodded. "The house takes lots of care. Your mother will get a maid to help her and I'll let the man go who has been doing janitor service for me. With this arrangement, I'll make your mother's salary $65 a month."

And so the decision was made.

It was the last week in September when Jim and his mother left Exham. The day before they left the old town, Jim tramped doggedly up the street toward the old Manning mansion. He had not been there since his father's death.

When he reached the dooryard he stopped, pulled off his cap and stood looking at the doorway that had welcomed so many Mannings and sped so many more. The boy stood, erect and slender, the wind ruffling his thick dark hair across his dreamer's forehead, his energetic jaw set firmly. Now and again tears blinded his gray eyes, but he blinked them back resolutely.

Jim must have stood before the door of his old home for half an hour, a silent, lonely young figure at whom the quarry men glanced curiously. When the whistle blew five Jim made an heroic effort and turned and looked at the derrick, again spliced into place. He shuddered but forced himself to look.

It was after sunset when Jim finally turned away. It was many years before he came to this place again. Yet Exham had made its indelible imprint on the boy. The convictions that had molded his first fourteen years were to mold his whole life. Somehow he felt that his father had been a futile sacrifice to the thing that was destroying New England and that old New England spirit which he had been taught to revere. What the thing was he did not know. And yet, with his boyish lips trembling, he promised the old mansion to make good for his father and for Exham—poor old Exham, with its lost ideals!

CHAPTER III