THE LANDLOPER

CONTENTS

THE LANDLOPER

I

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VII

VIII

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X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

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XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

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XXI

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XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

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XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

The man who called himself Walker Farr plodded down the dusty stretches of a country road.

He moved leisurely. He neither slouched like a vagabond nor did he swing with a stride which indicated that he had aim in life or destination in mind. When he came under arching elms he plucked his worn cap from his head and stuffed it into a coat pocket which already bulged bulkily against his flank. He gazed to right and left upon the glories of a sun-bathed June morning and strolled bareheaded along the aisle of a temple of the great Out-of-Doors.

He was young and stalwart and sunburnt.

A big, gray automobile squawked curt warning behind him and then swept past and on its way, kicking dust upon him from its whirring wheels.

He gave the car only an indifferent glance, but, as he walked on, he was conscious that out of the blur of impressions the memory of a girl's profile lingered.

A farmer-man who had come to the end of a row in a field near the highway fence leaned on his hoe-handle and squinted against the sun at the face of the passer-by. Then the farmer shifted his gaze to the stranger's clothing and scowled. The face was the countenance of a man who was somebody; the clothing was the road-worn garb of a vagrant.

“Here, you!” called the farmer.

“I hear you,” said the man who called himself Walker Farr, smiling and putting subtle insolence into the smile.

“Do you want a job?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you got a job?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is it?”

“Chopping down well-holes that have been turned inside out by a cyclone.”

The man in the highway flashed a wonderful smile at the farmer and passed on. The farmer blinked and then he scowled more savagely. He climbed the fence and followed, carrying his hoe.

“Look here, you! There ain't no such business.”

“Send for me next time you have a well turned wrong side out and I'll prove it.”

“You're a tramp.”

Farr sauntered on.

“You're a tramp, and here's what we are doing to tramps in this county right now!”

Beyond them in the highway men were delving with shovels and hacking with mattocks. The men wore blue drilling overalls, obtrusively new, and their faces were pasty pale.

“We have taken 'em out of jail and put 'em doing honest work,” said the farmer. He pointed to guards who were marching to and fro with rifles in the hook of their arms. “Here's where you belong. I'm a constable of this town. I arrest you.”

The young man halted. His smile became provokingly compassionate as he stared down at the nickel badge the farmer was tapping.

“So you represent the law, do you?” inquired Farr.

“I do.”

“It's too bad you don't know more about the law, then. I have neither solicited alms, trespassed on private property, begged food, nor committed crime in your little kingdom, my good and great three-tailed bashaw. Here is a coin to clear the law.” He exhibited a silver piece. “I am sorry I cannot remain here and help you mend your ways—they seem to need it!”

He went on past the sullen gang of pick and shovel, treading the middle of the broad turnpike.

“Ain't that a tramp?” asked one of the guards.

“I don't know what he is,” confessed the farmer.

The man who called himself Farr turned a corner and came upon the same automobile which had overtaken and passed him, contemptuously kicking its dust over him, a few minutes before he arrived at the farmer's fence.

A rear tire was flat and a young man who was smartly attired in gray was smacking gloved hands together and cursing the lumps of a jail-bird-built road and the guilty negligence of a garage-man who had forgotten to put a lift-jack back into the kit. Two women stood beside the car and looked upon the young man's helplessness.

“Enter tortoise, second scene of the ancient drama, 'The Tortoise and the Hare,'” Walter Farr informed himself.

His amused brown eyes noted the young man was obviously flabby.

“Here, you! Help me prop up this axle,” commanded the charioteer.

“You do not need help,” suggested Farr. “You need somebody who can do the whole job.”

The glance he gave the young man, up and down, conveyed his full meaning.

“Well, I must say that's saucy talk from a hobo,” declared one of the women.

“Mother!” warned the third member of the party.

Farr turned his cynical gaze from the older woman to the younger—from the bleached hair and rouged lips to a fresh, pure, and vivid loveliness. He saw her profile once more.

“No one has remembered to say 'please' yet,” the girl informed him, meeting his gaze. “I say it, sir!”

He bowed and went straight to the roadside and picked up a bit of plank on which his searching eyes rested.

He gave it into the gloved hands of the car's owner, he slipped off his own sun-faded coat and rolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt above his elbows, and then, with shoulder thrusting up; and arms straining, he heaved the car high enough so that the flabby gentleman could set the prop under the axle. And when the gentleman began to dust his gloves and to search for spots on his gray immaculateness, Farr dug tools from the box and proceeded to the work of replacing the tire.

The girl stood near him and regarded him with interest. He looked up when he had the opportunity and found her eyes studying him. She was entirely frank in her gaze. There was nothing in her eyes except the earnestness of a scrutiny which was satisfying curiosity.

When the work was done the owner offered money.

Farr refused with curt decisiveness.

“Well, have a drink?” invited the debtor.

“I do not use liquor.”

The autoist emptied his cigar-case into his hand and offered the cigars to Farr, who had just tugged on his coat.

“I do not smoke, sir.”

It was not declination with humility; the manner of the man of the road contained a hint that anybody who drank or smoked was no better than he should be. The girl studied him with renewed interest.

“Don't stand there and try to put anything over on me,” advised the man in gray, showing resentment. “What can I do for you?”

“You might thank the man, Richard,” declared the girl, tartly. She turned to Farr.

“He seems to have forgotten 'thank you' as he forgot 'please.' May I make amends? We thank you!”

“And now I am in your debt,” said the rover. He bowed and walked on.

When the car passed him the girl turned and gave him a long look. He waved his hand. The dust-cloud closed in between them.

“Kat Kilgour! That's a tramp! I'm amazed!” said the elder woman, observing the look and the salute.

“Yes, this world is full of surprises,” agreed the girl, sweetly.

“But your own eyes told you that he was a tramp.”

“There isn't any doubt of it, is there, if you used your eyes?” demanded their escort.

“We'll consider that the eyes have it—and let the matter drop,” said the girl—and her tone was not sweet.

The man of the keen brown eyes and the faded garb fared on.

He plucked a rose from a wayside bush and carried the flower in his hand.

“Your sister just passed this way,” he informed the rose in whimsical fashion. “I don't suppose you and I will ever catch up with her. I go very slowly, but you may journey along with me.”

The wayfarer who called himself Farr came down the long hill and turned the corner of the highway where the alders crowded to the banks of the narrow brook; they whispered to one another as the breeze fluttered their leaves. He drank there, bending and scooping the water in his palm. He bathed the rose and stroked its wilted petals.

“Too bad, little one!” he said. “The long road is a killing proposition, and I'm afraid I had no business inviting you to go with me. Your sister must be a long way ahead of us.”

The rocks were cool where the alders cast shade, and he sat there for a little while, watching the drift of tiny flotsam down the eddying current and observing the skipper-bugs skating over the still shallows on their spraddled legs.

There was a pleasant hush all about. The bubbling ecstasy of a bobolink floated above the grasses of a meadow, and near at hand a wren hopped about in the alders and chirped dozy notes. Peace and restfulness brooded. The man at the brook leaned low and thrust his head into the water and then rose and shook the drops from his thick thatch of brown hair. He did it with a sort of canine wriggle and smiled at the thought which came to him.

“A stray dog!” he muttered. “Of as much account—and he'd better forget the sister of the rose. Here's a good place to put imagination to sleep—here's a place where all is asleep.”

He went on around the curtain of the alders.

There was a big old-fashioned house near at hand. Its walls were weather-worn, its yard was not tidy. The faded curtains at the windows hung crookedly. The glass of the panes was dirty. The entire aspect of the place indicated that there was no woman's hand to make it home. It was commonplace and uninteresting.

But the front door was flung open suddenly with a screech of rusty hinges.

Then came backing out of the doorway a very old man—a bent and wrinkled old man with long white hair which trailed down from under a broad-brimmed hat. He was dragging a coffin, single-handed. The free end of the solemn box bumped down the wooden steps with a hollow clatter that suggested emptiness. There was a woodpile at one side of the yard. The old man tugged the casket over the litter of chips and dropped the end. He wrenched an ax from its cleft in a chopping-block and caved in the top of the coffin with the first blow.

The man Farr, observing from the road, saw that the casket was empty. The old man continued to bash and batter.

The wayfarer, before the destruction was begun, had time to note that the coffin was a remarkably fine specimen of cabinet-maker's work. There were various sorts of wood inlaid with care, and the fretwork along its sides had been jig-sawed with much pains spent in detail, and the pilasters were turned with art. But the old man battered at all this excellence with savageness. It was evident that he was not merely providing kindling-wood—he was expending fury.

It was an affair that demanded undivided attention from the observer in the road; but a man came around the corner of the house just then and Farr promptly gave over his interest in the aged chopper.

The new arrival was clothed cap-a-pie in armor.

He stood quietly at a little distance and gazed from under his vizor on the energetic old man at the woodpile.

Farr noted that the armor was obviously home-made. The helmet, though burnished and adorned with a horse's tail, had the unmistakable outlines of a copper kettle. The cuirass could not disguise its obligation to certain parts of an air-tight stove. But the ensemble was peculiarly striking and the man in the road took a quick glance around at the New England landscape in order to assure himself that he was still where he supposed he was.

Farr went to the fence and folded his arms on the top.

The old man, resting a moment, seemed to feel that intent regard from behind and, without turning his body, hooked his narrow and bony chin over his shoulder and swapped a long stare with the stranger.

“Well,” inquired the venerable chopper, “what is on thy mind, sir?” His tone was sour.

“Seeing that the question is direct and remembering that age deserves the truth, I'll say that I was thinking that this seems to be an ideal location for a private lunatic-asylum, and that guests are allowed to enjoy themselves.”

“I will have thee to understand that I have sat for thirty long years at the head of the Friends' meeting in this town and never has it been said that my wits are cracked. Furthermore, this is none of thy affair. Move on.”

Farr merely shifted his feet and took an easier pose at the fence.

“Feeling as I do, it will not trouble me much to come over there and take a chop or two at thee,” warned the old man.

“I didn't know that Quakers ever allowed their feelings to get so highly spiced.”

“Along with thee, tramp!”

“You see, my dear sir,” drawled the man in the road, “I am out in search of peace of mind. If I should go on my way without understanding what this means my itching curiosity would never allow me another good night's sleep. A word from you to soothe curiosity, and then I go!”

“Thee has seen me knocking into pieces a coffin. Is there anything strange in seeing me knock into pieces a coffin I have made with my own hands?”

“No, sir. That is quite within your rights. But why? From what little I saw of it it seemed to me to be a mighty fine piece of work.”

“It was,” stated the old man, a bit mollified. “Walnut with bird's-eye maple inlaid.”

“May I ask if it was made for anybody who died lately?”

“I made it for myself—I have had it by me for twenty years! Seeing that thee must stick thy nose into my business!” His tone was pettish and he stooped down and began to toss splinters and broken boards upon the woodpile.

“Then I suppose it was—er—sort of out of date,” suggested Farr, blandly.

“I see thee is minded to tease me—the world is full of fools.” He straightened as best he could, propping hands on his hips, and divided angry gaze between the man at the fence and the armored figure. “I am not going to die—I have decided to stay alive. I have a fool on my hands.”

“Father, I think thee had better choose thy words a bit better in the presence of a stranger,” advised the man in armor.

“Can't thee see that he is a fool?” demanded the old man.

“I don't think I want to venture an opinion, sir. I'll simply say that your son's choice of a summer suit seems a little peculiar. But, of course, every man to his liking!”

The old man walked down to the fence. He was crooked at the waist and his legs were hooked with the curves of age, but he strode along with brisk vigor. His gaze was as sharp as a gimlet, though the puckered lids were cocked over his eyes with the effect of little tents whose flaps were partly closed. He put his face close to Farr's.

“Thee is as cheeky as a crow and as prying as a magpie and I venture to say thee is a roving scamp. But I may as well talk to thee as to anybody.”

With armor rattling and squeaking, the son started toward them.

“I do not care to have thee talk about me, father,” he warned.

Farr noted that the son had eyes as keen and as gray as those of the elder. The armored citizen was sturdy and of middle age and the face under the vizor revealed intelligence and self-possession.

The father paid no heed to the son.

“Has thee traveled around the world much?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thee has met many men?”

“Many and of all sorts and conditions.”

“Then I want to ask thee what thee thinks of the good wit of a man who declares that he will go forth into the world, faring here and there, to try to do good to all men, to try to settle the troubles between men, free of all price?”

Farr turned gaze from the father to the earnest countenance of the son, and then stared again into the searching eyes of the old man. Prolonged and embarrassed silence followed.

“Thy looks speak louder than words,” declared the father. “Thy eyes say it—he is a fool.”

“It may be as well not to say so with thy tongue,” advised the son. “I might not be as patient with a stranger as I am with my father. He is wholly practical, without imagination, and so I excuse him.”

“I offer no comments,” said Walker Farr with a frank smile which won an answering flicker from the face under the vizor. “I do not understand.”

“I would not expect a vagabond to understand anything or to be brave enough to say what he thinks,” piped the father. He turned on his son. “Here's a scalawag of a tramp. Go along with him and be another such.”

“I may be a peripatetic philosopher, for all you know,” said Farr, teasingly. “There are knights in fustian as well as knights in armor.”

“I think thee is of more account than thy clothing indicates,” stated the son, regarding the stranger keenly. “And thee carries a rose in thy hand. Little things tell much.”

Farr put the flower into his pocket. “Don't fool yourself about me,” he said, roughly.

“Thy speech has betrayed thee,” insisted the other.

“I have met crib-crackers who were college men—and pocket dictionaries are cheap. And so good day to you, gentlemen.”

“Wait one moment!” appealed the man in armor. His face softened when he approached his father.

“We have talked much and there is no more to say to each other now. I have served here patiently many years. If I leave thee for a little while there is old Ben to wait and tend. And I will come back after I have done my duty.”

“I will stay alive so that I can bail thee out of prison,” his father informed him, sourly. “Go on, thou fool; learn thy lesson! The world is all right as it is; it will cuff the ears of meddlers. But go on!”

“I would rather thee would show another spirit at parting—but have it thy way,” returned the son, with Quaker repression of all emotions. He came forth from the gate.

“I am going thy road,” he informed Farr, “because all ways are alike to me. I would be pleased to talk with one who has journeyed. Thee may have good counsel for me. May I walk with thee?”

The wayfarer opened his mouth and closed it suddenly on a half-spoken and indignant refusal of this honor. He pursed his lips and his thick brows drew together in a frown. Then, as if in spite of himself, he began to smile.

“I will be no burden to thee,” pleaded the home-made knight. “I have had my armor for a long time and have practised walking in it.”

“But why the tin suit?” expostulated Farr.

“I will explain as we walk.”

“Well, come along!” blurted the wayfarer. “Nothing more can happen to me, anyway.”

“So thee has found one of thy own kind to follow about in the world?” inquired the father, tauntingly. “Feathers on the head and rattles in the hand! Cockahoops and fiddle-de-lorums! Thee'll be back soon with thy folly cured after I have bailed thee from the calaboose! Then thee'll stick to thy forge and be sensible!”

Farr noted a small shop by the roadside as they started off.

“My father is a good man, but practical—wholly practical,” said his new comrade of the ways. “From my good mother I derive imagination. My life has not been happy here. But work has helped.”

He pointed to the shop. Over the main door a faded, weather-worn sign advertised “Eastup Chick & Son, Blacksmiths.” On the gable was a newer sign heralding “Jared Chick & Father, Inventors.”

“I am Jared Chick, my friend.”

He talked slowly, pausing to pick words, phrasing with the carefulness of the man of method, talking as those persons talk who have read many books and use their tongue but seldom. Farr found much quaintness in the solemn man's discourse.

“My father put my name on the sign when I was young, and it pleased me. I put his name on the other sign when he was old and it did not please him, though I have insisted that he must share in all credit which comes to me. But my father does not possess imagination. I am sorry he lost his temper to-day and broke up his coffin. Not that I approved of having it in the house all these years, but he was very proud of it. He made it soon after my mother died. I think, now that he has destroyed it, he will live many years longer. He is very strong-minded.”

“I'm glad to have my suspicions confirmed,” said Farr.

“He was extremely angry when his eldest brother died at eighty. He stood over him in the last moments and made us all very uncomfortable by telling Uncle Joachim that there was no need of his dying—that if he would only show a little Chick spunk he could stay alive just as well as not and would not go fushing out just when he was most needed in the Friends' meeting.”

“Considering that the old fellow was eighty and probably felt like quitting, seems as if your father was rubbing it in just a little.”

“Perhaps he was a mite harsh, but there is another side of it. There were only three of us left of the Friends' society to go to the old meeting-house on First Day so that it might not be said that after one hundred years we had allowed the society of the fathers to perish in our town. Thee may have noted that my father and I still use the plain language, keeping up the ways of the founders. My father sat at the head of the meeting, my Uncle Joachim was next to him on the facing seat. I am the only worshiper. I am not fitted to be a minister. My father, when Joachim died, had no one with whom to exchange the hand-shake at the end of the meeting.”

“And now he's losing his congregation?”

“Yes, my friend, and so my father blames me for going, just as he blamed Uncle Joachim for dying. He has the meeting much at heart.”

“What will he do for a crowd after you go away?”

“He will continue to sit at the head of the meeting, sir.”

There was silence between them for some time. The blacksmith clanked on his way sturdily.

“He will still sit at the head of the meeting! Only a little fire is left there, sir, but he will not allow it to go out as long as he is alive to blow the bellows of devotion.”

“Look here, Brother Chick,” demanded Farr. “I don't want to be prying or impertinent, but what's your idea?”

“I'm not ashamed of anything I'm going to do. Even though it is a very strange plan, as the world would look at it, I'm not ashamed of it. A very few words will tell you: I'm going out among men and spread the gospel of mercy and forbearance, teach the lessons of peace, urge men to forgive instead of fight—showing them that courts of law are more often the devil's playground than the abode of real justice. I have worked hard, I have read many books, I have stored information in my mind, I have laid up money enough. You behold my armor—I have wrought at it patiently for a long time.”

“Expect to have 'em throw things at you?”

But the blacksmith, replying, gave no sign that he resented this brusque humor.

“It is well known that it is hard to attract the attention of the world from its own affairs. For instance, if I had stood in the yard to-day, dressed as a plain man, thee would have passed on thy way—providing father had been chopping up kindling-wood instead of a coffin. If I had stopped thee and started to explain my views thee would have paid little attention to me. Isn't that so?”

“It's so.”

“Well, then, thee have my theory and know my plan and have noted how it has worked,” said Mr. Chick.

“I don't want to discourage you in a good thing, but how long do you think a policeman would let you stand on a street corner?”

“I shall find places where I can deliver my message without offending.”

“There's another point—a rather delicate point to consider, Brother Chick. There are plenty of persons who are a bit dull when they are examining a man's motives, but who think they are almighty smart in detecting a man's mental failings; when somebody does anything they wouldn't do they say he's crazy.”

The blacksmith turned his serene face and smiled at Farr.

“I appeal to thy good judgment, sir. Would thee, after talking with me, even if I do wear iron outside my wool garments, send me to an asylum?”

“No,” acknowledged Farr, “I don't believe I would send you to an asylum.”

“Thank thee! I believe thee can speak quite generally for the average man.”

“But the armor scheme—it's a little risky, Friend Chick.”

“But it has been the trade-mark of unselfishness ever since the days of the Crusaders,” declared Mr. Chick. “Why shouldn't its significance be revived in these modern times? At any rate,” he added, with Yankee shrewdness, “it's necessary to give the world quite a jump these days before it will stop, look, and listen.”

“Some advertising concern will make you an offer that will pull you into camp your second day out, if you're not careful. You've certainly got a good idea of the business.”

“I am sincere. I am not trifling. I have pondered on this for a long time. I shall be misjudged—but I shall not be afraid!”

The two marched on, side by side, and Walker Farr, piecing in his mind, from the scraps he had heard, the entire history of the Chick family, indulged the whim of Jared and forgot for a moment the grotesque figure presented by his companion.

“No, I am not afraid!” repeated the new apostle of world harmony.

But it became promptly apparent that Mr. Chick could not communicate his intrepidity to other creatures.

Around the bend of the road came a sleepy horse, stubbing his hoofs into the dust, dragging a wagon in which rode a farmer and his wife.

The horse became wide awake at sight of Mr. Chick.

With head up, eyes goggling, nostrils dilating, and mane erect, the animal stopped short on straddled legs. Then he snorted, whirled, took the wagon around in a circle on two wheels in spite of the farmer's endeavors, and made off in the opposite direction, the driver pulling hard on the reins, hands above his head, elbows akimbo.

“It occurs to me, Friend Chick,” said his companion, after the outfit had disappeared, “that in planning this pilgrimage of yours you have failed to take everything into account. If that farmer-man and his wife pile into the ditch and break their necks, then all your general mediating in other quarters will hardly make up for the damage you have caused right here.”

“The world is full of problems,” sighed the man in armor. “There seems to be a hitch to about everything!”

After a few moments the farmer came pelting into sight on foot.

“What in the name of bald-headed Nicodemus do you call yourself, and what are you trying to do?” he shouted. “It's only by luck and chance and because the webbin's held that me and my wife ain't laying stiff and stark in the ditch.”

“I am sorry,” said friend Chick with dignity.

“Get a hoss used to bicycles, flying-machines, red whizzers and blue devils, and then along comes something else that ain't laid down in the back of the Old Farmer's Almanick! You there, the one that ain't crazy, what's this thing you're teaming round?” the farmer demanded, addressing Farr.

“In this case I am not my brother's keeper,” stated the young man.

“Well, where is his keeper, then? He needs one.” He walked around Chick and rudely rapped his whip-butt on the breastplate. “If I wasn't afraid of spraining a toe I'd boot you from here to hackenny, you old two-legged cook-stove!”

“If there has been damage done, I'll pay for it.”

“There isn't any damage and I'm not looking for anybody's money. But there will be damage unless you get out of this highway. If you're in sight when I drive my hoss past here again I'll lick you, even if I have to use blasting-powder and a can-opener to get you out of that suit.”

Jared Chick went apart into the bushes and Farr accompanied him.

“This is a rather vulgar and discouraging adventure for high ideals to run into so soon,” averred the younger man.

“I am not discouraged.”

“I'm afraid you'll be even more greatly misunderstood.”

“I don't expect silly old horses to understand me. My appeal is to men.”

Farr sniffed scornfully. “You'd better let men alone,” he advised.

“The world needs pure unselfishness,” insisted Chick.

“The purer it is the more it is misunderstood. I have tested the matter. I know.”

“Then you yourself would not go forth into the world and do good to men, without calculation and without price?”

“I don't think I would,” declared Farr, dryly. “And I am so little interested in the matter that I think you'll have to excuse me from further talk about it. You have just had one illustration in a crude way of how the world misunderstands anything that's out of the ordinary.”

“Have you any advice to give me?”

“Not a word. I'm not even able to give myself sensible counsel. Good day to you!”

“Then you do not care for my company longer on the way?”

“I do not. Excuse my bluntness, but these are parlous times for wayfarers and I cannot afford to have a tin can tied to me as I go about.”

“And you are absolutely selfish?” called Chick.

“I think so,” replied Farr from the highway, getting into his stride. “When I see you again I expect you'll be wondering why you ever were altruistic. That will be the case, providing you wear that armor any longer.”

Jared Chick from behind his bush called, appealingly, “But I fear I shall never see thee again and I have some questions to ask of thee!”

“Oh, I promise to look you up somewhere in the world. If you keep on wearing that suit it will be easy to find you.”

The man in armor leaned against a tree and pondered.

“A strange young man, and callous and selfish. But there is truly something under his shell. I would relish putting some questions to him.”

Then Jared Chick plunked an ash staff from a pile of hoop-poles left by a chopper and went on his way along shaded woodland paths, avoiding the main highroad. He decided that it would be better to go by the roundabout way and show himself on the streets of town instead of on a rural turnpike where countrified horses did not take kindly to a real knight-errant.

“It was a good place back there for sleeping,” reflected Walker Farr, remembering the brook, singing over the stones, the whispering alders, the old-fashioned house, and the somnolent landscape. “That man who has been living there until the day of his emigration has certainly been asleep for a long time and is sleeping soundly now; he is having a wonderful dream. The nightmare will begin shortly and he will wake up.”

After a time Farr came into a village, a hamlet of small houses which toed the crack of a single street. It was near the hour of noon and from the open windows of kitchens drifted scents of the dinners which the women were preparing. All the men of the place seemed to be afield; only women were in sight here and there at back doors, pinning freshly washed garments on lines, beating dust from rugs, or, seen through the windows, were bustling about the forenoon tasks set for patient household slaves in gingham.

At one back door, his back comfortably set against a folded clothes-reel, was a greasily fat tramp, gobbling a hand-out lunch which a housewife had given to him.

Under a little hill where the road dipped at the edge of the hamlet here sounded clink of steel on rock, suggesting that men labored there with trowel and drill. There was complaining creaking of cordage—the arm of a derrick sliced a slow arc across the blue sky of June.

The fat tramp held up his empty plate and whined a request and the hand of a woman emerged from a close-by window and placed something in the dish.

Farr slowed his steps and looked at the tramp, and a woman in a yard near by stared over the top of a sheet which she was pinning on the line and scowled at the new arrival.

“I wonder if I'm considered as the Damon of that Pythias?” Farr asked himself, smiling into her frown. “But Damon is nomad spelled backward! I wish I dared to ask her for a piece of that pie cooling on the sill.”

Just then, over the clink of metal under the hill, above wail of straining pulley, rose the screech of a man in agony, the raucous male squall whose timbre is more hideous than the death-cry of swine.

Then came a man running from the valley under the hill.

“It's your husband, Mrs. Jose,” he panted, turning in at the house where the fat tramp ate with his back against the clothes-reel. “You better go! I'll telephone for a doctor.”

She ran, white-faced, gasping cries. Other women ran. The spirit of helpfulness and curiosity to know what had happened set wings on the heels of the little community. The messenger telephoned and followed them.

The fat tramp set down his plate and glanced to right and left and all about. Then he shuffled into the deserted house and after a brief stay hastened out with his pockets crammed and bearing garments in his arms; he scuttled away with sagging trot across the fields.

Farr saw him go and did not pursue.

“Yonder goes the spirit of the age,” he told himself, with sardonic twisting of his lips. “When Opportunity knocks, knock Opportunity down. Embrace Opportunity, but be sure it's with the strangle hold. The directors of a robbed railroad make a more dignified getaway than that porcine pedestrian is making—but it's the same as far as the stockholders are concerned.”

He went on slowly toward the hollow under the hill.

The procession met him—a limp man, moaning, borne in the arms of his sweating mates, women trotting alongside and crossing the road, to and fro, like frightened hens—clucking sympathy.

Farr found a half-finished stone bridge under the hill. A paunchy boss with underset jaw and overhanging upper lip was profanely urging his helpers back to their jobs.

“Fifteen minutes before knock-off time—fifteen minutes! You can't help that man by standing around and doing his grunting for him. Get busy!”

The men lifted their tools slowly and sullenly.

“It's hell what can happen when you're fifteen days behind on a contract, with county commissioners waiting and anxious to grab off a penalty,” declared the boss, to nobody in particular. “One man bunged, and four to lug him home, and the rest of the crew taking a sympathetic vacation!”

Farr, sauntering, swung off the highway down the lane leading to the temporary bridge.

“Here, you long-horned steer, want a job?” called the contractor from his rostrum on the granite block.

“No, my Sussex shote, I do not!”

“Damnation! You dare to call me names, you hobo?”

“Yes,” returned Farr, quite simply.

“Well, quit it. I need men here. You're husky. Two dollars a day, even if you're not a regular mason.”

“No.”

He drawled both the affirmative and the negative and there was something subtly insolent in his tone—something that aroused more ire than a cruder retort would have accomplished. He turned his back on the cursing man and went on down to the bridge. He waited there for a time and watched the drift of foam on the fretted waters. The steady burbling of the stream made him oblivious to other sounds and he did not hear the two men approach. They leaped on him and seized him. One of his captors was the paunchy man, and his hands were heavy and his fingers gripped viciously.

“No wonder you wouldn't work! You're making your living in an easier way.”

“What is the occasion of this effusive welcome to your city?” asked Farr.

The man who held one of the captive's arms was panting. He had run at top speed from the house to which he and his mates had borne the injured man.

“You thief! You sneak! Eat a man's grub, his hard-earned grub, and steal when his wife's back is turned!”

“Of all dirty work this job is the worst,” declared the big man.

“She gave you all you could stuff into yourself, you loafer. You ransacked when her back was turned. You even stole her husband's Sunday suit. Where is it?”

“I saw a fat tramp running away into the woods,” returned Farr, quietly. “He was carrying articles in his arms.”

“You're the only tramp in sight around here,” insisted the contractor. “Where did you hide the plunder?”

“She said she fed a tramp. She left him at the back door. You're the sneak,” indorsed the panting emissary.

“If you will take me back to the house you may get some new light on the affair,” suggested their captive. “You need not drag me there. I'll go with much pleasure.”

The mistress of the despoiled home, red of eyes, hurrying from her sink with a cold compress in her trembling hands, viewed Farr from her back door.

“That isn't the man. I never saw him before. Oh, he is in awful pain. Why doesn't that doctor get here? But there doesn't seem to be anything broken. He took my pocketbook, too, with two dollars and twenty-seven cents in it. And it's every cent of money we've got by us. And it may be weeks before he can go to work again. Troubles don't come singly. That mis'able, fat, greasy thief! After I had fed him—even gave him pie!”

“As I told you, gentlemen, it was a fat tramp. I saw him run away into the woods.”

“If you call yourself a man why didn't you chase him?” inquired the contractor, with disgust.

“I took no interest in his affairs—no interest whatever,” stated Farr, with languid tone.

“You don't care much what happens to anybody else, you hog!”

“My interest in other persons is very limited.”

“You'll stand by and see one of your kind run away with the property of poor folks, will you? You meet him later and get your whack?” asked the big man.

“No,” said Farr, mildly. He directed compelling gaze into the eyes of his detractor. “And you do not think so yourself.”

“Perhaps not. But you're worse. You have just said it. You're a selfish renegade!”

“Peculiarly selfish, hard, and unfeeling.”

“And wouldn't turn your hand over to do a good turn for anybody?”

“I don't think so.”

“I'll tell you what I think I'll do—I'll detail four of my men to ride you out of this town on a rail.”

“I wouldn't call them off their jobs if I were you! I overheard you say that you are short of time and men. By the way, you offered me a job. I'll take it.”

The contractor blinked and hesitated.

“If after a half-day you find I'm not worth the money I'll pass on and you'll have a half-day's work free.”

“Get on to the job, then.”

Through the open door Farr could see the woman of the house wringing cloths at the sink.

He stepped to the door and addressed her. “Madame, will you take a boarder? I'm going to do your husband's work on the job yonder. I will pay liberally. In your present difficulties the money may help. I'll be small trouble.”

“We need the money terribly,” she said, after pondering. “Yes, I will take you. In the face you do not look like a tramp!”

“I thank you,” said Farr. “If you will give me some food in my hands I'll take myself out of your way.”

That afternoon Jared Chick came over the hill where the trowels clinked and the great derrick complained with its pulleys. He carried his armor on his back.

He stopped and watched for some time his former companion of the road, who was sweating over his man's toil.

“May I have sixty seconds off to speak with that man yonder?” Farr asked the contractor. “It partly concerns your business.”

The big man nodded surly assent.

“Thee sees I have taken off the armor for a time. I will wear it in the city where horses and people are not so silly. What is thee doing here?”

“I have no time to talk about myself, Friend Chick. I want to ask you if you are still of the same mind about your mission?”

“I am.”

“Then throw down that hardware and come to work on this job. A man has been hurt here—his wife is in need. Earn some money and give it to them.”

“But my mission concerns the world—the wide world.”

“Real selfishness's chief excuse! Here's something ready to your hand. Will you do it?”

“But thee told me thee would not go forth and do good!”

“No matter about me. I am not a professional knight-errant! Will you do this?”

“Ten seconds more!” warned the boss.

“I cannot change my plans so suddenly,” protested Chick.

“A knight-errant should not have plans! My time is up and I have work. Good-by, Friend Chick!”

The young man went back to his task and the Quaker passed on, muttering reaffirmation of his own high aims.

“And how could I expect a vagrant to understand?” he asked himself.

The vagrant toiled two weeks at his heavy task and when the man Jose was about again the volunteer slipped away without farewell.

He left on the table of his under-the-eaves bedroom in the Jose house all the pay he received for his work, to the last penny.

“He wasn't what he seemed to be,” ran the burden of Mrs. Jose's various disquisitions on this strange guest. “He ate his vittles and asked no questions, and was out from underfoot, and was always willing to set up with my husband and give me a snippet of rest and a wink of sleep; and he read out of little books all the time—he had 'em stuffed into his pockets. And there needn't anybody tell me! He left all his pay on the table, every cent of it, and stole away without waiting for no thanks from nobody!”

On a balmy forenoon a jovial-appearing old gentleman went jogging out of the mill city of Marion and along a country road in his two-wheeled chaise. He sat erect and he was tall above the average of men, and he was very neat in his attire.

“I wish,” he mused, “that the men who could really appreciate a good outfit of clothing and could use the same properly were not so infernally touchy. As it is, cranky human nature drives me out on an expedition like this—and I'm afraid I am just as cranky as the rest of 'em, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this!”

The old gentleman hummed a song under his breath and slapped his reins against the flanks of the plodding horse to keep time. He came into a piece of woodland. He seemed to take cheery and fresh interest in this place. He poked his rubicund face out from the shadow of the chaise's canopy and peered to right and to left. There was a smile in his puckery eyes. When there were trees ahead of him, trees behind him, and trees all about he pulled his old horse to a standstill.

He listened, squinted quizzically through the glass of his chaise's rear curtain, and then climbed down. From a box at the rear of the vehicle he secured various articles of clothing and draped them over his arm. There was a frock-coat, not too badly worn, trousers in good repair, waistcoat, and a shirt. He also took out of the box a pair of shoes and a hat. With this load he went to the roadside and began to rig out a fence-post. When the garments were hung on it and the broad-brimmed, black, slouch-hat had been jauntily set on top of the post, anybody could see that the old gentleman was thus disposing of some of his own extra clothing. He was wearing a similar hat and a frock-coat, himself, and the decorated post took on a bizarre and slouchy resemblance to its decorator.

He went back to the chaise and found a nickel alarm-clock in the box. He wound this up carefully and propped it on a rail of the fence near the clothing.

Before he could escape from the vicinity of the exhibit and get into his chaise a wagon came rattling around the bend of the road. There were firkins and jars in the rear of this wagon and the driver was plainly a farmer-man.

He pulled up short and then saluted the old gentleman with a stab of forefinger at his hat-brim.

“Any trouble, Judge?” he inquired, affably.

“None at all,” replied the old gentleman, edging away from the fully garbed fence-post.

“Airing 'em out, hey?” A jab of the forefinger toward the garments.

“No, leaving them out.”

All at once the old gentleman appeared to remember something else. He took off his hat and produced a placard. He straightened it and stuck it into a crack in a fence-rail. Its legend was “Help Yourself.”

“You're giving them clothes away, are you, Judge Peterson?”

“I am leaving them here for any one who chooses to take them. Do you want first pick, Jolson?”

“Not me! I ain't taking charity hand-me-downs from any man, Judge. If it's a polite question, why are you giving away your duds this way?”

“I think you have just answered that question, Jolson. I offered you these clothes. Your nose went into the air. Other men have acted in the same way in the past when I have offered to give a fellow a good suit. I don't want to hurt other folks' feelings. I don't want to have my own feelings hurt. So, let any man help himself when no one is looking.”

“I'll take the alarm-clock, if you say so,” volunteered Jolson. “It'll help to rout me out of bed at milking-time.”

“No, you cannot have the clock, Jolson. I have tinkered it so that it will purr a little every half-hour. It will call attention to the clothes. You see, a good many men rush through life without looking to right or left, and so they miss a lot of opportunities.”

Jolson clucked to his horse and rattled away down the road, muttering sour remarks.

The old gentleman, with the air of a man who has satisfied his philanthropic ambitions, climbed into his chaise and followed the farmer.

The brisk breeze flirted the tails of the frock-coat and the trousers legs tried out a modest little gig as if some of the jocose spirit of the old gentleman had remained with the garments he had discarded.

There were several passers before another half-hour had elapsed.

The trousers kicked out quite hilariously when a young couple drove by in a buggy. The girl was pretty, and companionship with her might have suited even a judge's garments. But the young man and the girl were quite absorbed in each other, and the trousers kicked and the frock-coat flirted ineffectually.

A peddler's cart passed very slowly, but the driver did not look up from a paper filled with figures.

There were others to whom the judge's garments offered themselves mutely, but no one glanced that way and the clock was discreetly silent. The breeze died down and the trousers and the coat hung with a sort of homeless, homesick, and wistful air. One might have thought they were trying to conceal themselves when the next person appeared, so still were they. He was not an inviting person—not such a new lord and master as a judge's garments might be expected to welcome.

He was grossly fat and his own trousers were lashed about his bulging waist with a frayed belt; his coat was sun-faded, a greasy Scotch cap was pulled over to one side on his head with the peak hauled down upon his ear, and he scuffed along in boots that were disreputable. Surely, a most unseemly and unwholesome character to be wrapped in the habiliments of a judge! But just then, with that cursed inappropriateness of inanimate things, the clock jangled its alarm.

The tramp—there was no mistaking that gait and that general air of the vagrant—snapped himself about, located the noise, stared at the post, and then hurried to it. He made sure that there was no one in sight. He scooped all into his arms, climbed the fence and trotted into the woods. He kept looking behind him as if he feared pursuit. It was plain from his disturbed demeanor that he was much perplexed and was chased by the uncomfortable thought that he was stealing this property. He bestowed so much attention behind him that he paid but little attention to what was ahead of him, and so he ran down into a little bowl of a valley among the trees and stopped short there, for he had come upon a man.

It was the man who called himself Walker Farr.

The man was kneeling beside a tiny fire, toasting bread on the end of a beech twig. He held the twig in one hand and an open book in the other. He looked up without changing his position when the tramp came charging down the hillside.

He had wide-open, brown eyes, this man in the hollow. The eyes were not merely wide open on account of surprise at this irruption—one could see that they were naturally that way—keenly observant eyes. He had hair as brown as his eyes; his cap was on the ground beside him.

But the tramp was not taking account of the attractions of this stranger; he was more interested in searching for flaws.

He had been frightened at first sight of the man—for the tramp had the timidity of his kind; now he began to feel cheered. This stranger in the hollow had not been shaved recently, his clothing was unkempt, his shoes bore the marks of a long hike. He was cooking in the open—plain indication of the nomad.

“Well, I say, bo,” chaffed the tramp, shifting from fright to high spirit with the hysteria of weak natures. “I'm sure glad to see one of the good old sort. I didn't know what I was dropping in on when I fell down that hill. But it's all right, hey? I'm on the road. My name is Boston Fat, and my monacker is a bean-pot.”

The brown eyes moved slowly from the grinning face to the garments heaped in the man's arms. They were cold and critical eyes and there was no humor in them.

“I do not do business during my lunch-hours, my man. I do not desire to change tailors just yet and I do not buy stolen property.”

His chilliness did not dampen the other's good nature.

“Oh, that's all right, old top. I'm no thief. These clothes were hung on a fence-post just above here on the road. I reckon they were only waiting for first-comer.”

He dropped the shoes, cocked the hat on his head, and began to fumble the garments. The placard dropped out of the folds of the coat and the man at the fire craned his neck and read aloud: “Help Yourself.”

“Oh, that's what the paper says, hey? I never learned to read any of the modern languages,” confided Boston Fat. “I was too much taken up with the dead ones at Harvard. Well, comrade, now you can see for yourself that I didn't steal this mess of moth-food. There was the sign right on it saying, 'Help Yourself.' It was there, even if I couldn't read it. Instinck told me them clothes was for me. I took 'em and came in here.”

He shook out the garments one by one and hung them on a bush, chattering his comments. He set the ticking clock on a stump.

The man at the fire slipped a piece of meat between two slabs of toasted bread and began to eat. He still held the open book in his hand but his eyes were watching the tramp.

The vagrant was orally appraising his find, exhibiting the wisdom of one who has begged garments at back doors for the purposes of peddling them to second-hand shops.

“A moucher,” observed the man at the fire. He continued aloud, evidently and sardonically exercising his vocabulary, plainly enjoying the amazement he provoked by his style of language. “The spirit of a stray cat at midnight, the tastes of the prowling hyena! The fat thief I saw running away into the woods! When such as these began to take to the road, knight-errantry vanished from the face of the earth. The varlets borrowed the grand idea of care-free itinerancy and debased it, as waiters borrow a gentleman's evening dress for their menial uniform, and drunken coachmen wear the same head-gear that a duke wears to a wedding! Why prove evolution by searching for a man with a tail? The performances of human nature must convince any thinking man that we have descended from apes!”

The astonished tramp stared for a short time at this person who employed such peculiar language—then mumbled an oath and shook his head.

He began to try on the frock-coat, paying scant attention to the other's monologue. The coat was a ludicrous misfit; it would not meet over the bulging belly; its tails dragged on the fat man's heels.

“If I happened to stand handy by when a Kansas cyclone ripped the insides out of a clothing-store only the boys' sizes would drop in the same county with me,” grumbled the tramp, working his arms out of the sleeves.

“The coat was plainly built for a gentleman,” stated the man at the fire. “Therefore it is of no value to you.”

Boston Fat surveyed the stranger with a vicious glint in his little eyes, as a pig might stare at a man who had struck it across the snout.

“Good afternoon, perfesser,” he sneered.

“Why 'professor,' my frayed and frowsled Falstaff?”

“There you go with it—showing yourself up out of your own mouth! Words a yard long—words that would break a decent man's teeth! You're one of these college dudes out on the road getting stuff to write into a book. I've heard about your kind. And that kind is getting too thick and plenty and you're putting slush all over the real profesh. Quit it and go back to college. Don't use me for your book.”

This was reciprocation of derogatory sentiment with a vengeance!

The man at the fire sat back on his haunches. He finished chewing his mouthful, regarding the tramp with a languid stare that traveled from crown of his head to tip of his battered shoe.

“The only thing about a book that you would be good for,” he said, “would be for use in a volume of this sort.” He tapped the book in his palm. “Your anatomy could supply the binding. It is bound in pigskin.”

The tramp squealed an oath in the falsetto voice that the weak and the flabby possess and took one step forward. The man at the fire came to his feet and stood erect. He was tall, and the brown eyes talked for him better than threats or bluster. The vagrant shifted his gaze from those eyes and backed away.

“If I hadn't been penned in a pie-belt jail all winter up North, and all the strength starved out of me,” he whined, “you wouldn't call me a pig and get away with it.”

“A person who forces himself into the presence of a gentleman who is dining mustn't expect compliments,” stated the stranger.

“You ain't a tramp—not a real one,” snarled Boston Fat.

Farr's eyes glistened; he smiled; he continued to play on this ignoramus his satiric pranks of mystifying language:

“More of your lack of acuteness, my fat friend. Because I do not patter the flash lingo with you, you appear to take me for a college professor in disguise. You are not a real tramp. You are a bum, a loafer, a yeg. You never traveled more than two hundred miles away from Hoboken—the capital city of hoboes. Have you ever hit the sage-brush trail, hiked the milk-and-honey route from Ogden through the Mormon country, decked the Overland Express, beaten the blind baggage on the Millionaires' Flier? Hey?”

The sullen vagrant blinked stupidly.

“Or have you made the prairie run on the truss of a Wagner freight, or thrown a stone at the Fox Train crew, or beaten the face off the Katy Shack when he tried to pitch you off a gondola-car?”

“I don't know what you're chewing about,” sneered the fat man.

“Probably not, for you are not a true man of the road. You disgrace the name of nomad, you sully an ancient profession. I'll venture to say you don't know who Ishmael was.”

“Who said I did?”

“Not I, because I'm not a flatterer. I am going to follow the example of the man who cast pearls before swine—I'm going to cast you a pearl from one of my own poems. You may listen. It will pass your ears, that's all. You cannot contaminate it by taking it in, so I repeat it for my own entertainment, to refresh my memory:

     “Of the morrow we take no heed, no care infests the day;
     Some hand-out gump and a train to jump, a grip on the rods, and
     away!
     To the game of grab for gold we give no thought or care.
     We own with you the arch of blue—our share of God's fresh air.
     One coin to clear the law, a section of rubber hose.
     To soften the chafe of a freight-car's truss, our portion of
     cast-off clothes,
     And the big wide world is ours—a title made good by right—
     By mankind's deed to the nomad breed with the taint of the
     Ishmaelite.
     Some from the wastes of the sage-brush, some from the orange land,
     Some from God's own country, dusty and tattered and tanned.
     Why are we? It's idle to tell you—you'd never understand.
     To and fro
     We come and go.
     Old Father Ishmael's band.”
 

He leaned back and laughed in the tramp's puzzled face.

“Well, what's the answer?” scoffed Boston Fat.

The other man talked on, humor in his eyes, plainly enjoying this verbal skylarking.

“I'm afraid I cannot waste time and breath on you in an attempt to answer the riddle of the ages, to explain the wanderlust that sent forth the tribes from the Aryan bowl of the birth of the races, my corpulent bean-pot. Your blank eyes and your flattened skull suggest a discouraging incapacity for information.”

“I don't know what you're gabbing abut. But there's one thing I do know. I'll tip 'em off at the next insane-asylum I come to that I met you headed north.” The tramp gathered the articles of clothing from the bushes and got down on his knees and began to fold them.

The man of the brown eyes stepped forward, laid down his little book, picked up the frock-coat and pulled it on, the fat man squealing expostulation. With serene disregard of this protest Farr buttoned the coat, smoothed it down, and then straightened his shoulders.

“You may see that it was built for a gentleman and that it fits a gentleman, friend pork-barrel.”

“You shuck it off and pass it over, that's what you do,” yelped the tramp. “It's my coat.”

“It was perfectly apparent that it was not your coat when you tried it on.”

“I tell you I found it hanging on a fence-post just above here.”

“That was merely by accident, and you should have passed on and left the garments for one whose frame was fitted to wear them. You illustrate the curse of modern society. Men are so filled with the greed of getting that they grab misfits simply out of passion for possessing.”

“I've stood your slurs ever since I got here, but I'll be jobeefed if I'll stand for your swiping my property.”

The man of the brown eyes smiled. His whole demeanor showed that he was more than ever hugely enjoying his own verbosity—the florid language which was both maddening and mystifying the tramp.

“Further evidence of your mean nature: a gentleman resents an insult that steals away his character much more quickly than he resents an act that steals mere property. In that little book which I have just laid down Shakespeare speaks trenchantly on that matter: 'Who steals my purse steals trash . . . but he that filches from me my good name robs me . . . and makes me poor indeed.'”

The tramp gave over his work of folding, and awkwardly and cumbersomely got upon his feet.

“You take off that coat and hand it over. It's mine—I found it. I can stand a crazy man's gab, but when any one tries to do me out of what's my own I'll fight.”

“May I ask what you're going to do with these garments of a gentleman which have fallen into your hands by accident?”

“I'm going to cash 'em in at the nearest second-hand shop, that's just what I'm going to do.”

“Just as you sold the Sunday suit you stole from a poor man! My friend, I was insulted that day on account of you. You owe me something!”

Just then the alarm-clock purred a brief signal.

Up to that time the air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the ignorant stranger who had come blundering upon him.

He stared at the clock, looked down upon the frock-coat, and then surveyed the other articles of clothing. He scowled as if he had suddenly begun to reflect. Seriousness smoldered in the brown eyes. That tinkling touch of metal against metal seemed to change his mood in astonishing fashion.

“Ah, it may be morning again, O my soul!” he cried with such tense feeling in his voice that the tramp surveyed him with gaping mouth and bulging eyes, as one stares at a person suddenly become mad.

“I will talk to you though you will not understand! Once upon a time the world was ruled by men who were ruled by omens. Man was then not so wise in his own conceit. His own soul was nearer the soul of things. He was not a mere gob of bumptiousness covered with the shell of cocksureness. He was willing to be informed. He sought the omens of true nature—he allowed Fate to guide him. He was not a pig running against the goad of circumstances, unheeding the upflung arms of Fortune, waving him toward the right path. He was simpler—he was truer. He felt that he was a part of nature instead of being boss of nature. Well, I have got nearer to true nature since I have been in the open. I am in contact with the soul of things. I am no longer insulated. I am not reformed, I am simply ready once again to grab Opportunity. So you think I am crazy, do you?”

“They had a gink in a padded cell in the jail where I was last winter and he didn't take on much worse'n you,” stated the tramp.

“As a brainless observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead in me. A moment later came habiliments of a gentleman, borne in the arms of a wretch who could not wear them. There came Opportunity. Then the jangle of that clock signaled Opportunity—and there was a throb in me as though my sleeping soul had rolled and blinked at the sunlight of hope and had murmured, 'It's morning again.' Such are omens, when one is ready to heed.”

He set his teeth, clenched his fists, and by expression and attitude showed that he had arrived at a decision of moment. He walked close to the tramp. “I will admit, Friend Belly-brains, that you came upon Opportunity before I did this day. But tell me again, are you to make no further use of said Opportunity than to run to an old-clothes shop and exchange for a few pennies that which will help to make a man?”

“They are mine and I'm going to sell 'em,” retorted the sullen vagrant.

“I am sorry because you have no wit—no power to understand. Otherwise you would gladly lay these garments in my hands and bid me Godspeed. You don't understand at all, do you?”

“Look here, are you trying to frisk me for these duds?”

“It's all a waste of breath to explain to you that Providence meant these things for me. You are not acute enough to understand close reasoning. I could not show you that, for the sake of a few coins, which would do you only that harm which would come from their value in cheap whisky or beer, you might be wrecking the future of a soul that is awake. I simply tell you that I shall keep the clothing for myself. Perhaps you can understand that plain statement!” The brown eyes became resolute and piercing. “Even if I had money I would not pay you for these garments. Money does such as you no good; it may bring you trouble. My dear Boston Fat, I cannot afford to let you prejudice my future, which, so instinct tells me, is wrapped up in those poor things of wool and warp.” He snapped a finger into his palm and extended his hand. “Give me that hat and then pass on about your business.”

The tramp backed away. His little blinking eyes expressed both fear and rebelliousness. More than ever did he resemble a pig at bay. The black hat, set on top of his greasy cap and topping with its respectability his disreputable general outfit, added a bizarre touch to the scene between the two men.

“You think now that you are the injured party,” calmly pursued the man of the brown eyes. “You haven't intelligence enough to take my own case into account. You are injured because you are losing a few coins—but I may be injured in all that gives life its flavor if I do not grasp this opportunity.” Both raillery and earnestness dropped out of his tones. He became merely matter-of-fact. “I'll make it plain. Trot along about your business, fat one, or I shall proceed to pound the face off you and then kick you a few rods on your happy way. You deserve it as a thief—I worked two weeks as a stone-mason on your account. Do you get me?”

For answer the infuriated vagrant rushed at him and kicked.

With one hand the stranger plucked the hat from the tramp's head and sailed it to a place of safety. With the other hand he grabbed the attacker's ankle before the foot hit him and with a jerk he laid the tramp on his back.

The victim fell so helplessly that the concussion knocked the breath and a groan out of him.

The man of the brown eyes had moved languidly and had talked languidly till then. When he grabbed the foot he moved with a sort of steel-trap efficiency and quickness. He promptly straddled his victim, seated himself on the protruding abdomen, and began to beat the man's face. He battered the flabby cheeks and punched his fists into the pulpy neck. He ground his knees against the fat flanks and redoubled his blows when the tramp struggled. After the squalling falsetto had implored for a long time, the assailant at last gave over the exercise.

“Are you licked?” he asked.

“Yes,” whined the tramp.

“You have stolen—in most dirty style. I whipped you for that job. Now will you stay licked for some time?”

“Yes.”

“You'll go on about your own business, will you, without any more foolish talk about those garments?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sorry you stole from that good woman who fed you?”

“Yes.”

The man of the brown eyes swung himself off his prostrate victim, as a rider dismounts from a horse, and the tramp sat up, moaning and patting his purple face.

“I never had no luck, never,” he blubbered. “I was kicked out of jail before the weather got warmed up, I was thrown in last fall just when the Indian summer was beginning. When other fellows get hand-outs of pie I get cold potatoes and bannock bread. I have to walk when other fellows ride. I'm too fat for the trucks and they can always see me on the blind baggage. I'll keep on walking. I never had no luck in all my life.”

He rolled upon his hands and knees and then stood up. He started away, wholly cowed, whining like a quill-pig, bewailing his luck.

“Luck!” the man of the brown eyes shouted after him in a tone which expressed anger and regret. “What do you know about luck, you animated lard-pail? A thing like you is in luck when he is in jail where there is no workshop. Better luck than that is too good for you. Hold on one minute! Turn around and look at me.”

The tramp obeyed. The stranger pounded one of those hard fists on his own breast.

“I say look at me! No matter what I was once! But to-day you found me cooking bacon over three sticks and ready to fight for another man's cast-off clothes. And in between whiles I have hiked every path that the hobo knows between the oceans. Now jog on and think that over and keep your jaw shut on luck! I say jog on! Don't look back. Forget that you ever saw me.”

He waved angry gesture and took two steps as though to enforce his command with his fists.

The tramp jogged on at a brisk pace. He hurried to the highway and set out on his shuffling pilgrimage, rubbing his aching face and muttering to himself.

The brown eyes of the victor watched the tramp out of sight and for some moments surveyed the nick in the undergrowth where the fellow had disappeared.

There was no anger in the eyes. There had been none while their possessor had been pummeling the wretch. He had beaten the man up in a calm, methodical and perfectly business-like manner.

When at last he turned and looked at the clothing he smiled whimsically.

“The perambulating pork-barrel thinks I am crazy,” he mused, looking at the frock-coat. He had stripped that garment from his shoulders and had tossed it on a bush when he had decided on combat. “If I should stop to argue the matter with myself just now I should find myself flattering his good judgment. I have robbed a poor devil for a whim. Thank God, I went at it brutally and frankly. There was no 'high finance' sneak-thieving about that job. I sent him away with his face smarting. They sent me away with my soul black-and-blue.”

He gathered the garments, picked up the shoes, put the hat on top of the pile on his arm, and went farther into the woods, following the course of a tiny stream of water. This stream led him to a pool. It was tree-bordered, it was a center gem in a dim alcove in the forest, it was as secret as a private chamber. The pool was glassy, for the winds were still in the tree-tops.

The man laid down his burden. He stripped off his own well-worn coat and shirt, and secured a razor and stick of soap from the scattered articles he dumped from the coat pocket. He kneeled on the brink of the pool, leaned over and shaved himself carefully, using the glassy surface as a mirror. Then he put off his other clothing, the mean garments of a vagrant, and plunged into the pool.

When he came forth from the water and dried himself with his discarded shirt, he revealed himself to the birds whom his splashings had attracted to the branches above the pool. If the birds' twitterings were comments on his appearance, they must have been admiring comments. The man's skin was white and he was lithe and tense and muscular. Breeding showed in him as it shows in the muscles and conformation of a race-horse. When he was dried he threw down the makeshift towel and combed his shock of brown hair with his fingers. Now that the bristle of beard was off his face he looked younger.

From the pile of clothing he selected his outfit, garment by garment. The jovial humor of the judge had provided complete equipment for a man. In the breast pockets of the frock-coat there were a clean collar, a necktie, and a freshly laundered handkerchief.

By the time he had finished his dressing the pool was still and glassy once more. He flirted out the handkerchief, holding it by one corner, and swept the soft fabric around and around the crown of the black hat.

He carefully set the hat on his head and leaned over the pool and took an interested peep at himself.

“You are a fool in this matter,” he informed the reflection. “And I wonder why you are determined to persist in the folly. The man Chick's tin suit cannot bring as much trouble to him as this garb of respectability may bring to you. For no man can step up to that poor Quaker and touch his shoulder and say—”

He broke off. He began to search through his discarded garments and to stow his few possessions into the pockets of his new attire.

“All folly!” ran his thoughts. “I am consumed with it all of a sudden. I have ranted to a tramp. Now I rant at myself. I am sloughing the rags that have protected me. All folly!”

His searching fingers, groping to the deepest corner of a pocket, found the crumbling fragments of a dried rose. He narrowed his eyes and surveyed it as it lay in his palm, and then made as if to toss it into the pool. But he checked the gesture. He set his chin in his hands and communed aloud with himself after the fashion of those who hold aloof from mankind:

“Folly, little sister! I may as well be truthful! Two dark eyes which gave me the first honest, unafraid, and frank gaze I've had from a maid in two years, two red lips which said 'Please' and 'Thank you'! A flash of a glance behind her which called me, even if she did not mean it as a call—and so, on I fare in a lunatic's dream. Own up! I have dreamed that some day I will see her again. And down in the depths of me stirs that impulse of the male which makes the peacock spread his feathers and silly man perk in front of a mirror. Why not give in to the sense of heredity once in a while even though it means beating up a tramp and making myself more of a mark for human eyes?”

He rolled the old clothes into a bundle and stuffed them under the roots of a tree. Then he strolled away leisurely, and when he as in the wider stretches of the wood where the light was better he pulled a small book from his pocket and read as he walked.

The volume was Sartor Resartus. His eyes happened to find this passage and he smiled as he read:

All visible things are emblems. Hence clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downward, are emblematic not of want only but of a manifold cunning victory over want. Men are properly said to be clothed with authority, clothed with beauty, with curses and the like. It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a vesture; which indeed they are: the time vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents spirit to spirit, is properly a clothing, a suit of raiment, put on for a season and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been; the whole Eternal Universe and what it holds is but clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the Philosophy of Clothes.

From time to time he looked down upon himself complacently.

When he came near a glade in the wood he heard the chatter of the voices of a merry party and he saw picnickers, men and women, gathered about hampers. Automobiles were parked at a little distance, and he made a detour to avoid the scene.

He emerged upon an animated tableau of modern nymph and modish satyr in a close-by forest aisle. The girl was flushed and disheveled and was resisting a young man who had pushed aside her veil and was kissing her with ardor. She beat him back with her gloved hands and eluded him, but he caught her to him with more of rough passion than tender affection.

“We are engaged to be married,” he insisted. “Why shouldn't I kiss you? Don't be a prude!”

She thrust her protesting palms against him and set her arms rigidly and held her head away, not with coyness, but with indignation and fierce rebellion.

“I love you! My God, can't you understand?” he gasped. “I can't keep my hands off you. You can't handle a man as you're trying to handle me. I must have some affection from you!”

“Richard! I'll not endure this! I am insulted!”

“My kisses an insult? I'm no ice-water lover. You set me crazy. I can't help myself.”

She wrenched herself from his grasp and faced him, her face filled with outraged fury.

Farr had started to leave the scene. He stopped. The girl was the girl of the red lips and the dark eyes.

“Don't touch me!” she cried. “The only promise you have had from me, Richard, is the one my mother has fairly forced from me. I am trying honestly to like you. I will please my mother and you if I can.”

“That's a devil of a thing to say to a man who loves you as I do,” he declared, with anger.

“That is all I can say just now. But if you use me again as you would pull and haul a girl of the streets, I'll despise you. I give you warning.”

“What sort of books have you been reading, Kate?” he asked, sarcastically. “Where did you get your idea of what love-making is? They don't sing serenades under windows these days. They don't kiss finger-tips and write mush poems. I am going to tell you a few things you ought to know, as a girl engaged to be married.”

Farr stood close by them and in plain sight, but their absorption in their struggle had left them attention only for each other. He knew that if he started away while they were talking his presence would be promptly noted and undoubtedly misjudged.

He set his finger between the leaves of his book and took his hat in his hand.

“Your pardon!” he pleaded. “I stumbled here quite by accident. Please suspend conversation on private matters until I can walk out of earshot.”

He stared straight into the eyes of the girl and once more received from her that frank and wondering gaze which had touched him so strangely when he had seen her first on the broad highway. His face was white under the tan. His hands trembled as he replaced his hat. In his heart he was saying farewell to her and his eyes expressed some of his emotion.

“You may take your own time, sir,” said the girl. “This gentleman and I have finished our conversation.” She passed Farr, looking him up and down with increasing curiosity and dawning recognition, and when her escort called to her impatiently, she caught her skirts around her and ran toward the glade where the others of the party were chattering over their hampers.

The lover started away slowly and sullenly on her trail, with only a glance at this blundering stranger.

“No, they do not sing serenades under windows any more—nor has the stone age returned with its love-making manners,” remarked Farr, his lips trembling and his emotion still in his eyes. “There are some manners which were worse, however, than knocking maidens down with clubs.”

The other man snapped himself around on his heels.

“Damn you, you're that fresh hobo! I don't forget a man who shoots off low-down sneers at me. Here! You come back here! I want to ask a few questions, my man.”

Farr continued on his way, opening his book.

“If I ever see you again—” blustered the lover.

“I sincerely hope that will never happen,” remarked the stranger, without turning his head. “Instinct of the purely animal sort tells me that if our paths cross in this life it will be very bad for one or the other.”

When Farr was in the highway he fumbled in his pocket and found the withered rose. He tossed it away among the roadside bushes.

But after he had gone on his way for some distance he retraced his steps and hunted in the bushes for a long time on his hands and knees until he found the poor little keepsake.

He put it carefully into the deepest pocket he could find in his newly acquired habiliments and trudged on down the world.

A blatant orator, haranguing passionately, attracted two new auditors.

A tall young man sauntered to the edge of the little group in the square and listened with a smile which indicated cynical half-interest.

An automobile halted on the opposite side of the group. A big man sat alone in the tonneau.

He began to scowl as he listened.

The young man continued to smile.

The big man was plainly a personality. He was cool and crisp in summer flannels—as immaculate as the accoutrements of his car.

In face and physique the young man was plainly not of that herd near which he stood.

His glance crossed that of the man in the car; he met the scowl with his smile.

Like a kiln open to the hot glare from a brassy sky or an oven where the July caloric blazed like a blast from the open mouth of a retort—such that day seemed Moosac Square in the heart of the cotton-mill city. High buildings closed in its treeless, ill-paved, dirty area. The air, made blistering by the torch of the sun, beat back and forth between the buildings in shimmering waves.

In the center of the square the blatant orator balanced himself on a stone trough which was arid and dust-choked. He harangued the group of unkempt men; sweating, blinking, apathetic men; slouchy men; men who were ticketed in attire and demeanor with all the squalid marks of idlers, vagrants, and the unemployed.

The man on the trough was of the ilk of the men who surrounded him. His face was flaming with the heat and with his vocal efforts. Perspiration streamed into his eyes, his voice was hoarse with shouting, but he had the natural eloquence of the demagogue. He was delivering the creed of the propaganda of rebellious poverty, the complaints of the dissatisfied, the demands of the idle agitators. He spiked his diatribe with threats flavored by anarchy. He pointed to policemen who had taken refuge in strips of shade which had been cast grudgingly by the high buildings. He reminded his hearers that those policemen had just driven them out of the tree-shaded parks. There the selfish rich folks were loafing under the trees. Poor folks were herded down the street and were forced to hold this meeting in that Gehenna, so he averred.

The man in the automobile muttered impatient words. Then he shouted, breaking in on the impassioned anathema which the orator addressed to the rich: “Stop lying to these men—stirring them up. The parks are for the people. You can go there—all you men can go there—if you'll go without making a disturbance.”

“If men in these days open their mouths to speak for their human rights it's a disturbance,” retorted the demagogue. “If we go up to the park and sit there and tremble like rabbits you rich men will let us stay there—perhaps! But we don't have as many rights there as the rabbits, for the rabbits are allowed to step on the grass.”

“You've got to obey the law like other citizens—you will not be allowed to disturb decent and respectable people. You and men like you must stop putting foolish notions in the heads of loafers in this city.”

“Then put something into our mouths—give us food. Why are we loafers?”

“Because you won't go to work. I'll give every able-bodied man here all the work he wants. Apply at the office of the Consolidated Water Company—now.”

“What's the work?” inquired a man in the crowd.

“Digging trenches for water-pipes. How many men want that work? Hold up hands.”

“It ain't work for human beings in this weather,” snarled the man who had inquired. No hands were raised.

“That's your style!” blazed the big man. The policemen had sauntered into the square and their presence was reassuring. He stood up and began to lecture them.

“And them's the kind of lord dukes that's running this country to-day—own it and run it,” growled a slouchy fellow who stood near the tall young man. “They ain't willing to give a poor man a show.”

“He has just offered you a show—all of you,” stated the young man.

“Yes, a Guinea job for white men.”

“You're picking a poor excuse for being a loafer, my friend.”

“Who says I'm a loafer?”

The young man shot out his hands and grasped the fellow's elbow and hand. The arm was flabby, the palm was soft. He doubled back the fingers and exhibited the palm to the crowd.

“I don't find any labor medals here, men. Is there anybody in the crowd who can show some?” He released the struggling, cursing captive.

“What's labor medals?” inquired a bystander.

The big man was still denouncing them from his car, but the group paid little attention now.

“Callous spots in the place where a working-man ought to wear them. And that place isn't on the tongue.”

“Are you sneering at us because we can't get a job?”

“You're a loafer yourself, and anybody can see it,” declared another.

The young man raised his arms, showing them his palms.

“I carry a few labor medals,” he returned, curtly.

“Why ain't you on your job? The lord dukes won't give you one?”

“When I work and where I work is my own business, so long as I don't beg food at back doors.”

“Do we?”

They had crowded around him and menaced him with murmurings and glowering gaze.

“I should say so,” he replied, giving them an indifferent going-over with his cold eyes. “You carry all the marks.”

Then he shouldered his way out from among them, displaying the air of one who found further discourse unprofitable.

He strolled leisurely in the direction of the big man in the car. The crowd he had left stared after him without presuming to voice taunt or reply; there was something compelling about him.

As Farr approached the automobile its owner stopped talking and stared at the tall stranger with some apprehension. Then the big man beckoned unobtrusively to a policeman. It was evident that Farr was not of the same sort as the ruck of men from among whom he had just emerged, nevertheless he had come from among them. The lordly man in the car had observed him moving in the group, for Farr had loomed above the heads of the others; what he had been saying to the malcontents the big man had not been able to hear, but he guessed.

“Some sort of sneak has been stirring up the fools in this city lately,” the aristocrat informed the officer who came promptly to the side of the car. “Who is this fellow coming?”

“I never saw him before, Colonel Dodd.”

“Stand by! He is going to tackle me and make a grand-stand play in front of his gang. His clothes give him away—a loafing demagogue!”

But the tall man did not pause at the car or even glance at the dignitary who occupied it. He seemed to have lost all interest in the occasion. He yawned as he passed the automobile and started away across the square.

“Here, you! You big chap!” called Colonel Dodd, promptly emboldened.

Farr halted and turned, his countenance showing mild inquiry.

“What do you mean by coming into a peaceable city and stirring up labor troubles?”

“Have I done so?”

“You have just been mixing and mingling with those men, talking to them. I know your kind.”

“Ah, a gentleman of keen discernment!”

“I have seen you before—you fellows with long-tailed coats and short-horned ideas. We don't want your kind in this city!”

“I seem to have made a prompt sensation without trying to do so,” returned Farr, meekly. “I have been in your city less than fifteen minutes, sir!”

“You're a traveling labor-agitator, aren't you?”

“No, sir.”

“But I just saw you circulating among those men. Your rig-out shows your character!”

“You mean these garments I wear?”

“Certainly! A frock-coat helps out your pose before an ignorant public.”

“He stole that coat from me,” squeaked a fat man, standing at a little distance, scrubbing a torn sleeve over his grimy, sweat-streaked face. “He picked it fair off'n my back. I have follered him to show him up as a robber and a fake. That's so help me!”

Riotous laughter from all the listeners followed that declaration; a glance at the tubby tramp and survey of the tall young man whose contours fitted the garments made the fat man's assertion seem like a huge joke.

“I can prove it!” squalled the vagrant.

“Beat it! Get out of this city!” commanded a policeman. “If you don't we'll have you on the rock-pile. What ye mean by such guff?” He flourished his stick and the tramp hurried away.

“It's no use,” he whined. “Grab and bluff! Him what can do it best always wins. That's the way the world goes!”

“When I took these clothes off the back of my vanishing friend I felt that they would make a change in my life,” stated Farr, with a smile which provoked more laughter. “But I did not dream that they would bring me such prominence in so short a time.” He bowed to the man in the car.

But Colonel Dodd was angry and insistent and did not join in the merriment.

“I say you are a labor-agitator. Any man who won't go to work himself has no right to be stirring up other workers against their own interests. You may as well own up to me, my man. These men standing around here know what you are—you have been talking with them. Outside of stirring trouble, you don't work, do you?”

“Oh yes, my lord!”

There was smiling mockery in the tone, almost insolence. He seemed to be willing to display to the rich man the same lack of respect he had displayed to the poor men who stood near and listened to this colloquy.

“Oh, you do?” Colonel Dodd raised his voice. “Listen sharp, my men! Do you want to be led around by the noses by a man who doesn't work? This gentleman is going to tell us what his job is!” He sneered when he said it.

“I am an assiduous toiler in my profession, your excellency. I am surprised that as an employer you do not recognize a real worker when you see one.”

This tone of raillery and this stilted manner of speech promptly caught the fancy of the throng. The men crowded more closely and the orator on the trough was silent.

“What do you work at?”

“I am an architect, your gracious highness.”

“Less of that insolence in the way of names, my friend! An architect, eh? Well, what did you ever build?”

“I laid out Dream Avenue in the boom city of Expectation and built on that thoroughfare a magnificent row of castles in the air. If you had a bit more imagination I might try to sell you something in my line. But it is useless, I see! Farewell!”

He swept off his broad-brimmed hat with a deep bow, backed away a few steps, and bowed again and went on his way. The crowd guffawed. This baiting of the city's labor magnate had most agreeably scratched their itching sense of resentment.

“I don't know who that josher is, but I hate to lose him out of town,” confided the orator on the trough to those near him.

“I never saw that fellow before, but I'll pinch him if you say so, Colonel Dodd,” volunteered the policeman. “Do you make complaint?”

“No,” snapped the colonel, glowering on the broad back which was swinging across the square in retreat. He told his chauffeur to drive on.

When the car passed Farr the colonel flicked cigar ashes which alighted in a spray of dust on the sleeve of the frock-coat.

“Bah!” said the colonel, shooting the young man a scowl.

Farr gave in return a smile, but it was not a particularly genial smile.

The young man went on his way leisurely; by his gait, by his frequent and somewhat prolonged pauses at shop windows, by his indifferent starings at traffic and pedestrians, it was plain that he had little of moment on his mind.

He bought a penny glass of water at a corner kiosk.

“Do you mind telling me,” he asked the vender, “Who is Colonel Dodd of this city? I am a stranger and I have just overheard the name.”

The man grinned. “If it wasn't for Colonel Symonds Dodd I wouldn't be making much of a living here, selling spring-water. He is president of the Consolidated.”

“And that means?”

“Why, it means that he is boss of the water trust that owns the system in this city and in all the other cities and towns of this state. And they pump all of their water out of the rivers because the lakes are so far off, and nobody drinks that water unless he has to or don't know any better. Colonel Dodd? Why, he bosses the whole state, they tell me.”

“I gathered that he was important,” said the young man, and walked on.

He was held up in the passing crowd at a street corner for a few moments because a parade of some half-dozen automobiles whirled past. The cars were decorated with banners, and the wild flowers and other spoil of forest and field in the arms of the ladies indicated that this was a party returning from a picnic in the suburbs.

“Would you mind telling me,” asked Farr of the policeman who was guarding the corner, “who that young man is—the one there in the gray automobile?”

“With the bleached blonde and the pretty girl?” asked the officer. “Oh, that's Colonel Dodd's nephew—Dicky Dodd. Of course you know who the colonel is.”

“Yes,” said Farr. He opened his mouth to ask another question, for the policeman seemed to be of the obliging sort. Then he closed his lips resolutely and marched along.

“What's the use?” he muttered. “Two dark eyes and a red mouth—and I am almost forgetting how to be a philosopher.”

Farther down the city thoroughfare he met one who had claimed to be a philosopher. It was Jared Chick, stalking along the sidewalk in his home-made armor. He held a box of stove-polish in one hand and a brush in the other, and as he strolled he was giving his corselet and such parts of the armor as he could handily reach a glossy coat—a gleaming and burnished surface. On his helmet in place of a crest Knight Chick bore aloft a metal banneret inscribed, “Invincible Stove Polish.”

“And the mission?” asked Farr, halting his quondam companion, who had been too intent upon his business to pay heed to passers.

“I find thee changed, and no doubt thee, too, finds me changed,” sighed Mr. Chick.

The mouth of an alley between high buildings afforded a retreat and the breeze blew there fitfully, and Mr. Chick stepped to that oasis of shade in the glare of sunshine.

“I have been obliged to modify my mission in some degree. I must confess that to thee,” he said. “This is a strange and wicked world.”

“Didn't you know it before you gave up a good blacksmith business to go out in the hot sun and suffer torment, all for nothing?”

“It is very hard work,” acknowledged Chick, showing his flushed and streaming face under his vizor. “If I were not used to the fires of the forge I think I would fall down and die. But I must keep on.”

“But you are simply an advertising-sign.”

“I have modified my mission. I have not given up, however. I will tell thee! I found a man beside the way—a man who had been drinking strong waters and whose pockets had been turned wrong side out. So I took him to a tavern and I sat with him through the night, and nursed him when he suffered, and revealed my mission when he awoke. 'I am out to do good to all men,' I told him, and he searched through his pockets with blasphemy, and he said that I had done him—and he haled me before the court, and the judge said that no man could publicly profess such disinterestedness and escape suspicion, because people in these days are all looking for the main chance. So he did not believe me and he sentenced me to the jail. But a good Samaritan interceded for me and took me from behind the bars, and now in the spirit of gratitude I am repaying him; he makes and sells this stove-polish.”

“That man is evidently shrewd in business and a good advertiser,” commented Farr.

“I find that I get along much better in the world,” asserted the knight-errant. “Now that I carry an advertising-sign my armor attracts no rude mobs. I can go abroad and do good to a foolish world; I can use the stipend my good benefactor allows to me for my work and I can help poor folks here and there. Therefore, I am content with my modified mission. Is thee more at peace with the world?”

“I ought to be, after hearing you say that you are contented,” said Farr, with irony.

“Thee has manifestly improved thy condition, so I observe.”

“It often happens in this world, Friend Chick, that the sleeker we are on the outside, the more ragged we are within. I think I'll move on. I might say something to jar your sense of sublime content. I'd be sorry to do that. Real contentment is a rare thing and must be handled very carefully.”

“I fear thee loves thyself too much,” chided the Quaker. “Affection for somebody might make thee happy, my friend.”

Farr choked back the comment that occurred to him in regard to love and walked away.

The afternoon was waning, but the hot bowl of the sky seemed to shut down over the city more closely.

Farr held to the shaded sides of the streets, and yearned for a patch of green and a tree and its shade.

At last he came into a section of the city where vast mills, one succeeding another in rows which vanished in the distance, clacked their everlasting staccato of hurrying looms, venting clamor from the thousands of open windows. A canal of slow-moving, turbid water intersected the city and fed its quota of power to each mill. The fenced bank of the canal was green; and elms, languid in the fierce heat, gave shade here and there with wilted leaves. The masses of brick which inclosed the toilers within the mills puffed off tremulous heat-waves and suggested that humanity must be baking in those gigantic ovens.

A high fence interposed between the canal and the street; the mill lawn which extended between the canal and the shimmering brick walls was also inclosed. Signs posted on the fence warned trespassers not to venture.

A bridge carried the street across the canal, and Farr stood there for a time and watched the swirl of the water below. Then he sauntered on and surveyed the expanse of mill lawn with appraising and envious gaze.

The young man climbed the canal fence, exhibiting more of his cool contempt for authority by helping himself over the sharp spikes with the aid of a “No Trespassing” sign. The sickly odor of raw cotton came floating to his nostrils from the open windows. He strolled to the head of a transverse canal which sucked water from the main stream. A sprawling tree shaded a foot-worn plank where an old man, with bent shoulders and a withered face, trudged to and fro, clawing down into the black waters with a huge rake. He was the rack-tender—it was his task to keep the ribs of the guarding rack clear of the refuse that came swirling down with the water, for flotsam, if allowed to lodge, might filch some of the jealously guarded power away from the mighty turbines which growled and grunted in the depths of the wheel-pits. With rake in one hand and a long, barbed pole in the other the old man bent over the bubbling torrent that the rack's teeth sucked hissingly between them. Bits of wood, soggy paper, an old umbrella, all manner of stuff which had been tossed into the canal by lazy folks up-stream, he raked and pulled up and piled at the end of his foot-bridge.

“Hy, yi, old Pickaroon!” came a child's shrill voice from a mill window. “There's a tramp under your tree.”

The old man raised his head from his work at the rack.

“You must not come on dis place,” he cried, with a strong French-Canadian accent.

“Who says so?” inquired the stranger, putting his back against the tree and stretching out his legs.

“I—Etienne Provancher.”

“And I—my worthy alien—I am Walker Farr from Nowhere. Now that we have been properly introduced I will sit here and rest. I am here because I love the soothing sound of babbling waters on a hot day. Go about your work. I'll watch you. I love surprises. Who knows what next you'll draw forth from the depths of fate?

“I can have you arrest!” cried the old man.

The uninvited guest took off his broad-brimmed hat, laid it across his knees, and ran his hand through his shock of brown hair; it curled damply over his forehead and, behind, reached down nearly to his coat-collar, hiding his tanned neck. In some men that length of hair might have seemed affectation. It gave this man, as he sat there uncovered, that touch of the unusual which separates the person of strong individuality from the mere mob. Then he smiled on old Etienne—such a warm, radiant, compelling, disarming sort of smile that the rack-tender turned to his work again, muttering. His mouth twitched and the crinkles in his withered face deepened.

Walker Farr found a comfortable indentation in the tree-trunk and settled his head there.

“How much do you get a week for doing that, Etienne?” he inquired, with cool assurance.

The old man glance sideways sharply, but the smile won him.

“Six dollaire.”

“After supporting your family, what do you do with the rest of the money these generous mill-owners allow you?”

“I never was marry.”

The young man looked up at the mill windows where childish heads were bobbing to and fro.

“That was poor judgment, Etienne. You might have married and have a dozen children now, working hard for you in the mill. Just like those children yonder.”

The old man came to the end of his foot-bridge and flung down his rake and his pike-pole.

The sudden emotions of his Gallic forebears swept through him. His features worked, his voice was high with passion.

“Ba gar, I don't sleep the night because I think about dem poor childs. Dem little white face, dem arm, dem leg—all dry up—not so big as chicken leg. And all outdoor free to odder childs—not to them childs up dere.” He shook his fists at the mill windows. And some child who saw the motion, getting a hasty peep from a widow, squealed, “Hi yi, old Pickaroon!”

“It doesn't pay to get too excited over the sorrows of the world, my friend,” drawled the young man under the tree. “It doesn't do any good; and then somebody calls you names. I was something like you once. But I've changed my philosophy. I have hypnotized my altruism. Now I'm perfectly happy.”

Etienne stared without understanding these big words. But he had often told himself that he never expected to understand Yankee speech very well. He worked alone; he lived alone in his garret in the tenement block; he talked but little with any person. But this young man with the wonderful smile seemed to inspire him to talk—even to the extent of revealing his secrets.

He lowered his voice. “Thirty year I have work here. I live way up in the little room. Bread I eat with lard on it. It costs little. Of the six dollaire I save much. Ah, oui! Hist! Not for me I save it. Ah, non! To the priest I give it. To the good priest. And the poor childs what are sick—he send 'em to the farm—to have some outdoors. But I don't sleep the night because I think the dollaire come so slow—and so many poor childs are sick.”

He picked up his rake and pike and went back to his labor.

The man under the tree did not lose his smile.

“Yonder is a brand of altruism that cannot be hypnotized or modified like Knight Chick's, I fear,” he muttered. “You'd have to hit it on the head—kill it with sticks! And my definition of philanthropy has always been, 'giving away something you don't want in order to get yourself advertised.' Etienne is interesting. He is the only philanthropist I have even found who will eat lard instead of butter so as to save more for his philanthropy.” Now his smile grew hard. “Don't dare to open your eyes, Altruism,” he commanded. “I saw the lids quiver a minute ago while that old man was talking, but remember you're hypnotized.”

He saw the rack-tender lay down his pike so as to give both hands to his big rake.

He was pulling at something heavier than the ordinary flotsam—something far below the surface of the water. At last it broke through the black surface of the turbid flood. To Walker Farr, glancing carelessly, it seemed like a bedraggled bundle of rags with something white at the end.

“You come help, m'sieu',” called old Etienne. “It is a dead woman.”

Together they pulled the rake's dread burden slowly up the bars of the rack.

“You seem pretty cool about this,” gasped the young man.

“It is no new thing. Many drown themselves—they drown in the canal so they will be found. Women and girls, they drown themselves. So! Help me carry her.”

Farr gazed down on her after she had been laid on the canal bank. She was young, but thin and work-worn.

“Weaver,” commented old Etienne, laying back on her breast one of the hands he had lifted. “There's the marks on the fingers where she have tie so many knots so quick.”

There was a key on her breast; it was secured by a cord that passed out of sight between the buttons on her waist. Farr stooped and pulled on the key. A folded paper came with the key; the other end of the cord was tied around the paper.

“You must not—it is for the coroner,” protested Etienne. “I know the law—I have drag up so many.”

“My besetting sin is curiosity,” declared the young man, his calm impertinence unruffled. He pulled the wet paper from the noose of the cord. “We'll read this together.”

“I cannot read,” confessed the rack-tender. “You shall read it to me.” His little black eyes gleamed now with curiosity of his own. “I shall be glad to hear. The coroner he never read to me.”

The water had spread the ink and spotted the paper, but Farr was able to decipher the missive. He read aloud:

“'My head has grown bad since my husband died. It is grief, the awful heat, the work at the looms. They said if I would give my little girl away she could go to the country and grow well. But I could not give her up for ever. I could not earn the money to send her to board. I could not earn the money except to buy us bread here in the tenement block. And my bad head has been telling me it's best to kill myself and take her with me. So I kill myself before my head grows so bad that I might take away my little girl's life. It belongs to her and I hope she may be happy. Will somebody take her and give her happiness? It is wicked to kill myself, but my head is so bad I cannot think out the right way to do. This is the key to the room in Block Ten.

“'MRS. ELISIANE SIROIS.

“'Her name is Rosemarie.'”

Walker Farr finished reading and stared into the glittering eyes of the old man.

Etienne Provancher swore roundly and furiously—the strange, hard oaths that his ancestors had brought from the Normandy of the seventeenth century.

“So you shall see—it is as I have say.” He shook his fists again at the mill. Its open windows vomited the staccato chatterings of the myriad looms. “It chews up the poor people. Hear its dam' teeth go chank—chank—chank!”

“The Gallic imagination is always active,” said Farr, joggling the key at the end of the cord and eyeing it with peculiar interest. “But in this case it seems to picture conditions pretty accurately. I wonder just what a visitor would find inside the door that this key fits!”

“You shall go tell them at the office of the mill,” commanded Etienne. “Tell them they have killed another. They will telephone for the coroner. I will give the paper and the key when he come.” He held out his hand. “It is the law.”

“I have a natural hankering—sometimes—to break the law,” affirmed the young man. “I feel that fatal curiosity of mine stirring again, Friend Etienne. I will send the coroner. But coroners love mysteries. If we give him the letter it will take all the spice out of this affair. Let's make him happy—he can drag out the inquest and give his friends a long job on the jury.” He smiled and started away, shaking his head when the old man protested shrilly. “Better say nothing about this letter and the key. You'll get into trouble for letting a stranger come in here and carry away evidence. Better keep out of the law, Etienne.” He grabbed the “No Trespassing” sign for a hand-hold and climbed over the fence. “I'll come back and tell you, Etienne. But keep mum,” he advised.

“It is his smile—it makes me break the law,” mumbled the old man.

Walker Farr gave the first policeman—a fat and sweltering individual—a piece of gruesome news and in return casually asked the location of Block Ten.

The policeman grudgingly growled the information over his shoulder while waiting for the station to answer the call from his box.

The young man, taking his time, found the place at last, one in an interminable row of tenement-houses, all identical in structure and squalor, bearing the mark of corporation niggardliness in their cheap lumber and stingy accommodations.

The hallway that Farr entered was narrow and stifling—stale odors of thousands of dead-and-gone boiled dinners mingled there, and a stairway with a greasy handrail invited him. The key bore a number. He hunted till he found a room, far up, flight after flight. Through open doors he saw here and there aged women or doddering old men who were guardians of dirty babes who tumbled about on the bare floors.

“Either too old to run a loom or too young to lug a bobbin,” Farr informed himself; “that's why they aren't in the mill.”

Old folks and babes stared at him without showing interest.

No one looked at him when he opened the door in which the key fitted.

He stepped in quickly and closed and locked the door behind him.

It was a little room and pitifully bare, and it was under the roof, and the ceiling slanted across it so sharply that the young man, tall above the average, was compelled to bow his head.

A little girl, a wraith of a child, pale with the pallor of a prisoner, hardly more than a toddler, sat on the floor and stared up at the intruder, frozen, silent, immobile with the sudden, paralyzing terror that grasps the frightened child. Pathetically poor little playthings were scattered about her: a doll fashioned from gingham and cotton-waste, makeshift dishes of pasteboard, a doll-carriage made from a broken flower-basket with spools for wheels. The man who entered saw all with one glance and understood that here in this bare room this child had been compelled to drag out the weary hours alone while the mother had toiled. Here now the child waited patiently for—for that water-soaked bundle, with the white, dead face, that lay on the canal bank waiting for the coroner.

And when he realized it and saw this and looked down on that lonely, patient, wistful little creature making the best shift she could with those pitiable playthings, something came up from that man's breast into his throat. He had not supposed he had any of it left in his soul—it was tender, agonizing, heartrending pity.

She still stared at him, terrorized. Probably she had never seen any face come in at that door except her mother's.

His pity must have given Walker Farr a hint of how to deal with this frightened child. He did not speak to her. He made no move toward her.

He smiled!

But it was not the smile he had given the fat plutocrat in the automobile, nor yet the jocular radiance he had displayed to old Etienne. It was such a smile as the man had never smiled before—and he realized it. He did not want to smile. He wanted to weep. But he brought that smile from tender depths in his soul—depths he had not known of before—and tears came with the smile.

Before that time the lines in his face had fitted the smile of the cynic, the grimace of banter, of irony and insolence. But the strange glory that now glowed upon his features came there after the mightiest effort he had ever made to control his feelings and his expression.

He smiled!

In that smile he soothed, he promised, he appealed. Then when he saw the tense expression of fear fade away he smiled more broadly—he provoked reply in kind. And slowly upon the child's face an answering smile began to dawn—little crinkles at the corners of the drooping mouth, little flickerings in the blue eyes, until at last the two beaming faces pledged—on the part of the man tender protection, on the part of the child unquestioning confidence.

But he said no word—he dared not trust his voice.

He went down on his knees cautiously, her smile welcoming him now.

He held out his hands. She hesitated a moment and then gave into them her chiefest possession—her rag doll. It was as if she had pledged her faith in him. He danced the doll upon his broad palm, and the child's eyes, dancing too, thanked him for the courtesy he was paying to her dearest friend.

But Walker Farr realized that something strange and disquieting in the case of a man who believed himself a cynic was stirring within him. That hostage of the doll was not sufficient to satisfy the sudden queer craving. The knowledge of the hopeless helplessness of that little girl throbbed through him. The memory of the spectacle of what he had left on the canal bank made the pathos of this little scene in the garret doubly poignant as he looked into the child's eyes. Never, in his memory, had he invited a child to come to him.

Now he put out his hand—and it trembled. She snuggled her warm little fist into his grasp. And then she scrambled up and came and nestled confidingly against him. She couldn't see his face then, and he allowed the tears of a strong man who is overcome before he has understood—who wonders at himself—he allowed those tears to streak his cheeks and did not wipe them away.

Walker Farr was too perturbed to soliloquize just then in his philosopher's style, but he did realize that some part of his altruism had come out of its trance.

And after he had knelt there on the floor for a time he rose and took the child in his arms and sat down in a creaky rocking-chair and crooned under his breath, and was astonished to find that she had gone sound asleep. He stared into the dusk that was gathering outside the dormer window and wondered what ailed him.

He had heard many feet thudding on the stairs below. The workers were returning. The beehive was filling. There were many voices, clatter of dishes, chatter of patois.

He wondered how well the woman Sirois was known in the house—whether she had relatives—how soon somebody would come and beat upon the door.

He wondered just what disposition was made of children left in this manner.

If the woman had relatives who were forced to take the child it meant more of this horrible tenement life. The child in his arms was pale and thin; her bones seemed as inconsiderable as a bird's.

He did not know much about children's homes, orphanages, institutions for the reception of the homeless, but it seemed to him that such a tiny, frail little girl would be very, very lonely in such a place.

The skies grew dark without. He was cramped because he had sat for hours in one position, fearing to waken her. But when he moved she did not waken—he did not understand how soundly childhood can sleep. He laid her on the foot of the narrow bed and looked about the room, shielding a match with his hands. He had resolved to carry her out of that fetid, overcrowded babel of a tenement. Where? He did not know. He hunted to find her belongings. He found a few clothes. There was no receptacle in which he could pack them. He folded them and crowded the articles in his pockets. He stuffed in the doll and the rude playthings and hooked the basket doll-carriage upon his arm. She did not waken when he picked her up. He tiptoed down the stairs and nobody noticed him, In his own dizzy mind he could not determine whether he felt most like a thief or a lunatic. At any rate, he found himself walking the streets of the mill city at ten o'clock at night, carrying a little girl in his arms and all her earthly possessions in his pockets.

It came over him at last that the longer he kept her the more uncertain he became as to what disposal he should make of her, or else he was more loath to part with her; he didn't exactly know which.

Then she woke and spoke for the first time. “Me is te'bble hungry—and firsty,” she mourned.

“Good Lord! What's the matter with me?” grunted the young man. “If I had found a cat or a dog, the first thing I would have done would be to give 'em something to eat. I reckon I must have thought I had picked up an angel.” To her he said, smoothing her hair with his free hand. “We'll have sumpin for baby's tummy mighty quick.” He flushed at sound of that baby prattle from his lips. But it had popped out in the most natural manner possible.

He headed for the nearest night lunch-cart. He entered with his burden.

He elbowed aside men who were eating sandwiches and pie at the counter. With complete and rueful knowledge as to the extent of his resources, he ordered a bowl of bread and milk—“the best you can do for a hungry kiddie for ten cents,” he added.

“Anything for yourself?” inquired the waiter.

He shook his head and paid for the child's supper with his whole capital, two nickels. He held her on the end of the counter and, awkwardly but with tender carefulness, fed the bread and milk to her with a spoon. A healthy man's hunger gnawed within him and the savor of coffee from the big, bubbling urn tantalized him. He tipped the bowl to her lips and she drank the last of the milk with a happy little sigh, and he went out into the night again, carrying her in his arms.

He understood all the suspicions that policemen entertain in the case of night prowlers, and knew that they would be particularly and meddlesomely interested in one who prowled with a child in his arms. The child began to whimper softly. Her interest in the stranger who had won her with a smile, her slumber in his arms, her feast in strange surroundings, had kept her child's mind busy and pacified till then. Now she voiced childhood's unvarying lament—“I wants my mamma!”

He soothed her as best he could, promising, giving her all manner of assurance regarding her mother, wondering all the time what was to be done. Why had he interfered? Why had he taken upon himself the custody of this mite, so trifling a weight in his arms, but now resting—a giant of a burden—on his responsibility? He did not know. He owned up to that ignorance frankly. But he walked on, carrying her, and put away from his thoughts the sensible alternative of placing her in the hands of those duly appointed to care for such cases.

He told himself that, as a stranger in the city, he would not be able to find a refuge—an institution that time of night—and he knew that he was lying to himself, and wondered why.

The impulse that directed his course toward the canal was rather grim, but he remembered the tree which had been sanctuary for him that day. He carefully lowered the little girl over the fence and climbed after her. And she did not call any more for her mother because this strange new scene seemed to impress her and fill her with wonderment. She stared up into the dim, mysterious, rustling foliage of the tree for a long time. She patted her hands upon the grass as if it were something she had never seen or felt before. She seemed to be making her first acquaintance with Mother Nature—claiming the heritage of outdoors that children so intensely covet. The sloped ceiling and the walls of the attic room had been sky and landscape for her. She peered into the still waters of the canal and saw the stars reflected there, and cocked her ear to listen when sleepy birds stirred above and chirped in their dreams. And then she fell asleep again and he tucked her within his coat to keep from her the dampness of the faint mist rising from the canal.

The dawn flushed early and she woke when the birds did, and found so much to interest her—ants who ran up and down the tree, funny bugs that tumbled, robins who bounced along the sward on stiff legs—that she did not ask for her mother nor seem to find at all strange the companionship of this tall man whose face was so kind.

And so Etienne Provancher found them when he came with his rake and pike-pole at six o'clock, the hour when the great turbines began to grunt and rumble in their deep pits.

“It is Rosemarie—I found her in the room,” said Walker Farr.

The old man came close and gazed down on the pallor and pathos of this little snipped who still stared at the new wonders of outdoors.

“Anodder one, hey? You found her lock up?”

“Yes, and I brought her away—and I don't know just what the matter is with me, Etienne. I have not been inclined to put myself out for anybody in this world—man, woman, or child—of late years. I had made up my mind to let the world run itself.”

“It is the way the rich man say—he do not care. But the poor man should care—he should try to help odder poor man. He should care.”

“Oh, there are things that can happen to make a man stop caring. But I brought her away, just the same. I—I woke up—or something. I have been awake all night—I have been thinking—I had nothing else to do. Insomnia has made me insane—one night of it!” He laughed when the old man blinked at him. “I'm so crazy that I want you to help me find some good woman who will take this child to board in a comfortable home.”

“Who'll pay?”

“I'll pay. Oh, I am completely crazy—I'm going to work—earn money to pay her board.”

“I know a good woman near by—she have leetle house, cat, plant in window.”

“That's the kind.”

“I will tell you where she live. You shall say you come from Etienne Provancher and it will make you good for her.” He paused, raised a brown finger, then went on. “But you shall not know where she live onless I may pay half the board money for the poor little one. We have been togedder in it—I tell some lie to the coroner—we must be togedder in help the childs.”

There was firm resolve in old Etienne's face and tones.

“Partnership it shall be, my old boy,” agreed the young man, heartily. “I'm no pig—I won't keep a good man out of a real picnic.” He rose and swept the child into his arms. “Give me the address and hand her over the fence to me. I'll have to quit being nurse and find a real job. By the way, Etienne, I heard a fat man weeping yesterday because he couldn't get men to dig dirt for the Consolidated Water Company. He seemed to take a great fancy to me. Where's their office?”

He received both the information and the child after he had climbed the fence. Etienne was able to point out the little house of sanctuary from where he stood—and he waved his rake reassuringly from a distance when the good woman came to the door, answering Farr's knock. He danced into the house with the child, behind the good woman, who had answered Etienne's signal with a return flip of her apron; he was trying to bring a smile to the little face.

“You'll have to lie to her more or less about her mother, good woman. Etienne and I will tell you all about it when there's time. When she asks about her mother just give her something to eat and lie a bit.” He set the child upon the table where the good woman was making fresh cookies. He piled the little toys about her. “I'm going to market, to market to buy a fat pig, and I'll be home again, riggy-jig-jig,” he declared in a singsong that fetched a chuckle from the waif, and she followed him with a smile as he hurried out. “That smile will sweeten a day's work in the trench,” he assured himself. “I sure am some foster-father when I get started!”

A listless clerk at the Consolidated office gave him a ticket to be delivered to the foreman of construction—the foreman sent him out with other men on a rattling jigger-wagon. By being very humble, and with the aid of his smile, he succeeded in begging a corned-beef sandwich for his breakfast from a workman on the jigger who was carrying his lunch to work. He ate it very slowly so as to make the most of it.

The new trench was in a suburban plot which had just been opened up by a real-estate syndicate. It was a bare tract, flat and dusty, and the only trees were newly planted saplings that were about as large as fishing-poles. How the sun did beat into that trench! But Walker Farr threw off his coat and used again his ready asset—his smile. He smiled at the boss who sneered at the style of “fiddler's hair” worn by a dirt-flinger—smiled so sweetly that the boss came over later and hit him a friendly clap on the shoulder and said, “Well, old scout, here's hoping that times will be better!”

“I'll take her out on the bank of the canal this evening before bedtime and we'll have a lark,” reflected Walker Farr as he toiled in the hot trench. And he stopped quizzing himself as to the whys of this sudden devotion to a freakish notion. He seemed to know at last.

When the noon hour came Farr went and sat under a spindling tree and began to read in one of his little books, dismissing thoughts of hunger with the resoluteness of a man who had suffered hollow yearning of the stomach and knew how to conquer it.

But he could not escape the keen eyes and kindly generosity of the fraternity of toilers.

“A topper down on his luck a bit—see his clothes,” said the foreman, and he took tithes from willing men who were eating from pails that were pinched between their knees; he carried the food to the young man.

Farr accepted with gratitude, ate with thrifty moderation, and hid what remained in the pockets of his coat; it would serve for his supper.

He ate that supper after his day's work was done and after he had laved his face and hands in the overflow from a public fountain in a little square.

Then he hurried to the house of the good woman.

She was busy with her dishes in the kitchen and Rosemarie was on the knees of a young woman who sat and rocked in one of the sitting-room chairs.

Farr entered by the kitchen door and stood there, looking in with some confusion on the girl and child.

“It is only Zelie Dionne; she is my boarder,” the woman informed him. “She is a good girl and she has the very nice job in the cloth-hall of the big Haxton mill. She lives with me because I was neighbor of her good folks in the Tadousac country, so far away from here in our Canada. Come! I make you acquaint. You shall see. She is a good girl!”

Zelie Dionne rose and acknowledged the introduction with a French girl's pretty grace. A bit of a flush lighted the dusky pallor of her cheeks when Farr bent before her. The bow in her hair was cocked with true Gallic chic and her gown was crisply smart in its simplicity. Her big, dark eyes were the wonderful feature of her face, and Farr looked into them and seemed to lose a bit of his cool self-possession; he faltered in speech, groping for words in the first commonplaces.

“You must talk together. I must work,” said the good woman. She hurried back into her kitchen.

The child ran to Farr and climbed upon his knees.

“You have been good to Rosemarie. I thank you,” he said. “I suppose the good woman has told you how it has happened.”

“Yes, when I came at noon.” Her tones were peculiarly sweet and compassionate. A touch of accent gave piquancy to what she said. She looked at him meaningly. “I have been talking to our little Rosemarie and she will not cry any more for her good mamma who has gone up to the green hills because she is sick and must rest. So Rosemarie will be patient and live here and I will be play-mamma.”

“Yes, play-mamma,” agreed the child. “Good play-mamma! Two mammas! But only one papa!” She put up her arms and tucked them about his neck and snuggled down with a happy sense of complete understanding of his protection. At last, so it seemed to her, she had recovered the father she had never known. Poor, little, caged bird, her release from that lonely prison was dated in her happy consciousness from his appearance in the doorway, and all things had been well for her after he came—sunlight, the trees, the blue sky, and tender care, and the companionship of human beings. Therefore, the rush of a love her child's comprehension could not analyze had gone out to him.

Farr returned with significance the look Zelie Dionne's dark eyes gave him.

“I found the note. It made me go a-meddling. It left a legacy to somebody—and I accepted—without understanding why I did so.” He stroked the child's curls.

“I did not understand at first—when Madame Maillet told me,” she confessed, with a smile. “Old Etienne came at noon to tell her and she has told it to me. It is very sad—but yet it is comical when I look at you. But as I look at you I understand better. You have a good heart. I can see!”

“I am only a strolling stranger—here to-day and there to-morrow,” protested Farr. “I think the heat must have affected my head. It has been very warm lately. But when I saw her—” He choked suddenly.

“Oh, it is easy to understand,” said the girl, reassuringly. A mist of tears came across her big eyes, though her mouth did not lose the wistful smile. “The poor folks help one another—and they understand.”

“It wouldn't be right to give her to an orphanage,” insisted Farr. “She has missed too much already. Of course I don't pretend to know what a little girl needs—but I am willing to be told.”

“I will tell you and I will help.”

“I think old Etienne and I need you in the partnership—as adviser. I thank you.”

Then came the old Canadian, his wrinkled face tender with solicitous interest, and he chuckled when he welcomed the new member of the firm.

“Ah, Mam'selle Zelie she shall help us the very much in what we do not know,” he informed the young man, and continued, while the dark eyes flashed protest: “I am of the Tadousac country, and she is a good girl, for I have know her all the years since I trot her on my knee when she much small as the petite Rosemarie. I can tell you how she dance down the meadows in the ring-a-rosy play and how she—”

“Phut! Your tongue is as long as your rake and it goes reaching down into other folks' affairs, old Etienne! What cares this strange gentleman for what happened in Tadousac? Go use your key instead of your tongue. Unlock your little door so that Rosemarie may walk on the cool grass beside the canal.”

The old man grinned and started away.

“We're going out where the birds will sing good night to you,” Farr told the child and lifted her off his knees. But at the door she stopped and turned to Zelie Dionne, who had not risen.

“Come, play-mamma!”

“I will wait here till you come back, Rosemarie.”

But the child was coaxingly insistent, holding out her hand.

“I think it is because she has been so lonely all her life,” suggested Farr. “Now that she has found friends she wants them to be with her in her little pleasures. May I presume enough to add my invitation to hers?”

She came and the child walked between them, holding their hands.

“One papa and my play-mamma!” she said, looking up at them in turn.

Mother Maillet came to the kitchen door and waved adieu with her dish-towel.

“Ah, the family!” she cried. “Yesterday it was not—to-day it is. And grandpere marching off ahead!”

“Old folks and children—they say embarrassing things,” remarked Farr when they were on their way.

“One must be silly along with them to be disturbed by such chatter,” said Zelie Dionne, tartly.

They followed old Etienne through his little door and walked along the canal bank where the waters were still and glassy, for the big gates had been closed and power lay motionless and locked in the sullen depths till morning. The sunset behind the big mills glowed redly through the myriad windows.

They walked slowly because little Rosemarie found marvels for childish eyes at every step, and even the cool carpet of the grass provided unfailing delight as she set slow and cautious footsteps into its yielding luxuriance. The old man plodded ahead, muttering and frowning as he peered down at the flotsam in the motionless waters.

The silence between the two who accompanied the child continued a long time and Farr found it oppressive.

“I have never been in Canada,” he said. “I am sorry you did not care to have Etienne talk about your home. I would like to know more about that country.”

“He was talking about me instead of my home in Tadousac. I am not so important that I am to be talked about.”

“Where is Tadousac?”

Her vivacity returned, her dark eyes glowed. “Ah, m'sieu', you should go there. It is in the country of the good habitants where the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay meet. And now, as the sun is setting, the people are resting under the wide eaves of the little white houses, looking up where the hills are all so blue, or off across the wide bay. The white houses are very small and they crowd along the road, and the farms are narrow, and there is not much money in the homespun clothes or in the old clock, but the good world is wide about them and the people are not sad like those who sit yonder.”

She pointed across the canal to rows of wooden tenement-houses many stories in height; on narrow porches, nicked one above another, and on fire-escapes which were slowly cooling after hours on the forge of the sun, men, women, and children were packed, seeking a breath of fresh air.

“They stand at loom and spinner and slasher all day,” she said. “They are too tired to walk afar to the parks. They wait there for good air to come and it does not come.”

“I don't understand why they flock down here from Canada—why they stay,” he declared, bluntly.

“Ah, you look at me when you say that!” she cried, arching her brows. “You hear me talk about the sunset over the meadows and the hills, and you wonder why I am not there? Well, listen! There are fourteen sons and daughters of Onesime Dionne—that's my father—for all the habitant folks marry young, and the priest smiles and blesses the household when there are many children. And girls are not of much account in the house. The sons claim and receive their shares of the arpents of land when those boys are grown and married. The girl may marry—yes! But what if the right one does not ask? What if the right one has a father who says to him that he must obey and marry one the father has chosen? All kinds of things can happen in the habitant country, m'sieu'. So, then, the girl is less account in the house. And the letters come back from the girls who have gone down into the mills in the States. The pictures come back showing the new gown and the smart hat—and so!” She shrugged her shoulders and tossed her free hand. “One more girl for the big mill!”

He stared at her with some curiosity.

“You ask yourself which one of those things happened to me, do you not?”

“Perhaps,” he confessed.

“I talk little about myself. I talk about the habitant girls. I am fortunate. I do not breathe the air where the looms clack. I inspect in the cloth-hall because I have sharp eyes and nimble fingers.”

“But you came here alone—it is strange. I mean, do not the father and mother and all the family move here, usually?”

She lifted her chin and gazed at him with pride in her mien.

“If you go to Tadousac you shall find that my father owns a large farm and that one of his grandfathers was a captain with General Montcalm, and many Dionnes have lived on the land that was given to a brave man. I came to the States because I wanted to come. My people did not come.”

She clipped the last sentence in a manner that suggested to Farr that there was no more to be said on that topic. But she went on after a time in softened tones.

“It is not strange that so many came to the States, sir. The farms of Beauce, of l'Islet, of the Chaudiere, were so crowded. Years ago, the old folks used to tell me, the boys began to drive the little white horses hitched to buckboards across the border in the early summer, and the boys were strong and willing, and the farmers who laughed at them and called them Canucks hired them for the hay-fields just the same. And they slept in the haymows and under the trees and worked hard and brought back all their money. Then the big mills needed men and women and children, and the Yankee girls would not work in the mills any more. You must understand how it was: Ouillette, who had worked in the hay-field, would hear of the work in the mill, and the Ouillettes would sell and go to the city. And as soon as they had seen the lights and the theater and the car which ran with a stick on a wire, and had earned their first pay and had bought Yankee clothes they wrote home to their cousins the Pelletiers and the Pelletiers sat nights till late talking excitedly—and then they sold and came, and so it has gone on and on—the endless chain, one family pulling on its neighbor, down the long way from Canada to the States. But it may be all for the best. I am not wise in such things. But when the sun bakes and the fever comes and the children die in the tenements, then I wish the fathers and mothers were back on the little farms and that workers of some other race than the habitants were chained to the looms in the big mills. That may be a selfish thought, but my own people are dear to me.”

Farr was not in the mood to argue the economic side of that question with this girl who had so tersely told the story of two generations of mill-toilers. With that little waif between them, victim of the industrial Moloch which must roll on even if its wheels crushed the innocent here and there, he permitted sentiment to sway him. In fact, for a day and a night he had surrendered to sentiment and had found a strange sort of intoxication in the experience. His heart was with the humble folk and pity was in him—pity which was uncalculating and in which his cynicism was dissolving.

And when the stars were mirrored in the still canal and the grass was damp with the dew, they walked back to the house of Mother Maillet and little Rosemarie murmured her bit of a prayer and was tucked in bed.

“I hope that some day I may go to Tadousac,” said Farr to the girl, before he passed out of the good woman's house. “I would like to see the sunset, for you have praised it.”

“Ask for the house of Onesime Dionne, second beyond the big parish cross. It will be easy to find, and the sunset is very grand from the porch under the eaves.”

Farr went along with the old man and they walked slowly. Their way took them down narrow streets between the high tenements.

“Yes, you shall find it very grand at Tadousac—and M'sieu' Dionne is an honest man,” declared Etienne. “Now and then in the thirty year I have been visit up there in Tadousac, and I sit those day and whittle for the children and then little Zelie trot on my knee with the others. So I know the story of those place. And all the people up there don't care if I know, because I listen and am glad to know, and sometimes I can give advice, for I have live long on the States where great matters are happening. But Farmer Leroux would not listen to me when I advise about his good son Jean and Zelie Dionne. Farmer Leroux is a good man, but he is a hard man when his ugly mad get stir. And the children up there do what the father tell—because that is what the cure preach and it is the way of the habitants.”

“The old, old story—the Montagues and the Capulets on the banks of the river of the North.”

“I think I know something what you mean, m'sieu', though I don't know your friend you speak about. But if he say to his son, 'Ba gar, you don't marry no girl what I don't like her fadder because we have hosswhip one anodder t'ree or two time when we have fuss over line fence—or crowd our wagon when we go to market'—why, then that's your friend. And it start from there and grow into big thing, so that all the cure can say it don't make no friend of them. So they wait—Jean and Zelie! Ah yes, they wait!” He put his finger beside his nose and winked. “They love. They get marry some nice day. But now!” He flirted his gaunt fingers. “They say nottings. I maself say nottings. But I see some very queer look in Jean Leroux's eye when he say to me as I meet him at the gate of his fadder's farm, 'And how carries Zelie Dionne herself these days?' And though he look high over the tree and chew the straw and look very careless, ah, I see the big tear in his eye and hear him choke in his throat.”

“It's played out and old-fashioned, this letting old folks manage young folks that way just to satisfy old grudges,” scoffed Farr. “If they are in love they ought to get married and tell the old folks to go hang!”

Etienne stopped and gazed quizzically at the young man who thus expounded the law for lovers.

“I think you have in you none of the understanding of the French habitants who have live the three generation on one farm so that a young man, no matter if he love a mam'selle so very much that all the bread he eat taste ashes in his mouth—ah, he cannot say 'I will leave—I will go!' For then that young man must turn himself to be anodder young man—and the habitant does not so change.”

“I may be a poor judge,” acknowledged Farr. “I have never yet taken root in the soil of any one place.”

“And I think, mebbe, the girl you do not understand! Is it to stay in the home and hear every day about you love the pig of a Leroux, bah? No, no, m'sieu'! That's too proud, is Zelie Dionne. And so is Zelie Dionne too proud to take a son from a home that do not want her. So they wait.”

“It's a tough old world, Uncle Etienne,” said Farr. “Why, even I, lord of my own affairs as I am, don't know where I'm going to sleep to-night. Do you have a boarding-place?”

“I have my little room on the block up there—my room and my place at the big table. It is not grand. But there is place for you—and anodder little room. If you like you shall come and I will speak good for you.”

“All right, Etienne! Take me along and speak good for me.”

It was another such place as Block Ten. It was a crowded and stuffy warren, and the basement kitchen advertised itself with stale odors in all the corridors. But Farr was glad to stretch himself upon the narrow bed. He owned up to himself that he was a very weary bird of passage and confessed to his own heart, just as frankly, that he was a captive in the frail grasp of a little girl—and he did not try to understand.

It proved to be an amicable and satisfactory partnership between Etienne Provancher and Walker Farr and dark-eyed Zelie Dionne.

When the days were pleasant the old man kept the little girl with him out of doors on the canal bank. She did not trouble him by running about. Her long days of confinement in the attic room had accustomed her to remain quietly in one place. She sat contentedly in the shade and watched the bugs in the grass and the birds in the tree above her. In the cool of the evening she trudged along the canal bank with Farr and the play-mamma until eyes grew heavy and little feet stumbled with weariness and it was time for bed. Rainy evenings they studied the alphabet or he read to her from picture-books in blazing colors, and after a time she remembered all the stories and made believe read them to him.

He worked in the trench and looked forward impatiently to Saturday nights when the clerk came along with the pay-envelopes; there were so many things in the stores that would delight the heart of a little girl who had never had any toys except a rag doll and a broken flower-basket. Then there were pretty dresses to buy. The taste of Zelie Dionne took charge of that shopping. When he bought the first one—one that was white and fluffy—and Rosemarie walked out with him she displayed such feminine pride in fine feathers that he looked forward to future Saturdays nights and new dresses with anticipatory gusto. If one had questioned him he could have told weeks ahead just what his plans of purchases were, for he canvassed all the possibilities with the play-mamma who knew so well how to get value for a dollar—who knew the places to buy and whose needle helped to much.

It was a wicked summer for those who were doomed to the mills and the tenement-houses. The heat puffed and throbbed over the lashing machinery. The slashers seemed to spit caloric. The spinning-frames tossed it off their spindles. The looms fairly wove it into the warp. The thick, sweet, greasy air seemed to distil cotton-oil upon the faces of the workers. The nights proved to be no better than the days. The stuffy tenements gulped in the hot air of midday and held it as a person holds his breath. All the folks came out upon the little platforms that were ranged, story after story, above each other. They gasped for air in the narrow spaces between the high buildings. The stars above those narrow spaces did not sparkle and suggest coolness; they seemed to float above the hot earth like red cinders.

Every day the undertakers' wagons came “boombling” down the narrow canyons of streets between the “Blocks,” for the people were dying. The little white hearse was a more frequent visitor than the rusty black one; the ranks of the children were paying the greatest toll to death.

“But we shall not worry about our Rosemarie,” old Etienne told Farr. “Under the shade on the green grass she shall stay where outdoors can paint her cheeks the very fine color.”

But when the old man called for her at the good woman's house one morning something else than the sun had painted the little girl's cheeks—they were flushed with fever. He told the good woman to send straight for the doctor, and went to his work much disturbed.

Later in the day the yard overseer, passing the rack, saw that the man was working with furious energy. He was even reaching out his rake to capture floating stuff before it touched the bars.

“This seems to be your busy day, Pickaroon,” suggested the overseer.

“I make believe this old rack to be a good friend of mine and that the float stuff be sickness come at him—so I work hard to keep it away.”

The overseer went along about his business, commenting mentally on a Frenchman's imagination.

When the big mill bells clanged the noon hour Etienne hurried to the good woman's house. The city physician had been there and had left medicine—two tumblers of it. He had hurried in and had hurried away and had been curt and brusk and had not told her what was the trouble, so the woman reported. But the child had been sleeping.

She was drowsy all that evening while Farr held her in his arms and Etienne sat near by with Zelie Dionne, ministering solicitously.

“Her cheeks are not so hot,” said the young man many times. He talked hopefully to reassure himself as well as the others, for he had been dreadfully frightened when he had come from his work. Fright had trodden close on the heels of much joy—for the superintendent of the Consolidated had taken him out of the hot trench that day and had appointed him boss of twoscore Italian diggers, doubling his pay.

“I have been watching you,” the superintendent told him. “You're built to boss men. What kind of a bump was it that ever slammed you down like this?”

The answer the superintendent got was a smile which put further questions out of his mind.

“No, her cheeks are not so hot,” affirmed Farr when he laid her in her bed that night. “She will come along all right.”

But at the end of a week languor still weighed on the child. There were circles under her eyes and her cheeks were wan, and she did not clap her hands with the old-time glee when he brought her new toys; the playthings lay beside her on the bed and invited her touch—staring eyes of dolls, beady eyes of toy dogs—without avail.

“It is the queer way of being sick,” lamented the old man. “The doctor mebbe not know, because he very gruff and do not say. I think I know what may cure her—it has been done many time.

“Away up in the Canada country there is the shrine of the good Sainte Anne de Beaupre. There she stand in the middle of the big church and she hold her little grandson in her arm—the little boy Jesus. So she feel very tender toward poor, sick childs. Ah, I have seen her many time—I have seen childs healed there and made so very smart—all cure. She loves little childs. Oui. All about her feet are short, small crutch where she has cure childs. The piece of her wrist-bone is there in the sacristy—it look like a wee scrap of some gray moss under the glass. And it cure when the good priest say the word for her. I know the way to the shrine of La Bonne Sainte Anne—I will go with the little Rosemarie and she shall sing and dance after that.”

For a moment the cynical smile of the skeptic etched itself at the corners of Farr's mouth—the flash of the nature the young man had hidden during recent weeks.

He turned to Zelie Dionne and found her regarding him with grave eyes.

“It is as M'sieu' Etienne says,” she assured the young man. “La Bonne Sainte listens very tenderly when the children come to her. She is good to all, but her spirit leans over the poor little children and comforts them.”

“You have been there?”

“Many times, sir. It is not only the sick body that the good Sainte Anne heals—she comforts anybody who is in much sorrow—she tells the right way to go. There are many roads to take in this life—and if any one goes to her with prayer and humble soul she will guide. Ah, it is true, sir.”

There was earnestness in her features and conviction in her tones and it was plain that Zelie Dionne was speaking out of the depths of her heart, and Farr remembered what old Etienne had said about the son of Farmer Leroux.

“Yes, she will lead to the right way and make all well in the end,” asserted the girl. “And, most of all, she is kind and gentle to the little children.”

Between her and the wistful old man Farr divided tolerant and kindly gaze.

“I believe in more things than I used to,” he said. “I'm willing to admit in these days that things I do not understand may have truth in them. The doctor is not making her well. But it is a long way to that shrine.”

“It is a long way, so! But I am very scare for her as she lie here all day. I will carry her very tender—on the railway car—on the big boat. The good Sainte Anne is everywhere, too. She will help.”

“If faith can move mountains it ought to heal easily one poor, little toddlekins,” muttered Farr.

A new doctor came the next day, a breezy young man, a talkative and frank young man, the assistant of the over-worked city physician, whose municipal duties had obliged him to take on helpers.

“I shall ask him, hey—about the shrine?” whispered Etienne to Farr while the doctor was examining the child.

“Yes; he'll be more patient with you than with me.”

“And do you think that pretty soon she can go on the railway if I be very careful, good docteur?” asked the old man, wistfully, apologetically.

“Go where?”

“On the pilgrimage to the shrine of the good Sainte Anne in the Canada country.”

“Don't you realize what this case is?” demanded the young physician.

“He have not say—he hurry in, he hurry out.”

“You the grandfather?”

“No!”

The doctor turned on Farr.

“Father?”

“No.”

“Then I can talk right out to you two. This is a case of typhoid that will be fatal in twenty-four hours. There's no use lying about it.”

Old Etienne's mouth and eyes seemed to sink deep into his wrinkles, as if Time had forced him suddenly to swallow an extra score of years. He looked at Farr's blank and whitening face, and as quickly looked away.

“Break it to her grandmother,” advised the doctor, nodding toward the kitchen where the good woman was at work.

“But you don't know what you say,” stammered the old man.

“It so happens that I do, my man. I've been handling too many of these cases to be fooled. Why, I've got more than fifty cases of typhoid in this city—just myself.”

“But she has had sun and fresh air—on the canal bank where I tend the rack.”

“Sun and fresh air can't cure victims of the poison that is being pumped through the water-mains of this city,” snapped the doctor.

“Water-mains!”

The doctor turned and stared at Farr, for the husky croak of his exclamation had not sounded human.

“That's what I said. You can't have lived very long in this state not to know what we're up against on the water proposition.”

“I haven't lived here long. But about the child—it can't—”

“Why, this Consolidated Company is owned by Colonel Dodd and his politicians—and they own all the city and town water systems in this state,” said the doctor, no longer interested in his patient—exploding with the violence of imprudent youth. “They boss mayors, the aldermen, the politicians—boss the governor himself. That's because they've got the machine and the money. They've got a lot of money, because they won't wake up and spend it to lay lines far enough to tap the lakes in the hills. They tap these rotten rivers at our back doors, pump poison through the mains, sell it at prices that yield them twenty percent dividends. They say the water is all right—and back it up with analyses. I say it's all wrong.”

“And you damnation doctors are letting this go on—letting folks drink poison—telling us when it's too late!” shouted Farr, purple replacing the white in his face.

“Well, the folks up-town who have got wisdom and the money buy spring-water and mineral water. All the doctors don't agree that the river is responsible for the typhoid. With the governor and the legislature bossed by Dodd and his associates, and the city governments tied up by them, and the banks taking orders from the syndicate in case any town or an independent company tries to borrow money and install a water system, and the mill corporations and the tenement-block owners all in cahoots, a crusader who expected to get anywhere in politics or make money out of his business would stand a fine and dandy show, now wouldn't he? And the most of us in this world are trying to get ahead either in business or in politics.” He snapped the catch of his little black case. “Forget what I have said, you two. I hold my job through politics. I'm apt to talk too much when I get started. But don't drink city water, no matter if Colonel Dodd's analyses do give it a clean bill.”

Farr caught him at the door, restraining him with a heavy hand.

“You stay here, don't you let that baby die. By the gods, she sha'n't die!”

“My staying will do no good, my friend. The little girl is death-struck already. It's quick work with the children. Sometimes we can bring the grown folks through. Get another doctor, if you feel like it, but I've got to keep moving—there are lots of folks waiting for me in these tenements.”

He shook off Farr's hand and hurried away.

Old Etienne stood by the bedside, gazing down on the little sufferer, closing and unclosing his shriveled hands as if he were grasping at straws of hope, dragging the depths of his soul for reassurance even as he dragged his rake in the black waters of the canal.

“The whippersnapper lied about her. Because she's a baby he won't bother,” stormed Farr. “I'll ransack this town for doctors—I'll find one who knows his business.” He tiptoed to the bed and laid tender palm against the child's cheek. “I say her face isn't as hot as it was,” he persisted. “Where can I find a doctor with gray whiskers, Etienne? That young fool doesn't know.”

“There are many wise old docteurs in the long street named Western Boulevard—they live in the big houses—but they don't come to the tenement folks.”

“One of them will come this time even if I have to lug him on my back.”

He began to search for his hat, not remembering where he had tossed it in the haste and eagerness of his arrival at the good woman's house. He did not find it readily and he rushed out bareheaded.

“The sun and the air they do no good! It is the poison water—and the poor folks of the tenements they do not know!” muttered the old man. “That is what he say?” He went to the kitchen sink and unscrewed the faucet. He sniffed and made a wry face, then he ran his thin finger into the valve-chamber. He hooked and brought forth stringy slime, held it near his nose, and groaned. “The poor folks do not know. They who ask for the votes of the slashers, the weavers, the beamers—the men of the mills—they who ask votes do not want the poor folks to know, because the votes would not be given to them who sell poison in the water,” he told the astonished good woman who had watched his act.

“I am careful about my kitchen—I am neat—I wash everything, Etienne,” she assured him, sniffing at the slime in the sink, overcome by confusion, her housewife's reputation at stake.

“Yes, but you cannot wash the souls of them dam' scoundrels who send that water through the pipes to the poor people who can buy no other,” he raged. “This is not your blame—you did not know.” He pointed his finger, quivering, dripping with the slime, at the child on the bed. “They have murder her! With this!” He slatted his finger with the gesture of one who throws off a noisome serpent.

“But I drink the water—it hasn't made me sick,” she protested.

“You—me—odders that are all dry up—tough old fools—we ought to die and we don't,” he raged, stamping back and forth across the kitchen, waving his arms. “We have been poison so much we do not notice. But the poor little childs—the young folks that die—die in these tenements all the time—and we see the white ribbons hanging from the doors, so many place every day—the poor young folks with life ahead and much to live for even down here—they are poison and they do not know! Oh, le bon Dieu! Boil dem dam' devil in hell in the water they have sell to the poor!” He stopped, shocked by these words he heard coming from his mouth, and crossed himself contritely. “But I look at her—I hear what the docteur say—I talk and I cannot help!” He staggered into the room where the child lay, and sat down in a chair and held his face in his hands.

It was an aged and somewhat unctuous physician whom Farr brought. The doctor pursed his lips and puckered his eyebrows above the little wraith who minded him not at all, lying with eyes half closed, plucking with finger and thumb at the bedclothing.

“With a bit stronger constitution—if she were a little older—Take the case of an adult—”

“Say it short,” growled Farr, clenching his fists as if he wanted to beat indulgence for the child out of the hide of the world. “I'm paying you for her life.”

“I have nothing to sell you in this case—therefore there can be no pay.” He leaned over the bed and smoothed the moist, tangled hair away from the child's brow. “I can only give you something, my friend. I give you all my sympathy. This baby is departing on a long journey, and I'm Christian enough to believe that the way will be made very smooth for the feet of little children. That's the faith of an old man.”

There were both earnestness and tenderness in his tones—the smugness of the physician was gone. He shook Farr's hand and went out of the room, treading softly.

And the next day Rosemarie's tiny fingers stopped their flutterings and she went away—somewhere!

Walker Farr would not allow the tiny body of Rosemarie to be carried away in the white hearse. In his grief he had not been able as yet to dissociate the identity of the child from the poor little tenement in which her spirit had dwelt for the few barren years of her life; it seemed to him that she would be very lonely in the white hearse. He rode to the cemetery, holding the tiny casket across his knees. There was only the one carriage—it was sufficient to carry the friends of little Rosemarie: one Walker Farr and old Etienne and play-mamma Zelie Dionne.

The rack-tender sat opposite Farr and nursed a bundle on his knees. He had wrapped it surreptitiously.

The two men sent Zelie Dionne back to the city in the carriage. But they waited beside the grave until the sexton had finished his work; Farr felt an uncontrollable impulse to wait till all was ended, as he had always waited every night till the little girl was sound asleep and tucked up in bed in the good woman's house. He sat crouched on the edge of a turfed grave, elbows on his knees, his hands clutched into his shock of hair.

After the sexton had departed, tools on his shoulder, Etienne unwrapped the bundle. He began to arrange the child's toys on the grave.

“It is as the others do—the fathers and mothers of our faith in the tenement-houses,” he explained, wistfully, to the young man. He pointed to other graves in the vicinity, short and narrow graves. Toys were spread on them, too. They were the poor treasures of dead children. The toys had been left there in the vague, helpless yearning of parents who strove to reach their human consolation beyond the grave.

Farr gazed on these pitiful memorials of the children—from those graves to the new mound which covered Rosemarie. The ache that had been in his throat for so many hours grew more excruciating. He realized that a father in those circumstances would weep, but he did not feel like shedding tears, and he was ashamed of himself for what seemed lack of something within himself. What he felt then, what he had felt ever since that young doctor had passed sentence of death was surly, bitter rancor—the anger of a man who is robbed.

“Look all around at the graves,” said Etienne, tears in his wrinkles. “I know something better since I take off that faucet. Not all the martyr die when the lion eat 'em up and the fire burn 'em; there be some martyr these day, too. And sometimes, mebbe, some man what have the power will come here and see all these poor little grave and then he go and choke the lion what eat all these poor childs.”

“What kind of man would that be?” pondered Farr. At that moment he had little faith—much less faith than usual—in the decency of any human being; and for many years his faith in humankind had been expressed by a contemptuous snap of his finger.

To sit there longer and look at that fresh earth with the pathetic toys sprinkled over it was a torment his soul could not endure.

He arose and hurried away and Etienne followed him. They trudged in silence back to the city—Etienne to take his rake and pike-pole from the hands of the man who had substituted at the rack, and Farr to resume surly domination over his sweating Italians.

“The martyrs,” Etienne had called them. The notion of that stuck in Farr's brooding thoughts.

He tried to look deeper into his own heart than he had ever looked before and explain to himself just what motive had attracted him to the child in the first place; he had never been especially interested in children before. He found himself muttering, “And a little child shall lead them,” without understanding just why this child had led him so strangely.

If one Walker Farr had understood it at all and had been able to explain it to himself, he would have penetrated the mystery of the dynamics of love—the great gift to humanity that God has not seen fit to expose in its inner workings. Therefore, Farr strode here and there in the hot sun, spurred his diggers with crisp oaths, and on the heels of his profanity muttered to himself, “And a little child shall lead them.”

The tile boss of the Consolidated, whose crew was following the trench-diggers, accosted Farr, after several inspections of his lugubrious countenance.

“Don't you think you need to be cheered up a little?”

Farr scowled at him.

“I don't know what has disagreed with you, but you're certainly in a bad way,” pursued the boss. “Go up with the crowd to City Hall to-night and hear 'em open up the police scandals. Plenty of free fun for the heavy-hearted! There are about half a dozen fat cops in this city who'll be fried to a crisp on both sides, and the sound of the sizzling will be pleasant in the ears.”

“I'm not interested.”

“You will be, if you tend out. The hearing is before the mayor and the whole city government. Nothing very hefty in the way of charges—only loafing in beer-coolers during the heat of the day, spending their time chasing the labor-agitators out of the parks, and letting burglars keep house all summer in the mansions up-town while the owners are away at the seashore. It's all more or less of a joke.”

“Why don't the mayor and aldermen of this city attend to duty instead of jokes?”

“Oh, this city is run so smooth that there's nothing to do in the summer except stage a little farce comedy at City Hall.”

“Let me tell you that there's something to be investigated in this city that isn't a joke,” raged Farr, his bitter ponderings blossoming into speech.

“What's that?”

“Murder going on every day in this damnable town.”

“Well, I guess if there was any murder going on which we didn't hear about, even from our fat cops, it would be investigated, all right. What's the matter with you?”

“I'm glad now you told me about that hearing to-night,” stated Farr, ignoring the other's curiosity. “I'm glad I know when and where to locate the mayor and his men in session. I'll find out if they propose to waste the people's time hearing funny stories about policemen and are going to let murder go on while they are laughing.”

He strode away, cursing at his workmen as he tramped along the side of the ditch.

Farr knocked at the garret room of Etienne early that evening.

“I want you to come with me,” he commanded.

The old man obeyed without questions. As they walked along the streets Farr did not volunteer information. He was grimly sure that if Etienne should receive an inkling of what was expected of him the old man would not stop running until he had crossed the Canadian border.

They were ten minutes worming their way through the press that packed the corridors of City Hall. Groups were bulked at the doors admitting to the aldermen's room—men thatched against each other and overlapping like bees in a swarm at the door of a hive.

But the young man was tall and his shoulders were broad and he kept uttering the magic words, “Room for witnesses!” In his own consciousness he knew that what he should attempt to testify to that night was not on the slate, but the crowd accepted him as one of those from whom they anticipated entertainment, and allowed him to pass—and Etienne, holding to his young friend's coat, followed close and made his way before the throng could close in again.

The hearing began and progressed, and there was much laughter when the delinquencies of certain fat policemen were related—it was a free-and-easy affair—a sort of midsummer fantasy in municipal politics—a squabble between ward bosses who had become jealous in matters of the distribution of police patronage.

Walker Farr, standing against the wall of the audience-chamber, did not laugh. He was busy with thoughts of his own. This bland fooling in municipal matters while stealthy death, protected by city franchise, dripped, so he believed, from every faucet in the tenement-house district, stirred his bitter indignation. Etienne Provancher stood beside him, and the old man did not laugh, either, because he did not understand in the least what those men were talking about. And he was very uneasy, wistfully awe-stricken, hardly daring to touch with his hands the polished oak at his back. He was in the great hotel de ville whose exterior he had stared at many times without presuming or daring to enter the broad portals.

Then there came a recess while the mayor examined papers at his desk. The aldermen leaned back in their chairs with lighted cigars.

“Etienne,” whispered the young man, deep resolve thrilling him, his eyes blazing into the wondering gaze of the old man, “those men who sit behind those desks can do something to save the children and the poor folks in the tenements. But they must wake up, these men here must. You and I must try to wake them up!”

Etienne's eyes opened wide. He did not in the least comprehend how he could serve.

“I know you will not desert a friend, Etienne. I know you'll stand behind me. I know you love the children. So be a brave man now!”

The next moment Etienne was so frightened that he feared he would drop where he stood, because the young man raised his voice so that it rang through the great hall and all eyes were turned that way.

“Your honor the mayor, and gentlemen; I am a stranger here. But I humbly ask permission to address you.”

“If you are a witness in the police matter you will be called on in your turn after the recess,” stated the mayor.

“I am not a witness in the police matter. I am here on other business.”

“There is no other business before this meeting.”

“But there should be, sir, for the business I have come on is a dreadful matter. It is a matter of life and death.”

A hush fell on those in the chamber, and the mayor and his aldermen leaned forward, staring apprehensively. They had been warned that there were dangerous labor-agitators in the city. Many meetings had been broken up by the police at the request of Colonel Dodd, president of the Consolidated Water Company, and other employers had backed him. This tall young man had startled them with his sudden outbreak.

“It is a matter, gentlemen, which concerns every man, woman, and child in this city—vitally concerns them every hour of the day—every hour they are awake. You say you have no other business now except this silly police investigation. For God's sake, wake up and attend to real business—save the people's lives. Here you are in session and here are the people to listen.”

“State your complaint. Be very brief,” commanded the mayor.

But Walker Farr, it was plain, possessed craft as well as courage; he realized that curiosity, properly tickled, will make men more patient in listening.

“First, I want to call a witness. I am not known to this city. But I have here a man whom many of you know, I'm sure, for he has stood out in plain view of a street where many pass, and has worked there for thirty years. It is Etienne Provancher.”

Several men laughed when Farr pushed the old man into view. There was a murmured chorus of “Pickaroon.”

“It's for the children—the poor folks—for the memory of our little girl,” hissed Farr in the old man's ear. “Will you go to your bed to-night—the night of the day we buried her—knowing that—you are a coward? These are only men. We must tell them so that they will know. Speak! Tell them!” He set his firm clutch around the trembling old Frenchman's arm and held him out where all could see.

“I do not know how to talk here—to so much man—to the lords of the city,” stammered the miserable old man, licking his parched lips, scared until all was black before his eyes.

The hush was profound. Men curved their palms at their ears, wondering what old Pickaroon could have to say in City Hall.

“Remember what we have left up there—in the cemetery—the poor children in their graves,” muttered Farr, again bending close to Etienne's ear.

Then, thus reminded, thus spurred, all his Gallic emotion bursting into flame in him suddenly, the old man felt the desperate resolution that often animates the humble and ignorant in great emergencies. The little ones had been martyrs—why not he? That thought flashed through the tumult in his brain.

“Yes, since you all hark for me to speak I will speak,” he declared. “Messieurs, I am a poor man. Not wise. It is very hard for me to talk to you. But I have been to-day up where the little children are bury—so many of them, with their playthings on the graves. I went to take there anodder little child, poor baby girl. I leave her there with the odder ones—so very lonesome all of them—their modders cannot sing them to sleep any more.”

“This is irregular,” cried the mayor. “What do you want?”

“Nottings for maself,” cried Etienne, passionately shrill in his tone now. “But I have to ask you, masters of this city, how much longer shall you send poison down the water-pipes to the poor folks and the children in the tenement blocks? It is poison that has kill our little Rosemarie—and all her life ahead! The doctor say so—and he say I cannot understand about the rich man, why he do it. But I understand that the childs are dying. I say you shall not sent that water—if you do send it I will bring here the fadders who have lost their babies and the modders of the babies.” His lips curled back in his excitement and froth flecked his mouth. “Sacred name of God! We shall tear that poison-factory up from the ground with our bare hands!”

“Officer, put that man out of the room,” ordered the mayor.

“Won't you listen to us?” shouted Farr. “You are the chief magistrate of this city. You and these aldermen are the guardians of the people. Are you going to sit there in those cushioned chairs and let a crowd of rich assassins murder the poor people?”

Men hissed that speech.

The mayor rapped his gavel furiously.

“This is no matter to be brought up here at this time. You're slandering honorable men, sir! We have other business.”

“Can there be any other business as important as this?”

“Put both of these men out, officer.”

“Are you and these aldermen owned by the water syndicate, as report says you are?” cried Farr. “Look here, you men, men in this room and at the door! This is your City Hall—these aldermen are elected by your votes. Aren't you going to demand that the people be heard in this matter? Don't you know that typhoid fever is killing off the children in this city—and that poison water is the cause of it?”

“It's rotten stuff to drink—we all know that,” cried a voice. “But there'll have to be a change in politics in this state before they'll give us anything else.”

Two policemen elbowed their rough way to Farr and Etienne.

“The big chap is right—it's about time to have this water question opened up, Mr. Mayor,” called another voice.

“Open it up in a legal and proper way, then,” snapped the mayor. “Go to the law.”

“That's it—go to the law—go to the law,” jeered another. “And we'll all be dead and the lawyers will have all our money before the thing is decided.”

There were more hisses.

But an outburst of indorsing voices indicated that many men in that chamber understood more or less of the political management behind the Consolidated Water Company.

“If a thing is wrong, change it. What better law do you need than that?” asked Farr, disregarding an officer's thumb that jerked imperious gesture.

“When you know a little more law you won't be ignoramus enough to come into a public hearing and try to break it up. You'd better go and study law,” said the indignant mayor. He pounded his gavel to indicate that the recess was over.

“I'll take your advice,” replied Farr, towering over the policeman and vibrating his finger at his Honor. “If you hadn't found law so handy in your own case you wouldn't forget yourself in your excitement and recommend it to others. If we've got to fight the devil we'd better use his weapons.”

Men shouted approval all around him.

“Clear the room,” ordered the mayor. “Everybody out!”

“Keep your hands off,” Farr advised the officer nearest him. “I'll go without any help. I have found out that I'm only wasting my time in this place.”

In the corridor men pressed around him. Some of them insisted on shaking his hand. Others shouted commendation. Still others exhibited only frank curiosity in the stalwart stranger. And others were clamorously hostile.

“By gad! If you wanted to start something you took the right way to do it,” affirmed one of the throng.

“You showed good courage,” declared an elderly man with an earnest face. “Some of the rest of us have tried to do something in the past. But those who didn't have much power were either kept out or kicked out of any office in city government or the legislature—and those who did amount to something were gobbled up by the machine. The machine can pay. Working for the people isn't very profitable. So I'm afraid you won't get very far.”

“You needn't worry about that chap not getting along all right,” remarked one of the group—but his indorsement was ironical. “He's a construction boss for the Consolidated, and he went into that hearing to start some kind of a back-fire. Shrewd operators—the Consolidated folks.”

The men about Farr pulled away from him and there was considerable malicious laughter in the crowd.

“So we see the game, even if we don't catch on to the meaning of it just now,” said the observant one.

Farr squared his shoulders. They stared at him with fresh interest and a bit of additional respect. They saw in him something more than a mere popular agitator—a disturber of a municipal hearing; he must be a trusted agent of the great political machine, executing a secret mission.

“You're right—I have been working for the Consolidated,” he admitted in tones that all could hear.

“Move on! Get outdoors! Clear this corridor—all of you,” shouted a captain of police who had come hurrying up from down-stairs and had taken command of the situation.

The crowd began to surge on, following Farr.

“I went to work digging in their trenches because I struck this town on my uppers and needed the money—needed it quick. I was promoted to be a boss. But I want to tell you now, gentlemen, that I do not work for the Consolidated.”

“I reckon you're right,” said somebody. “I just overheard a man telephoning to the superintendent about you—and if I'm any judge of a conversation you are not working for the Consolidated. Not any more!”

“I'm sorry you're going to leave the city,” lamented the elderly man. “We need chaps like you.”

“I'm not going to leave the city.”

“You might just as well,” counseled one of the bystanders, “after what you said in that hearing. If you get a job in this city after this you'll be a good one!”

When they were outside City Hall, Farr waited for a moment on the steps. Etienne, still trembling after that most terrible experience of his placid life, pressed close at the young man's side.

“Will all you gentlemen please take a good look at me so that you'll know me when you see me again?” invited the ex-boss for the Consolidated.

They stared at him. His face was well lighted by the arc-light under the arch of the door.

“I am not a labor-leader, nor a walking delegate, nor a politician, nor an anarchist. You men go home and unscrew the faucets in your kitchens, take a good sniff, and pull the slime out of the valve. Then remember that the mayor and aldermen of this city wouldn't listen to me to-night in the Hall that the tax-payer's money built. Also remember that a little later they will listen to me. Gentlemen, my name is Walker Farr. I'm going to stay here in this city. Good night.”

As usual at nine-thirty in the afternoon, the big tower clock on the First National Bank building in the city of Marion pointed the finger of its minute-hand straight downward.

As usual, at this hour, as he had done for many years, Colonel Symonds Dodd eased himself down from the equipage that brought him to his office. This day the vehicle was his limousine car.

In view of the fact that Colonel Dodd owned the First National block the big clock seemed to point its finger at him with the bland pride of a flunky in a master. It seemed to say, “Behold! The great man is here!”

Colonel Dodd was never embarrassed when fingers were pointed at him wherever he went. If a man is lord of finance and politics in his state he expects to be pointed out.

When he stepped from his car he carried in his arms, with great tenderness, a long parcel which was carefully wrapped in tissue-paper. He always carried a similar parcel when he came to his office. Each morning the gardener of the Dodd estate laid choice flowers on the seat of that vehicle which had been chosen to convey the master to the city.

Colonel Dodd coddled the long parcel with the care a nurse would have bestowed on an infant—but he kicked his fat leg clumsily at an urchin who got in his way on the sidewalk. A college professor of Marion happened to be passing at the moment and saw the act and knew what the colonel was carrying in his arms. The professor made a mental note of fresh material for his lecture on “The Psychological Phenomena of the Bizarre in the Emotions.” The professor had just met a woman wheeling a cat out in a baby-carriage.

The doctor had advised exercise for the colonel—a small amount. The colonel toilsomely climbed the one flight of stairs to his office. That was his daily quota of exercise.

A little man with a beak of a nose was waiting in the corridor and hastened to unlock a door marked “Private,” and the colonel went in, and the little man locked the door and tiptoed down the corridor to the general offices.

Before he removed his hat Colonel Dodd carefully stripped the tissue-paper from the damp flowers. There were two huge bouquets. He set these into vases of ornate bronze, one on each end of his desk. He patted and stroked the flowers until they appeared to best advantage. He stood back and bestowed affectionate regard on them. No human being had ever reported the receipt of such a look from Colonel Symonds Dodd. It was rather astonishing to find softness in him in respect to flowers. He seemed as hard as a block of wood. He had a squat, square body and his legs seemed to be set on the corners of that body. His square face was smooth except for a wisp of whisker, minute as a water-color brush, jutting from under his pendulous lower lip.

He hung up his hat and stood for a moment before a massive mirror. The report in Marion was that he stood before that mirror and made up his expression to suit the character of a day's business.

Then he sat down at his desk and stuck a pudgy finger on one button of a battery of buttons.

A girl entered with a promptitude which showed that she had been waiting for the summons.

He did not look up at her. His gaze was on one of the bouquets.

She brought a portfolio and packets of letters all neatly docketed.

His salutation was merely, “Miss Kilgour.” Colonel Dodd did not deal in many “Good-mornings.” It was also reported in Marion and the state that his stock of urbanity was so small he was compelled to expend it very thriftily. He certainly did not waste any of it on his office help. He might have afforded at least one glance at the girl, for she was extremely pretty. Still another report in Marion was to the effect that he had selected Kate Kilgour as his secretary as the final artistic touch to the beauty of his private office in order that he might have a perfect ensemble. She did seem, so far as his interest in her went, to be only a part of that ensemble which he occasionally swept carelessly with his gaze—he reserved all his intimate admiration for the bouquets.

She laid his “Strictly Personal” letters on his fresh blotter.

She sat down and began to read the business letters aloud, not waiting for his orders to begin. It was her daily routine, business transacted as Colonel Dodd wished it to be transacted—crisply, promptly, directly.

He dictated replies, usually laconic, even curt, as soon as she had finished each letter. His eyes were on the flowers as he talked.

When the letters were finished she retired with her portfolio and her notes, the thick carpet muffling the sound of her withdrawal.

After he had slit the envelopes of his personal correspondence and had read the contents the colonel pushed another button. The little man who had been waiting in the corridor slipped edgewise in at the door. He was thin and elderly and his knob of a head, set well down on his pinched shoulders, had peering eyes on each side of that beak of a nose. When he walked across the room his long arms were behind him under his coat-tails and held them extended, and he bore some resemblance to a bird. In fact, one did not require much imagination to note resemblance to a bird in Peter Briggs—many folks likened him to a woodpecker—for he flitted to and fro in Colonel Dodd's anteroom, among those awaiting audience, tapping here and rapping there with the metaphorical beak of questions, starting up the moths and grubs of business which men who came and waited hid under the bark of their demeanor.

“Seventeen, Colonel Dodd. Five for real business; twelve of them are sponges.”

“The five?”

“Chief Engineer Snell of the Consolidated, Dr. Dohl of the State Board of Health, the three promoters of the Danburg Village Water system.”

“Send in Snell.”

Engineer Snell did not sit in the presence of his president, nor did the president ask him to sit.

“Briggs tells me the Danburg men are here.”

“They're waiting out there, Colonel Dodd.”

“Quitting?”

“I don't think so—just yet. They look too mad. I gave 'em the harpoon in good shape, as is usual, but I didn't expect they'd run here so soon. Thought they would flop a little longer.”

“They got their poke from Stone & Adams yesterday afternoon, did they?”

“Yes, Colonel. My report to Stone & Adams showed that the Danburg plan of levels is faulty, that their unions are not up to contract, that their station and pumps are inefficient for the demands. So Stone & Adams had to tell 'em that their bonds were turned down.”

“Do you know whether they have tried another banking-house yet?”

“I don't believe they have had time, Colonel.”

“But such fellows always do try. Their banging in here on me so quickly looks a little irregular. In business, you know, Snell, if you tie a tin can to a dog and he runs and ki-yi's, that's perfectly natural and you can sit back and wait for nature to take its course. If the dog doesn't run, but sits down and gnaws the string in two—then look out for the dog.”

“I must admit they're coming here sudden after their jolt. They look mad. But I figure they must have quit. The jolt was a hard one, for Stone & Adams had been leading 'em on—according to orders.”

The colonel stared at a bouquet.

“Have you got your other report—the side report—in shape for me to get a hasty idea? If they have come here with a proposition—want to quit and cover themselves, I need information right now.”

Engineer Snell laid papers on the desk. He proceeded to explain.

“If you don't feel you have time to go over it—don't want to keep the Danburg crowd waiting—I can tell you that the plant is pretty nearly all right. So much all right that you can afford to slip 'em a couple of thousand apiece on top of what they have already spent. I don't suppose you want 'em to holler too loud. I can tell you that Davis, Erskine, and Owen—those men out there—are cleaned out. They have put in all their ready money. They were depending on Stone & Adams for the first instalment from the bonds, so as to take up some thirty-day notes and pay bills due on material.”

Colonel Dodd meditated, pulling on his wisp of whisker.

“It's one thing to encourage enterprise in this state—it's another thing to be everlastingly paying rake-offs to local promoters who grab a franchise when we're not looking and then hold us up. I don't want to hurt the Danburg men. But my stockholders expect certain things of me and it's about time men in this state understand that we propose to control the water question. Snell, you go and talk to those Danburg men like a father to children. Send them in here smoothed down and we'll do the right thing by them.”

He signaled for Briggs and told him to admit Dr. Dohl.

The doctor, chairman of the State Board of Health, was a chubby man with a tow-colored, fan-shaped beard. He sat down and sprung his eye-glasses on his bulgy nose and drew out a package of manuscript.

“Colonel, I have felt it my duty to write a special chapter on the typhoid situation in this state for the report of the State Board of Health.”

“Very well, Doctor.” The colonel was curt and his tone admitted nothing of his sentiments.

“DO you care to listen to it? It rather vitally concerns the Consolidated Water Company.”

“You don't blame us for all these typhoid cases, do you?”

“No, sir—not for all of them.”

“Why blame us for any of them? Our analyses show that we're giving clean water. How about dirty milkmen and the sanitary arrangements in these tenement-houses and all such? It's the fashion to blame a corporation for everything bad that happens in this world.”

“We have placed blame on milkmen where any blame is due,” stated Dr. Dohl. He tapped his manuscript. “But I have spent considerable of my department's money in making a house-to-house canvass, tracing the sources. The man before me guessed. I have made sure! Colonel Dodd, the Consolidated water is pretty poisonous stuff these days.”

“What's the matter in this state all of a sudden?” snapped the colonel. “I am told that a lunatic almost broke up our city government meeting the other night, shouting that the Consolidated is trying to poison folks. You're too level-headed a man to get into that class, Dr. Dohl.”

“I'll allow you to set me down in any class which seems fitting from your point of view,” replied the doctor, stiffly. “But if that lunatic, as you call him, got an angle-worm or a frog's leg out of his tap I don't blame him for breaking up a meeting of the city government which will tolerate the water which is being pumped through the city mains just now.”

“We're working on the filtering-plant—it will be all right in a little while. It got out of hand before we realized it,” said the colonel, now a bit apologetic.

“In this crisis your filter amounts to about that!” The doctor snapped a pudgy finger into a plump palm. “The river-water in this state has been poisoned. You must go into the hills—to the lakes, Colonel Dodd.”

“You don't mean to say that you recommend that in your report, Doctor?”

“Absolutely—emphatically.”

“Without stopping to think of the millions it will cost my company to build over its plants?”

“It has come to a point where it isn't a question of money, Colonel.”

“We can't afford it.”

“Then let the cities and towns of the state buy in their water-plants and do it.”

“Good Jefferson! Don't you know that every city and town in this state where we have a water-plant has already exceeded its debt limit of five percent?”

“Do I understand you as intimating, Colonel Dodd, that there is no help for this present condition of affairs?”

“Look here—I'm neither a Herod nor a Moloch, even if some of the crack-brained agitators in this state will have it that way,” protested the magnate, with heat. “Are you going to print that report before you have given us time to turn around?”

“With one hundred deaths a day from typhoid fever in this state, Colonel, that matter of time becomes mighty important.”

“Look here, Dohl, don't you remember that it was my indorsement that gave you your job?”

“I do, Colonel Dodd. But I'm a physician, not a politician.”

“I see you're not,” retorted the colonel, dryly. “But you're a member of our political party, and you know that the Consolidated and its associate interests are the backbone of that party. There are a lot of soreheads in this state, and we're having a devil of a time to hold 'em in line. Every savings-bank in this state, furthermore, holds bonds of the Consolidated. Do you want to start a panic? You've got to be careful how you touch the first brick standing in a row. Dohl, you leave that report with me. I'll go over it. I'll take the matter up with the directors. We'll move as fast as possible.”

The doctor hesitated, stroking the folds of his manuscript.

“You're not doubting my word, are you?” demanded the colonel.

“No, sir!” Even the physician's sense of duty did not embolden him to persist under this scowl of the man of might.

The colonel took the document from Dr. Dohl's relaxing hands and shoved it into a pigeonhole of the big desk.

“You must understand that pipe-lines to lakes cannot be laid in a minute as a child strings straws, Doctor,” admonished the magnate.

“Do you propose to lay lines to the lakes, Colonel? I need to throw a little sop to my conscience if my report is delayed.”

“Everything right will be done in good time, Dr. Dohl. I will proceed as rapidly as possible, considering that the law, finance, and politics are all concerned. As you are leaving,” he added, giving his visitor the blunt hint that the interview was over, “I must draw your attention to the fact that if you bludgeon the Consolidated with a report like this it may be a long time before we can move in the matter. You'll only scare the banks and set the cranks to yapping. Just remember that you're a state officer and have a weighty responsibility to your party and to financial interests.”

Dr. Dohl went away. He sourly realized that he was only a cog in the big machine; that for a moment he had threatened to develop a rough edge and start a squeak, but the big file had been used on him. It had been used on many another of the State House cogs, as he well knew. Responsibility as to his party! Safety and sanity in regard to financial interests! He knew that these talismanic words had been used to control even the lords in national politics. He departed from the Presence, muttering his rebellion, but fully conscious that a political Samson in modern days made but a sorry spectacle of himself when he started to pull down the pillars of the party temple.

He continued to mutter when he walked through the anteroom.

Most of the men who waited there had faces as lowering as the visage which Dr. Dohl displayed.

The doctor had not lost all faith in his own fearlessness and rectitude of motive, but he was obliged to acknowledge to himself that just then he was a rather weak champion.

“However, I'd like to lay eyes on the sort of man who can unjoint this devilish combination of politics and law and finance,” he informed himself, trying to justify his own retreat.

His eyes, in passing, swept a stranger.

The stranger was a tall young man with wavy hair and brown eyes. He sat patiently, nursing a broad-brimmed black hat on his knees.

“I'd like to see that man!” repeated Dr. Dohl, mentally, sugar-coating his disgust at his own weakness.

If mortal man were gifted with prescience Dr. Dohl would have stared out of countenance the tall young man who sat on a bench in the outer office of the state's overlord and nursed a broad-brimmed hat upon his knees.

“I appreciate zeal in public affairs,” mused Colonel Dodd, gazing at the door which Dr. Dohl had closed behind him. “But once there was a retriever dog who chased his master with a stick of dynamite that had a sputtering fuse.”

He set his broad hands upon the arms of his chair, derricked himself up, and went over to the mirror. He peered at himself and seemed to rearrange his countenance, much as a woman would smooth the ruffled plumage of her hat.

“We're not murderers,” he informed the composed visage which the mirror held forth to him. “But we haven't got to the point where we're letting lunatics who break up city government meetings, or crank doctors, tell us how to spend a million or two of the money we've worked hard to accumulate. There's getting to be too much of this telling business men in this country how to run their business. If we're peddling typhoid fever in spite of what our analyses tell us, then we'll go ahead, of course, and clean up.” Colonel Dodd was willing to acknowledge that much to himself, surveying his countenance in the mirror. “But we'll continue to run our own business,” he added.

Then he sat down again in his chair and pushed a button. “Briggs,” he directed, “send in those three men from Danburg.”

He whirled his swivel-chair and sat there at his desk, his rectangular front squared to meet them.

The three men who came in were of the rural businessmen type, and their faces were not amiable. Two of them halted in the middle of the sumptuous apartment and the third stepped a couple of paces ahead of them. He carried a huge roll of engineers' plans under his arm.

“My name is Davis, as I suppose you know, Colonel Dodd,” he reported.

“Have seats, gentlemen.”

“We are tired of sitting,” stated the spokesmen, with sour significance.

“I understand, Mr. David. But mornings are very busy times for me. I was attending to appointments made beforehand. You made no appointment, and I was not expecting you.”

There was silence, and the three men glowered on him. It was evident that settled animosity emboldened these country merchants even in the presence of Colonel Symonds Dodd.

“I was not expecting you, I say.”

The colonel's demeanor displayed a little uncertainty; he had rather expected suppliants. He knew what a nasty blow had been dealt these men the day before.

“Probably not,” assented Davis. “You expected that after Stone & Adams yanked the gangplank out from under us yesterday we would put in at least one day tearing around to other banking firms, trying to place our bonds.”

“Why—why—Well, if Stone & Adams—You naturally wouldn't take the verdict of one banking-house on a matter of bonds, would you?”

“Look here, Colonel Dodd, we understand you—clear way down to the ground—and we may as well save wear on our tongues. And first of all we have come right here to save shoe-leather. We have come straight to headquarters. Do you suppose we're going to gallop around this city to bankers after the word has gone out about us? Not much! We are here in the captain's office, and you can't fool us about that.”

“I never heard such—” the colonel began to sputter.

“I know you never did—and it's getting your goat,” asserted the blunt countryman. “We've got a plain and pertinent question to put to you—do you intend to ram us to the wall in our water deal?”

The head of the state's water trust simulated anger perfectly, even if he didn't feel it. And there was astonishment in his anger.

“What have I to do with your dealings with bankers?” he demanded. “Probably your plant isn't up to pitch.”

“That talk doesn't go with us, not for a minute, Colonel Dodd,” shouted the undaunted Davis. “You're talking to business men, not to children. We offered to leave the matter of our plan to any three engineers in this state. Why is it that Stone & Adams refuse to take the word of anybody except your man, Snell?”

“They probably want the word of the best consulting-engineer in the state.”

“But he's your man.”

“He is our man because he is the best. We hire him for our work. But we do not control his opinions when he is consulted by others. Oh no! And I want to tell you, my men, that I refuse to listen to any more such talk from you.”

“Then call in one of your political policemen and have us put out,” invited the unterrified Davis.

“Build your plant right and your bonds will sell. Our bonds sell when Mr. Snell reports on our plants.”

“We'll save our strength in the matter of building plants and running around trying to place bonds with brokers who have been tipped off by the money trust of this state. We propose to get it straight from you first. You can't fool us for one minute, I repeat! We'll have our last wiggle right here. Will you take your hands off our affairs?”

“I haven't put my hands on your affairs,” shouted Colonel Dodd, furious at being baited in this amazing manner. Never before had any visitor dared to raise his voice in that office. “You're crazy.”

“You're right—we are—pretty nearly so. Myself and these two neighbors of mine have tied up every dollar we can rake and scrape to build a water-plant for our little village and give our folks clean water from a lake, not the rotten poison you would pump out of our millstream for us. We have tried to do this for our town and make an honest dollar for ourselves. Now you have got us lashed to the mast, financially, so you think, and you propose to step in and gobble our franchise. That's enough to make men crazy.”

“Get out of my office!”

“You grabbed the franchise and common stock of Westham that way,” declared Davis. “You scooped in Durham and Newry and a lot of others. But I'm here to warn you, Colonel Dodd. Danburg is going to choke you if you try to swallow it. We are only countrymen, and we know it. You have always done all the bossing and threatening in this state up to now. But I tell you, Colonel Dodd, there comes a time when the rabbit will spit in the bulldog's eye. If we three go out of this room in the same spirit in which we came into it something will drop in this state. We shall have a story to tell.”

Colonel Dodd swung his chair around and faced his desk.

“Gentlemen, let's not get excited,” he appealed. Ostensibly he reached for a pencil. He also pushed a button he had not touched before that day. Then he came around slowly on the swivel of his chair. “You have mentioned certain towns, Davis. Those towns have water systems that are a part of the Consolidated, to be sure. But the men who promoted those plants and were unable to complete them came to us and begged us to step in and take the burden off their hands.” While Colonel Dodd talked he kept glancing, but in an extremely unobtrusive manner, at a huge and magnificent Japanese screen that occupied one corner of his office. “It is easy enough to start ventures in this world, Mr. Davis. An inexperienced man can do that. But it most often takes experience and a lot of money to install a successful water plant.”

“We want to get down to cases, Colonel Dodd,” insisted the spokesman. “We haven't come here without posting ourselves. We know how you have talked to the others. But you can't bluff us. You propose to steal our plant, such of it as we have been able to build to date. One word from you to the money gang takes the hoodoo off us. Now talk business! Do you propose to pot us like you have the rest?”

The heart of the big rose in the center of the screen flashed once with a glow that was imperceptible unless one had been gazing at it, watching for a signal. Colonel Dodd understood that Miss Kate Kilgour had entered through a low door and was behind the screen, ready with note-book and pencil. He leaned back in his deep chair and interlocked his pudgy fingers across his paunch.

“I assure you I have not the least interest in your projects as to the Danburg water system, Mr. Davis, Mr. Erskine, Mr. Owen.” He dwelt on the names. “The Consolidated has plenty of its own business to attend to.”

“But I say you are trying to run our business, too—no, ruin it!”

“Do you realize, Mr. Davis, that you are accusing me of criminal conspiracy—making a statement that might go hard with you in a court of law? You have accused me of trying to discredit you with banking-houses. Can you produce any proof except your foolish and unjust suspicions? You have been made angry by a refusal to handle your bonds. I don't sell bonds. I build and operate water systems.”

“The same old game,” sneered Davis. “Your water syndicate, the railroads of this state, the banks, the politics—they're all snarled up together like snakes in winter quarters. I say, if you pass the word our bonds will be taken. If you don't do it, I'm going to trot out of this office and expose your highway-robber system.”

“In one breath you threaten me because you say I'm interfering in your affairs. In the next breath you threaten me because I refuse to interfere. You are making dangerous talk, Davis. I may call the courts to pass on that threat. There is only one proposition I can make to you—and that's strictly in the line of my business. If you are tied up financially—are at the end of your resources and must have help—I'll give you my aid in getting the Consolidated to take over the Danburg plant at a fair valuation.”

“Is that the best word you've got for us?”

“I have made you an honorable business proposition.”

“That your final talk?”

“Absolutely.”

Davis found words inadequate for his boiling emotions just then. He advanced on Dodd, who shrank back into his chair. Davis whipped the long roll of plans out from under his arm, held the roll by one end, and swung it like a bat-stick. But he did not strike at Dodd, as the magnate seemed to apprehend.

He swung over the colonels' head and swept the top of the desk clean of everything; vases, bouquets, objets d'art, all went rolling and smashing to the floor.

Colonel Dodd ducked low and held his square head in his hands as if he feared that the next assault would be on that. But Davis led his associates out of the room through the door which Briggs had flung open, summoned by the crash in his master's holy of holies.

For the first time, perhaps, in the history of that private office the door leading into the anteroom was left open and unguarded. Briggs ran into the room, his coat-tails streaming, his inquisitive beak stretched forward. On his heels followed the tall young man who had been waiting in the anteroom. It was Walker Farr, who closed the door behind him, shutting out the curious anteroom clients who flocked and peered.

When the colonel lifted his head he found himself looking squarely into the eyes of this tall young man whom he in no way remembered.

Briggs went down on his hands and knees and began to pick up the debris.

One of the bouquets had rolled to the colonel's feet, and he stooped with some difficulty, recovered it, and laid it across his knees. He gazed past Farr with a frown—with a significant, dismissing jerk of his head. The young man turned in time to see the capitalist's handsome secretary. The amazing riot in the sanctuary of her employer had brought her from behind the screen. Uncertainty and alarm were in her eyes and excitement had flushed her cheeks. Against the background of the gorgeous screen she seemed a veritable apparition of loveliness, and while Farr stared, frankly admiring her, recognizing her, exchanging that startled recognition with her, she disappeared.

“How do you dare to come into my private office in this fashion?”

“I have waited in that anteroom every day for ten days, trying to get an audience. The door was open just now and I came in.”

“It's your own fault if you haven't seen me. I see men who have business with me and who send in an explanation of that business.”

“So I have been told by that man,” stated Farr, pointing to Briggs, who was groping about on the carpet. “But my business with you couldn't be discussed through a third party.”

“Now that you're in here, what is that business?”

“I'll tell you first what it is not, so that there won't be any misunderstanding in your mind about me. I am not here to borrow money, beg money, ask for work, ask for a personal favor of any kind, solicit a political job, nor have I anything to sell to you or to give to you. So, you see, my business is different.”

With a quick motion he brought out a parcel which he had held concealed in the broad-brimmed hat.

Briggs straightened up on his knees and remained thus, seemingly paralyzed, staring at the parcel.

The capitalist sank back in his chair, his face growing greenish white.

“Don't you throw that bomb!” he gasped. In his panic he was not able to deduce any other explanation for the presence of this stranger who had so strenuously disclaimed all reasonable motives for his visit. He quailed before this man who seemed to be a dangerous crank—for Farr's attire was out of the ordinary and his eyes were flashing and his poise was that of a man sure of himself.

“What do you think I have here in this package?”

“Dynamite!” mumbled the magnate.

“It's worse.”

Colonel Dodd rolled his head to and fro on the back of his chair, shutting his eyes in vain attempt to find somebody to whom to appeal for help. He started a furtive hand in the direction of the battery of buttons.

“Keep your hands in your lap,” commanded Farr. “I say that what I have here in this package is worse than dynamite.” He tore the paper and disclosed a half-dozen faucets that were still dripping with slime. “You know now what I mean, Colonel Dodd. This is the stuff your water company is pumping through the pipes in this state.”

The president of the Consolidated straightened in his chair, but he had been thoroughly frightened.

While Farr talked on the colonel seemed to be gathering himself—recovering his voice.

“It's a mighty bold act for me to come in here like this, Colonel Dodd. I understand it. I'm a poor man and a stranger in this city. Just consider me a voice—call me Balaam's ass if you want to. But I've come up from the tenement-house districts where the children are dying.”

“What do you want?” The magnate discharged the question explosively.

“Pure water in the city mains.”

“Whom do you represent?”

Farr hesitated. Colonel Dodd scented possible political strategy in this visit, and was controlling his ire in order to probe the matter.

“Come, my man. Out with it! Who commissioned you to come here?”

“I'll not claim that I have any powers delegated to me, sir.”

“How did you dare to force your way in here?”

“Considering what kind of a man I was a few weeks ago, I'm having pretty hard work to explain to myself what I'm doing, sir.”

The colonel knotted bushy brows. This person seemed to be playing with him. “Who told you to come here?”

“The soul of a little girl who was named Rosemarie.”

Colonel Dodd came out of his chair, thoroughly angry—and yet he repressed his anger. This person, more than ever, seemed to him to be a crank with vagaries.

Farr put up a protesting palm. His tones trembled, and into them he put all the appeal a human voice can compass.

“I know I astonish you, Colonel,” he added. “I astonish myself. I'm not much on self-analysis. I don't know just what has come over me the last few weeks. But they do say the Deity picks out queer instruments when He wants things done. Man to man, now, forgetting you're a mighty man and I'm a small one, won't you say you'll give the people of this state pure water instead of poison?”

“You don't think you can stroll in here and coax me to build over the whole Consolidated system, do you?”

“That isn't the idea at all, sir. Treat me simply as a voice—a jog of your conscience—a reminder. I'll go away and you'll never see me again.”

“If you think the cranks in this state can influence me in the least item about running my own business you're the worst lunatic outside the state asylum,” declared the colonel, with passion.

“You mean that what I have asked on behalf of women and children hasn't had any effect on you?”

“Not the slightest. Get out!” In his present mood Colonel Dodd would not admit to this interloper that he planned reforms, and in that moment he unwittingly created his Frankenstein's monster.

Farr retreated a couple of steps and bowed. “Colonel Dodd, in my part of the West we fellows had a little code: help a woman, always, everywhere; tote a tired child in our arms; and, in the case of a man who announced himself an enemy, give him fair notice when it came time to pull guns. Better get your weapon loose on your hip.”

He bowed again and went out.

Briggs rose from his knees and his master snapped an angry stare from the door that the young man had closed softly behind himself.

“What kind of a resort is my office getting to be? Do you know who that devilish fool is, Briggs?”

“No, sir. He has been hanging around here, that's all I know. I kept at him.” He made a little dab of his woodpecker beak. “But I couldn't find out anything from him.”

“Well find out from somebody else, then. And get judge Warren on the 'phone for me.”

When the bell rang and the colonel heard the voice of the Consolidated's corporation counsel greeting him on the wire he ordered the judge to come over at once.

“Hell has just burned through here in three small patches,” stated the colonel, grimly. “The sooner we turn on the Consolidated hose, the better.”

In the early dusk of a summer evening Mr. Peter Briggs stood at the edge of the sidewalk of one of the squalid avenues of the district of the tenement-houses of Marion. His hands were behind him, propping out his coat-tails. He kept peering at the gloomy stairway of a house near at hand. Take the gloom, his attitude, and his sooty garb, and he gave a very picturesque impression of a raven doing sentinel duty.

At last a tall young man came down the stairs which Mr. Briggs was watching and strolled off leisurely up the avenue, stopping here and there to chat, nodding to this man, flourishing a hand salute to that man. The young man apparently had nothing whatever on his mind except to enjoy a stroll in the summer evening.

Mr. Briggs watched him out of sight without moving from his tracks. Then he withdrew both hands from under his coat-tails. In one hand was a note-book, in the other hand was a pencil. Mr. Briggs made an entry, closed the book with decision, and snapped an elastic band around the covers. Then he made off toward his home. He lived up-town in a section where there were fewer smells and better scenery. He determined that this should be his last tour of surveillance. He had found his trips into the nooks and crannies of the Eleventh Ward to be very distasteful employment for a man who had served Colonel Dodd for so many years in the sumptuous surroundings of that office in the First National block.

He asked himself what would be the use of hunting for any more information regarding such an inconsequential individual as one Walker Farr? He wondered why this crank had impressed Colonel Symonds Dodd sufficiently to stir up all this trouble for himself, Peter Briggs. The fellow had come from somewhere—nobody in Marion seemed to know. He had been discharged from the employment of the Consolidated. Now he was going about, warning all the people to boil the city water they drew from the faucets. He seemed to be a crank on the water subject, so Peter Brigg's note-book recorded.

The book also recorded that this queer Walker Farr strolled about the streets in the poorer quarters, “currying favor”: so Peter Briggs expressed the young man's evening activities in the note-book. That seemed to be all there was to it. At any rate, Peter Briggs decided that he had finished his quest.

Thereupon he had snapped the elastic band with vigor and made up his mind to tell Colonel Dodd the next morning that chasing that worthless fellow around or thinking that such a fellow could do anything to interfere with Colonel Dodd was poppycock. Peter Briggs hoped he would dare to call it “poppycock” in the presence of his master—for he was thoroughly sick of being a sleuth in the ill-smelling Eleventh Ward.

He did dare to call it poppycock. And Colonel Dodd shrugged his shoulders and forgot one Walker Farr. The fellow seemed inconsiderable—and Colonel Dodd found other matters very pressing.

For one thing, those three men from Danburg had brought suit against both Stone & Adams and the Consolidated Water Company and had engaged as counsel no less a personage than the Honorable Archer Converse, the state's most eminent corporation lawyer, a man of such high ideals and such scrupulous conception of legal responsibility that he had never been willing to accept a retainer from the great System which dominated state affairs. Colonel Symonds Dodd feared the Honorable Archer Converse. It was hinted that the Danburg case would involve charges of conspiracy with intent to restrain independents, and would be used to show up what the opponents of the Consolidated insisted was general iniquity in finance and politics.

Colonel Dodd outwardly was not intimidated. He sent no flag of truce. He decided to intrench and fight. He cursed when he remembered the interview with the Danburg triumvirate.

“Under ordinary circumstances I would buy them off in the usual way,” he informed Judge Warren. “But that damnation lunatic raved at me with all the insults he could think of—then he up with his dirty bunch of plans and knocked my flowers on to the floor—yes, sir, that was what the mad bull did—he knocked my flowers on to the floor!”

And Colonel Dodd emphasized that as the crime unforgivable.

It was from Citizen Drew that Walker Farr heard the story of Captain Andrew Kilgour.

Citizen Drew was the elderly man with the earnest face who had been first to commend Farr that evening at City Hall when he and old Etienne had made their pathetically useless foray against bulwarked privilege.

Folks in Marion who knew Citizen Drew had forgotten his given name. In his propaganda of protest he called himself “Citizen.” He built carriage-tops in a little shop where there were drawers stuffed with political and economic literature, and he read and pondered during his spare hours.

Farr sought out Citizen Drew and sat at his feet, with open ears.

For Citizen Drew knew the political history of his state, the men concerned, their characters, their aims, their weaknesses, their virtues, their faults—especially did he understand their faults—their affiliations with the Machine, their attitude toward the weak; he had followed their trails as the humble hound follows big game.

Therefore, Farr, a stranger in that land, seeking knowledge with which to arm his resolve, went and sat with Citizen Drew and learned many things.

Sometimes loquacity carried Citizen Drew a bit afield from the highway of politics, and when he touched on the case of Captain Andrew Kilgour Farr's heart thumped and his eyes glistened. For Drew prefaced the bit of a story with this:

“I never knew Symonds Dodd to do anything toward squaring a wrong he had committed except when he gave Kate Kilgour a fine position in his office. And there are those who say that he was only showing more of his selfishness when he hired her; he wanted the prettiest girl in the city to match his office furnishings.”

“I have seen her,” said Farr, trying to be matter-of-fact. “I—I sort of wondered!”

“Her father was a friend of mine. He was a good man. And the Consolidated money couldn't buy him. His people were Kilgowers in Scotland and he was a man not given to much talk, but he was willing to let me run on, nodding his head now and then while he smoked. He was an honest man and the best engineer in the state, and he kept his own counsel in all things. And he showed me the Kilgower coat of arms—and he didn't show that to many. He was no boaster. He was proud of his people, but he used to say that it made but little difference who the ancestors were unless the descendants copied the virtues and tried to improve over the faults. There was a Kilgower who went down across the border and gave himself as a hostage so that the clan might gain time—and he knew that he would be hung—and he was. But he saved his people. And I wish you would remember that, Mr. Farr, for it explains a bit the state of mind of Andrew Kilgour.

“He wouldn't sell himself for the gang's dirty work—he made honest reports. So they did for him, Mr. Farr. And he couldn't afford to have them do for him, because his wife was vain and a spendthrift and he let her waste and spend because he was a good and simple man when it came to the matter of a woman's domination over him. That's the curse on strong men—they are tender when it comes to a woman. She wasn't worthy of him, his wife. It's the daughter who has his honesty. I think if she knew who had done for her father she would not stay in Symonds Dodd's office. But the gang does for a man most often without leaving the trail open when they run away and hide.

“He would come here and sit with me and smoke and was very silent. I knew there were debts and I knew well enough that the woman wanted him to sell himself.

“He raked and scraped money—he sold everything of his own, his instruments and all. He took out every cent of insurance that money would buy. Then he put prussic acid in a capsule—a shell of salol, I believe they said it was—so that the work of the poison would be delayed, and he swallowed the capsule on the street and went into an office and sat and chatted with friends and joked and laughed much more than was his habit till at last his eyes closed and his face grew white and he fell out of his chair upon the floor stone-dead, and never uttered a groan.

“It was brave work. They called it heart disease, but it's not easy to fool insurance people. They took him out of his grave and proved suicide—and they did not pay a dollar of insurance to his family. They were not obliged to. The policies were new and the suicide clause let the companies out. So he left only debts instead of twenty-five thousand dollars. However, I say it was brave work.”

“It would have been braver to stay and face it,” blurted Farr.

“But Andrew Kilgour had a code of his own—a state of mind some of us could not understand—the example of an ancestor. We are not all alike. Many cannot stay and face trouble. You might be able to do it—you seem to have a level head!”

Farr grew pale, his hands trembled on the arms of his chair, and then he got up and marched across the little shop to the window, turning his back on Citizen Drew.

“You told them in City Hall that you would stay here and fight,” pursued Citizen Drew. “That is brave work.”

“I'll be much obliged to you, Citizen Drew, if you'll leave me out of your catalogue of heroes. And I take back what I said about his facing it. I hadn't any right to make any such comment.”

“So the girl went to work in Symonds Dodd's office and his nephew is courting her. I hope he doesn't get Andrew Kilgour's daughter. He never went after any other girl honestly. I have looked into this case because I was Andrew's friend. Young Dodd wants to marry her and the mother is helping him. But I know that rapscallion, Mr. Farr. I can't believe that Kate Kilgour will be caught by him.”

“He has a fine position, they tell me,” said Farr, still gazing out of the window.

“The Machine made old Peleg Johnstone state treasurer, and he doesn't know bonds from biscuit. Colonel Dodd put in his nephew as chief clerk, and old Peleg is a figure-head, smoking his pipe in the back office and resting his wool-tipped boots on his desk. Oh, I know the bunch of 'em, sir. I can tell you the inside of things. Young Dodd takes orders from his uncle and runs the treasury. All the state's money is in the Dodd banks on the checking-account basis—and the gang is letting it out at six percent. Tidy little profit! And nobody to say a word, even to ask how Richard Dodd finds so much money to spend. But that's the principal wonder in the world, Mr. Farr—how your neighbor gets his money to blow. Jones, Smith, Brown, and Robinson—they stand and look at one another and ask the same question. And folks in the Eleventh Ward are even asking me how you get your living,” added Citizen Drew, smoothing his curiosity with a bit of jocoseness.

“I have been working in this city—doing good, hard work,” stated Farr, moving toward the door.

“Yes, but you have been discharged.”

“I understand how it is you know so much stuff to tell me,” returned the young man, smiling. “Well, Citizen Drew, I'm going to take the first job that offers itself. Tell 'em that!”

“I'm glad of it,” said Citizen Drew, with blunt heartiness. “If you have set out to do anything among the plain folks you've got to be at work in the open, earning honest wages, or they'll suspect you. They have been fooled too often by fakes and loafers. But since you advertised yourself in City Hall you may find jobs a little hard to land. It's pretty much of an air-tight proposition, Consolidated influence.”

“I have somebody looking after my interests in that line, Citizen Drew. I'm not worrying.” He opened the door. “In fact, there are two mighty helpful chaps whom I'm going to associate with more or less from now on.”

“Bring 'em with you and let me know 'em. Can't have too many in a good cause.”

“I'll bring them—but they are pretty hard to understand—rather slow getting acquainted—lots of folks have no use for them,” said Farr, starting down-stairs.

“What are their names?” asked the inquisitive citizen, eager for more additions to his general stock of information.

“I'll tell you later.”

But Farr named them to himself when he was on the street.

“Chance and Humility—I hope you are going to stick by me from now on,” he muttered. “Chance, you have led me into a queer position and into a strange state of mind. Humility, you are helping me to understand. Now, Chance, what have you to say to me?”

It was more of the fantastic whimsy with which Walker Farr played.

His eyes, searching the street after this challenge to Chance, beheld an ice-wagon rumbling past. It was a neat-looking cart, painted white, and bore the advertisement, “Crystal Pure Independent Ice Company.”

Another wagon, painted dirty yellow, followed. It was a Consolidated ice-cart; Farr knew those carts with their loads of river-ice.

The spectacle of something which promised rivalry to that yellow cart piqued his interest. His mood welcomed the first adventure which Chance presented. He had found Chance playing peculiar pranks with his affairs in the days just past.

He hurried in pursuit of the white cart and accosted the driver.

“Where can I find the manager of this company?”

“He's up at Coosett Lake this afternoon, sir.” The man was respectful. The stranger's garb and demeanor impressed him. “The trolley will take you pretty near it. Take a car in the square—a Halcyon Park car.”

Without canvassing the matter further Farr took the car.

He decided that it was a most comforting sensation, this abandoning his problems to Chance! It saved so much fuss and worry.

He found the little lake at the limits of the park area—a hollow among the hills.

Men were busy at the foot of the slope over whose crest he marched. He saw several rough buildings at the edge of the lake, plainly makeshift ice-houses. One was a new structure and the other two were old barns which had been “darned” here and there with new material, and their yawed sides were propped with joists. Men were loading ice upon carts; the translucent cubes flashed in the rays of the sun.

During the process of his little crusade he had become acquainted with the conditions in the city of Marion and he knew that the Consolidated folks controlled the ice-supply as well as the water. They held an iron grip by legislative charter on all the riparian rights along the river and allowed no one else to operate an ice-field. He had seen and sniffed the unwholesome slime which a melted cake of Consolidated ice deposited.

When he found opportunity he accosted a man in corduroy. He was a big chap, bronzed by the sun, and Farr singled him out as the manager because he had been directing the other workers while he toiled himself.

“It's a little business of my own,” said the man. “I have started in independent.”

“I had thought the Consolidated had control of everything.”

“They would control everything if they could. They wouldn't let me run my carts through the city streets if they knew how to stop me. I worked for them fifteen years, lugging their dirty ice on my back, up stairs and down, and I know that crowd. I don't understand much of anything but the ice business, mister, whoever you are. But I wouldn't lug any more of that ice into homes. I put my savings in here, every cent, hired these barns and a shore privilege, and I'm selling clean ice. But I'm going to lose every blamed cent! It's no use. I can't buck 'em. Excuse me! It's no interest to you. My mouth runs away with me when I get talking about that gang.”

He went back to the barn to help his men shift a runway.

Farr waited patiently until he was able to speak to the busy man again.

“I don't mean to bother you, sir,” he said, humbly. “But I am interested in this proposition of yours. I have worked for the Consolidated, myself. I was discharged because I stood up and damned their water before the mayor and aldermen.”

“Say, I heard something about that!” cried the iceman, displaying prompt interest and admiration. “The boys said it was good work.”

“I mention it merely to put myself right with you.”

“Then say on ahead, my friend!”

“Do you tell me you can't make a go of this?”

“I'm afraid I can't. It's a half-mile haul for me to the nearest siding. The railroad folks don't give me any better rate than they're obliged to—and you know why that is! And I have to have another set of carts for the city delivery. And no capital to work with! I'm up against a crowd that has all the money, plenty of equipment, and has its supply right at the back door of the city—and it belongs at the back door! But you know what the buying public is! The only reason why I have lasted is because my old customers gave me their business and are sticking pretty well.”

“My friend,” declared Farr, putting his hand on the shoulder bent and ridged by many years of ice-toting, “lots of men who are making money as missionaries are not doing half the good in the world you're doing. You're certainly showing some of the citizens of Marion the difference between good ice and frozen gobs of pestilence.”

“A fellow needs grit, grace, gumption, and a lot of missionary spirit to fight what I'm fighting, mister. I ain't going to say anything about a lot of obstacles the syndicate has put in my way. Those were to be expected in the way of regular business competition. But you can see I have only got limited resources here, and I can't afford a big outfit in the city. Sometimes I have run short, the best I could do—and it's mighty little sleep I have. And the Consolidated drivers have refused to sell ice to anybody who has been buying of me even when mothers have pleaded so as to keep milk for sick babies from souring. That's orders from headquarters! You wouldn't think that the same big chaps who boss the governor of the state would get down to such nubbins as that, eh? But they do—that's their system. They used to tell me that it's the only way a big syndicate can keep its grip—never leave a bar down! Yes, sir, they have blacklisted my customers until they'll be good and give the Consolidated a yearly contract. More than that, they pass word along that I'll be out of business by another season and that folks who have bought of me this year will be given the go-by next! Can you beat it?”

“Are you going to sell out to them?”

“No,” said the iceman, grimly. “There are two good reasons: I won't sell and they won't buy. They will kill me out so that nobody else will be encouraged to try the scheme again.”

“I want a job,” stated Farr, curtly. “I want to work for you. Give me a place on one of your carts in the city.”

“Say, look here,” blurted the other man, frankly astonished, “you look more like a gent than an iceman!”

“No matter what I look like. The main question is, can I lug ice? Feel of my muscle!”

“It may be a poor outlook for your pay—working for me,” warned the proprietor. “And if you ever want another job in Marion you may be blacklisted. I don't want to get you into a scrape.”

“I can't be in any worse scrape than the one I am in now. Haven't I just told you who I am?”

“Oh, I know that! I reckon you're the same fellow. But, see here, mister, I'm one of those simple kind of galoots—and the less a man knows the more suspicious he is. You ain't wanting to work for me just because you need a job!”

“I do need a job! I have spent the little money I had by me after I was fired by the Consolidated. I had some special expenses—the funeral of a—a friend,” he added, wistfulness in his tones. He drove his hand into his pockets and exhibited a few small coins in his palm when he pulled his hand out. “That's my cash—every cent of it!”

“Sure! I see it. But money's easy enough to come at by a fellow like you when he needs it. You haven't come across all square with me yet!” It was not mere inquisitiveness; it was the insistence of a plain man who wanted a definite peg on which to hitch the first warp of association. “You've got to handle money of mine,” he went on. “I'm in a tight place and I have got to have the right men tied up with me. I wouldn't have to ask one of those boys yonder why he wanted to lug ice. But you ain't no ordinary slouch, mister. You don't do things—not many of 'em—unless you've got a good reason for same.” It was the instinct of ingenuousness. “Keep it all to yourself if you want to. But in that case you'll have to excuse me!”

Farr did not hesitate. He smiled.

“You're a down-on-the-ground fellow who may be able to understand the thing better than I do myself,” he declared. Again he put his hand on the bent shoulder.

“You didn't break loose from a good job and start this ice business here simply to make more money, did you?”

“Well, I've got a family to support and I wanted to make some money, of course, but I thought it was about time to have less relics, germs, curiosities, microbes, and general knickknacks left in ice-boxes after the ice had melted. So I went out of the frozen museum business, mister.” His voice softened suddenly. “We lost a little girl a year ago last summer. Typhoid!”

“I lost a little girl—a friend,” said Farr, patting the shoulder. “It's this way with me—What is your name?”

“Freeland Nowell.”

“Mr. Nowell, I have poked more or less fun in my life at men who claimed to have missions. Perhaps that was because those men drew my attention by advertising their missions loudly—and, therefore, I concluded that all men with licenses to cure this and fix that and regulate the other were fooling themselves or else were bluffs. But all of a sudden I have waked up to something. I believe that any human being who isn't doing a little something on the side to help somebody else in this life is mighty miserable. I believe that the average sort of folks are doing it—keeping it quiet, in most cases, perhaps. I thought I had a mission and I stood up in your city government and advertised it and made considerable of an ass of myself.”

“Well, it was all right one way you look at it,” said Nowell, with the caution of the honest citizen. “But, of course, you got the stigmy put onto you of being a crank and a disturber and you don't get nowhere! It ain't gab and holler that does it! If talk sets folks to thinking—that's all right, so far as it goes. But a lot of these chaps set their mouths to going and let their hands lay crossed in their laps and then wonder why the world doesn't get better because they have asked it to be good.”

It was sagacity from the humble observer.

“Mr. Nowell, I don't want to be quite as lonesome in this world as I have been,” said Farr, with earnestness. “It's an awful feeling, that! A man can be lonely for a time and crowd down the hankering to be in the march of honest men where he can touch elbows and be a part of things. I see you look at me! That's right—it's queer stuff to be talking to you.” He pondered for a moment and went on. “Queer thing, eh, for a fellow to wake up all of a sudden—a fellow of my stamp—and want to do some real good in the world? Well, it surprises me, and it would surprise you a whole lot more if you knew me better. We won't try to analyze the feeling. I've given up trying to do it.” He paused and his brown eyes surveyed the blinking iceman with a quizzical appeal in them. “That's a pretty long preface, Mr. Nowell. It ought to lead up to some very important request. But it doesn't. I simply want a job on your ice-cart. It will give me the best opportunity I know of to go into homes and tell mothers to boil the water which comes out of those dirty taps; after I unscrew the faucets I won't have to argue much. I told Colonel Dodd in his office to look out for me! That may have been bluster. I am a nobody. But I'm on his trail, and there is one thing I can do to start with! I can help save the lives of a few children. That's all! I'll be following my new motto. Will you give me the job?”

“I sure will,” declared Nowell, heartily. “If I don't know when a man is talking rock-bottom to me, then it's my own fault. When do you want to go to work?”

“Now.”

Nowell gave the new man's garments a disparaging side glance.

“You look more as if you was going out to preach instead of deliver ice. But I can fix that if you're busted, my friend. You slip off that coat and help here till we're loaded. Then ride into the city on the freight-car and tell any one of my men to give you the overalls and jumper I left hanging in my stable office.”

In this fashion it came about that Farr that day was riding on an ice-wagon in Marion, learning his route. A red-headed youth who was nursing an ice-pick wound in a bundled-up foot served as guide and driver and spotted the “Crystal Pure” cards propped here and there in windows, mutely signaling the household needs. With zestful complacency, and with secret enjoyment in being allowed to “team” this chap who looked and talked like a “nob,” the youth allowed Farr to do all the work.

The route took in many apartment-houses of the city.

The labor was muscle-racking. In most cases there were stairs to climb. He stood, sagging under his burden, till chests were cleared by the housewives or sluggish maids. He discovered that the iceman was considered a fair and logical butt for all the forenoon grouches of the kitchen. Women complained querulously that the ice dripped on the clean floor, or that the piece was not up to the twenty-cent piece delivered by the other company, or that he was late, or he had not had his eyes about him the day before or else he would have seen the card.

On numerous occasions he was obliged to carry a piece of ice back down-stairs to his cart and exchange it for a piece of another size and price. He received no apology in such cases; he was tartly informed that he ought to have common sense enough to know what was wanted in that house. In other cases, the mistress of the apartments turned him from the door and explained with entire lack of interest in his long climb that the card had been left up by oversight—the chest had been filled the day before.

And at two places sharp-tongued women would not allow him to enter, frankly stating that icemen were too dirty creatures to allow inside the door of a respectable house; the women received their ten-cent cubes in pans and slammed the door in his face.

And through all this Farr preserved his smile.

In this slavery, tongue-lashed by fretful women, sweating under his burden, he was happy; he could not account for it and did not attempt to, but he knew it. He accepted the situation.

He received rewards enough to fortify his resolution.

A motherly woman asked him to wait a moment and she mixed for him a glass of lemonade. That gave him an opportunity to say a few words to her about drinking-water, modestly and deferentially. She was interested, and he showed her what the guilty faucet of her tap held in concealment.

And he saw that she was shocked and after he had warned her he asked her to tell all the other women whom she knew. She promised to bring the matter up in her sewing-club.

“And even the fussy women,” he told himself, as he plodded back to his cart, encouraged by his first experiment, “if I keep calm, if I keep smiling—I shall find my chance to say something to them after a time.”

A fresh doughnut was given to him by a maid who smiled up at his manly good looks approvingly, and he was very grateful, for his breakfast had been a meager one because he had barely enough small coins to make a jingle in his pocket.

The maid gasped affrightedly when he showed her what was in the faucet, and immediately set on water to boil to supply the bottles in the ice-chest.

Furthermore, the maid stated that she knew many other maids who would be glad to know about such a dreadful thing, and that she would have a word to say to them on the way to Sunday mass and back.

Farr began to understand more clearly what can be accomplished by a lone voice, carrying a gospel which can be backed and illustrated by signs and wonders.

“I'll have them listening to me yet,” he pondered. “I'll never say another unkind word about a woman's tongue.”

Colonel Symonds Dodd flashed past the ice-cart that afternoon in his limousine.

Farr laughed aloud at the humor of a thought which occurred to him: he reflected that he would like to behold Colonel Dodd's face and hear Colonel Dodd's remarks if somebody told that gentleman that the man before whom he had quailed and grown pale was now starting what the man believed was a more effective assault on the dynasty than even a whole car-load of dynamite bombs could make, even if they were exploded in all the Consolidated reservoirs. The remarks which would entertain, so Farr pondered, would come when the colonel was informed that the assault consisted of a lone iceman making talk to women in kitchens.

“However,” said the iceman to himself, as he checked a nick in a ten-cent cube at the back of his cart. “I hold that my new motto is all right, and old Etienne will indorse it, and he knows what self-sacrifice consists of. It isn't rolling up your eyes and folding your hands and saying, 'What can I do?' It's saying, 'I'll do what I can!'—and then keeping your hands busy!”

Mr. Richard Dodd came wooing.

He waited in his gray car at the curb in front of the First National Bank block until Kate Kilgour issued forth into the afternoon sunshine.

He called to her, holding open the side door.

“I just had to see you,” he told her. “I have come down from the capital, doing forty miles an hour. You're more precious than all the money I have locked up in the vaults.”

He did not find in her eyes any of that acclaimed glad love-light which eager lovers seek. On the contrary, Miss Kilgour made just a bit of a face at him and was distinctly petulant.

“I do not want to ride, Richard. I enjoy my walk. I need it after a day at my desk.”

“But I'm going to take you on a long ride into the country. We'll have dinner at Hillcrest Inn and we'll—”

“I'll go straight home, if you please.”

“Then come in here with me.”

“Oh, if you insist!” She said it with weary impatience.

“Are you tired?”

“Yes.”

He drove slowly. “I don't want you to work any more. You know I don't. You know how I feel. Kate, I have published our intentions of marriage.”

Her demeanor till then had been marked by tolerance, a bit pettish. Now she turned on him the indignant stare of offended womanhood.

“Richard, I have not given you permission to do that.”

“But you are going to marry me!”

“Some day. I will tell you when. I am not ready.”

“You are playing with me.”

“I am not so frivolous.”

“But why do you keep putting it off?”

“A woman who gives herself has the right to say when it shall be.”

“My God!” he raged. “I wish you would wake up.”

She did not answer.

“You don't know what love is. You won't let me touch you.”

“I suppose that your experience has qualified you, Richard,” she returned, half humorously, half scornfully.

“We are going to be married. Your mother is anxious for you to marry. I am going to tell my uncle to hunt for another secretary.”

“Be careful how you take liberties with my private business,” she warned him, sharply.

“You need somebody to take care of it for you. You have promised to be my wife. You can't give me a single good reason for waiting any longer.”

“But I intend to wait.”

He drove along in angry silence and they left the car together at the Trelawny Apartments. The car had made a detour in reaching the curb—avoiding a white wagon at the rear of which an iceman was briskly pecking in twain a cake of ice.

The girl glanced sharply at the man and turned her head when she reached the sidewalk in order to survey him more closely. The iceman, peering up at the windows to locate such signal-cards as might be visible, lowered his gaze and intercepted the girl's scrutiny. Color came into her cheeks, but she frowned as if resenting his stare and hurried into the vestibule, her lover at her heels.

“Look here, Friend Myself,” reflected Walker Farr, “it's time you woke up!” He sighed and swung a chunk of ice upon his shoulder. “But what else can I expect? Come on, Humility, and give me a soft word or two. I was hoping I'd never see her again.”

“Youse take those two front numbers—ten and twelve—Mrs. Kilgour and Mr. Knowles,” advised his helper. “Package-entrance is around behind.”

Farr toiled up the stairs, carrying one ice cube on his shoulder, with another swinging from tongs. There was but one door to the Kilgour apartment and the girl and Dodd stood in front of it; they had evidently waited in the corridor after emerging from the elevator, and the young man was detaining her, talking earnestly.

The girl opened the door with her latch-key, and with an apology he stepped in front of the pair and entered.

“Well, I'll be—” blurted Dodd. “So that's what he is—a cheap, low-lived iceman!”

Mrs. Kilgour came into her vestibule and led the way to the kitchen, for Farr stood irresolutely in the doorway, awaiting directions as to his burden. Following her, the young man noted her house-dress, beribboned over-much, her rouged face, her bleached hair, and wondered how such a woman could have beguiled Andrew Kilgour, as he felt he knew that sacrificing hero from what Citizen Drew had said.

“Say, that's the plug-ugly who insulted us in the woods. I'll never forget that face,” stormed Dodd, making no effort by lowered tones to conceal his sentiments from the iceman. “Where else am I going to run across him? He needs a horse-whipping. If there weren't ladies present I'd give him one.”

“The man seems to be minding his own business,” said the girl, coldly.

Farr heard her. There was a hint of contempt in her tones, and the young man humbly accepted the scorn as directed toward him. He lifted the ice into the box and received his coin from the languid woman, who seemed to pay as little heed to his presence as she did to Dodd's threats.

She seemed to be more especially interested in herself, and when Farr departed was fondling into place the masses of her hair before a mirror in the vestibule. Through the space formed by the portieres he saw Dodd reaching eager hands to the girl, her presence having apparently charmed away his thoughts of vengeance.

The iceman went humbly on his way.

He was meditating on the sacrifice of Captain Andrew Kilgour; he remembered that stalwart men are willing slaves of the weakest women. He wondered how much of the honesty of the father was in the daughter. He tried to console himself by insisting that it was not there. He had had only a limited opportunity to study Richard Dodd. However, he was convinced that his unflattering estimate of that young man was surely justified; and so certain was he that the character of Dodd must be patent to all he went back to his tasks with a lowered estimate of the girl who would select such a man as husband. And yet out of the dust of the highway the profile of her face had touched him as his heart never had been touched before; he had plucked the rose and had plodded on behind the little sister of the rose. He wondered what strange impulse had touched him. She must be merely like all the rest. Her graciousness in that first meeting had tempted him to believe that she was different. Now some consciousness, equally as intangible, suggested to him that she was selfishly selling herself for ease. His thoughts were pretty much mixed, he acknowledged. But as he went on, bearing his burdens, listening to the petty tyrants who may ruthlessly taunt the man who comes in by the back door, he was aware that he had full need of much ministration from his new friend, Humility.

In the sitting-room of the Kilgour flat Richard Dodd was telling the mother that he had made application for a marriage license.

“And I have waited long enough,” he declared. “Mother Kilgour, you must convince Kate that we are to be married within a week.”

And he gave the mother a look which made her turn pale and twist her ringed fingers nervously.

“Kate, what is the use?” she pleaded. “You are acting like a child. You love Richard. You know you love him. You tell me often that you love him! Richard is such a dear boy!” She said this fawningly, with evident intent to placate the sullen young man. Her tone, her air suggested the nervous embarrassment of a debtor who seeks to put off a creditor with flattery and fresh promises. “Now be a darling child and say that we'll have the wedding next week without any fuss or feathers.”

“I am not ready to get married, and I simply will not be married just yet,” declared the girl, her red lips compressed.

“You don't love me!” complained Dodd.

“I like you, Richard,” admitted the girl, frankly, without any coquettishness. “I have never cared for anybody else. You have been good to me, except when you were foolish.”

“Foolishness—that's what she calls being so much in love with her that I can't keep my hands off her,” said Dodd to the mother. “Mother Kilgour, you haven't talked to Kate as you should. She doesn't know what love is.”

“Oh, I'll find out all about it, and then we'll be married—when I'm ready to become a wife,” said the girl, with an indulgent smile. “All at once I'll wake up, just as you have been begging me to do, and then we'll simply run away and be married and live happily for ever after.”

“I don't like this stalling,” growled Dodd, brutally.

“I'll leave you two children together,” said the mother. “I'm sure you'll come to an understanding.” She went away, showing relief.

“Sit down here on the divan with me, sweetheart,” pleaded the young man.

But without removing her hat she went to the piano and began to play.

“Please come!” he entreated.

She smiled at him over her shoulder and made a pretty moue.

Muttering an oath of passion he leaped up, hurried across the room, and began to kiss her fiercely.

He crushed back with his lips all her protests; standing over her, he held her upon the piano-bench until by main strength and with all the force of her resentment she tore away from him.

“And now you are going to blame me because I can't help it,” he gasped.

“I don't in the least understand why normal persons can find any pleasure in that kind of folly.”

“Is your idea of loving anybody rubbing noses like Eskimos?”

“I'd endure that kind of loving in preference to that kind of kissing, Richard. That isn't love which you're offering—not the kind of love I want. I am going out for my walk—you filched it from me. No, I'm going alone. Go and talk with mamma, if you like.”

She escaped the clutch he made and hurried out and to the elevator.

Flushed and angry, Dodd made his way to an inner room where Mrs. Kilgour was reading a novel, sunning herself with feline indolence. She put the book by with evident regret.

“Oh, Kate, has so much poise!” she lamented, breaking in on the young man's complaints. “She is so like her father. No one except myself could do anything with him at all. Sometime it was very hard for me! He would set his mind and his teeth! But I always won in the end.”

“Well, go ahead and win now,” commanded the surly lover. “You are simply letting this thing run along.”

“I know Kate's nature, Richard. It's only a matter of the right time.”

He sat down at her feet on the end of the couch.

“The time is here—now!” he told her. “I insist that you make Kate understand. I have been patient and reasonable for a year. You have promised me that you will bring everything around all right. Why don't you do it?”

“But delivering a daughter into marriage isn't like delivering groceries on order!” Her tone showed a bit of impatience. “Be reasonable!”

“I don't want to say anything to hurt your feelings, but we must get down to cases. I'm not asking you to deliver anything to me except what was promised long ago—promised by Kate herself. And you know what you said when I loaned you five thousand dollars to help you save those stocks. Excuse me, Mother Kilgour, but I can't always control my nature; I've been in the game with the bunch for a long time and I'm naturally suspicious—I have seen a good many chaps trimmed, and I don't propose to have anything put over on me.”

“You are insolent and cruel,” she cried, her cheeks pale.

“I don't mean you—I believe you want to help me. But it's time to be up and doing. She doesn't give me one good reason why she will not be married right away. It's only jolly and putting it off.”

“But you are twitting me about the service you have done me! I am not selling my daughter!”

“That isn't it at all! But you must agree that I have been good to you. I want you to be a friend to me. But I don't get anything that's definite. If this thing drags on and on the first thing I know some fellow will come along and she'll fall for him. That's the girl nature!”

“You are talking about my daughter, Richard! She has her father's disposition and she is true blue. She has given her promise and she will keep it.”

“When?” he demanded, curtly.

“I can't drive her.”

“You said you could,” he insisted. “You said a year ago when I advanced that money that you knew just how to handle her.”

“Are you going to keep twitting me about that money?”

“No; only I'm going to say that you haven't even told me about what stocks you were protecting. You haven't said anything about repaying the loan, Mother Kilgour. It has been a sort of general stand-off all around for me. Hold on! I'm not making a holler! But I like to be taken in right. I'm a Dodd, and I can't help playing to protect myself.”

“It will come around all right, Richard. You don't know Kate as I do. I understand her because I understood her father. She is rather self-centered. But she is romantic underneath! But you know you're so sort—sort of—well, just a business man—so matter-of-fact. A girl like Kate needs to be stirred—her poise shaken—something like that!”

“Lochinvar business, eh?” he sneered.

“It must be something a little bit out of the ordinary to hurry her, Richard. Go away, please. Let me think. I have an idea. I must spend a little time on it.”

“How much time?”

“Oh, I don't know just how much. Be patient.”

“Mrs. Kilgour, if this thing cannot be put through by you I want you to say so. I'm at the end of that patience you're appealing to. I won't be fooled.”

“You don't need to say that you're Colonel Dodd's nephew,” she retorted. “You have all the family traits.”

“Well, there's one I haven't got: I loaned you five thousand dollars without taking security—and that's the act of a good friend. Excuse me, but I've got to speak of it—you need a little reminder. Four days from now I'll have my marriage license from the city clerk. And when I have it in my hands I shall come to you and shall expect that you'll do your part.”

“I will,” she said.

“How? I want plain statements from now on.”

“I will write you a letter to-morrow,” she faltered. “I will give you directions what to do. You'd better not come here till—till I have it all arranged. You know what they say about absence!”

“I know what they say about a good many things. But I want something besides say-so.”

“I will tell you in my letter what to do. Then you follow instructions.”

“I don't like to go into a thing blind. What is the plan?”

“Oh, if I tell you all about it you'll go and do something to spoil it,” she protested, impatiently. “A woman knows about such matters better than a man does. I will write to you at the State House. Now be patient!”

“I'll be going before you preach any more patience to me,” he said, sourly. “I might be provoked into saying something you won't like.”

After he had gone she rose and touched up her cheeks.

“The fool! They are all alike,” she muttered, viciously. “They pay. They never forget they have paid. Then they stand with their hand out—and just remember that they have paid. I am glad I bought this novel,” she added, taking the book from the couch and settling herself to read. “The woman who wrote it must have known human nature. If the plan worked in the case of the girl she writes about it ought to work in the case of Kate. If it doesn't it will be his fault because he has hurried me so. A poor, persecuted woman can't do everything.”

And she applied herself to her recently discovered manual of procedure in the case of stubbornness in a maid.

Walker Farr put aside papers upon which he had been working since he had eaten his modest supper, and pulled on his coat and went forth into the evening. He strolled up one of the streets in the Eleventh Ward of Marion, manifestly glad to be out among the people.

He stopped at the curb and hailed the driver of a truck-wagon which was loaded down with kegs and jugs.

“Marston,” he said, when the driver halted, “it's good to see the noble work going on.”

“Yes, and now that the babies aren't dying off so fast old Dodd's newspapers are claiming that the new filtering-plant is doing all the good, sir.”

“Well, it shows that our work is worth while if they're claiming it, Marston. But we'll wake up the folks all in good time. Do what we can for first aid, that's the idea! The people are waking up to what we're doing. And they are waking up in other places. I took a little run up state last week. Five other cities are going to try this co-operative scheme of getting good water to the poor folks until something better can be done.”

“You've got a head on you,” commended the driver. “It's a little tough on tired horses to work at this after a day's trudging on regular business, but my nags seem to understand what it's all about—honest they do. I have hauled five hundred gallons this week. But I'd like to haul old Dodd up to Coosett Lake and drown him, if it wasn't for spoiling water that the poor folks are drinking.”

Farr shook his head and walked on.

He was a rather striking figure for a New England city as he strolled along. It did not seem to be affectation for this man to wear a frock-coat without a waistcoat, a flowing black tie setting off his snowy linen. The attire seemed to belong to his physique and manner.

Women smiled at him in friendly fashion; men gave respectful and affectionate salutation.

Soon he stepped off the street into a room where a group of men were waiting for him, so it appeared, because they all rose when he entered.

He called the little meeting to order promptly, informing them that he would detain them only a short time.

“I rise to make a motion,” said a man at one stage of the proceedings. “There have been so many volunteers in the work and the folks have been so ready to pay for real water in place of that stuff we get from the taps, that three hundred dollars have accumulated in the treasury. We all know that there is just one man who had been responsible for this whole plan and has given his time and has run about our state and hasn't charged anything but expenses for doing it all. I move we give that sum to Mr. Farr—wishing it was more.”

The speaker was loudly applauded.

Farr was so quickly on his feet and spoke so promptly that he clipped the man's last words.

“A moment, my friends, before that motion is seconded.” He held up his hand and checked their protests against what his air told them. “Because my little plan has succeeded better than I hoped is not due to me, but to the generous co-operation of good men who have given their time. We are saving the babies, thank God! But do you know what else we have done by our hard toil and our devotion? We are propping up the Consolidated Water Company in this state. Understand me! I am not attacking that company because it is a corporation. If it were now making preparations to pipe down to us clean water from the hills I would gladly go on giving my time to this cause in order to help the case of the Consolidated. But the men in control are deliberately shutting their eyes to the real situation. Now that folks aren't dying, they claim all the credit—when we know the credit is due to weary men who go on working after their day's toil is over. It isn't right—it isn't just! My friends, I have got hold of a bigger thing than I reckoned on when I started out to wake those poison-peddlers up. Now that we are cleaning up the typhoid, the Consolidated is simply riding on our backs—refusing to see the real truth. If they give Marion pure water it will be only at more exorbitant rates, because the nearest lake is twenty miles away. I'm not an anarchist—I want to see capital get its just reward. But when a syndicate takes a franchise from citizens and makes them pay over and over for what was their own the citizens have a right to rise in self-defense. When we force the Consolidated to give us what we're paying for—pure water—they evidently propose to make us pay for what they call our cheek in asking.” He paused for a moment, and his smile succeeded his earnestness. “I beg your pardon for saying 'we.' I must remember that I'm still a stranger in this city.”

“I'll have to dispute you there,” interposed a man. “You're one of us. And we're going to prove it to you a little later.”

“My friends,” went on Farr, “until the cities and towns of this state own their own water-plants and take their own profits they will be paying double tribute to a merciless crowd.”

“But we can't own our plants till the millennium, sir. There's that five-percent-debt-limit clause in the constitution.”

Farr smiled—this time wistfully. “I've—I've had a sort of vision in regard to that,” he said. “I don't dare to explain myself just now, friends. It may be only a vision—but I think not. I'll not say any more at present. I did not intend to say as much. What was on my mind when I got up was this: I will not accept that money in the treasury—on no account will I take it. Because I believe that strange days are coming upon us soon in this state—days when we shall need money. Keep that nest-egg and guard it.” He picked up his hat and started for the door. “The meeting is adjourned,” he informed them. He smiled at them over his shoulder in such a manner that they wondered whether he joked or was in earnest. “Guard well that money—for the only way my vision can be realized, I fear, is by turning this state's politics upside down, and that will be quite a job for a rank outsider fighting Colonel Symonds Dodd—and fighting without money. Good night!”

Men whom Walker Farr met as he strolled ducked amiable greetings. They grinned admiringly after him as he passed on.

If a woman asked in regard to him or a stranger in the ward questioned a native they were informed with gusto that he was “the boy who stood in City Hall and talked turkey to the mayor and all the bunch, and said a good word for the poor people, and twisted the tail of the Consolidated and lost a good job doing it—and that's more than any alderman would do for those who elected him.”

At a street corner children of the poor were dancing around a hurdy-gurdy. Farr gave the man at the crank a handful of change and told him to stay there and keep the kiddies happy. Shrill juvenile voices promptly proclaimed his praises to all the neighborhood, and mothers and fathers beamed benedictions on him from windows.

He stopped at another street corner where a dozen youths were congregated. They were heavy-eyed, leering cubs, their hats were tipped back, and frowzled fore-tops stuck out over their pimply faces—types of youths whom modest girls avoid hurriedly by detours.

“Boys, folks are writing to the newspapers complaining that young chaps are insulting girls on the street corners of Marion. But it must be those high-toned loafers up-town. You're not up to any of that business down here, of course.”

“None of us would ever as much as say 'shoo' to a chicken,” protested one of the group.

“You're Dave Joyce's boy, aren't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The fifty men he bosses at the ice-house like him because he's square. Here's a good motto: 'Square with the boys and nice to the girls.' But keep off the street corners, fellows, or they'll get you mixed up with some of that masher gang.”

The Joyce boy pulled his hat forward and marshaled the retreat from the loafing-place.

“Naw, he ain't no candidate, nuther,” he informed his associates when they were out of hearing. “He ain't canvassing for no votes. My old man says he ain't. He ain't a four-flusher. He's the guy that stood for the poor folks up at City Hall and doped out the spring-water stuff.”

At the side of a street where traffic raged to and from the city's Union Station Farr came upon two shriveled old ladies who were teetering on the curbstones, waiting tremulously for an opportunity to cross. They put down into the roaring street first one apprehensive foot and then another, like children trying chilly water. The big fellow offered an arm to each and led them safely across.

“You're a real knight-errant, sir,” squeaked one of the two, looking up into the kindly face.

He laughed, doffed the broad-brimmed hat with a low bow, and strolled on his way.

“Knight-errant,” he muttered, still smiling. “Guess not. They don't have 'em these days. The stories about 'em read well. Wonder what kind of a feeling it was that started those boys off on the hike! Perhaps there wasn't enough doing in politics. It must have been a fine game, though, rescuing distressed damsels. And all for love and not for pay!”

A poster in the window of an empty store caught his eye just then. It advertised a woman's-suffrage rally.

“The girls would paint rally signs on a knight's tin suit these days and send him off on an advertising trip,” was his whimsical reflection.

At that moment, with this thought of knight in armor in his mind, he was attracted by a flare of red fire in a blacksmith shop located just off the street. The one worker in the place was revealed by the forge fire. The glow lighted the features of the man. There was no mistaking him—it was Friend Jared Chick. And Farr turned off the street and went into the shop and greeted his one-time traveling companion.

“How does thee do?” replied Jared Chick, quietly, his Quaker calm undisturbed. He drew forth a white-hot iron and deftly hammered it into a circle around the snout of the anvil.

“So you have given up knight-errantry and have gone back to the old job, have you, Friend Chick?”

“No. This is a part of my service. The man who owns this shop is a good man who works hard here all day. And after he has gone home he allows me to work here in the evening.”

He pounded away industriously and Farr walked up to the anvil to inspect the nature of the work, for the iron rod was assuming queer shapes.

“A new kind of armor, Friend Chick?”

If there was a bit of sarcasm in Farr's tone the Quaker paid no apparent heed.

“No,” he said, quietly and meekly, “this is a brace for the leg of a little lame boy. I have found many children in this city who cannot walk. Their parents are too poor to buy braces. So I come here nights, when the good man is away from the forge, and I make braces and carry them with my blessing. I have some knack with the hammer. I hope to find other ways of doing my bit of good.”

“I beg your pardon, Friend Chick,” said Farr, a catch in his voice. “I will not bother you in your work. Good night!”

“Good night to thee!” said the Quaker, swinging at the bellows arm.

Farr went back upon the street, his head bowed. “We all have our own way of doing it,” he pondered, contritely.

He met a man and greeted him with a friendly handclasp. It was Citizen Drew, that elderly man with the earnest face.

And as he had in the past, he turned, caught step with Farr, and they walked together.

Their stroll took them into the broader avenues of up-town.

As they talked, Farr caught side glances from his companion. The glances were a bit inquisitive.

“Well, Citizen Drew,” asked the young man, “what is on your mind this evening?”

“Since I have known you and studied you I have been thinking that you have the spirit of knight-errantry in you,” stated Citizen Drew.

Farr laughed boyishly.

“Two very nice old ladies have just got ahead of you with that accusation, my friend.”

“Laugh if you feel like it. But there are so few men who can do anything unselfishly in these days that when a chap like you does come along he gets noticed—at any rate, I notice him.” He stopped dealing in side glances and stared at Farr fully and frankly. “Other men who would do the things you are doing so quietly in this state have been playing politics—and I have made it my business to watch politicians. And as soon as men have been elected to office by fooling the people—well, those men have simply been set into the Big Machine as new cogs. Are you like the rest, Mr. Farr? Nobody knows where you came from. Everybody who sees you knows you're above the jobs you have been working at. They're talking you up for alderman in our ward. But we have been fooled so many times!”

Farr replied to this wistful inquisition in a way there was no misunderstanding.

“I am not a candidate for anything, Citizen Drew. And I'll tell you how I can prove I am not. I am not a voter here. I have intentionally failed to have myself registered. Whenever you hear another man talking me up for office you tell him that. Therefore, it makes no difference to anybody where I came from or what job I work at.”

Citizen Drew accepted the rebuke humbly and walked on in silence.

“You have always been fooled, you say, when you have elected men to office. Haven't you any men in this state whom you can elect to high office, knowing for sure that they'll stay straight?”

“No,” returned Citizen Drew.

“I'm a stranger—I don't know your big men—you do know them, and I suppose I ought to take your word. But I don't believe you, Citizen Drew.”

“But I told you the truth. We have big men who are honest men. But they won't go into politics. They feel too far above the game. Therefore, how can we elect them to office? I say I told you the truth. The men who go out and hunt for office are the ones who work the thing for their own profit—and that means they stand in with the bunch and the head boss.”

It was the same old lament which is everlastingly on the lips of the voters of America! Citizen Drew had again epitomized the average politics of the great Republic!

Walker Farr smiled—and he could express in a smile more than most men can express in speech.

“An original idea has just occurred to me, Citizen Drew,” he said, with humorous drawl in his tones. “I'm sure nothing like it has ever been thought of before. There ought to be a new party formed in this country—a party outside all the others. No, not a party, exactly! What should I call it? You see, the idea has just come to me, and I'm floundering a little.” His tone was still jocular. “You're right about most of the able and big men staying out of politics except when the highest offices are passed around. Now, how's this for a scheme? Organize a loyal band and call it—well, say the Purified Political Privateers, the Sanctified Kidnappers, the People's Progressive and Public-spirited Press Gang. Go around and grab the Great and the Good who insist on minding their private business and who are letting the country be gobbled up—just go and grab 'em right up by the scruff of the neck and fling them into politics head over heels. They would sputter and froth and flop for a little while—and then they'd strike out and swim. They couldn't help swimming! They'd know that the folks were looking on. And then a lot of the sinking and drowning poor devils, like you and me and the folks in the tenements, could grab onto the Great and the Good and ask 'em to tow us safely ashore; and by that time their pride and their dander would be up and they'd swim all the harder—with the other folks looking on. Hah! An idea, eh? You see, I feel rather imaginative and on the high pressure and in a mood for adventure this evening! Probably because the nice old ladies called me a knight-errant.”

Citizen Drew was not ready with comment on this amazing suggestion. He clawed his hand into his sparse hair and wrinkled his forehead in attempt to decide whether or not he ought to resent this playful retort to his lament. The next moment he dealt Farr a swift jab in the ribs with his elbow.

“Take a good look at this man coming,” he mumbled.

The oncomer was close upon them, and in spite of the dusk Farr's sharp gaze took him all in.

In garb and mien he was a fine type of the American gentleman who is marked by a touch of the old school. There was a clean-cut crispness about him; the white mustache and the hair which matched it looked as if they would crackle if rubbed. His eyes were steely blue, and he held himself very erect as he walked, and he tapped the pavement briskly with his cane.

He passed them, marched up the steps of a large building, and disappeared through a door which a boy in club uniform held open for him.

“That man,” explained Citizen Drew, complacently displaying his boasted knowledge of public men in minute detail, “is the Honorable Archer Converse, whose father was General Aaron Converse, the war governor of this state. Lawyer, old bach, rich, just as crisp in talk as he is in looks, just as straight in his manners and morals and honesty as he is in his back, arrives every night at the Mellicite Club for his dinner on the dot of eight”—Citizen Drew waved his hand at the illuminated circle of the First National clock—“leaves the club exactly at nine for a walk through the park, then marches home, plays three games of solitaire, and goes to bed.”

“I know him!” stated Farr.

Citizen Drew's air betrayed a bit of a showman's disappointment.

“I never saw him before—never heard of him. But I mean I know him now after your description—know his nature, his thoughts. You have a fine touch in your size-ups, Citizen Drew.”

“I've studied 'em all.”

“What has he done in politics?”

“Never a thing. He is one of the kind I was complaining about. Too high-minded.”

“But, ho, how a man like that would swim if he were once thrown in!” declared Farr.

“He never even tended out on a caucus.”

“I know the style when I see it,” pursued Farr. He did not look at Citizen Drew. He was talking as much to himself as to his companion. “Spirit of a crusader harnessed by every-day habit! Righteousness in a rut! Achievement timed to the tick of the clock. But, once in, how he would swim!”

“Think how our affairs would swing along with a man like that at the head of the state!”

“Why hasn't he been put at the head?”

“I have been in delegations that have gone to him”—he waved his hand—“he said he couldn't think of being mixed into political messes.”

“He looked on you wallowing in muddy water and you invited him in. I don't blame him for not jumping.”

“He's a good man,” insisted Citizen Drew. “He gives more money to the poor than any other man in town. The only way I found that out is by having a natural nose for finding out things. He doesn't say anything about it.”

“How he would swim!” repeated Farr. “Steady and strong and straight toward the shore, Citizen Drew, and he wouldn't kick away the poor drowning devils, either.”

“He probably thinks he has paid his debt to the world when he hands out his money,” stated Drew. “When he looks around and sees so many other men holding the poor chaps upside down and shaking the dollars out of their pockets he must think he is doing a mighty sight more than is required of him. But sticking plasters of dollar bills onto sore places in this state ain't curing anything.” He stopped. “I've walked with you farther than I intended to, Mr. Farr. But somehow I wanted to talk with you. There's a meeting of the Square Deal Club this evening at Union Hall. I didn't know but in some way we might—It was thought you might be going to run for office.”

“The registration-office will prove that I'm not. Pass that word!”

“I'll go back—to the meeting. It doesn't seem to be much use in holding the meetings,” said the man. “We hear one another talk—we know we are talking the truth. But nobody listens who can help us poor folks. Well, I'll admit that the politicians come in and listen and promise to help us and we give our votes; but that's all: they give nothing back to us.”

Farr broke out with a remark which seemed to have no bearing on what Citizen Drew was saying.

“He comes out at nine o'clock, eh?”

“Who?”

“The Honorable Archer Converse. Leaves that clubhouse then, does he?”

“Regular to the tick of the clock.”

“Citizen Drew, hold your club in session until half past nine or a little later. My experience with those meetings is that you always have troubles enough to keep you talking for at least two hours.”

Citizen Drew glanced at the face of Farr and then at the big door of the Mellicite Club.

“You don't mean to say—”

“I don't say anything. I seem to be in a queer state of mind to-night, Citizen Drew.” Again there was an odd note of raillery in his voice. “A lot of odd ideas keep coming to me. Another one had just popped into my head. That's all! Keep your boys at the hall.”

He swung off up the street.

He turned after a few steps and saw the elderly man standing where he had left him. Drew was a rather pathetic figure there in the brilliantly lighted main thoroughfare, a poor, plain man from the Eleventh Ward of the tenement-houses—this man who had been striving and struggling, reading and studying, endeavoring to find some way out for the poor people; some relief—something that would help. Farr knew what sort of men were waiting in the little hall. He had attended their meetings. It was the only resource they understood—a public meeting. They knew that the important folks up-town held public meetings of various sorts, and the poor folks had decided that there must be virtue in assemblages. But nothing had seemed to come out of their efforts in the tenement districts.

Farr stepped back to where Citizen Drew stood.

“I think I will say something to you, after all. Tell the boys in Union Hall to be patient and I'll bring the Honorable Archer Converse around this evening.”

He smiled into the stare of blank amazement on the man's face, flung up a hand to check the stammering questions, and went off up the street.

“A decent man's conscience will make him keep a promise he has made to a child or to the simple or to the helpless,” Farr told himself. “I have undertaken a big contract, I reckon, but now that I have put myself on record I've got to go ahead and deliver the goods. At any rate, I feel on my mettle.” Then he smiled at what seemed to be his sudden folly. “I think I'll have to lay it all to those nice old ladies who were foolish enough to put that knight-errant idea into my head,” he said.

Farr glanced again at the big clock in the First National block.

He had less than one hour to wait, according to the schedule Citizen Drew had promulgated in regard to the unvarying movements of the Honorable Archer Converse. As to how this first coup in the operations of that nascent organization, the Public-spirited Press Gang, was to be managed Farr had little idea at that moment.

He decided to devote that hour to devising a plan, deciding to attempt nothing until he saw the honorable gentleman march down the club steps. A club must be sanctuary—but the streets belonged to the people.

Therefore, Farr took a walk. He went back into that quarter of the city from which he had emerged during his stroll with Citizen Drew; he felt his courage deserting him in those more imposing surroundings of up-town; he went back to the purlieus of the poor, hoping for contact that might charge him afresh with determination. He realized that he needed all the dynamics of courage in the preposterous task he had set himself.

He knew he would find old Etienne sitting on the stoop of Mother Maillet's house where the old man posted himself on pleasant summer evenings and whittled whirligigs for the crowding children—just as his peasant ancestors whittled the same sort of toys in old Normandy.

Mother Maillet's house had a yard. It was narrow and dusty, because the feet of the children had worn away all the grass. Some of the palings were off the fence, and through the spaces the little folks came and went as they liked. It was not much of a yard to boast of, but there were few open spaces in that part of the city where the big land corporation hogged all the available feet of earth in order to stick the tenement-houses closely together. Therefore, because Mother Maillet was kind, the yard was a godsend so far as the little folks were concerned. The high fence kept children off the greensward where the canal flowed. Householders who had managed to save their yards down that way were, in most cases, fussy old people who were hanging on to the ancient cottage homes in spite of the city's growth, and they shooed the children out of their yards where the flower-beds struggled under the coal-dust from the high chimneys.

But Mother Maillet did not mind because she had no flower-beds and because the palings were off and the youngsters made merry in her yard. She had two geraniums and a begonia and a rubber-plant on the window-sill in order to give the canary-bird a comfortable sense of arboreal surroundings; so why have homesick flowers out in a front yard where they must all the time keep begging the breeze to come and dust the grime off their petals? It should be understood that Mother Maillet had known what real flower-beds were when she was a girl in the Tadousac country.

Furthermore, Etienne Provancher always came to the yard o' fine evenings and it served as his little realm; and the door-step of the good woman's house was his throne where he sat in state among his little subjects. However, on second thought, this metaphor is not happy description; old Etienne did not rule—he obeyed.

He did not resent familiarity—he welcomed the comradeship of the children. When they called him “Pickaroon” it seemed to him that they were making a play-fellow of him.

He sat and whittled toys for them out of the pine-wood scraps which the yard foreman gave him. There were grotesque heads for rag dolls, and the good woman seemed to have unlimited rags and an excellent taste in doll-dressmaking; there were chunky automobiles with spools for wheels; there were funny little wooden men who jumped in most amusing fashion at the end of wires which were stuck into their backs. Old Etienne was always ready to sit and whittle until the evening settled down and he could see no longer, even though he held the wood and busy knife close to his eyes.

So on that evening he whittled as usual.

Walker Farr came to the yard and sat beside the old man on the door-step and was plainly thinking no agreeable thoughts while he listened to the chatter of the children.

After the darkness had come and the larger boys and girls, custodians of their tiny kin, had dragged away the protesting and whimpering little folks because it was bedtime, Zelie Dionne laid down her needlework over which she had been straining her eyes. The good woman protested often because the girl toiled so steadily with her needle after her day at the mill was ended. And on that summer evening she voiced complaint again.

“You have so many pretty gowns already! You wear one last evening—you wear anodder this evening—and still you make some more! When a young girl nigh kill herself so as to make a picture-book of her dresses I think it is time to look for some young man who seems to like the pictures. Eh?”

“Mother Angelique, I do not relish jokes which are silly,” protested the girl. “You know how the girls of our country are taught! We cannot sit with hands in our laps without being very unhappy.”

She went out and sat upon the door-step where old Etienne made way for her.

“At first I did not think I would come out, Mr. Farr,” she said. “But I have made bold to come.”

“I do not think it needs boldness to come where I am,” he returned. “I hope you are not going to make a stranger of me because I have not been very neighborly of late. I have been busy and I have been away. The boys have paid my fare up-country, and so I ran about to carry the gospel of the free water. The truckmen have volunteered in half a dozen places. We are doing a great work.”

“And yet I am afraid,” she confessed. “You are fighting men who can do you much harm. I have been asking questions so as to know more about those men. For they have threatened poor Father Etienne. I wanted to know about them. I cannot help. But can you not help, Mr. Farr? I think you are much more than you seem to be,” she added, naively.

“They have threatened Etienne?” demanded Farr, a sharp note in his voice.

“Ah, m'sieu', I have said nottin's to you. I am only poor old man. No matter.”

“Why didn't you say something to me?”

“It's because you might feel bad, m'sieu'. P'raps not, for I'm only poor man and don't count.”

“What have they said to you?”

“It's nottin's,” said Etienne, stubbornly. “You shall not think you got me into trouble. You did not. I would have done it maself as soon as I thought of it.”

“I command you to tell me what has been said to you, Etienne.”

“They say that I shall be discharge from the rack. They say I have talk too much to my compatriots about the poison water. But I shall talk—yes—jesso!”

“Who says so?”

“The yard boss say to me that. Oh, there's no mistake. He have the power, M'sieu' Farr. The super tell the yard boss, the mill agent tell the super, the alderman tell the mill agent, the mayor he tell the alderman.”

“And probably Colonel Symonds Dodd told the mayor,” growled Farr. “It's a great system, Etienne. Nobody too small—nobody too big!”

“But I do not care. I shall talk some more—yes, I shall talk in the hotel de ville when you shall tell me to talk. I was scare at first and I tol' you I would not talk; but now I have found out I can talk—and I am not scare any more, and I will talk.” Pride and determination were in the old man's tones. Since that most wonderful evening in all his life when he had heard his voice as if it were the voice of another man ringing forth denunciation of those in high places, the old rack-tender had referred to that new manifestation of himself as if he were discussing another man whom he had discovered. The memory of his feat was ever fresh within him. And his meek pride was filled with much wonderment that such a being should have been hidden all the years in Etienne Provancher. Many men had called around to shake his hand and increase his wonderment as to his own ability.

“We will wait awhile,” counseled Farr, understanding the pride and treating it gently. “Stay at your work and be very quiet, Etienne, and they will not trouble you. You need your money, and I will call on you when you can help again.”

“Then I will come. I shall be sorry to see somebody have my rake and pole, but I shall come.”

A moment of silence fell between them, and during that moment a young woman passed rapidly along the sidewalk. Walker Farr shut his eyes suddenly, as a man tries to wink away what he considers an illusion, and then opened his eyes and made sure that she was what she seemed; there was no mistaking that face—it was Kate Kilgour.

He stared after her. She halted on the next corner, peered up at the dingy street light to make sure of the sign legend on its globe and then turned down an alley.

“Ba gar!” commented old Etienne, putting Farr's thoughts into words, “that be queer t'ing for such a fine, pretty lady to go down into Rose Alley, because Rose Alley ain't so sweet as what it sounds.”

Then two men came hurrying past without paying any attention to the denizens of the neighborhood who were sitting in the gloom on the stoop. The street light revealed the faces of the men as it had shown to them the girl's features. One was Richard Dodd. Unmistakably, they were following the girl. Farr heard Dodd say: “Slow up! Give her time to get there. She's headed all right.”

And Farr stared after those men, more than ever amazed.

One of them was obtrusively a clergyman—that is to say, he was cased in a frock-coat that flapped against his calves, wore a white necktie, and carried a book under his arm.

Dodd was attired immaculately in gray, and as he walked he whipped a thin cane nervously. They began to stroll soon after they had hurried past the stoop, and were sauntering leisurely when they turned into Rose Alley.

“I now say two ba gars!” exploded Etienne. “Because I been see the jailbird, Dennis Burke, all dress up like minister, go past here with the nephew of Colonel Dodd. And they go 'long after la belle mam'selle.”

“A jailbird!”

“He smart, bad man, that Dennis Burke. But he was hire by the big man to do something with the votes on election-time—so to cheat—and he get caught and so he been in the state prison. But he seem to be out all free now and convert to religion in some funny way. Eh?”

“Etienne, are you sure of what you are talking about?” demanded Farr. His voice trembled. The visit of that handsome girl to that quarter of the city—those men so patently pursuing her—there was a sinister look to the affair.

“Oh, we all know that Burke. He hire many votes in this ward for many years. He known in Marion just so well as the steeple on the hotel de ville. And that odder—that young mans, we know him, for his oncle is Colonel Dodd. Oh yes!”

“Good night, Etienne—and to you Miss Zelie!” said Farr, curtly, walking off toward the entrance of Rose Alley. He did not ask the old man to go with him. He was drawn in two directions by his emotions and stopped after he had taken a few steps. This seemed like espionage in a matter which was none of his concern. It was entirely possible that the confidential secretary of Colonel Dodd and the nephew of that gentleman might have common business even in Rose Alley and at that time of evening.

But the matter of that masquerading ballot-falsifier, just out of state prison, overcame Farr's scruples about meddling in the affairs of Kate Kilgour.

He turned the corner into the alley in season to see the two men far ahead of him; they passed out of the radiance shed by a dim light and he saw no more of them. He walked the length of the alley and was not able to locate any of the party. At its lower end the alley was closed in by houses, and it was plain that the people he sought had not passed out into another thoroughfare. He marched back, scrutinizing the outside of buildings, trying to conjecture what business the handsome girl and the two men could have in that section at that hour, and where they had entered to prosecute that business.

“I must continue to blame it all on the nice old ladies,” he told himself, smiling at the shamed zest he was finding in this hunt. “But I hope this knight-errantry will not grow to be a habit with me. I mustn't forget that I have another job on hand for nine o'clock—also knight-errantry!”

He paused under the dim light where his men had disappeared and looked at his cheap watch.

Twenty-five minutes of nine!

Then he heard a woman's protesting voice. She cried “No, no, NO!” in crescendo.

He gazed at the house from which the voice seemed to come. It was near at hand, a shabby little cottage with a thin slice of yard closed in by a dilapidated picket fence. He perceived no observers in the alley, and he stepped into the yard. The front windows were open, for the evening was warm, but no lights were visible in the house.

He heard the protesting cry again. It was more earnest.

He head the rumble of a man's voice, but could not catch the words. Whatever was happening was taking place in some rear room.

“No, I say, no! Unlock that door,” cried the voice, passionately.

Farr troubled his mind no longer with quixotic considerations about intrusion. He hoisted himself over the window-sill into the darkened front room, passed down a short corridor and, when he heard the voice once again on the inside of a door which he found locked, he immediately kicked the door open. He appeared to those in the room, heralded by an amazing crash and flying splinters.

First of all, he was astonished to find two women there; one was Miss Kilgour and the other was her mother. And there were the two men whom he had followed.

Farr swept off his hat and addressed the girl.

“I happened to be passing and heard your voice,” he said. “If you are—” He hesitated, a bit confused, realizing all at once that knight-errantry in modern days is not quite as free and easy a matter as it used to be when damsels were in distress in the ruder times of yore. “I am at your service,” he added, a bit curtly.

But she did not reply. Her attitude was tense, her cheeks were flaming, her eyes were like glowing coals.

“You lunatic, you have come slamming in here, disturbing a private wedding,” announced the man in the white tie, slapping his palm upon the book he carried.

“Get out of here!” shouted Dodd. He had dodged into a corner of the room, his face whitening, when Farr had burst in. He remained in the corner now, brandishing his cane.

The uninvited guest surveyed the young man with more composure than he had been able to command when he looked at the girl.

Etienne Provancher had fortified him with some valuable information.

“Mr. Richard Dodd, I'll apologize and walk out of here after you have explained to me why you have faked up into a parson one Dennis Burke, late of the state prison, to officiate at weddings.”

Upon the silence that followed the girl thrust an “Oh!” into which she put grief, protest, anger, consternation.

“Mother!” she cried. “Did you know? How could you allow—how did you come to do such a terrible thing?”

Her mother put her hands to her face and sat down and began to sob with hysterical display of emotion. Farr scowled a bit as he looked at her. She was overdressed. There was an artificial air about her whole appearance—even her hysterics seemed artificial.

The girl turned from her with a gesture of angry despair as if she realized, from experience, that she could expect, at that juncture, only emotion without explanation.

“Hold on here,” cried Dodd, “hold on here, everybody! This is all right. You just let me inform you, Mr. Butter-in, that Mr. Burke has full authority to solemnize a marriage. He is a notary and was commissioned at the last meeting of the governor and council. And I know that,” he added, attempting a bit of a swagger, “for I secured the commission for him myself.” He came out of his corner and shook his cane at Farr. “I want you to understand that I have political power in this state!”

“I wouldn't brag about that kind of political power, when you can use it to make notaries out of jailbirds. That must be a nice bunch you have up at your State House!”