Chapter IX…

Chapter IX

SUSAN sat up in bed suddenly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. It was broad day, and the birds were making a mighty clamor. She gazed round, astonished that it was not her own room. Then she remembered. But it was as a child remembers; for when we have the sense of perfect physical well-being we cannot but see our misfortunes with the child's sense of unreality--and Susan had not only health but youth, was still in the child stage of the period between childhood and womanhood. She lay down again, with the feeling that so long as she could stay in that comfortable bed, with the world shut out, just so long would all be well with her. Soon, however, the restlessness of all nature under the stimulus and heat of that brilliant day communicated itself to her vigorous young body. For repose and inaction are as foreign to healthy life as death itself, of which they are the symptoms; and if ever there was an intense and vivid life, Susan had it. She got up and dressed, and leaned from the window, watching the two-horse reaper in the wheat fields across the hollow of the pasture, and listening to its faint musical whirr. The cows which had just been milked were moving sedately through the gate into the pasture, where the bull, under a tree, was placidly awaiting them. A boy, in huge straw hat and a blue cotton shirt and linsey woolsey trousers rolled high upon his brown bare legs, was escorting the herd.

Her aunt in fresh, blue, checked calico came in. "Wouldn't you like some breakfast?" said she. And Susan read in her manner that the men were out of the way.

"No, I don't feel hungry," Susan replied.

She thought this was true; but when she was at the table she ate almost as heartily as she had the night before. As Susan ate she gazed out into the back yard of the house, where chickens of all sizes, colors and ages were peering and picking about. Through the fence of the kitchen garden she saw Lew, the farm hand, digging potatoes. There were ripening beans on tall poles, and in the farther part the forming heads of cabbages, the sprouting melon vines, the beautiful fresh green of the just springing garden corn. The window through which she was looking was framed in morning glories and hollyhocks, and over by the garden gate were on the one side a clump of elders, on the other the hardy graceful stalks of gaudily spreading sunflowers. Bees flew in and out, and one lighted upon the dish of honey in the comb that went so well with the hot biscuit.

She rose and wandered out among the chickens, to pick up little fluffy youngsters one after another, and caress them, to look in the henhouse itself, where several hens were sitting with the pensive expression that accompanies the laying of eggs. She thought of those other hens, less conventional, who ran away to lay in secret places in the weeds, to accumulate a store against the time when the setting instinct should possess them.

She thought of those cannier, less docile hens and laughed. She opened a gate into the barnyard, intending to go to the barn for a look at the horses, taking in the duck pond and perhaps the pigs on the way. Her Uncle George's voice arrested her.

"Susan," he cried. "Come here."

She turned and looked wistfully at him. The same harsh, unforgiving countenance--mean with anger and petty thoughts. As she moved hesitatingly toward him he said, "You are not to go out of the yard." And he reëntered the house. What a mysterious cruel world! Could it be the same world she had lived in so happily all the years until a few days ago--the same she had always found "God's beautiful world," full of gentleness and kindness?

And why had it changed? What was this sin that after a long sleep in her mother's grave had risen to poison everyone against her? And why had it risen? It was all beyond her.

She strolled wretchedly within bounds, with a foreboding of impending evil. She watched Lew in the garden; she got her aunt to let her help with the churning--drive the dasher monotonously up and down until the butter came; then she helped work the butter, helped gather the vegetables for dinner, did everything and anything to keep herself from thinking. Toward eleven o'clock her Uncle Zeke appeared in the dining-room, called his wife from the kitchen. Susan felt that at last something was to happen. After a long time her aunt returned; there were all the evidences of weeping in her face.

"You'd better go to your room and straighten it up," she said without looking at the girl. "The thing has aired long enough, I reckon. . . . And you'd better stay up there till I call you."

Susan had finished the room, was about to unpack the heavy-laden shawl strap and shake the wrinkles out of the skirts, folded away for two days now. She heard the sound of a horse's hoofs, went to the window. A young man whom she recognized as one of her Uncle Zeke's tenants was hitching to the horse block a well-set-up young mare drawing a species of broad-seated breaking sulky. He had a handsome common face, a wavy black mustache. She remembered that his name was Ferguson--Jeb Ferguson, and that he was working on shares what was known as "the creek-bottom farm," which began about a mile and a half away, straight down the pasture hollow. He glanced up at the window, raised his black slouch hat, and nodded with the self-conscious, self-assured grin of the desired of women. She tried to return this salute with a pleasant smile. He entered the gate and she heard his boots upon the front steps.

Now away across the hollow another figure appeared--a man on horseback coming through the wheat fields. He was riding toward the farther gate of the pasture at a leisurely dignified pace. She had only made out that he had abundant whiskers when the sound of a step upon the stairs caused her to turn. As that step came nearer her heart beat more and more wildly. Her wide eyes fixed upon the open door of the room. It was her Uncle George.

"Sit down," he said as he reached the threshold. "I want to talk to you."

She seated herself, with hands folded in her lap. Her head was aching from the beat of the blood in her temples.

"Zeke and I have talked it over," said Warham. "And we've decided that the only thing to do with you is to get you settled. So in a few minutes now you're going to be married."

Her lack of expression showed that she did not understand. In fact, she could only feel--feel the cruel, contemptuous anger of that voice which all her days before had caressed her.

"We've picked out a good husband for you," Warham continued. "It's Jeb Ferguson."

Susan quivered. "I--I don't want to," she said.

"It ain't a question of what you want," retorted Warham roughly. He was twenty-four hours and a night's sleep away from his first fierce outblazing of fury--away from the influence of his wife and his daughter. If it had not been for his brother Zeke, narrow and cold, the event might have been different. But Zeke was there to keep his "sense of duty" strong. And that he might nerve himself and hide and put down any tendency to be a "soft-hearted fool"--a tendency that threatened to grow as he looked at the girl--the child--he assumed the roughest manner he could muster.

"It ain't a question of what you want," he repeated. "It's a question of what's got to be done, to save my family and you, too--from disgrace. We ain't going to have any more bastards in this family."

The word meant nothing to the girl. But the sound of it, as her uncle pronounced it, made her feel as though the blood were drying up in her veins.

"We ain't going to take any chances," pursued Warham, less roughly; for now that he had looked the situation full and frankly in the face, he had no nerve to brace himself. The necessity of what he was prepared to do and to make her do was too obvious. "Ferguson's here, and Zeke saw the preacher we sent for riding in from the main road. So I've come to tell you. If you'd like to fix up a little, why your Aunt Sallie'll be here in a minute. You want to pray God to make you a good wife. And you ought to be thankful you have sensible relations to step in and save you from yourself."

Susan tried to speak; her voice died in her throat. She made another effort. "I don't want to," she said.

"Then what do you want to do--tell me that!" exclaimed her uncle, rough again. For her manner was very moving, the more so because there was none of the usual appeal to pity and to mercy.

She was silent.

"There isn't anything else for you to do."

"I want to--to stay here."

"Do you think Zeke'd harbor you--when you're about certain to up and disgrace us as your mother did?"

"I haven't done anything wrong," said the girl dully.

"Don't you dare lie about that!"

"I've seen Ruth do the same with Artie Sinclair--and all the girls with different boys."

"You miserable girl!" cried her uncle.

"I never heard it was so dreadful to let a boy kiss you."

"Don't pretend to be innocent. You know the difference between that and what you did!"

Susan realized that when she had kissed Sam she had really loved him. Perhaps that was the fatal difference. And her mother--the sin there had been that she really loved while the man hadn't. Yes, it must be so. Ruth's explanation of these mysteries had been different; but then Ruth had also admitted that she knew little about the matter--and Susan most doubted the part that Ruth had assured her was certainly true.

"I didn't know," said Susan to her uncle. "Nobody ever told me. I thought we were engaged."

"A good woman don't need to be told," retorted Warham. "But I'm not going to argue with you. You've got to marry."

"I couldn't do that," said the girl. "No, I couldn't."

"You'll either take him or you go back to Sutherland and I'll have you locked up in the jail till you can be sent to the House of Correction. You can take your choice."

Susan sat looking at her slim brown hands and interlacing her long fingers. The jail! The House of Correction was dreadful enough, for though she had never seen it she had heard what it was for, what kind of boys and girls lived there. But the jail--she had seen the jail, back behind the courthouse, with its air of mystery and of horror. Not Hell itself seemed such a frightful thing as that jail.

"Well--which do you choose?" said her uncle in a sharp voice.

The girl shivered. "I don't care what happens to me," she said, and her voice was dull and sullen and hard.

"And it doesn't much matter," sneered Warham. Every time he looked at her his anger flamed again at the outrage to his love, his trust, his honor, and the impending danger of more illegitimacy. "Marrying Jeb will give you a chance to reform and be a good woman. He understands--so you needn't be afraid of what he'll find out."

"I don't care what happens to me," the girl repeated in the same monotonous voice.

Warham rose. "I'll send your Aunt Sallie," said he. "And when I call, she'll bring you down."

The girl's silence, her non-resistance the awful expression of her still features--made him uneasy. He went to the window instead of to the door. He glanced furtively at her; but he might have glanced openly as there wasn't the least danger of meeting her eyes. "You're marrying about as well as you could have hoped to, anyhow--better, probably," he observed, in an argumentative, defensive tone. "Zeke says Jeb's about the likeliest young fellow he knows--a likelier fellow than either Zeke or I was at his age. I've given him two thousand dollars in cash. That ought to start you off well." And he went out without venturing another look at her. Her youth and helplessness, her stony misery, were again making it harder for him to hold himself to what he and the fanatic Zeke had decided to be his duty as a Christian, as a father, as a guardian. Besides, he did not dare face his wife and his daughter until the whole business was settled respectably and finally. His sister-in-law was waiting in the next room. As soon as his descent cleared the way she hurried in. From the threshold she glanced at the girl; what she saw sent her hurrying out to recompose herself. But the instant she again saw that expression of mute and dazed despair the tears fought for release. The effort to suppress outward signs of pity made her plain fat face grotesque. She could not speak. With a corner of her apron she wiped imaginary dust from the glass bells that protected the artificial flowers. The poor child! And all for no fault of hers--and because she had been born out of wedlock. But then, the old woman reflected, was it not one of the most familiar of God's mysterious ways that people were punished most severely of all for the things that weren't their fault--for being born in shame, or in bad or low families, or sickly, or for being stupid or ugly or ignorant? She envied Zeke--his unwavering belief in religion. She believed, but her tender heart was always leading her into doubts.

She at last got some sort of control over her voice. "It'll turn out for the best," she said, with her back to Susan. "It don't make much difference nohow who a woman marries, so long as he's steady and a good provider. Jeb seems to be a nice feller. He's better looking than your Uncle George was before he went to town and married a Lenox and got sleeked up. And Jeb ain't near so close as some. That's a lot in a husband." And in a kind of hysteria, bred of fear of silence just then, she rattled on, telling how this man lay awake o' nights thinking how to skin a flea for its hide and tallow, how that one had said only a fool would pay over a quarter for a new hat for his wife----

"Will it be long?" asked the girl.

"I'll go down and see," said Mrs. Warham, glad of a real excuse for leaving the room. She began to cry as soon as she was in the hall. Two sparrows lit upon the window sill near Susan and screamed and pecked at each other in a mock fight. She watched them; but her shiver at the faint sound of her aunt's returning step far away down the stairs showed where her attention was. When Zeke's wife entered she was standing and said:

"Is it time?"

"Come on, honey. Now don't be afraid."

Susan advanced with a firm step, preceded her aunt down the stairs. The black slouch hat and the straw of dignified cut were side by side on the shiny hall table. The parlor door was open; the rarely used showroom gave forth an earthy, moldy odor like that of a disturbed grave. Its shutters, for the first time in perhaps a year, were open; the mud daubers that had built in the crevices between shutters and sills, fancying they would never be disturbed, were buzzing crossly about their ruined homes. The four men were seated, each with his legs crossed, and each wearing the funereal expression befitting a solemn occasion. Susan did not lift her eyes. The profusely whiskered man seated on the haircloth sofa smoothed his black alpaca coat, reset the black tie deep hid by his beard, rose and advanced with a clerical smile whose real kindliness took somewhat from its offensive unction. "This is the young lady, is it?" said he, reaching for Susan's rising but listless hand. "She is indeed a young lady!"

The two Warham men stood, shifting uneasily from leg to leg and rubbing their faces from time to time. Sallie Warham was standing also, her big unhealthy face twitching fantastically. Jeb alone was seated--chair tilted back, hands in trousers pockets, a bucolic grin of embarrassment giving an expression of pain to his common features. A strained silence, then Zeke Warham said:

"I reckon we might as well go ahead."

The preacher took a small black-bound book from the inside pocket of his limp and dusty coat, cleared his throat, turned over the pages. That rustling, the creaking of his collar on his overstarched shirt band, and the buzzing of the mud daubers round the windows were the only sounds. The preacher found the place, cleared his throat again.

"Mr. Ferguson----"

Jeb, tall, spare, sallow, rose awkwardly.

"--You and Miss Lenox will take your places here----" and he indicated a position before him.

Susan was already in place; Jeb shuffled up to stand at her left. Sallie Warham hid her face in her apron. The preacher cleared his throat vigorously, began--"Dearly beloved"--and so on and on. When he put the questions to Susan and Jeb he told them what answer was expected, and they obeyed him, Jeb muttering, Susan with a mere, movement of the lips. When he had finished--a matter of less than three minutes--he shook hands warmly first with Susan, then with Jeb. "Live in the fear of the Lord," he said. "That's all that's necessary."

Sallie put down her apron. Her face was haggard and gray. She kissed Susan tenderly, then led her from the room. They went upstairs to the bedroom. "Do you want to stay to dinner?" she asked in the hoarse undertone of funeral occasions. "Or would you rather go right away?"

"I'd rather go," said the girl.

"You set down and make yourself comfortable. I'll hook up your shawl strap."

Susan sat by the window, her hands in her lap. The hand with the new circlet of gold on it was uppermost. Sallie busied herself with the bundle; abruptly she threw her apron over her face, knelt by the bed and sobbed and uttered inarticulate moans. The girl made no sound, did not move, looked unseeingly at her inert hands. A few moments and Sallie set to work again. She soon had the bundle ready, brought Susan's hat, put it on.

"It's so hot, I reckon you'll carry your jacket. I ain't seen as pretty a blue dress as this--yet it's plain-like, too." She went to the top of the stairs. "She wants to go, Jeb," she called loudly. "You'd better get the sulky ready."

The answer from below was the heavy thump of Jeb's boots on the oilcloth covering of the hall floor. Susan, from the window, dully watched the young farmer unhitch the mare and lead her up in front of the gate.

"Come on, honey," said Aunt Sallie, taking up the bundle.

The girl--she seemed a child now--followed her. On the front stoop were George and his brother and the preacher. The men made room for them to pass. Sallie opened the gate; Susan went out. "You'll have to hold the bundle," said Sallie. Susan mounted to the seat, took the bundle on her knees. Jeb, who had the lines, left the mare's head and got up beside his bride.

"Good day, all," he said, nodding at the men on the stoop. "Good day, Mrs. Warham."

"Come and see us real soon," said Sallie. Her fat chin was quivering; her tired-looking, washed-out eyes gazed mournfully at the girl who was acting and looking as if she were walking in her sleep.

"Good day, all," repeated Jeb, and again he made the clucking sound.

"Good-by and God bless you," said the preacher. His nostrils were luxuriously sniffing the air which bore to them odors of cookery.

The mare set out. Susan's gaze rested immovably upon the heavy bundle in her lap. As the road was in wretched repair, Jeb's whole attention was upon his driving. At the gate between barnyard and pasture he said, "You hold the lines while I get down."

Susan's fingers closed mechanically upon the strips of leather. Jeb led the mare through the gate, closed it, resumed his seat. This time the mare went on without exacting the clucking sound. They were following the rocky road along the wester hillside of the pasture hollow. As they slowly made their way among the deep ruts and bowlders, from frequent moistenings of the lips and throats, noises, and twitchings of body and hands, it was evident that the young farmer was getting ready for conversation. The struggle at last broke surface with, "Zeke Warham don't waste no time road patchin'--does he?"

Susan did not answer.

Jeb studied her out of the corner of his eye, the first time a fairly good bit of roadway permitted. He could make nothing of her face except that it was about the prettiest he had ever seen. Plainly she was not eager to get acquainted; still, acquainted they must get. So he tried again:

"My sister Keziah--she keeps house for me--she'll be mighty surprised when I turn up with a wife. I didn't let on to her what I was about, nary a word."

He laughed and looked expectantly at the girl. Her expression was unchanged. Jeb again devoted himself to his driving.

"No, I didn't let on," he presently resumed. "Fact is, I wan't sure myself till I seed you at the winder." He smiled flirtatiously at her. "Then I decided to go ahead. I dunno, but I somehow kinder allow you and me'll hit it off purty well--don't you?"

Susan tried to speak. She found that she could not--that she had nothing to say.

"You're the kind of a girl I always had my mind set on," pursued Jeb, who was an expert love-maker. "I like a smooth skin and pouty lips that looks as if they wanted to be kissed." He took the reins in one hand, put his arm round her, clumsily found her lips with his. She shrank slightly, then submitted. But Jeb somehow felt no inclination to kiss her again. After a moment he let his arm drop away from her waist and took the reins in both hands with an elaborate pretense that the bad road compelled it.

A long silence, then he tried again: "It's cool and nice under these here trees, ain't it?"

"Yes," she said.

"I ain't saw you out here for several years now. How long has it been?"

"Three summers ago."

"You must 'a' growed some. I don't seem to recollect you. You like the country?"

"Yes."

"Sho! You're just sayin' that. You want to live in town. Well, so do I. And as soon as I get things settled a little I'm goin' to take what I've got and the two thousand from your Uncle George and open up a livery stable in town."

Susan's strange eyes turned upon him. "In Sutherland?" she asked breathlessly.

"Right in Sutherland," replied he complacently. "I think I'll buy Jake Antle's place in Jefferson Street."

Susan was blanched and trembling. "Oh, no," she cried. "You mustn't do that!"

Jeb laughed. "You see if I don't. And we'll live in style, and you can keep a gal and stay dolled up all the time. Oh, I know how to treat you."

"I want to stay in the country," cried Susan. "I hate Sutherland."

"Now, don't you be afraid," soothed Jeb. "When people see you've got a husband and money they'll not be down on you no more. They'll forget all about your maw--and they won't know nothin' about the other thing. You treat me right and I'll treat you right. I'm not one to rake up the past. There ain't arry bit of meanness about me!"

"But you'll let me stay here in the country?" pleaded Susan. Her imagination was torturing her with pictures of herself in Sutherland and the people craning and whispering and mocking.

"You go where I go," replied Jeb. "A woman's place is with her man. And I'll knock anybody down that looks cockeyed at you."

"Oh!" murmured Susan, sinking back against the support.

"Don't you fret, Susie," ordered Jeb, confident and patronizing. "You do what I say and everything'll be all right. That's the way to get along with me and get nice clothes--do what I say. With them that crosses me I'm mighty ugly. But you ain't a-goin' to cross me. . . . Now, about the house. I reckon I'd better send Keziah off right away. You kin cook?"

"A--a little," said Susan.

Jeb looked relieved. "Then she'd be in the way. Two women about always fights--and Keziah's got the Ferguson temper. She's afraid of me, but now and then she fergits and has a tantrum." Jeb looked at her with a smile and a frown. "Perk up a little," he more than half ordered. "I don't want Keziah jeerin' at me."

Susan made a pitiful effort to smile. He eyed it sourly, grunted, gave the mare a cut with the whip that caused her to leap forward in a gallop. "Whoa!" he yelled. "Whoa--damn you!" And he sawed cruelly at her mouth until she quieted down. A turning and they were before a shallow story-and-a-half frame house which squatted like an old roadside beggar behind a weather-beaten picket fence. The sagging shingle roof sloped abruptly; there were four little windows downstairs and two smaller upstairs. The door was in the center of the house; a weedy path led from its crooked step, between two patches of weedy grass, to the gate in the fence.

"Whoa!" shouted Jeb, with the double purpose of stopping the mare and informing the house of his arrival. Then to Susan: "You git down and I'll drive round to the barn yonder." He nodded toward a dilapidated clapboard structure, small and mean, set between a dirty lopsided straw heap and a manure heap. "Go right in and make yourself at home. Tell Keziah who you air. I'll be along, soon as I unhitch and feed the mare."

Susan was staring stupidly at the house--at her new home.

"Git down," he said sharply. "You don't act as if your hearin' or your manners was much to brag on."

He felt awkward and embarrassed with this delicately bred, lovely child-woman in the, to him, wonderfully fine and fashionable dress. To hide his nervousness and to brave it out, he took the only way he knew, the only way shy people usually know--the way of gruffness. It was not a ferocious gruffness for a man of his kind; but it seemed so to her who had been used to gentleness only, until these last few days. His grammar, his untrained voice, his rough clothes, the odor of stale sweat and farm labor he exhaled, made him horrible to her--though she only vaguely knew why she felt so wretched and why her body shrank from him.

She stepped down from the sulky, almost falling in her dizziness and blindness. Jeb touched the mare with the whip and she was alone before the house--a sweet forlorn figure, childish, utterly out of place in those surroundings. On the threshold, in faded and patched calico, stood a tall gaunt woman with a family likeness to Jeb. She had thin shiny black hair, a hard brown skin, high cheekbones and snapping black eyes. When her thin lips parted she showed on the left side of the mouth three large and glittering gold teeth that in the contrast made their gray, not too clean neighbors seem white.

"Howdy!" she called in a tone of hostility.

Susan tried in vain to respond. She stood gazing.

"What d'ye want?"

"He he told me to go in," faltered Susan. She had no sense of reality. It was a dream--only a dream--and she would awaken in her own clean pretty pale-gray bedroom with Ruth gayly calling her to come down to breakfast.

"Who are you?" demanded Keziah--for at a glance it was the sister.

"I'm--I'm Susan Lenox."

"Oh--Zeke Warham's niece. Come right in." And Keziah looked as if she were about to bite and claw.

Susan pushed open the latchless gate, went up the short path to the doorstep. "I think I'll wait till he comes," she said.

"No. Come in and sit down, Miss Lenox." And Keziah drew a rush-bottomed rocking chair toward the doorway. Susan was looking at the interior. The lower floor of the house was divided into three small rooms. This central room was obviously the parlor--the calico-covered sofa, the center table, the two dingy chromos, and a battered cottage organ made that certain. On the floor was a rag carpet; on the walls, torn and dirty paper, with huge weather stains marking where water had leaked from the roof down the supporting beams. Keziah scowled at Susan's frank expression of repulsion for the surroundings. Susan seated herself on the edge of the chair, put her bundle beside her.

"I allow you'll stay to dinner," said Keziah.

"Yes," replied Susan.

"Then I'll go put on some more to cook."

"Oh, no--please don't--I couldn't eat anything--really, I couldn't." The girl spoke hysterically.

Just then Jeb came round the house and appeared in the doorway. He grinned and winked at Susan, looked at his sister. "Well, Keziah," said he, "what d'ye think of her?"

"She says she's going to stay to dinner," observed Keziah, trying to maintain the veneer of manners she had put on for company.

The young man laughed loudly. "That's a good one--that is!" he cried, nodding and winking at Susan. "So you ain't tole her? Well, Keziah, I've been and gone and got married. And there she is."

"Shut up--you fool!" said Keziah. And she looked apologetically at their guest. But the expression of Susan's face made her catch her breath. "For the Lord's sake!" she ejaculated. "She ain't married you!"

"Why not?" demanded Jeb. "Ain't this a free country? Ain't I as good as anybody?"

Keziah blew out her breath in a great gust and seated herself on the tattered calico cover of the sofa. Susan grew deathly white. Her hands trembled. Then she sat quiet upon the edge of the old rush-bottomed chair. There was a terrible silence, broken by Jeb's saying loudly and fiercely, "Keziah, you go get the dinner. Then you pack your duds and clear out for Uncle Bob's."

Keziah stared at the bride, rose and went to the rear door. "I'm goin' now," she answered. "The dinner's ready except for putting on the table."

Through the flimsy partitions they heard her mounting the uncarpeted stairs, hustling about upon an uncarpeted floor above, and presently descending. "I'll hoof it," she said, reappearing in the doorway. "I'll send for my things this afternoon."

Jeb, not caring to provoke the "Ferguson temper," said nothing.

"As for this here marryin'," continued Keziah, "I never allowed you'd fall so low as to take a baby, and a bastard at that."

She whirled away. Jeb flung his hat on the table, flung himself on the sofa. "Well--that's settled," said he. "You kin get the dinner. It's all in there." And he jerked his head toward the door in the partition to the left. Susan got up, moved toward the indicated door. Jeb laughed. "Don't you think you might take off your hat and stay awhile?" said he.

She removed her hat, put it on top of the bundle which she left on the floor beside the rocking chair. She went into the kitchen dining-room. It was a squalid room, its ceiling and walls smoke-stained from the cracked and never polished stove in the corner. The air was foul with the strong old onions stewing on the stove. In a skillet slices of pork were frying. On the back of the stove stood a pan of mashed potatoes and a tin coffeepot. On the stained flowered cloth which covered the table in the middle of the room had been laid coarse, cracked dishes and discolored steel knives and forks with black wooden handles. Susan, half fainting, dropped into a chair by one of the open windows. A multitude of fat flies from the stable were running and crawling everywhere, were buzzing about her head. She was aroused by Jeb's voice: "Why, what the--the damnation! You've fell asleep!"

She started up. "In a minute!" she muttered, nervously.

And somehow, with Jeb's eyes on her from the doorway, she got the evil-smelling messes from the stove into table dishes from the shelves and then on the table, where the flies descended upon them in troops of scores and hundreds. Jeb, in his shirt sleeves now, sat down and fell to. She sat opposite him, her hands in her lap. He used his knife in preference to his fork, leaping the blade high, packing the food firmly upon it with fork or fingers, then thrusting it into his mouth. He ate voraciously, smacking his lips, breathing hard, now and then eructing with frank energy and satisfaction.

"My stummick's gassy right smart this year," he observed after a huge gulp of coffee. "Some says the heavy rains last spring put gas into everything, but I dunno. Maybe it's Keziah's cooking. I hope you'll do better. Why, you ain't eatin' nothin'!"

"I'm not hungry," said Susan. Then, as he frowned suspiciously, "I had a late breakfast."

He laughed. "And the marrying, too," he suggested with a flirtatious nod and wink. "Women's always upset by them kind of things."

When he had filled himself he pushed his chair back. "I'll set with you while you wash up," said he. "But you'd better take off them Sunday duds. You'll find some calikers that belonged to maw in a box under the bed in our room." He laughed and winked at her.

"That's the one on t'other side of the settin'-room. Yes--that's our'n!" And he winked again.

The girl, ghastly white, her great eyes staring like a sleepwalker's, rose and stood resting one hand on the back of the chair to steady her.

Jeb drew a cigar from his waistcoat pocket and lighted it. "Usually," said he, "I take a pipe or a chaw. But this bein' a weddin' day----"

He laughed and winked again, rose, took her in his arms and kissed her. She made a feeble gesture of thrusting him away. Her head reeled, her stomach turned.

She got away as soon as he would release her, crossed the sitting-room and entered the tiny dingy bedroom. The windows were down and the bed had not yet been made. The odor was nauseating--the staleness left by a not too clean sleeper who abhors fresh air. Susan saw the box under the bed, knelt to draw it out. But instead she buried her face in her hands, burst into wild sobs. "Oh, God," she prayed, "stop punishing me. I didn't mean to do wrong--and I'm sure my mother didn't, either. Stop, for Thy Son's sake, amen." Now surely she would wake. God must answer that prayer. She dared not take her palms from her eyes. Suddenly she felt herself caught from behind. She gave a wild scream and sprang up.

Jeb was looking at her with eyes that filled her with a fear more awful than the fear of death. "Don't!" she cried. "Don't!"

"Never mind, hon," said he in a voice that was terrible just because it was soft. "It's only your husband. My, but you're purty!" And he seized her. She fought. He crushed her. He kissed her with great slobbering smacks and gnawed at the flesh of her neck with teeth that craved to bite.

"Oh, Mr. Ferguson, for pity's sake!" she wailed. Then she opened her mouth wide as one gasping for breath where there is no air; and pushing at him with all her strength she vented a series of maniac shrieks.

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Chapter X

LATE that afternoon Jeb returned to the house after several hours of uneasy, aimless pottering about at barn and woodshed. He stumped and stamped around the kitchen, then in the sitting-room, finally he mustered the courage to look into the bedroom, from which he had slunk like a criminal three hours before. There she lay, apparently in the same position. Her waxen color and her absolute stillness added fear to his sense of guilt--a guilt against which he protested, because he felt he had simply done what God and man expected of him. He stood in the low doorway for some time, stood there peering and craning until his fear grew so great that he could no longer put off ending or confirming it.

"Sleepin'?" said he in a hoarse undertone.

She did not reply; she did not move. He could not see that she was breathing.

"It'll soon be time to git supper," he went on--not because he was thinking of supper but because he was desperately clutching for something that must draw a reply from her--if she could reply. "Want me to clean up the dinner and put the supper things on?"

She made a feeble effort to rise, sank back again. He drew an audible sigh of relief; at least she was not what her color had suggested.

In fact, she was morbidly conscious. The instant she had heard him at the outer door she had begun to shiver and shake, and not until he moved toward the bedroom door did she become quiet. Then a calm had come into her nerves and her flesh--the calm that descends upon the brave when the peril actually faces. As he stood there her eyes were closed, but the smell of him--beneath the earthy odor of his clothing the odor of the bodies of those who eat strong, coarse food--stole into her nostrils, into her nerves. Her whole body sickened and shrank--for to her now that odor meant marriage--and she would not have believed Hell contained or Heaven permitted such a thing as was marriage. She understood now why the Bible always talked of man as a vile creature born in sin.

Jeb was stealthily watching her ghastly face, her limp body. "Feelin' sickish?" he asked.

A slight movement of the head in assent.

"I kin ride over to Beecamp and fetch Doc Christie."

Another and negative shake of the head, more determined. The pale lips murmured, "No--no, thank you." She was not hating him. He existed for her only as a symbol, in this hideous dream called life, that was coiled like a snake about her and was befouling her and stinging her to death.

"Don't you bother 'bout supper," said he with gruff, shamefaced generosity. "I'll look out for myself, this onct."

He withdrew to the kitchen, where she heard him clattering dishes and pans. Daylight waned to twilight, twilight to dusk, to darkness. She did not think; she did not feel, except an occasional dull pang from some bodily bruise. Her soul, her mind, were absolutely numb. Suddenly a radiance beat upon her eyes. All in an instant, before the lifting of her eyelids, soul and body became exquisitely acute; for she thought it was he come again, with a lamp. She looked; it was the moon whose beams struck full in at the uncurtained window and bathed her face in their mild brightness. She closed her eyes again and presently fell asleep--the utter relaxed sleep of a child that is worn out with pain, when nature turns gentle nurse and sets about healing and soothing as only nature can. When she awoke it was with a scream. No, she was not dreaming; there was an odor in the room--his odor, with that of a saloon added to it.

After cooking and eating supper he had taken the jug from its concealment behind the woodbox and had proceeded to cheer his drooped spirits. The more he drank the better content he was with himself, with his conduct, and the clearer became his conviction that the girl was simply playing woman's familiar game of dainty modesty. A proper game it was too; only a man must not pay attention to it unless he wished his woman to despise him. When this conviction reached the point of action he put away the jug, washed the glass, ate a liberal mouthful of the left-over stewed onions, as he would not for worlds have his bride catch him tippling. He put out the lamp and went to the bedroom, chuckling to himself like a man about to play a particularly clever and extremely good-humored practical joke. His preparations for the night were, as always, extremely simple merely a flinging off of his outer clothes and, in summer, his socks. From time to time he cast an admiring amorous glance at the lovely childlike face in the full moonlight. As he was about to stretch himself on the bed beside her he happened to note that she was dressed as when she came. That stylish, Sundayish dress was already too much mussed and wrinkled. He leaned over to wake her with a kiss. It was then that she started up with a scream.

"Oh--oh--my God!" she exclaimed, passing her hand over her brow and staring at him with crazed, anguished eyes.

"It's jest me," said he. "Thought you'd want to git ready fur bed, like as not."

"No, thank you, no," she stammered, drawing away toward the inner side of the bed. "Please I want to be as I am."

"Now, don't put on, sweetness," he wheedled. "You know you're married and 'ave got to git used to it."

He laid his hand on her arm. She had intended to obey, since that was the law of God and man and since in all the world there was no other place for her, nameless and outcast. But at his touch she clenched her teeth, cried:

"No--Mr. Ferguson--please--please let me be."

"Now, hon," he pleaded, seizing her with strong gentleness. "There ain't no call to be skittish. We're married, you know."

She wrenched herself free. He seized her again. "What's the use of puttin' on? I know all about you. You little no-name," he cursed, when her teeth sank into his hand. For an instant, at that reminder of her degradation, her indelible shame that made her of the low and the vile, she collapsed in weakness. Then with new and fierce strength she fought again. When she had exhausted herself utterly she relaxed, fell to sobbing and moaning, feebly trying to shelter her face from his gluttonous and odorous kisses. And upon the scene the moon shone in all that beauty which from time immemorial has filled the hearts of lovers with ecstasy and of devotees with prayer.

They lay quietly side by side; he fell into a profound sleep. He was full upon his back, his broad chest heaving in the gray cotton undershirt, his mouth wide open with its upper fringe of hair in disarray and agitated by his breath. Soon he began to snore, a deafening clamor that set some loose object in the dark part of the room to vibrating with a tapping sound. Susan stealthily raised herself upon her elbow, looked at him. There was neither horror nor fear in her haggard face but only eagerness to be sure he would not awaken. She, inch by inch, more softly than a cat, climbed over the low footboard, was standing on the floor. One silent step at a time, with eyes never from his face so clear in the moonlight, she made her way toward the door. The snoring stopped--and her heart stopped with it. He gasped, gurgled, gave a snort, and sat up.

"What--which----" he ejaculated. Then he saw her near the door. "Hello--whar ye goin'?"

"I thought I'd undress," she lied, calmly and smoothly.

"Oh--that's right." And he lay down.

She stood in the darkness, making now and then a faint sound suggestive of undressing. The snoring began again--soft, then deep, then the steady, uproarious intake with the fierce whistling exhalation. She went into the sitting-room, felt round in the darkness, swift and noiseless. On the sofa she found her bundle, tore it open. By feeling alone she snatched her sailor hat, a few handkerchiefs, two stockings, a collar her fingers chanced upon and a toothbrush. She darted to the front door, was outside, was gliding down the path, out through the gate into the road.

To the left would be the way she had come. She ran to the right, with never a backward glance--ran with all the speed in her lithe young body, ran with all the energy of her fear and horror and resolve to die rather than be taken. For a few hundred yards the road lay between open fields. But after that it entered a wood. And in that dimness she felt the first beginnings of a sense of freedom. Half a mile and open fields again, with a small house on the right, a road southeastward on the left. That would be away from her Uncle Zeke's and also away from Sutherland, which lay twenty miles to the southwest. When she would be followed Jeb would not think of this direction until he had exhausted the other two.

She walked, she ran, she rested; she walked and ran and walked again. The moon ascended to the zenith, crossed the levels of the upper sky, went down in the west; a long bar of dusky gray outlined a cloud low upon the horizon in the northeast. She was on the verge of collapse. Her skin, the inside of her mouth, were hot and dry. She had to walk along at snail's pace or her heart would begin to beat as if it were about to burst and the blood would choke up into the veins of her throat to suffocate her. A terrible pain came in her side--came and went--came and stayed. She had passed turning after turning, to the right, to the left--crossroads leading away in all directions. She had kept to the main road because she did not wish to lose time, perhaps return upon her path, in the confusion of the darkness. Now she began to look about her at the country. It was still the hills as round Zeke Warham's--the hills of southeastern Indiana. But they were steeper and higher, for she was moving toward the river. There was less open ground, more and denser undergrowth and forest. She felt that she was in a wilderness, was safe. Night still lay too thick upon the landscape for her to distinguish anything but outlines. She sat down on the ruined and crumbling panel of a zigzag fence to rest and to wait for light. She listened; a profound hush. She was alone, all alone. How far had she come? She could not guess; but she knew that she had done well. She would have been amazed if she had known how well. All the years of her life, thanks to Mrs. Warham's good sense about health, she had been steadily adding to the vitality and strength that were hers by inheritance. Thus, the response to this first demand upon them had been almost inevitable. It augured well for the future, if the future should draw her into hardships. She knew she had gone far and in what was left of the night and with what was left of her strength she would put such a distance between her and them that they would never believe she had got so far, even should they seek in this direction. She was supporting her head upon her hands, her elbows upon her knees. Her eyes closed, her head nodded; she fought against the impulse, but she slept.

When she straightened up with a start it was broad day. The birds must have finished their morning song, for there was only happy, comfortable chirping in the branches above her. She rose stiffly. Her legs, her whole body, ached; and her feet were burning and blistered. But she struck out resolutely.

After she had gone halfway down a long steep hill, she had to turn back because she had left her only possessions. It was a weary climb, and her heart quaked with terror. But no one appeared, and at last she was once more at the ruins of the fence panel. There lay her sailor hat, the handkerchiefs, wrapped round the toothbrush, the collar--and two stockings, one black, the other brown. And where was her purse? Not there, certainly. She glanced round in swift alarm. No one. Yet she had been absolutely sure she had taken her purse from the sitting-room table when she came upon it, feeling about in the dark. She had forgotten it; she was without a cent!

But she had no time to waste in self-reproaches or forebodings. Though the stockings would be of no use to her, she took them along because to leave them was to leave a trail. She hastened down the hill. At the bottom ran a deep creek--without a bridge. The road was now a mere cowpath which only the stoutest vehicles or a horseman would adventure. To her left ran an even wilder trail, following the downward course of the creek. She turned out of the road, entered the trail. She came to a place where the bowlders over which the creek foamed and splashed as it hurried southeastward were big and numerous enough to make a crossing. She took it, went slowly on down the other bank.

There was no sign of human intrusion. Steeply on either side rose a hill, strewn with huge bowlders, many of them large as large houses. The sun filtered through the foliage to make a bright pattern upon the carpet of last year's leaves. The birds twittered and chirped; the creek hummed its drowsy, soothing melody. She was wretchedly weary, and Oh, so hungry! A little further, and two of the great bowlders, tumbled down from the steeps, had cut off part of the creek, had formed a pool which their seamed and pitted and fern-adorned walls hid from all observation except that of the birds and the squirrels in the boughs.

At once she thought how refreshed she would be if she could bathe in those cool waters. She looked round, stepped in between the bowlders. She peered out; she listened. She was safe; she drew back into her little inclosure. There was a small dry shelf of rock. She hurried off her clothes, stood a moment in the delicious warmth of the sunshine, stepped into the pool. She would have liked to splash about; but she dared make no sound that could be heard above the noise of the water. Luckily the creek was just there rather loud, as it was expressing its extreme annoyance over the stolid impudence of the interrupting bowlders. While she was waiting for the sun to dry her she looked at her underclothes. She simply could not put them on as they were. She knelt at the edge of the shelf and rinsed them out as well as she could. Then she spread them on the thick tufts of overhanging fern where the hot sun would get full swing at them. The brown stocking of the two mismates she had brought along almost matched the pair she was wearing. As there was a hole in the toe of one of them, she discarded it, and so had one fresh stocking. She dried her feet thoroughly with the stocking she was discarding. Then she put her corsets and her dress directly upon her body. She could not afford to wait until the underclothes dried; she would carry them until she found for herself a more remote and better hiding place where she could await nightfall. She stuffed the stocking with the hole deep into a cleft in the rock and laid a small stone upon it so that it was concealed. Here where there were no traces, no reminders of the human race which had cast her out and pursued her with torture of body and soul, here in the wilderness her spirits were going up, and her young eyes were looking hopefully round and forward. The up-piling horrors of those two days and their hideous climax seemed a dream which the sun had scattered. Hopefully! That blessed inexperience and sheer imagination of youth enabling it to hope in a large, vague way when to hope for any definite and real thing would be impossible.

She cleaned her tan low shoes with branches of fern and grass, put them on. It is impossible to account for the peculiarities of physical vanity. Probably no one was ever born who had not physical vanity of some kind; Susan's was her feet and ankles. Not her eyes, nor her hair, nor her contour, nor her skin, nor her figure, though any or all of these might well have been her pleasure. Of them she never thought in the way of pride or vanity. But of her feet and ankles she was both proud and vain--in a reserved, wholly unobtrusive way, be it said, so quietly that she had passed unsuspected. There was reason for this shy, secret self-satisfaction, so amusing in one otherwise self-unconscious. Her feet were beautifully formed and the curves of her instep and ankle were beautiful. She gave more attention now to the look of her shoes and of her stockings than to all the rest of this difficult woodland toilet. She then put on the sailor hat, fastened the collar to her garter, slipped the handkerchiefs into the legs of her stockings. Carrying her underclothes, ready to roll them into a ball should she meet anyone, she resumed her journey into that rocky wilderness. She was sore, she had pains that were the memories of the worst horrors of her hideous dream, but up in her strong, healthy body, up through her strong young soul, surged joy of freedom and joy of hope. Compared with what her lot had been until such a few brief days before, this lot of friendless wanderer in the wilderness was dark indeed. But she was comparing it with the monstrous dream from which it was the awakening. She was almost happy--and madly hungry.

An enormous bowlder, high above her and firmly fixed in the spine of the hill, invited as a place where she could see without being seen, could hide securely until darkness came again. She climbed to the base of it, found that she might reach the top by stepping from ledge to ledge with the aid of the trees growing so close around it that some of their boughs seemed rooted in its weather-dented cliffs. She dragged herself upward the fifty or sixty feet, glad of the difficulties because they would make any pursuer feel certain she had not gone that way. After perhaps an hour she came upon a flat surface where soil had formed, where grass and wild flowers and several little trees gave shade and a place to sleep. And from her eyrie she commanded a vast sweep of country--hills and valleys, fields, creeks, here and there lonely farmhouses, and far away to the east the glint of the river!

To the river! That was her destination. And somehow it would be kind, would take her where she would never, never dream those frightful dreams again!

She went to the side of the bowlder opposite that which she had climbed. She drew back hastily, ready to cry with vexation. It was not nearly so high or so steep; and on the slope of the hill a short distance away was set a little farmhouse, with smoke curling up from its rough stone chimney. She dropped to all fours in the tall grass and moved cautiously toward the edge. Flat upon her breast, she worked her way to the edge and looked down. A faintly lined path led from the house through a gate in a zigzag fence and up to the base of her fortress. The rock had so crumbled on that side that a sort of path extended clear up to the top. But her alarm quieted somewhat when she noted how the path was grass-grown.

As nearly as she could judge it was about five o'clock. So that smoke meant breakfast! Her eyes fixed hungrily upon the thin column of violet vapor mounting straight into the still morning air. When smoke rose in that fashion, she remembered, it was sure sign of clear weather. And then the thought came, "What if it had been raining!" She simply could not have got away.

As she interestedly watched the little house and its yard she saw hurrying through the burdock and dog fennel toward the base of her rock a determined looking hen. Susan laughed silently, it was so obvious that the hen was on a pressing and secret business errand. But almost immediately her attention was distracted to observing the movements of a human being she could obscurely make out through one of the windows just back of the chimney. Soon she saw that it was a woman, cleaning up a kitchen after breakfast--the early breakfast of the farmhouse in summer.

What had they had for breakfast? She sniffed the air. "I think I can smell ham and cornbread," she said aloud, and laughed, partly at the absurdity of her fancy, chiefly at the idea of such attractive food. She aggravated her hunger by letting her imagination loose upon the glorious possibilities. A stealthy fluttering brought her glance back to the point where the hen had disappeared. The hen reappeared, hastened down the path and through the weeds, and rejoined the flock in the yard with an air which seemed to say, "No, indeed, I've been right here all the time."

"Now, what was she up to?" wondered Susan, and the answer came to her. Eggs! A nest hidden somewhere near or in the base of the rock!

Could she get down to that nest without being seen from the house or from any other part of the region below? She drew back from the edge, crawled through the grass to the place where the path, if path it could be called, reached the top. She was delighted to find that it made the ascent through a wide cleft and not along the outside. She let herself down cautiously as the footway was crumbling and rotten and slippery with grass. At the lower end of the cleft she peered out. Trees and bushes--plenty of them, a thick shield between her and the valleys. She moved slowly downward; a misstep might send her through the boughs to the hillside forty feet below. She had gone up and down several times before her hunger-sharpened eyes caught the gleam of white through the ferns growing thickly out of the moist mossy cracks which everywhere seamed the wall. She pushed the ferns aside. There was the nest, the length of her forearm into the dim seclusion of a deep hole. She felt round, found the egg that was warm. And as she drew it out she laughed softly and said half aloud: "Breakfast is ready!"

No, not quite ready. Hooking one arm round the bough of a tree that shot up from the hillside to the height of the rock and beyond, she pressed her foot firmly against the protecting root of an ancient vine of poison ivy. Thus ensconced, she had free hands; and she proceeded to remove the thin shell of the egg piece by piece. She had difficulty in restraining herself until the end. At last she put the whole egg into her mouth. And never had she tasted anything so good.

But one egg was only an appetizer. She reached in again. She did not wish to despoil the meritorious hen unnecessarily, so she held the egg up in her inclosing fingers and looked through it, as she had often seen the cook do at home. She was not sure, but the inside seemed muddy. She laid it to one side, tried another. It was clear and she ate it as she had eaten the first. She laid aside the third, the fourth, and the fifth. The sixth seemed all right--but was not. Fortunately she had not been certain enough to feel justified in putting the whole egg into her mouth before tasting it. The taste, however, was enough to make her reflect that perhaps on the whole two eggs were sufficient for breakfast, especially as there would be at least dinner and supper before she could go further. As she did not wish to risk another descent, she continued to sort out the eggs. She found four that were, or seemed to be, all right. The thirteen that looked doubtful or worse when tested by the light she restored with the greatest care. It was an interesting illustration of the rare quality of consideration which at that period of her life dominated her character.

She put the four eggs in the bosom of her blouse and climbed up to her eyrie. All at once she felt the delicious languor of body and mind which is Nature's forewarning that she is about to put us to sleep, whether we will or no. She lost all anxiety about safety, looked hastily around for a bed. She found just the place in a corner of the little tableland where the grass grew tall and thick. She took from her bosom the four eggs--her dinner and supper--and put them between the roots of a tree with a cover of broad leaves over them to keep them cool. She pulled grass to make a pillow, took off her collar and laid herself down to sleep. And that day's sun did not shine upon a prettier sight than this soundly and sweetly sleeping girl, with her oval face suffused by a gentle flush, with her rounded young shoulders just moving the bosom of her gray silk blouse, with her slim, graceful legs curled up to the edge of her carefully smoothed blue serge skirt. You would have said never a care, much less a sorrow, had shadowed her dawning life. And that is what it means to be young--and free from the curse of self-pity, and ignorant of life's saddest truth, that future and past are not two contrasts; one is surely bright and the other is sober, but they are parts of a continuous fabric woven of the same threads and into the same patterns from beginning to end.

When she awoke, beautifully rested, her eyes clear and soft, the shadows which had been long toward the southwest were long, though not so long, toward the southeast. She sat up and smiled; it was so fine to be free! And her woes had not in the least shaken that serene optimism which is youth's most delightful if most dangerous possession. She crawled through the grass to the edge of the rock and looked out through the screening leaves of the dense undergrowth. There was no smoke from the chimney of the house. The woman, in a blue calico, was sitting on the back doorstep knitting. Farther away, in fields here and there, a few men--not a dozen in all--were at work. From a barnyard at the far edge of the western horizon came the faint sound of a steam thresher, and she thought she could see the men at work around it, but this might have been illusion. It was a serene and lovely panorama of summer and country. Last of all her eyes sought the glimpse of distant river.

She ate two of her four eggs, put on the underclothes which were now thoroughly sun-dried, shook out and rebraided her hair. Then she cast about for some way to pass the time.

She explored the whole top of the rock, but that did not use up more than fifteen minutes, as it was so small that every part was visible from every other part. However, she found a great many wild flowers and gathered a huge bouquet of the audacious colors of nature's gardens, so common yet so effective. She did a little botanizing--anything to occupy her mind and keep it from the ugly visions and fears. But all too soon she had exhausted the resources of her hiding place. She looked down into the valley to the north--the valley through which she had come. She might go down there and roam; it would be something to do, and her young impatience of restraint was making her so restless that she felt she could not endure the confines of that little rock. It had seemed huge; a brief experience of freedom, a few hours between her and the night's horrors and terrors, and it had shrunk to a tiny prison cell. Surely she would run no risk in journeying through that trackless wilderness; she need not be idle, she could hasten her destiny by following the creek in its lonely wanderings, which must sooner or later bring it to the river. The river!

She was about to get the two remaining eggs and abandon her stronghold when it occurred to her that she would do well to take a last look all around. She went back to the side of the rock facing the house.

The woman had suspended knitting and was gazing intently across the hollow to the west, where the road from the north entered the landscape. Susan turned her eyes in that direction. Two horsemen at a gallop were moving southward. The girl was well screened, but instinctively she drew still further back behind the bushes--but not so far that the two on horseback, riding so eagerly, were out of her view. The road dipped into the hollow. the galloping horsemen disappeared with it. Susan shifted her gaze to the point on the brow of the hill where the road reappeared. She was quivering in every nerve. When they came into view again she would know.

The place she was watching swam before her eyes. Suddenly the two, still at a gallop, rose upon the crest of the hill. Jeb and her Uncle Zeke! Her vision cleared, her nerve steadied.

They did not draw rein until they were at the road gate of the little house. The woman rose, put down her knitting in the seat of her stiff, rush-bottomed rocker, advanced to the fence. The air was still, but Susan could not hear a sound, though she craned forward and strained her ears to the uttermost. She shrank as if she had been struck when the three began to gaze up at the rock--to gaze, it seemed to her, at the very spot where she was standing. Was her screen less thick than she thought? Had they seen--if not her, perhaps part of her dress?

Wildly her heart beat as Jeb dismounted from his horse the mare behind which she had made her wedding journey--and stood in the gateway, talking with the woman and looking toward the top of the rock. Zeke Warham turned his horse and began to ride slowly away. He got as far as the brow of the hill, with Jeb still in the gateway, hesitating. Then Susan heard:

"Hold on, Mr. Warham. I reckon you're right."

Warham halted his horse, Jeb remounted and joined him. As the woman returned toward the back doorstep, the two men rode at a walk down into the hollow. When they reappeared it was on the road by which they had come. And the girl knew the pursuit in that direction--the right direction--was over. Trembling and with a fluttering in her breast like the flapping of a bird's wings, she sank to the ground. Presently she burst into a passion of tears. Without knowing why, she tore off the wedding ring which until then she had forgotten, and flung it out among the treetops. A few minutes, and she dried her eyes and stood up. The two horsemen were leaving the landscape at the point at which they had entered it. The girl would not have known, would have been frightened by, her own face had she seen it as she watched them go out of her sight--out of her life. She did not understand herself, for she was at that age when one is no more conscious of the forces locked up within his unexplored and untested character than the dynamite cartridge is of its secrets of power and terror.

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Chapter XI

SHE felt free to go now. She walked toward the place where she had left the eggs. It was on the side of the rock overlooking the creek. As she knelt to remove the leaves, she heard from far below a man's voice singing. She leaned forward and glanced down at the creek. In a moment appeared a young man with a fishing rod and a bag slung over his shoulder. His gray and white striped flannel trousers were rolled to his knees. His fair skin and the fair hair waving about his forehead were exposed by the flapping-brimmed straw hat set upon the back of his head. His voice, a strong and manly tenor, was sending up those steeps a song she had never heard before--a song in Italian. She had not seen what he looked like when she remembered herself and hastily fell back from view. She dropped to the grass and crawled out toward the ledge. When she showed her face it so happened that he was looking straight at her.

"Hello!" he shouted. "That you, Nell?"

Susan drew back, her blood in a tumult. From below, after a brief silence, came a burst of laughter.

She waited a long time, then through a shield of bunches of grass looked again. The young man was gone. She wished that he had resumed his song, for she thought she had never heard one so beautiful. Because she did not feel safe in descending until he was well out of the way, and because she was so comfortable lying there in the afternoon sunshine watching the birds and listening to them, she continued on there, glancing now and then at where the creek entered and where it left her range of vision, to make sure that no one else should come and catch her. Suddenly sounded a voice from somewhere behind her:

"Hey, Nell! I'm coming!"

She sprang to her feet, faced about; and Crusoe was not more agitated when he saw the print of the naked foot on his island's strand. The straw hat with the flapping brim was just lifting above the edge of the rock at the opposite side, where the path was. She could not escape; the shelf offered no hiding place. Now the young man was stepping to the level, panting loudly.

"Gee, what a climb for a hot day!" he cried. "Where are you?"

With that he was looking at Susan, less than twenty yards away and drawn up defiantly. He stared, took off his hat. He had close-cropped wavy hair and eyes as gray as Susan's own, but it was a blue-gray instead of violet. His skin was fair, too, and his expression intelligent and sympathetic. In spite of his hat, and his blue cotton shirt, and trousers rolled high on bare sunburned legs, there was nothing of the yokel about him.

"I beg your pardon," he exclaimed half humorously. "I thought it was my cousin Nell."

"No," said Susan, disarmed by his courtesy and by the frank engaging manner of it.

"I didn't mean to intrude." He showed white teeth in a broad smile. "I see from your face that this is your private domain."

"Oh, no--not at all," stammered Susan.

"Yes, I insist," replied he. "Will you let me stay and rest a minute? I ran round the rock and climbed pretty fast."

"Yes--do," said Susan.

The young man sat on the grass near where he had appeared, and crossed his long legs. The girl, much embarrassed, looked uneasily about. "Perhaps you'd sit, too?" suggested he, after eyeing her in a friendly way that could not cause offense and somehow did not cause any great uneasiness.

Susan hesitated, went to the shadow of a little tree not far from him. He was fanning his flushed face with his hat. The collar of his shirt was open; below, where the tan ended abruptly, his skin was beautifully white. Now that she had been discovered, it was as well to be pleasant, she reasoned. "It's a fine day," she observed with a grown-up gravity that much amused him.

"Not for fishing," said he. "I caught nothing. You are a stranger in these parts?"

Susan colored and a look of terror flitted into her eyes. "Yes," she admitted. "I'm--I'm passing through."

The young man had all he could do to conceal his amusement. Susan flushed deeply again, not because she saw his expression, for she was not looking at him, but because her remark seemed to her absurd and likely to rouse suspicion.

"I suppose you came up here to see the view," said the man. He glanced round. "It is pretty good. You're not visiting down Brooksburg way, by any chance?"

"No," replied Susan, rather composedly and determined to change the subject. "What was that song I heard you singing?"

"Oh--you heard, did you?" laughed he. "It's the Duke's song from 'Rigoletto.'"

"That's an opera, isn't it--like 'Trovatore'?"

"Yes--an Italian opera. Same author."

"It's a beautiful song." It was evident that she longed to ask him to sing it. She felt at ease with him; he was so unaffected and simple, was one of those people who seem to be at home wherever they are.

"Do you sing?" he inquired.

"Not really," replied she.

"Neither do I. So if you'll sing to me, I'll sing to you."

Susan looked round in alarm. "Oh, dear, no--please don't," she cried.

"Why not?" he asked curiously. "There isn't a soul about."

"I know--but--really, you mustn't."

"Very well," said he, seeing that her nervousness was not at all from being asked to sing. They sat quietly, she gazing off at the horizon, he fanning himself and studying her lovely young face. He was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five and a close observer would have suspected him of an unusual amount of experience, even for a good-looking, expansive youth of that age.

He broke the long silence. "I'm a newspaper man from Cincinnati. I'm on the Commercial there. My name's Roderick Spenser. My father's Clayton Spenser, down at Brooksburg"--he pointed to the southeast--"beyond that hill there, on the river. I'm here on my vacation." And he halted, looking at her expectantly.

It seemed to her that there was in courtesy no escape without a return biographical sketch. She hung her head, twisted her tapering fingers in her lap, and looked childishly embarrassed and unhappy. Another long silence; again he broke it. "You'll pardon my saying so, but--you're very young, aren't you?"

"Not so--so terribly young. I'm almost seventeen," replied she, glancing this way and that, as if thinking of flight.

"You look like a child, yet you don't," he went on, and his frank, honest voice calmed her. "You've had some painful experience, I'd say."

She nodded, her eyes down.

A pause, then he: "Honest, now--aren't you--running away?"

She lifted her eyes to his piteously. "Please don't ask me," she said.

"I shouldn't think of it," replied he, with a gentleness in his persistence that made her feel still more like trusting him, "if it wasn't that----

"Well, this world isn't the easiest sort of a place. Lots of rough stretches in the road. I've struck several and I've always been glad when somebody has given me a lift. And I want to pass it on--if you'll let me. It's something we owe each other--don't you think?"

The words were fine enough; but it was the voice in which he said them that went to her heart. She covered her face with her hands and released her pent emotions. He took a package of tobacco and a sheaf of papers from his trousers pocket, rolled and lighted a cigarette. After a while she dried her eyes, looked at him shamefacedly. But he was all understanding and sympathy.

"Now you feel better, don't you?"

"Much," said she. And she laughed. "I guess I'm more upset than I let myself realize."

"Sorry you left home?"

"I haven't any home," answered she simply. "And I wouldn't go back alive to the place I came from."

There was a quality in the energy she put into her words that made him thoughtful. He counseled with the end of his cigarette. Finally he inquired:

"Where are you bound for?"

"I don't know exactly," confessed she, as if it were a small matter.

He shook his head. "I see you haven't the faintest notion what you're up against."

"Oh, I'll get along. I'm strong, and I can learn."

He looked at her critically and rather sadly.

"Yes--you are strong," said he. "But I wonder if you're strong enough."

"I never was sick in my life."

"I don't mean that. . . . I'm not sure I know just what I do mean."

"Is it very hard to get to Chicago?" inquired she.

"It's easier to get to Cincinnati."

She shook her head positively. "It wouldn't do for me to go there."

"Oh, you come from Cincinnati?"

"No--but I--I've been there."

"Oh, they caught you and brought you back?"

She nodded. This young man must be very smart to understand so quickly.

"How much money have you got?" he asked abruptly.

But his fear that she would think him impertinent came of an underestimate of her innocence. "I haven't got any," replied she. "I forgot my purse. It had thirty dollars in it."

At once he recognized the absolute child; only utter inexperience of the world could speak of so small a sum so respectfully. "I don't understand at all," said he. "How long have you been here?"

"All day. I got here early this morning."

"And you haven't had anything to eat!"

"Oh, yes! I found some eggs. I've got two left."

Two eggs--and no money and no friends--and a woman. Yet she was facing the future hopefully! He smiled, with tears in his eyes.

"You mustn't tell anybody you saw me," she went on. "No matter what they say, don't think you ought to tell on me."

He looked at her, she at him. When he had satisfied himself he smiled most reassuringly. "I'll not," was his answer, and now she knew she could trust him.

She drew a breath of relief, and went on as if talking with an old friend. "I've got to get a long ways from here. As soon as it's dark I'm going."

"Where?"

"Toward the river." And her eyes lit.

"The river? What's there?"

"I don't know," said she triumphantly.

But he understood. He had the spirit of adventure himself--one could see it at a glance--the spirit that instinctively shuns yesterday and all its works and wings eagerly into tomorrow, unknown, different, new--therefore better. But this girl, this child-woman--or was she rather woman-child?--penniless, with nothing but two eggs between her and starvation, alone, without plans, without experience--

What would become of her?. . . "Aren't you--afraid?" he asked.

"Of what?" she inquired calmly.

It was the mere unconscious audacity of ignorance, yet he saw in her now--not fancied he saw, but saw--a certain strength of soul, both courage and tenacity. No, she might suffer, sink--but she would die fighting, and she would not be afraid. And he admired and envied her.

"Oh, I'll get along somehow," she assured him in the same self-reliant tone. Suddenly she felt it would no longer give her the horrors to speak of what she had been through. "I'm not very old," said she, and hers was the face of a woman now. "But I've learned a great deal."

"You are sure you are not making a mistake in--in--running away?"

"I couldn't do anything else," replied she. "I'm all alone in the world. There's no one--except----

"I hadn't done anything, and they said I had disgraced them--and they----" Her voice faltered, her eyes sank, the color flooded into her face. "They gave me to a man--and he--I had hardly seen him before--he----" She tried but could not pronounce the dreadful word.

"Married, you mean?" said the young man gently.

The girl shuddered. "Yes," she answered. "And I ran away."

So strange, so startling, so moving was the expression of her face that he could not speak for a moment. A chill crept over him as he watched her wide eyes gazing into vacancy. What vision of horror was she seeing, he wondered. To rouse her he spoke the first words he could assemble:

"When was this?"

The vision seemed slowly to fade and she looked at him in astonishment. "Why, it was last night!" she said, as if dazed by the discovery. "Only last night!"

"Last night! Then you haven't got far."

"No. But I must. I will. And I'm not afraid of anything except of being taken back."

"But you don't realize what may be--probably is--waiting for you--at the river--and beyond."

"Nothing could be so bad," said she. The words were nothing, but the tone and the expression that accompanied them somehow convinced him beyond a doubt.

"You'll let me help you?"

She debated. "You might bring me something to eat--mightn't you? The eggs'll do for supper. But there's tomorrow. I don't want to be seen till I get a long ways off."

He rose at once. "Yes, I'll bring you something to eat." He took a knockabout watch from the breast pocket of his shirt. "It's now four o'clock. I've got three miles to walk. I'll ride back and hitch the horse down the creek--a little ways down, so it won't attract attention to your place up here. I'll be back in about an hour and a half. . . . Maybe I'll think of something that'll help. Can I bring you anything else?

"No. That is--I'd like a little piece of soap."

"And a towel?" he suggested.

"I could take care of a towel," agreed she. "I'll send it back to you when I get settled."

"Good heavens!" He laughed at her simplicity. "What an honest child you are!" He put out his hand, and she took it with charming friendliness. "Good-by. I'll hurry."

"I'm so glad you caught me," said she. Then, apologetically, "I don't want to be any trouble. I hate to be troublesome. I've never let anybody wait on me."

"I don't know when I've had as much pleasure as this is giving me." And he made a bow that hid its seriousness behind a smile of good-humored raillery.

She watched him descend with a sinking heart. The rock--the world--her life, seemed empty now. He had reminded her that there were human beings with good hearts. But--perhaps if he knew, his kindness would turn also. . . . No, she decided not. Men like him, women like Aunt Sallie--they did not believe those dreadful, wicked ideas that people said God had ordained. Still--if he knew about her birth--branded outcast--he might change. She must not really hope for anything much until she was far, far away in a wholly new world where there would be a wholly new sort of people, of a kind she had never met. But she was sure they would welcome her, and give her a chance.

She returned to the tree against which she had been sitting, for there she could look at the place his big frame had pressed down in the tall grass, and could see him in it, and could recall his friendly eyes and voice, and could keep herself assured she had not been dreaming. He was a citified man, like Sam--but how different! A man with a heart like his would never marry a woman--no, never! He couldn't be a brute like that. Still, perhaps nice men married because it was supposed to be the right thing to do, and was the only way to have children without people thinking you a disgrace and slighting the children--and then marrying made brutes of them. No wonder her uncles could treat her so. They were men who had married.

Afar off she heard the manly voice singing the song from "Rigoletto." She sprang up and listened, with eyes softly shining and head a little on one side. The song ended; her heart beat fast. It was not many minutes before she, watching at the end of the path, saw him appear at the bottom of the huge cleft. And the look in his eyes, the merry smile about his expressive mouth, delighted her. "I'm so glad to see you!" she cried.

Over his shoulder was flung his fishing bag, and it bulged. "Don't be scared by the size of my pack," he called up, as he climbed. "We're going to have supper together--if you'll let me stay. Then you can take as much or as little as you like of what's left."

Arrived at the top, he halted for a long breath. They stood facing each other. "My, what a tall girl you are for your age!" said he admiringly.

She laughed up at him. "I'll be as tall as you when I get my growth."

She was so lovely that he could scarcely refrain from telling her so. It seemed to him, however, it would be taking an unfair advantage to say that sort of thing when she was in a way at his mercy. "Where shall we spread the table?" said he. "I'm hungry as the horseleech's daughter. And you--why, you must be starved. I'm afraid I didn't bring what you like. But I did the best I could. I raided the pantry, took everything that was portable."

He had set down the bag and had loosened its strings. First he took out a tablecloth. She laughed. "Gracious! How stylish we shall be!"

"I didn't bring napkins. We can use the corners of the cloth." He had two knives, two forks, and a big spoon rolled up in the cloth, and a saltcellar. "Now, here's my triumph!" he cried, drawing from the bag a pair of roasted chickens. Next came a jar of quince jelly; next, a paper bag with cold potatoes and cold string beans in it. Then he fished out a huge square of cornbread and a loaf of salt-rising bread, a pound of butter--

"What will your folks say?" exclaimed she, in dismay.

He laughed. "They always have thought I was crazy, ever since I went to college and then to the city instead of farming." And out of the bag came a big glass jar of milk. "I forgot to bring a glass!" he apologized. Then he suspended unpacking to open the jar. "Why, you must be half-dead with thirst, up here all day with not a drop of water." And he held out the jar to her. "Drink hearty!" he cried.

The milk was rich and cold; she drank nearly a fourth of it before she could wrest the jar away from her lips. "My, but that was good!" she remarked. He had enjoyed watching her drink. "Surely you haven't got anything else in that bag?"

"Not much," replied he. "Here's a towel, wrapped round the soap. And here are three cakes of chocolate. You could live four or five days on them, if you were put to it. So whatever else you leave, don't leave them. And--Oh, yes, here's a calico slip and a sunbonnet, and a paper of pins. And that's all."

"What are they for?"

"I thought you might put them on--the slip over your dress--and you wouldn't look quite so--so out of place--if anybody should see you."

"What a fine idea!" cried Susan, shaking out the slip delightedly.

He was spreading the supper on the tablecloth. He carved one of the chickens, opened the jelly, placed the bread and vegetables and butter. "Now!" he cried. "Let's get busy."

And he set her an example she was not slow to follow. The sun had slipped down behind the hills of the northwest horizon. The birds were tuning for their evening song. A breeze sprang up and coquetted with the strays of her wavy dark hair. And they sat cross-legged on the grass on opposite sides of the tablecloth and joked and laughed and ate, and ate and laughed and joked until the stars began to appear in the vast paling opal of the sky. They had chosen the center of the grassy platform for their banquet; thus, from where they sat only the tops of trees and the sky were to be seen. And after they had finished she leaned on her elbow and listened while he, smoking his cigarette, told her of his life as a newspaper man in Cincinnati. The twilight faded into dusk, the dusk into a scarlet darkness.

"When the moon comes up we'll start," said he. "You can ride behind me on the horse part of the way, anyhow."

The shadow of the parting, the ending of this happiness, fell upon her. How lonely it would be when he was gone! "I haven't told you my name," she said.

"I've told you mine Roderick Spenser--with an s, not a c."

"I remember," said she. "I'll never forget. . . . Mine's Susan Lenox."

"What was it--before----" He halted.

"Before what?" His silence set her to thinking. "Oh!" she exclaimed, in a tone that made him curse his stupidity in reminding her. "My name's Susan Lenox--and always will be. It was my mother's name." She hesitated, decided for frankness at any cost, for his kindness forbade her to deceive him in any way. Proudly, "My mother never let any man marry her. They say she was disgraced, but I understand now. She wouldn't stoop to let any man marry her."

Spenser puzzled over this, but could make nothing of it. He felt that he ought not to inquire further. He saw her anxious eyes, her expression of one keyed up and waiting for a verdict. "I'd have only to look at you to know your mother was a fine woman," said he. Then, to escape from the neighborhood of the dangerous riddle, "Now, about your--your going," he began. "I've been thinking what to do."

"You'll help me?" said she, to dispel her last doubt--a very faint doubt, for his words and his way of uttering them had dispelled her real anxiety.

"Help you?" cried he heartily. "All I can. I've got a scheme to propose to you. You say you can't take the mail boat?"

"They know me. I--I'm from Sutherland."

"You trust me--don't you?"

"Indeed I do."

"Now listen to me--as if I were your brother. Will you?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to take you to Cincinnati with me. I'm going to put you in my boarding house as my sister. And I'm going to get you a position. Then--you can start in for yourself."

"But that'll be a great lot of trouble, won't it?"

"Not any more than friends of mine took for me when I was starting out." Then, as she continued silent, "What are you thinking? I can't see your face in this starlight."

"I was thinking how good you are," she said simply.

He laughed uneasily. "I'm not often accused of that," he replied. "I'm like most people--a mixture of good and bad--and not very strong either way. I'm afraid I'm mostly impulse that winks out. But--the question is, how to get you to Cincinnati. It's simply impossible for me to go tonight. I can't take you home for the night. I don't trust my people. They'd not think I was good--or you, either. And while usually they'd be right--both ways--this is an exception." This idea of an exception seemed to amuse him. He went on, "I don't dare leave you at any farmhouse in the neighborhood. If I did, you could be traced."

"No--no," she cried, alarmed at the very suggestion. "I mustn't be seen by anybody."

"We'll go straight to the river, and I'll get a boat and row you across to Kentucky--over to Carrollton. There's a little hotel. I can leave you----"

"No--not Carrollton," she interrupted. "My uncle sells goods there, and they know him. And if anything is in the Sutherland papers about me, why, they'd know."

"Not with you in that slip and sunbonnet. I'll make up a story--about our wagon breaking down and that I've got to walk back into the hills to get another before we can go on. And--it's the only plan that's at all possible."

Obviously he was right; but she would not consent. By adroit questioning he found that her objection was dislike of being so much trouble to him. "That's too ridiculous," cried he. "Why, I wouldn't have missed this adventure for anything in the world."

His manner was convincing enough, but she did not give in until moonrise came without her having thought of any other plan. He was to be Bob Peters, she his sister Kate, and they were to hail from a farm in the Kentucky hills back of Milton. They practiced the dialect of the region and found that they could talk it well enough to pass the test of a few sentences They packed the fishing bag; she wrapped the two eggs in paper and put them in the empty milk bottle. They descended by the path--a slow journey in the darkness of that side of the rock, as there were many dangers, including the danger of making a noise that might be heard by some restless person at the house. After half an hour they were safely at the base of the rock; they skirted it, went down to the creek, found the horse tied where he had left it. With her seated sideways behind him and holding on by an arm half round his waist, they made a merry but not very speedy advance toward the river, keeping as nearly due south as the breaks in the hills permitted. After a while he asked: "Do you ever think of the stage?"

"I've never seen a real stage play," said she. "But I want to--and I will, the first chance I get."

"I meant, did you ever think of going on the stage?"

"No." So daring a flight would have been impossible for a baby imagination in the cage of the respectable-family-in-a-small-town.

"It's one of my dreams to write plays," he went on. "Wouldn't it be queer if some day I wrote plays for you to act in?"

When one's fancy is as free as was Susan's then, it takes any direction chance may suggest. Susan's fancy instantly winged along this fascinating route. "I've given recitations at school, and in the plays we used to have they let me take the best parts--that is--until--until a year or so ago."

He noted the hesitation, had an instinct against asking why there had come a time when she no longer got good parts. "I'm sure you could learn to act," declared he. "And you'll be sure of it, too, after you've seen the people who do it."

"Oh, I don't believe I could," said she, in rebuke to her own mounting self-confidence. Then, suddenly remembering her birth-brand of shame and overwhelmed by it, "No, I can't hope to be to be anything much. They wouldn't have--me."

"I know how you feel," replied he, all unaware of the real reason for this deep humility. "When I first struck town I felt that way. It seemed to me I couldn't hope ever to line up with the clever people they had there. But I soon saw there was nothing in that idea. The fact is, everywhere in the world there's a lot more things to do than people who can do them. Most of those who get to the top--where did they start? Where we're starting."

She was immensely flattered by that "we" and grateful for it. But she held to her original opinion. "There wouldn't be a chance for me," said she. "They wouldn't have me."

"Oh, I understand," said he and he fancied he did. He laughed gayly at the idea that in the theater anyone would care who she was--what kind of past she had had--or present either, for that matter. Said he, "You needn't worry. On the stage they don't ask any questions--any questions except 'Can you act? Can you get it over? Can you get the hand?'"

Then this stage, it was the world she had dreamed of--the world where there lived a wholly new kind of people--people who could make room for her. She thrilled, and her heart beat wildly. In a strangely quiet, intense voice, she said:

"I want to try. I'm sure I'll get along there. I'll work--Oh, so hard. I'll do anything!"

"That's the talk," cried he. "You've got the stuff in you."

She said little the rest of the journey. Her mind was busy with the idea he had by merest accident given her. If he could have looked in upon her thoughts, he would have been amazed and not a little alarmed by the ferment he had set up.

Where they reached the river the bank was mud and thick willows, the haunt of incredible armies of mosquitoes. "It's a mystery to me," cried he, "why these fiends live in lonely places far away from blood, when they're so mad about it." After some searching he found a clear stretch of sandy gravel where she would be not too uncomfortable while he was gone for a boat. He left the horse with her and walked upstream in the direction of Brooksburg. As he had warned her that he might be gone a long time, he knew she would not be alarmed for him--and she had already proved that timidity about herself was not in her nature. But he was alarmed for her--this girl alone in that lonely darkness--with light enough to make her visible to any prowler.

About an hour after he left her he returned in a rowboat he had borrowed at the water mill. He hitched the horse in the deep shadow of the break in the bank. She got into the boat, put on the slip and the sunbonnet, put her sailor hat in the bag. They pushed off and he began the long hard row across and upstream. The moon was high now and was still near enough to its full glory to pour a flood of beautiful light upon the broad river--the lovely Ohio at its loveliest part.

"Won't you sing?" he asked.

And without hesitation she began one of the simple familiar love songs that were all the music to which the Sutherland girls had access. She sang softly, in a deep sweet voice, sweeter even than her speaking voice. She had the sunbonnet in her lap; the moon shone full upon her face. And it seemed to him that he was in a dream; there was nowhere a suggestion of reality--not of its prose, not even of its poetry. Only in the land no waking eye has seen could such a thing be. The low sweet voice sang of love, the oars clicked rhythmically in the locks and clove the water with musical splash; the river, between its steep hills, shone in the moonlight, with a breeze like a friendly spirit moving upon its surface. He urged her, and she sang another song, and another. She sighed when she saw the red lantern on the Carrollton wharf; and he, turning his head and seeing, echoed her sigh.

"The first chance, you must sing me that song," she said.

"From 'Rigoletto'? I will. But--it tells how fickle women are--'like a feather in the wind.'. . . They aren't all like that, though--don't you think so?"

"Sometimes I think everybody's like a feather in the wind," replied she. "About love--and everything."

He laughed. "Except those people who are where there isn't any wind."

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Chapter XII

FOR some time Spenser had been rowing well in toward the Kentucky shore, to avoid the swift current of the Kentucky River which rushes into the Ohio at Carrollton. A few yards below its mouth, in the quiet stretch of backwater along shore, lay the wharf-boat, little more than a landing stage. The hotel was but a hundred feet away, at the top of the steep levee. It was midnight, so everyone in the village had long been asleep. After several minutes of thunderous hammering Roderick succeeded in drawing to the door a barefooted man with a candle in his huge, knotted hand--a man of great stature, amazingly lean and long of leg, with a monstrous head thatched and fronted with coarse, yellow-brown hair. He had on a dirty cotton shirt and dirty cotton trousers--a night dress that served equally well for the day. His feet were flat and thick and were hideous with corns and bunions. Susan had early been made a critical observer of feet by the unusual symmetry of her own. She had seen few feet that were fit to be seen; but never, she thought, had she seen an exhibition so repellent.

"What t'hell----" he began. Then, discovering Susan, he growled, "Beg pardon, miss."

Roderick explained--that is, told the prearranged story. The man pointed to a grimy register on the office desk, and Roderick set down the fishing bag and wrote in a cramped, scrawly hand, "Kate Peters, Milton, Ky."

The man looked at it through his screen of hair and beard, said, "Come on, ma'am."

"Just a minute," said Roderick, and he drew "Kate" aside and said to her in a low tone: "I'll be back sometime tomorrow, and then we'll start at once. But--to provide against everything--don't be alarmed if I don't come. You'll know I couldn't help it. And wait."

Susan nodded, looking at him with trustful, grateful eyes.

"And," he went on hurriedly, "I'll leave this with you, to take care of. It's yours as much as mine."

She saw that it was a pocketbook, instinctively put her hands behind her.

"Don't be silly," he said, with good-humored impatience. "You'll probably not need it. If you do, you'll need it bad. And you'll pay me back when you get your place."

He caught one of her hands and put the pocketbook in it. As his argument was unanswerable, she did not resist further. She uttered not a word of thanks, but simply looked at him, her eyes swimming and about her mouth a quiver that meant a great deal in her. Impulsively and with flaming cheek he kissed her on the cheek. "So long, sis," he said loudly, and strode into the night.

Susan did not flush; she paled. She gazed after him with some such expression as a man lost in a cave might have as he watches the flickering out of his only light. "This way, ma'am," said the hotel man sourly, taking up the fishing bag. She started, followed him up the noisy stairs to a plain, neat country bedroom. "The price of this here's one fifty a day," said he. "We've got 'em as low as a dollar."

"I'll take a dollar one, please," said Susan.

The man hesitated. "Well," he finally snarled, "business is slack jes' now. Seein' as you're a lady, you kin have this here un fur a dollar."

"Oh, thank you--but if the price is more----"

"The other rooms ain't fit fur a lady," said the hotel man. Then he grinned a very human humorous grin that straightway made him much less repulsive. "Anyhow, them two durn boys of mine an' their cousins is asleep in 'em. I'd as lief rout out a nest of hornets. I'll leave you the candle."

As soon as he had gone Susan put out the light, ran to the window. She saw the rowboat and Spenser, a black spot far out on the river, almost gone from view to the southwest. Hastily she lighted the candle again, stood at the window and waved a white cover she snatched from the table. She thought she saw one of the oars go up and flourish, but she could not be sure. She watched until the boat vanished in the darkness at the bend. She found the soap in the bag and took a slow but thorough bath in the washbowl. Then she unbraided her hair, combed it out as well as she could with her fingers, rubbed it thoroughly with a towel and braided it again. She put on the calico slip as a nightdress, knelt down to say her prayers. But instead of prayers there came flooding into her mind memories of where she had been last night, of the horrors, of the agonies of body and soul. She rose from her knees, put out the light, stood again at the window. In after years she always looked back upon that hour as the one that definitely marked the end of girlhood, of the thoughts and beliefs which go with the sheltered life, and the beginning of womanhood, of self-reliance and of the hardiness--so near akin to hardness--the hardiness that must come into the character before a man or a woman is fit to give and take in the combat of life.

The bed was coarse, but white and clean. She fell asleep instantly and did not awaken until, after the vague, gradually louder sound of hammering on the door, she heard a female voice warning her that breakfast was "put nigh over an' done." She got up, partly drew on one stocking, then without taking it off tumbled over against the pillow and was asleep. When she came to herself again, the lay of the shadows told her it must be after twelve o'clock. She dressed, packed her serge suit in the bag with the sailor hat, smoothed out the pink calico slip and put it on. For more than a year she had worn her hair in a braid doubled upon itself and tied with a bow at the back of her neck. She decided that if she would part it, plait it in two braids and bring them round her head, she would look older. She tried this and was much pleased with the result. She thought the new style not only more grown-up, but also more becoming. The pink slip, too, seemed to her a success. It came almost to her ankles and its strings enabled her to make it look something like a dress. Carrying the pink sunbonnet, down she went in search of something to eat.

The hall was full of smoke and its air seemed greasy with the odor of frying. She found that dinner was about to be served. A girl in blue calico skirt and food-smeared, sweat-discolored blue jersey ushered her to one of the tables in the dining-room. "There's a gentleman comin'," said she. "I'll set him down with you. He won't bite, I don't reckon, and there ain't no use mussin' up two tables."

There was no protesting against two such arguments; so Susan presently had opposite her a fattish man with long oily hair and a face like that of a fallen and dissipated preacher. She recognized him at once as one of those wanderers who visit small towns with cheap shows or selling patent medicines and doing juggling tricks on the street corners in the flare of a gasoline lamp. She eyed him furtively until he caught her at it--he being about the same business himself. Thereafter she kept her eyes steadily upon the tablecloth, patched and worn thin with much washing. Soon the plate of each was encircled by the familiar arc of side dishes containing assorted and not very appetizing messes--fried steak, watery peas, stringy beans, soggy turnips, lumpy mashed potatoes, a perilous-looking chicken stew, cornbread with streaks of baking soda in it. But neither of the diners was critical, and the dinner was eaten with an enthusiasm which the best rarely inspires.

With the prunes and dried-apple pie, the stranger expanded. "Warm day, miss," he ventured.

"Yes, it is a little warm," said Susan. She ventured a direct look at him. Above the pleasant, kindly eyes there was a brow so unusually well shaped that it arrested even her young and untrained attention. Whatever the man's character or station, there could be no question as to his intelligence.

"The flies are very bothersome," continued he. "But nothing like Australia. There the flies have to be picked off, and they're big, and they bite--take a piece right out of you. The natives used to laugh at us when we were in the ring and would try to brush, em away." The stranger had the pleasant, easy manner of one who through custom of all kinds of people and all varieties of fortune, has learned to be patient and good-humored--to take the day and the hour as the seasoned gambler takes the cards that are dealt him.

Susan said nothing; but she had listened politely. The man went on amusing himself with his own conversation. "I was in the show business then. Clown was my line, but I was rotten at it--simply rotten. I'm still in the show business--different line, though. I've got a show of my own. If you're going to be in town perhaps you'll come to see us tonight. Our boat's anchored down next to the wharf. You can see it from the windows. Come, and bring your folks."

"Thank you," said Susan--she had for gotten her role and its accent. "But I'm afraid we'll not be here."

There was an expression in the stranger's face--a puzzled, curious expression, not impertinent, rather covert--an expression that made her uneasy. It warned her that this man saw she was not what she seemed to be, that he was trying to peer into her secret. His brown eyes were kind enough, but alarmingly keen. With only half her pie eaten, she excused herself and hastened to her room.

At the threshold she remembered the pocketbook Spenser had given her. She had left it by the fishing bag on the table. There was the bag but not the pocketbook. "I must have put it in the bag," she said aloud, and the sound and the tone of her voice frightened her. She searched the bag, then the room which had not yet been straightened up. She shook out the bed covers, looked in all the drawers, under the bed, went over the contents of the bag again. The pocketbook was gone--stolen.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap, and stared at the place where she had last seen the pocketbook--his pocketbook, which he had asked her to take care of. How could she face him! What would he think of her, so untrustworthy! What a return for his kindness! She felt weak--so weak that she lay down. The food she had taken turned to poison and her head ached fiercely. What could she do? To speak to the proprietor would be to cause a great commotion, to attract attention to herself--and how would that help to bring back the stolen pocketbook, taken perhaps by the proprietor himself? She recalled that as she hurried through the office from the dining-room he had a queer shifting expression, gave her a wheedling, cringing good morning not at all in keeping with the character he had shown the night before. The slovenly girl came to do the room; Susan sent her away, sat by the window gazing out over the river and downstream. He would soon be here; the thought made her long to fly and hide. He had been all generosity; and this was her way of appreciating it!

They sent for her to come down to supper. She refused, saying she was not feeling well. She searched the room, the bag, again and again. She would rest a few minutes, then up she would spring and tear everything out. Then back to the window to sit and stare at the river over which the evening shadows were beginning to gather. Once, as she was sitting there, she happened to see the gaudily painted and decorated show boat. A man--the stranger of the dinner table--was standing on the forward end, smoking a cigar. She saw that he was observing her, realized he could have seen her stirring feverishly about her room. A woman came out of the cabin and joined him. As soon as his attention was distracted she closed her shutters. And there she sat alone, with the hours dragging their wretched minutes slowly away.

That was one of those nights upon which anyone who has had them--and who has not?--looks back with wonder at how they ever lived, how they ever came to an end. She slept a little toward dawn--for youth and health will not let the most despairing heart suffer in sleeplessness. Her headache went, but the misery of soul which had been a maddening pain settled down into a throbbing ache. She feared he would come; she feared he would not come. The servants tried to persuade her to take breakfast. She could not have swallowed food; she would not have dared take food for which she could not pay. What would they do with her if he did not come? She searched the room again, hoping against hope, a hundred times fancying she felt the purse under some other things, each time suffering sickening disappointment.

Toward noon the servant came knocking. "A letter for you, ma'am."

Susan rushed to the door, seized the letter, tore it open, read:

When I got back to the horse and started to mount, he kicked me and broke my leg. You can go on south to the L. and N. and take a train to Cincinnati. When you find a boarding house send your address to me at the office. I'll come in a few weeks. I'd write more but I can't. Don't worry. Everything'll come out right. You are brave and sensible, and I back you to win.

With the unsigned letter crumpled in her hands she sat at the window with scarcely a motion until noon. She then went down to the show boat. Several people--men and women--were on the forward end, quarreling. She looked only at her acquaintance. His face was swollen and his eyes bloodshot, but he still wore the air of easy and patient good-humor. She said, standing on the shore, "Could I speak to you a minute?"

"Certainly, ma'am," replies he, lifting his dingy straw hat with gaudy, stained band. He came down the broad plank to the shore. "Why, what's the matter?" This in a sympathetic tone.

"Will you lend me two dollars and take me along to work it out?" she asked.

He eyed her keenly. "For the hotel bill?" he inquired, the cigar tucked away in the corner of his mouth.

She nodded.

"He didn't show up?"

"He broke his leg."

"Oh!" The tone was politely sympathetic, but incredulous. He eyed her critically, thoughtfully. "Can you sing?" he finally asked.

"A little."

His hands were deep in the pockets of his baggy light trousers. He drew one of them out with a two-dollar bill in it. "Go and pay him and bring your things. We're about to push off."

"Thank you," said the girl in the same stolid way. She returned to the hotel, brought the bag down from her room, stood at the office desk.

The servant came. "Mr. Gumpus has jes' stepped out," said she.

"Here is the money for my room." And Susan laid the two-dollar bill on the register.

"Ain't you goin' to wait fur yer--yer brother?"

"He's not coming," replied the girl. "So--I'll go. Good-by."

"Good-by. It's awful, bein' took sick away from home."

"Thank you," said Susan. "Good-by."

The girl's homely, ignorant face twisted in a grin. But Susan did not see, would have been indifferent had she seen. Since she accepted the war earth and heaven had declared against her, she had ceased from the little thought she had once given to what was thought of her by those of whom she thought not at all. She went down to the show boat. The plank had been taken in. Her acquaintance was waiting for her, helped her to the deck, jumped aboard himself, and was instantly busy helping to guide the boat out into mid-stream. Susan looked back at the hotel. Mr. Gumpus was in the doorway, amusement in every line of his ugly face. Beside him stood the slovenly servant. She was crying--the more human second thought of a heart not altogether corrupted by the sordid hardness of her lot. How can faith in the human race falter when one considers how much heart it has in spite of all it suffers in the struggle upward through the dense fogs of ignorance upward, toward the truth, toward the light of which it never ceases to dream and to hope?

Susan stood in the same place, with her bag beside her, until her acquaintance came.

"Now," said he, comfortably, as he lighted a fresh cigar, "we'll float pleasantly along. I guess you and I had better get acquainted. What is your name?"

Susan flushed. "Kate Peters is the name I gave at the hotel. That'll do, won't it?"

"Never in the world!" replied he. "You must have a good catchy name. Say--er--er----" He rolled his cigar slowly, looking thoughtfully toward the willows thick and green along the Indiana shore. "Say--well, say--Lorna--Lorna--Lorna Sackville! That's a winner. Lorna Sackville!--A stroke of genius! Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Susan. "It doesn't matter."

"But it does," remonstrated he. "You are an artist, now, and an artist's name should always arouse pleasing and romantic anticipations. It's like the odor that heralds the dish. You must remember, my dear, that you have stepped out of the world of dull reality into the world of ideals, of dreams."

The sound of two harsh voices, one male, the other female, came from within the cabin--oaths, reproaches. Her acquaintance laughed. "That's one on me--eh? Still, what I say is true--or at least ought to be. By the way, this is the Burlingham Floating Palace of Thespians, floating temple to the histrionic art. I am Burlingham--Robert Burlingham." He smiled, extended his hand. "Glad to meet you, Miss Lorna Sackville--don't forget!"

She could not but reflect a smile so genuine, so good-humored.

"We'll go in and meet the others--your fellow stars--for this is an all-star aggregation."

Over the broad entrance to the cabin was a chintz curtain strung upon a wire. Burlingham drew this aside. Susan was looking into a room about thirty feet long, about twelve feet wide, and a scant six feet high. Across it with an aisle between were narrow wooden benches with backs. At the opposite end was a stage, with the curtain up and a portable stove occupying the center. At the stove a woman in a chemise and underskirt, with slippers on her bare feet, was toiling over several pots and pans with fork and spoon. At the edge of the stage, with legs swinging, sat another woman, in a blue sailor suit neither fresh nor notably clean but somehow coquettish. Two men in flannel shirts were seated, one on each of the front benches, with their backs to her.

As Burlingham went down the aisle ahead of her, he called out: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to present the latest valuable addition to our company--Miss Lorna Sackville, the renowned ballad singer."

The two men turned lazily and stared at Susan, each with an arm hanging over the back of the bench.

Burlingham looked at the woman bent over the stove--a fat, middle-aged woman with thin, taffy-yellow hair done sleekly over a big rat in front and made into a huge coil behind with the aid of one or more false braids. She had a fat face, a broad expanse of unpleasant-looking, elderly bosom, big, shapeless white arms. Her contour was almost gone. Her teeth were a curious mixture of natural, gold, and porcelain. "Miss Anstruther--Miss Sackville," called Burlingham. "Miss Sackville, Miss Violet Anstruther."

Miss Anstruther and Susan exchanged bows--Susan's timid and frightened, Miss Anstruther's accompanied by a hostile stare and a hardening of the fat, decaying face.

"Miss Connemora--Miss Sackville." Burlingham was looking at the younger woman--she who sat on the edge of the little stage. She, too, was a blond, but her hair had taken to the chemical somewhat less reluctantly than had Miss Anstruther's, with the result that Miss Connemora's looked golden. Her face--of the baby type must have been softly pretty at one time--not so very distant. Now lines were coming and the hard look that is inevitable with dyed hair. Also her once fine teeth were rapidly going off, as half a dozen gold fillings in front proclaimed. At Susan's appealing look and smile Miss Connemora nodded not unfriendly.

"Good God, Bob," said she to Burlingham with a laugh, "are you going to get the bunch of us pinched for child-stealing?"

Burlingham started to laugh, suddenly checked himself, looked uneasily and keenly at Susan. "Oh, it's all right," he said with a wave of the hand. But his tone belied his words. He puffed twice at his cigar, then introduced the men--Elbert Eshwell and Gregory Tempest--two of the kind clearly if inelegantly placed by the phrase, "greasy hamfats." Mr. Eshwell's black-dyed hair was smoothly brushed down from a central part, Mr. Tempest's iron-gray hair was greasily wild--a disarray of romantic ringlets. Eshwell was inclined to fat; Tempest was gaunt and had the hollow, burning eye that bespeaks the sentimental ass.

"Now, Miss Sackville," said Burlingham, "we'll go on the forward deck and canvass the situation. What for dinner, Vi?"

"Same old rot," retorted Miss Anstruther, wiping the sweat from her face and shoulders with a towel that served also as a dishcloth. "Pork and beans--potatoes--peach pie."

"Cheer up," said Burlingham. "After tomorrow we'll do better."

"That's been the cry ever since we started," snapped Violet.

"For God's sake, shut up, Vi," groaned Eshwell. "You're always kicking."

The cabin was not quite the full width of the broad house boat. Along the outside, between each wall and the edge, there was room for one person to pass from forward deck to rear. From the cabin roof, over the rear deck, into the water extended a big rudder oar. When Susan, following Burlingham, reached the rear deck, she saw the man at this oar--a fat, amiable-looking rascal, in linsey woolsey and a blue checked shirt open over his chest and revealing a mat of curly gray hair. Burlingham hailed him as Pat--his only known name. But Susan had only a glance for him and no ear at all for the chaffing between him and the actor-manager. She was gazing at the Indiana shore, at a tiny village snuggled among trees and ripened fields close to the water's edge. She knew it was Brooksburg. She remembered the long covered bridge which they had crossed--Spenser and she, on the horse. To the north of the town, on a knoll, stood a large red brick house trimmed with white veranda and balconies--far and away the most pretentious house in the landscape. Before the door was a horse and buggy. She could make out that there were several people on the front veranda, one of them a man in black--the doctor, no doubt. Sobs choked up into her throat. She turned quickly away that Burlingham might not see. And under her breath she said,

"Good-by, dear. Forgive me--forgive me."

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Chapter XIII

WOMAN'S worktable, a rocking chair and another with a swayback that made it fairly comfortable for lounging gave the rear deck the air of an outdoor sitting-room, which indeed it was. Burlingham, after a comprehensive glance at the panorama of summer and fruitfulness through which they were drifting, sprawled himself in the swayback chair, indicating to Susan that she was to face him in the rocker. "Sit down, my dear," said he. "And tell me you are at least eighteen and are not running away from home. You heard what Miss Connemora said."

"I'm not running away from home," replied Susan, blushing violently because she was evading as to the more important fact.

"I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to know," pursued Burlingham, alarmed by the evidences of a dangerous tendency to candor. "I've no desire to have my own past dug into, and turn about's fair play. You came to me to get an engagement. I took you. Understand?"

Susan nodded.

"You said you could sing--that is, a little."

"A very little," said the girl.

"Enough, no doubt. That has been our weak point--lack of a ballad singer. Know any ballads?--Not fancy ones. Nothing fancy! We cater to the plain people, and the plain people only like the best--that is, the simplest--the things that reach for the heartstrings with ten strong fingers. You don't happen to know 'I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight'?"

"No--Ruth sings that," replied Susan, and colored violently.

Burlingham ignored the slip. "'Blue Alsatian Mountains'?"

"Yes. But that's very old."

"Exactly. Nothing is of any use to the stage until it's very old. Audiences at theaters don't want to hear anything they don't already know by heart. They've come to see, not to hear. So it annoys them to have to try to hear. Do you understand that?"

"No," confessed Susan. "I'm sorry. But I'll think about it, and try to understand it." She thought she was showing her inability to do what was expected of her in paying back the two dollars.

"Don't bother," said Burlingham. "Pat!"

"Yes, boss," said the man at the oar, without looking or removing his pipe.

"Get your fiddle."

Pat tied the oar fast and went forward along the roof of the cabin. While he was gone Burlingham explained, "A frightful souse, Pat--almost equal to Eshwell and far the superior of Tempest or Vi--that is, of Tempest. But he's steady enough for our purposes, as a rule. He's the pilot, the orchestra, the man-of-all-work, the bill distributor. Oh, he's a wonder. Graduate of Trinity College, Dublin--yeggman--panhandler--barrel-house bum--genius, nearly. Has drunk as much booze as there is water in this river----"

Pat was back beside the handle of the oar, with a violin. Burlingham suggested to Susan that she'd better stand while she sang, "and if you've any tendency to stage fright, remember it's your bread and butter to get through well. You'll not bother about your audience."

Susan found this thought a potent strengthener--then and afterward. With surprisingly little embarrassment she stood before her good-natured, sympathetic employer, and while Pat scraped out an accompaniment sang the pathetic story of the "maiden young and fair" and the "stranger in the spring" who "lingered near the fountains just to hear the maiden sing," and how he departed after winning her love, and how "she will never see the stranger where the fountains fall again--adé, adé, adé." Her voice was deliciously young and had the pathetic quality that is never absent from anything which has enduring charm for us. Tears were in Burlingham's voice--tears for the fate of the maiden, tears of response to the haunting pathos of Susan's sweet contralto, tears of joy at the acquisition of such a "number" for his program. As her voice died away he beat his plump hands together enthusiastically.

"She'll do--eh, Pat? She'll set the hay-tossers crazy!"

Susan's heart was beating fast from nervousness. She sat down. Burlingham sprang up and put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her. He laughed at her shrinking.

"Don't mind, my dear," he cried. "It's one of our ways. Now, what others do you know?"

She tried to recall, and with his assistance finally did discover that she possessed a repertoire of "good old stale ones," consisting of "Coming Thro' the Rye," "Suwanee River," "Annie Laurie" and "Kathleen Mavourneen." She knew many other songs, but either Pat could not play them or Burlingham declared them "above the head of Reub the rotter."

"Those five are quite enough," said Burlingham. "Two regulars, two encores, with a third in case of emergency. After dinner Miss Anstruther and I'll fit you out with a costume. You'll make a hit at Sutherland tonight."

"Sutherland!" exclaimed Susan, suddenly pale. "I can't sing there--really, I can't."

Burlingham made a significant gesture toward Pat at the oar above them, and winked at her. "You'll not have stage fright, my dear. You'll pull through."

Susan understood that nothing more was to be said before Pat. Soon Burlingham told him to tie the oar again and retire to the cabin. "I'll stand watch," said he. "I want to talk business with Miss Sackville."

When Pat had gone, Burlingham gave her a sympathetic look. "No confidences, mind you, my dear," he warned. "All I want to know is that it isn't stage fright that's keeping you off the program at Sutherland."

"No," replied the girl. "It isn't stage fright. I'm--I'm sorry I can't begin right away to earn the money to pay you back. But--I can't."

"Not even in a velvet and spangle costume--Low neck, short sleeves, with blond wig and paint and powder? You'll not know yourself, my dear--really."

"I couldn't," said Susan. "I'd not be able to open my lips."

"Very well. That's settled." It was evident that Burlingham was deeply disappointed. "We were going to try to make a killing at Sutherland." He sighed. "However, let that pass. If you can't, you can't."

"I'm afraid you're angry with me," cried she.

"I--angry!" He laughed. "I've not been angry in ten years. I'm such a damn, damn fool that with all the knocks life's given me I haven't learned much. But at least I've learned not to get angry. No, I understand, my dear--and will save you for the next town below." He leaned forward and gave her hands a fatherly pat as they lay in her lap. "Don't give it a second thought," he said. "We've got the whole length of the river before us."

Susan showed her gratitude in her face better far than she could have expressed it in words. The two sat silent. When she saw his eyes upon her with that look of smiling wonder in them, she said, "You mustn't think I've done anything dreadful. I haven't--really, I haven't."

He laughed heartily. "And if you had, you'd not need to hang your head in this company, my dear. We're all people who have lived--and life isn't exactly a class meeting with the elders taking turns at praying and the organ wheezing out gospel hymns. No, we've all been up against it most of our lives--which means we've done the best we could oftener than we've had the chance to do what we ought." He gave her one of his keen looks, nodded: "I like you. . . . What do they tell oftenest when they're talking about how you were as a baby?"

Susan did not puzzle over the queerness of this abrupt question. She fell to searching her memory diligently for an answer. "I'm not sure, but I think they speak oftenest of how I never used to like anybody to take my hand and help me along, even when I was barely able to walk. They say I always insisted on trudging along by myself."

Burlingham nodded, slapped his knee. "I can believe it," he cried. "I always ask everybody that question to see whether I've sited 'em up right. I rather think I hit you off to a T--as you faced me at dinner yesterday in the hotel. Speaking of dinner--let's go sit in on the one I smell."

They returned to the cabin where, to make a table, a board had been swung between the backs of the second and third benches from the front on the left side of the aisle. Thus the three men sat on the front bench with their legs thrust through between seat and back, while the three women sat in dignity and comfort on the fourth bench. Susan thought the dinner by no means justified Miss Anstruther's pessimism. It was good in itself, and the better for being in this happy-go-lucky way, in this happy-go-lucky company. Once they got started, all the grouchiness disappeared. Susan, young and optimistic and determined to be pleased, soon became accustomed to the looks of her new companions--that matter of mere exterior about which we shallow surface-skimmers make such a mighty fuss, though in the test situations of life, great and small, it amounts to precious little. They were all human beings, and the girl was unspoiled, did not think of them as failures, half-wolves, of no social position, of no standing in the respectable world. She still had much of the natural democracy of children, and she admired these new friends who knew so much more than she did, who had lived, had suffered, had come away from horrible battles covered with wounds, the scars of which they would bear into the grave--battles they had lost; yet they had not given up, but had lived on, smiling, courageous, kind of heart. It was their kind hearts that most impressed her--their kind taking in of her whom those she loved had cast out--her, the unknown stranger, helpless and ignorant. And what Spenser had told her about the stage and its people made her almost believe that they would not cast her out, though they knew the dreadful truth about her birth.

Tempest told a story that was "broad." While the others laughed, Susan gazed at him with a puzzled expression. She wished to be polite, to please, to enjoy. But what that story meant she could not fathom. Miss Anstruther jeered at her. "Look at the innocent," she cried.

"Shut up, Vi," retorted Miss Connemora. "It's no use for us to try to be anything but what we are. Still, let the baby alone."

"Yes--let her alone," said Burlingham.

"It'll soak in soon enough," Miss Connemora went on. "No use rubbing it in."

"What?" said Susan, thinking to show her desire to be friendly, to be one of them.

"Dirt," said Burlingham dryly. "And don't ask any more questions."

When the three women had cleared away the dinner and had stowed the dishes in one of the many cubbyholes along the sides of the cabin, the three men got ready for a nap. Susan was delighted to see them drop to the tops of the backs of the seats three berths which fitted snugly into the walls when not in use. She saw now that there were five others of the same kind, and that there was a contrivance of wires and curtains by which each berth could be shut off to itself. She had a thrilling sense of being in a kind of Swiss Family Robinson storybook come to life. She unpacked her bag, contributed the food in it to the common store, spread out her serge suit which Miss Anstruther offered to press and insisted on pressing, though Susan protested she could do it herself quite well.

"You'll want to put it on for the arrival at Sutherland," said Mabel Connemora.

"No," replied Susan nervously. "Not till tomorrow."

She saw the curious look in all their eyes at sight of that dress, so different from the calico she was wearing. Mabel took her out on the forward deck where there was an awning and a good breeze. They sat there, Mabel talking, Susan gazing rapt at land and water and at the actress, and listening as to a fairy story--for the actress had lived through many and strange experiences in the ten years since she left her father's roof in Columbia, South Carolina. Susan listened and absorbed as a dry sponge dropped into a pail of water. At her leisure she would think it all out, would understand, would learn.

"Now, tell me about _your_self," said Mabel when she had exhausted all the reminiscences she could recall at the moment--all that were fit for a "baby's" ears.

"I will, some time," said Susan, who was ready for the question. "But I can't--not yet."

"It seems to me you're very innocent," said Mabel, "even for a well-brought-up girl. I was well brought up, too. I wish to God my mother had told me a few things. But no--not a thing."

"What do you mean?" inquired Susan.

That set the actress to probing the girl's innocence--what she knew and what she did not. It had been many a day since Miss Connemora had had so much pleasure. "Well!" she finally said. "I never would have believed it--though I know these things are so. Now I'm going to teach you. Innocence may be a good thing for respectable women who are going to marry and settle down with a good husband to look after them. But it won't do at all--not at all, my dear!--for a woman who works--who has to meet men in their own world and on their own terms. It's hard enough to get along, if you know. If you don't--when you're knocked down, you stay knocked down."

"Yes--I want to learn," said Susan eagerly. "I want to know--everything!"

"You're not going back?" Mabel pointed toward the shore, to a home on a hillside, with a woman sewing on the front steps and children racing about the yard. "Back to that sort of thing?"

"No," replied Susan. "I've got nothing to go back to."

"Nonsense!"

"Nothing," repeated Susan in the same simple, final way. "I'm an outcast."

The ready tears sprang to Mabel's dissipated but still bright eyes. Susan's unconscious pathos was so touching. "Then I'll educate you. Now don't get horrified or scandalized at me. When you feel that way, remember that Mabel Connemora didn't make the world, but God. At least, so they say--though personally I feel as if the devil had charge of things, and the only god was in us poor human creatures fighting to be decent. I tell you, men and women ain't bad--not so damn bad--excuse me; they will slip out. No, it's the things that happen to them or what they're afraid'll happen--it's those things that compel them to be bad--and get them in the way of being bad--hard to each other, and to hate and to lie and to do all sorts of things."

The show boat drifted placidly down with the current of the broad Ohio. Now it moved toward the left bank and now toward the right, as the current was deflected by the bends--the beautiful curves that divided the river into a series of lovely, lake-like reaches, each with its emerald oval of hills and rolling valleys where harvests were ripening. And in the shadow of the awning Susan heard from those pretty, coarse lips, in language softened indeed but still far from refined, about all there is to know concerning the causes and consequences of the eternal struggle that rages round sex. To make her tale vivid, Mabel illustrated it by the story of her own life from girlhood to the present hour. And she omitted no detail necessary to enforce the lesson in life. A few days before Susan would not have believed, would not have understood. Now she both believed and understood. And nothing that Mabel told her--not the worst of the possibilities in the world in which she was adventuring--burned deep enough to penetrate beyond the wound she had already received and to give her a fresh sensation of pain and horror.

"You don't seem to be horrified," said Mabel.

Susan shook her head. "No," she said. "I feel--somehow I feel better."

Mabel eyed her curiously--had a sense of a mystery of suffering which she dared not try to explore. She said: "Better? That's queer. You don't take it at all as I thought you would."

Said Susan: "I had about made up my mind it was all bad. I see that maybe it isn't."

"Oh, the world isn't such a bad place--in lots of ways. You'll get a heap of fun out of it if you don't take things or yourself seriously. I wish to God I'd had somebody to tell me, instead of having to spell it out, a letter at a time. I've got just two pieces of advice to give you." And she stopped speaking and gazed away toward the shore with a look that seemed to be piercing the hills.

"Please do," urged Susan, when Mabel's long mood of abstraction tried her patience.

"Oh--yes--two pieces of advice. The first is, don't drink. There's nothing to it--and it'll play hell--excuse me--it'll spoil your looks and your health and give you a woozy head when you most need a steady one. Don't drink--that's the first advice."

"I won't," said Susan.

"Oh, yes, you will. But remember my advice all the same. The second is, don't sell your body to get a living, unless you've got to."

"I couldn't do that," said the girl.

Mabel laughed queerly. "Oh, yes, you could--and will. But remember my advice. Don't sell your body because it seems to be the easy way to make a living. I know most women get their living that way."

"Oh--no--no, indeed!" protested Susan.

"What a child you are!" laughed Mabel. "What's marriage but that?. . . Believe your Aunt Betsy, it's the poorest way to make a living that ever was invented--marriage or the other thing. Sometimes you'll be tempted to. You're pretty, and you'll find yourself up against it with no way out. You'll have to give in for a time, no doubt. The men run things in this world, and they'll compel it--one way or another. But fight back to your feet again. If I'd taken my own advice, my name would be on every dead wall in New York in letters two feet high. Instead----" She laughed, without much bitterness. "And why? All because I never learned to stand alone. I've even supported men--to have something to lean on! How's that for a poor fool?"

There Violet Anstruther called her. She rose. "You won't take my advice," she said by way of conclusion. "Nobody'll take advice. Nobody can. We ain't made that way. But don't forget what I've said. And when you've wobbled way off maybe it'll give you something to steer back by."

Susan sat on there, deep in the deepest of those brown studies that had been characteristic of her from early childhood. Often--perhaps most often--abstraction means only mental fogginess. But Susan happened to be of those who can concentrate--can think things out. And that afternoon, oblivious of the beauty around her, even unconscious of where she was, she studied the world of reality--that world whose existence, even the part of it lying within ourselves, we all try to ignore or to evade or to deny, and get soundly punished for our folly. Taking advantage of the floods of light Mabel Connemora had let in upon her--full light where there had been a dimness that was equal to darkness--she drew from the closets of memory and examined all the incidents of her life--all that were typical or for other reasons important. One who comes for the first time into new surroundings sees more, learns more about them in a brief period than has been seen and known by those who have lived there always. After a few hours of recalling and reconstructing Susan Lenox understood Sutherland probably better than she would have understood it had she lived a long eventless life there. And is not every Sutherland the world in miniature?

She also understood her own position--why the world of respectability had cast her out as soon as she emerged from childhood--why she could not have hoped for the lot to which other girls looked forward--why she belonged with the outcasts, in a world apart--and must live her life there. She felt that she could not hope to be respected, loved, married. She must work out her destiny along other lines. She understood it all, more clearly than would have been expected of her. And it is important to note that she faced her future without repining or self-pity, without either joy or despondency. She would go on; she would do as best she could. And nothing that might befall could equal what she had suffered in the throes of the casting out.

Burlingham roused her from her long reverie. He evidently had come straight from his nap--stocking feet, shirt open at the collar, trousers sagging and face shiny with the sweat that accumulates during sleep on a hot day. "Round that bend ahead of us is Sutherland," said he, pointing forward.

Up she started in alarm.

"Now, don't get fractious," cried he cheerfully. "We'll not touch shore for an hour, at least. And nobody's allowed aboard. You can keep to the cabin. I'll see that you're not bothered."

"And--this evening?"

"You can keep to the dressing-room until the show's over and the people've gone ashore. And tomorrow morning, bright and early, we'll be off. I promised Pat a day for a drunk at Sutherland. He'll have to postpone it. I'll give him three at Jeffersonville, instead."

Susan put on her sunbonnet as soon as the show boat rounded the bend above town. Thus she felt safe in staying on deck and watching the town drift by. She did not begin to think of going into the cabin until Pat was working the boat in toward the landing a square above the old familiar wharf-boat. "What day is this?" she asked Eshwell.

"Saturday."

Only Saturday! And last Monday--less than five days ago--she had left this town for her Cincinnati adventure. She felt as if months, years, had passed. The town seemed strange to her, and she recalled the landmarks as if she were revisiting in age the scenes of youth. How small the town seemed, after Cincinnati! And how squat! Then----

She saw the cupola of the schoolhouse. Its rooms, the playgrounds flashed before her mind's eye--the teachers she had liked--those she had feared--the face of her uncle, so kind and loving--that same face, with hate and contempt in it----

She hurried into the cabin, tears blinding her eyes, her throat choked with sobs.

The Burlingham Floating Palace of Thespians tied up against the float of Bill Phibbs's boathouse--a privilege for which Burlingham had to pay two dollars. Pat went ashore with a sack of handbills to litter through the town. Burlingham followed, to visit the offices of the two evening newspapers and by "handing them out a line of smooth talk"--the one art whereof he was master--to get free advertising. Also there were groceries to buy and odds and ends of elastic, fancy crêpe, paper muslin and the like for repairing the shabby costumes. The others remained on board, Eshwell and Tempest to guard the boat against the swarms of boys darting and swooping and chattering like a huge flock of impudent English sparrows. An additional--and the chief--reason for Burlingham's keeping the two actors close was that Eshwell was a drunkard and Tempest a gambler. Neither could be trusted where there was the least temptation. Each despised the other's vice and despised the other for being slave to it. Burlingham could trust Eshwell to watch Tempest, could trust Tempest to watch Eshwell.

Susan helped Mabel with the small and early supper--cold chicken and ham, fried potatoes and coffee. Afterward all dressed in the cabin. Some of the curtains for dividing off the berths were drawn, out of respect to Susan not yet broken to the ways of a mode of life which made privacy and personal modesty impossible--and when any human custom becomes impossible, it does not take human beings long to discover that it is also foolish and useless. The women had to provide for a change of costumes. As the dressing-room behind the stage was only a narrow space between the back drop and the forward wall of the cabin, dressing in it was impossible, so Mabel and Vi put on a costume of tights, and over it a dress. Susan was invited to remain and help. The making-up of the faces interested her; she was amazed by the transformation of Mabel into youthful loveliness, with a dairy maid's bloom in place of her pallid pastiness. On the other hand, make-up seemed to bring out the horrors of Miss Anstruther's big, fat, yet hollow face, and to create other and worse horrors--as if in covering her face it somehow uncovered her soul. When the two women stripped and got into their tights, Susan with polite modesty turned away. However, catching sight of Miss Anstruther in the mirror that had been hung up under one of the side lamps, she was so fascinated that she gazed furtively at her by that indirect way.

Violet happened to see, laughed. "Look at the baby's shocked face, Mabel," she cried.

But she was mistaken. It was sheer horror that held Susan's gaze upon Violet's incredible hips and thighs, violently obtruded by the close-reefed corset. Mabel had a slender figure, the waist too short and the legs too nearly of the same girth from hip to ankle, but for all that, attractive. Susan had never before seen a woman in tights without any sort of skirt.

"You would show up well in those things," Violet said to her, "that is, for a thin woman. The men don't care much for thinness."

"Not the clodhoppers and roustabouts that come to see us," retorted Mabel. "The more a woman looks like a cow or a sow, the better they like it. They don't believe it's female unless it looks like what they're used to in the barnyard and the cattle pen."

Miss Anstruther was not in the least offended. She paraded, jauntily switching her great hips and laughing. "Jealous!" she teased. "You poor little broomstick."

Burlingham was in a white flannel suit that looked well enough in those dim lights. The make-up gave him an air of rakish youth. Eshwell had got himself into an ordinary sack suit. Tempest was in the tattered and dirty finery of a seventeenth-century courtier. The paint and black made Eshwell's face fat and comic; it gave Tempest distinction, made his hollow blazing eyes brilliant and large. All traces of habitation were effaced from the "auditorium"; the lamps were lighted, a ticket box was set up on the rear deck and an iron bar was thrown half across the rear entrance to the cabin, that only one person at a time might be able to pass. The curtain was let down--a gaudy smear of a garden scene in a French palace in the eighteenth century. Pat, the orchestra, put on a dress coat and vest and a "dickey"; the coat had white celluloid cuffs pinned in the sleeves at the wrists.

As it was still fully an hour and a half from dark, Susan hid on the stage; when it should be time for the curtain to go up she would retreat to the dressing-room. Through a peephole in the curtain she admired the auditorium; and it did look surprisingly well by lamplight, with the smutches and faded spots on its bright paint softened or concealed. "How many will it hold?" she asked Mabel, who was walking up and down, carrying her long train.

"A hundred and twenty comfortably," replied Miss Connemora. "A hundred and fifty crowded. It has held as high as thirty dollars, but we'll be lucky if we get fifteen tonight."

Susan glanced round at her. She was smoking a cigarette, handling it like a man. Susan's expression was so curious that Mabel laughed. Susan, distressed, cried: "I'm sorry if--if I was impolite."

"Oh, you couldn't be impolite," said Mabel. "You've got that to learn, too--and mighty important it is. We all smoke. Why not? We got out of cigarettes, but Bob bought a stock this afternoon."

Susan turned to the peephole. Pat, ready to take tickets, was "barking" vigorously in the direction of shore, addressing a crowd which Susan of course could not see. Whenever he paused for breath, Burlingham leaned from the box and took it up, pouring out a stream of eulogies of his show in that easy, lightly cynical voice of his. And the audience straggled in--young fellows and their girls, roughs from along the river front, farmers in town for a day's sport. Susan did not see a single familiar face, and she had supposed she knew, by sight at least, everyone in Sutherland. From fear lest she should see someone she knew, her mind changed to longing. At last she was rewarded. Down the aisle swaggered Redney King, son of the washerwoman, a big hulking bully who used to tease her by pulling her hair during recess and by kicking at her shins when they happened to be next each other in the class standing in long line against the wall of the schoolroom for recitation. From her security she smiled at Redney as representative of all she loved in the old town.

And now the four members of the company on the stage and in the dressing-room lost their ease and contemptuous indifference. They had been talking sneeringly about "yokels" and "jays" and "slum bums." They dropped all that, as there spread over them the mysterious spell of the crowd. As individuals the provincials in those seats were ridiculous; as a mass they were an audience, an object of fear and awe. Mabel was almost in tears; Violet talked rapidly, with excited gestures and nervous adjustments of various parts of her toilet. The two men paced about, Eshwell trembling, Tempest with sheer fright in his rolling eyes.

They wet their dry lips with dry tongues. Each again and again asked the other anxiously how he was looking and paced away without waiting for the answer. The suspense and nervous terror took hold of Susan; she stood in the corner of the dressing-room, pressing herself close against the wall, her fingers tightly interlocked and hot and cold tremors chasing up and down her body.

Burlingham left the box and combined Pat's duties with his own--a small matter, as the audience was seated and a guard at the door was necessary only to keep the loafers on shore from rushing in free. Pat advanced to the little space reserved before the stage, sat down and fell to tuning his violin with all the noise he could make, to create the illusion of a full orchestra. Miss Anstruther appeared in one of the forward side doors of the auditorium, very dignified in her black satin (paper muslin) dress, with many and sparkling hair and neck ornaments and rings that seemed alight. She bowed to the audience, pulled a little old cottage organ from under the stage and seated herself at it.

After the overture, a pause. Susan, peeping through a hole in the drop, saw the curtain go up, drew a long breath of terror as the audience was revealed beyond the row of footlights, beyond the big, befrizzled blond head of Violet and the drink-seared face of Pat. From the rear of the auditorium came Burlingham's smooth-flowing, faintly amused voice, announcing the beginning of the performance "a delightful feast throughout, ladies and gentlemen, amusing yet elevating, ever moral yet with none of the depressing sadness of puritanism. For, ladies and gentlemen, while we are pious, we are not puritan. The first number is a monologue, 'The Mad Prince,' by that eminent artist, Gregory Tempest. He has delivered it before vast audiences amid thunders of applause."

Susan thrilled as Tempest strode forth--Tempest transformed by the footlights and by her young imagination into a true king most wonderfully and romantically bereft of reason by the woes that had assailed him in horrid phalanxes. If anyone had pointed out to her that Tempest's awful voice was simply cheap ranting, or that her own woes had been as terrible as any that had ever visited a king, or that when people go mad it is never from grief but from insides unromantically addled by foolish eating and drinking--if anyone had attempted then and there to educate the girl, how angry it would have made her, how she would have hated that well-meaning person for spoiling her illusion!

The spell of the stage seized her with Tempest's first line, first elegant despairing gesture. It held her through Burlingham and Anstruther's "sketch" of a matrimonial quarrel, through Connemora and Eshwell's "delicious symphonic romanticism" of a lovers' quarrel and making up, through Tempest's recitation of "Lasca," dying to shield her cowboy lover from the hoofs of the stampeded herd. How the tears did stream from Susan's eyes, as Tempest wailed out those last lines:

But I wonder why I do not care for the things that are like the things that were?

Can it be that half my heart lies buried there, in Texas down by the Rio Grande?

She saw the little grave in the desert and the vast blue sky and the buzzard sailing lazily to and fro, and it seemed to her that Tempest himself had inspired such a love, had lost a sweetheart in just that way. No wonder he looked gaunt and hollow-eyed and sallow. The last part of the performance was Holy Land and comic pictures thrown from the rear on a sheet substituted for the drop. As Burlingham had to work the magic lantern from the dressing-room (while Tempest, in a kind of monk's robe, used his voice and elocutionary powers in describing the pictures, now lugubriously and now in "lighter vein"), Susan was forced to retreat to the forward deck and missed that part of the show. But she watched Burlingham shifting the slides and altering the forms of the lenses, and was in another way as much thrilled and spellbound as by the acting.

Nor did the spell vanish when, with the audience gone, they all sat down to a late supper, and made coarse jests and mocked at their own doings and at the people who had applauded. Susan did not hear. She felt proud that she was permitted in so distinguished a company. Every disagreeable impression vanished. How could she have thought these geniuses common and cheap! How had she dared apply to them the standards of the people, the dull, commonplace people, among whom she had been brought up! If she could only qualify for membership in this galaxy! The thought made her feel like a worm aspiring to be a star. Tempest, whom she had liked least, now filled her with admiration. She saw the tragedy of his life plain and sad upon his features. She could not look at him without her heart's contracting in an ache.

It was not long before Mr. Tempest, who believed himself a lady-killer, noted the ingenuous look in the young girl's face, and began to pose. And it was hardly three bites of a ham sandwich thereafter when Mabel Connemora noted Tempest's shootings of his cuffs and rumplings of his oily ringlets and rollings of his hollow eyes. And at the sight Miss Mabel's bright eyes became bad and her tongue shot satire at him. But Susan did not observe this.

After supper they went straightway to bed. Burlingham drew the curtains round the berth let down for Susan. The others indulged in no such prudery on so hot a night. They put out the lamps and got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways forward. To help on the circulation of air Pat raised the stage curtain and drop, and opened the little door forward. Each sleeper had a small netting suspended over him from the ceiling; without that netting the dense swarms of savage mosquitoes would have made sleep impossible. As it was, the loud singing of these baffled thousands kept Susan awake.

After a while, to calm her brain, excited by the evenings thronging impressions and by the new--or, rather, reviewed--ambitions born of them, Susan rose and went softly out on deck, in her nightgown of calico slip. Because of the breeze the mosquitoes did not trouble her there, and she stood a long time watching the town's few faint lights--watching the stars, the thronging stars of the Milky Way--dreaming--dreaming--dreaming. Yesterday had almost faded from her, for youth lives only in tomorrow--youth in tomorrow, age in yesterday, and none of us in today which is all we really have. And she, with her wonderful health of body meaning youth as long as it lasted, she would certainly be young until she was very old--would keep her youth--her dreams--her living always in tomorrow. She was dreaming of her first real tomorrow, now. She would work hard at this wonderful profession--her profession!--would be humble and attentive; and surely the day must come when she too would feel upon her heart the intoxicating beat of those magic waves of applause!

Susan, more excited than ever, slipped softly into the cabin and stole into her curtained berth. Like the soughing of the storm above the whimper of the tortured leaves the stentorian snorings of two of the sleepers resounded above the noise of the mosquitoes. She had hardly extended herself in her close little bed when she heard a stealthy step, saw one of her curtains drawn aside.

"Who is it?" she whispered, unsuspiciously, for she could see only a vague form darkening the space between the parted curtains.

The answer came in a hoarse undertone: "Ye dainty little darling!" She sat up, struck out madly, screamed at the top of her lungs. The curtains fell back into place, the snoring stopped. Susan, all in a sweat and a shiver, lay quiet. Hoarse whispering; then in Burlingham's voice stern and gruff--"Get back to your bed and let her alone, you rolling-eyed----" The sentence ended with as foul a spatter of filth as man can fling at man. Silence again, and after a few minutes the two snores resumed their bass accompaniment to the falsetto of the mosquito chorus.

Susan got a little troubled sleep, was wide awake when Violet came saying, "If you want to bathe, I'll bring you a bucket of water and you can put up your berth and do it behind your curtains."

Susan thanked her and got a most refreshing bath. When she looked out the men were on deck, Violet was getting breakfast, and Connemora was combing her short, thinning, yellow hair before a mirror hung up near one of the forward doors. In the mirror Connemora saw her, smiled and nodded.

"You can fix your hair here," said she. "I'm about done. You can use my brush."

And when Susan was busy at the mirror, Mabel lounged on a seat near by smoking a before-breakfast cigarette. "I wish to God I had your hair," said she. "I never did have such a wonderful crop of grass on the knoll, and the way it up and drops out in bunches every now and then sets me crazy. It won't be long before I'll be down to Vi's three hairs and a half. You haven't seen her without her wigs? Well, don't, if you happen to be feeling a bit off. How Burlingham can--" There she stopped, blew out a volume of smoke, grinned half amusedly, half in sympathy with the innocence she was protecting--or, rather, was initiating by cautious degrees. "Who was it raised the row last night?" she inquired.

"I don't know," said Susan, her face hid by the mass of wavy hair she was brushing forward from roots to ends.

"You don't? I guess you've got a kind of idea, though."

No answer from the girl.

"Well, it doesn't matter. It isn't your fault." Mabel smoked reflectively. "I'm not jealous of him--a woman never is. It's the idea of another woman's getting away with her property, whether she wants it or not--that's what sets her mad-spot to humming. No, I don't give a--a cigarette butt--for that greasy bum actor. But I've always got to have somebody." She laughed. "The idea of his thinking you'd have him! What peacocks men are!"

Susan understood. The fact of this sort of thing was no longer a mystery to her. But the why of the fact--that seemed more amazing than ever. Now that she had discovered that her notion of love being incorporeal was as fanciful as Santa Claus, she could not conceive why it should be at all. As she was bringing round the braids for the new coiffure she had adopted she said to Mabel:

"You--love him?"

"I?" Mabel laughed immoderately. "You can have him, if you want him."

Susan shuddered. "Oh, no," she said. "I suppose he's very nice--and really he's quite a wonderful actor. But I--I don't care for men."

Mabel laughed again--curt, bitter. "Wait," she said.

Susan shook her head, with youth's positiveness.

"What's caring got to do with it?" pursued Mabel, ignoring the headshake. "I've been about quite a bit, and I've yet to see anybody that really cared for anybody else. We care for ourselves. But a man needs a woman, and a woman needs a man. They call it loving. They might as well call eating loving. Ask Burly."

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Chapter XIV

AT breakfast Tempest was precisely as usual, and so were the others. Nor was there effort or any sort of pretense in this. We understand only that to which we are accustomed; the man of peace is amazed by the veteran's nonchalance in presence of danger and horror, of wound and death. To these river wanderers, veterans in the unconventional life, where the unusual is the usual, the unexpected the expected, whatever might happen was the matter of course, to be dealt with and dismissed. Susan naturally took her cue from them. When Tempest said something to her in the course of the careless conversation round the breakfast table, she answered--and had no sense of constraint. Thus, an incident that in other surroundings would have been in some way harmful through receiving the exaggeration of undue emphasis, caused less stir than the five huge and fiery mosquito bites Eshwell had got in the night. And Susan unconsciously absorbed one of those lessons in the science and art of living that have decisive weight in shaping our destinies. For intelligent living is in large part learning to ignore the unprofitable that one may concentrate upon the profitable.

Burlingham announced that they would cast off and float down to Bethlehem. There was a chorus of protests. "Why, we ought to stay here a week!" cried Miss Anstruther. "We certainly caught on last night."

"Didn't we take in seventeen dollars?" demanded Eshwell. "We can't do better than that anywhere."

"Who's managing this show?" asked Burlingham in his suave but effective way. "I think I know what I'm about."

He met their grumblings with the utmost good-humor and remained inflexible. Susan listened with eyes down and burning cheeks. She knew Burlingham was "leaving the best cow unmilked," as Connemora put it, because he wished to protect her. She told him so when they were alone on the forward deck a little later, as the boat was floating round the bend below Sutherland.

"Yes," he admitted. "I've great hopes from your ballads. I want to get you on." He looked round casually, saw that no one was looking, drew a peculiarly folded copy of the Sutherland Courier from his pocket. "Besides"--said he, holding out the paper--"read that."

Susan read:

George Warham, Esq., requests us to announce that he has increased the reward for information as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Susan Ferguson, his young niece, nee Susan Lenox, to one thousand dollars. There are grave fears that the estimable and lovely young lady, who disappeared from her husband's farm the night of her marriage, has, doubtless in a moment of insanity, ended her life. We hope not.

Susan lifted her gaze from this paragraph, after she had read it until the words ran together in a blur. She found Burlingham looking at her. Said he: "As I told you before, I don't want to know anything. But when I read that, it occurred to me, if some of the others saw it they might think it was you--and might do a dirty trick." He sighed, with a cynical little smile. "I was tempted, myself. A thousand is quite a bunch. You don't know--not yet--how a chance to make some money--any old way--compels a man--or a woman--when money's as scarce and as useful as it is in this world. As you get along, you'll notice, my dear, that the people who get moral goose flesh at the shady doings of others are always people who haven't ever really been up against it. I don't know why I didn't----" He shrugged his shoulders. "Now, my dear, you're in on the secret of why I haven't got up in the world." He smiled cheerfully. "But I may yet. The game's far from over."

She realized that he had indeed made an enormous sacrifice for her; for, though very ignorant about money, a thousand dollars seemed a fortune. She had no words; she looked away toward the emerald shore, and her eyes filled and her lip quivered. How much goodness there was in the world--how much generosity and affection!

"I'm not sure," he went on, "that you oughtn't to go back. But it's your own business. I've a kind of feeling you know what you're about."

"No matter what happens to me," said she, "I'll never regret what I've done. I'd kill myself before I'd spend another day with the man they made me marry."

"Well--I'm not fond of dying," observed Burlingham, in the light, jovial tone that would most quickly soothe her agitation, "but I think I'd take my chances with the worms rather than with the dry rot of a backwoods farm. You may not get your meals so regular out in the world, but you certainly do live. Yes--that backwoods life, for anybody with a spark of spunk, is simply being dead and knowing it." He tore the Courier into six pieces, flung them over the side. "None of the others saw the paper," said he. "So--Miss Lorna Sackville is perfectly safe." He patted her on the shoulder. "And she owes me a thousand and two dollars."

"I'll pay--if you'll be patient," said the girl, taking his jest gravely.

"It's a good gamble," said he. Then he laughed. "I guess that had something to do with my virtue. There's always a practical reason--always."

But the girl was not hearing his philosophies. Once more she was overwhelmed and stupefied by the events that had dashed in, upon, and over her like swift succeeding billows that give the swimmer no pause for breath or for clearing the eyes.

"No--you're not dreaming," said Burlingham, laughing at her expression. "At least, no more than we all are. Sometimes I suspect the whole damn shooting-match is nothing but a dream. Well, it's a pretty good one eh?"

And she agreed with him, as she thought how smoothly and agreeably they were drifting into the unknown, full of the most fascinating possibilities. How attractive this life was, how much at home she felt among these people, and if anyone should tell him about her birth or about how she had been degraded by Ferguson, it wouldn't in the least affect their feeling toward her, she was sure. "When do--do you--try me?" she asked.

"Tomorrow night, at Bethlehem--a bum little town for us. We'll stay there a couple of days. I want you to get used to appearing." He nodded at her encouragingly. "You've got stuff in you, real stuff. Don't you doubt it. Get self-confidence--conceit, if you please. Nobody arrives anywhere without it. You want to feel that you can do what you want to do. A fool's conceit is that he's it already. A sensible man's conceit is that he can be it, if he'll only work hard and in the right way. See?"

"I--I think I do," said the girl. "I'm not sure."

Burlingham smoked his cigar in silence. When he spoke, it was with eyes carefully averted. "There's another subject the spirit moves me to talk to you about. That's the one Miss Connemora opened up with you yesterday." As Susan moved uneasily, "Now, don't get scared. I'm not letting the woman business bother me much nowadays. All I think of is how to get on my feet again. I want to have a theater on Broadway before the old black-flagger overtakes my craft and makes me walk the plank and jump out into the Big Guess. So you needn't think I'm going to worry you. I'm not."

"Oh, I didn't think----"

"You ought to have, though," interrupted he. "A man like me is a rare exception. I'm a rare exception to my ordinary self, to be quite honest. It'll be best for you always to assume that every man you run across is looking for just one thing. You know what?"

Susan, the flush gone from her cheeks, nodded.

"I suppose Connemora has put you wise. But there are some things even she don't know about that subject. Now, I want you to listen to your grandfather. Remember what he says. And think it over until you understand it."

"I will," said Susan.

"In the life you've come out of, virtue in a woman's everything. She's got to be virtuous, or at least to have the reputation of it--or she's nothing. You understand that?"

"Yes," said Susan. "I understand that--now."

"Very well. Now in the life you're going into, virtue in a woman is nothing--no more than it is in a man anywhere. The woman who makes a career becomes like the man who makes a career. How is it with a man? Some are virtuous, others are not. But no man lets virtue bother him and nobody bothers about his virtue. That's the way it is with a woman who cuts loose from the conventional life of society and home and all that. She is virtuous or not, as she happens to incline. Her real interest in herself, her real value, lies in another direction. If it doesn't, if she continues to be agitated about her virtue as if it were all there is to her--then the sooner she hikes back to respectability, to the conventional routine, why the better for her. She'll never make a career, any more than she could drive an automobile through a crowded street and at the same time keep a big picture hat on straight. Do you follow me?"

"I'm not sure," said the girl. "I'll have to think about it."

"That's right. Don't misunderstand. I'm not talking for or against virtue. I'm simply talking practical life, and all I mean is that you won't get on there by your virtue, and you won't get on by your lack of virtue. Now for my advice."

Susan's look of unconscious admiration and attention was the subtlest flattery. Its frank, ingenuous showing of her implicit trust in him so impressed him with his responsibility that he hesitated before he said:

"Never forget this, and don't stop thinking about it until you understand it: Make men as men incidental in your life, precisely as men who amount to anything make women as women incidental."

Her first sensation was obviously disappointing. She had expected something far more impressive. Said she:

"I don't care anything about men."

"Be sensible! How are you to know now what you care about and what you don't?" was Burlingham's laughing rebuke. "And in the line you've taken--the stage--with your emotions always being stirred up, with your thoughts always hovering round the relations of men and women--for that's the only subject of plays and music, and with opportunity thrusting at you as it never thrusts at conventional people you'll probably soon find you care a great deal about men. But don't ever let your emotions hinder or hurt or destroy you. Use them to help you. I guess I'm shooting pretty far over that young head of yours, ain't I?"

"Not so very far," said the girl. "Anyhow, I'll remember."

"If you live big enough and long enough, you'll go through three stages. The first is the one you're in now. They've always taught you without realizing it, and so you think that only the strong can afford to do right. You think doing right makes the ordinary person, like yourself, easy prey for those who do wrong. You think that good people--if they're really good--have to wait until they get to Heaven before they get a chance."

"Isn't that so?"

"No. But you'll not realize it until you pass into the second stage. There, you'll think you see that only the strong can afford to do wrong. You'll think that everyone, except the strong, gets it in the neck if he or she does anything out of the way. You'll think you're being punished for your sins, and that, if you had behaved yourself, you'd have got on much better. That's the stage that's coming; and what you go through with there--how you come out of the fight--will decide your fate--show whether or not you've got the real stuff in you. Do you understand?"

Susan shook her head.

"I thought not. You haven't lived long enough yet. Well, I'll finish, anyhow."

"I'll remember," said Susan. "I'll think about it until I do understand."

"I hope so. The weather and the scenery make me feel like philosophizing. Finally, if you come through the second stage all right, you'll enter the third stage. There, you'll see that you were right at first when you thought only the strong could afford to do right. And you'll see that you were right in the second stage when you thought only the strong could afford to do wrong. For you'll have learned that only the strong can afford to act at all, and that they can do right or wrong as they please because they are strong."

"Then you don't believe in right, at all!" exclaimed the girl, much depressed, but whether for the right or for her friend she could not have told.

"Now, who said that?" Demanded he, amused. "What did I say? Why--if you want to do right, be strong or you'll be crushed; and if you want to do wrong, take care again to be strong--or you'll be crushed. My moral is, be strong! In this world the good weaklings and the bad weaklings had better lie low, hide in the tall grass. The strong inherit the earth."

They were silent a long time, she thinking, he observing her with sad tenderness. At last he said:

"You are a nice sweet girl--well brought up. But that means badly brought up for the life you've got to lead--the life you've got to learn to lead."

"I'm beginning to see that," said the girl. Her gravity made him feel like laughing, and brought the tears to his eyes. The laughter he suppressed.

"You're going to fight your way up to what's called the triumphant class--the people on top--they have all the success, all the money, all the good times. Well, the things you've been taught--at church--in the Sunday School--in the nice storybooks you've read--those things are all for the triumphant class, or for people working meekly along in 'the station to which God has appointed them' and handing over their earnings to their betters. But those nice moral things you believe in--they don't apply to people like you--fighting their way up from the meek working class to the triumphant class. You won't believe me now--won't understand thoroughly. But soon you'll see. Once you've climbed up among the successful people you can afford to indulge--in moderation--in practicing the good old moralities. Any dirty work you may need done you can hire done and pretend not to know about it. But while you're climbing, no Golden Rule and no turning of the cheek. Tooth and claw then--not sheathed but naked--not by proxy but in your own person."

"But you're not like that," said the girl.

"The more fool I," repeated he.

She was surprised that she understood so much of what he had said--childlike wonder at her wise old heart, made wise almost in a night--a wedding night. When Burlingham lapsed into silence, laughing at himself for having talked so far over the "kiddie's" head, she sat puzzling out what he had said. The world seemed horribly vast and forbidding, and the sky, so blue and bright, seemed far, far away. She sighed profoundly. "I am so weak," she murmured. "I am so ignorant."

Burlingham nodded and winked. "Yes, but you'll grow," said be. "I back you to win."

The color poured into her cheeks, and she burst into tears. Burlingham thought he understood; for once his shrewdness went far astray. Excusably, since he could not know that he had used the same phrase that had closed Spenser's letter to her.

Late in the afternoon, when the heat had abated somewhat and they were floating pleasantly along with the washing gently a-flutter from lines on the roof of the auditorium, Burlingham put Eshwell at the rudder and with Pat and the violin rehearsed her. "The main thing, the only thing to worry about," explained he, "is beginning right." She was standing in the center of the stage, he on the floor of the auditorium beside the seated orchestra. "That means," he went on, "you've simply got to learn to come in right. We'll practice that for a while."

She went to the wings--where there was barely space for her to conceal herself by squeezing tightly against the wall. At the signal from him she walked out. As she had the utmost confidence in his kindness, and as she was always too deeply interested in what she and others were doing to be uncomfortably self-conscious, she was not embarrassed, and thought she made the crossing and took her stand very well. He nodded approvingly. "But," said he, "there's a difference between a stage walk and walking anywhere else--or standing. Nothing is natural on the stage. If it were it would look unnatural, because the stage itself is artificial and whatever is there must be in harmony with it. So everything must be done unnaturally in such a way that it seems natural. Just as a picture boat looks natural though it's painted on a flat surface. Now I'll illustrate."

He gave her his hand to help her jump down; then he climbed to the stage. He went to the wings and walked out. As he came he called her attention to how he poised his body, how he advanced so that there would be from the auditorium no unsightly view of crossing legs, how he arranged hands, arms, shoulders, legs, head, feet for an attitude of complete rest. He repeated his illustration again and again, Susan watching and listening with open-eyed wonder and admiration. She had never dreamed that so simple a matter could be so complex. When he got her up beside him and went through it with her, she soon became as used to the new motions as a beginner at the piano to stretching an octave. But it was only after more than an hour's practice that she moved him to say:

"That'll do for a beginning. Now, we'll sing."

She tried "Suwanee River" first and went through it fairly well, singing to him as he stood back at the rear door. He was enthusiastic--cunning Burlingham, who knew so well how to get the best out of everyone! "Mighty good--eh, Pat? Yes, mighty good. You've got something better than a great voice, my dear. You've got magnetism. The same thing that made me engage you the minute you asked me is going to make you--well, go a long ways--a long ways. Now, we'll try 'The Last Rose of Summer.'"

She sang even better. And this improvement continued through the other four songs of her repertoire. His confidence in her was contagious; it was so evident that he really did believe in her. And Pat, too, wagged his head in a way that made her feel good about herself. Then Burlingham called in the others whom he had sent to the forward deck. Before them the girl went all to pieces. She made her entrance badly, she sang worse. And the worse she sang, the worse she felt and the worse her next attempt was. At last, with nerves unstrung, she broke down and sobbed. Burlingham climbed up to pat her on the shoulder.

"That's the best sign yet," said he. "It shows you've got temperament. Yes--you've got the stuff in you."

He quieted her, interested her in the purely mechanical part of what she was doing. "Don't think of who you're doing it before, or of how you're doing it, but only of getting through each step and each note. If your head's full of that, you'll have no room for fright." And she was ready to try again. When she finished the last notes of "Suwanee River," there was an outburst of hearty applause. And the sound that pleased her most was Tempest's rich rhetorical "Bravo!" As a man she abhorred him; but she respected the artist. And in unconsciously drawing this distinction she gave proof of yet another quality that was to count heavily in the coming days. Artist he was not. But she thought him an artist. A girl or boy without the intelligence that can develop into flower and fruit would have seen and felt only Tempest, the odious personality.

Burlingham did not let her off until she was ready to drop with exhaustion. And after supper, when they were floating slowly on, well out of the channel where they might be run down by some passing steamer with a flint-hearted captain or pilot, she had to go at it again. She went to bed early, and she slept without a motion or a break until the odor of the cooking breakfast awakened her. When she came out, her face was bright for the first time. She was smiling, laughing, chatting, was delighted with everything and everybody. Even the thought of Roderick Spenser laid up with a broken leg recurred less often and less vividly. It seemed to her that the leg must be about well. The imagination of healthy youth is reluctant to admit ideas of gloom in any circumstances. In circumstances of excitement and adventure, such as Susan's at that time, it flatly refuses to admit them.

They were at anchor before a little town sprawled upon the fields between hills and river edge. A few loafers were chewing tobacco and inspecting the show boat from the shady side of a pile of lumber. Pat had already gone forth with the bundle of handbills; he was not only waking up the town, but touring the country in horse and buggy, was agitating the farmers--for the show boat was to stay at least two nights at Bethlehem. "And we ought to do pretty well," said Burlingham. "The wheat's about all threshed, and there's a kind of lull. The hayseeds aren't so dead tired at night. A couple of weeks ago we couldn't have got half a house by paying for it."

As the afternoon wore away and the sun disappeared behind the hills to the southwest, Susan's spirits oozed. Burlingham and the others--deliberately--paid no attention to her, acted as if no great, universe-stirring event were impending. Immediately after supper Burlingham said:

"Now, Vi, get busy and put her into her harness. Make her a work of art."

Never was there a finer display of unselfishness than in their eagerness to help her succeed, in their intense nervous anxiety lest she should not make a hit. The bad in human nature, as Mabel Connemora had said, is indeed almost entirely if not entirely the result of the compulsion of circumstances; the good is the natural outcropping of normal instincts, and resumes control whenever circumstances permit. These wandering players had suffered too much not to have the keenest and gentlest sympathy. Susan looked on Tempest as a wicked man; yet she could not but be touched by his almost hysterical excitement over her debut, when the near approach of the hour made it impossible for his emotional temperament longer to hide its agitation. Every one of them gave or loaned her a talisman--Tempest, a bit of rabbit's foot; Anstruther, a ring that had twice saved her from drowning (at least, it had been on her finger each time); Connemora, a hunchback's tooth on a faded velvet string; Pat, a penny which happened to be of the date of her birth year (the presence of the penny was regarded by all as a most encouraging sign); Eshwell loaned her a miniature silver bug he wore on his watch chain; Burlingham's contribution was a large buckeye----"Ever since I've had that, I've never been without at least the price of a meal in my pocket."

They had got together for her a kind of evening dress, a pale blue chiffon-like drapery that left her lovely arms and shoulders bare and clung softly to the lines of her figure. They did her hair up in a graceful sweep from the brow and a simple coil behind. She looked like a woman, yet like a child dressed as a woman, too, for there was as always that exuberant vitality which made each of the hairs of her head seem individual, electric. The rouge gave her color, enhanced into splendor the brilliance of her violet-gray eyes--eyes so intensely colored and so admirably framed that they were noted by the least observant. When Anstruther had put the last touches to her toilet and paraded her to the others, there was a chorus of enthusiasm. The men no less than the women viewed her with the professional eye.

"Didn't I tell you all?" cried Burlingham, as they looked her up and down like a group of connoisseurs inspecting a statue. "Wasn't I right?"

"'It is the dawn, and Juliet is the east,'" orated Tempest in rich, romantic tones.

"A damn shame to waste her on these yaps," said Eshwell.

Connemora embraced her with tearful eyes. "And as sweet as you are lovely, you dear!" she cried. "You simply can't help winning."

The two women thought her greatest charms were her form and her feet and ankles. The men insisted that her charm of charms was her eyes. And certainly, much could be said for that view. Susan's violet-gray eyes, growing grayer when she was thoughtful, growing deeper and clearer and softer shining violet when her emotions were touched--Susan's eyes were undoubtedly unusual even in a race in which homely eyes are the exception.

When it was her turn and she emerged into the glare of the footlights, she came to a full stop and an awful wave of weakness leaped up through legs and body to blind her eyes and crash upon her brain. She shook her head, lifted it high like a swimmer shaking off a wave. Her gaze leaped in terror across the blackness of the auditorium with its thick-strewn round white disks of human faces, sought the eyes of Burlingham standing in full view in the center of the rear doorway--where he had told her to look for him. She heard Pat playing the last of the opening chords; Burlingham lifted his hand like a leader's baton. And naturally and sweetly the notes, the words of the old darkey song of longing for home began to float out through the stillness.

She did not take her gaze from Burlingham. She sang her best, sang to please him, to show him how she appreciated what he had done for her. And when she finished and bowed, the outburst of applause unnerved her, sent her dizzy and almost staggering into the wings. "Splendid! Splendid!" cried Mabel, and Anstruther embraced her, and Tempest and Eshwell kissed her hands. They all joined in pushing her out again for the encore--"Blue Alsatian Mountains." She did not sing quite so steadily, but got through in good form, the tremolo of nervousness in her voice adding to the wailing pathos of the song's refrain:

Adé, adé, adé, such dreams must pass away, But the Blue Alsatian Mountains seem to watch and wait alway.

The crowd clapped, stamped, whistled, shouted; but Burlingham defied it. "The lady will sing again later," he cried. "The next number on the regular program is," etc., etc. The crowd yelled; Burlingham stood firm, and up went the curtain on Eshwell and Connemora's sketch. It got no applause. Nor did any other numbers on the program. The contrast between the others and the beauty of the girl, her delicate sweetness, her vital youth, her freshness of the early morning flower, was inevitable.

The crowd could think only of her. The quality of magnetism aside, she had sung neither very well nor very badly. But had she sung badly, still her beauty would have won her the same triumph. When she came on for her second number with a cloud-like azure chiffon flung carelessly over her dark hair as a scarf, Spanish fashion, she received a stirring welcome. It frightened her, so that Pat had to begin four times before her voice faintly took up the tune. Again Burlingham's encouraging, confident gaze, flung across the gap between them like a strong rescuing hand, strengthened her to her task. This time he let the crowd have two encores--and the show was over; for the astute manager, seeing how the girl had caught on, had moved her second number to the end.

Burlingham lingered in the entrance to the auditorium to feast himself on the comments of the crowd as it passed out. When he went back he had to search for the girl, found her all in a heap in a chair at the outer edge of the forward deck. She was sobbing piteously. "Well, for God's sake!" cried he. "Is this the way you take it!"

She lifted her head. "Did I do very badly?" she asked.

"You swept 'em off their big hulking feet," replied he.

"When you didn't come, I thought I'd disappointed you."

"I'll bet my hand there never was such a hit made in a river show boat--and they've graduated some of the swells of the profession. We'll play here a week to crowded houses--matinées every day, too. And this is a two-night stand usually. I must find some more songs." He slapped his thigh. "The very thing!" he cried. "We'll ring in some hymns. 'Rock of Ages,' say--and 'Jesus, Lover of my Soul'--and you can get 'em off in a churchy kind of costume something like a surplice. That'll knock 'em stiff. And Anstruther can dope out the accompaniments on that wheezer. What d'you think?"

"Whatever you want," said the girl. "Oh, I am so glad!"

"I don't see how you got through so well," said he.

"I didn't dare fail," replied Susan. "If I had, I couldn't have faced you." And by the light of the waning moon he saw the passionate gratitude of her sensitive young face.

"Oh--I've done nothing," said he, wiping the tears from his eyes--for he had his full share of the impulsive, sentimental temperament of his profession. "Pure selfishness."

Susan gazed at him with eyes of the pure deep violet of strongest feeling. "I know what you did," she said in a low voice. "And--I'd die for you."

Burlingham had to use his handkerchief in dealing with his eyes now. "This business has given me hysterics," said he with a queer attempt at a laugh. Then, after a moment, "God bless you, little girl. You wait here a moment. I'll see how supper's getting on."

He wished to go ahead of her, for he had a shrewd suspicion as to the state of mind of the rest of the company. And he was right. There they sat in the litter of peanut hulls, popcorn, and fruit skins which the audience had left. On every countenance was jealous gloom.

"What's wrong?" inquired Burlingham in his cheerful derisive way. "You are a nice bunch, you are!"

They shifted uneasily. Mabel snapped out, "Where's the infant prodigy? Is she so stuck on herself already that she won't associate with us?"

"You grown-up babies," mocked Burlingham. "I found her out there crying in darkness because she thought she'd failed. Now you go bring her in, Conny. As for the rest of you, I'm disgusted. Here we've hit on something that'll land us in Easy Street, and you're all filled up with poison."

They were ashamed of themselves. Burlingham had brought back to them vividly the girl's simplicity and sweetness that had won their hearts, even the hearts of the women in whom jealousy of her young beauty would have been more than excusable. Anstruther began to get out the supper dishes and Mabel slipped away toward the forward deck. "When the child comes in," pursued Burlingham, "I want to see you people looking and acting human."

"We are a lot of damn fools," admitted Eshwell. "That's why we're bum actors instead of doing well at some respectable business."

And his jealousy went the way of Violet's and Mabel's. Pat began to remember that he had shared in the triumph--where would she have been without his violin work? But Tempest remained somber. In his case better nature was having a particularly hard time of it. His vanity had got savage wounds from the hoots and the "Oh, bite it off, hamfat," which had greeted his impressive lecture on the magic lantern pictures. He eyed Burlingham glumly. He exonerated the girl, but not Burlingham. He was convinced that the manager, in a spirit of mean revenge, had put up a job on him. It simply could not be in the ordinary course that any audience, without some sly trickery of prompting from an old expert of theatrical "double-crossing," would be impatient for a mere chit of an amateur when it might listen to his rich, mellow eloquence.

Susan came shyly--and at the first glance into her face her associates despised themselves for their pettiness. It is impossible for envy and jealousy and hatred to stand before the light of such a nature as Susan's. Away from her these very human friends of hers might hate her--but in her presence they could not resist the charm of her sincerity.

Everyone's spirits went up with the supper. It was Pat who said to Burlingham, "Bob, we're going to let the pullet in on the profits equally, aren't we?"

"Sure," replied Burlingham. "Anybody kicking?"

The others protested enthusiastically except Tempest, who shot a glance of fiery scorn at Burlingham over a fork laden with potato salad. "Then--you're elected, Miss Sackville," said Burlingham.

Susan's puzzled eyes demanded an explanation. "Just this," said he. "We divide equally at the end of the trip all we've raked in, after the rent of the boat and expenses are taken off. You get your equal share exactly as if you started with us."

"But that wouldn't be fair," protested the girl. "I must pay what I owe you first."

"She means two dollars she borrowed of me at Carrollton," explained Burlingham. And they all laughed uproariously.

"I'll only take what's fair," said the girl.

"I vote we give it all to her," rolled out Tempest in tragedy's tone for classic satire.

Before Mabel could hurl at him the probably coarse retort she instantly got her lips ready to make, Burlingham's cool, peace-compelling tones broke in:

"Miss Sackville's right. She must get only what's fair. She shares equally from tonight on--less two dollars."

Susan nodded delightedly. She did not know--and the others did not at the excited moment recall--that the company was to date eleven dollars less well off than when it started from the headwaters of the Ohio in early June. But Burlingham knew, and that was the cause of the quiet grin to which he treated himself.

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Chapter XV

BURLINGHAM had lived too long, too actively, and too intelligently to have left any of his large, original stock of the optimism that had so often shipwrecked his career in spite of his talents and his energy. Out of the bitterness of experience he used to say, "A young optimist is a young fool. An old optimist is an old ass. A fool may learn, an ass can't." And again, "An optimist steams through the fog, taking it for granted everything's all right. A pessimist steams ahead too, but he gets ready for trouble." However, he was wise enough to keep his private misgivings and reservations from his associates; the leaders of the human race always talk optimism and think pessimism. He had told the company that Susan was sure to make a go; and after she had made a go, he announced the beginning of a season of triumph. But he was surprised when his prediction came true and they had to turn people away from the next afternoon's performance. He began to believe they really could stay a week, and hired a man to fill the streets of New Washington and other inland villages and towns of the county with a handbill headlining Susan.

The news of the lovely young ballad singer in the show boat at Bethlehem spread, as interesting news ever does, and down came the people to see and hear, and to go away exclaiming. Bethlehem, the sleepy, showed that it could wake when there was anything worth waking for. Burlingham put on the hymns in the middle of the week, and even the clergy sent their families. Every morning Susan, either with Mabel or with Burlingham, or with both, took a long walk into the country. It was Burlingham, by the way, who taught her the necessity of regular and methodical long walks for the preservation of her health. When she returned there was always a crowd lounging about the landing waiting to gape at her and whisper. It was intoxicating to her, this delicious draught of the heady wine of fame; and Burlingham was not unprepared for the evidences that she thought pretty well of herself, felt that she had arrived. He laughed to himself indulgently. "Let the kiddie enjoy herself," thought he. "She needs the self-confidence now to give her a good foundation to stand on. Then when she finds out what a false alarm this jay excitement was, she'll not be swept clean away into despair."

The chief element in her happiness, he of course knew nothing about. Until this success--which she, having no basis for comparison, could not but exaggerate--she had been crushed and abused more deeply than she had dared admit to herself by her birth which made all the world scorn her and by the series of calamities climaxing in that afternoon and night of horror at Ferguson's. This success--it seemed to her to give her the right to have been born, the right to live on and hold up her head without effort after Ferguson. "I'll show them all, before I get through," she said to herself over and over again. "They'll be proud of me. Ruth will be boasting to everyone that I'm her cousin. And Sam Wright--he'll wonder that he ever dared touch such a famous, great woman." She only half believed this herself, for she had much common sense and small self-confidence. But pretending that she believed it all gave her the most delicious pleasure.

Burlingham took such frank joy in her innocent vanity--so far as he understood it and so far as she exhibited it--that the others were good-humored about it too--all the others except Tempest, whom conceit and defeat had long since soured through and through. A tithe of Susan's success would have made him unbearable, for like most human beings he had a vanity that was Atlantosaurian on starvation rations and would have filled the whole earth if it had been fed a few crumbs. Small wonder that we are ever eagerly on the alert for signs of vanity in others; we are seeking the curious comfort there is in the feeling that others have our own weakness to a more ridiculous degree. Tempest twitched to jeer openly at Susan, whose exhibition was really timid and modest and not merely excusable but justifiable. But he dared go no further than holding haughtily aloof and casting vaguely into the air ever and anon a tragic sneer. Susan would not have understood if she had seen, and did not see. She was treading the heights, her eyes upon the sky. She held grave consultation with Burlingham, with Violet, with Mabel, about improving her part. She took it all very, very seriously--and Burlingham was glad of that. "Yes, she does take herself seriously," he admitted to Anstruther. "But that won't do any harm as she's so young, and as she takes her work seriously, too. The trouble about taking oneself seriously is it stops growth. She hasn't got that form of it."

"Not yet," said Violet.

"She'll wake from her little dream, poor child, long before the fatal stage." And he heaved a sigh for his own lost illusions--those illusions that had cost him so dear.

Burlingham had intended to make at least one stop before Jeffersonville, the first large town on the way down. But Susan's capacities as a house-filler decided him for pushing straight for it. "We'll go where there's a big population to be drawn on," said he. But he did not say that in the back of his head there was forming a plan to take a small theater at Jeffersonville if the girl made a hit there.

Eshwell, to whom he was talking, looked glum. "She's going pretty good with these greenies," observed he. "But I've my doubts whether city people'll care for anything so milk-like."

Burlingham had his doubts, too; but he retorted warmly: "Don't you believe it, Eshie. City's an outside. Underneath, there's still the simple, honest, grassy-green heart of the country."

Eshwell laughed. "So you've stopped jeering at jays. You've forgotten what a lot of tightwads and petty swindlers they are. Well, I don't blame you. Now that they're giving down to us so freely, I feel better about them myself. It's a pity we can't lower the rest of the program to the level of their intellectuals."

Burlingham was not tactless enough to disturb Eshwell's consoling notion that while Susan was appreciated by these ignorant country-jakes, the rest of the company were too subtle and refined in their art. "That's a good idea," replied he. "I'll try to get together some simple slop. Perhaps a melodrama, a good hot one, would go--eh?"

After ten days the receipts began to drop. On the fifteenth day there was only a handful at the matinée, and in the evening half the benches were empty. "About milked dry," said Burlingham at the late supper. "We'll move on in the morning."

This pleased everyone. Susan saw visions of bigger triumphs; the others felt that they were going where dramatic talent, not to say genius, would be at least not entirely unappreciated. So the company was at its liveliest next morning as the mosquito-infested willows of the Bethlehem shore slowly dropped away. They had made an unusually early start, for the river would be more and more crowded as they neared the three close-set cities--Louisville, Jeffersonville, and New Albany, and the helpless little show boat must give the steamers no excuse for not seeing her. All day--a long, dreamy, summer day--they drifted lazily downstream, and, except Tempest, all grew gayer and more gay. Burlingham had announced that there were three hundred and seventy-eight dollars in the japanned tin box he kept shut up in his bag.

At dusk a tug, for three dollars, nosed them into a wharf which adjoined the thickly populated labor quarter of Jeffersonville.

Susan was awakened by a scream. Even as she opened her eyes a dark cloud, a dull suffocating terrifying pain, descended upon her. When she again became conscious, she was lying upon a mass of canvas on the levee with three strange men bending over her. She sat up, instinctively caught together the front of the nightdress she had bought in Bethlehem the second day there. Then she looked wildly from face to face.

"You're all right, ma'am," said one of the men. "Not a scratch--only stunned."

"What was it?" said the girl. "Where are they?"

As she spoke, she saw Burlingham in his nightshirt propped against a big blue oil barrel. He was staring stupidly at the ground. And now she noted the others scattered about the levee, each with a group around him or her. "What was it?" she repeated.

"A tug butted its tow of barges into you," said someone. "Crushed your boat like an eggshell."

Burlingham staggered to his feet, stared round, saw her. "Thank God!" he cried. "Anyone drowned? Anyone hurt?"

"All saved--no bones broken," someone responded.

"And the boat?"

"Gone down. Nothing left of her but splinters. The barges were full of coal and building stone."

"The box!" suddenly shouted Burlingham. "The box!"

"What kind of a box?" asked a boy with lean, dirty, and much scratched bare legs. "A little black tin box like they keep money in?"

"That's it. Where is it?"

"It's all right," said the boy. "One of your people, a black actor-looking fellow----"

"Tempest," interjected Burlingham. "Go on."

"He dressed on the wharf and he had the box."

"Where is he?"

"He said he was going for a doctor. Last I seed of him he was up to the corner yonder. He was movin' fast."

Burlingham gave a kind of groan. Susan read in his face his fear, his suspicion--the suspicion he was ashamed of himself for having. She noted vaguely that he talked with the policeman aside for a few minutes, after which the policeman went up the levee. Burlingham rejoined his companions and took command. The first thing was to get dressed as well as might be from such of the trunks as had been knocked out of the cabin by the barge and had been picked up. They were all dazed. Even Burlingham could not realize just what had occurred. They called to one another more or less humorous remarks while they were dressing behind piles of boxes, crates, barrels and sacks in the wharf-boat. And they laughed gayly when they assembled. Susan made the best appearance, for her blue serge suit had been taken out dry when she herself was lifted from the sinking wreck; the nightgown served as a blouse. Mabel's trunk had been saved. Violet could wear none of her things, as they were many sizes too small, so she appeared in a property skirt of black paper muslin, a black velvet property basque, a pair of shoes belonging to Tempest. Burlingham and Eshwell made a fairly respectable showing in clothing from Tempest's trunk. Their own trunks had gone down.

"Why, where's Tempest?" asked Eshwell.

"He'll be back in a few minutes," replied Burlingham. "In fact, he ought to be back now." His glance happened to meet Susan's; he hastily shifted his eyes.

"Where's the box?" asked Violet.

"Tempest's taking care of it," was the manager's answer.

"Tempest!" exclaimed Mabel. Her shrewd, dissipated eyes contracted with suspicion.

"Anybody got any money?" inquired Eshwell, as he fished in his pockets.

No one had a cent. Eshwell searched Tempest's trunk, found a two-dollar bill and a one wrapped round a silver dollar and wadded in among some ragged underclothes. Susan heard Burlingham mutter "Wonder how he happened to overlook that!" But no one else heard.

"Well, we might have breakfast," suggested Mabel.

They went out on the water deck of the wharf-boat, looked down at the splinters of the wreck lying in the deep yellow river. "Come on," said Burlingham, and he led the way up the levee. There was no attempt at jauntiness; they all realized now.

"How about Tempest?" said Eshwell, stopping short halfway up.

"Tempest--hell!" retorted Mabel. "Come on."

"What do you mean?" cried Violet, whose left eye was almost closed by a bruise.

"We'll not see him again. Come on."

"Bob!" shrieked Violet at Burlingham. "Do you hear that?"

"Yes," said he. "Keep calm, and come on."

"Aren't you going to do anything?" she screamed, seizing him by the coat tail. "You must, damn it--you must!"

"I got the policeman to telephone headquarters," said Burlingham. "What else can be done? Come on."

And a moment later the bedraggled and dejected company filed into a cheap levee restaurant. "Bring some coffee," Burlingham said to the waiter. Then to the others, "Does anybody want anything else?" No one spoke. "Coffee's all," he said to the waiter.

It came, and they drank it in silence, each one's brain busy with the disaster from the standpoint of his own resulting ruin. Susan glanced furtively at each face in turn. She could not think of her own fate, there was such despair in the faces of these others. Mabel looked like an old woman. As for Violet, every feature of her homeliness, her coarseness, her dissipated premature old age stood forth in all its horror. Susan's heart contracted and her flesh crept as she glanced quickly away. But she still saw, and it was many a week before she ceased to see whenever Violet's name came into her mind. Burlingham, too, looked old and broken. Eshwell and Pat, neither of whom had ever had the smallest taste of success, were stolid, like cornered curs taking their beating and waiting in silence for the blows to stop.

"Here, Eshie," said the manager, "take care of the three dollars." And he handed him the bills. "I'll pay for the coffee and keep the change. I'm going down to the owners of that tug and see what I can do."

When he had paid they followed him out. At the curbstone he said, "Keep together somewhere round the wharf-boat. So long." He lifted the battered hat he was wearing, smiled at Susan. "Cheer up, Miss Sackville. We'll down 'em yet!" And away he went--a strange figure, his burly frame squeezed into a dingy old frock suit from among Tempest's costumes.

A dreary two hours, the last half-hour in a drizzling rain from which the narrow eaves of the now closed and locked wharf-boat sheltered them only a little. "There he comes!" cried Susan; and sure enough, Burlingham separated from the crowd streaming along the street at the top of the levee, and began to descend the slope toward them. They concentrated on his face, hoping to get some indication of what to expect; but he never permitted his face to betray his mind. He strode up the plank and joined them.

"Tempest come?" he asked.

"Tempest!" cried Mabel. "Haven't I told you he's jumped? Don't you suppose I know him?"

"And you brought him into the company," raged Violet. "Burlingham didn't want to take him. He looked the fool and jackass he is. Why didn't you warn us he was a rotten thief, too?"

"Wasn't it for shoplifting you served six months in Joliet?" retorted Mabel.

"You lie--you streetwalker!" screamed Violet.

"Ladies! Ladies!" said Eshwell.

"That's what I say," observed Pat.

"I'm no lady," replied Mabel. "I'm an actress."

"An actress--he-he!" jeered Violet. "An actress!"

"Shut up, all of you," commanded Burlingham. "I've got some money. I settled for cash."

"How much?" cried Mabel and Violet in the same breath, their quarrel not merely finished but forgotten.

"Three hundred dollars."

"For the boat and all?" demanded Eshwell. "Why, Bob----"

"They think it was for boat and all," interrupted Burlingham with his cynical smile. "They set out to bully and cheat me. They knew I couldn't get justice. So I let 'em believe I owned the boat--and I've got fifty apiece for us."

"Sixty," said Violet.

"Fifty. There are six of us."

"You don't count in this little Jonah here, do you?" cried Violet, scowling evilly at Susan.

"No--no--don't count me in," begged Susan. "I didn't lose anything."

Mabel pinched her arm. "You're right, Mr. Burlingham," said she. "Miss Sackville ought to share. We're all in the same box."

"Miss Sackville will share," said Burlingham. "There's going to be no skunking about this, as long as I'm in charge."

Eshwell and Pat sided with Violet. While the rain streamed, the five, with Susan a horrified onlooker, fought on and on about the division of the money. Their voices grew louder. They hurled the most frightful epithets at one another. Violet seized Mabel by the hair, and the men interfered, all but coming to blows themselves in the mêlée. The wharfmaster rushed from his office, drove them off to the levee. They continued to yell and curse, even Burlingham losing control of himself and releasing all there was of the tough and the blackguard in his nature. Two policemen came, calmed them with threat of arrest. At last Burlingham took from his pocket one at a time three small rolls of bills. He flung one at each of the three who were opposing his division. "Take that, you dirty curs," he said. "And be glad I'm giving you anything at all. Most managers wouldn't have come back. Come on, Miss Sackville. Come on, Mabel." And the two followed him up the levee, leaving the others counting their shares.

At the street corner they went into a general store where Burlingham bought two ninety-eight-cent umbrellas. He gave Mabel one, held the other over Susan and himself as they walked along. "Well, ladies," said he, "we begin life again. A clean slate, a fresh start--as if nothing had ever happened."

Susan looked at him to try to give him a grateful and sympathetic smile. She was surprised to see that, so far as she could judge, he had really meant the words he had spoken.

"Yes, I mean it," said he. "Always look at life as it is--as a game. With every deal, whether you win or lose, your stake grows--for your stake's your wits, and you add to 'em by learning something with each deal. What are you going to do, Mabel?"

"Get some clothes. The water wrecked mine and this rain has finished my hat."

"We'll go together," said Burlingham.

They took a car for Louisville, descended before a department store. Burlingham had to fit himself from the skin out; Mabel had underclothes, needed a hat, a dress, summer shoes. Susan needed underclothes, shoes, a hat, for she was bareheaded. They arranged to meet at the first entrance down the side street; Burlingham gave Susan and Mabel each their fifty dollars and went his way. When they met again in an hour and a half, they burst into smiles of delight. Burlingham had transformed himself into a jaunty, fashionable young middle-aged man, with an air of success achieved and prosperity assured. He had put the fine finishing touch to his transformation by getting a haircut and a shave. Mabel looked like a showy chorus girl, in a striped blue and white linen suit, a big beflowered hat, and a fluffy blouse of white chiffon. Susan had resisted Mabel's entreaties, had got a plain, sensible linen blouse of a kind that on a pinch might be washed out and worn without ironing. Her new hat was a simple blue sailor with a dark blue band that matched her dress.

"I spent thirty-six dollars," said Burlingham.

"I only spent twenty-two," declared Mabel. "And this child here only parted with seven of her dollars. I had no idea she was so thrifty."

"And now--what?" said Burlingham.

"I'm going round to see a friend of mine," replied Mabel. "She's on the stage, too. There's sure to be something doing at the summer places. Maybe I can ring Miss Sackville in. There ought to be a good living in those eyes of hers and those feet and ankles. I'm sure I can put her next to something."

"Then you can give her your address," said Burlingham.

"Why, she's going with me," cried Mabel. "You don't suppose I'd leave the child adrift?"

"No, she's going with me to a boarding house I'll find for her," said Burlingham.

Into Mabel's face flashed the expression of the suspicion such a statement would at once arouse in a mind trained as hers had been. Burlingham's look drove the expression out of her face, and suspicion at least into the background. "She's not going with your friend," said Burlingham, a hint of sternness in his voice. "That's best--isn't it?"

Miss Connemora's eyes dropped. "Yes, I guess it is," replied she. "Well--I turn down this way."

"We'll keep on and go out Chestnut Street," said Burlingham. "You can write to her--or to me--care of the General Delivery."

"That's best. You may hear from Tempest. You can write me there, too." Mabel was constrained and embarrassed. "Good-by, Miss Sackville."

Susan embraced and kissed her. Mabel began to weep. "Oh, it's all so sudden--and frightful," she said. "Do try to be good, Lorna. You can trust Bob." She looked earnestly, appealingly, at him. "Yes, I'm sure you can. And--he's right about me. Good-by." She hurried away, not before Susan had seen the tears falling from her kind, fast-fading eyes.

Susan stood looking after her. And for the first time the truth about the catastrophe came to her. She turned to Burlingham. "How brave you are!" she cried.

"Oh, what'd be the use in dropping down and howling like a dog?" replied he. "That wouldn't bring the boat back. It wouldn't get me a job."

"And you shared equally, when you lost the most of all."

They were walking on. "The boat was mine, too," said he in a dry reflective tone. "I told 'em it wasn't when we started out because I wanted to get a good share for rent and so on, without any kicking from anybody."

The loss did not appeal to her; it was the lie he had told. She felt her confidence shaking. "You didn't mean to--to----" she faltered, stopped.

"To cheat them?" suggested he. "Yes, I did. So--to sort of balance things up I divided equally all I got from the tug people. What're you looking so unhappy about?"

"I wish you hadn't told me," she said miserably. "I don't see why you did."

"Because I don't want you making me into a saint. I'm like the rest you see about in pants, cheating and lying, with or without pretending to themselves that they're honest. Don't trust anybody, my dear. The sooner you get over the habit, the sooner you'll cease to tempt people to be hypocrites. All the serious trouble I've ever got into has come through trusting or being trusted."

He looked gravely at her, burst out laughing at her perplexed, alarmed expression. "Oh, Lord, it isn't as bad as all that," said he. "The rain's stopped. Let's have breakfast. Then--a new deal--with everything to gain and nothing to lose. It's a great advantage to be in a position where you've got nothing to lose!"

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