The Carlisle independent., 1915-03-25
CHAPTER |.
The Message From the Deep.


 The two old men sat in the library eyeing the unresponsive blue envelope that lay on the end of the long table nearest the fireplace, where merry but unnoticed bed of coals cracked fiercely in the vain effort to cry down wind that whistled about the corners of the house.
 There was something maddening in the fact that the envelope would have to remain unopened until young Fred erick Brood came home for the night. They found themselves wondering if by any chance he would fail to come in at all. Their hour for retiring was ten o'clock, day in, day out.
 Up to half-past nine they discussed the blue envelope with every inmate of the house, from Mrs. John Des- mond, the housekeeper, down to the voiceless but eloquent decanter of port that stood between them, first on the arm of one chair, then the other. They were very old men; they could solilo- quize without in the least disturbing each other. An observer would say, during these periods of abstraction, that their remarks were addressed to the decanter and that the poor decan- ter had something to say in return. But, for all that. their eyes seldom left the broad, blue envelope that had lain there since half-past eight.
 They knew that it came directly or Indirectly from the man to whom they owed their present condition of com fort and security after half a century of vicissitudes; from the man whose in those old, evil days when comforts were so few that they passed without recognition in the maelstrom of events. From midocean James Brood was speaking to his son.
 Twenty years ago these two old cro- nies had met James Brood in one of the blackest holes of Calcutta, a dere- lfct being swept to perdition with the swiftness and sureness of a tide that knows no pause. They found him when the dregs were at his lips, and the stupor of defeat in his brain Without meaning to be considered Samaritans, good or bad, they dragged Dim from the depths and found that they had revived a man. Those were the days when James Brood's life meant nothing to him, days when he was tortured by the thought that it WOlIlh hn all Innu dure, yet he was not the kind to mur- der himself as men do who lack the courage to go on living.
 Weeks after the rescue in Calcutta these two soldiers of fortune and an- other. John Desmond, learned from the lips of the man himself that he was not such as they, but rich in this worlds goods, richer than the Solo, mon of their discreet imagination.
 What Brood told them of his life brought the grim smile of appreciation to the lips of each. He had married a beautiful foreigner-an Austrian, they gathered-of excellent family, and had taken her to his home in New York city, to the house in lower Fifth ave nue where his father and grandfather had lived before him-the house in which two of the wayfarers after twenty years, now sat in rueful con- temptation of blue envelope.
 A baby boy came to the Broods in the second year of their welded life, but before that there had come a mana music master, dreamy-eyed, handsome, Latin; man who played upon the harp as only the angels may play. In his delirious rawlings Brood cursed this man and the wife he had stolen away from him; he reviled the baby boy, even denying him; he laughed with blood-curdling glee over the manner in which he had cast out the woman who had broken h,s heart and crushed his pride; he walled in anguish over the mistake he had made in allowing the man to live that he might gloat and sheer in triumph. This much the three men who lifted him from hell were able to glean from lips that knew not what they said. and they were filled with pity. Later on. AN e@ AoSAOioi WOdhhCOS, uC lOlQ them more, and without curses. A deep. silent, steadfast bitterness succeeded the violent rawlings. He became a way. farer with them, quiet, dogged, fatal: where they went he also went; what they did, also did he. Soon he led. and they followed Into the dark places of the world they plunged, for peril meant little to him, death even less. They no longer knew days of priva- tion-he shared his wealth with them: but they knew no rest, no peace. no safety Life had been a whirlwind be- fore they came upon James Brood; it was hurricane afterward
 Twice John Desmond, younger than Danbury Dawes and Joseph Riggs, saved the life of James Brood by acts of unparalleled heroism; once in a South African jungle when a lion- ess fought for her young, and again In upper India, when single-handed, he held off horde of Hindus for days while his comrade lay wound ed in a cavern. Dawes and Riggs, fin tho Hi,nalavac croDt doup tho