Chapter 15…

Chapter 15

If additional proof of the awful cost of hating one's fellow-men were required, the strike which burst upon the industrial world that winter must furnish it in sickening excess. But other facts, too, were rendered glaringly patent by that same desperate clash which made Avon a shambles and transformed its fair name into a by-word, to be spoken only in hushed whispers when one's thought dwells for a moment upon the madness of the carnal mind that has once tasted blood. The man-cleft chasm between labor and capital, that still unbridged void which separates master and servant, and which a money-drunk class insolently calls God-made, grows wider with each roar of musketry aimed by a frenzied militia at helpless men and women; grows deeper with each splitting crack of the dynamite that is laid to tear asunder the conscienceless wielder of the goad; and must one day fall gaping in a cavernous embouchure that will engulf a nation.

Hitt saw it, and shuddered; Haynerd, too. Ames may have dimly marked the typhoon on the horizon, but, like everything that manifested opposition to this superhuman will, it only set his teeth the firmer and thickened the callous about his cold heart. Carmen saw it, too. And she knew--and the world must some day know--that but one tie has ever been designed adequate to bridge this yawning cañon of human hatred. That tie is love. Aye, well she knew that the world laughed, and called it chimera; called it idealism, and emotional weakness. And well she knew that the most pitiable weakness the world has ever seen was the class privilege which nailed the bearer of the creed of love upon the cross, and to-day manifests in the frantic grasping of a nation's resources, and the ruthless murder of those who ask that they, too, may have a share in that abundance which is the common birthright of all. Do the political bully, the grafter, the tout, know the meaning of love? No; but they can be taught. Oh, not by the hypocritical millionaire pietists who prate their glib platitudes to their Sunday Bible classes, and return to their luxurious homes to order the slaughter of starving women and babes! They, like their poor victims, are deep under the spell of that mesmerism which tells them that evil is good. Nor by the Church, with its lamentable weakness of knowledge and works. Only by those who have learned something of the Christ-principle, and are striving daily to demonstrate its omnipotence in part, can the world be taught a saving knowledge of the love that solves every problem and creates a new heaven and a newer, better concept of the earth and its fullness.

That morning when Carmen went to see Ames the Express received word of the walk-out of the Avon mill employes. Almost coincident with the arrival of the news, Carmen herself came unsteadily into Hitt's office. The editor glanced up at her, then looked a second time. He had never before seen her face colorless. Finally he laid down his papers.

"What's happened?" he asked.

"Nothing," answered the girl. "What work have you--for me--to-day?" She smiled, though her lips trembled.

"Where have you been?" he pursued, scanning her closely.

She did not reply at once. Then, so low that he scarcely caught the words, "I--I have been with--a friend."

Sidney Ames came puffing into the office at that moment. "Hello!" he cried as he saw Carmen. "How does it happen you're out riding with Willett? Saw him help you out of an auto just now."

"He brought me here," she answered softly.

"Where from?"

"Your father's office."

Hitt and the lad stared at her with open mouths. She turned, and started for her own room, moving as if in a haze. As she neared the door she stumbled. Sidney sprang after her and caught her in his arms. When she turned her face, they saw that her eyes were swimming in tears.

Hitt was on his feet instantly. "Look here!" he cried. "Something's wrong! Leave us, Sidney. Let me talk with her alone."

The boy reluctantly obeyed. Hitt closed the door after him, then took the girl's hand and led her back to his own chair. "Now, little one," he said gently, "tell me all about it."

For a moment she sat quiet. Then the tears began to flow; and then she leaned her head against him and sobbed--sobbed as does the stricken mother who hangs over the lifeless form of her babe--sobbed as does the strong man bereft of the friend of his bosom--sobbed as did the Man of Sorrow, when he held out his arms over the worldly city that cruelly rejected him. He was the channel for the divine; yet the wickedness of the human mind broke his great heart. Carmen was not far from him at that moment.

Hitt held her hand, and choked back the lump that filled his throat. Then the weeping slowly ceased, and the girl looked up into his anxious face.

"It's all past now," she said brokenly. "Jesus forgave them that killed him. And--"

"You have been with--Ames?" said Hitt in a low, quiet tone. "And he tried to kill you?"

"He--he knew not what he was doing. Evil used him, because as yet he has no spiritual understanding. But--God is life! There is--no--death!" Her voice faded away in a whisper.

"Well, little girl, I am waiting for the whole story. What happened?"

Carmen got to her feet. "Nothing happened, Mr. Hitt--nothing. It didn't happen--it wasn't real. I--I seemed to manifest weakness--and I fell--to the floor--but I didn't lose consciousness. And just then Mr. Willett came in--and Mr. Ames sent me here with him."

"But what had Ames said to you, Carmen?" persisted Hitt, his face dark with anger.

The girl smiled feebly. "I see Mr. Ames only as--as God's child," she murmured. "Evil is not real, and it doesn't happen. Now I want to work--work as I never did before! I must! I must!"

"Will you not tell me more about it?" he asked, for he knew now that a deadly thrust had been made at the girl's life.

She brushed the tears away from her eyes. "It didn't happen," was her reply. "Good is all that is. God is life. There is no death!"

A suspicion flashed into Hitt's mind, kindled by the girl's insistence upon the nothingness of death. "Carmen," he asked, "did he tell you that--some one had died?"

She came to him and laid her head against him. Her hands stole into his. "Don't! Please, Mr. Hitt! We must never speak of this again! Promise me! I shall overcome it, for God is with me. Promise that no one but us shall know! Make Sidney promise. It--it is--for me."

The man's eyes grew moist, and his throat filled. He drew the girl to him and kissed her forehead. "It shall be as you wish, little one," he said in a choking voice.

"Now set me to work!" she cried wildly. "Anything! This is another opportunity to--to prove God! I must prove Him! I must--right here!"

He turned to his desk with a heavy heart. "There is work to be done now," he said. "I wonder--"

She took the telegram from his hands and scanned it. At once she became calm, her own sorrow swallowed up in selfless love. "Oh, they have gone out at Avon! Those mothers and children--they need me! Mr. Hitt, I must go there at once!"

"I thought so," he replied, swallowing hard. "I knew what you would do. But you are in higher hands than mine, Carmen. Go home now, and get ready. You can go down in the morning. And we, Sidney and I, will say nothing of--of your visit to his father."

* * * * *

That night Hitt called up the Beaubien and asked if he and Haynerd might come and talk with her after the paper had gone to press, and requesting that she notify Carmen and Father Waite. A few hours later the little group met quietly in the humble cottage. Miss Wall and Sidney were with them. And to them all those first dark hours of morning, when as yet the symbol of God's omnipresence hung far below the horizon, seemed prescient with a knowledge of evil's further claims to the lives and fortunes of men.

"I have asked you here," Hitt gravely announced when they were assembled, "to consider a matter which touches us all--how deeply, God alone knows. At ten o'clock to-night I received this message." He opened the paper which he held in his hand and read:

"'Property of Hitt oil company, including derricks, pump houses, storage tanks, destroyed by fire. Dynamite in pump houses exploded, causing wells to cave and choke. Loss complete. Wire instructions.'"

The news burst over them like the cracking of a bomb. Haynerd, who, like the others, had been kept in ignorance of the message until now, started from his chair with a loud exclamation, then sank back limp. Carmen's face went white. Evil seemed to have chosen that day with canny shrewdness to overwhelm her with its quick sallies from out the darkness of the carnal mind.

Hitt broke the tense silence. "I see in this," he said slowly, "the culmination of a long series of efforts to ruin the Express. That my oil property was deliberately wrecked, I have not the slightest doubt. Nor can I doubt by whose hand."

"Whose?" demanded Haynerd, having again found his voice. "Ames's?"

Hitt replied indirectly. "The Express has stood before the world as a paper unique and apart. And because of its high ideals, the forces of evil singled it out at the beginning for their murderous assaults. That the press of this country is very generally muzzled, stifled, bought and paid for, I have good reason now to know. My constant brushes with the liquor interests, with low politicians, judges, senators, and dive-keepers, have not been revealed even to you. Could you know the pressure which the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, has tried to exert upon us, you would scarce credit me with veracity. But the Express has stood out firm against feudalism, mediaevalism, and entrenched ecclesiasticism. It has fearlessly opposed the legalizing of drugging. It has fought the debauching of a nation's manhood by the legalized sale of a deadly poison, alcohol. And it has fought without quarter the pernicious activity of morally stunted brewers and distillers, whose hellish motto is, 'Make the boys drink!' It has fought the money octopus, and again and again has sounded to the world the peril which money-drunken criminals like Ames and his clique constitute. And for that we must now wear the crown of martyrdom!"

Silence, dismal and empty, lay over the little room for a long time. Then Hitt resumed. "The Express has not been self-supporting. Its growth has been steady, but it has depended for its deficit upon the revenue from my oil property. And so have we all. Ames ruined Madam Beaubien financially, as well as Miss Wall. He cleaned you out, Ned. And now, knowing that we all depended upon my oil wells, he has, I doubt not, completely removed that source of income."

"But," exclaimed Haynerd, "your property was insured, wasn't it?"

"Yes," replied Hitt, with a feeble attempt at a smile. "But with the proviso that dynamite should not be kept on the premises. You will note that dynamite wrecked the wells. That doubtless renders my policies void. But, even in case I should have a fighting chance with the insurance companies, don't you think that they will be advised that I purposely set fire to the wells, in order to collect the insurance? I most certainly do. And I shall find myself with a big lawsuit on my hands, and with no funds to conduct the fight. Ames's work, you know, is always thorough, and the Express is already facing his suit for libel."

"But you told us you were going to mortgage your property," said Miss Wall.

"I stood ready to, should the Express require it. But, with its recent little boom, our paper did not seem to need that as yet," he returned.

"Good God!" cried Haynerd. "We're done for!"

"Yes, Ned, God is good!" It was Carmen who spoke.

Hitt turned quickly to the girl. "Can you say that, after all you have endured, Carmen?"

He looked at her for a moment, lost in wonder. "An outcast babe," he murmured, "left on the banks of a great river far, far away; reared without knowledge of father or mother, and amid perils that hourly threatened to crush her; torn from her beloved ones and thrust out into an unknown and unsympathetic world; used as a stepping-stone to advance the low social ambitions of worldly women; blackened by the foulest slander, and ejected as an outcast by those who had fawned at her feet; still going about with her beautiful message of love, even though knowing that her childhood home is enveloped in the flames of war, and her dear ones scattered, perhaps lost; spurned from the door of the rich man whom she sought to save; carrying with her always the knowledge that the one upon whom her affections had centered had a son in distant Cartagena, and yet herself contributing to the support of the little lad; and now, this morning--" He stopped, for he remembered his promise.

"This morning," she finished, "shielded by the One who is both Father and Mother to me."

"That One surely ought to love you, Carmen--"

"He does," she answered softly.

"Well!" put in Haynerd, torn with anger and fear. "What are we going to do now?"

"Everything, Ned, that error seems to tell us not to do," replied the girl.

She reached over to the little table that stood near, and took from it a Bible. Opening it, she read aloud, very slowly, the entire fourteenth chapter of Exodus. Then she concluded by reading the last two verses of the eighth chapter of Romans.

"Now," she said, looking up, "we know what we are going to do, don't we? We are going right on, as 'seeing Him who is invisible' to men like Mr. Ames."

They sat looking at her in silence.

"There is no curse, whether of the Church, or of business, or of any department of human thought, that can overthrow legitimate business; and we are in the legitimate business of reflecting God to the world. If the physical sense of supply is now lost, we are fortunate, for now we are obliged to acquire a higher sense. All that we have comes from God. And we become aware of it in our own consciousness. It is there that we interpret His supply. Mr. Ames interprets it one way; we, in a very different way. God has always been able to prepare a table in the wilderness of human thought. If we look for supply from without, we shall not find it, for everything is within. And the very fact that there is a legitimate demand shows that there is the supply to meet it, for--though the world hasn't learned this yet--it is the supply itself that really creates the demand!"

"But money makes the wheels go!" retorted Haynerd.

"Money, Ned, is the counterfeit of God. He is our only supply. He is our Principle--infinite, inexhaustible. He is our credit--without limit! We are facing a crisis, but, like every seeming disturbance of the infinite harmony, it will vanish in a little while if we but cling to the divine Mind that is God for guidance."

Hitt folded the telegram and returned it to his pocket. "Are you going to Avon to-morrow?" he abruptly asked of the girl.

"Yes, why not?"

"We can't afford it now!" cried Haynerd.

Hitt reflected a moment. Then he rose. "And we sit here lamenting!" he exclaimed. "And when we have in our midst this girl, who has borne, without one word of complaint or reviling, the world's most poignant sorrows! I--I really regret that I told you of--of this telegram. I seemed for a moment to be overwhelmed. But I am on my feet again now!"

He reached into a pocket and took out some bills, which he handed to Carmen. "That will see you through for a day or so down there. If you need more, wire me. I'll get it from some source! Come," he added, beckoning to Haynerd, "the Express will be issued to-morrow as usual, and we must get to bed. I've really had quite a strenuous day!" He turned, then paused and looked at Carmen.

The girl caught the meaning in his glance, and went directly to the piano. Hitt followed and bent over her.

"Don't," he said, "if you do not feel like it. This day has been a hard one for you, I know. And--"

"But I do feel like it," she answered, smiling up at him. "I want to sing for you. And," her voice dropped low, "I want to sing to--Him."

Hitt gulped down something in his throat. "The bravest little girl in the whole wide world!" he muttered through his set teeth.

* * * * *

The carnage at Avon was not incidental; it was the logical effect of definite mental causes. It was the orderly sequence of an endless train of hatred of man for man, bred of greed and the fear of starvation. And starvation is the externalized human belief that life is at the caprice of intelligent matter. But that is an infraction of the first Commandment, given when the human race was a babe.

When the mill hands left their looms at evening of the day following Ames's rejection of their demands, the master closed the doors behind them and locked them out. Were not these mills his?

No, they were a sacred trust asset.

Bah! The parrot-cry of the maudlin sentimental!

But, four thousand men, women, and little children, with never a dollar beyond their earnings of the day, thrust out into the blasts of the bitterest winter the New England states had known in years!

True; but why, then, did they strike? For, you see, that of itself proved the soundness of Ames's single reply to all further appeal: "There is nothing whatever to arbitrate."

In the garden of the human mind waves many a flower, both black and red, fanned by the foul winds of carnal thought. There grow the brothel, the dive, the gin-shop, the jail. About these hardier stems twine the hospital, the cemetery, the madhouse, the morgue. And Satan, "the man-killer from the beginning," waters their roots and makes fallow the soil with the blood of fools. But of those for whom the gardener waits, there is none whose blood is so life-giving to these noxious plants as that type of the materially rich who, like Ames, have waxed gross upon the flesh of their own brothers.

Ames was a gambler in human lives. They were his chips, by which he gained or lost, and of themselves were void of intrinsic value. The world was the table whereon he played; the game rouge et noir, with the whirl of predatory commercialism as the wheel, and the ball weighted to drop where he might direct. He carried millions on margin, and with them carried the destinies, for weal or for woe, of millions of his fellow-men, with not one thought that he did so at the cost of their honor and morality, not less than their life-blood.

It had been his custom to close his mills for several months each year, in order to save expense when times were dull. And he did this as casually as he closed the doors of his stables, and with much less thought for the welfare of those concerned. It is doubtful if he had ever really considered the fact that these four thousand human beings were wholly dependent upon him for their very existence. For he was a business man, and gold was far weightier in the scale of values than human flesh, and much less easily obtained. Cain's comforting philosophy was quite correct, else would the business world not have been so firmly established upon it. Besides, he was terribly busy; and his life was lived upon a plane high, high above that upon which these swarming toilers groveled with their snouts in the dust.

And now, with the doors of his mills barred against the hungry hordes, he would frame the terms upon which they should be reopened. The eight-hour law must not be enforced. Perhaps he could influence the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional, as depriving the mill hands of the right to labor as long as they pleased. Wages should not be raised. And the right to organize and band together for their common good would be contemptuously denied the ignorant rats who should be permitted to toil for him once more. If they offered violence, there was the state militia, armed and impatient to slay. Also, this was an excellent opportunity to stamp out trade-unionism within the confines of his activities. He would win the plaudits of the whole industrial world by so doing. He therefore immediately got in touch with the Governor, a Tammany puppet, and received that loyal henchman's warm assurances of hearty support for any measures which the great magnate might wish to enforce. He then approached the officers of the state guard, and secured them to a man. Times were hard, and they welcomed his favor. He finally posted armed guards in all his buildings at Avon, and bade them remember that property rights were of divine institution. Then he sat down and dictated the general policy to be followed by the Amalgamated Spinners' Association throughout the country in support of his own selfish ends.

His activity in these preparations, as in everything, was tremendous. His agents swarmed over the state like ants. The Catholic Archbishop was instructed that he must remove Father Danny from Avon, as his influence was pernicious. But the objection was made that the priest was engaged only in humanitarian labors. It availed not; Ames desired the man's removal. And removed he was. The widow Marcus likewise had been doing much talking. Ames's lawyer, Collins, had her haled into court and thoroughly reprimanded. And then, that matters might be precipitated, and Congress duly impressed with the necessity of altering the cotton schedule in favor of the Spinners' Association, Ames ordered his agents to raise the rents of his miserable Avon tenements. There were few, he knew, who dared even attempt to meet the raise; and those who could not, he ordered set into the streets.

It was a wild winter's day that the magnate chose for the enforcement of this cruel order. A driving blizzard had raged throughout the night, and the snow had banked up in drifts in places many feet deep. The temperature was freezing, and the strong east wind cut like a knife. It was Ames's desire to teach these scum a needed lesson, and he had chosen to enlist the elements to aid him in the righteous task.

For a week, ever since the strike was declared, Carmen had lived among these hectored people. Daily her reports of the unbearable situation had gone to Hitt. And through them the editor had daily striven to awaken a nation's conscience. Ames read the articles, and through the columns of the Budget sought to modify them to the extent of shifting the responsibility to the shoulders of the mill hands themselves, and to a dilatory Congress that was criminally negligent in so framing a cotton tariff as to make such industrial suffering possible. Nor did he omit to foully vilify the Express and calumniate its personnel.

Amid curses, screams, and despairing wails, the satanic work of ejecting the tenement dwellers went on that day. Ames's hirelings, with loaded rifles, assisted the constables and city police in the miserable work, themselves cursing often because of the keen blasts that nipped their ears and numbed their well-cased limbs. More than one tiny, wailing babe was frozen at the breast that dull, drab afternoon, when the sun hung like a ghastly clot of human blood just above the horizon, and its weird, yellow light flitted through the snow-laden streets like gaunt spectres of death. More than one aged, toil-spent laborer, broken at the loom in the service of his insatiable master, fell prone in the drifts and lay there till his thin life-current froze and his tired heart stopped. More than one frenzied, despairing father, forgetful for the moment of the divine right of property, rushed at a guard and madly strove with him, only to be clubbed into complaisance, or, perchance, be left in a welter of crimson on the drifting snow. Carmen saw it all. She had been to see Pillette that same morning, and had been laughed from his presence. She did not understand, she was told, what miserable creatures these were that dared ask for bread and human rights. Wait; they themselves would show their true colors.

And so they did. And the color was red. And it spurted like fountains from their veins. And they saw it with dimming eyes, and were glad, for it brought sweet oblivion. That night there were great fires built along the frozen creek. Shacks and tents were hastily reared; and the shivering, trembling women and babes given a desperate shelter. Then the men, sullen and grim, drew off into little groups, and into the saloons and gambling halls of the town. And when the blizzard was spent, and the cold stars were dropping their frozen light, these dull-witted things began to move, slowly at first, circling about like a great forming nebula, but gaining momentum and power with each revolution. More than a thousand strong, they circled out into the frozen streets of the little town, and up along the main thoroughfare. Their dull murmurs slowly gained volume. Their low curses welled into a roar. And then, like the sudden bursting of pent-up lava, they swept madly through the town, carrying everything to destruction before them.

Stores, shops, the bank itself, burst open before this wave of maddened humanity. Guns and pistols were thrown from laden shelves to the cursing, sweating mob below. Axes and knives were gathered by armfuls, and borne out into the streets to the whirling mass. Great barrels of liquor were rolled into the gutters and burst asunder. Bread and meat were dragged from the shops and savagely devoured. The police gathered and planted themselves with spitting pistols before the human surge. They went down like grass under stampeded cattle. Frightened clerks and operators rushed to the wires and sent wild, incoherent appeals for help to New York. Pandemonium had the reins, the carnal mind was unleashed.

On rolled the mob, straight on to the massive stone house of Pillette, the resident manager of the great Ames mills. On over the high iron fence, like hungry dock rats. On through the battered gate. On up the broad drive, shouting, shooting, moaning, raving. On over the veranda, and in through broken windows and shattered doors, swarming like flies over reeking carrion, until the flames which burst through the peaked roof of the mansion drove them forth, and made them draw sullenly, protestingly away, leaving the tattered bodies of Pillette and his wife and daughters to be consumed in the roaring furnace.

Oh, ye workers, ye toilers at loom and forge, it is indeed you who bear the world's burdens! It is you who create the rich man's wealth, and fight his battles. So ye fought in the great war between North and South, and protected the rich man at home, hovering in fright over his money bags. It is you who put into his hands the bayonet which he turns against you to guard his wealth and maintain his iniquitous privilege. It is indeed in your hands that the destinies of this great nation lie; but what will ye do with your marvelous opportunity? What, with your stupendous, untried strength? Will ye once more set up the golden calf, and prostrate yourselves before it? Will ye again enthrone ecclesiastical despotism, and grovel before image of Virgin and Saint? Will ye raise high the powers of mediaeval darkness, and bend your necks anew to the yoke of ignorance and stagnation? But think you now that flames and dynamite will break your present bonds? Aye, America may be made a land without a pauper, without a millionaire, without industrial strife. But fire and sword will not effect the transformation. Yes, perhaps, as has been said, our "comfortable social system and its authority will some day be blown to atoms." But shall we then be better off than we are to-day? For shall we know then how to use our precious liberty?

Blood-drunk and reeling, the mob turned from the flaming wreckage and flowed down toward the mills. There were some among them, saner, and prescient of the dire consequences of their awful work, who counseled restraint. But they were as chips in a torrent. Down into the creek bottom rolled the seething tide, with a momentum that carried it up the far side and crashing into the heavily barred oak doors of the great mills. A crushing hail of bullets fell upon them, and their leaders went down; but the mass wavered not. Those within the buildings knew that they would become carrion in the maws of the ravening wolves outside, and fought with a courage fed with desperation.

In the solemn hush of death Socrates said, "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which is better, God only knows." And mankind through the ages in their last hours have echoed this sentiment of the gentle philosopher. For all human philosophy leads to a single end--resignation.

But hunger transforms resignation into madness. And madness is murder. The frenzied hordes swarming about the Ames mills knew in their heart of hearts that death was preferable to life in death under the goad of human exploitation. But such knowledge came only in rational moments. Now they were crazed and beyond reason.

In the distance, across the swale, the sky glowed red where the souls of the agent of predatory wealth and his family had gone out in withering heat. In the stricken town, men huddled their trembling loved ones about them and stood with loaded muskets. Somewhere on the steel bands that linked this scene of carnage with the great metropolis beyond, a train plunged and roared, leaping over the quivering rails at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, bringing eager militiamen and their deadly instruments of civilization. For the Ames mills were private property. And that was a divine institution.

* * * * *

In his luxurious office in the tower of the Ames building the master sat that black night, surrounded by his laboring cohorts. Though they strained under the excitement of the hour, Ames himself remained calm and determined. He was in constant communication with the Governor at Albany, and with the municipal officers of both New York and Avon. He had received the tidings of the destruction of the Pillette family with a grim smile. But the smile had crystallized into an expression of black, malignant hatred when he demanded of the Governor that the New York contingent of the state guard be sent at once to protect his property, and specified that the bullets used should be of the "dum-dum" variety. For they added to the horrors of death. Such bullets had been prohibited by the rules of modern warfare, it was true. But this was a class war. And Ames, foreseeing it all, had purchased a hundred thousand rounds of these hellish things for the militia to exchange for those which the Government furnished. And then, as an additional measure of precaution, he had sent Hood and Collins into the United States District Court and persuaded the sitting judge to issue an injunction, enjoining any possible relief committees from furnishing food and shelter to such as might enter the industrial conflict being waged against him.

Had the man gone mad? That he had! And in the blood-red haze that hung before his glittering eyes was framed the face of the girl who had spurned him but a few days before. She was the embodiment of love that had crossed his path and stirred up the very quintessence of evil within him. From the first she had drawn him. From the first she had aroused within his soul a conflict of emotions such as he had never known before. And from the night when, in the Hawley-Crowles box at the opera he had held her hand and looked down into her fathomless eyes, he had been tortured with the conflicting desires to possess that fair creature, or to utterly destroy her.

But always she had eluded him. Always she hovered just within his grasp; and then drew back as his itching fingers closed. Always she told him she loved him--and he knew she lied not. But such love was not his kind. When he loved, he possessed and used. And such love had its price--but not hers. And so hope strove with wrath, and chagrin with despair. She was a babe! Yet she conquered him. He was omnipotent in this world! Her strength she drew from the world invisible. And with it she had laid the giant low and bound him with chains.

Not so! Though he knew now that she was lost to him forever; though with foul curses he had seen hope flee; yet with it he had also bidden every tender sentiment, every last vestige of good depart from his thought forever more. And:

"----with hope, farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good!"

That same night Hitt's wells burned. And that night the master slept not, but sat alone at his desk in the great Fifth Avenue mansion, and plotted the annihilation of every human being who had dared oppose his worldly ambitions. Plotted, too, the further degradation and final ruin of the girl who had dared to say she loved him, and yet would not become his toy.

* * * * *

There is no need to curse the iniquitous industrial and social system upon which the unstable fabric of our civilization rests, for that system is its own fell curse in the rotting fruit it bears. A bit of that poisonous fruit had now dropped from the slimy branch at Avon. Up from the yards came the militiamen at double-quick, with rifles unslung and loaded with the satanic Ames bullets. Behind them they dragged two machine guns, capable of discharging three hundred times a minute. The mob had concentrated upon the central building of the mill group, and had just gained entrance through its shattered doors. Before them the guards were falling slowly back, fighting every inch of the way. The dead lay in heaps. The air was thick with powder smoke. One end of the building was in flames. The roar of battle was deafening.

Quickly swinging into action, the militia opened upon the mill hands. Hemmed in between two fires, the mob broke and fled down the frozen stream. The officers of the guard then ordered their men to join in the work of extinguishing the flames, which were beginning to make headway, fanned by the strong draft which swept through the long building. Until dawn they fought the stubborn fire. Then, the building saved, they pitched their tents and sought a brief rest.

At noon the soldiers were again assembled, for there remained the task of arresting the leaders of the mob and bringing them to justice. The town had been placed under martial law with the arrival of the militia. Its streets were patrolled by armed guards, and a strong cordon had been thrown around the shacks which the mill hands had hastily erected the afternoon before. And now, under the protection of a detachment of soldiers, the demand was made for the unconditional surrender of the striking laborers.

Dull terror lay like a pall over the miserable shacks huddled along the dead stream. It was the dull, hopeless, numbing terror of the victim who awaits the blow from the lion's paw in the arena. Weeping wives and mothers, clasping their little ones to them, knelt upon the frozen ground and crossed themselves. Young men drew their newly-wed mates to their breasts and kissed them with trembling lips. Stern, hard-faced men, with great, knotted hands, grouped together and looked out in deadly hatred at the heartless force surrounding them.

Then out from among them and across the ice went Carmen, up the slippery hillside, and straight to the multi-mouthed machine gun, at the side of which stood Major Camp. She had been all night with these bewildered, maddened people. She had warmed shivering babes at her own breast. She had comforted widows of a night, and newly-bereaved mothers. She had bound up gaping wounds, and had whispered tender words of counsel and advice. And they had clung to her weeping; they had called upon Virgin and Saint to bless her; and they named her the Angel of Avon--and the name would leave her no more.

"Take me," she said, "take me into court, and let me tell all."

The major fell back in amazement. This beautiful, well-clad girl among such miserable vermin!

"You have demanded their leaders," she continued. "I have been trying to lead them. Leave them, and take me."

The major's eyes roved over her face and figure. He could make nothing out of her words, but he motioned to an aid, and bade him place the girl under arrest.

A wild shout then rose from the shacks, as Carmen moved quietly away under guard. It was the last roar of raging despair. The girl was being taken from them! A dozen men sprang out and rushed, muskets in hand, up toward the soldiers to liberate her. The major called to them to halt. Poor, dull-witted creatures! Their narrow vision could comprehend but one thing at a time; and they saw in the arrest of the girl only an additional insult piled upon their already mountainous injuries.

The major shouted a command. A roar burst from the soldiers' rifles. It was answered by a shriek of rage from the hovels, and a murderous return fire. Then the major gave another loud command, and the machine guns began to vomit forth their clattering message of death.

At the sound of shooting, Carmen's guard halted. Then one of them fell, pierced by a bullet from the strikers. The others released the girl, and hurried back to the battle line. Carmen stood alone for a moment. Bullets whizzed close about her.

One sang its death-song almost in her ear. Another tore through her coat. Then she turned and made her way slowly up the hill to the paralyzed town.

Down in the vale beneath, Death swung his scythe with long, sweeping strokes. The two machine guns poured a flaming sheet of lead into the little camp below. The shacks fell like houses of cards. The tents caught fire, and were whirled blazing aloft by the brisk wind. Men dropped like chaff from a mill. Hysterical, screaming women rushed hither and yon to save their young, and were torn to shreds by the merciless fusillade from above. Babes stood for a moment bewildered, and then sank with great, gaping wounds in their little, quivering bodies. And over all brooded the spirit of the great manipulator, Ames, for the protection of whose sacred rights such ghastly work is done among civilized men to-day.

* * * * *

That night, while the stars above Avon drew a veil of gray between them and the earth below, that they might not see the red embers and stark bodies, Carmen came slowly, and with bent head, into the office of the Express. As she approached Hitt's door she heard him in earnest conversation with Haynerd.

"Yes," the editor was saying, "I had a mortgage placed on the Express to-day, but I couldn't get much. And it's a short-term one, at that. Stolz refused point blank to help us, unless we would let him dictate the policy of the paper. No, he wouldn't buy outright. He's still fighting Ames for control of C. and R. And I learn, too, that the Ketchim case is called for next week. That probably means an attempt by Ames to smoke Stolz out through Ketchim. It also means that Carmen--"

"Yes; what about her?"

"That she will be forced to go upon the stand as a witness."

"Well?"

"And that, as I read it, means a further effort on Ames's part to utterly discredit her in the eyes of the world, and us through her association with the Express."

"But--where is she, Hitt? No word from her since we got the news of the massacre at Avon this afternoon! Nothing happened to her, do you think?"

Hitt's face was serious, and he did not answer. Then Carmen herself came through the open door. Both men rose with exclamations of gladness to welcome her. The girl's eyes were wet, and her wonted smile had gone.

"Mr. Hitt," she said, "I want a thousand dollars to-night."

"Well!" Hitt and Haynerd both sat down hard.

"I must go back to Avon to-morrow," she announced. "And the money is for the--the people down there." Her voice caught, and her words stumbled.

The two men looked at each other blankly. Then Hitt reached out and took her hand. "Tell us," he said, "about the trouble there to-day."

Carmen shook her head. "No," she said, "we will not talk about evil. You--you have the money? A thousand--"

"I have that much on deposit in the bank now, Carmen," he replied gravely. His thought was on the mortgage which he had signed that morning.

"Then write me a check at once, and I will deposit it in the Avon bank when I get there to-morrow. I must go home now--to see mother."

"But--let me think about it, Carmen. Money is--well, won't less than that amount do you?"

"No, Mr. Hitt. Write the check now."

Hitt sighed, but made no further protest. If the Express must founder, then this money were well spent on the stricken people of Avon. He took out his book, and immediately wrote the check and handed it to the girl.

"Hitt," said Haynerd, after Carmen had left them and he had exhausted his protests over the size of the check, "something's killing that girl! And it isn't only the trouble at Avon, either! What is it? I believe you know."

Hitt shook his head. "She's no longer in this world, Ned. She left it two days ago."

"Eh? Say! News about that Rincón fellow?"

But Hitt would say nothing to further illuminate his cryptic remark, and Haynerd soon switched to the grim topic of the industrial war in progress at Avon.

"What are we coming to?" he cried. "What's going to be the end? A social and industrial system such as ours, which leaves the masses to starve and consume with disease under intolerable burdens, that a handful may rot in idleness and luxury, marks us in this latest century as hopelessly insane!"

"Well, Ned, whence came the idea, think you, that it is divine justice for a majority of the people on earth to be poor in order that a few may be rich? And how are we going to get that perverted idea out of the minds of men? Will legislation do it?"

"Humph!" grunted Haynerd. "Legislation arouses no faith in me! We are suffering here because, in our immensely selfish thought of ourselves only, we have permitted the growth of such men as Ames, and allowed them to monopolize the country's resources. Heavens! Future generations will laugh themselves sick over us! Why, what sane excuse is there for permitting the commonest necessities of life to be juggled with by gamblers and unmoral men of wealth? How can we ask to be considered rational when we, with open eyes, allow 'corners' on foodstuffs, and permit 'wheat kings' to amass millions by corralling the supply of grain and then raising the price to the point where the poor washerwoman starves? Lord! We are a nation gone mad! The existence of poverty in a country like America is not only proof positive that our social system is rotten to the core, but that our religion is equally so! As a people we deserve to be incarcerated in asylums!"

"A considerable peroration, Ned," smiled Hitt. "And yet, one that I can not refute. The only hope I see is in a radical change in the mental attitude of the so-called enlightened class--and yet they are the very worst offenders!"

"Sure! Doesn't the militia exist for men like Ames? To-day's work at Avon proves it, I think!"

"Apparently so, Ned," returned Hitt sadly. "And the only possibility of a change in enlightened people is through a better understanding of what is really good and worth while. That means real, practical Christianity. And of that Ames knows nothing."

"Seems to me, Hitt, that it ought to stagger our preachers to realize that nineteen centuries of their brand of Christianity have scarcely even begun to cleanse society. What do you suppose Borwell thinks, anyway?"

"Ned, they still cling to human law as necessarily a compelling influence in the shaping of mankind's moral nature."

"And go right on accepting the blood-stained money of criminal business men who have had the misfortune to amass a million dollars! And, more, they actually hold such men up as patterns for the youth to emulate! As if the chief end of endeavor were to achieve the glorious manhood of an Ames! And he a man who is deader than the corpses he made at Avon to-day!"

"The world's ideal, my friend, has long been the man who succeeds in everything except that which is worth while," replied Hitt. "But we have been bidden to come out from the world, and be separate. Is it not so?"

"Y--e--s, of course. But I can't take my thought from Avon--"

"And thereby you emphasize your belief in the reality of evil."

"Well--look at us! The Express stands for righteousness. And now we are a dead duck!"

"Then, if that is so, why not resign your position, Ned? Go seek work elsewhere."

"No, sir! Not while the Express has a leg to stand on! Your words are an offense to me, sir!"

Hitt rose and clapped his friend heartily on the back. "Ned, old man! You're a jewel! Things do look very dark for us, if we look only with the human sense of vision. But we are trying to look at the invisible things within. And there is only perfection there. Come, we must get to work. The Express still lives."

"But--Carmen?"

Hitt turned and faced him. "Ned, Carmen is not in our hands. She is now completely with her God. We must henceforth wait on Him."

* * * * *

On the following afternoon at three a little group of Avon mill hands crept past the guards and met in Father Danny's Mission, down in the segregated vice district. They met there because they dared not go through the town to the Hall. Father Danny was with them. He had slipped into town the preceding night, and remained in hiding through the day. And Carmen was with them, too. She had gone first to the Hall, and then to the Mission, when she arrived again in the little town. And after she had deposited Hitt's check in the bank she had asked Father Danny to call together some of the older and more intelligent of the mill hands, to discuss methods of disbursing the money.

Almost coincident with her arrival had come an order from Ames to apprehend the girl as a disturber of the peace. The hush of death lay over Avon, and even the soldiers now stood aghast at their own bloody work of the day before. Carmen had avoided the main thoroughfares, and had made her way unrecognized. At a distance she saw the town jail, heavily guarded. Its capacity had been sorely taxed, and many of the prisoners had been crowded into cold, cheerless store rooms, and placed under guards who stood ready to mow them down at the slightest threatening gesture.

"It's come, Miss Carmen!" whispered Father Danny, after he had quietly greeted the girl. "It's come! It may be the beginning of the great revolution we've all known wasn't far off! I just had to get back here! They can only arrest me, anyway. And, oh, God! my poor, poor people!"

He sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands. But soon he sprang to his feet. "No time for mollycoddling!" he exclaimed. "Come, men, we'll give you checks, and do you get food for the babies. Only, don't buy of the company stores!"

"We'll have to, Father," said one of them. "It's dangerous not to."

"But they've never taken cash from you there, ye know. Only your pay scrip."

"Aye, Father, and they've discounted that ten per cent each time. But if we bought at other stores we were discharged. And now we'd be blacklisted."

"Ah, God, that's true!" exclaimed the priest. "But now then, Miss Carmen, we'll begin."

For an hour the girl wrote small checks, and the priest handed them out to the eager laborers. They worked feverishly, for they knew that at any moment they might be apprehended.

"Ah, you men!" cried Father Danny, at last unable to restrain himself. "Did ye but know that this grand nation is wholly dependent on such as you, its common people! Not on the rich, I say, the handful that own its mills and mines, but on you who work them for your rich masters! But then, ye're so ignorant!"

"Don't, Father!" pleaded Carmen, "don't! They have suffered so much!"

"Ah, lass, it's but love that I'm dealin' out to 'em, God knows! And yet, it's they that are masters of the situation, only they don't know it! There's the pity! They've no leaders, except such as waste their money and leave 'em in the ditch! The world's social schemes, Miss Carmen, don't reach such as these. They're only sops. And they've got the contempt of the wage-earners."

"The Church, Father, could do much for these people, if--"

"Don't hesitate, Miss Carmen. You mean, if we didn't give all our thought to the rich, eh? But still, it's wholly up to the people themselves, after all. And, mark me, when they do rise, why, such men as Ames won't know what's hit 'em!"

The door was thrown violently open at that moment, and a squad of soldiers under the command of a lieutenant entered.

Carmen and Father Danny rose and faced them. The mill hands stood like stone images, their faces black with suppressed rage. The lieutenant halted his men, and then advanced to the girl.

"Is a woman named Carmen Ariza here?" he demanded rudely.

"I am she," replied the fearless girl.

"Come with us," he said in a rough voice.

"That she will not!" cried Father Danny, suddenly pulling the girl back and thrusting himself before her.

The lieutenant raised his hand. The soldiers advanced. The mill hands quickly formed about the girl. And then, with a yell of rage, they threw themselves upon the soldiers.

For a few minutes the little room was a bedlam. The crazed strikers fought without weapons, except such as they could wrest from the soldiers. But they fought to the death. One of them seized Carmen and threw her beneath the table at which she had been working. Above her raged the desperate conflict. The shouting and cursing might have been heard for blocks around. Father Danny stood in front of the table, beneath which lay the girl. He strove desperately to maintain his position, that he might protect her, meantime frantically calling to the mill hands to drag her out to the rear, and escape by the back door.

In the midst of the mêlée a soldier mounted a chair near the door and raised his rifle. The shot roared out, and Father Danny pitched forward to the floor. Another shot, and still another followed in quick succession. The strikers fell back. Confusion seized them. Then they turned and fled precipitately through the rear exit.

The lieutenant dragged Carmen from beneath the table and out through the door. Then, assembling his men, he gave an order, and they marched away with her up the icy street to the town jail.

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Chapter 16

With the wreckage which he had wrought strewn about him, J. Wilton Ames sat at his rich desk far above the scampering human ants in the streets below and contemplated the fell work of his own hands. And often and anon as he looked, great beads of perspiration welled out upon his forehead, and his breath came hot and dry. In the waste basket at his feet lay crumpled the newspapers with their shrieking, red-lettered versions of the slaughter at Avon. He was not a coward, this man! But he had pushed that basket around the desk out of his sight, for when he looked at it something rose before him that sent a chill to his very soul. At times his vision blurred; and then he passed his hands heavily across his eyes. He had chanced to read in the grewsome accounts of the Avon massacre that little children had been found among those fallen shacks, writhing in their last agonies. And the reports had said that great, red-dripping holes had been ripped in their thin little bodies by those awful "dum-dum" bullets. God! Why had he used them? And why had the demoniac soldiers down there blown the brains from harmless women and helpless babes? He really had not intended to go so far!

And yet, he had! Curse them! The brats would have grown up to oppose the vested privileges of the rich! They, too, would have become anarchists and rioters, bent on leveling the huge industrial fabric which such as he had so laboriously erected under the legal protection afforded their sacred rights! He had done well to remove them now! And the great captains of industry would thank him for the example he had thus fearlessly set!

To think of Avon was for him now to think in terms of blood. And yet his carnal soul hourly wrestled sore with thoughts of a wholly different stamp; with those strange emotions which he had felt when in Carmen's presence; with those unfamiliar sentiments which, had he not fought them back so bitterly, might have made him anew, and--

But the remembrance maddened him. His face grew black, and his mouth poured forth a torrent of foul imprecations and threats upon her and upon those who stood with her. His rage towered again. He smote the desk with his great fist. He fumed, he frothed, he hurled reason from its throne, and bade the Furies again become his counselors.

Upon the desk before him lay the mortgage papers which Hitt had signed. He had bought the mortgage from the bank which had loaned the Express the money. He would crush that sheet now, crush it until the ink dripped black from its emasculated pages! And when it fell into his hands, he would turn it into the yellowest of sensational journals, and hoot the memory of its present staff from ocean to ocean!

Then, his head sunk upon his breast, he fell to wondering if he might not secure a mortgage upon the Beaubien cottage, and turn its occupants into the street. Ah, what a power was money! It was the lever by which he moved the world, and clubbed its dull-witted inhabitants into servile obeisance! Who could stand against him--

That girl!

He sprang to his feet and called Hood. That obedient lackey hastened into his master's presence.

"The Ketchim trial?" snarled Ames.

"Called for this week, sir," replied Hood, glad that the announcement could not possibly offend his superior.

"Humph! The--that girl?"

"Brought up from Avon, and lodged in the Tombs, sir."

"You tell Judge Spencer that if he allows her bail I'll see that his federal appointment is killed, understand?"

"You may rely upon him, sir."

Ames regarded the man with a mixture of admiration and utter contempt. For Hood stood before him a resplendent example of the influence of the most subtle of all poisons, the insidious lure of money. Soul and body he had prostituted himself and his undoubted talents to it. And now, were he to be turned adrift by Ames, the man must inevitably sink into oblivion, squeezed dry of every element of genuine manhood, and weighted with the unclean lucre for which his bony fingers had always itched.

"Will Cass defend Ketchim?" the master asked.

"Oh, doubtless. He knows most about the formation of the defunct Simití company."

"Well, see him and--you say he's young, and got a wife and baby? Offer him twenty-five thousand to quit the case."

"I'm afraid it wouldn't do, sir," returned Hood, shaking his head dubiously. "I've had men talking with him regarding the trial, and he--"

"Then get him over here. I'll see if I can't persuade him," growled Ames in an ugly tone.

Hood bowed and went out. A few minutes later Reverend Darius Borwell was ushered into the financier's private office.

"Mr. Ames," cried that gentleman of the cloth, "it's shocking, terribly so, what those unbridled, unprincipled mill hands have drawn upon themselves down in Avon! Goodness! And four members of the Church of the Social Revolution came to my study last evening and demanded that I let them speak to my congregation on the coming Sabbath!"

"Well?"

"Why, I told them certainly not! My church is God's house! And I shall have policemen stationed at the doors next Sunday to maintain order! To think that it has come to this in America! But, Mr. Ames, is your house guarded? I would advise--"

"Nobody can get within a block of my house, sir, without ringing a series of electric bells," replied Ames evenly. "I have fifty guards and private detectives in attendance in and about my premises all the time. My limousine has been lined with sheet steel. And my every step is protected. I am not afraid for my life. I simply want to keep going until I can carry out a few plans I have in hand." His thought had reverted again to the fair girl in the Tombs.

"But now, Borwell," he continued, "I want to talk with you about another matter. I am drawing up my will, and--"

"Why, my dear Mr. Ames! You are not ill?"

Ames thought of his physician's constantly iterated warning; but shook his head. "I may get caught in this Avon affair," he said evasively. "And I want to be prepared. The President has sent his message to Congress, as you may be aware. There are unpleasant suggestions in it regarding dispossession in cases like my own. I'm coming back by magnanimously willing to Congress a hundred millions, to stand as a fund for social uplift."

"Ah!" sighed the clergyman. Great was Mammon!

"But the little matter I wish to discuss with you is the sum that I am setting aside for the erection of a new church edifice," continued Ames, eying the minister narrowly.

"You don't mean it!" cried that worthy gentleman, springing up and clasping the financier's hand. "Mr. Ames! So magnanimous! Ah--the amount?"

"Well, will half a million do?" suggested Ames.

The minister reflected a moment. One should not be too precipitate in accepting tentative benefactions. "Ah--we really should have--ah--a trifle more, Mr. Ames. There's the settlement home, and the commons, you know, and--"

"Humph! Well, we'll start with half a million," replied Ames dryly. "By the way, you know Jurges, eh? Reverend William Jurges? Er--have you any particular influence with him, if I may ask?" His sharp eyes bored straight through the wondering divine.

"Why--yes--yes, I know the gentleman. And, as for influence--well, I may--"

"Yes, just so," put in Ames. "Now there is a trial coming up this week, and Jurges will be called to the stand. I want you to give him the true facts in regard to it. I'll call Hood, and we'll go over them in detail now. Then you see Jurges this afternoon, and--say, he's raising a building fund too, isn't he?"

The magnate summoned Hood again; and for an hour the trio discussed the forthcoming trial of the unfortunate Philip O. Ketchim. Then Ames dismissed the clergyman, and bade his office boy admit the young lawyer, Cass, who had come in response to Hood's request.

For some moments after Cass entered the office Ames stood regarding him, studying what manner of man he was, and how best to approach him. Then he opened the conversation by a casual reference to the unsatisfactory business situation which obtained throughout the country, and expressed wonder that young men just starting in their professions managed to make ends meet.

"But," he concluded with deep significance, "better go hungry than take on any class of business which, though promising good money returns, nevertheless might eventually prove suicidal." He looked hard at the young lawyer when he paused.

"I quite agree with you, Mr. Ames," returned Cass. "But as I am particularly busy this morning, may I ask why you have sent for me? Have you anything that I can--"

"I have," abruptly interrupted the financier. "We need additions to our legal staff. I thought perhaps you might like to talk over the matter with me, with a view to entering our employ."

"Why, Mr. Ames, I--I have never thought of--" The young man's eyes glistened.

"Well, suppose you think of it now," said Ames, smiling graciously. "I have heard considerable about you of late, and I must say I rather like the way you have been handling your work."

Cass looked at him with rising wonder. The work which he had been doing of late was most ordinary and routine, and called for no display of legal skill whatever. Suspicions slowly began to rise.

"I'd hate to see you tackle anything at this stage of your career, Mr. Cass, that would bring discredit upon you. And I am afraid your association with Ketchim is going to do just that. But possibly you do not intend to handle further business for him?"

Ketchim, though long confined in the Tombs, had at length secured bail, through the not wholly disinterested efforts of his uncle, Stolz, the sworn enemy of Ames. And, because of his loyal efforts in behalf of Ketchim, Stolz had insisted that Cass be retained as counsel for the latter when his trial should come up.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Mr. Cass," said Ames suddenly. "Mr. Hood will take you on at a salary of, say, five thousand to start with. We'll try you out for a few weeks. Then, if we don't mutually fit, why, we'll quietly separate and say nothing. How about it?"

Cass thought hard. Half of that salary would have looked large to him then. But--

"May I ask," he slowly said in reply, "what class of work Mr. Hood would give me to start with?"

"Why, nothing of great importance, perhaps, while you are getting into the harness. Possibly court work, as a starter. You've had experience in that, eh?"

Cass reflected again. The temptation was tremendous. That little house which he had passed and stopped to look at so wistfully every night on his way home was now within his grasp.

He glanced up at the great man, sitting so calmly before him. Then he thought suddenly of Avon. Then of Carmen.

"Mr. Ames," he said, "if I enter your employ, it must be with the stipulation that I shall have nothing to do with the Ketchim trial."

Ames's face went suddenly dark. "If you enter my employ, sir, it will be with the stipulation that you do as I say," he returned coldly.

And then the young lawyer saw through the mask. And his anger flamed high at what he discerned behind it. He rose and faced the great man.

"Mr. Ames," said he, "you have made a mistake. I am poor, and I need business. But I have not as yet fallen so completely under the spell of fortune-hunting as to sell my honor to a man like you! To enter your employ, I now see, would mean the total loss of character and self respect. It would mean a lowering of my ideals, whatever they may be, to your own vulgar standard. I may have done wrong in becoming associated with Mr. Ketchim. In fact, I know that I have. But I pledged myself to assist him. And yet, in doing so, I scarcely can blacken my reputation to the extent that I should were I to become your legal henchman. I want wealth. But there are some terms upon which even I can not accept it. And your terms are among them. I bid you good morning."

Ames gave a snort of anger when Cass went out. Summoning Hood, he vented his great wrath upon that individual's bald pate. "And now," he concluded, "I want that fellow Cass so wound up that he will sneak off to a lonely spot and commit suicide! And if you can't do it, then I'll accept your resignation!"

"Very well, sir," replied Hood. "And, by the way, Mr. Ames, I have just learned that Judge Harris, father of the young man who came up with that girl, is in Colombia. Seems that he's taken some wealthy man down there to look at La Libertad mine."

"What!" Ames's eyes snapped fire.

"They believe you put one over on Ketchim, with the help of Monsignor Lafelle, and so they've gone down to get titles to that mine."

"By G--"

"And they say that--"

"Never mind what they say!" roared Ames. "Cable Wenceslas at once to see that those fellows remain permanently in Colombia. He has ways of accomplishing that. Humph! Fools! Judge Harris, eh? Ninny! I guess Wenceslas can block his little game!"

His great frame shook slightly as he stood consuming with rage, and a slight hemorrhage started from his nostrils. He turned to the lavatory. And as he walked, Hood thought his left foot dragged slightly. But the lawyer made no comment.

* * * * *

And then, with the way well cleared, came the Ketchim trial, which has gone down in history as containing the most spectacular dénoûement in the record of legal procedure in the New World. Had it been concerned, as was anticipated, only with routine legal procedure against the man Ketchim, a weak-souled compound of feeble sycophancy and low morals, it would have attracted slight attention, and would have been spread upon the court records by uninterested clerks with never a second thought. But there were elements entering into it of whose existence the outside world could not have even dreamed. Into it converged threads which now may be traced back to scenes and events in three continents; threads whose intricate windings led through trackless forest and dim-lit church; through court of fashion and hut of poverty; back through the dark mazes of mortal thought, where no light shines upon the carnal aims and aspirations of the human mind; back even to the doors of a palace itself, even to the proudest throne of the Old World.

But none of these elements found expression in the indictment against the frightened defendant, the small-visioned man who had sought to imitate the mighty Ames, and yet who lacked sufficient intelligence of that sort which manifests in such a perversion of skill and power. Ames was a tremendous corruptionist, who stood beyond the laws simply because of the elemental fact that he himself made those laws. Ketchim was a plain deceiver. And his deception was religious fervor. Mingling his theology with fraud, he employed the unholy alliance for the purpose of exploiting the credulous who attended his prayer meetings and commented with bated breath upon his beautiful showing of religious zeal. He was but one of a multitude afflicted with the "dollar mania." His misfortune was that his methods were so antique that they could not long fail of detection. And it was because of his use of the mails for the purpose of deceit that the indictment had been drawn against Philip O. Ketchim et al. by the long-suffering, tolerant complainant, called the people.

Nominally the people's interests were in the hands of the Public Prosecutor, a certain smug young worldling named Ellis. But, as that gentleman owed his appointment to Ames, it is not surprising that at his right hand sat Hood and his well trained staff. Nominally, too, Judge Spencer conducted the trial strictly upon its merits, not all of which lay with the people. But the judge might have been still prosecuting petty cases back in the unknown little district from which he came, had it not been for the great influence of Ames, long since, who had found him on a certain occasion useful. And so the jury panel contained none but those who, we may be very sure, were amenable to the tender pressure of a soft hand lined with yellow gold. And only those points of evidence were sustained which conduced to the incrimination of the miserable defendant. Ketchim was doomed before the trial began.

And yet, to subserve the dark schemes of Ames, and to lengthen the period of torture to which his victims should be subjected, the trial was dragged through many days. Besides, even he and his hirelings were bound to observe the formalities.

It was at the suggestion of Cass that no effort had been made to procure bail for Carmen after her arrest. The dramatic may always be relied upon to carry a point which even plain evidence negatives. And she, acquiescing in the suggestion, remained a full two weeks in the Tombs before Ames's eager counsel found their opportunity to confront her on the witness stand and besmirch her with their black charges. The Beaubien was prostrated. But, knowing that for her another hour of humiliation and sorrow had come, she strove mightily to summon her strength for its advent. Father Waite toiled with Cass day and night. Hitt and Haynerd, without financial resources, pursued their way, grim and silent. The Express was sinking beneath its mountainous load. And they stood at the helm, stanch to their principles, not yielding an iota to offers of assistance in exchange for a reversal of the policy upon which the paper had been launched.

"We're going down, Hitt," said Haynerd grimly. "But we go with the flag flying at the mast!"

Yet Hitt answered not. He was learning to know as did Carmen, and to see with eyes which were invisible.

It was just when the jury had been impaneled, after long days of petty wrangling and childish recrimination among the opposing lawyers, that Stolz came to Ames and laid down his sword. The control of C. and R. should pass unequivocally to the latter if he would but save Ketchim from prison.

Then Ames lay back and roared with laughter over his great triumph. C. and R! Poof! He would send Stolz' nephew to prison, and then roll a bomb along Wall Street whose detonation would startle the financial world clean out of its orbit! Stolz had failed to notice that Ames's schemes had so signally worked out that C. and R. was practically in his hands now! The defeated railroad magnate at length backed out of the Ames office purple with rage. And then he pledged himself to hypothecate his entire fortune to the rescue of his worthless nephew.

Thus, in deep iniquity, was launched the famous trial, a process of justice in name only, serving as an outlet for a single man's long nurtured personal animosities. The adulterous union of religion and business was only nominally before the bar. The victims, not the defendant only, not the preachers, the washerwomen, the factory girls, the widows, and the orphans, whose life savings Ketchim had drawn into his net by the lure of pious benedictions, but rather those unfortunates who had chanced to incur the malicious hatred of the great, legalized malefactor, Ames, by opposition to his selfish caprice, and whose utter defeat and discrediting before the public would now place the crown of righteous expediency upon his own chicanery and extortion and his wantonly murderous deeds.

The prosecution scored from the beginning. Doctor Jurges, utterly confused by the keen lawyers, and vainly endeavoring to follow the dictates of his conscience, while attempting to reconcile them with his many talks with Darius Borwell, gave testimony which fell little short of incriminating himself. For there were produced letters which he had written to members of his congregation, and which for subtlety and deception, though doubtless innocently done, would have made a seasoned promoter look sharp to his own laurels.

Then Harris was called. He had been summoned from Denver for the trial. But his stuttering evidence gave no advantage to either side. And then--crowning blunder!--Cass permitted Ketchim himself to take the stand. And the frightened, trembling broker gave his own cause such a blow that the prosecution might well have asked the judge to take the case from the jury then and there. It was a legal faux pas; and Cass walked the floor and moaned the whole night through.

Then, as per program, the prosecution called Madam Beaubien. Could not that sorrowing woman have given testimony which would have aided the tottering defense, and unmasked the evil genius which presided over this mock trial? Ah, yes, in abundance! But not one point would the judge sustain when it bordered upon forbidden territory. It was made plain to her that she was there to testify against Ketchim, and to permit the Ames lawyers to bandy her own name about the court room upon the sharp points of their cruel cross-questions and low insinuations.

But, she protested, her knowledge of the Simití company's affairs had come through another person.

And who might that be?

Mr. J. Wilton Ames.

Ah! But Mr. Ames should give his own testimony--for was it not he who had, not long since, legally punished the witness on a charge of defamation of character? The witness was dismissed. And the spectators knew that it was because the righteous prosecution could no longer stain its hands with one who bore such a tarnished name as she.

And then, taunted and goaded to exasperation, the wronged woman burst into tears and flayed the bigamist Ames there before the court room crowded with eager society ladies and curious, non-toiling men. Flayed him as men are seldom flayed and excoriated by the women they trample. The bailiffs seized her, and dragged her into an ante-room; the judge broke his gavel rapping for order, and threatened to clear the court; and then Cass, too young and inexperienced to avoid battle with seasoned warriors, rose and demanded that Madam Beaubien be returned to the stand.

The astonished judge hesitated. Cass stood his ground. He turned to the people, as if seeking their support. A great murmur arose through the court room. The judge looked down at Ames. That man, sitting calm and unimpassioned, nodded his head slightly. And the woman was led back to the chair.

"It may have an important bearing upon the case, Your Honor!" cried the young lawyer for the defense. "Mr. Ames is to take the stand as an important witness in this case. If Madam Beaubien brings such a charge against him, it gives us reason to believe his honor peccable, and his testimony open to suspicion!"

It was a daring statement, and the whole room gasped, and held its breath.

"I object, Your Honor!" shouted the chief prosecutor, Ellis. "The lawyer for the defense is in contempt of court! Madam Beaubien has been shown to be a--"

"The objection is sustained!" called the judge. "The charge is utterly irrelevant! Order in the court!"

"His first wife's portrait--is in a glass window--in his yacht!" cried the hysterical Beaubien. Then she crumpled up in a limp mass, and was led from the chair half fainting.

At the woman's shrill words a white-haired man, dressed in black, clerical garb, who had been sitting in the rear of the room close to the door, rose hastily, then slowly sat down again. At his feet reposed a satchel, bearing several foreign labels. Evidently he had but just arrived from distant lands.

Consternation reigned throughout the room for a few minutes. Then Cass, believing that the psychological moment had arrived, loudly called Carmen Ariza to the stand. The dramatic play must be continued, now that it had begun. The battle which had raged back and forth for long, weary days, could be won, if at all, only by playing upon the emotions of the jury, for the evidence thus far given had resulted in showing not only the defense, but likewise the Beaubien, and all who had been associated with the Simití company, including Cass himself, to be participators in gross, intentional fraud.

The remaining witness, the girl herself, had been purposely neglected by the prosecution, for the great Ames had planned that she must be called by the defense. Then would he bring up the prostitute, Jude, and from her wring testimony which must blast forever the girl's already soiled name. Following her, he would himself take the stand, and tell of the girl's visits to his office; of her protestations of love for him; of her embracing him; and of a thousand indiscretions which he had carefully garnered and stored for this triumphant occasion.

But the judge, visibly perturbed by the dramatic turn which the case seemed to be taking, studied his watch for a moment, then Ames's face, and then abruptly adjourned court until the following day. Yet not until Cass had been recognized, and the hounded girl summoned from her cell in the Tombs, to take the stand in the morning for--her life!

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Chapter 17

In the days to come, when the divine leaven which is in the world to-day shall have brought more of the carnal mind's iniquity to the surface, that the Sun of Truth may destroy the foul germs, there shall be old men and women, and they which, looking up from their work, peep and mutter of strange things long gone, who shall fall wonderingly silent when they have told again of the fair young girl who walked alone into the crowded court room that cold winter's morning. And their stories will vary with the telling, for no two might agree what manner of being it was that came into their midst that day.

Even the bailiffs, as if moved by some strange prescience, had fallen back and allowed her to enter alone. The buzz of subdued chatter ceased, and a great silence came over all as they looked. Some swore, in awed whispers, when the dramatic day had ended, and judge and jury and wrangling lawyer had silently, and with bowed heads, gone quiet and thoughtful each to his home, that a nimbus encircled her beautiful head when she came through the door and faced the gaping multitude. Some said that her eyes were raised; that she saw not earthly things; and that a heavenly presence moved beside her. Nor may we lightly set aside these tales; for, after the curtain had fallen upon the wonderful scene about to be enacted, there was not one present who would deny that, as the girl came into the great room and went directly to the witness chair, God himself walked at her side and held her hand.

"Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest."

Through the mind of that same white-haired man in the clerical garb ran these words as he watched the girl move silently across the room. She seemed to have taken on a new meaning to him since the previous day. And as he looked, his eyes grew moist, and he drew out his handkerchief.

But his were not the only eyes that had filled then. Hitt and Haynerd bent their heads, that the people might not see; Miss Wall and the Beaubien wept silently, and with no attempt to stay their grief; Jude buried her head in her hands, and rocked back and forth, moaning softly. Why they wept, they knew not. A welter of conflicting emotions surged through their harassed souls. They seemed to have come now to the great crisis. And which way the tide would turn rested with this lone girl.

For some moments after she was seated the silence remained unbroken. And as she sat there, waiting, she looked down at the man who sought to destroy what he might not possess. Some said afterward that as she looked at him she smiled. Who knows but that the Christ himself smiled down from the cross at those who had riven his great heart?

But Ames did not meet her glance. Somehow he dared not. He was far from well that morning, and an ugly, murderous mood possessed him. And yet, judged by the world's standards, he had tipped the crest of success. He had conquered all. Men came and went at his slightest nod. His coffers lay bursting with their heavy treasure. He was swollen with wealth, with material power, with abnormal pride. His tender sensibilities and sympathies were happily completely ossified, and he was stone deaf and blind to the agonies of a suffering world. Not a single aim but had been realized; not a lone ambition but had been met. Even the armed camp at Avon, and the little wooden crosses over the fresh mounds there, all testified to his omnipotence; and in them, despite their horrors, he felt a satisfying sense of his own great might.

The clerk held up the Bible for the girl to give her oath. She looked at him for a moment, and then smiled. "I will tell the truth," she said simply.

The officer hesitated, and looked up at the judge. But the latter sat with his eyes fixed upon the girl. The clerk did not press the point; and Carmen was delivered into the hands of the lawyers.

Cass hesitated. He knew not how to begin. Then, yielding to a sudden impulse, he asked the girl to mention briefly the place of her birth, her parentage, and other statistical data, leading up to her association with the defendant.

The story that followed was simply given. It was but the one she had told again and again. Yet the room hung on her every word. And when she had concluded, Cass turned her back again to Simití, and to Rosendo's share in the mining project which had ultimated in this suit.

A far-away look came into the girl's eyes as she spoke of that great, black man who had taken her from desolate Badillo into his own warm heart. There were few dry eyes among the spectators when she told of his selfless love. And when she drew the portrait of him, standing alone in the cold mountain water, far up in the jungle of Guamocó, bending over the laden batea, and toiling day by day in those ghastly solitudes, that she might be protected and educated and raised above her primitive environment in Simití, there were sobs heard throughout the room; and even the judge, hardened though he was by conflict with the human mind, removed his glasses and loudly cleared his throat as he wiped them.

Ames first grew weary as he listened, and then exasperated. His lawyer at length rose to object to the recital on the ground that it was largely irrelevant to the case. And the judge, pulling himself together, sustained the objection. Cass sat down. Then the prosecution eagerly took up the cross-examination. Ames's hour had come.

"Boast not thyself of to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth," murmured the white-haired man in the clerical garb far back in the crowded room. Had he learned the law of Truth to error, "Thou shall surely die"? Did he discern the vultures gnawing at the rich man's vitals? Did he, too, know that this giant of privilege, so insolently flaunting his fleeting power, his blood-stained wealth and his mortal pride, might as well seek to dim the sun in heaven as to escape the working of those infinite divine laws which shall effect the destruction of evil and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven even here upon earth?

Ames leaned over to whisper to Hood. The latter drew Ellis down and transmitted his master's instructions. The atmosphere grew tense, and the hush of expectancy lay over all.

"Miss Carmen," began Ellis easily, "your parentage has been a matter of some dispute, if I mistake not, and--"

Cass was on his feet to object. What had this question to do with the issue?

But the judge overruled the objection. That was what he was there for. Cass should have divined it by this time.

"H'm!" Ellis cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses. "And your father, it is said, was a negro priest. I believe that has been accepted for some time. A certain Diego, if I recall correctly."

"I never knew my earthly father," replied Carmen in a low voice.

"But you have admitted that it might have been this Diego, have you not?"

"It might have been," returned the girl, looking off absently toward the high windows.

"Did he not claim you as his daughter?" pursued the lawyer.

"Yes," softly.

"Now," continued Ellis, "that being reasonably settled, is it not also true that you used the claim of possessing this mine, La Libertad, as a pretext for admission to society here in New York?"

The girl did not answer, but only smiled pityingly at him. He, too, had bartered his soul; and in her heart there rose a great sympathy for him in his awful mesmerism.

"And that you claimed to be an Inca princess?" went on the merciless lawyer.

"Answer!" admonished the judge, looking severely down upon the silent girl.

Carmen sighed, and drew her gaze away from the windows. She was weary, oh, so weary of this unspeakable mockery. And yet she was there to prove her God.

"I would like to ask this further question," Ellis resumed, without waiting for her reply. "Were you not at one time in a resort conducted by Madam Cazeau, down on--"

He stopped short. The girl's eyes were looking straight into his, and they seemed to have pierced his soul. "I am sorry for you," she said gently, "oh, so sorry! Yes, I was once in that place."

The man knew not whether to smile in triumph or hide his head in shame. He turned to Hood. But Hood would not look at him. Ames alone met his embarrassed glance, and sent back a command to continue the attack.

Cass again rose and voiced his protest. What possible relation to the issue involved could such testimony have? But the judge bade him sit down, as the counsel for the prosecution doubtless was bringing out facts of greatest importance.

Ellis again cleared his throat and bent to his loathsome task. "Now, Miss Ariza, in reference to your labors to incite the mill hands at Avon to deeds of violence, the public considers that as part of a consistent line of attack upon Mr. Ames, in which you were aiding others from whom you took your orders. May I ask you to cite the motives upon which you acted?"

Cass sank back in abject despair. Ketchim was being forgotten!

"We have not attacked Mr. Ames," she slowly replied, "but only the things he stands for. But you wouldn't understand."

Ellis smiled superciliously. "A militant brand of social uplift, I suppose?"

"No, Mr. Ellis, but just Christianity."

"H'm. And that is the sort of remedy that anarchists apply to industrial troubles, is it not?"

"There is no remedy for industrial troubles but Christianity," she said gently. "Not the burlesque Christianity of our countless sects and churches; not Roman Catholicism; not Protestantism; nor any of the fads and fancies of the human mind; but just the Christianity of Jesus of Nazareth, who knew that the human man was not God's image, but only stood for it in the mortal consciousness. And he always saw behind this counterfeit the real man, the true likeness of God. And--"

"You are diverging from the subject proper and consuming time, Miss Ariza!" interrupted the judge sternly.

Carmen did not heed him, but continued quietly:

"And it was just such a man that Jesus portrayed in his daily walk and words."

"Miss Ariza!" again commanded the judge.

"No," the girl went calmly on, "Jesus did not stand for the intolerance, the ignorance, the bigotry, the hatred, and the human hypothesis, the fraud, and chicanery, and the 'Who shall be greatest?' of human institutions. Nor did he make evil a reality, as mortals do. He knew it seemed awfully real to the deceived human consciousness; but he told that consciousness to be not afraid. And then he went to work and drove out the belief of evil on the basis of its nothingness and its total lack of principle. The orthodox churches and sects of to-day do not do that. Oh, no! They strive for world dominion! Their kingdom is wholly temporal, and is upheld by heartless millionaires, and by warlike kings and emperors. Their tenets shame the intelligence of thinking men! Yet they have slain tens of millions to establish them!"

What could the Court do? To remove the girl meant depriving Ames of his prey. But if she remained upon the stand, she would put them all to confusion, for they had no means of silencing her. The judge looked blankly at Ames; his hands were tied.

Ellis hurried to change the current of her talk by interposing another question.

"Will you tell us, Miss Carmen, why you have been working--"

"I have been working for God," she interrupted. Her voice was low and steady, and her eyes shone with a light that men are not wont to see in those of their neighbors. "I have not been working for men. He alone is my employer. And for Him I am here to-day."

Consternation was plainly discernible in the camp of the prosecution. Cass knew now that he need make no more objections. The defense had passed from his hands.

At this juncture James Ketchim, brother of the defendant, thinking to relieve the strain and embarrassment, gave audible voice to one of his wonted witticisms. All turned to look at him. But the effect was not what he had anticipated. No one laughed.

"Hold your tongue, Mr. Ketchim!" roared the exasperated judge, bending far over his desk. "You are just a smart little fool!" And the elder Ketchim retired in chagrin and confusion.

"Miss Carmen," pursued Ellis, eager to recover his advantage, for he saw significant movements among the jury, "do you not think the unfortunate results at Avon quite prove that you have allied yourself with those who oppose the nation's industrial progress?"

Carmen sat silent. Order had now been restored in the court room, and Ellis was feeling sure of himself again.

"You have opposed the constructive development of our country's resources by your assaults upon men of wealth, like Mr. Ames, for example, have you not?"

Then the girl opened her mouth, and from it came words that fell upon the room like masses of lead. "I stand opposed to any man, Mr. Ellis, who, to enrich himself, and for the purpose of revenge, spreads the boll weevil in the cotton fields of the South."

Dull silence descended upon the place. And yet it was a silence that fell crashing upon Ames's straining ears. He sat for a moment stunned; then sprang to his feet. All eyes were turned upon him. He held out a hand, and made as if to speak; then sank again into his chair.

Ellis stood as if petrified. Then Hood rose and whispered to him. Ellis collected himself, and turned to the judge.

"Your Honor, we regret to state that, from the replies which Miss Ariza has given, we do not consider her mentally competent as a witness. We therefore dismiss her."

But Cass had leaped to the floor. "Your Honor!" he cried. "I should like to examine the witness further!"

"She is dismissed!" returned the judge, glowering over his spectacles at the young lawyer.

"I stand on--"

"Sit down!" the judge bellowed.

"Miss Carmen!" called Cass through the rising tumult, "the lawyer for the prosecution has heaped insults upon you in his low references to your parentage. Will you--"

The judge pounded upon his desk with the remnant of his broken gavel. Then he summoned the bailiffs.

"I shall order the room cleared!" he called in a loud, threatening voice.

The murmur subsided. The judge sat down and mopped his steaming face. Hood and Ellis bent in whispered consultation. Ames was a study of wild, infuriated passion. Cass stood defiantly before the bar. Carmen sat quietly facing the crowded room. She had reached up and was fondling the little locket which hung at her throat. It was the first time she had ever worn it. It was not a pretty piece of jewelry; and it had never occurred to her to wear it until that day. Nor would she have thought of it then, had not the Beaubien brought it to the Tombs the night before in a little box with some papers which the girl had called for. Why she had put it on, she could not say.

Slowly, while the silence continued unbroken, the girl drew the slender chain around in front of her and unclasped it.

"I--I never--knew my parents," she murmured musingly, looking down lovingly at the little locket. Then she opened it and sat gazing, rapt and absorbed, at the two little portraits within. "But there are their pictures," she suddenly announced, holding the locket out to Cass.

It was said afterward that never in the history of legal procedure in New York had that court room held such dead silence as when Cass stood bending over the faces of the girl's earthly parents, portrayed in the strange little locket which Rosendo had taken from Badillo years before. Never had it known such a tense moment; never had the very air itself seemed so filled with a mighty, unseen presence, as on that day and in that crisal hour.

Without speaking, Hood rose and looked over Cass's shoulder at the locket. A muffled cry escaped him, and he turned and stared at Ames. The judge bent shaking over his desk.

"Mr. Hood!" he exclaimed. "Have you ever seen those pictures before?"

"Yes, sir," replied Hood in a voice that was scarcely heard.

"Where, sir?"

Hood seemed to have frozen to the spot. His hands shook, and his words gibbered from his trembling lips.

"The--the woman's portrait, sir--is--is--the one in--in Mr. Ames's yacht!"

"My God!"

The piercing cry rang through the still room like a lost soul's despairing wail. Ames had rushed from his seat, overturning his chair, thrusting the lawyers aside, and seized the locket. For a moment he peered wildly into it. It seemed as if his eyes would devour it, absorb it, push themselves clean through it, in their eagerness to grasp its meaning.

Then he looked up. His eyes were red; his face ashen; his lips white. His unsteady glance met the girl's. His mouth opened, and flapped like a broken shutter in the wind. His arms swung wildly upward; then dropped heavily. Suddenly he bent to one side; caught himself; straightened up; and then, with a horrifying, gurgling moan, crashed to the floor. The noise of the tremendous fall reverberated through the great room like an echo of Satan's plunge into the pit of hell.

Pandemonium broke upon the scene. Wild confusion seized the excited spectators. They rushed forward in a mass, over railings, over chairs and tables, heedless of all but the great mystery that was slowly clearing away in the dim light that winter's morning. Through them the white-haired man, clad in clerical vestments, elbowed his way to the bar.

"Let me see the locket!" he cried. "Let me see it!"

He tore it from Hood's hand and scanned it eagerly. Then he nodded his head. "The same! The very same!" he murmured, trembling with excitement. Then, shouting to the judge above the hubbub:

"Your Honor! I can throw some light upon this case!"

The crowd fell back.

"Who are you?" called the judge in a loud, quavering voice.

"I am Monsignor Lafelle. I have just returned from Europe. The woman's portrait in this little locket is that of Doña Dolores, Infanta, daughter of Queen Isabella the Second, of Spain! And this girl," pointing to the bewildered Carmen, who sat clinging to the arms of her chair, "is her child, and is a princess of the royal blood! Her father is the man who lies there--J. Wilton Ames!"

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Chapter 18

Borne on pulsing electric waves, the news of the great dénoûement flashed over the city, and across a startled continent. Beneath the seas it sped, and into court and hovel. Madrid gasped; Seville panted; and old Padre Rafaél de Rincón raised his hoary head and cackled shrilly.

To the seething court room came flying reporters and news gatherers, who threw themselves despairingly against the closed portals. Within, the bailiffs fought with the excited crowd, and held the doors against the panic without.

Over the prostrate form of Ames the physicians worked with feverish energy, but shook their heads.

In the adjoining ante-room, whither she had been half carried, half dragged by Hitt when Ames fell, sat Carmen, clasped in the Beaubien's arms, stunned, bewildered, and speechless. Hitt stood guard at the door; and Miss Wall and Jude tiptoed about with bated breath, unable to take their eyes from the girl.

In the court room without, Haynerd held the little locket, and plied Monsignor Lafelle with his incoherent questions. The excited editor's brain was afire; but of one thing he was well assured, the Express would bring out an extra that night that would scoop its rivals clean to the bone!

In a few minutes the bailiffs fought the mob back from the doors and admitted a man, a photographer, who had been sent out to procure chemicals in the hope that the portrait of the man in the locket might be cleaned. Ten minutes later the features of J. Wilton Ames stood forth clearly beside those of the wife of his youth. The picture showed him younger in appearance, to be sure, but the likeness was unmistakable.

"Lord! Lord! Monsignor, but you are slow! Come to the point quickly! We must go to press within an hour!" wailed Haynerd, shaking the churchman's arm in his excitement.

"But, what more?" cried Lafelle. "I saw the portrait in the Royal Gallery, years ago, in Madrid. It impressed me. I could not forget the sad, sweet face. I saw it again in the stained-glass window in the Ames yacht. I became suspicious. I inquired when I returned to Spain. There was much whispering, much shaking of heads, but little information. But this I know: the queen, the great Isabella, had a lover, a wonderful tenor, Marfori, Marquis de Loja. And one day a babe was taken quietly to a little cottage in the Granada hills. Rumor said that it was an Infanta, and that the tenor was its father. Who knew? One man, perhaps: old Rafaél de Rincón. But Rome suddenly recalled him from Isabella's court, and after that he was very quiet."

"But, Ames?" persisted Haynerd.

Lafelle shrugged his shoulders. "Mr. Ames," he said, "traveled much in Europe. He went often to Spain. He bought a vineyard in Granada--the one from which he still procures his wine. And there--who knows?--he met the Infanta. But probably neither he nor she guessed her royal birth."

"Well! Good Lord! Then--?"

"Well, they eloped--who knows? Whether married or not, I can not say. But it is evident she went with him to Colombia, where, perhaps, he was seeking a concession from Congress in Bogotá. So far, so good. Then came the news of his father's sudden death. He hastened out of the country. Possibly he bade her wait for his return. But a prospective mother is often excitable. She waited a day, a week--who knows how long? And then she set out to follow him. Alas! she was wild to do such a thing. And it cost her life. She died at the little riverine town of Badillo, after her babe, Carmen, was born. Is it not plausible?"

"God above!" cried Haynerd. "And the girl's wonderful voice?"

"A heritage from her grandfather, the tenor, Marfori," Lafelle suggested.

"But--the portraits--what is the name under that of Ames? Guillermo? That is not his!"

"Yes, for Guillermo in Spanish is William. Doubtless Ames told her his name was Will, contracted from Wilton, the name he went by in his youth. And the nearest the Spanish could come to it was Guillermo. Diego's name was Guillermo Diego Polo. And after he had seen that name in the locket he used it as a further means of strengthening his claim upon the girl."

"Then--she is--a--princess!"

"Yes, doubtless, if my reasoning is correct. Not an Inca princess, but a princess of the reigning house of Spain."

Haynerd could hold himself no longer, but rushed madly from the room and tore across town to the office of the Express.

Then came the white-enameled ambulance, dashing and careening to the doors of the building where Ames lay so quiet. Gently, silently, the great body was lifted and borne below. And then the chattering, gesticulating mob poured from the court room, from the halls and corridors, and out into the chill sunlight of the streets, where they formed anew into little groups, and went over again the dramatic events but a few minutes past.

Then, too, emerged Carmen, heavily veiled from the curious, vulgar gaze of the rabble, and entered the waiting limousine, with the Beaubien and Hitt. Miss Wall and the gasping Jude followed in another. The judge had bidden the girl go on her own recognizance. The arrest at Avon; the matter of bail; all had merged into the excitement of the hour and been forgotten. Ketchim went out on Cass's arm. The judge had ordered the clerk to enter an adjournment.

* * * * *

All that afternoon and far into the night a gaping, wondering concourse braved the cold and stood about the walk that led up to the little Beaubien cottage. Within, the curtains were drawn, and Sidney, Jude, and Miss Wall answered the calls that came incessantly over the telephone and to the doors. Sidney had not been in the court room, for Haynerd had left him at the editor's desk in his own absence. But with the return of Haynerd the lad had hurried into a taxicab and commanded the chauffeur to drive madly to the Beaubien home. And once through the door, he clasped the beautiful girl in his arms and strained her to his breast.

"My sister!" he cried. "My own, my very own little sister! We only pretended before, didn't we? But now--now, oh, God above! you really are my sister!"

The scarce comprehending girl drew his head down and kissed him. "Sidney," she murmured, "the ways of God are past finding out!"

Aye, for again, as of old, He had chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; He had chosen the weak to confound the mighty; and the base things, and the things despised, had He used to bring to naught the things that are. And why? That no flesh might glory in His terrible presence!

"Carmen!" cried the excited boy. "Think what this means to our book!"

The girl smiled up at him; then turned away. "My father!" she murmured. "He--my father!" she kept repeating, groping her way about the room as if in a haze. "He! It can't be! It can't!"

The still dazed Beaubien drew the girl into her arms. "My little princess!" she whispered. "Oh! But who would have dreamed it! Yet I called you that from the very first. But--oh, Carmen! And he--that man--your father!"

"Don't! Mother, don't! It--it isn't proved. It--"

Then the Beaubien's heart almost stopped. What if it were true? What, then, would this sudden turn in the girl's life mean to the lone woman who clung to her so?

"No, mother dearest," whispered Carmen, looking up through her tears. "For even if it should be true, I will not leave you. He--he--"

She stopped; and would speak of him no more.

But neither of them knew as yet that in that marvelous Fifth Avenue palace, behind those drawn curtains and guarded bronze doors, at which an eager crowd stood staring, Ames, the superman, lay dying, his left side, from the shoulder down, paralyzed.

* * * * *

In the holy quiet of the first hours of morning, the mist rose, and the fallen man roused slowly out of his deep stupor. And then through the dim-lit halls of the great mansion rang a piercing cry. For when he awoke, the curtain stood raised upon his life; and the sight of its ghastly content struck wild terror to his naked soul.

He had dreamed as he lay there, dreamed while the mist was rising. He thought he had been toiling with feverish energy through those black hours, building a wall about the things that were his. And into the design of the huge structure he had fitted the trophies of his conquest. Gannette toiled with him, straining, sweating, groaning. Together they reared that monstrous wall; and as they labored, the man plotted the death of his companion when the work should be done, lest he ask for pay. And into the corners of the wall they fitted little skulls. These were the children of Avon who had never played. And over the great stones which they heaved into place they sketched red dollar-marks; and their paint was human blood. A soft wind swept over the rising structure, and it bore a gentle voice: "I am Love." But the toilers looked up and cursed. "Let us alone!" they cried. "Love is weakness!" And over the rim of the wall looked fair faces. "We are Truth, we are Life!" But the men frothed with fury, and hurled skulls at the faces, and bade them begone! A youth and a tender girl looked down at the sweating toilers. "We ask help; we are young, and times are so hard!" But the great man pointed to himself. "Look at me!" he cried. "I need no help! Begone!" And then the darkness settled down, for the wall was now so high that it shut out the sun. And the great man howled with laughter; the wall was done. So he turned and smote his companion unto death, and dipped his hands in the warm blood of the quivering corpse.

But the darkness was heavy. The man grew lonely. And then he sought to mount the wall. But his hands slipped on the human blood of the red, slimy dollar-marks, and he fell crashing back among his tinkling treasures. He rose, and tried again. The naked, splitting skulls leered at him. The toothless jaws clattered, and the eyeless sockets glowed eerily. The man raised his voice. He begged that a rope be lowered. He would go out once more into the sunlit world. But the chill wind brought him only despairing moans.

Then he rushed madly to the wall, and smote it with his bare hands. It mocked him with the strength which he had given it. He turned and tore his hair and flesh. He gnashed his teeth until they broke into bits. He cursed; he raved; he pleaded; he offered all his great treasure for freedom. But the skulls grinned their horrid mockery at him; and the blood on the stones dripped upon his burning head. And above it all he heard the low plotting of those without who were awaiting his death, that they might throw down the wall and take away his treasure.

And then his fear became frenzy; his love of gold turned to horror; his reason fled; and he dashed himself wildly against the prison which he had reared, until he fell, bleeding and broken. And as he fell, he heard the shrill cackle of demons that danced their hellish steps on the top of the wall. Then the Furies flew down and bound him tight.

"Ah, my God, What might I not have made of Thy fair world Had I but loved Thy highest creature here? It was my duty to have loved the highest; It surely was my profit had I known."

He awoke from his terror, dripping. He feebly lifted his head. Then he sought to raise his arms, to move. He was alive! And then the scream tore from his dry throat. His great body was half dead!

The attendants flew to his couch. The physicians bent over him and sought to soothe his mental agony. The man's torture was fearful to behold; his weakness, pitiable. He sank again into somnolence. But the sleep was one of unbroken horror; and those in the room stopped in the course of their duties; and their faces blanched; and they held their hands to their ears, when his awful moans echoed through the curtained room.

Through his dreams raced the endless panorama of his crowded life. Now he was wading through muddy slums where stood the wretched houses which he rented for immoral purposes. He was madly searching for something. What could it be? Ah, yes, his girl! Some one had said she was there. Who was it? Aye, who but himself? But he found her not. And he wept bitterly.

And then he hurried to Avon; and there he dug into those fresh graves--dug, dug, dug, throwing the dirt up in great heaps behind him. And into the face of each corpse as he dragged it out of its damp bed he peered eagerly. But with awful moans he threw them from him in turn, for she was not there.

Then he fled down, down, far into the burning South; and there he roamed the trackless wastes, calling her name. And the wild beasts and the hissing serpents looked out at him from the thick bush, looked with great, red eyes, and then fled from him with loathing. And, suddenly, he came upon another mound near the banks of a great river. And over it stood a rude cross; and on the cross he read the dim, penciled word, Dolores. Ah, God! how he cried out for the oblivion that was not his. But the ghastly mound froze his blood, and he rushed from it in terror, and fell, whirling over and over, down, down into eternal blackness filled with dying men's groans!

The awful day drew to a close. The exhausted attendants stood about the bed with bated breath. The physicians had called Doctor Morton in consultation, for the latter was a brain specialist. And while they sat gazing at the crazed, stricken giant, hopelessly struggling to lift the inert mass of his dead body, Reverend Darius Borwell entered. He bowed silently to them all; then went to the bedside and took the patient's hand. A moment later he turned to the physicians and nurses.

"Let us ask God's help for Mr. Ames," he said gravely.

They bowed, and he knelt beside the bed and prayed long and earnestly; prayed that the loving Father who had made man in His image would take pity on the suffering one who lay there, and, if it be His will, spare him for Jesus' sake.

He arose from his knees, and they all sat quiet for some moments. Then Doctor Morton's heavy voice broke the silence of death. "Mr. Borwell," he said in awful earnestness, extending his hand toward the bed, "cure that man, if your religion is anything more than a name!"

A hot flush of indignation spread over the minister's face; but he did not reply. Doctor Morton turned to the physicians.

"Gentlemen," he said solemnly, "Mr. Ames, I think, is past our aid. There is nothing on earth that can save him. If he lives, he will be hopelessly insane." He hesitated, and turned to a maid. "Where is his daughter Kathleen?" he asked.

"Upstairs, sir, in her apartments," answered the maid, wiping her red eyes.

"See that she remains there," said the doctor gruffly. "Gentlemen," turning again to the physicians, "I have but one suggestion. Send for--for--that little girl, Carmen."

"It is ill-advised, Doctor," interrupted one of the men. "It would only further excite him. It might hasten the end."

"I do not agree with you," returned Doctor Morton. "As it is, he is doomed. With her here--there may be a chance."

The others shook their heads; but Doctor Morton persisted stubbornly. Finally Doctor Haley gave his ultimatum. "If she is sent for, I shall retire from the case."

"Very well," announced Doctor Morton evenly, "then I will take it myself." He rose and went out into the vestibule where there was a telephone. Calling for the Beaubien cottage, he gave a peremptory order that Carmen come at once in the automobile which he was sending for her.

The Beaubien turned from the telephone to the girl. Her face was deathly pale.

"What is it, mother dearest?"

"They--they want--you!"

"Why--is it--is he--"

"They say he is--dying," the woman whispered.

Carmen stood for a minute as if stunned. "Why--I--didn't know--that there was--anything wrong. Mother, you didn't tell me! Why?"

The Beaubien threw her arms around the girl. Father Waite rose from the table where he had been writing, and came to them.

"Go," he said to Carmen. "The Lord is with thee! Go in this thy might!"

A few minutes later the great bronze doors of the Ames mansion swung wide to admit the daughter of the house.

Doctor Morton met the wondering girl, and led her directly into the sick-room. The other physicians had departed.

"Miss Carmen," he said gravely, "Mr. Ames is past earthly help. He can not live."

The girl turned upon him like a flash from a clear sky. "You mean, he shall not live!" she cried. "For you doctors have sentenced him!"

The startled man bowed before the rebuke. Then a sense of her magnificent environment, of her strange position, and of the vivid events of the past few hours swept over her, and she became embarrassed. The nurses and attendants, too, who stood about and stared so hard at her, added to her confusion.

But the doctor took her hand. "Listen," he said, "I am leaving now, but you will remain. If I am needed, one of the maids will summon me."

Carmen stood for a moment without speaking. Then she walked slowly to the bed and looked down at the man. Doctor Morton motioned to the attendants to withdraw. Then he himself stepped softly out and closed the door. When the girl turned around, she was alone--with death.

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Chapter 19

A curious, gossiping world, dwelling only in the froth of the human mind, will not comprehend for many a year to come what took place in that dim, tapestried chamber of the rich man in those next hours. When twilight began to steal through the marble halls of the great, shrouded mansion, the nurse in charge, becoming apprehensive, softly opened the door of the sick-room and peeped in. Through the darkness she saw the girl, sitting beside the bed, with the man's right hand clasped in both of hers, and her head resting upon his shoulder. And the nurse quickly closed the door again in awe, and stole away.

The girl sat there all that day and all that night, nor would leave but for brief moments to eat, or to reassure the Beaubien over the telephone that all was well. Doctor Morton came, and went, and came again. Carmen smiled, and held his hand for a moment each time, but said little. Ames had slept. And, more, his cheeks were stained where the scalding tears had coursed down them. But the doctor would ask no questions. He was satisfied. The nurses entered only when summoned. And three days and nights passed thus, while Carmen dwelt with the man who, as the incarnation of error, seeking the destruction of others, had destroyed himself.

Then Doctor Morton announced to a waiting world that his patient would live--but he would say no more. And the world heard, too, that Kathleen Ames had left her father's roof--left in humiliation and chagrin when she learned that Carmen had come there to live--and had gone to England for a prolonged visit with the Dowager Duchess of Altern and her now thoroughly dismayed son. But Sidney came; and with him the black-veiled Beaubien. And they both knelt beside the bed of suffering; and the hand of the now quiet man slowly went out and lay for a moment upon their bowed heads, while Carmen stood near. Then Willett was sent for; and he came often after that, and took his master's scarce audible instructions, and went away again to touch the wires and keys that ended the war of hatred at Avon; that brought Father Danny in the master's private car to the great metropolitan hospital; that sent to the startled Hitt the canceled mortgage papers on the Express; and that inaugurated that great work of restitution which held the dwellers in the Ames mansion toiling over musty books and forgotten records for months to come.

What had passed between the man and the sweet-faced girl who hovered over him like a ray of light, no one may know. That he had trod the glowing embers of hell, his cavernous, deep-lined face and whitening hair well testified. It was said afterward that on that third day he had opened his eyes and looked straight into those of the girl. It was said that she then whispered but one word, "Father." And that, when the sound of her low voice fell upon his straining ears, he had reached out the arm that still held life, and had drawn her head down upon his breast, and wept like a motherless babe. But what he had said, if aught, about the abandoned mother who, on the banks of the distant river, years gone, had yielded her life to him and his child, no one knew. Of but one thing was there any certainty: the name of Padre Josè de Rincón had not crossed their lips during those dark days.

And so two weeks passed. Then strong men lifted the giant from his bed and placed him in a wheel chair; and Carmen drew the chair out into the conservatory, among the ferns and flowers, and sat beside him, his hand still clasped in both of hers. That he had found life, no one who marked his tense, eager look, which in every waking moment lay upon the girl, could deny. His body was dead; his soul was fluttering feebly into a new sense of being.

But with the awakening of conscience, in the birth-throes of a new life, came the horrors, the tortures, the wild frenzy of self-loathing; and, but for the girl who clung so desperately to him, he would have quickly ended his useless existence. What had he done! God! What mad work had he done! He was a murderer of helpless babes! He was the blackest of criminals! The stage upon which the curtain had risen, whereon he saw the hourly portrayal of his own fiendish deeds, stood always before him like a haunting spectre; and as he gazed with horrified eyes, his hair grew hourly white.

And the torture was rendered more poignant by the demands of his erstwhile associates and henchmen. They had taken fright at the first orders which had issued from the sick-bed, but now they swooped down upon the harassed man to learn what might be expected from him in the future. What were to be his policies now in regard to those manifold interests which he was pursuing with such vigor a few weeks ago? Was he still bent upon depriving Senator Gossitch of the seat which the Ames money had purchased? Was the Ketchim prosecution to continue? The Amalgamated Spinners' Association must know at once his further plans. The Budget needed money and advice. His great railroad projects, his mining ventures, his cotton deals, his speculations and gambling schemes--whither should they tend now? Ward bosses, dive keepers, bank presidents, lawyers, magnates, and preachers clamored for admission at his doors when they learned that he would live, but that a marvelous, incomprehensible change had swept over him.

The tired, hectored man turned to Carmen. And she called Hitt and Waite and the keen-minded Beaubien. The latter's wide business experience and worldly knowledge now stood them all in good stead, and she threw herself like a bulwark between the stricken man and the hounds that roared at his gates. There were those among them who, like Ames, had bitterly fought all efforts at industrial and social reform, and yet who saw the dawning of a new era in the realms of finance, of politics, of religion. There were those who sensed the slow awakening of the world-conscience, and who resisted it desperately, and who now sat frightened and angered at the thought of losing their great leader. Their attitude toward life, like his, had been wrong from the beginning; they, like him, were striking examples of the dire effects of a false viewpoint in the impoverishing of human life. But, with him, they had built up a tremendous material fabric. And now they shook with fear as they saw its chief support removed. For they must know that his was a type that was fast passing, and after it must come the complete breakdown of the old financial order. His world-embracing gambling--which touched all men in some way, for it had to do with the very necessities of life, with crops, with railroads, with industries, and out of which he had coined untold millions--had ceased forever. What did it portend to them?

And to him also came Reverend Darius Borwell, in whose congregation sat sanctimonious malefactors of vast wealth, whose pockets bulged with disease-laden profits from the sales of women's bodies and souls. Reverend Borwell came to offer the sufferer the dubious consolations of religion--and inquire if his beautiful change of heart would affect the benefaction which he had designed for the new church.

Ah, this was the hour when the fallen giant faced the Apostle's awful question: What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death!

And then came Monsignor Lafelle, asking not to see the sick man, but the girl. And, alone with her in the great library that day, he bent low over her hand and begged that she would forgive and forget. It was he who told Mrs. Ames that flagrantly false tale of the girl's parentage. He had received it from Wenceslas, in Cartagena. It was he who, surmising the dark secret of Ames, had concluded that the supposed Infanta had been his wife. And he had returned to New York to confront him with the charge, and to make great capital out of it. But he had never suspected for a moment Carmen's connection with the mystery. And now--

But the girl saw only the image of God in the humiliated man. And when he kissed her hand and departed, she bade him know, always, that she loved him as a brother. And he knew it, knew that her love was of the spirit--it left all for the Christ.

A few days later there was delivered at the Ames mansion a cable message from Cartagena, in reply to one which the master had sent to the lawyer, Estrella. Ames shook with suppressed excitement when he read it. Then he bade Carmen send at once for Hitt, Willett, and Captain McCall, and leave them with him for a private conference.

"She must not know! She must not know!" Ames repeated, as the three men sat leaning eagerly forward an hour later, drinking in every word he spoke. "If the mission is successful, well and good. If it fails, then our silence now will be justified, for as yet I have said nothing to her regarding him. Peace is being concluded there. Wenceslas has won--but with--but of that later. When can you get under way, McCall?"

"To-night, sir. The bunkers are full."

"Very good. I will go aboard at ten. You will weigh anchor immediately."

"What?" cried Hitt. "You will go?"

"I will!" The sudden flash of his old-time energy nearly startled them from their chairs. "And," he added, "you, Mr. Hitt, will accompany us. Now, Willett, have the door of my limousine widened to accommodate this wheel chair. I want a dozen men to insure our privacy, and to keep the way clear. No one not in our confidence must see us depart."

Hitt gasped. "But--Carmen--"

"Goes with us," returned Ames. "I can not spare her for a moment. Madam Beaubien will have charge of the house during our absence. We will be back here, weather favorable, in three weeks--or not at all!"

"Yet, she will know--"

"Nothing. I take the trip, ostensibly, for the change; to get away from those who are hounding me here; for recuperation--anything! Go, now, and make ready!" The man's eyes glistened like live coals, and his sunken cheeks took on a feverish glow.

That night the Cossack, enveloped in gloom, steamed noiselessly out of New York harbor, and turned her prow to the South. And when she had entered the high sea, Captain McCall from his bridge aloft sent a message down to the waiting engineer:

"Full speed ahead!"

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Chapter 20

Cartagena's slumber of centuries had been broken by nearly four years of civil warfare. But on the day that the lookout in the abandoned convent of Santa Candelaria, on the summit of La Popa, flashed the message down into the old city that a steam yacht had appeared on the northern horizon, she was preparing to sink back again into quiet dreams. For peace was being concluded among the warring political factions. The country lay devastated and blood-soaked; but the cause of Christ had triumphed, and the Church still sat supreme in the councils of Bogotá. Cartagena was en fête; the last of the political agitators would be executed on the morrow. And so the lookout's message was received with indifference, even though he embellished it with the comment that the boat must be privately owned, as no ships of the regular lines were due to arrive that day.

Quietly the graceful craft swept down past Tierra Bomba and into the Boca Chica, between the ancient forts of San Fernando and San Josè, and came to anchor out in the beautiful harbor, a half mile from the ancient gate of the clock. A few curious idlers along the shore watched it and commented on its perfect lines. And the numerous officials of the port lazily craned their necks at it, and yawningly awaited the arrival of the skiff that was immediately lowered and headed for the pier.

The tall American who stepped from the little boat and came at once to them to show his papers, easily satisfied their curiosity, for many tourists of the millionaire class dropped anchor in Cartagena's wonderful harbor, and came ashore to wander among the decaying mementos of her glorious past. And this boat was not a stranger to these waters. On the yacht itself, as they glanced again toward it, there was no sign of life. Even the diminishing volume of smoke that rose from its funnels evidenced the owner's intention of spending some time in that romantic spot.

From the dock, Hitt passed through the old gateway in the massive wall, quickly crossed the Plaza de Coches, and lost himself in the gay throngs that were entering upon the day's festivities. Occasionally he dropped into wine shops and little stores, and lingered about to catch stray bits of gossip. Then he slowly made his way up past the Cathedral and into the Plaza de Simón Bolívar.

For a while, sitting on a bench in front of the equestrian statue of the famous Libertador, he watched the passing crowds. From time to time his glance strayed over toward the Cathedral. Once he rose, and started in that direction; then came back and resumed his seat. It was evident that he was driven hard, and yet knew not just what course to pursue.

Finally he jumped to his feet and went over to a little cigar store which had caught his eye. He bent over the soiled glass case and selected several cigars from the shabby stock. Putting one of them into his mouth, he lighted it, and then casually nodded to a powerfully built man standing near.

The latter turned to the proprietor and made some comment in Spanish. Hitt immediately replied to it in the same tongue. The man flushed with embarrassment; then doffed his hat and offered an apology. "I forget, señor," he said, "that so many Americans speak our language."

Hitt held out his hand and laughed heartily at the incident. Then his eye was attracted by a chain which the man wore.

"May I examine it?" he asked, bending toward it.

"Cierto, señor," returned the man cordially. "It came from an Indian grave up in Guamocó. I am a guaquero--grave digger--by profession; Jorge Costal, by name."

Hitt glanced up at the man. Somehow he seemed to be familiar with that name. Somewhere he seemed to have heard it. But on whose lips? Carmen's? "Suppose," he said, in his excellent Spanish, "that we cross the Plaza to yonder wine shop. You may be able to tell me some of the history of this interesting old town. And--it would be a great favor, señor."

The man bowed courteously and accepted the invitation. A few moments later they sat at a little table, with a bottle between them, commenting on the animated scene in the street without.

"Peace will be concluded to-day, they say," reflected Hitt, by way of introduction.

"Yes," returned the man grimly, "there is but little more blood to let. That flows to-morrow."

"Political agitators?" Hitt suggested.

The man's face darkened. "Only one," he muttered. "The other is--"

He stopped and eyed Hitt furtively. But the American manifested only a casual interest.

"Their names?" he asked nonchalantly.

"They were posted this morning," said the man. "Amado Jesus Fanor and Josè de Rincón."

Hitt started, but held himself. "Who--who are they?" he asked in a controlled voice.

"A liberal general and an ex-priest."

"Ex-priest?" exclaimed Hitt.

The man looked at him wonderingly. "Yes, señor. Why?"

"Oh, nothing--nothing. It is the custom to--to shoot ex-priests down here, eh?"

"Caramba! No! But this man--señor, why do you ask?"

"Well--it struck me as curious--that's all," returned Hitt, at a loss for a suitable answer. "You didn't happen to know these men, I presume?"

"Na, señor, you seek to involve me. Who are you, that you ask such questions of a stranger?" The man reflected the suspicious caution of these troublous times.

"Why, amigo, it is of no concern to me," replied Hitt easily, flicking the ashes from his cigar. "I once knew a fellow by that name. Met him here years ago. Learned that he afterward went to Simití. But I--"

"Señor!" cried the man, starting up. "Are you the Americano, the man who explored?"

"I am," said Hitt, bending closer to him. "And we are well met, for you are Don Jorge, who knew Padre Josè de Rincón in Simití, no?"

The man cast a timid glance around the room. "Señor," he whispered, "we must not say these things here! I leave you now--"

"Not yet!" Hitt laid a hand upon his. "Where is he?" he demanded in a low voice.

"In San Fernando, señor."

"And how long?"

"A year, I think. He was first three years in the prison in Cartagena. But the Bish--"

"Eh? Don Wenceslas had him removed to San Fernando?"

The man nodded.

"And--"

"He will be shot to-morrow, señor."

Hitt thought with desperate rapidity. Then he looked up. "Why do you say he is an ex-priest?" he asked.

"He has just been excommunicated," replied the man. "Cursed, they say, by bell, book, and candle."

"Good heavens! That he might be shot? Ah, I see it all! Ames's message! Of course Don Wenceslas would not dare to execute a priest in good standing. And so he had him excommunicated, eh?"

Don Jorge shrugged his shoulders. "Quien sabe?" he muttered.

Hitt sat for a while in a deep study. Time was precious. And yet it was flying like the winds. Then he roused up.

"You knew a little girl--in Simití--in whom this Rincón was interested?"

"Ah, yes, señor. But--why do you ask? She went to the great States from which you come. And I think little was heard from her after that."

"Eh? Yes, true. She lived with--"

"Don Rosendo Ariza."

"Yes. And he?"

"Dead--he and his good wife, Doña Maria."

Hitt's head sank. How could he break this to Carmen? Then he sprang to his feet. "Come," he said, "we will stroll down by the walls. I would like a look at San Fernando."

"Ha! Señor, you--you--"

Hitt threw him a look of caution, and shook his head. Then, motioning him to follow, he led him out and down through the winding, tortuous thoroughfares. On the summit of the walls were sentinels, posted at frequent intervals; and no civilian might walk upon the great enclosure until peace had been formally declared.

Hailing a passing carriage, Hitt urged the wondering Don Jorge into it, and bade the driver convey them to the old ruin of San Felipe, and leave them. There they climbed the broken incline into the battered fortress, and seated themselves in the shadow of a crumbling parapet. They were alone on the enormous, grass-grown pile. From their position they commanded a wonderful view across the town and harbor, and far out over the green waters of the Caribbean. The Cossack lay asleep in the quiet harbor. Don Jorge saw it, and wondered whence it came.

"Listen, amigo," began Hitt, pointing to the yacht. "In that boat is a girl, whose dearest earthly treasure is the condemned prisoner out there in San Fernando. That girl is the little Carmen, foster-daughter of old Rosendo."

"Hombre!" cried Don Jorge, staring at Hitt as if he suspected his sanity.

"It is true, friend, for I myself came with her in that boat."

"Caramba!"

"And," continued Hitt, glancing again about the ruined fortress and lowering his voice, "we have come for Josè de Rincón."

"Santa Virgen! Are you loco?"

Hitt smiled. "And now," he went on eagerly, "how are we to get him?"

"But, amigo! San Fernando is closely guarded! And he--por supuesto, he will be in the dungeons!"

"No doubt," returned Hitt dryly, "if your excellent friend Wenceslas has had anything to do with it. But dungeons have windows, eh?"

"Caramba, yes; and San Fernando's are just above the water's edge. And when the waves are high the sea pours into them!"

"And--could we learn which window is his, do you think?"

"Señor, I know," replied the man.

"Ha! And--"

"I learned from one of the soldiers, Fernando, who once lived in Simití. I had thought, señor, that--that perhaps I--"

"That perhaps you might make the attempt yourself, eh?" put in Hitt eagerly.

Don Jorge nodded. Hitt sprang to his feet and looked out toward the silent fortress.

"Don Jorge, it is dark out over the harbor at night, eh? No searchlights?"

"None, señor."

Hitt began to pace back and forth. Suddenly he stopped, and stood looking down through a hole in the broken pavement. Then he knelt and peered long and eagerly into it.

"Look here, friend," he called. "How does one get into that place?"

Don Jorge came and looked into the aperture. "It is one of the rooms of the fortress," he said. "But--caramba! I know not how it may be reached."

"The passageways?"

"Caved--all of them."

"But--you are a mighty husky fellow; and I am not weak. Suppose we try lifting one of these flags."

"Na, señor, as well try the tunnels! But, why?"

Hitt did not answer. But, bidding Don Jorge follow, he sought the fallen entrance to the old fortress, and plunged into the dark passage that led off from it into the thick gloom. Groping his way down a long, damp corridor, he came to a point where three narrower, brick-lined tunnels branched off, one of them dipping into the earth at a sharp angle. He struck a match, and then started down this, followed by the wondering Don Jorge.

A thousand bats, hideous denizens of these black tunnels, flouted their faces and disputed their progress. Don Jorge slapped wildly at them, and cursed low. Hitt took up a long club and struck savagely about him. On they stumbled, until the match flickered out, and they were left in Stygian blackness, with the imps of darkness whirring madly about them. Hitt struck another match, and plunged ahead.

At length they found the way blocked by a mass of rubbish which had fallen from the roof. Hitt studied it for a moment, then climbed upon it and, by the aid of the feeble light from his matches, peered into the foul blackness beyond.

"Come," he said, preparing to proceed.

"Na, amigo! Not I!" exclaimed Don Jorge. His Latin soul had revolted.

"Then wait for me here," said Hitt, pushing himself through the narrow aperture at the top of the rubbish, and fighting the horde of terrified bats.

A few minutes later he returned, covered with slime, and scratched and bleeding. "All right," he muttered. "Now let's get out of this miserable hole!"

Out in the sunlight once more, Hitt sought to remove the stains from his clothes, meanwhile bidding Don Jorge attend well to his words.

"You swim, eh?"

"Yes."

"Then do you come to the beach to-night to bathe, down across from the yacht. And, listen well: you would do much for the little Carmen, no? And for your friend Josè? Very good. You will swim out to the yacht at seven to-night, with your clothes in a bundle on your head, eh? And, Don Jorge--but we will discuss that later. Now you go back to the city alone. I have much to do. And, note this, you have not seen me."

Meantime, to the group of politicians, soldiers, and clergy assembled in the long audience room of the departmental offices to debate the terms of the peace protocol, news of the arrival of the Cossack was brought by a slow-moving messenger from the dock. At the abrupt announcement the acting-Bishop was seen to start from his chair. Was the master himself on board? Quien sabe? And, if so--but, impossible! He would have advised his faithful co-laborer of his coming. And yet, what were those strange rumors which had trickled over the wires, and which, in his absorption in the local issues, and in the excitement attendant upon the restoration of peace and the settlement of the multifold claims of innumerable greedy politicians, he had all but forgotten? A thousand suggestions flashed through his mind, any one of which might account for the presence of the Cossack in Cartagena's harbor that day. But extreme caution must be observed until he might ascertain its errand. He therefore despatched a message to the yacht, expressing his great surprise and pleasure, and bidding its master meet him at a convenient hour in his study in the Cathedral. This done, he bent anew to the work before him, yet with his thought harried by doubt, suspicion, and torturing curiosity.

Wenceslas soon received a reply to his message. The master was aboard, but unable to go ashore. The acting-Bishop would therefore come to him at once.

Wenceslas hesitated, and his brow furrowed. He knew he was called upon to render his reckoning to the great financier who had furnished the sinews of war. But he must have time to consider thoroughly his own advantage, for well he understood that he was summoned to match his own keen wits with those of a master mind.

And then there flashed through his thought the reports which had circled the world but three short weeks before. The man of wealth had found his daughter; and she was the girl for whom the two Americans had outwitted him four years ago! And the girl--Simití--and--ah, Rincón! Good! He laughed outright. He would meet the financier--but not until the morrow, at noon, for, he would allege, the unanticipated arrival of Ames had found this day completely occupied. So he again despatched his wondering messenger to the Cossack. And that messenger was rowed out to the quiet yacht in the same boat with the tall American, whose clothes were torn and caked with mud, and in whose eyes there glowed a fierce determination.

That night the sky was overcast. The harbingers of the wet season had already arrived. At two in the morning the rain came, descending in a torrent. In the midst of it a light skiff, rocking dangerously on the swelling sea, rounded a corner of San Fernando and crept like a shadow along the dull gray wall. The sentry above had taken shelter from the driving rain. The ancient fort lay heavily shrouded in gloom.

At one of the narrow, grated windows which were set just above the water's surface the skiff hung, and a long form arose from its depths and grasped the iron bars. A moment later the gleam of an electric lantern flashed into the blackness within. It fell upon a rough bench, standing in foul, slime-covered water. Upon the bench sat the huddled form of a man.

Then another dark shape rose in the skiff. Another pair of hands laid hold on the iron bars. And behind those great, calloused hands stretched thick arms, with the strength of an ox. An iron lever was inserted between the bars. The heavy breathing and the low sounds of the straining were drowned by the tropic storm. The prisoner leaped from the bench and stood ankle-deep in the water, straining his eyes upward.

The light flashed again into his face. His heart pounded wildly. His throbbing ears caught the splash of a knotted rope falling into the water at his feet. Above the noise of the rain he thought he heard a groaning, creaking sound. Those rusted, storm-eaten bars in the blackness above must be slowly yielding to an awful pressure. He turned and dragged the slime-covered bench to the window, and stood upon it. Then he grasped the rope with a strength born anew of hope and excitement, and pulled himself upward. The hands from without seized him; and slowly, painfully, his emaciated body was crushed through the narrow space between the bent bars.

* * * * *

Cartagena awoke to experience another thrill. And then the ripple of excitement gave place to anger. The rabble had lost one of its victims, and that one the chief. Moreover, the presence of that graceful yacht, sleeping so quietly out there in the sunlit harbor, could not but be associated with that most daring deed of the preceding night, which had given liberty to the excommunicated priest and political malefactor, Josè de Rincón. Crowds of chattering, gesticulating citizens gathered along the harbor shores, and loudly voiced their disappointment and threats. But the boat lay like a thing asleep. Not even a wisp of smoke rose from its yellow funnels.

Then came the Alcalde, and the Departmental Governor, grave and sedate, with their aids and secretaries, their books and documents, their mandates and red-sealed processes, and were rowed out to confront the master whom they believed to have dared to thwart the hand of justice and remain to taunt them with his egregious presence. This should be made an international episode, whose ramifications would wind down through years to come, and embrace long, stupid congressional debates, apologies demanded, huge sums to salve a wounded nation, and the making and breaking of politicians too numerous to mention!

But the giant who received them, bound to his chair, in the splendid library of the palatial yacht, and with no attendant, save a single valet, flared out in a towering rage at the gross insult offered him and his great country in these black charges. He had come on a peaceful errand; partly, too, for reasons of health. And he was at that moment awaiting a visit from His Grace. What manner of reception was this, that Cartagena extended to an influential representative of the powerful States of the North!

"But," the discomfited Indignation Committee gasped, "what of the tall American who was seen to land the day before?"

The master laughed in their faces. He? Why, but a poor, obsessed archaeologist, now prowling around the ruins of San Felipe, doubtless mumbling childishly as he prods the dust and mold of centuries! Go, visit him, if they would be convinced!

And when these had gone, chagrined and mortified--though filled with wonder, for they had roamed the Cossack, and peered into its every nook and cranny, and stopped to look a second time at the fair-haired young boy who looked like a girl, and hovered close to the master--came His Grace, Wenceslas. He came alone, and with a sneer curling his imperious lips. And his calm, arrogant eyes held a meaning that boded no good to the man who sat in his wheel chair, alone, and could not rise to welcome him.

"A very pretty trick, my powerful friend," said the angered churchman in his perfect English. "And one that will cause your Government at Washington some--"

"Enough!" interrupted Ames in a steady voice. "I sent for you yesterday, intending to ask you to release the man. I had terms then which would have advantaged you greatly. You were afraid to see me until you had evolved your plans of opposition. Only a fixed and devilish hatred, nourished by you against a harmless priest who possessed your secrets, doomed him to die to-day. But we will pass that for the present. I have here my demands for the aid I have furnished you. You may look them over." He held out some typewritten sheets to Wenceslas.

The churchman glanced hastily over them; then handed them back with a smile.

"With certain modifications," he said smoothly. "The terms on which peace is concluded will scarcely admit of--"

"Very well," returned Ames quietly. "And now, La Libertad?"

Wenceslas laughed. "En manos muertas, my friend," he replied. "It was your own idea."

"And the emerald concession?"

"Impossible! A government monopoly, you know," said His Grace easily. "You see, my friend, it is a costly matter to effect the escape of state prisoners. As things stand now, your little trick of last night quite protects me. For, first you instruct me, long ago, to place the weak little Josè in San Fernando; and I obey. Then you suffer a change of heart, and slip down here to release the man, who has become a state prisoner. That quite removes you from any claims upon us for a share of the spoils of war. I take it, you do not wish to risk exposure of your part in this four years' carnage?"

Ames drew a sigh. Then he pulled himself together. "Wenceslas," he said, "I am not the man with whom you dealt in these matters. He is dead. I have but one thing more to say, and that is that I renounce all claims upon you and your Government, excepting one. La Libertad mine was owned by the Rincón family. It was rediscovered by old Rosendo, and the title transferred to his foster-daughter. Its possession must remain with her and her associates. There is no record, so you have informed me, to the effect that the Church possesses this mine."

"But, my friend, there shall be such a record to-day," laughed Wenceslas. "And, in your present situation, you will hardly care to contest it."

Ames smiled. He now had the information which he had been seeking. The title to the famous mine lay still with the Simití company. He pressed the call-button attached to his chair. The door opened, and Don Jorge entered, leading the erstwhile little newsboy, Josè de Rincón, by the hand.

Wenceslas gasped, and staggered back. He knew not the man; but the boy was a familiar figure.

Don Jorge advanced straight to him. Their faces almost touched.

"Your Grace, were you married to the woman by whom you had this son?" Don Jorge's steady words fell upon the churchman's ears like a sentence of death.

"I ask," continued the dark-faced man, "because I learned last night that the lad's mother was my daughter, the little Maria."

"Santa Virgen!"

"Yes, Your Grace, a sainted virgin, despoiled by a devil! And the man who gave me this information--would you like to know? Bien, it was Padre Josè de Rincón, in whose arms she died, you lecherous dog!"

Wenceslas paled, and his brow grew moist. He stared at the boy, and then at the strong man whom he had so foully wronged.

"If you have concluded your talk with Señor Ames," continued Don Jorge, "we will go ashore--you and the lad and I."

Wenceslas's face brightened. Ashore! Yes, by all means!

The trio turned and quietly left the room. Gaining the deck, Wenceslas found a skiff awaiting them, and two strong sailors at the oars. Don Jorge urged him on, and together they descended the ladder and entered the boat. A few moments later they landed at the pier, and the skiff turned back to the yacht.

As to just what followed, accounts vary. There were some who remembered seeing His Grace pass through the narrow streets with a dark-skinned, powerful man, whose hand grasped that of the young newsboy. There were others who said that they saw the boy leave them at the Cathedral, and the two men turn and enter. Still others said they saw the heavy-set man come out alone. But there was only one who discovered the body of Wenceslas, crumpled up in a hideous heap upon the floor of his study, with a poignard driven clean through his heart. That man was the old sexton, who fled screaming from the awful sight late that afternoon.

Again Cartagena shook with excitement, and seethed with mystery. Had the escaped prisoner, Rincón, returned to commit this awful deed? There were those who said he had. For the dark-skinned man who had entered the Cathedral with His Grace was seen again on the streets and in the wine shops that afternoon, and had been marked by some mounting the broken incline of San Felipe.

Again the Governor and Alcalde and their numerous suite paid a visit to the master on board the Cossack. But they learned only that His Grace had gone ashore long before he met his fearful death. And so the Governor returned to the city, and was driven to San Felipe. But his only reward was the sight of the obsessed archaeologist, mud-stained and absorbed, prying about the old ruins, and uttering little cries of delight at new discoveries of crumbling passageways and caving rooms. And so there was nothing for the disturbed town to do but settle down and ponder the strange case.

A week later smoke was seen again pouring out of the Cossack's funnels. That same day the Governor and Alcalde and their suites were bidden to a farewell banquet on board the luxurious yacht. Far into the night they sat over their rare wines and rich food, drinking deep healths to the entente cordial which existed between the little republic of the South and the great one of the North. And while they drank and sang and listened enraptured to the wonderful pipe-organ, a little boat put out from the dark, tangled shrubbery along the shore. And when it rubbed against the yacht, a muffled figure mounted the ladder which hung in the shadows, and hastened through the rear hatchway and down into the depths of the boat. Then, long after midnight, the last farewell being said by the dizzy officials, and the echoes of Adios, adios, amigos! lingering among its tall spars, the Cossack slipped noiselessly out of the Boca Chica, and set its course for New York.

A few hours later, while the boat sped swiftly through the phosphorescent waves, the escaped prisoner, Josè de Rincón, who had lain for a week hidden in the bowels of old fort San Felipe, stood alone in the wonderful smoking room of the Cossack, and looked up at the sweet face pictured in the stained-glass window above. And then he turned quickly, for the door opened and a girl entered. A rush, a cry of joy, and his arms closed about the fair vision that had sat by his side constantly during the four long years of his imprisonment.

"Carmen!"

"My Josè!"

"I have solved my problem! I have proved God! I have found the Christ!"

"I knew you would, for he was with you always!"

"But--oh, you beautiful, beautiful girl!"

Then in a little while she gently released herself and went to the door through which she had entered. She paused for a moment to smile back at the enraptured man, then turned and flung the door wide.

A woman entered, leading a young boy. The man uttered a loud exclamation and started toward her.

"Ana!"

He stopped short and stared down at the boy. Then he looked wonderingly at Carmen.

"Yes," she said, stooping and lifting the boy up before Josè, "it is Anita's babe--and he sees!"

The man clasped the child in his arms and buried his face in its hair.

Verily, upon them that sat in darkness had the Light shined.

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Chapter 21

Another summer had come and gone. Through the trees in Central Park the afternoon sunlight, sifted and softened by the tinted autumn leaves, spread over the brown turf like a gossamer web. And it fell like a gentle benediction upon the massive figure of a man, walking unsteadily beneath the trees, holding the hand of a young girl whose beauty made every passer turn and look again.

"Now, father," laughed the girl, "once more! There! Why, you step off like a major!"

They were familiar figures, out there in the park, for almost daily during the past few weeks they might have been seen, as the girl laughingly said, "practicing their steps." And daily the man's control became firmer; daily that limp left arm and leg seemed increasingly to manifest life.

On a bench near by sat a dark-featured woman. About her played her boy, filling the air with his merry shouts and his imperfect English.

"There, father, comes Josè after us," announced the girl, looking off with love-lit eyes at an approaching automobile. "And Lewis is with him. Now, mind, you are going to get into the car without any help!"

The man laughed, and declared vehemently that if he could not get in alone he would walk home. A few minutes later they had gone.

The profound depth of those changes which had come into the rich man's life, he himself might not fathom. But those who toiled daily with him over his great ledgers and files knew that the transformation went far. There were flashes at times of his former vigor and spirit of domination, but there were also periods of grief that were heart-rending to behold, as when, poring over his records for the name of one whom in years past he had ruthlessly wrecked, he would find that the victim had gone in poverty beyond his power to reimburse him. And again, when his thought dwelt on Avon, and the carnal madness which had filled those new graves there, he would sink moaning into his chair and bury his drawn face in his hands and sob.

And yet he strove madly, feverishly, to restore again to those from whom he had taken. The Simití company was revived, through his labors, and the great La Libertad restored to its reanimated stockholders. Work of development had begun on the property, and Harris was again in Colombia in charge of operations. The Express was booming, and the rich man had consecrated himself to the carrying out of its clean policies. The mills at Avon were running day and night; and in a new location, far from the old-time "lungers' alley," long rows of little cottages were going up for their employes. The lawyer Collins had been removed, and Lewis Waite was to take his place within a week. Father Danny, now recovered, rejoiced in resources such as he had never dared hope to command.

And so the rich man toiled--ah, God! if he had only known before that in the happiness of others lay his own. If only he could have known that but a moiety of his vast, unused income would have let floods of sunshine into the lives of those dwarfed, stunted children who toiled for him, and never played! Oh, if when he closed his mills in the dull months he had but sent them and their tired mothers to the country fields, how they would have risen up and called him blessed! If he could have but known that he was his brother's keeper, and in a sense that the world as yet knows not! For he is indeed wise who loves his fellow-men; and he is a fool who hates them!

The great Fifth Avenue mansion was dark, except where hung a cluster of glowing bulbs over the rich mahogany table in the library. There about that table sat the little group of searchers after God, with their number augmented now in ways of which they could not have dreamed. And Hitt, great-souled friend of the world, was speaking again as had been his wont in the days now gone.

"The solution of the problems of mankind? Ah, yes, there is a cure-all; there is a final answer to every ethical question, every social, industrial, economic problem, the problems of liquor, poverty, disease, war. And the remedy is so universal that it dissolves even the tangles of tariff and theology. What is it? Ah, my friends, the girl who came among us to 'show the world what love will do' has taught us by her own rich life--it is love. But not the sex-mesmerism, the covetousness, the self-love, which mask behind that heavenly name. For God is Love. And to know Him is to receive that marvelous Christ-principle which unlocks for mankind the door of harmony.

"No, the world's troubles are not the fault of one man, nor of many, but of all who seek happiness in things material, and forget that the real man is the likeness of spirit, and that joy is spiritual. The trusts, and the men of wealth, are not all malefactors; the churches are not wholly filled with evil men. But all, yes all, have 'missed the mark' through the belief that matter and evil are real, and must grope amid sickness, poverty, crime, and death, until they are willing to turn from such false beliefs, and from self, and seek their own in the reflection of Him, who is Love, to their fellow-men. It is only as men join to search for and apply the Christ-principle that they truly unite to solve the world's sore problems and reveal the waiting kingdom of harmony, which is always just at hand. And it can be done. It must be, sometime.

"In that day all shall know that cause and effect are mental. The man who hears the tempter, the carnal mind's suggestion to enrich himself materially at the cost of his brother, will know that it is but the voice of mesmerism, that 'man-killer from the beginning', which bids him sever himself from his God, who alone is infinite abundance. The society woman who flits like a gorgeous butterfly about the courts of fashion, her precious days wasted in motoring, her nights at cards, and whose vitality goes into dress, and into the watery schemes for 'who shall be greatest' in the dismal realm of the human mind, must learn, willingly or through suffering, that her activities are but mesmeric shams that counterfeit the divine activity which manifests in joy and fullness for all.

"Christianity? What is it but the Christ-knowledge, the knowledge of good, and its correlated knowledge, that evil is only the mesmeric lie which has engulfed the world? But, oh, the depths of that divine knowledge! The knowledge which heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, and opens the prisons to them that are captive! We who are gathered here to-night, feeling in our midst that great, unseen Presence which makes for righteousness, know now that 'in my flesh shall I see God,' for we have indeed already seen and known Him."

With them sat the man who, swept by the storms of error and the carnal winds of destruction, had solved his problem, even as the girl by his side told him he should, and had been found, when his foul prison opened, sitting "clothed and in his right mind" at the feet of the Christ. Jesus "saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit--God--like a dove descending upon him--immediately the Spirit--carnal belief, error, the lie--driveth him into the wilderness." And there he was made to prove God. So Josè de Rincón, when the light had come, years gone, in desolate Simití, had been bidden to know the one God, and none else. But he wavered when the floods of evil rolled over him; he had looked longingly back; he had clung too tightly to the human concept that walked with him like a shining light in those dark days. And so she had been taken from him, and he had been hurled into the wilderness--alone with Him whom he must learn to know if he would see Life.

Then self-consciousness went out, in those four years of his captivity, and he passed from thence into consciousness of God.

Then his great world-knowledge he saw to have been wholly untrue. His store of truth he saw to have been but relative at best. His knowledge had rested, he then knew, upon viewpoints which had been utterly false. And so, like Paul, he died that he might live. He crucified Self, that he might resurrect the image of God.

"The world," resumed Hitt, "still worships false gods, though it reaches out for Truth. And yet, what are we all seeking? Only a state of consciousness, a consciousness of good, of joy and harmony. And we are seeking to rid ourselves of the consciousness of evil, with its sin, its disease and death. But, knowing now that consciousness is mental activity, the activity of thought, can we not see that harmony and immortality are within our grasp? for they are functions of right thought. Salvation is not from evil realities, but from the false sense of evil, even as Jesus taught and proved. The only salvation possible to mankind is in learning to think as Jesus did--not yielding our mentalities daily to a hodge-podge of mixed thoughts of good and evil, and then running to doctors and preachers when such yielding brings its inevitable result in sickness and death. Jesus insisted that the kingdom of heaven was within men, a tremendous potentiality within each one of us. How may it be reached? By removing hampering false belief, by removing the limitations of superstition and human opinion which hold its portals closed. True progress is the release of mankind from materialism, with its enslaving drudgery, its woes, and its inevitable death. Mankind's chief difficulty is ignorance of what God is. Jesus proved Him to be mind, spirit. He proved Him to be the creator of the spiritual universe, but not the originator of the lie of materiality. He showed matter to be but the manifestation of the false belief that creation is material. He showed it to be but a sense-impression, without life, without stability, without existence, except the pseudo-existence which it has in the false thought of which the human or carnal consciousness is formed. But the lack of understanding of the real nature of matter, and the persistent belief in the stability of its so-called laws, has resulted in centuries of attempts to discredit the Bible records of his spiritual demonstrations of God's omnipotence and immanence, and so has prevented the human mind from accepting the proofs which it so eagerly sought. And now, after nineteen centuries of so-called Christian teaching, the human mind remains still deeply embedded in matter, and subject to the consentaneous human beliefs which it calls material laws. Jesus showed that it was the communal mortal mind, with its false beliefs in matter, sin, disease, and death, that constituted 'the flesh'; he showed that mortals are begotten of such false beliefs; he showed that the material universe is but manifested human belief. And we know from our own reasoning that we see not things, but our thoughts of things; that we deal not with matter, but with material mental concepts only. We know that the preachers have woefully missed the mark, and that the medicines of the doctors have destroyed more lives than wars and famine, and yet will we not learn of the Master? To reach God through material thinking is utterly impossible, for He is spirit, and He can be cognized only by a spiritual consciousness. Yet such a consciousness is ours, if we will but have it.

"Ah, friends, God said: Let US make man in OUR image and likeness--let Life, Love, Spirit make its spiritual reflection. But where is that man to-day? Buried deep beneath the dogma and the crystallized human beliefs of mortals--buried beneath 'the lie' which mankind accept about truth. Nothing but scientific religion will meet humanity's dire needs and reveal that man. And scientific religion admits of actual, practical proof. Christianity is as scientific as mathematics, and quite as capable of demonstration. Its proofs lie in doing the works of the Master. He is a Christian who does these works; he who does not is none. Christianity is not a failure, but organized ecclesiasticism, which always collapses before a world crisis, has failed utterly. The hideous chicane of imperial government and imperial religion against mankind has resulted in a Christian veneer, which cracks at the first test and reveals the unchanged human brute beneath. The nations which writhe in deadly embrace to-day have never sought to prove God. They but emphasize the awful fact that the human mind has no grasp upon the Principle which is God, and at a time of crisis reverts almost instantly to the primitive, despite so-called culture and civilization. Yes, religion as a perpetuation of ancient human conceptions, of materialistic traditions and opinions of 'the Fathers,' is a flat failure. By it the people of great nations have been molded into servile submission to church and ruler--have been persuaded that wretchedness and poverty are eternal--that heaven is a realm beyond the grave, to which admission is a function of outward oblation--and that surcease from ills here, or in the life to come, is a gift of the Church. Can we wonder that commercialism is mistaken by nations for progress? That king and emperor still call upon God to bless their barbaric attempts at conquest? And that human existence remains, what it has always been, a ghastly mockery of Life?

"Healing the sick by applied Christianity is not the attempt to alter a mental concept; it is the bringing out of harmony where before was discord. Evil can not be 'thought away.' He who indulges evil only proves his belief in its reality and power. Christian healing is not 'mental suggestion,' wherein all thought is material. When evil thinking is overcome, then the discords which result from it will disappear from consciousness. That is the Christ-method. Behind all that the physical senses seem to see, know, and feel, is the spiritual fact, perfect and eternal. Jesus healed the sick by establishing this fact in the human consciousness. And we must learn to do likewise. The orthodox churches must learn it. They must cease from the dust-man, whose breath is in his nostrils; they must cease from preaching evil as an awful reality, permitted by God, or existing despite Him; they must know it as Jesus bade all men know it, as the lie about Truth. Then, by holding the divine ideal before the human mind, they will cause that mentality gradually to relinquish its false beliefs and copy the real. And thus, step by step, changing from better to better beliefs, at length the human mind will have completely substituted reality for unreality, and will be no more, even in thought. The 'old man' will have given place to the 'new.' This is the method of Jesus. There is no other. Yes, for the present we reckon with material symbols; we have not yet fully learned their unreality. But at length, if we are faithful, we shall lay them aside, and know only Truth and its pure manifestations.

"Ah, my friends, how simple is Christianity! It is summed up in the Sermon on the Mount. Our salvation is in righteousness. He who thinks right shall know things as they are. He who thinks wrong shall seem to know them as they are not, and shall pass his days in sore travail, even in wars, famine, and utter misery. Then why not take up the demonstration of Christianity in the spirit of joy and freedom from prejudice with which we pursue our earthly studies, and as gladly, thankfully seek to prove it? For it, of all things, is worth while. It alone is the true business of men. For if what we have developed in our many talks regarding God, man, and the mental nature of the universe and all things is true, then are the things with which men now occupy themselves worth while? No, decidedly no! But are the things which we have developed true? Yes, for they can be and have been demonstrated. Then, indeed, are we without excuse. Carmen has shown us the way. No, she is not unnatural; she is only divinely natural. She has shown us what we all may become, if we but will. She has shown us what we shall be able to do when we are completely lost in accord with God, and recognize no other life, substance, nor law than His. But--

"'I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil,' cried the prophet. Truth always has its suppositional opposite! Choose ye then whom ye will serve. All is subject to proof. Only that which is demonstrably true, not after the change which we call death, but here this side of the grave, can stand. The only test of a Christian is in the 'signs following.' Without them his faith is but sterile human belief, and his god but the distorted human concept whom kings beseech to bless their slaughter.

"'Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of?

"'His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

"'That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

"'Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh; yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.'"

The fire crackled briskly on the great hearth. Carmen rose and turned off the light above them. All drew their chairs about the cheery blaze.

Silence, sacred, holy, lay upon them. The rich man, now possessing treasures beyond his wildest dreams, sat holding his daughter's hand. Her other hand lay in Josè's. Sidney had just entered; and Haynerd had sent word that he would join them soon.

Then the silence was broken by the rich man. His voice was unsteady and low.

"My friends, sorrow and joy fill my heart to-night. To the first I am resigned; it is my due; and yet, were it greater, I know not how I could live. But the joy--who can understand it until he has passed through death into life! This little girl's mother knew not, nor did I, that she was royal born. Sometimes I wonder now if it is really so. And yet the evidence is such that I can scarcely doubt. We met in the sun-kissed hills of Granada; and we loved. Her old nurse was Argus-eyed; and our meetings were such as only lovers can effect. I was young, wild, and my blood coursed like a torrent through my veins! But I loved her, yes, base though I was, I loved her. And in these years since I left her in that little house in Bogotá, I have suffered the agonies of the lost when her memory and my own iniquity fell upon me and smote me sore--

"We were married in Spain, and the marriage was performed by Padre Rafaél de Rincón."

"My uncle!" cried the startled Josè.

"And then we fled," continued Ames. "I was rich; I was roaming the world, extending my vast business interests; and I took her to Colombia, where I labored with the politicians in Bogotá to grant me timber and cattle concessions. We had a cottage on the outskirts of the city, where we were happy. With us lived her faithful old nurse, whom she would not leave in Spain--

"Then, one day, came a cable message that my father had died. The news transformed me. I knew I must return at once to New York. But--I would not take a wife back with me! Why, I know not. I was mad! And I kissed her tear-stained face, and bade her wait, for I would return and make her happy. And then--

"Months later I wrote to her, and, receiving no reply, I caused inquiry to be made. But she had gone--whither, no one knew. The old nurse, too, had disappeared. I never learned that a woman had been left at Badillo to die. And she was not known in Bogotá. She was timid, and went out seldom. And then--then I thought that a marriage here would strengthen my position, for I was powerful and proud.

"Oh, the years that her sad face haunted me! I was mad, mad! I know not why, but when the Cossack was built I had her portrait in glass set in the smoking room. And night after night I have sat before it and cursed myself, and implored her to forgive!"

"But--the locket?" said Father Waite.

"It came from Spain. I was Guillermo to her, and she Dolores to me. But I had never forgotten it. Had Carmen ever worn it in my presence I must have recognized it at once. Oh, God, that she had! What would it not have saved!"

"Father!" The girl's arms were about his neck.

"But," said Ames, choking down his sorrow, "that man is dead. He, like Goliath, fought Truth, and the Truth fell upon him, crushing him to powder. The man who remains with you now lives only in this little girl. And she has brought me my own son, Sidney, and another, Josè. All that I have is theirs, and they will give it to the world. I would that she could have brought me that noble black man, Rosendo, who laid down his beautiful life when he saw that his work was done. I learn from my inquiries that he and Doña Maria lived with Don Nicolás far up the Boque river during the troublous times when Simití was burned and devastated. And that, when the troops had gone, they returned to their desolated home, and died, within a month of each other. What do I not owe to them! And can my care of their daughter Ana and her little son ever cancel the debt? Alas, no!"

Sidney turned to the man. "Father, does Josè know that it was Kathleen whom he rescued from the Tiber in Rome, years ago, and who caused him to lose his notebook?"

Another exclamation burst from Josè. Ames shook his head. "No, Sidney, we had not told him. Ah, how small is the world! And how inextricably bound together we all are! And, Josè, I have not told you that the woman who lived and died alone in the limestone caves near Honda, and whose story you had from Don Jorge in Simití, was doubtless the faithful old nurse of Dolores. My investigations all but confirm it. Padre Rafaél de Rincón maintained her there."

Haynerd entered the room at that moment, and with him came Miss Wall.

"Now," said Hitt softly, "the circle is complete. Carmen, may I--"

The girl rose at once and went into the music room. Those who remained sat in awed, expectant silence. Another presence stole softly in, but they saw him not. Soon through the great rooms and marble halls drifted the low, weird melody which the girl had sung, long before, in the dreary Elwin school.

In the flickering light of the fire strange shapes took form; and the shadows that danced on the walls silhouetted scenes from the dimming past. From out their weird imagery rose a single form. Into it passed the unseen presence. Slowly it rose before them from out the shadows. It was black of face, but its wondrous heart which had cradled the nameless babe of Badillo glistened like drifting snow.

The last sweet notes of the plaintive Indian lament fluttered from the girl's lips, echoed among the marble pillars, and died away down the distant corridors. She returned and bent over her father with a tender caress.

Then the great black man in the shadows extended his arms for a moment above them, and faded from their sight. There was the sound of low weeping in the room. For

"these are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

GLOSSARY

A

á buen precio, for a good price. adios, good-bye. adioscito, good-bye (used among intimates). alcalde, mayor, chief of village. algarroba, the carob-tree bean. alpargates, hempen sandals. americano, American. amigo, amiga, friend. anisado, liquor made from anise-seed. á propósito, by-the-bye, apropos arena, bull ring, circle where bull-fights are held. arepa, corn cake baked in ashes. arma blanca, steel arms, generally the machete. arrastra, or arrastre, a mining mill. arreglo, arrangement. arriba, above. arroyo, ditch, small stream, creek. asequia, gutter, conduit for water. auto da fé, public punishment by the Holy Inquisition. avispas, wasps. ay de mí, ah me! woe is me! alas!

B

bagre, fish from Lake Simití, dried and salted. baile, dance. barra, bar of wood or iron. batea, a wooden basin corresponding to the gold-pan. bejuco, thin filament, growing on tropical trees. Also, vine. bendita virgen, Blessed Virgin. bien, well. bien pues, well, then. billetes, bank notes, government notes, paper money. bodega, warehouse. Also, depot, supply house, cellar. boga, boatman, rower. bóveda, vault, or arched enclosure. Burial vault, tomb. bueno, good. buen padre, good father.

C

cabildo, corporation of a town, town council. calentura, fever. camino real, royal road, highway. canasto, large basket, waste-basket. cantina, saloon, public drinking place. caño, canal. caoba, mahogany tree or wood. capilla mayor, high altar, principal chapel. capitán, captain. caramba, an interjection of no particular meaning. cárcel, jail. cargadores, human pack-carriers, porters. carísíma, dearest little girl. carita, dear little girl. caro amigo, dear friend. catalina, Katharine. cayman, crocodile. champán, a native thatch-roofed river boat. chiquita mía, my dearest little girl. chiquito-a, dearest little one. cielo, heaven. ciénaga, a marsh or moor. Sometimes lake. cierto, certain, sure, surely, certainly. cochero, coachman, driver. cola, a tropical non-alcoholic drink. cólera, cholera. colibrí, humming bird. comadre, friend, when used casually addressing a woman. comjejen, white wood-eating ant. compadre, friend, when used casually addressing a man. conque, adios, "well, good-bye." conque, hasta luego, "well, good-bye until we meet again." conqueros, conquerors. conquistadores, conquerors. cordilleras, chain or ridge of mountains. corriente, right, correct. costumbre del país, national custom. cura, priest.

D

de nada, don't mention it. desayuno, breakfast. dia, day. diablo, devil. dios arriba, God above! dios mío, my God! dios nos guarde, God preserve us! dios y diablo, God and devil! dique, canal, channel. doncella, young woman.

E

el, the (masculine). enamorada, infatuated one (female). en manos muertas, "in dead hands." escapulario, scapulary. escritorio, writing desk.

F

feria, fair, festival. fiasco, failure. finca, farm. flor, flower (pl. flores)

G

garrafón, jug. garrapata, wood-tick. garza, heron. gracias, thanks, thank you. guaquero, hunter of Indian graves. guerrillas, band of guerrillas.

H

hacienda, farm. hada, witch. hermano, brother. hermoso, beautiful. hermosísimo-a, most beautiful. hidalgo, nobleman, hola! halloo! hombre, man. hostia, sacred wafer used in the mass.

I

iguana, large edible lizard. infanta, Spanish princess.

J

jejen, gnat. jipijapa, very fine woven straw, used in Panamá hats. jipitera, child's disease, due to eating dirt.

L

la, the (feminine). lianas, vines. llanos, flat plains. loado sea el buen dios, praised be the good God! loco, crazy, mad.

M

macana, a very hard, tough palm, used in hut construction. machete, cane-knife, large knife used for trail-cutting. machetero, trail-cutter. madre de dios, mother of God. maestro, master. maldito, cursed, cursed one. mantilla, head-scarf of lace. mariposa, butterfly. matador, bull-fighter who slays the bull with the sword. médico, doctor. mestizo, half-breed. milagro, miracle. Also, small gold image, blessed by a priest, and supposed to work a cure. mora, bramble-bush. mozo, waiter, servant, also young boy or man. muchacho, boy. muy bien, very well. muy buenos dias, "good morning."

N

na, an expression of disagreement, disavowal, or demurral. nada, nothing, nada más, nothing more. nombre de dios, name of God.

O

ojalá, "would to God!" "God grant!" olla, pot, or kettle. Also, a stew of meat and vegetables. oporto, port wine.

P

padre, father, Father, priest. panela, the crude sugar of tropical America. pantano, swamp. pater-noster, the Lord's prayer. patio, the interior court of a dwelling, yard, garden. patron (naut.), cockswain of a boat. peon, day-laborer. peso, dollar. peso oro, a dollar in gold. peso y medio, a dollar and a half. petate, straw mat on which the poor people sleep. plaga, plague, pestilence. platano, plantain tree, or its fruit. playa, shore, beach, strand. policía, police. por, for, by. por dios, by God! por el amor del cielo, for the love of heaven! por supuesto, of course. posada, inn, hotel, restaurant. pozo, well, pond, puddle. pronto, soon, quickly. pueblo, town, settlement, people.

Q

quebrada, creek, small stream. qué chiste, what a joke! qué importa, what does it matter? quemador, public square where heretics were burned. queridito-a, dear little one. quien sabe, who knows?

R

real (reales), a silver coin, valued at 5, 10, or 12-1/2 cents. religion de dinero, a religion of money. ruana, a cape worn by the poor males of tropical America. rurales, country people, peasants, farmers.

S

sacristía, sacristy. san benito, the garb worn by condemned heretics. santa maría, Saint Mary. santa virgen, the sainted Virgin. santo dios, the blessed God! selva, forest. seminario, seminary. señora, Madam, Mrs., a mature woman, a married woman. señorita, Miss, a young unmarried woman. sepulcros, tombs, graves. sierras, mountain chain. siesta, the midday hour of rest, the hottest part of the day. sobrinito, little nephew.

T

temprano, early. terciana, intermittent fever. tía, aunt. tierra caliente, hot lands. tío mío, my uncle. tiple, a small guitar. toldo, awning, the mosquito netting hung over beds. trago, tragito, a drink, a draught. tumba, tomb, grave.

Y

ya está, vámonos, all ready, let's go! yucca, or yuca, the yucca plant or its roots.

DONE INTO A BOOK FOR THE

MAESTRO COMPANY BY W. B.

CONKEY COMPANY, CHICAGO

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