The Wrong Twin

CHAPTER IX

The colourful years sped. At fifteen Wilbur Cowan, suddenly alive to this quick way of time, was looking back to the days of his heedless youth. That long aisle of years seemed unending, but it narrowed in perspective until earlier experiences were but queerly dissolving shapes, wavering of outline, dimly discerned, piquant or sad in the mind, but elusive when he would try to fix them.

On a shining, full-starred night he stood before the little house in the Penniman side yard and bade farewell to this youth. A long time he gazed into the arched splendour above. He had never noticed that the stars were so many and so bright; and they were always there, by day as well as by night, so his father said. Many of them, on the same veracious authority, were peopled; some with people who were yet but monkeys like the Vielhaber's Emil; some with people now come to be human like himself; others with ineffable beings who had progressed in measureless periods of time beyond any human development that even Dave Cowan could surmise.

The aging boy felt suddenly friendly with all those distant worlds, glad they were there, so almost sociably near. On more than one of them, perhaps far off in that white streak they called the Milky Way, there must be boys like himself, learning useful things about life, to read good books and all about machinery, and have good habits, and so forth. Surely on one of those far worlds there was at least one boy like himself, who was being a boy for the last time and would to-morrow be a man. For Wilbur Cowan, beneath this starry welter of creation—of worlds to be or in being, or lifeless hulks that had been worlds and were outworn—was on this June night uplifted to face the parting of the ways. His last day had been lived as a boy with publicly bare feet.

No more would he feel the soft run of new grass beneath his soles, or longer need beware the chance nail or sharp stone in the way. On the morrow, presumably to be a day inviting to bare feet as had all the other days of his summers, remembered and forgotten, he would, when he rose, put on stockings and stout shoes; and he would put them on world without end through all the new mornings of his life, howsoever urgently with their clement airs they might solicit the older mode. It was a solemn thing to reflect upon, under a glittering heaven that held, or not, those who might feel with him the bigness of the moment. He suffered a vision of the new shoes, stiffly formidable, side by side at the foot of his bed in the little house. It left him feeling all his years.

And he would wear long trousers! With tolerant amusement he saw himself as of old, barefoot, bare-legged, the knee pants buttoned to the calico blouse. It was all over. He scanned the stars a last time, dimly feeling that the least curious of their inhabitants would be aware of this crisis.

Perhaps on one of those blinking orbs people with a proper concern for other world events would be saying to one another: "Yes, he's grown up now. Didn't you hear the big news? Why, to-morrow he's going to begin driving a truck for Trimble Cushman—got a job for the whole summer."

If the announcement startled less than great news should, the speaker could surely produce a sensation by adding: "The first automobile truck in Newbern Center."

And how had this immature being, capable out-of-doors boy though he was, come to be so exalted above his fellows? Sam Pickering's linotype had first revealed his gift for machinery. For Sam had installed a linotype, and Wilbur Cowan had patiently mastered its distracting intricacies. Dave Cowan had informally reappeared one day, still attired with decreasing elegance below the waist—his cloth-topped shoes but little more than distressing memories—and announced that he was now an able operator of this wondrous machine; and the harried editor of the Advance, stung to enterprise by flitting wastrels who tarried at his case only long enough to learn the name of the next town, had sought relief in machinery, even if it did take bread from the mouths of honest typesetters. Their lack of preference as to where they earned there bread, their insouciant flights from town to town without notice, had made Sam brutal. He had ceased to care whether they had bread or not. So Dave for a summer had brought him surcease from help worries.

The cynical journeyman printer of the moment, on a day when Dave tried out the new machine, had stood by and said she might set type but she certainly couldn't justify it, because it took a human to do that, and how would a paper look with unevenly ending lines? When Dave, seated before the thing, proved that she uncannily could justify the lines of type before casting them in metal, the dismayed printer had shuddered at the mystery of it.

Dave Cowan seized the moment to point out to his admiring son and other bystanders that it was all the working of evolution. If you couldn't change when your environment demanded it Nature scrapped you. Hand compositors would have to learn to set type by machinery or go down in the struggle for existence. Survival of the fittest—that was it. The doubting printer was not there to profit by this lecture. Though it was but five o'clock, he was down on the depot platform moodily waiting for the six-fifty-eight.

The next number of the Advance was set by linotype, a circumstance of which one of its columns spoke feelingly, and set, moreover, in the presence of as many curious persons as could crowd about the operator. Among these none was so fascinated as Wilbur Cowan. He hung lovingly about the machine, his fingers itching to be at its parts. When work for the day was over he stayed by it until the light grew dim in the low-ceilinged, dusty office. He took liberties with its delicate structure that would have alarmed its proud owner, playing upon it with wrench and screw driver, detaching parts from the whole for the pure pleasure of putting them back. He thus came to an intimate knowledge of the contrivance. He knew what made it go. He early mastered its mere operation. Sam Pickering felt fortified against the future.

Then it developed that though Dave Cowan could perform ably upon the instrument while it retained its health he was at a loss when it developed ailments; and to these it was prone, being a machine of temperament and airs, inclined to lose spirit, to sulk, even irritably to refuse all response to Dave's fingering of the keyboard. Dave was sincerely startled when his son one day skillfully restored tone to the thing after it had disconcertingly rebelled. Sam Pickering, on the point of wiring for the mechanic who had installed his treasure, looked upon the boy with awe as his sure hands wrought knowingly among the weirdest of its vitals. Dave was impressed to utter lack of speech, and resumed work upon the again compliant affair without comment. Perhaps he reflected that the stern processes of his favourite evolution demanded more knowledge of this machine than even he had acquired.

There ensued further profitable education for the young mechanic from the remarkable case of Sharon Whipple's first motor car. Sharon, the summer before, after stoutly affirming for two years that he would never have one of the noisy things on the place, even though the Whipple New Place now boasted two—boasting likewise of their speed and convenience—and even though Gideon Whipple jestingly called him a fossilized barnacle on the ship of progress, had secretly bought a motor car and secretly for three days taken instructions in its running from the city salesman who delivered it. His intention was to become daringly expert in its handling and flash upon the view of the discomfited Gideon, who had not yet driven a car. He would wheel carelessly up the drive to the Whipple New Place in apparently contemptuous mastery of the thing, and he would specifically deny ever having received any driving lessons whatever, thus by falsehood overwhelming his brother with confusion.

In the stable, therefore, one afternoon he had taken his place at the wheel. Affecting a jovial ease of mind, he commanded the company of his stableman, Elihu Titus, on the seat beside him. He wished a little to show off to Elihu, but he wished even more to be not alone if something happened. With set jaws and a tight grip of the wheel he had backed from the stable, and was rendered nervous in the very beginning by the apparent mad resolve of the car to continue backing long after it was wished not to. Elihu Titus was also rendered nervous, and was safely on the ground before the car yielded to the invincible mass of a boxwood hedge that had been forty years in growing. Sharon pointed his eyebrows.

"It makes you feel like a helpless fool," he confided to his hireling.

"She's all right on this side," said Elihu Titus, cannily peering at the nether mechanism in pretense that he had left his seat to do just that.

The next start was happier in results. Down the broad driveway Sharon had piloted the monster, and through the wide gate, though in a sudden shuddering wonder if it were really wide enough for his mount; then he had driven acceptably if jerkily along back streets for an exciting hour. It wasn't so bad, except once when he met a load of hay and emerged with frayed nerves from the ordeal of passing it; and he had been compelled to drive a long way until he could find space in which to turn round. The smarty that had sold the thing to him had turned in a narrow road, but not again that day would Sharon employ the whimsically treacherous gear of the retrograde.

He came at last to a stretch of common that permitted a wide circle, and took this without mishap. A block farther along he had picked up the Cowan boy. He was not above prizing the admiration of this child for his mechanical genius. Wilbur exclaimed his delight at the car and lolled gingerly upon its luxurious back seat. He was taken full into the grounds of the Whipple Old Place, because Sharon had suddenly conceived that he could not start the car again if he stopped it to let down his guest. The car entered the wide gateway, which again seemed dangerously narrow to its driver, and purred on up the gravelled drive. When half the distance to the haven of the stable had been covered it betrayed symptoms of some obscure distress, coughing poignantly. Sharon pretended not to notice this. A dozen yards beyond it coughed again, feebly, plaintively, then it expired. There could be no doubt of its utter extinction. All was over. The end had come suddenly, almost painlessly.

They got out and blankly eyed the lifeless hulk. After a moment of this, which was fruitless, Sharon spoke his mind concerning the car. For all the trepidation it had caused him, the doubts and fears and panics, he took his revenge in words of biting acidity—and he was through with the thing.

"Let's get it out of sight," he said at last, and the three of them pushed it on along the drive to the shelter of the stable.

Elihu Titus then breathed a long sigh and went silently to curry a horse in a neighbouring box stall. He knew when to talk and when not to. But Wilbur Cowan, wishing motor cars were in build more like linotypes, fearlessly opened the hood.

"My shining stars!" murmured Sharon at this his first view of his car's more intimate devices. "She's got innards like a human, ain't she?" He instantly beheld a vision of the man in the front of the almanac whose envelope is neatly drawn back to reveal his complicated structure in behalf of the zodiacal symbols. "It's downright gruesome," he added. But his guest was viewing the neat complexities of metal with real pleasure and with what seemed to the car's owner a practiced and knowing eye.

"Understand 'em?" demanded Sharon.

The boy hesitated. What he wished more than anything was freedom to take the thing apart, all that charming assemblage of still warm metal and pipes and wires. He wanted to know what was inside of things, what made them go, and—to be sure—what had made them stop.

"Well, I could if I had a chance," he said at last.

"You got it," said Sharon. "Spend all your born days on the old cadaver if you're so minded." Already to Sharon it was an old car. He turned away from the ghastly sight, but stopped for a final warning: "But don't you ever tell anybody. I ain't wanting this to get out on me."

"No, sir," said Wilbur.

"Maybe we ought to——" began Sharon, but broke off his speech with a hearty cough. He was embarrassed, because he had been on the point of suggesting that they call Doc Mumford. Doc Mumford was the veterinary. The old man withdrew. Elihu Titus appeared dimly in the background.

"Ain't she one gosh-awful crazy hellion?" he called softly to Wilbur, and returned to the horse, whose mechanism was understandable.

The boy was left sole physician to the ailing monster. He drew a long breath of gloating and fell upon it. For three days he lived in grimed, greased, and oiled ecstasy, appeasing that sharp curiosity to know what was inside of things. The first day he took down the engine bit by bit. The clean-swept floor about the dismantled hulk was a spreading turmoil of parts. Sharon, on cool afterthought, had conceived that his purchase might not have suffered beyond repair, but returning to survey the wreck, had thrown up his fat hands in a gesture of hopeless finality.

"That does settle it," he murmured. He pointed to the scattered members. "How in time did you ever find all them fiddlements in that little space?" Of course no one could ever put them back.

He picked up the book that had come with the car, a book falsely pretending to elucidate its mechanism, even to minor intelligences. The book was profuse in diagrams, and each diagram was profuse in letters of the alphabet, but these he found uninforming. For the maker of the car had unaccountably neglected to put A, B, or C on the parts themselves, which rendered the diagrams but maddening puzzles. He threw down the book, to watch the absorbed young mechanic who was frankly puzzled but still hopeful.

"It's an autopsy," said Sharon. He fled again, in the buggy drawn by the roan. "A fool and his money!" he called from the sagging seat.

The second day passed with the parts still spread about the floor. Elihu Titus told Sharon the boy was only playing with them. Sharon said he was glad they could furnish amusement, and mentally composed the beginning of what would be a letter of withering denunciation to the car's maker.

But the third day the parts were unaccountably reassembled. Elihu Titus admitted that every one of them was put back, though he hinted they were probably by no means where they had been. But Sharon, coming again to the dissecting room at the day's end, was stricken with awe for the astounding genius that had put back all those parts. He felt a gleam of hope.

"She'd ought to go now," said the proud mechanic.

"You ought to know," said Sharon. "You been plumb into her gizzard."

"Only other thing I can think of," continued the mechanic, "mebbe she needs more of that gasoline stuff." He raised the cushion of the front seat and unscrewed a cap. "We might try that," he suggested, brightly. "This tank looks like she's empty."

"Try it," said Sharon, and the incredulous Elihu Titus was dispatched to the village for a five-gallon tin of the gasoline stuff. Elihu was incredulous, because in Newbern gasoline was until now something that women cleaned white gloves with. But when the tank was replenished the car came again to life, throbbing buoyantly.

"I'll be switched!" said Sharon.

A day later he was telling that his new car had broke down on him, but Buck Cowan had taken her all apart and found out the trouble in no time, and put her gizzard and lights and liver back as good as new. And Buck Cowan himself came to feel quite unjustifiably a creator's pride in the car. It was only his due that Sharon should let him operate it; perhaps natural that Sharon should prefer him to. Sharon himself was never to become an accomplished chauffeur. He couldn't learn to relax at the wheel.

So it was that the boy was tossed to public eminence on a day when Starling Tucker, accomplished horseman, descended into the vale of ignominy by means of the Mansion House's new motor bus. Starling had permitted the selling agents to instruct him briefly in the operation of the new bus, though with lordly condescension, for it was his conviction that a man who could tame wild horses and drive anything that wore hair could by no means fail to guide a bit of machinery that wouldn't r'ar and run even if a newspaper blew across its face. He mounted the seat, on his first essay alone, with the jauntiness becoming a master of vehicular propulsion. There may have been in his secret heart a bit of trepidation, now that the instructor was not there. In fact, one of the assembled villagers who closely observed his demeanour related afterward that Star's face was froze and that he had hooked onto the wheel like he was choking it to death. But the shining structure had glided off toward the depot, its driver's head rigid, his glance strained upon the road's centre. As it moved away Wilbur Cowan leaped to the rear steps and was carried with it. He had almost asked Starling Tucker for the privilege of a seat beside him, but the occasion was really too great.

Five blocks down Geneseo Street Starling had turned out to permit the passing of Trimble Cushman's loaded dray—and he had inexplicably, terribly, kept on turning out when there was no longer need for it. Frozen with horror, helpless in the fell clutch of circumstance, he sat inert and beheld himself guide the new bus over the sidewalk and through the neat white picket fence of the Dodwell place. It demolished one entire panel of this, made deep progress over a stretch of soft lawn, and came at last—after threatening a lawless invasion of the sanctity of domicile—to a grinding stop in a circular bed of pansies that would never be the same again. There was commotion within the bus. Wild-eyed faces peered from the polished windows. A second later, in the speech of a bystander, "she was sweating passengers at every pore!"

Then came a full-throated scream of terror from the menaced house, and there in the doorway, clad in a bed gown, but erect and defiant, was the person of long-bedridden Grandma Dodwell herself. She brandished her lace cap at Starling Tucker and threatened to have him in jail if there was any law left in the land. Excited citizens gathered to the scene, for the picket fence had not succumbed without protest, and the crash had carried well. Even more than at the plight of Starling, they marvelled at the miracle that had been wrought upon the aged sufferer—her that hadn't put foot to floor in twenty years. There were outcries of alarm and amazement, hasty suggestions, orders to Starling Tucker to do many things he was beyond doing; but above them all rose clear-toned, vigorous denunciation from the outraged owner of the late pansy bed, who now issued from the doorway, walked unsupported down the neat steps, and started with firm strides for the offender. Starling Tucker beheld her approach, and to him, as to others there assembled, it was as if the dead walked. He climbed swiftly down upon the opposite side of his juggernaut, pushed a silent way through the crowd, and strode rapidly back to town. Starling's walk had commonly been a loose-jointed swagger, his head up in challenge, as befitted a hero of manifold adventure with wild horses. He now walked head down with no swagger.

But the crowd ceased to regard him, for now a slight boyish figure—none other than that of Wilbur Cowan—leaped to the seat, performed swift motions, grasped the fateful wheel, and made the bus roar. The smell of burned gasoline affronted the pretty garden. Wheels revolved savagely among the bruised roots of innocent pansies. Grandma Dodwell screamed anew. Then slowly, implacably hesitant, ponderous but determined, the huge bus backed along the track it had so cruelly worn in the sward—out through the gap in the fair fence, over the side-walk and into the road, rocking perilously, but settling level at last. Thereupon the young hero had done something else with mysterious handles, and the bus glided swiftly on to the depot, making the twelve-two in ample time.

Great moments are vouchsafed only to those souls fortified to survive them. To one who had tamed the proud spirit of Sharon Whipple's hellion it was but lightsome child's play to guide this honest and amiable new bus. To the Mansion he returned in triumph with a load of passengers, driving with zest, and there receiving from villagers inflamed by tales of his prowess an ovation that embarrassed him with its heartiness. He hastened to remove the refulgent edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new age. Unable to adapt himself, he would see the Mansion's stable become a noisome garage, while he performed humble and gradually dwindling service to a few remaining horses.

Wilbur Cowan guided the Mansion's bus for two days. He longed for it as a life work, but school was on and he was not permitted to abandon this, even for a glorious life at the wheel. There came a youth in neat uniform to perform this service—described by Starling Tucker as a young squirt that wouldn't know one end of a hawse from the other. Only on Saturdays—on Saturdays openly and clandestinely on Sundays—was there present on the driver's seat a knowing amateur who could have sat there every day but for having unreasonably to learn about compound fractions and geography.

CHAPTER X

Now school was over for another summer and Trimble Cushman's dray could be driven at a good wage—by a boy overnight become a man. There were still carpers who would regard him as a menace to life and limb. Judge Penniman was among these. A large truck in sole charge of a boy—still in his teens, as the judge put it—was not conducive to public tranquillity. But this element was speedily silenced. The immature Wilbur drove the thing acceptably, though requiring help on the larger boxes of merchandise, and Trimble Cushman, still driving horses on his other truck, was proud of his employee. Moreover, the boy became in high repute for his knowledge of the inner mysteries of these new mechanisms. New cars appeared in Newbern every day now, and many of them, developing ailments of a character more or less alarming to their purchasers, were brought to his distinguished notice with results almost uniformly gratifying. He was looked up to, consulted as a specialist, sent for to minister to distant roadside failures, called in the night, respected and rewarded.

It was a new Newbern through whose thoroughfares the new motor truck of Trimble Cushman was so expertly propelled. Farm horses still professed the utmost dismay at sight of vehicles drawn by invisible horses, and their owners often sought to block industrial progress by agitation for a law against these things, but progress was triumphant. The chamber of commerce recorded immense gains in population. New factories and mills had gone up beside the little river. New people were on the streets or living in their new houses. New merchants came to meet the new demand for goods.

The homy little town was putting on airs of a great city. There was already a Better Newbern club. The view down River Street from its junction with State, Masonic Hall on the left and the new five-story Whipple block on the right, as preserved on the picture postcards sold by the Cut-Rate Pharmacy, impressed all purchasers with the town's vitality. The Advance appeared twice a week, outdoing its rival, the Star, by one issue; and Sam Pickering, ever in the van of progress, was busy with plans for making his journal a daily.

Newbern was coming on, even as boys were coming on from bare feet to shoes on week-days. Ever and again there were traffic jams on River Street, a weaving turmoil of farmers' wagons, buggies, delivery carts, about a noisy, fuming centre of motor vehicles. High in the centre would be the motor truck of Trimble Cushman, loaded with cases and nursed through the muddle by a cool, clear-eyed youth, who sat with delicate, sure hands on a potent wheel. Never did he kill or maim either citizen or child, to the secret chagrin of Judge Penniman. Traffic jams to him were a part of the day's work.

When he had performed for a little time this skilled labour for Trimble Cushman it was brought to him one day that he was old indeed. For he observed, delivering a box to Rapp Brothers, jewellery, that from the sidewalk before that establishment he was being courted by a small boy; a shy boy with bare feet and freckles who permanently exposed two front teeth, and who followed the truck to the next place of delivery. Here, when certain boxes had been left, he seated himself, as if absentmindedly, upon the remote rear of the truck and was borne to another stopping place. The truck's driver glanced back savagely at him, but not too savagely; then pretended to ignore him.

The newcomer for an hour hung to the truck leechlike, without winning further recognition. Then by insensible gradations, by standing on the truck bed as it moved, by edging forward toward the high seat, by silently helping with a weighty box, it seemed he had acquired the right to mount to the high seat of honour itself. He did this without spoken words, yet with an ingratiating manner. It was a manner that had been used, ages back, by the lordly driver of the present truck, when he had formed alliances with drivers of horse-drawn vehicles. He recognized it as such and turned to regard the courtier with feigned austerity.

"Hello, kid!" he said, with permitting severity. But secretly he rejoiced. Now he was really old.

Winona viewed the latest avocation of her charge with little enthusiasm. It compelled a certain measure of her difficult respect, especially when she beheld him worm his truck through crowded River Street with a supreme disregard for the imminent catastrophe—which somehow never ensued. But it lacked gentility. At twenty-eight Winona was not only perfected in the grammar of morals, more than ever alert for infractions of the merely social code, but her ideals of refinement and elegance had become more demanding. She would have had the boy engage in a pursuit that would require clean hands and smart apparel and bring him in contact with people of the right sort. She stubbornly held out to him the shining possibility that he might one day rise to the pinnacle of a clerical post in the First National Bank.

True, he had never betrayed the faintest promise of qualifying for this eminence, and his freely voiced preferences sweepingly excluded it from the catalogue of occupations in which he might consent to engage. But Winona was now studying doctrines that put all power in the heart's desire. Out of the infinite your own would come to you if you held the thought, and she serenely held the better thought for Wilbur, even in the moment of mechanical triumphs that brimmed his own cup of desire. She willed him to prefer choicer characters than the roughs he consorted with, to aspire to genteel occupation that would not send him back at the day's end grimed, reeking with low odours, and far too hungry.

His exigent appetite, indeed, alarmed her beyond measure, because he cried out for meat, whereas Winona's new books said that meat eaters could hope for little reward of the spirit. A few simple vegetables, fruits, and nuts—these permitted the soul to expand, to attain harmony with the infinite, until one came to choose only the best among ideals and human associates. But she learned that she must in this case compromise, for a boy demanding meat would get it in one place if not another. If not at the guarded Penniman table, then at the low resort next to Pegleg McCarron's of one T-bone Tommy, where they commonly devoured the carcasses of murdered beasts and made no secret of it.

He even rebelled at fabrications, highly extolled in the gospel of clean eating, which were meant to placate the baser minded by their resemblances to meat—things like nut turkey and mock veal loaf and leguminous chicken and synthetic beefsteak cooked in pure vegetable oils. These he scorned the more bitterly for their false pretense, demanding plain meat and a lot of it. The nations cited by Winona that had thrived and grown strong on the produce of the fields left him unimpressed. He merely said, goaded to harshness, that he was not going to be a Chinese laundryman for any one.

Of what avail to read the lyrics of a great Hindu vegetarian poet to this undeveloped being? Still Winona laboured unceasingly to bring light to the dark place. Teaching a public school for eight years had developed a substratum of granite determination in her character. She would never quit. She was still to the outer eye the slight, brown Winona of twenty—perky, birdlike, with the quick trimness of a winging swallow, a little sharper featured perhaps, but superior in acuteness of desire and persistence, and with some furtive, irresponsible girlishness lurking timorously back in her bright glance.

She still secretly relished the jesting address of Dave Cowan, when at long intervals he lingered in Newbern from cross-country flights. It thrilled her naughtily to be addressed as La Marquise, to be accused of goings-on at the court of Louis XVIII, about which the less said the better. She had never brought herself to wear the tan silk stockings of invidious allure, and she still confined herself to her mother's plainest dressmaking, yearning secretly for the fancy kind, but never with enough daring. Lyman Teaford still came of an evening to play his flute acceptably, while Winona accompanied him in many an amorous morceau. Lyman, in the speech of Newbern, had for eight years been going with Winona. But as the romantically impatient and sometimes a bit snappish Mrs. Penniman would say, he had never gone far.

Winona rejoiced a year later when golf promised, at least for a summer, to snatch Wilbur Cowan from the grimy indistinction of a mechanic's career. For thriving and aspiring Newbern had eased one of its growing pains with a veritable golf course, and the whilom machinery enthusiast became smitten with this strange new sport. Winona rejoiced, because it would bring him into contact with people of the better sort, for of course only these played the game. Her charge, it is true, engaged in the sport as a business, and not as one seeking recreation, but the desired social contact was indubitable. To carry over the course a bag or two of clubs for the elect of Newbern was bound to be improving.

And it was true that he now consorted daily through a profitable summer with people who had heretofore been but names to him. But Winona had neglected to observe that he would meet them not as a social equal but as a hireling. This was excusable in her, because she had only the vaguest notions of golf or of the interrelations between caddie and player. One informed in the ways of the sport could have warned her that caddies inevitably become cynical toward all people of the sort one cares to meet. Compelled by a rigid etiquette to silent, unemotional formality, they boil interiorly with contempt for people of the better sort, not only because their golf is usually atrocious—such as every caddie brilliantly surpasses in his leisure moments—but because the speech provoked by their inveterate failures is commonly all too human.

So the results of Wilbur Cowan's contact with people Winona would approve, enduring for a mercifully brief summer and autumn, were not what Winona had fondly preconceived. He had first been attracted to the course—a sweet course, said the golf-architect who had laid it out over the rolling land south of town—by the personality of one John Knox McTavish, an earnest Scotchman of youngish middle age, procured from afar to tell the beginning golfers of Newbern to keep their heads down and follow through and not to press the ball. As John spoke, it was "Don't pr-r-r-r-ess th' ball." He had been chosen from among other candidates because of his accent. He richly endowed his words with r's, making more than one grow where only one had grown before. It was this vocal burriness that drew the facile notice of Wilbur. He delighted to hear John McTavish talk, and hung about the new clubhouse, apparently without purpose, until John not only sanctioned but besought his presence, calling him Laddie and luring him with tales of the monstrous gains amassed by competent caddies.

The boy lingered, though from motives other than mercenary. His cup was full when he could hear John's masterful voice addressed to Mrs. Rapp, Junior, or another aspirant.

"R-r-remember, mum, th' ar-r-r-um close, th' head down—and don't pr-r-r-ress th' ball."

Yet he was presently allured by a charm even more imperious, the charm of the game itself. For John at odd moments would teach him the use of those strange weapons, so that he had the double thrill of standing under the torrential r's addressed to himself and of feeling the sharp, clean impact of the club head upon a ball that flew a surprising distance. His obedient young muscles soon conformed to the few master laws of the game. He kept down, followed through and forebore, against all human instinct, to press the ball.

By the end of Newbern's golfing season he was able to do almost unerringly what so many of Newbern's better sort did erratically and at intervals. And the talk of John Knox McTavish about the wealth accruing to alert caddies had proved to be not all fanciful. In addition to the stipend earned for conventional work, there were lost balls in abundance to be salvaged and resold.

"Laddie," said John McTavish, "if I but had the lost-ball pur-r-rivilege of yon sweet courr-r-se and could insu-r-r-e deliver-r-r-y!"

For the better sort of Newbern, despite conscientious warnings for which they paid John McTavish huge sums, would insist upon pressing the ball in the face of constant proof that thus treated it would slice into the rough to cuddle obscurely at the roots of tall grass.

Wilbur Cowan became a shrewd hunter and a successful merchandiser of golf balls but slightly used. Newbern's better sort denounced the scandal of this, but bought of him clandestinely, for even in that far day, when golf balls in price were yet within reach of the common people, few of them liked to buy a new ball and watch it vanish forever after one brilliant drive that would have taken it far down the fairway except for the unaccountable slice.

On the whole his season was more profitable than that of the year before, when he had nursed the truck of Trimble Cushman through the traffic jams of River Street, and he was learning more about the world of men if less about gas engines. Especially did the new sport put him into closer contact with old Sharon Whipple. Having first denounced the golf project as a criminal waste of one hundred and seventy-five acres of prime arable land, Sharon had loitered about the scene of the crime to watch the offenders make a certain kind of fools of themselves. From the white bench back of the first tee this cynic would rejoice mirthfully at topped or sliced drives or the wild swing that spends all its vicious intent upon the imponderable air. His presence came to be a trial to beginning players, who took no real pleasure in the game until they reached the second tee, beyond the ken of the scoffer.

But this was perilous sport for Sharon Whipple. Day after day, looking into the whirlpool, he was—in a moment of madness—himself to leap over the brink. On an afternoon had come his brother Gideon and Rapp, Senior, elated pupils of John McTavish, to play sportingly for half a ball a hole. They ignored certain preliminary and all-too-pointed comments of the watcher. They strode gallantly to the tee in turn and exhibited the admirable form taught them by John. They took perfect practice swings. They addressed the ball ceremoniously, waggled the club at it, first soothingly, then with distinct menace, looked up to frown at a spot far down the fairway, looked back, exhaled the breath, and drove. Rapp, Senior, sliced into the rough. Gideon Whipple hooked into the rough.

Sharon Whipple mocked them injuriously. His ironic shouts attracted the notice of arriving players. Gideon Whipple stayed placid, smiling grimly, but Rapp, Senior, was nettled to retort.

"Mebbe you could do a whole lot better!" he called to Sharon in tones unnecessarily loud.

Sharon's reply, in a voice eminently soothing and by that calculated further to irritate the novice, was in effect that Rapp, Senior, might safely wager his available assets that Sharon Whipple could do better.

"Well, come on and do it then if you're so smart!" urged Rapp, Senior. "Come on, once—I dare you!"

Sharon scorned—but rather weakly—the invitation. Secretly, through his hostile study of the game, he had convinced himself that he by divine right could do perfectly what these people did so clumsily. Again and again his hands had itched for the club as he watched futile drives. He knew he could hit the ball. He couldn't help hitting it, stuck up the way it was on a pinch of sand—stuck up like a sore thumb. How did they miss it time after time? He had meant to test his conviction in solitude, but why not put it to trial now, and shame this doubting and inept Rapp, Senior?

"Oh, well, I don't mind," he said, and waddled negligently to the tee.

Rapp, Senior, voiced loud delight. Gideon Whipple merely stood safely back without comment, though there was a malicious waiting gleam in his eyes.

"You folks make something out of nothing," scolded Sharon, fussily.

Grasping the proffered club he severely threatened with it the new ball which Rapp, Senior, had obligingly teed up for him. In that moment he felt a quick strange fear, little twinges of doubt, a suspicion that all was not well. Perhaps the sudden hush of those about him conduced to this. Even newly arrived players in the background waited in silence. Then he recovered his confidence. There was the ball and there was the club—it was easy, wasn't it? Make a mountain out of a mole hill, would they? He'd show them!

Amid the hanging silence—like a portent it overhung him—he raised the strange weapon and brought it gruntingly down with all the strength of his stout muscles.

In the fading light of seven o'clock on that fair summer's evening John McTavish for the hundredth time seized the heavy arms of Sharon Whipple and bent them back and up in the right line. Then Sharon did the thing faithfully in his own way, which was still, after an hour's trial, not the way of John McTavish.

"Mon, what have I told ye?" expostulated John. He had quit calling Sharon Sir-r-r. Perhaps his r's were tired, and anyway, Sharon called him Sandy, being unable to believe that any Scotchman would not have this for one or another of his names. "Again I tell ye, th' body must bend between th' hips an' th' neck, but ye keep jer-r-rkin' the head to look up."

"But, Sandy, I've sprained my back trying to bend from the hips," protested the plaintive Sharon.

"Yer-r-r old car-r-r-cass is musclebound, to be sur-r-e," conceded John. "You can't hope to bend it the way yon laddie does." He pointed to Wilbur Cowan, who had been retrieving balls—from no great distance—hit out by the neophyte.

"Can he do it?" questioned Sharon.

"Show 'um!" ordered John.

And Wilbur Cowan, coming up for the driver, lithely bent to send three balls successively where good golf players should always send them. Sharon blinked at this performance, admiring, envious, and again hopeful. If a child could do this thing——

"Well, I ain't giving up," he declared. "I'll show some people before I'm through."

He paused, hearing again in his shamed ears the ironic laughter of Rapp, Senior, at the three wild swings he had made before—in an excess of caution—he had struck the ground back of the immune ball and raked it a pitiful five feet to one side. He heard, too, the pleased laughter in the background, high, musical peals of tactless women and the full-throated roars of brutal men. He felt again the hot flush on his cheeks as he had slunk from the dreadful scene with a shamed effort to brazen it out, followed by the amused stare of Gideon Whipple. And he had slunk back when the course was cleared, to be told the simple secret of hitting a golf ball. He would condescend to that for the sake, on a near day, of publicly humiliating a certain vainglorious jewellery dealer. But apparently now, while the secret was simple enough to tell—it took John McTavish hardly a score of burry words to tell it all—it was less simple to demonstrate. It might take him three or even four days.

"Ye've done gr-r-rand f'r-r a beginnerr-r," said John McTavish, wearily, perfunctorily.

"I'll tell you," said Sharon. "I ain't wanting this to get out on me, that I come sneaking back here to have you teach me the silly game."

"Mon, mon!" protested the hurt McTavish.

"So why can't Buck here come up and teach me in private? There's open space back of the stables."

"Ye cud do wor-r-rse," said John. "And yer-r-r full hour-r-'s lesson now will be two dollar-r-rs."

"Certainly, McTavish," said Sharon, concealing his amazement. He could no longer address as Sandy one who earned two dollars as lightly as this.

There was a spacious opening back of the stable on the Whipple Old Place—space and the seclusion which Sharon Whipple considered imperative. Even Elihu Titus was sent about his business when he came to observe; threatened with an instant place in the ranks of the unemployed if he so much as breathed of the secret lessons to a town now said to be composed of snickering busybodies. The open space immediately back of the stable gave on wider spaces of pasture and wood lot.

CHAPTER XI

Archaeologists of a future age will doubtless, in their minute explorations of this region, come upon the petrified remains of golf balls in such number as will occasion learned dispute. Found so profusely and yet so far from any known course, they will perhaps give rise to wholly erroneous surmises. Prefacing his paper with a reference to lost secrets once possessed by other ancients, citing without doubt that the old Egyptians knew how to temper the soft metal of copper, a certain scientist will profoundly deduce from this deposit of balls, far from the vestiges of the nearest course, that people of this remote day possessed the secret of driving a golf ball three and a half miles, and he will perhaps moralize upon the degeneracy of his own times, when the longest drive will doubtless not exceed a scant mile.

For three days Sharon sprayed out over the landscape, into ideal golf-ball covert, where many forever eluded even the keen eyes of Wilbur Cowan, one hundred balls originally purchased by the selecter golfing set of Newbern. Hereupon he refused longer to regard the wooden driver as a possible instrument of precision, and forever renounced it. Elihu Titus heard him renounce it balefully in the harness room one late afternoon, and later entering that apartment found the fragments of a shattered driver.

It remained for Wilbur Cowan to bring Sharon into the game by another avenue. A new campaign was entered upon, doubtfully at first by Sharon, at length with dawning confidence. He was never to touch a wooden club. He was to drive with an iron, not far, but truly; to stay always in the centre of the fairway and especially to cultivate the shorter approach shots and the use of the putter. The boy laboured patiently with his pupil, striving to persuade him that golf was more than a trial of strength. From secret lessons back of the stable they came at length to furtive lessons over the course at hours when it was least played. John Knox McTavish figured at these times as consulting expert.

"It's th' shor-r-t game that tells th' stor-r-r-y," said John; and Sharon, making his whole game a short game, was presently telling the story understandably, to the vast pride of the middle man who provided endless balls for his lessons.

It was a day of thrills for them both when Rapp, Senior, publicly challenged and accepting with dreams of an easy conquest, bent down before the craft of Sharon Whipple. Sharon, with his competent iron in a short half-arm swing—he could not, he said, trust the utensil beyond the tail of his eye—sent the ball eighteen times not far but straight, and with other iron shots coaxed it to the green, where he sank it with quite respectable putting. Rapp, Senior, sliced his long drives brilliantly into shaded grassy dells and scented forest glades, where he trampled scores of pretty wild flowers as he chopped his way out again. Rapp, Senior, made the course excitingly in one hundred and thirty-eight; Sharon Whipple, playing along safe and sane lines, came through with one hundred and thirty-five, and was a proud man, and looked it, and was still so much prouder than he looked that he shuddered lest it get out on him. Later he vanquished, by the same tactics, other men who used the wooden driver with perfect form in practice swings.

Contests in which he engaged, however, were likely to be marred by regrettable asperities rising from Sharon's inability to grasp the nicer subtleties of golf. It seemed silly to him not to lift his ball out of some slight depression into which it had rolled quite by accident; not to amend an unhappy lie in a sand trap; and he never came to believe that a wild swing leaving the ball untouched should be counted as a stroke. People who pettishly insisted upon these extremes of the game he sneeringly called golf lawyers. When he said that he made a hole in nine, he meant nine or thereabouts—approximately nine; nice people, he thought, should let it go at that. So he became feared on the course, not only for his actual prowess but for his matchless optimism in casting up his score. He was a pleased man, and considered golf a good game; and he never forgot that Wilbur Cowan had made him the golfer he was. More than ever was he believing that Harvey D. Whipple had chosen wrongly from available Cowans. On the day when he first made the Newbern course in, approximately, one hundred and twenty—those short-arm iron shots were beginning to lengthen down the centre of the fairway—he was sure of it.

It must be said that Sharon was alone in this conviction. The others most concerned, had he allowed it to be known, would have been amazed by it—Winona Penniman most of all. Winona's conviction was that the rejected Cowan twin conspicuously lacked those qualities that would make him desirable for adoption by any family of note, certainly not by Whipples. He had gone from bad to worse. Driving a truck had been bad. There had been something to say in its favour in the early stages of his career, until the neophyte had actually chosen to wear overalls like any common driver. In overalls he could not be mistaken for a gentleman amateur moved by a keen love for the sport of truck driving—and golf was worse. Glad at first of this change in his life work, Winona had been shocked to learn that golf kept people from the churches. And the clothes, even if they did not include overalls, were not genteel. Wilbur wore belted trousers of no distinction, rubber-soled sneakers of a neutral tint, and a sweater now so low in tone that the precise intention of its original shade was no longer to be divined. A rowdyish cap completed the uniform. No competent bank president, surveying the ensemble, would have for a moment considered making a bookkeeper out of the wearer. He was farther than ever before, Winona thought, from a career of Christian gentility in which garments of a Sabbath grandeur are worn every day and proper care may be taken of the hands.

It was late in this summer that she enforced briefly a demand for genteel raiment, and kept the boy up until ten-thirty of a sleepy evening to manicure his nails. The occasion was nothing less than the sixteenth birthday of Merle Whipple, to be celebrated by an afternoon festivity on the grounds of his home. The brothers had met briefly and casually during Merle's years as a Whipple; but this was to be an affair of ceremony, and Winona was determined that the unworthy twin should—at least briefly—appear as one not socially impossible.

She browbeat him into buying a suit such as those that are worn by jaunty youths in advertisements, including haberdashery of supreme elegance, the first patent-leather shoes worn by this particular Cowan, and a hat of class. He murmured at the outlay upon useless finery. It materially depleted his capital—stored with other treasure in a tin box labelled "Cake" across its front. But Winona was tenacious. He murmured, too, at the ordeal of manicuring, but Winona was insistent, and laboured to leave him with the finger tips of one who did not habitually engage in a low calling.

He fell asleep at the final polishing, even after trying to fix his gaze upon the glittering nails of the hand Winona had relinquished, and while she sought to impress him with the importance of the approaching function. There would be present not only the Whipples, but their guests, two girl friends of Patricia from afar and a school friend of Merle's; there would be games and refreshment and social converse, and Winona hoped he would remember not to say "darn it" any time in such of the social converse as he provided; or forget to say, on leaving, what a charming time it was and how nice every one had been to ask him. He dozed through much of this instruction.

Yet Winona, the next day, felt repaid for her pains. Arrayed in the new suit, with the modish collar and cravat, the luminous shoes and the hat of merit, the boy looked entirely like those careless youths in the pictures who so proudly proclaim the make of their garments. No one regarding him would have dreamed that he was at heart but a golf caddie or a driver of trucks for hire. Winona insisted upon a final polish of his nails, leaving them with a dazzling pinkish glitter, and she sprayed and anointed him with precious unguents, taking especial pains that his unruly brown hair should lie back close to his head, to show the wave.

When he installed her beside him in Sharon Whipple's newest car, pressed upon the youth by its owner for this occasion, she almost wished that she had been a bit more daring in her own dress. It was white and neat, but not fancy dressmaking in any sense of the word. She regretted for a moment her decision against pink rosebuds for the hat, so warmly urged by her mother, who kept saying nowadays that she would be a girl but once. Winona was beginning to doubt this. At least you seemed to be a girl a long time. She had been a little daring, though. Her stockings were white and of a material widely heralded as silkona. Still her skirt was of a decent length, so that she apprehended no scandal from this recklessness.

When her genteel escort started the car and guided it by an apparently careless winding of the wheel she felt a glow that was almost pride in his appearance and nonchalant mastery of this abstruse mechanism. She was frightened at the speed and at the narrow margin by which he missed other vehicles and obtruding corners. When he flourished to an impressive halt under the Whipple porte-cochère she felt a new respect for him. If only he could do such things at odd moments as a gentleman should, and not continuously for money, in clothes unlike those of the expensive advertisements!

She descended from the car in a flutter of pretense that she habitually descended from cars, and a moment later was overjoyed to note that her escort sustained the greetings of the assembled Whipples and their guests with a practiced coolness, or what looked like it. He shook hands warmly with his brother and Patricia Whipple; was calm under the ordeal of introductions to the little friends Winona had warned him of—two girls of peerless beauty and a fair-haired, sleepy-looking boy with long eyelashes and dimples.

These young people were dressed rather less formally than Winona had expected, being mostly in flannels and ducks and tennis shoes not too lately cleaned. She was instantly glad she had been particular as to Wilbur's outfit. He looked ever so much more distinguished than either Merle or his friend. She watched him as he stood unconcerned under the chatter of the three girls. They had begun at once to employ upon him the oldest arts known to woman, and he was not flustered or "gauche"—a word Winona had lately learned. Beyond her divining was the truth that he would much rather have been talking to Starling Tucker. She thought he was merely trying to look bored, and was doing it very well.

The little friends of Patricia, and Patricia herself, could have told her better. They knew he was genuinely bored, and redoubled their efforts to enslave him. Merle chatted brightly with Winona, with such a man-of-the-world air that she herself became flustered at the memory that she had once been as a mother to him and drenched his handkerchief with perfume on a Sabbath morning. The little male friend of Merle stood by in silent relief. Patricia and her little guests had for three days been doing to him what they now tried doing to the new boy; he was glad the new boy had come. He had grown sulky under the incessant onslaughts.