“What are you playing, Alice?”
The daughter arose from the piano and kissed her mother, holding for a moment the pretty face, crowned with white hair, between her two palms.
“It—it is an old song which Tom and I used to love to sing.”
The last of the sentence came so slowly that it sank almost into silence, as of one beginning a sentence and becoming so absorbed in the subject as to forget the speech. Then she turned again to the piano, as if to hide from her mother the sorrow which had crept into her face.
“You should cease to think of that. Such things are dreams—at present we are confronted by very disagreeable realities.”
“Dreams—ah, mother mine”—she answered with forced cheeriness—“but what would life be without them?”
“For one thing, Alice”—and she took the daughter's place at the piano and began to play snatches of an old waltz tune—“it would be free from all the morbid unnaturalness, the silliness, the froth of things. There is too much hardness in every life—in the world—in the very laws of life, for such things ever to have been part of the original plan. For my part, I think they are the product of man and wine or women or morphine or some other narcotic.”
“We make the dreams of life, but the realities of it make us,” she added.
“Oh, no, mother. 'Tis the dreams that make the realities. Not a great established fact exists but it was once the vision of a dreamer. Our dreams to-day become the realities of to-morrow.”
“Do you believe Tom is not dead—that he will one day come back?” asked her mother abruptly.
It was twilight and the fire flickered, lighting up the library. But in the flash of it Mrs. Westmore saw Alice's cheek whiten in a hopeless, helpless, stricken way.
Then she walked to the window and looked out on the darkness fast closing in on the lawn, clustering denser around the evergreens and creeping ghostlike toward the dim sky line which shone clear in the open.
The very helplessness of her step, her silence, her numbed, yearning look across the lawn told Mrs. Westmore of the death of all hope there.
She followed her daughter and put her arms impulsively around her.
“I should not have hurt you so, Alice. I only wanted to show you how worse than useless it is ... but to change the subject, I do wish to speak to you of—our condition.”
Alice was used to her mother's ways—her brilliancy—her pointed manner of going at things—her quick change of thought—of mood, and even of temperament. An outsider would have judged Mrs. Westmore to be fickle with a strong vein of selfishness and even of egotism. Alice only knew that she was her mother; who had suffered much; who had been reduced by poverty to a condition straitened even to hardships. To help her the daughter knew that she was willing to make any sacrifice. Unselfish, devoted, clear as noonday in her own ideas of right and wrong, Alice's one weakness was her blind devotion to those she loved. A weakness beautiful and even magnificent, since it might mean a sacrifice of her heart for another. The woman who gives her time, her money, her life, even, to another gives but a small part of her real self. But there is something truly heroic when she throws in her heart also. For when a woman has given that she has given all; and because she has thrown it in cold and dead—a lifeless thing—matters not; in the poignancy of the giving it is gone from her forever and she may not recall it even with the opportunity of bringing it back to life.
She who gives her all, but keeps her heart, is as a priest reading mechanically the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible. But she who gives her heart never to take it back again gives as the Christ dying on the Cross.
“Now, here is the legal paper about”—
Her voice failed and she did not finish the sentence.
Alice took the paper and glanced at it. She flushed and thrust it into her pocket. They were silent a while and Mrs. Westmore sat thinking of the past. Alice knew it by the great reminiscent light which gleamed in her eyes. She thought of the time when she had servants, money, friends unlimited—of the wealth and influence of her husband—of the glory of Westmoreland.
Every one has some secret ambition kept from the eyes of every living soul—often even to die in its keeper's breast. It is oftenest a mean ambition of which one is ashamed and so hides it from the world. It is often the one weakness. Alice never knew what was her mother's. She did not indeed know that she had one, for this one thing Mrs. Westmore had kept inviolately secret. But in her heart there had always rankled a secret jealousy when she thought of The Gaffs. It had been there since she could remember—a feeling cherished secretly, too, by her husband: for in everything their one idea had been that Westmoreland should surpass The Gaffs,—that it should be handsomer, better kept, more prosperous, more famous.
Now, Westmoreland was gone—this meant the last of it. It would be sold, even the last hundred acres of it, with the old home on it. Gone—gone—all her former glory—all her family tradition, her memories, her very name.
Gone, and The Gaffs remained!
Remained in all its intactness—its beauty—its well equipped barns with all the splendor of its former days. For so great was the respect of Schofield's army for the character of Colonel Jeremiah Travis that his home escaped the torch when it was applied to many others in the Tennessee Valley. And Richard Travis had been shrewd enough after the war to hold his own. Joining the party of the negro after the war, he had been its political ruler in the county. And the Honorable Richard Travis had been offered anything he wanted. At present he was State Senator. He with others called himself a Republican—one of the great party of Lincoln to which the negroes after their enfranchisement united themselves. It was a fearful misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is not drawn on belief but on race and color. The white men, believing everything they please from free trade to protection, vote a ticket which they call Democratic. The negroes, and a few whites who allied themselves with them for the spoils of office, vote the other ticket. Neither of them represent anything but a race issue.
To this negro party belonged Richard Travis—and the price of his infamy had been Honorable before his name.
But Mrs. Westmore cared nothing for this. She only knew that he was a leader of men, was handsome, well reared and educated, and that he owned The Gaffs, her old rival. And that there it stood, a fortune—a refuge—a rock—offered to her and her daughter, offered by a man who, whatever his other faults, was brave and dashing, sincere in his idolatrous love for her daughter. That he would make Alice happy she did not doubt; for Mrs. Westmore's idea of happiness was in having wealth and position and a splendid name. Having no real heart, how was it possible for her to know, as Alice could know, the happiness of love?
An eyeless fish in the river of Mammoth Cave might as well try to understand what light meant.
He would make Alice happy, of course he would; he would make her happy by devotion, which he was eager to give her with an unstinted hand. Alice needed it, she herself needed it. It was common sense to accept it,—business sense. It was opportunity—fate. It was the reward of a life—the triumph of it—to have her old rival—enemy—bound and presented to her.
And nothing stood between her and the accomplishment of it all but the foolish romance of her daughter's youth.
And so she sat building her castles and thinking:
“With The Gaffs, with Richard Travis and his money would come all I wish, both for her and for me. Once more I would hold the social position I once held: once more I would be something in the world. And Alice, of course, she would be happy; for her's is one of those trusting natures which finds first where her duty points and then makes her heart follow.”
But Mrs. Westmore wisely kept silent. She did not think aloud. She knew too well that Alice's sympathetic, unselfish, obedient spirit was thinking it over.
She sat down by her mother and took up a pet kitten which had come purring in, begging for sympathy. She stroked it thoughtfully.
Mrs. Westmore read her daughter's thoughts:
“So many people,” the mother said after a while, “have false ideas of love and marriage. Like ignorant people when they get religion, they think a great and sudden change must come over them—changing their very lives.”
She laughed her ringing little laugh: “I told you of your father's and my love affair. Why, I was engaged to three other men at the same time—positively I was. And I would have been just as happy with any of them.”
“Why did you marry father, then?”
Her mother laughed and tapped the toe of her shoe playfully against the fender: “It was a silly reason; he swam the Tennessee River on his horse to see me one day, when the ferry-boat was a wreck. I married him.”
“Would not the others have done as well?”
“Yes, but I knew your father was brave. You cannot love a coward—no woman can. But let a man be brave—no matter what his faults are—the rest is all a question of time. You would soon learn to love him as I did your father.”
Mrs. Westmore was wise. She changed the subject.
“Have you noticed Uncle Bisco lately, mother?” asked Alice after a while.
“Why, yes; I intended to ask you about him.”
“He says there are threats against his life—his and Aunt Charity's. He had a terrible dream last night, and he would have me to interpret it.”
“Quite Biblical,” laughed her mother. “What was it?”
“They have been very unhappy all day—you know the negroes have been surly and revengeful since the election of Governor Houston—they believe they will be put back into slavery and they know that Uncle Bisco voted with his white friends. It is folly, of course—but they beat Captain Roland's old body servant nearly to death because he voted with his old master. And Uncle Bisco has heard threats that he and Aunt Charity will be visited in a like manner. I think it will soon blow over, though at times I confess I am often worried about them, living alone so far off from us, in the cabin in the wood.”
“What was Uncle Bisco's dream?” asked Mrs. Westmore.
“Why, he said an angel had brought him water to drink from a Castellonian Spring. Now, I don't know what a Castellonian Spring is, but that was the word he used, and that he was turned into a live-oak tree, old and moss-grown. Then he stood in the forest surrounded by scrub-oaks and towering over them and other mean trees when suddenly they all fell upon him and cut him down. Now, he says, these scrub-oaks are the radical negroes who wish to kill him for voting with the whites. You will laugh at my interpretation,” she went on. “I told him that the small black oaks were years that still stood around him, but that finally they would overpower him and he would sink to sleep beneath them, as we must all eventually do. I think it reassured him—but, mamma, I am uneasy about the two old people.”
“If the Bishop were here—”
“He would sleep in the house with a shotgun, I fear,” laughed Alice.
They were silent at last: “When did you say Richard was coming again, Alice?”
“To-morrow night—and—and—I hear Clay in his laboratory. I will go and talk to him before bed time.”
She stooped and kissed her mother. To her surprise, she found her mother's arms around her neck and heard her whisper brokenly:
“Alice—Alice—you could solve it all if you would. Think—think—what it would mean to me—to all of us—oh, I can stand this poverty no longer—this fight against that which we cannot overcome.”
She burst into a flood of tears. Never before had Alice seen her show her emotions over their condition, and it hurt her, stabbed her to the vital spot of all obedience and love.
With moistened eyes she went into her brother's room.
And Mrs. Westmore wrote a note to Richard Travis. It did not say so in words but it meant: “Come and be bold—you have won.”
“I shall go to Boston next week to meet the directors of the mill and give in my annual report.”
The three had been sitting in Westmoreland library this Sunday night—for Richard Travis came regularly every Sunday night, and he had been talking about the progress of the mill and the great work it was doing for the poor whites of the valley. “I imagine,” he added, “that they will be pleased with the report this year.”
“But are you altogether pleased with it in all its features?” asked Alice thoughtfully.
“Why, what do you mean, Alice?” asked her mother, surprised.
“Just this, mother, and I have been thinking of talking to Richard about it for some time.”
Travis took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at her quizzically.
She flushed under his gaze and added: “If I wasn't saying what I am for humanity's sake I would be willing to admit that it was impertinent on my part. But are you satisfied with the way you work little children in that mill, Richard, and are you willing to let it go on without a protest before your directors? You have such a fine opportunity for good there,” she added in all her old beautiful earnestness.
“Oh, Alice, my dear, that is none of our affair. Now I should not answer her, Richard,” and Mrs. Westmore tapped him playfully on the arm.
“Frankly, I am not,” he said to Alice. “I think it is a horrible thing. But how are we to remedy it? There is no law on the subject at all in Alabama—”
“Except the broader, unwritten law,” she added.
Travis laughed: “You will find that it cuts a small figure with directors when it comes in conflict with the dividends of a corporation.”
“But how is it there?” she asked,—“in New England?”
“They have seen the evils of it and they have a law against child labor. The age is restricted to twelve years, and every other year they must go to a public school before they may be taken back into the mill. But even with all that, the law is openly violated, as it is in England, where they have been making efforts to throttle the child-labor problem for nearly a century, and after whose law the New England law was patterned.”
“Why, by the parents of the children falsely swearing to their age.”
Alice looked at him in astonishment.
“Do you really mean it?” she asked.
“Why, certainly—and it would be the same here. If we had a law the lazy parents of many of them would swear falsely to their children's ages.”
“There could be some way found to stop that,” she said.
“It has not been found yet,” he added. “What is to prevent two designing parents swearing that an eight year old child is twelve—and these little poor whites,” he added with a laugh, “all look alike from eight to sixteen—scrawny—hard and half-starved. In many cases no living man could swear whether they are six or twelve.”
“If you really should make it a rule to refuse all children under twelve,” she added, “tell me how many would go out of your mill.”
“In other words, how many under twelve do we work there?” he asked.
She nodded.
He thought a while and then said: “About one hundred and twenty-five.”
She started: “That is terrible—terrible! Couldn't you—couldn't you bring the subject up before the directors for—for—”
“Your sake—yes”—he said, admiringly.
“Humanity's—God's—Right's—helpless, ignorant, dying children!”
“Do you know,” he added quickly, “how many idle parents these hundred and twenty-five children support—actually support? Why, about fifty. Now do you see? The whole influence of these fifty people will be to violate the law—to swear the children are twelve or over. Yes, I am opposed to it—so is Kingsley—but we are powerless.”
“My enthusiasm has been aroused, of late, on the subject,” Alice went on, “by the talks and preaching of my old friend, Mr. Watts.”
Travis frowned: “The old Bishop of Cottontown,” he added ironically—“and he had better stop it—he will get into trouble yet.”
“Why?”
“Because he is doing the mill harm.”
“And I don't suppose one should do a corporation harm,” she said quickly,—“even to do humanity good?”
“Oh, Alice, let us drop so disagreeable a subject,” said her mother. “Come, Richard and I want some music.”
“Any way,” said Alice, rising, “I do very much hope you will bring the subject up in your visit to the directors. It has grown on me under the talks of the old Bishop and what I have seen myself—it has become a nightmare to me.”
“I don't think it is any of our business at all,” spoke up Mrs. Westmore quickly.
Alice turned her big, earnest eyes and beautiful face on her mother.
“Do you remember when I was six years old?” she asked.
“Of course I do.”
“Suppose—suppose—that our poverty had come to us then, and you and papa had died and left brother and me alone and friendless. Then suppose we had been put into that mill to work fourteen hours a day—we—your own little ones—brother and I”—
Mrs. Westmore sprang up with a little shriek and put her hands over her daughter's mouth.
Richard Travis shrugged his shoulders: “I had not thought of it that way myself,” he said. “That goes home to one.”
Richard Travis was always uplifted in the presence of Alice. It was wonderful to him what a difference in his feelings, his behavior, his ideas, her simple presence exerted. As he looked at her he thought of last night's debauch—the bar-room—the baseness and vileness of it all. He thought of his many amours. He saw the purity and grandeur of her in this contrast—all her queenliness and beauty and simplicity. He even thought of Maggie and said to himself: “Suppose Alice should know all this.... My God! I would have no more chance of winning her than of plucking a star from the sky!”
He thought of Helen and it made him serious. Helen's was a different problem from Maggie's. Maggie was a mill girl—poor, with a bed-ridden father. She was nameless. But Helen—she was of the same blood and caste of this beautiful woman before him, whom he fully expected to make his wife. There was danger in Helen—he must act boldly, but decisively—he must take her away with him—out of the State, the South even. Distance would be his protection, and her pride and shame would prevent her ever letting her whereabouts or her fate be known.
Cold-bloodedly, boldly, and with clear-cut reasoning, all this ran through his mind as he stood looking at Alice Westmore.
We are strangely made—the best of us. Men have looked on the Madonna and wondered why the artist had not put more humanity there—had not given her a sensual lip, perhaps. And on the Cross, the Christ was thinking of a thief.
Two hours later he was bidding her good-bye.
“Next Sunday, do you remember—Alice—next Sunday night you are to tell me—to fix the day, Sweet?”
“Did mother tell you that?” she asked. “She should let me speak for myself.”
But somehow he felt that she would. Indeed he knew it as he kissed her hand and bade her good-night.
Richard Travis had ridden over to Westmoreland that Sunday night, and as he rode back, some two miles away, and within the shadows of a dense clump of oaks which bordered the road, he was stopped by two dusky figures. They stood just on the edge of the forest and came out so suddenly that the spirited saddle mare stopped and attempted to wheel and bolt. But Travis, controlling her with one hand and, suspecting robbers, had drawn his revolver with the other, when one of them said:
“Friends, don't shoot.”
“Give the countersign,” said Travis with ill-concealed irritation.
“Union League, sir. I am Silos, sir.”
Travis put his revolver back into his overcoat pocket and quieted his mare.
The two men, one a negro and the other a mulatto, came up to his saddle-skirt and stood waiting respectfully.
“You should have awaited me at The Gaffs, Silos.”
“We did, sir,” said the mulatto, “but the boys are all out here in the woods, and we wanted to hold them together. We didn't know when you would come home.”
“Oh, it's all right,” said Travis pettishly—“only you came near catching one of my bullets by mistake. I thought you were Jack Bracken and his gang.”
The mulatto smiled and apologized. He was a bright fellow and the barber of the town.
“We wanted to know, sir, if you were willing for us to do the work to-night, sir?”
“Why bother me about it—no need for me to know, Silos, but one thing I must insist upon. You may whip them—frighten them, but nothing else, mind you, nothing else.”
“But you are the commander of the League—we wanted your consent.”
Travis bent low over the saddle and talked earnestly to the man a while. It was evidently satisfactory to the other, for he soon beckoned his companion and started off into the woods.
“Have you representatives from each camp present, Silos?”
The mulatto turned and came back.
“Yes—but the toughest we could get. I'll not stay myself to see it. I don't like such work, sir—only some one has to do it for the cause—the cause of freedom, sir.”
“Of course—why of course,” said Travis. “Old Bisco and his kind are liable to get all you negroes put back into slavery—if the Democrats succeed again as they have just done. Give them a good scare.”
“We'll fix him to-night, boss,” said the black one, grinning good naturedly. Then he added to himself: “Yes, I'll whip 'em—to death.”
“I heard a good deal of talk among the boys, to-night, sir,” said the mulatto. “They all want you for Congress next time.”
“Well, we'll talk about that, Silos, later. I must hurry on.”
He started, then wheeled suddenly:
“Oh, say, Silos—”
The latter came back.
“Do your work quietly to-night—Just a good scare—If you disturb”—he pointed to the roof of Westmoreland in the distance showing above the beech tops. “You know how foolish they are about old Bisco and his wife—”
“They'll never hear anything.” He walked off, saying to himself: “A nigger who is a traitor to his race ought to be shot, but for fear of a noise and disturbin' the ladies—I'll hang 'em both,—never fear.”
Travis touched his mare with the spur and galloped off.
Uncle Bisco and his wife were rudely awakened. It was nearly midnight when the door of their old cabin was broken open by a dozen black, ignorant negroes, who seized and bound the old couple before they could cry out. Bisco was taken out into the yard under a tree, while his wife, pleading and begging for her husband's life, was tied to another tree.
“Bisco,” said the leader, “we cum heah to pay you back fur de blood you drawed frum our backs whilst you hilt de whip ob slabery an' oberseed fur white fo'ks. An' fur ebry lick you giv' us, we gwi' giv' you er dozen on your naked back, an' es fur dis ole witch,” said the brute, pointing to old Aunt Charity, “we got de plain docyments on her fur witchin' Br'er Moses' little gal—de same dat she mek hab fits, an' we gwi' hang her to a lim'.”
The old man drew himself up. In every respect—intelligence, physical and moral bravery—he was superior to the crowd around him. Raised with the best class of whites, he had absorbed many of their virtues, while in those around him were many who were but a few generations removed from the cowardice of darkest Africa.
“I nurver hit you a lick you didn't deserve, suh, I nurver had you whipped but once an' dat wus for stealin' a horg which you sed yo'se'f you stole. You ken do wid me es you please,” he went on, “you am menny an' kin do it, an' I am ole an' weak. But ef you hes got enny soul, spare de po' ole 'oman who ain't nurver dun nothin' but kindness all her life. De berry chile you say she witched hes hed 'leptis fits all its life an' Cheerity ain't dun nuffin' but take it medicine to kwore it. Don't hurt de po' ole 'oman,” he exclaimed.
“Let 'em do whut dey please wid me, Bisco,” she said: “Dey can't do nuffin' to dis po' ole body but sen' de tired soul on dat journey wher de buterful room is already fix fur it, es you read dis berry night. But spare de ole man, spare 'im fur de secun' blessin' which Gord dun promised us, an' which boun' ter cum bekase Gord can't lie. O Lord,” she said suddenly, “remember thy po' ole servants dis night.”
But her appeals were fruitless. Already the “witch council” of the blacks was being formed to decide their fate. And it was an uncanny scene that the moon looked down on that night, under the big trees on the banks of the Tennessee. They formed in a circle around the “Witch Finder,” an old negro whose head was as white as snow, and who was so ignorant he could scarcely speak even negro dialect.
Both his father and mother were imported from Africa, and the former was “Witch Finder” for his tribe there. The negroes said the African Witch Finder had imparted his secret only to his son, and that it had thus been handed down in one family for many generations.
The old negro now sat upon the ground in the center of the circle. He was a small, bent up, wiry-looking black, with a physiognomy closely resembling a dog's, which he took pains to cultivate by drawing the plaits of his hair down like the ears of a hound, while he shaped his few straggling strands of beard into the under jaw of the same animal. Three big negroes had led him, blind-folded, into the circle, chanting a peculiar song, the music of which was weird and uncanny. And now as he sat on the ground the others regarded him with the greatest reverence and awe. It was in one of the most dismal portions of the swamp, a hundred yards or two from the road that led to the ferry at the river. Here the old people had been brought from their homes and tied to this spot where the witch council was to be held. Before seating himself the Witch Finder had drawn three rings within a circle on the ground with the thigh bone of a dog. Then, unbuttoning his red flannel shirt, he took from his bosom, suspended around his neck, a kind of purse, made from the raw-hide of a calf, with white hair on one side and red on the other, and from this bag he proceeded to take out things which would have given Shakespeare ideas for his witch scene in Macbeth. A little black ring, made of the legs of the black spider and bound together with black horse hair; a black thimble-like cup, not much longer than the cup of an acorn, made of the black switch of a mule containing the liver of a scorpion. The horny head and neck of the huge black beetle, commonly known to negroes as the black Betsy Bug; the rattle and button of a rattlesnake; the fang-tooth of a cotton-mouth moccasin, the left hind foot of a frog, seeds of the stinging nettle, and pods of peculiar plants, all incased in a little sack made of a mole's hide. These were all given sufficient charm by a small round cotton yarn, in the center of which was a drop of human blood. They were placed on the ground around him, but he held the ball of cotton yarn in his hand, and ordered that the child be brought into the ring. The poor thing was frightened nearly to death at sight of the Witch Finder, and when he began slowly to unwind his ball of cotton thread and chant his monotonous funeral song, she screamed in terror. At a signal from the “Witch Finder,” Aunt Charity was dragged into the ring, her hands tied behind her. The sight of such brutality was too much for the child, and she promptly had another fit. No other evidence was needed, and the Witch Finder declared that Aunt Charity was Queen of Witches. The council retired, and in a few minutes their decision was made: Uncle Bisco was to be beaten to death with hickory flails and his old wife hung to the nearest tree. Their verdict being made, two stout negroes came forward to bind the old man to a tree with his arms around it. At sight of these ruffians the old woman broke out into triumphant song:
And it was well that she sang that song, for it stopped three horsemen just as they forded the creek and turned their horses' heads into the lane that led to the cabin. One who was tall and with square shoulders sat his horse as if born in the saddle. Above, his dark hair was streaked with white, but the face was calm and sad, though lit up now with two keen and kindly eyes which glowed with suppressed excitement. It was the face of splendid resolve and noble purpose, and the horse he rode was John Paul Jones. The other was the village blacksmith. A negro followed them, mounted on a raw-bone pony, and carrying his master's Enfield rifle.
The first horseman was just saying: “Things look mighty natural at the old place, Eph; I wonder if the old folks will know us? It seems to me—”
He pulled up his horse with a jerk. He heard singing just over to his left in the wood. Both horsemen sat listening:
“Do you know that voice, Eph?” cried the man in front to his body servant. “We must hurry”; and he touched the splendid horse with the heel of his riding boot.
But the young negro had already plunged two spurs into his pony's flanks and was galloping toward the cabin.
It was all over when the white rider came up. Two brutes had been knocked over with the short heavy barrel of an Enfield rifle. There was wild scattering of others through the wood. An old man was clinging in silent prayer to his son's knees and an old woman was clinging around his neck, and saying:
“Praise God—who nurver lies—it's little Ephrum—come home ag'in.”
Then they looked up and the old man raised his hands in a pitiful tumult of joy and fear and reverence as he said:
“An' Marse Tom, so help me God—a-ridin' John Paul Jones!”
Man may breed up all animals but himself. Strive as he may, the laws of heredity are hidden. “Like produces like or the likeness of an ancestor” is the unalterable law of the lower animal. Not so with man—he is a strange anomaly. Breed him up—up—and then from his high breeding will come reversion. From pedigrees and plumed hats and ruffled shirts come not men, but pygmies—things which in the real fight of life are but mice to the eagles which have come up from the soil with the grit of it in their craws and the strength of it in their talons.
We stop in wonder—balked. Then we see that we cannot breed men—they are born; not in castles, but in cabins.
And why in cabins? For therein must be the solution. And the solution is plain: It is work—work that does it.
We cannot breed men unless work—achievement—goes with it.
From the loins of great horses come greater horses; for the pedigree of work—achievement—is there. Unlike man, the race-horse is kept from degeneracy by work. Each colt that comes must add achievement to pedigree when he faces the starter, or he goes to the shambles or the surgeon.
Why may not man learn this simple lesson—the lesson of work—of pedigree, but the pedigree of achievement?
The son who would surpass his father must do more than his father did. Two generations of idleness will beget nonentities, and three, degenerates.
The preacher, the philosopher, the poet, the ruler—it matters not what his name—he who first solves the problem of how to keep mankind achieving will solve the problem of humanity.
And now to Helen Conway for the first time in her life this simple thing was happening—she was working—she was earning—she was supporting herself and Lily and her father. Not only that, but gradually she was learning to know what the love of one like Clay meant—unselfish, devoted, true.
If to every tempted woman in the world could be given work, and to work achievement, and to achievement independence, there would be few fallen ones.
All the next week Helen went to the mill early—she wanted to go. She wanted to earn more money and keep Lily out of the mill. And she went with a light heart, because for the first time in her life since she could remember, her father was sober. Helen's earnings changed even him. There was something so noble in her efforts that it uplifted even the drunkard. In mingled shame and pride he thought it out: Supported by his daughter—in a mill and such a daughter! He arose from it all white-lipped with resolve: “I will be a Conway again!” He said it over and over. He swore it.
It is true he was not entirely free from that sickening, sour, accursed smell with which she had associated him all her life. But that he was himself, that he was making an earnest effort, she knew by his neatly brushed clothes, his clean linen, his freshly shaved face, his whole attire which betokened the former gentleman.
“How handsome he must have been when he was once a Conway!” thought Helen.
He kissed his daughters at the breakfast table. He chatted with them, and though he said nothing about it, even Lily knew that he had resolved to reform.
After breakfast Helen left him, with Lily sitting on her father's lap, her face bright with the sunshine of it:
“If papa would always be like this”—and she patted his cheek.
Conway started. The very intonation of her voice, her gesture, was of the long dead mother.
Tears came to his eyes. He kissed her: “Never again, little daughter, will I take another drop.”
She looked at him seriously: “Say with God's help—” she said simply. “Mammy Maria said it won't count unless you say that.”
Conway smiled. “I will do it my own self.”
But Lily only shook her head in a motherly, scolding way.
“With God's help, then,” he said.
Never was an Autumn morning more beautiful to Helen as she walked across the fields to the mill. She had learned a nearer way, one which lay across hill and field. The path ran through farms, chiefly The Gaffs, and cut across the hills and meadow land. Through little dells, amid fragrant groves of sweet gum and maples, their beautiful many-colored leaves now scattered in rich profusion around. Then down little hollows where the brooks sputtered and frothed and foamed along, the sun all the time darting in and out, as the waters ran first in sunshine and then in shadow. And above, the winds were so still, that the jumping of the squirrel in the hickories made the only noise among the leaves which still clung to the boughs.
All so beautiful, and never had Helen been so happy.
She was earning a living—she was saving Lily from the mill and her father from temptation.
Her path wound along an old field and plunged into scrub cedar and glady rocks. A covey of quail sprang up before her and she screamed, frightened at the sudden thunder of their wings.
Then the path ran through a sedge field, white with the tall silvered panicled-leaves of the life-everlasting.
Beyond her she saw the smoke-stack of the mill, and a short cut through a meadow of The Gaffs would soon take her there.
She failed to see a warning on the fence which said: Keep out—Danger.
Through the bars she went, intent only on soon reaching the mill beyond and glorying in the strong rich smell of autumn in leaf and grass and air.
“What a beautiful horse that is in the pasture,” she thought, and then her attention went to a meadow lark flushed and exultant. She heard shouts, and now—why was Jim, the stable boy, running toward her so fast, carrying a pitchfork in his hands and shouting: “Whoa—there, Antar—Antar,—you, sir!”
And the horse! One look was enough. With ears laid back, and mouth wide open, with eyes blazing with the fire of fury he was plunging straight at her.
Helpless, she turned in sickening doubt, to feel that her limbs were limp in the agony of fear. She heard the thunder of the man-eating stallion's hoofs just behind her and she butted blindly, as she sank down, into some one who held bravely her hand as she fell, and the next instant she heard a thundering report and smelt a foul blast of gunpowder. She looked up in time to see the great horse pitch back on his haunches, rear, quiver a moment and strike desperately at the air with his front feet and fall almost upon her.
When she revived, the stable boy stood near by the dead stallion, pale with fright and wonder. A half-grown boy stood by her, holding her hand.
“You are all right now,” he said quietly as he helped her to arise. In his right hand he held a pistol and the foul smoke still oozed up from the nipple where the exploded cap lay shattered, under the hammer.
He was perfectly cool—even haughtily so. He scarcely looked at Helen nor at Jim, who kept saying nervously:
“You've killed him—you've killed him—what will Mr. Travis say?”
The boy laughed an ironical laugh. Then he walked up and examined the shot he had made. Squarely between the great eyes the ball had gone, and scarcely had the glaring, frenzied eye-balls of the man-eater been fixed in the rigid stare of death. He put his fingers on it, and turning, said:
“A good shot, running—and at twenty paces!”
Then he stood up proudly, and his blue eyes flashed defiance as he said:
“And what will Mr. Travis say? Well, tell him first of all that this man-eating stallion of his caught the bullet I had intended for his woman-eating master—this being my birth-day. And tell him, if he asks you who I am, that last week I was James Adams, but now I am James Travis. He will understand.”
He came over to Helen gallantly—his blue eyes shining through a smile which now lurked in them:
“This is Miss Conway, isn't it? I will see you out of this.”
Then, taking her hand as if she had been his big sister, he led her along the path to the road and to safety.