APPARENTLY McLeod’s triumph was complete and permanent. The farmers were disappointed in their wild hopes of a sub-treasury, and other socialistic schemes, but the passions of the campaign had been violent, and the offices they had won with their Negro ally had been soothing to their sense of pride.
A Republican farmer was Governor for a term of four years, they had elected two Senators, and three Supreme Court judges, and they had completely smashed the power of the Democratic party in the county governments. Everywhere they were triumphant in the local elections, filling almost every county office with heavy-handed sons of toil from the country districts, and making the town fops who had been drawing these fat salaries get out and work for a living.
Even McLeod was amazed at the thoroughness with which they cleaned the state of every vestige of the invincible Democracy that had ruled with a rod of iron since Legree’s flight.
Gaston could see but one weak spot in the alliance. The negroes had demanded their share of the spoils, and were gradually forcing their reluctant allies to grant them. He watched the progress of this movement with thrilling interest. The negroes had demanded the repeal of the county government plan of the Democracy, under which the credit of the forty black counties had been rescued from bankruptcy at the expense of local selfgovernment.
When the lawmakers who succeeded Legree had put this scheme of centralised power in force, these forty counties were immediately lifted from ruin to prosperity. But no negro ever held another office in them.
Now the negroes demanded the return to the principles of pure Democracy and the right to elect all town, township, and county officers direct. They got their demands. They took charge in short order of the great rich counties in the Black Belt, and white men ceased to hold the offices.
A negro college-graduate from Miss Walker’s classical institution had started a newspaper at Independence noted for its open demands for the recognition of the economic, social and political equality of the races. Young negro men and women walking the streets now refused to give half the sidewalk to a white man or woman when they met, and there were an increasing number of fights from such causes.
Gaston noted these signs with a growing sense of their import, and began his work for the second great campaign. The election for a legislature alone, he knew was lost already. His party had simply abandoned the fight. The Allied Party had passed new election laws, and under the tutelage of the doubtful methods of the past they had taken every partisan advantage possible within the limits of the Constitution. They could not be overthrown short of a political earthquake, and he knew it. But he thought he heard in the depths of the earth the low rumble of its coming, and he began to prepare for it.
THREE weeks before Christmas Gaston began to dream of the visit he was to make to Independence to see Sallie Worth. How long it seemed since she had kissed him in the twilight of that Pullman car and the Limited had rolled away bearing her further and further from his life! He would sit now for an hour reading her last letter, looking at her picture on his desk, and dreaming of what she would say when he sat by her side again in her own home.
And then like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky came a tearful letter announcing another storm at home. Her father had again forbidden her to write. She said, at the last, that Gaston’s visit must be postponed indefinitely for the present. He gazed at the letter with a hardened look.
“I will go. I ’ll face General Worth in his own home, and demand his reasons for such treatment. I am a man I am entitled to the respect of a man.” He made this declaration with a quiet force that left no doubt about his doing it.
He wrote Sallie that he could not and would not endure such a fight in the dark with the General, and that he was going to Independence on the day before Christmas as she had planned at first, to have it out with him face to face.
She wrote in reply and begged him under no circumstances to come until conditions were more favourable. He got this letter the day before he was to start.
“I ’ll go and I ’ll see him if I have to fight my way into his house, that’s all there is to it!” he exclaimed.
When he reached Independence, St. Clare met him at the depot, and gave him an eager welcome.
“I’ve been expecting you, you hard-headed fool!” he said impulsively.
“Well, your words are not equal to your handshake. What’s the matter?” asked Gaston.
“You know what’s the matter. Miss Sallie has been to see me this afternoon, and begged me to chain you at my house if you came to town to-day.”
“Well, you ’ll need handcuffs, and help to get them on,” replied Gaston with quiet decision.
“Look here, old boy, you’re not going down to that house to-night with the old man threatening to kill you on sight, and your girl bordering on collapse!”
“I am. I’ve been bordering on collapse for some time myself. I’m getting used to it.”
“You’re a fool.”
“Granted, but I ’ll risk it.”
“But, man, I tell you Miss Sallie will be furious with you if you go after all the messages she has sent you.”
“I ’ll risk her fury too.”
“Gaston, let me beg you not to do it.”
“I’m going, Bob. It isn’t any use for you to waste your breath.”
“You know where my heart is, old chum,” said Bob, yielding reluctantly. “I couldn’t go down to that house to-night under the conditions you are going for the world.”
“Why not? It’s the manly thing to do.”
“It’s a dangerous thing to do. Fathers have killed men under such conditions.”
“Well, I ’ll risk it. I’m going as soon as I can brush up a little.”
Bob walked with him to the outskirts of the city, begging in vain that he should turn back, but he never slacked his pace.
When he turned to go home, Bob pressed his hand and said “Good luck. And may your shadow never grow less.”
Gaston walked rapidly on toward Oakwood. As he passed through the shadows of the forest near the gate, a flood of tender memories rushed over him. He was back again by her side on that morning he met her, with the first flush of love thrilling his life. He could see her looking earnestly at him as though trying to solve a riddle. He could hear her laughter full of joy and happiness. As he turned into the gateway the house flashed on him its gleaming windows from the hill top. He felt his heart sink with bitterness as he realised the contrast of his last entrance into that house, its welcomed guest, and his present unbidden intrusion. Once those lights had gleamed only a message of peace and love. Now they seemed signals of war some enemy had set on the hill to warn of his approach.
He paused a moment and wiped the perspiration from his brow. It was Christmas eve, but the air was balmy and spring-like and his rapid walk had tired him. He had eaten nothing all day, had slept only a few hours the night before, and the nerve strain had been more than he knew.
He looked up at the great white pillars softly shining in the starlight, and a sickening fear of a possible tragedy behind those doors crept over him.
“My God!” he exclaimed, “I had rather charge a breastworks in the face of flashing guns than to go into that house to-night and meet one man!”
He recognised the breach of the finer amenities of life involved in forcing his way into a home under such conditions, and it humiliated him for a moment.
“We will not stickle for forms now,” he said to himself firmly. “This is war. I am to uncover the batteries of my enemy. I have hesitated long enough. I will not fight in the dark another day.”
As he stepped briskly up to the door, he started at a sudden thought. What if the General had ordered the servants to slam the door in his face! The possibility of such an unforeseen insult made the cold sweat break out over his face as he rang the bell. No matter, he was in for it now, he would face hell if need be!
He waited but an instant, and heard the heavy tread of a man approach the door. Instinctively he knew that the General himself was on guard, and would open the door. Evidently he had expected him.
The door opened about two feet and the General glared at him livid with rage. He held one hand on the door and the other on its facing, and his towering figure filled the space.
“Good evening, General!” said Gaston with embarrassment.
“What do you want, sir?” he growled.
“I wish to see you for a few minutes.”
“Well, I don’t want to see you.”
“Whether you wish to or not, you must do it sooner of later,” answered Gaston with dignity.
“Indeed! Your insolence is sublime, I must say!”
“The sooner you and I have a plain talk the better for both of us. It can’t be put off any longer,” Gaston continued with self control. He was looking the General straight in the eyes now, with head and broad shoulders erect and his square-cut jaws were snapping his words with a clean emphasis that was not lost on the older master of men before him.
“Call at my office in the morning at ten o’clock.” he said, at length.
“I will not do it. I am going home on the nine o’clock train. To-morrow is Christmas day. The issue between us is of life import to me, and it may be of equal importance to you. I will not put it off another hour!”
The General glared at him. His hands began to tremble, and raising his voice, he thundered, “I am not accustomed to take orders from young upstarts. How dare you attempt to force yourself into my house when you were told again and again not to attempt it, sir?”
“Your former welcome to me on three occasions when the object of my visits was as well known to you as to me, gives me, at least, the vested rights of a final interview. I demand it,” retorted Gaston curtly.
“And I refuse it!” Still there was a note of indecision in his voice which Gaston was quick to catch.
“General,” he protested, “you are a soldier and a gentleman. You never fought an enemy with uncivilised warfare. Yet you have allowed some one under your protection to stab me in the dark for the past year. I am entitled to know why I fight and against whom. I ask your sense of fairness as a soldier if I am not right?”
The General hesitated, and finally said, as he opened the door, “Walk into the parlour.”
When they were seated, Gaston plunged immediately into the question he had at heart.
“Now, General, I wish to ask you plainly why you have treated me as you have since I asked you for your daughter’s hand?”
“The less said about it, the better. I have good and sufficient reasons, and that settles it.”
“But I have the right to know them.”
“What right?”
“The right of every man to face his accuser when on trial for his life.”
“Bah! men don’t die nowadays for love, or women either,” the General growled.
“Besides,” continued Gaston, “you are under the deepest obligations to tell me fairly your reasons.”
“Obligations?”
“The obligations of the commonest justice between man and man. You invited me to your home. I was your welcome guest. You encouraged my suit for your daughter’s hand.”
“How dare you say such a thing, sir!”
“Because she told me you did. I was led to believe that you not only looked with favour on my suit, but that you were pleased with it. I asked for your daughter. You insulted my manhood by refusing me permission even to seek an interview, and know the reasons for your change of views. Since then you have treated me with plain brutality. Now something caused this change.”
“Certainly something caused it, something of tremendous importance,” said the General.
“I am entitled to know what it is.”
“Simply this. I received information concerning you, your habits, your associates, your character, and your family, that caused me to change my mind.”
“Did you inquire as to their truth?”
“It was unnecessary. I love my daughter beyond all other treasures I possess. With her future I will take no risks.”
“I have the right to know the charges, General,” insisted Gaston. “I demand it.”
“Well, sir, if you demand it, you will get it. I learned that you are a man of the most dissolute habits and character, that you are a hard drinker, a gambler, a rake and a spendthrift, and that your family’s history is a deplorable one.”
“My family history a deplorable one!” cried Gaston, springing to his feet, with trembling clinched fists and scarlet face on which the blue veins suddenly stood out.
“I begged you to spare me and yourself the pain of this,” replied the General in a softer voice.
“No, I do not ask to be spared. Give me the particulars. What is the stain on my family name?”
“Not a moral one, but in some respects more hopeless, a physical one. I have positive information that your people on one side are what is known in the South as poor white trash—”
Gaston smiled. “I thank you, General, for your frankness. The only wrong of which I complain, is your withholding the name of the liar.”
“There is no use of a fight over such things. I do not wish my daughter’s name to be smirched with it.”
“Her name is as dear to me as it can possibly be to you. Never fear. You are her father, I honour you as such. I thank you for the information. I scorn to stoop to answer. The humour of it forbids an answer if I could stoop to make one. Now, General, I make you this proposition. I am not in a hurry. I will patiently wait any time you see fit to set for any developments in my life and character about which you have doubts. All I ask is the privilege of writing to the woman I love. Is not this reasonable?”
“No, sir,” declared the General, “I will not have it. You are not in a position to make me a proposition of any sort. I have settled this affair. It is not open for discussion.”
“You mean to say that I have no standing whatever in the case?” asked Gaston with a smile, rubbing his hand over his smooth shaved lips and chin.
“Exactly. I’ve settled it. There’s nothing more to be said.”
“I ’ll never give her up. She is the one woman God made for me, and you will have to put me under the ground before you have settled my end of it,” said Gaston still smiling.
The old man’s face clouded for a moment, he wrinkled his brow, drew his bushy eyebrows closer and then turned toward Gaston in a persuasive way.
“Look here, Gaston, don’t be a fool. It’s amusing to me to hear a youngster talk such drivel. Love is not a fatal disease for a man, or a woman. You will find that out later if you don’t know it now. I loved a half dozen girls, and when I got ready to marry, I asked the one handiest, and that seemed most suited to my temper. We married and have lived as happily as the romancers. The world is full of pretty girls. Go on about your business, and quit bothering me and mine.”
“There’s only one girl for me, General!”
“That’s proof positive to my mind that you are a little cracked!” he answered with a smile.
Gaston laughed and shook his head. “I ’ll never give her up in this world, or the next,” he doggedly added.
Again the General frowned. “Look here, young man, did it ever occur to you that your pursuit might be held the work of a low adventurer? My daughter is an heiress. You haven’t’ a dollar. Don’t you know that I will disinherit her if she marries without my consent?”
“You can’t frighten me on that tack,” answered Gaston firmly. “No dollar mark has yet been placed on the doors of Southern society. Manhood, character and achievement are the keys that unlock it. You know that, and I now it. I was poorer and more obscure the day you first invited me here than to-day. And yet you gave me as hearty a welcome as her richest suitor. All I ask is time to prove to you in my life my manhood and worth,—one year, two years, five years, ten years, any time you see fit to name.”
“No, sir,” firmly snapped the General, “not a day. I don’t like long engagements. Yours is ended, once and for all time. I have settled that.”
“Can even a father decide the destiny of two immortal souls off hand like that?”
“Now, you are assuming too much. I am not speaking for myself alone. I have laid all the facts carefully before Sallie, and she has agreed to the wisdom of my decision, and asked me to represent her in what I say this evening.”
Gaston turned pale, his lips quivered, and turning to the General suddenly, he said, “That is the only important fact you have laid before me. Just let her come here, stand by your side and say that with her own lips, and I will never cross your path in life again.”
The General hung his head and stammered, “No, it is not necessary. It will embarrass and humiliate her. I will not permit it.”
“Then I deny your credentials!” exclaimed Gaston.
The General seemed embarrassed by the failure of this fatherly subterfuge, and Gaston could not help smiling at the revelation of his weakness. He decided to press his advantage and try to see her if only for a moment.
“General,” protested Gaston persuasively, “I appeal to your sense of courtesy, even to an enemy. After all that has passed between us in this house, is it fair or courteous to show me that door without one word of farewell to the woman to whom I have given my life? Or is it wise from your point of view?”
Again the General hesitated. He was a big-hearted man of generous impulses, and he felt worsted in this interview somehow, but it was hard to deny such a request. He fumbled at his watch chain, arose, and said, “I will see if she desires it.”
Gaston’s heart bounded with joy! If she desired it! He could feel her soul enveloping him with its love as he sat there conscious that she was somewhere in that house praying for him!
He fairly choked with the pain and the joy of the certainty that in a moment he would be near her, touch her hand, see her glorious beauty and his ears drink the music of her voice.
“Just step this way,” said the General, re-appearing at the door.
Gaston walked into the hall and met Sallie as she emerged from the library door opposite. He tried to say something, but his throat was dry and his tongue paralysed with the wonder of her presence! Besides, the General stood grimly by like a guard over a life prisoner.
He looked searchingly into her eyes as he held her hand for a moment and felt its warm impulsive pressure. Oh! the eyes of the woman we love! What are words to their language of melting tenderness, of faith and longing. Gaston felt like shouting in the General’s face his triumph. She tried to speak, but only pressed his hand again. It was enough.
He bowed to the General, and left without a word.
THAT night as he walked back through the streets he was thrilled with a sense of strength and of triumph. He knew his ground now. There was to be war between him and the General to the bitter end. He had never asked her once to oppose her father’s or mother’s command. Now he would see who was master in a test of strength. And he was eager for the struggle. His mind was alert, and every nerve and muscle tense with energy.
“Heavens, how hungry I am!” he exclaimed when he reached the brilliantly lighted business portion of the city.
He went into a restaurant, ordered a steak, and enjoyed a good meal. He recalled then that he had not eaten for twenty-four hours. The steak was good, and the faces of the people seemed to him lit with gladness. He was singing a battle song in his soul, and the eyes of the woman he loved looked at him with yearning tenderness.
“Now, Bob, I count on you,” he cried to his friend next morning. “I am going to have a merry Christmas and you are to aid in the skirmishing.”
“I’m with you to the finish!” Bob responded with enthusiasm.
“We must make a feint this morning to deceive the enemy while I turn his flank. I go home on the nine o’clock train. You understand?”
“Yes, over the left. It’s dead easy too. There’s to be a big Christmas party to-night at the Alexanders’. She’s invited. I ’ll see that she goes to it if I have to drag her.”
“Good. Don’t tell her I’m in town. I want to surprise her.”
The General had a man at the morning train who reported Gaston’s departure. He was surprised at Sallie’s good spirits but attributed it to the magnificent present he had given her that morning of a diamond ring and an exquisite pearl necklace.
He bustled her off to the party that night and congratulated himself on the certainty of his triumph over an aspiring youngster who dared to set his will against his own.
When the festivities had begun, and the children were busy with their fireworks, Sallie strolled along the winding walks of the big lawn. She was chatting with Bob St. Clare about a young man they both knew, and when they reached the corner furthest from the house, under the shadows of a great magnolia with low overhanging boughs she saw the figure of a man.
She smiled into Bob’s face, pressed his hand and said, “Now, Bob you’ve done all a good friend could do. Go back. I don’t need you.”
And Bob answered with a smile and left her. In a moment Gaston was by her side with both her hands in his kissing them tenderly.
“Didn’t I surprise you, dear?” he softly asked.
“No. Bob denied you were here, but I knew it was a story. I was sure you would never leave without seeing me. You couldn’t, could you?”
“Not after what I saw in your eyes last night!” He whispered.
“It seems a century since I’ve heard your voice,” she said wistfully. “God alone knows what I have suffered, and I am growing weary of it.”
“Do you think I have been treated fairly?” he asked.
“No, I do not”
“Then you will write to me?”
“Yes. I will not starve my heart any longer.” And she pressed his hand.
“You have made the world glorious again! When will you marry me, Sallie?” he bent his face close to her, and for an answer she tenderly kissed him.
They stood in silence a moment with clasped hands, and then she said slowly, “You didn’t want your freedom did you, dear? That’s the third kiss, isn’t it? I wonder if kissing will be always as sweet! But you asked me when we can marry? I can’t tell now. I can do nothing to shock Mama. She seems to draw closer and closer to me every day. And now that I have determined no power shall separate us, it seems more and more necessary that I shall win Papa’s consent. He loves me dearly. I feel that I must have his blessing on our lives. Give me time. I hope to win him.”
“And you will never let another week pass without writing to me?”
“Never. Send my letters to Bob. He loves you better than he ever thought he loved me. He will give them to me on Sundays at church, and when he calls.”
For two hours the kindly mantle of the magnolia sheltered them while they told the old sweet story over and over again. And somehow that night it seemed to them sweeter each time it was told.
WHEN Gaston reached Hambright the following day, and whispered to his mother the good news, he hastened to tell his friend Tom Camp. The young man’s heart warmed toward the white-haired old soldier in this hour of his victory. With sparkling eyes, he told Tom of his stormy scene with the General, of its curious ending, and the hours he spent in heaven beneath the limbs of an old magnolia.
Tom listened with rapture. “Ah, didn’t I tell you, if you hung on you’d get her by-and-by? So you bearded the General in his den did you? I ’ll bet his eyes blazed when he seed you! He’s got an awful temper when you rile him. You ought to a seed him one day when our brigade was ordered into a charge where three concealed batteries was cross firin’ and men was failin’ like wheat under the knife. Geeminy but didn’t he cuss! He wouldn’t take the order fust from the orderly, and sent to know if the Major-General meant it. I tell you us fellers that was layin’ there in the grass listenin’ to them bullets singin’ thought he was the finest cusser that ever ripped an oath.
“He reared and he charged, and he cussed, and He damned that man for tryin’ to butcher his men, and he never moved till the third order came. That was the night ten thousand wounded men lay on the field, and me in the middle of ’em with a Minie ball in my shoulder. The Yankees and our men was all mixed up together, and just after dark the full moon came up through the trees and you could see as plain as day. I begun to sing the old hymn, ‘There is a land of pure delight,’ and you ought to have heard them ten thousand wounded men sing!
“While we was singing the General came through lookin’ up his men. He seed me and said, ‘Is that you, Tom Camp?’
“I looked up at him, and he was crying like a child, and he went on from man to man cryin’ and cussin the fool that sent us into that hell-hole. The General’s a rough man, if you rub his fur the wrong way, but his heart’s all right. He’s all gold I tell you!”
“Well, I’m in for a tussle with him, Tom.”
“Shucks, man, you can beat him with one hand tied behind you if you’ve got his gal’s heart. She’s got his fire, and a gal as purty as she is can just about do what she pleases in this world.”
“I hope she can bring him around. I like the General. I’d much rather not fight him.”
“Where’s Flora?” cried Tom looking around in alarm.
“I saw her going toward the spring in the edge of the woods there a minute ago,” replied Gaston.
Tom sprang up and began to hop and jump down the path toward the spring with incredible rapidity.
Flora was playing in the branch below the spring and Tom saw the form of a negro man passing over the opposite hill going along the spring path that led in that direction.
“Was you talkin’ with that nigger, Flora?” asked Tom holding his hand on his side and trying to recover his breath.
“Yes, I said howdy, when he stopped to get a drink of water, and he give me a whistle,” she replied with a pout of her pretty lips and a frown.
Tom seized her by the arm and shook her. “Didn’t I tell you to run every time you seed a nigger unless I was with you!”
“Yes, but he wasn’t hurtin’ me and you are!” she cried bursting into tears.
“I’ve a notion to whip you good for this!” Tom stormed.
“Don’t Tom, she won’t do it any more, will you Flora?” pleaded Gaston taking her in his arms and starting to the house with her. When they reached the house, Tom was still pale and trembling with excitement.
“Lord, there’s so many triflin’ niggers loafin’ round the county now stealing and doin’ all sorts of devilment, I’m scared to death about that child. She don’t seem any more afraid of ’em than she is of a cat.”
“I don’t believe anybody would hurt Flora, Tom,—she’s such a little angel,” said Gaston kissing the tears from the child’s face.
“She is cute—ain’t she?” said Tom with pride. “I’ve wished many a time lately I’d gone out West with them Yankee fellers that took such a likin’ to me in the war. They told me that a poor white man had a chance out there, and that there wern’t a nigger in twenty miles of their home. But then I lost my leg, how could I go?”
He sat dreaming with open eyes for a moment and continued, looking tenderly at Flora, “But, baby, don’t you dare go nigh er nigger, or let one get nigh you no more’n you would a rattlesnake!”
“I won’t Pappy!” she cried with an incredulous smile at his warning of danger that made Tom’s heart sick. She was all joy and laughter, full of health and bubbling life. She believed with a child’s simple faith that all nature was as innocent as her own heart.
Tom smoothed her curls and kissed her at last, and she slipped her arm around his neck and squeezed it tight.
“Ain’t she purty and sweet now?” he exclaimed.
“Tom, you ’ll spoil her yet,” warned Gaston as he smiled and took his leave, throwing a kiss to Flora as he passed through the little yard gate. Tom had built a fence close around his house when Flora was a baby to shut her in while he was at work.
Two days later about five o’clock in the afternoon as Gaston sat in his office writing a letter, to his sweetheart, his face aglow with love and the certainty that she was his, as he read and re-read her last glowing words he was startled by the sudden clang of the court house bell. At first he did not move, only looking up from his paper. Sometimes mischievous boys rang the bell and ran down the steps before any one could catch them. But the bell continued its swift stroke seeming to grow louder and wilder every moment. He saw a man rush across the square, and then the bell of the Methodist, and then of the Baptist churches joined their clamour to the alarm.
He snapped the lid of his desk, snatched his hat and ran down the steps.
As he reached the street, he heard the long piercing cry of a woman’s voice, high, strenuous, quivering!
“A lost child! A lost child!”
What a cry! He was never so thrilled and awed by a human voice. In it was trembling all the anguish of every mother’s broken heart transmitted through the centuries!
At the court house door an excited group had gathered. A man was standing on the steps gesticulating wildly and telling the crowd all he knew about it. Over the din he caught the name, “Tom Camp’s Flora!”
He breathed hard, bit his lips, and prayed instinctively.
“Lord have mercy on the poor old man! It will kill him!” A great fear brooded over the hearts of the crowd, and soon the tumult was hushed into an awed silence.
In Gaston’s heart that fear became a horrible certainty from the first. Within a half hour a thousand white people were in the crowd. Gaston stood among them, cool and masterful, organising them in searching parties, and giving to each group the signals to be used.
In a moment the white race had fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate, and revenge. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the banker and the blacksmith, the great and the small, they were all one now. The sorrow of that old one-legged soldier was the sorrow of all, every heart beat with his, and his life was their life, and his child their child.
But at the end of an hour there was not a negro among them! By some subtle instinct they had recognised the secret feelings and fears of the crowd and had disappeared. Had they been beasts of the field the gulf between them would not have been deeper.
When Gaston reached Tom’s house the crowd was divided into the groups agreed upon and a signal gun given to each. If the child was not dead when found two should be fired—if dead, but one.
He sought Tom to be sure there was no mistake and that the child had not fallen asleep about the house. He found the old man shut up in his room kneeling in the middle of the floor praying.
When Gaston laid his hand gently on his shoulder his lips ceased to move, and he looked at him in a dazed sort of way at first without speaking.
“Oh!—it’s you, Charlie!” he sighed.
“Yes, Tom, tell me quick. Are you sure she is nowhere in the house?”
“Sure!—Sure?” he cried in a helpless stare. “Yes, yes, I found her bonnet at the spring. I looked everywhere for an hour before I called the neighbours!”
“Then I’m off with the searchers. The signal is two guns if they find her alive. One gun if she is dead. You will understand.”
“Yes, Charlie,” answered the old soldier in a faraway tone of voice, “and don’t forget to help me pray while you look for her.”
“I’ve tried already, Tom,” he answered as he pressed his hand and left the house. All night long the search continued, and no signal gun was heard. Torches and lanterns gleamed from every field and wood, byway and hedge for miles in every direction.
Through every hour of this awful night Tom Camp was in his room praying—his face now streaming with tears, now dry and white with the unspoken terror that could stop the beat of his heart. His white hair and snow-white beard were dishevelled, as he unconsciously tore them with his trembling hands. Now he was crying in an agony of intensity, “As thy servant of old wrestled with the angel of the Lord through the night, so, oh God, will I lie at Thy feet and wrestle and pray! I will not let Thee go until Thou bless me! Though I perish, let her live! I have lost all and praised Thee still. Lord, Thou canst not leave me desolate!”
From the pain of his wound and the exhaustion of soul and body he fainted once with his lips still moving in prayer. For more than an hour he lay as one dead. When he revived, he looked at his clock and it was but an hour till dawn.
Again he fell on his knees, and again the broken accents of his husky voice could be heard wrestling with God. Now he would beg and plead like a child, and then he would rise in the unconscious dignity of an immortal soul in combat with the powers of the infinite and his language was in the sublime speech of the old Hebrew seers!
Just before the sun rose the signal gun pealed its message of life, ONE! TWO! in rapid succession.
Tom sprang to his feet with blazing eyes. One! Two! echoed the guns from another hill, and fainter grew its repeated call from group to group of the searchers.
“There! Glory to God!” He screamed at the top of his voice, the last note of his triumphant shout breaking into sobs. “God be praised! I knew they would find her—she’s not dead, she’s alive! alive! oh! my soul, lift up thy head!”
The tramp of swift feet was heard at the door and Gaston told him with husky stammering voice, “She’s alive Tom, but unconscious. I ’ll have her brought to the house. She was found just where your spring branch runs into the Flat Rock, not five hundred yards from here in those woods. Stay where you are. We will bring her in a minute.”
Gaston bounded back to the scene.
Tom paid no attention to his orders to stay at home, but sprang after him jumping and falling and scrambling up again as he followed. Before they knew it he was upon the excited tearful group that stood in a circle around the child’s body.
Gaston, who was standing on the opposite side from Tom’s approach, saw him and shouted, “My God, men, stop him! Don’t let him see her yet!” But Tom was too quick for them. He brushed aside, the boy who caught at him, as though a feather, crying, “Stand back!”
The circle of men fell away from the body and in a moment Tom stood over it transfixed with horror.
Flora lay on the ground with her clothes torn to shreds and stained with blood. Her beautiful yellow curls were matted across her forehead in a dark red lump beside a wound where her skull had been crushed. The stone lay at her side, the crimson mark of her life showing on its jagged edges.
With that stone the brute had tried to strike the death blow. She was lying on the edge of the hill with her head up the incline. It was too plain, the terrible crime that had been committed.
The poor father sank beside her body with an inarticulate groan as though some one had crushed his head with an axe. He seemed dazed for a moment, and looking around he shouted hoarsely, “The doctor boys! The doctor quick! For God’s sake, quick! She’s not dead yet—we may save her—help—help!” he sank again to the ground limp and faint from pain and was soon insensible.
Gaston gathered the child tenderly in his arms and carried her to the house. The men hastily made a stretcher and carried Tom behind him.