THE STORY OF A SINGING SOUBRETTE

faithful to him, at least to my way of thinking.

Now, the old demon of an Evanston was still jealous of my society, and jealous even of his son Charley had had a girl who worked at Clayton's, and after our marriage the old man encouraged his son to continue with the old mistress. Old Evanston's motive was to get Charley out of the house so that he (the old man) could be with me. Then he would say to me, "Where's Charley?" and condemn him for leaving me so much alone.

"I don't think it is right," he would say, "for Charley to neglect you so."

The horrible old man still wanted me, but he found that I was now as unyielding as a stone wall. It must have surprised him, for how could he understand the strength that comes even to the weakest woman from the feeling of her duty and love for another? I don't think even good men understand this, and so why should an old brute like Evanston!

To show his great consideration for me the old man gave me no peace until I consented to act again, and I finally went on another tour before I was really able to. We all went off together as usual, and for a time Charley and I were fairly happy together. I often reminded him of his promise to take me away from the family, but he always put it off. I think he was fond of me, but he could not give up his other girls, and he was so much in the habit of looking to his father as the head of the house that he did not dare to make the break.

So we began to quarrel and these quarrels were fostered by the old man, whose spying around and jealousy made it so uncomfortable for us that we soon gave up rooming together; and that, I think, is always a step toward coldness and alienation. A man and woman who are living together always either grow nearer or further apart, and old man Evanston took care that we should not be very fond of each other. I think he was sorry he had urged the marriage, when he found that I still stood him off, for, after we had been married only a few months, the old man came to me and Charley one day and said:

"My children, I am afraid you are not happy together. I am very sorry, for nothing would please me so much as to see you live in peace."

"The wretch How I hated him then! I knew he said this only for Charley's benefit, for that I saw through him he could have no doubt. Charley, of course, was ignorant of my former relation with his father; or otherwise the old man could not have fooled him so.

"I am afraid I made a mistake," old Evanston continued, "and I fear the best we can do now is to secure a divorce."

Then he sneered in his horrible way, and looked at me. He seemed to me more like a snake than ever before.

Many conversations on the same subject followed, and although I was still fond of Charley, I saw that he was weaker even than I, and in a kind of disgust I finally consented to a separation, which, however, I might not have come to agree to, had it not been for a specially violent quarrel, on which occasion he struck me.

His mother was really the cause of it. We were rehearsing at San Antonio, and Mrs. Evanston did not take the cue and I, being a bit angry, did not repeat it; so she waited, and I said: "I gave the cue."

"You did not," she said, angrily. The poor woman always took an opportunity to quarrel with me.

"I did," I said, as calmly as I could.

Whereupon she turned to Charley and said:

"Do you hear that girl call your mother a liar?"

Then Charley struck me in the face and a general row ensued, which ended by the old man cursing his son and the old lady having a fainting fit.

They took Mrs. Evanston home and left Charley and me in the theatre. I went to the dressing room and wept, and Charley came and begged my pardon and said:

"May, you were right. We made a mistake in staying with these folks. Had we gone away after our marriage we would have been all right. If we were away from the family we would be happy."

THE TREND

But I replied: “Charley, a man can
only strike me once; I then know his
nature. We must separate. I ought to
have repeated the cue, but I am tired of
it all, and cannot stand this life.”

Some months from that time the old
man secured a divorce for us on the
ground of cruelty.

As soon as he had received news of it,
he hastened to me. There was triumph
in his voice, and the old hated look of
desire in his eyes when he told me about
it. But how futile and harmless he
seemed to me then. He seemed like a
snake with his fangs pulled.

I seemed to myself then standing all
alone, happily independent, with no more
ties holding me to that unfortunate fam-
ily and I didn't even hate him when I
said, in a tone so quiet and matter-of-
fact that he knew I meant it:

"No, I am going to leave you; and I
am not going to run away this time. I
am simply going to leave."

I was not yet nineteen years old, and
yet I looked and felt older than I do
now at thirty. I had been living for two
years in a way that ought to have
crushed any girl's spirit and self-respect.
What terrible complications! Between
so many fires! The daughter's confi-
dante and chum; the old man's mistress;
the son's wife; the object of the wronged
woman's jealousy—this last, perhaps, the
worst of all. She could not realize that
I was miserable, for few women get
into such a situation without their free
will. I tried to explain to her many
times, and tried to borrow money from
her to get away with, but she never
trusted me.

And now, as I faced the disappointed
old man and looked into the eyes which
had influenced me so fatally, I knew that
my shackles had been broken. How it
came about, this change in me, I don't
exactly know. But since then, though I
have had my troubles, I have grown
steadily stronger and happier, as the
patient reader will see. Sordidness, and,
in a way, sin continued to be with me,
but life seems infinitely sweeter to me
now than when I was a young girl.

I suppose so terrible an existence gave
me strength to meet troubles calmly

which otherwise would have been crushing. But they have seemed nothing in comparison. I even think that is why I care so little for money. Poverty and struggle have always appeared to me quite endurable. In one way, indeed, I think I am lucky. Even my experience with old Evanston did me good in one way. Indeed, I am inclined to think that in some mysterious way everything is for our good. And I believe that old man has since suffered untold agonies. He has never had any luck since. He used to live well and the last I saw of him, as I shall explain in the next chapter, he was indeed most wretched. He ruined my prospects for a good home life, but now as I think of him, I do not hate him. His later end was too miserable to call for anything but pity....

And now I can revert, for a brief
time, to my love affair with Harry, for
only today a change has come, and I
believe I am being cured! Since I wrote
the above I have seen him again.
After the show tonight—I am writing
at mid-night—I went to the Metropol-
tan Hotel to see Ada Lane, the lion-
tamer, and sat talking with her in her
room until nearly eleven o'clock. I then
decided to start home, and just as I was
leaving the hotel, Harry walked in. My
heart jumped, but I merely said "Hello,"
and "good-night" both together and went
on to the office and there met Billy K—,
whom I asked to come to the parlor and
play over a song which I am learning
for next week. We played, talked, and
laughed, altogether both of us were feel-
ing a bit blue, for a few minutes, when
Harry came to the door and asked for
Van, and I told him we were waiting for
him. Harry went away, and soon I said
good-night to Billy and started to go
home.

But as I passed through the hall I saw
a blonde girl standing talking to some
one who was twirling a cane, and it
flashed through my mind that the cane
twirler was Harry! And it was, for
another step and I was face to face with
him. I hummed a tune, and he said
"Hello." I answered with the same, and
as I went down stairs, I continued to

hum the tune, and the strangest calm
came over me. Although I felt a pe-
culiar sensation as of pain, it was noth-
ing to what I have endured recently. I
never ceased humming the tune until I
came in contact with the people in the
street.

A week ago I know I should almost
have gone mad, but I have been pre-
paring myself for something like this,
and it did not seem a surprise, for in
running the cards some time ago I found
a blonde woman often with him, and
when I saw them together to-night it
just appeared like a dream acted out be-
fore my eyes. It seems to me that I
knew it somehow before it had occured.

I have often said I am a lucky woman,
and this goes to prove it; for has not
Almighty God, who sees all things, been
preparing me for this? Why, really, I
don't feel as if I had a nerve in my body,
and early this morning I was very nerv-
ous and a week ago I was all nerves.
Why, a week ago Thursday morning
about four o'clock my heart was almost
broken. I can never express how I
suffered. And then this happened on
Thursday, too. All the events of my
life of any importance have happened
on Thursday. There was a splendid
article in to-day's paper by my favorite
writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which was
almost in answer to an unasked question
of mine. I cannot help marvelling at my
feelings to-night, for though I love him
still, that terrible pain has gone. I won-
der how Ella Wheeler Wilcox would
explain. She has wonderful sympathy
and keen psychology and I think I will
write and ask her.

I think I am a bit of a psychologist
myself, and I am sometimes a strange
mixture. I am a strange mixture of a
little good, much bad, no hate, much
love, and very little suspicion. Really,
I feel as if I wanted to be a philosopher
to-night, but not like my friend the
newspaper man. He is too cynical—I
prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I'd like
to tell her about my meeting with Harry
and the blonde girl, and my feelings!

CHAPTER IV

It was at Waco, Texas, that Charley

and I were divorced. I was still very
fond of him, and he of me, and it was
for that reason mainly that I continued
my business relations with the Evan-
stons for some time. But I now lived
as I pleased and no longer boarded in
the same place with them, and I also
demanded and received a salary when-
ever there was any money. We stayed
a whole summer at Waco and I brought
on mother and she and I lived together,
and seldom saw the Evanstons except at
the theatre. We still traveled occasion-
ally, playing week-stands and giving
mixed dramatic and vaudeville shows.

Old man Evanston was such a bad
manager and actor, that as my ambition
and ability grew, I saw clearly that if
only for business reasons, I ought to
drop him entirely; and I determined to
do so as soon as I could make other ar-
rangements for a livelihood for myself
and mother. He was of course, in addi-
tion, a disagreeable object to me, and I
often shuddered when I saw him, be-
cause of the past.

A Southern boy at Waco was very
anxious to marry me, but his family
objected because I was an actress. I
used to talk to him about my ex-husband,
and once, I remember, he told me, ob-
viously, that I was still in love with
him. I said I wasn't, but I really think
I was then, and for sometime after-
wards. But when I went away with
him in another company some time after
that, I lost all affection for him, although
we still continued to be good friends,
and if we met now, I think I and my
ex-husband would be chums.

During this time at Waco I gradually
recovered my spirits, my natural gaiety
returned to me and I had innumerable
flirtations, which I have continued ever
since. We used to have birthday parties
in every town we played, and these were
occasions rich in opportunity for amor-
ous diversion. It was at a birthday
party at Waco that I met the Southern
boy, and I was really not bad to him,
as his fond papa imagined. He was
tied up at the time with a disreputable
girl who used to take large sums of
money from him—money his rich father
thought was going to me, whom the boy

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really wanted to marry. One day his father came to me, after the show, in my dressing-room. He began to weep, and begged me not to ruin his son.

"I'll give you $1,000 if you will leave town," he sobbed.

Now, I don't object to presents if they are made in the right way and without unworthy conditions. But this offer made me angry, for it seemed to say that I was a wicked adventuress. I therefore requested him to go to a warm place and also asked him to leave my dressing-room immediately. But thinking it over afterwards I decided I would act on the man's suggestion and leave town as soon as I could, for I did not want to make trouble for the boy, and I also desired to see the last of old man Evanston, who was still an eye-sore to me.

Charley's chum was a young fellow named Tom Stewart, who played a piano in a disreputable house at Waco. It was there that Charley, whose habits were never very good, met him; and for a time, Charley had a room in this same house! Such was my ex-husband! When I think of my companions at that time, I wonder how it happened that something even more miserable and gloomy did not happen to me than what has actually turned out to be my lot.

My opportunity to leave Waco came through Tom Stuart. His father, who was styled "Doc", was the manager of what is called a "medicine show", that is a traveling vaudeville crowd with a doctor who makes a speech before and during the show and sells patent medicines and all sorts of faked concoctions.

"Doc" Stewart was an illiterate, drunken, dope-fiend, who came to Waco from a little town named Gresbeck to see if he could not raise some performers for his little show. He had been at one time with a medicine show run by a man named Whitehall. Dr. Whitehall's aggregation carried a nice big tent, under which they played in rainy weather. Most medicine shows have carpets, but some are too poor even to possess a tent. Now, Whitehall's wife was a bad woman at heart. She could not have too many men, and "Doc" Stewart was

one of them. After Whitehall died, she lost all her money, and finally ended up in the sporting house at Waco, where "Doc" Stewart's son Tom was pianist-player at the time I was in Waco.

One day "Doc" Stewart went to see this woman, and Tom introduced him to my ex-husband, Charley, who at the time occupied a spare room in the house. "Doc" told Charley he was looking for some performers to start a medicine show with, and Charley recommended me.

"She is a great performer, Doc," he said. "She can do anything. She used to be my wife and I ought to know. She will make your show, if you can get her to go with you."

So Charley introduced his new-found friend to me. I'll never forget my first impression of "Doc" Stewart. He looked like a regular tough. He was a short, stout, insignificant-looking man, with a thick neck, a silk hat on the back of his head, no shirt or collar and a cigarette in the place where a tooth ought to be. Even at that time he seemed to me unusually tough, but I was quite in the mood for an adventure and very anxious to leave Waco, so I closed with him, and we left town on the midnight train for a little town of about 600 inhabitants where we intended to open our medicine show. There was only one street in the village, a post office and a bank, and a few gullible Reubs. It was there I was introduced to the medicine business.

Our show was of a very modest character. We had no tent, only a side wall and board seats, where it cost ten cents to sit down. Those customers who were willing to stand could see the performance for nothing. We had to do that, so that we could call it a "free" affair and so save the cost of a license. Mrs. Stewart, the "Doc's" wife, sold tickets. The "Doc" played the organ, sang songs and sold the medicine. Charley was the black-faced comedian and I sang sentimental songs, danced a bit in short skirts and helped to make the medicine.

"Making the medicine" was the most complicated part of the show, and even that was not very scientific. For a hair

641

tonic we used rain water, bay rum and a little burgomant and anoline to make it red. When we were flush with money we put in other ingredients. The less money we had, the more rain water we put in. The tooth-powder which we made in the wash-bowl, was composed of chalk and sugar pounded together. Then we would label it, "Dr. Stewart's Great Tooth Powder." From time to time we would manufacture other valuable things, but I am bound to say that, even at that time when my ideas were not as grand as they are now, I regarded it all as a "shine show."

In the afternoon "Doc" would hire a carriage, take his banjo and his large company of three persons and make a "pitch", that is, sell medicines, jokes and songs in the streets. At other times, he would give a "tally hoo", that is to say, he would go outside the tent and sing, in order to attract a crowd. He would offer to pull teeth and as a great attraction would often reduce the price of his great tooth powder and hair oil.

My salary in this great dramatic company was $8 a week, and my ex-husband got $10, for he was the black-face comedian and a great card. I eked out my small salary by having frequent birthdays, on which occasions I used to get presents from the Reubs we met. Once I received a mandolin, and at another time a fan.

In a little town in Texas I met a Banker, named Boliver, who was infatuated with me. He was bald-headed, and "Doc" sold him a whole jug of hair-oil at twice the ordinary price. As "Doc" was a terrible drinker and gambler we did not save much money, and Boliver loaned him a large sum of money so that we could leave that particular village. The banker was so good that we stayed in that town a long time, but at the end, Boliver thought we might as well go, as he wanted to keep a reserve in the bank; and besides, he began to believe that I was on the level. So many single men have come to believe that! So he loaned "Doc" a large sum, as I have said.

I grew to like this man "Doc" Stewart, although he had absolutely no virtues

except good nature, and, on the other hand, he had all the vices. His wife was devoted to him. She had been a sporting character, and when women like that fall for a man they stick like glue. At Ennis, Texas, "Doc's" son, Tom, joined the company, and he and I grew to be great pals. So much so that "Doc" said to me one day:

"Now, that you are divorced from Charley, why don't you marry Tom?"

I laughed heartily, and so did he, for he knew how I felt at the time. He knew I liked both the boys, but he also knew that I liked freedom better. He did not know my reasons, but he recognized in me a jolly bohemian, and he liked that sort. And that is why I liked him.

And yet what a dance he led his wife! She used to try to prevent him going out in the evening, for she knew that meant he would get drunk and gamble away all the money. Charley, Tom, Mrs. Stewart and I used to play cards at night, and sometimes "Doc" was with us. More frequently he would get away with the "boys" of the town, and he often played tricks on his wife, so that he could go out.

One night he came in to his wife's room, where she and I were playing cards, and said:

"Well, I'm not going out with those boys to-night."

I knew it was a bluff, or he would not have been so determined about it.

While we were drinking beer and playing cards, "Doc" undressed and went to bed. Soon Charley came in, and called to "Doc" that there was a man down stairs who wanted his tooth pulled. Mrs. Stewart was suspicious and "Doc" yelled out to Charley:

"Tell him I'll yank it out in the morning for him."

Then Tom came in, and said: "Father, that man says he wants his tooth out now."

Upon this, "Doc" appeared to be terribly angry, and as Charley and Tom continued the game by bringing fresh and impudent messages, "Doc" wrathfully dressed himself swearing that he

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would go out and lick H— out of that fellow!"

He went out, but did not return, and in the morning Tom found his father in a gambling house, dead drunk, with no money in his pocket.

"Doc" had as many vices as old man Evanston, and drunkenness in addition, but somehow he was a good fellow, and that made all the difference. Old man Evanston was a degenerate Puritan, and "Doc" was simply a tough.

While we were at Ennis, I saw the last of my old man of the sea. It so happened that when I left Waco with "Doc's" company, old Evanston was out of town. When he returned and found that Charley and I had gone, and that his means of support were taken from him, I have no doubt he had a number of terrible spells. He tried to bully my mother, whom I had left at Waco, into telling him where I was, and he also tried to hold up the post-man. One day my mother pointed a pistol at him, to compel him to leave her alone.

He was an old coward, and was losing his grip on everybody. So he ran out of the house and went directly for consolation to the sporting place where Tom Stewart, who had not yet joined us on the road, still was. He discovered, through Tom, where Charley and I were and wrote repeatedly to Waco, both to Charley and me, begging me to send him money so that he could join our company. We returned his last letters unopened, and then we did not hear from him for many days.

It seems, in the meantime, he was walking to Ennis! But he had an impulse coming from the young men of Waco, who told him they would tar and feather him if he did not get out. When Charley and I ceased writing to him, the old man, for revenge, published an article in the Kansas City Times defamatory of my character. The young men of Waco knew it was a lie, for I had been in their town all summer, and they knew better, and besides, I was very popular. So they gave old Evanston notice, and he walked out of Waco on the railroad track.

One rainy night in Ennis when we

could not give a show because there was no top to our tent, I was playing cards with Tom and Mrs. Stewart, when Charley came in, his face white with fear, and said to me:

"Papa's here!"

I had not been afraid of old Evanston for months, as I have said, but something, perhaps the look on Charley's face, brought back, for a moment, my old dread. But when it comes to a crisis, I can be very cool—at least since my early teens.

I thought Charley was a fool to blurt out in that way before the others. I appeared to pay no attention to him, but kept on playing cards.

"He's coming here to-night," continued Charley.

"Who's coming?" I asked, as indifferently as I could, at the same time giving Charley a look intended to shut him up.

At last he took the hint, and then, while waiting for the old man to come, I had to do something. As a stage stunt it was one of the finest I ever did; for I was very nervous, and yet when "Doc" came up and said Dr. DeG— (old Evanston's stage name) wanted to see me, I assumed ignorance, and continued to play as coolly as ever.

I did not go down stairs, but went into my room and locked and bolted my door; but I did not sleep that night. I don't know why it affected me so. Perhaps because the old man had been out of my mind so long that now it came back in a hideous rush.

But the next day Charley and I had an interview with old Evanston, and I felt nothing but pity and loathing. He was greatly broken, and I wondered how he ever could have influenced me as he did. He told me he had been to a priest and had confessed his sins, and then, with sobs and tears the old wretch told his son all about his relations with me! I felt so humiliated that I was not even angry. Charley said nothing during the long and broken recital. I don't think it moved him much, for Charley was hardly a man. At the end of the interview, the old man turned to me and said:

"Will you forgive me?"

"I'll try," I said.

Then he asked me for a kiss and I replied:

"No, but here's my hand, and I hope we'll never meet again."

We gave him a little money—all we had. It was not enough for him to ride, so he again walked out of town. I have never seen him since.

It was about this time I met "Reddy," one of the flames who have meant the most to me. It is queer how many of the men I have liked have had red hair. "Reddy", Flay and now Harry! "Reddy" came to visit Tom Stewart at Ennis, where, however, I saw him only a short time. Most of our love-making was done in letters, for he was smitten at first sight. He worked at an ice-factory in Dallas, but some of the letters were very warm! He sent me his little dog Tootsie, a beautiful white Eskimo, who became so fond of me that she was jealous of mother!

As time went on, Reddy's admiration for me—at a distance!—grew, and in a letter a week or two after the above I find the following choice morsel:

"Regarding the position you offer me with "Doc's" Specialty Company, will say that what you offer me is perfectly acceptable. In fact, though not withing to emulate Atlas, I have such ambition to see you that I would be willing to carry the tent and even the talent about the country. You see my ambition is vivid. May, is this not love? 'Twas generally conceded that I loved Ethel. She believed it, and so did I. I loved her most devotedly until she proved deceptful, and no matter what accusation you make against me regarding my (?) vanity let me assure you that I think just that much of E. W. Marsh, Esq., that I don't cast my affections to everyone who comes along. Since I have known you I have no love for myself, but really, my friend, I had the same opinion of your own sweet little self that you are very much in love with May—as I am. If you will come to the Fair here, I can assure "Doc's" success, and will prove to you that I love you as sincerely as I ever professed to love Ethel. I

am going driving this evening with Miss Verna Gorham, a very pretty little soubrette. I wish 'twas May instead. Then my happiness would be complete."

After my usual limit—two weeks—were up, I began to get tired of Reddy's letters. They began to get too warm, and besides his style was stilted and I didn't like his selections from the poets, so I replied to his effusions on postal cards.

After my first postal he wrote: "Permit me, my love, to express in feeble words my appreciation and gratitude for the photo and the postal. I will love you because of your confidence in me, because of your wondrous beauty, because you are so good and truthful, and last but not least, because you are May—the same, pure and noble May always, who is worthy of the love of any man—

"What I said to you regarding your beauty was said in all seriousness and sincerity (remember that you have promised to believe all that I say to you) I do most positively think you are the perfection of beauty and loveliness, none have I ever seen who I thought as pretty. Tell me, Little Woman, do you believe me or have you still doubts of my sincerity? Again judge me wrongly by saying that men see you behind the scenes with powder and paint on your face which impresses us with an opinion of falseness, not considering the real character and disposition of you. As you say, one is naturally impelled to form an opinion upon subjects as they appear; had I seen you in the former "predicament" (?), doubtless, I should have been impressed as you say, but fortunately, I was acquainted with you in your real guise and had formed my opinion before you disguised your true womanly character."

After my third postal card, Reddy began to cool off, and commenced to demand the return of his dog. I had grown very fond of Tootsie, but he was so persistent that I finally had to send her back. I saw Reddy only once after our correspondence when we were playing at Sherman, Texas. I lay off for a few days and went to Waco, to see mother. I wrote the banker Boliver, and

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two other admirers who lived along the route, and whom I thought I would like to see for a few minutes. After my visit with mother, I wnet to Dallas, before returning to the company, and saw Reddy there, and also another admirer.

Reddy, the other fellow, and I, all had dinner together and afterwards a little something to drink in his room in the hotel. I did not have enough money to pay my bill, and did not like to ask Reddy for it. That would have been humiliating. So I got the other fellow to go into the hall with me for a moment and asked him for $2. He did not have it, he said, and I finally was obliged to ask Reddy. He appeared surprised that they had sent me a bill, paid it and took me to the train and bought my fare for me. I was grateful to him for not offering to loan me any money; and I made a point of sending him the amount of my bill and railroad ticket. I thought that was due myself.

But I did not always feel that way about money. When the Banker Boller came to visit me a little later, I allowed him to buy me a new trunk, for which he received only one stingy little kiss. I had borrowed the money previously from a drygoods clerk with a salary of $3 per week, and had not intended to pay him back, for he did not interest me, but when I found I could get the necessary $18 from Boliver, I sent back the money to the poor little clerk. I did it for pure pity.

Then I traveled back to the company at Sherman, where I met another young man in the dry-goods store. I was at the time looking for $500 to start out alone in my profession, for my ambition to better myself and get away from my lowly companions was steadily growing. I tried to get the money from this clerk, but he said he hoped to be able to take me to Europe in ten years! I could not see that, although he offered to pay my board bills for life. If I had ever married such a dull, quiet fellow, I would have taken poison long before this.

Just two months after I saw the last of old Evanston I met the man who became my first real love, and with whom I lived for many years. During the in-

term of about two years between my term of about two years between my divorce from Charley and my meeting with the first man whom I ever really loved, I was quite happy. I had thrown off the "Evil Power" and had a good time. I amused myself and enjoyed the bohemian life of the road. I began to think for myself, and loved my independence, and although I liked many men during those years, I never allowed myself to get intimate with any of them. I seemed, through the influence this freedom had on me, to grow younger and prettier. Certainly, when I was eighteen I looked twenty-three, and when I was twenty-one I did not look more than sixteen.

It was through a girl named Lottie that I met the man with whom I was to live and work for so long. We had given up the medicine show and had formed a specialty company. Charley and Tom had left and we were joined by several others, among them a man named Mountain and this girl Lottie.

Lottie and I became dear friends immediately, and have remained so ever since, in spite of what most people will think was a very strange relation that existed between us, and in spite of her past, which was very bad, or at least unfortunate.

When a very young girl Lottie had been in a sporting house. As I have already said, my lot seemed to throw me in with a great many of these people. A large number of these girls are with shows, and it is difficult for them to conceal their past. These women have never seemed to me the monsters that the world paints them. They seem miserable, that is all. I suppose one reason they never filled me with horror is that I can always accommodate myself to my environment. With my mother's country relations, I can be like them. I never use an oath in their presence and spent a whole summer recently with my aunt without being bored. But when I am with the Broadway set I can be as highflown and profane as any of them.

Well, the girl Lottie was not a bad sort, she had been up against almost everything. She was taken out of the

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sporting house six or seven years before I met her by a man named Brownell—the man who was to be my next fate, and whom I was to meet through her! She lived with Brownell several years, and then he got tired of her and left her to struggle with life. After that she fell for almost everything—dope, and all sorts of vices. At one time she was mixed up with counterfeiters and was arrested and sent to jail, but got off, for she is wise as an old grafter. I have befriended her for many years, have given her money and helped her to get along on the stage, for I really think there was something good in her, and at times she was so sad! She almost committed suicide once. Some people can have the toughest experience and yet not be bad at heart, and Lottie was one of them.

When Lottie joined our show she had found another regular lover—this man Mountain, who immediately began to fancy me, for I was jolly and she was melancholy. But I could not see him with a glass, and I soon froze him off. I might have flirted with him a little if it had not been for Lottie, whom I already began to like.

But the day soon came when I did not want to flirt for quite a while, for I

fell desperately in love. One night we were playing a little town in Texas, when Mountain came rushing to the dressing-room where Lottie and I were, and yelled:

“Ed is here!”

How significant those words proved to me! For they introduced the man I was to live with for eight years—as his wife in the eyes of the world—and from whom I was to separate with joy and thanksgiving.

Lottie went across the stage to meet this Edward Brownell, and I, too, rushed forward to get a glimpse of him, for Lottie's stories about him had greatly stirred my curiosity. I was eager to see the wonderful fellow. As he kissed Lottie, I could see that he was well-dressed, but he did not make a hit with me at first. He chewed tobacco, and was not very handsome. I evidently pleased him at the rehearsal, for he told me afterwards that he could not imagine why I was with that bunch, because I was so much better than the others. He imagined I must be “Doc” Stewart's mistress. I also saw that he was much more clever than Mountain, and I told Lottie she was foolish to fall for Mountain, after she had possessed Brownell.

Pasteur and Rabies

BY GEORGE GIBIER RAMBAUD, M .S., M.D.,

Director of the New York Pasteur Institute.

Edinburgh, Feb. 18, 1874.

My dear Sir:—

Allow me to offer you a pamphlet which I am sending you under separate cover, in which are described some experiments on a subject upon which you have thrown so much light: the germ theory and fermentation. I hope that you may read with interest what I wrote about an organism which you were the first to study in your "Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactic.

I do not know if you ever see the "British Annals of Surgery." If you have read them, you may have seen from time to time descriptions of the antiseptic system which, since nine years, I am endeavoring to perfect.

Allow me to take this opportunity to tender you my most cordial thanks for having demonstrated to me, through your brilliant researches, the germ theory of putrefaction and to have given me the only principle which could bring to a successful issue the antiseptic method.

If you should ever come to Edinburgh, it would, I believe, be a true reward for you to see, in our hospital, to how great an extent humankind has benefited through your work. Need I add what great satisfaction I would feel to show you what surgery owes you?

Pardon the forwardness which prompts me through our common love for science and believe in the profound respect of

Yours most sincerely,
JOSEPH LISTER.

This early tribute to the genius of Pasteur was immediately recalled to my memory as I read the opening paragraph of the article "Pasteur and Rabies" (THE TREND, May, 1914) to which the Editor of THE TREND called my attention, graciously offering me space in the magazine columns, if I wished to answer it.

This letter from Lister is the only answer I wish to make to a more or less rabid attack on established facts and principles, which begins in this flippant manner:

"Pasteur, having in his laboratory investigations, as a chemist, made sundry discoveries useful to wine growers for the prevention of fermentation,* went on to devise a method of treatment for the cure of rabies." Then the author goes on, quoting statements made, mostly, a decade or two ago, by an array of illustrious unknown, (with one or two exceptions tending to prove the non-existence of rabies, the uselessness of the anti-rabic treatment, the folly of Pasteur, etc., etc.

No answer need be made to such preposterous and childish allegations. There are, at this time, few people who are totally ignorant on the subject of rabies. And yet, in view of the possible harm which might be caused by the publication of such erroneous statements, it may not be amiss to insist once more upon a correct presentation of facts.—As to the monument erected to Pasteur, one droplet of mud cannot soil it!

Pasteur,** made his first experiments on rabies in 1881. His first discovery had been made in 1848, on the polarisation of crystals. In 1856 he began his studies on fermentation and read his first communication on "lactic fermentation" before the Scientific Society of Lille in August 1857; he was then Dean of the Lille Faculty of Sciences.—In January 1860, he was the recipient of the Prize on Experimental Physiology, given by the Academy of Sciences of Paris, for his experiments on alcoholic, lactic, and tartaric acid fermentations.

At that time he was already foreseeing the solution of the famous question of spontaneous generation. With Pasteur a theory did not remain long as

*Italics mine G. G. B.

**Born, December 27, 1822.

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such: realization soon had to follow. He had the genius of finding devices for overcoming every obstacle which presented itself, and every experiment was carried out with mathematical exactness. With the aid of his little peculiar long-swan necked flasks containing a culture medium and which he was carrying through the cellar of the Paris Observatory, to the vineyards of his native Jura, and to the top of Montauvert near Chamonix, to expose them to the atmospheric air under varying conditions, he finally solved the problem and demonstrated that there could be no fermentation, no decomposition, without the presence of "organized corpuscles which exist in the atmosphere."

In 1865, after several years of despair in the silk industry of Southern France, Pasteur was asked by the French Government to study the question: within three years he had not only found the cause of the disease of the silk worms; but devised, and proved to the satisfaction of the world, his method for the eradication of the scourge.

Meanwhile he had studied the maladies to which the juice of the grape is subject, and had shown that by heating the juice to a certain temperature, it would ever remain sweet and pure. Through the discovery that the myco derma aceti was the organism wholly responsible for the production of vinegar and its use in *pure* cultures, Pasteur had shown to the vinegar producers of Orleans how to avoid the great losses to which they were so frequently subjected. In 1871, he applied to the study of beer the method he had used with wine and vinegar, and showed, first in Paris, then to the big brewers of London, how beer uniformly pure and stable in quality could be obtained by a careful selection of the yeast, elimination of foreign ferments, and sterilization of the apparatus used in manufacturing. To him the brewery industry owes several millions every year.

Pasteur's labors are too numerous to permit of their history being told here. From 1871 to 1881, a great deal of his time was spent in the study of a number

of contagious diseases, and during that time he demonstrated that the bacillus observed by Davaine in the blood of animals suffering of anthrax was the sole cause of the disease, and in looking for a preventative against the malady, he evolved the process of attenuated viruses used since then as vaccines. Chicken cholera, the "rouget" of swine, were successfully dealt with. Industrial trials and agriculturists were the first to derive direct benefits from the great chemist's discoveries. In a lecture before the "Royal Society of London," Huxley, the great English physiologist, said "The discoveries of Mr. Pasteur would alone be sufficient to cover the ransom of five billion francs paid by France to Germany in 1870,"—and they really shared greatly in helping the country to recuperate from this enormous drain on its wealth.

Between 1867 and 1870, in the district of Novgorod, in Russia, 56,000 animals (horses, cattle and sheep) and 528 persons had died of anthrax. In France, the losses caused by this disease were enormous. In one department (Cantal) the yearly monetary loss was computed at 3,000,000 francs. In 1882, in France, 614,000 sheep and 84,000 head of cattle were vaccinated: epidemics were completely eradicated. The mortality which for ten years had been over 10%, had become less than 1%.

One day, while Pasteur was walking on one of the streets of Clermont-Ferrand, a peasant, meeting him, stopped short, tossed his great felt hat in the air, shouting "Vive Pasteur," and coming to the great little man he seized both of his hands, saying simply: "You have saved my herds!"

In medicine, the early works of Pasteur on fermentation and the theory of spontaneous generation, were soon utilized—not at home—but in England. Starting from the principle established by the young French scientist, Lister, a surgeon of Edinburgh, evolved his anti-septic system. Until that time, the mortality after operations, whether in hospitals or on the battlefield, had been

PASTEUR AND RABIES

651

high—in many cases appalling. The so-called hospital gangrene was the dread of surgeons and simple operations were regarded with fear on account of their frequent fatal complications. In Paris, in 1868, the mortality following amputations was 60%; at the Maternity Hospital in 1864 there had been 310 deaths among 1130 patients. Lister began to use his method of antisepsis in 1867; in two years, out of 40 amputations, he had only 6 deaths. In 1882, since the application of antisepsis in general operations, the mortality was reduced from 50% to 5%, and in maternity hospitals, from 10 to 20% it was reduced to 3 per 1000, and later to 1 per 1000.

Already in 1876, Tyndall, the great English physicist, was writing to Pasteur: "For the first time in the history of science we have the right to entertain the sincere hope that, regarding epidemic diseases, medicine will soon be delivered from empiricism and placed on a real scientific basis; when this day shall have arrived, humanity, in my opinion, will acknowledge that to you belongs the greatest share of its gratitude." And later, Charles Richet, one of the greatest scientists of to-day, the last recipient of the Nobel prize in medicine, said "There are two sciences of medicine, one which came before, and the other which came after, Pasteur."

This man, who had already done so much to alleviate disease and suffering, was, in some quarters, looked upon as a terrible executioner on account of his experiments upon animals—the actual work being, I must add, carried on mostly by his assistants. For, as a matter of fact, Pasteur was very sensitive.

"One cannot imagine how much repugnance Pasteur had had to overcome in order to visit patients and be present at autopsies," wrote Roux. "His sensitivity was extreme, and he suffered morally and physically when witnessing the sufferings of others. How often did we see him come out ill from the hospitals and amphitheatres. But his love for science, his eagerness for the

truth were stronger: he would return the next day."

In 1880, Pasteur began his researches on rabies. In 1881 he had demonstrated the presence of the virus in the brains of the animals dying of the disease. However, in the experiments upon rabbits and animals, the ordinary subcutaneous inoculation gave very uncertain and varying results. Pasteur saw the necessity of depositing the virus in immediate contact with the brain of the animals used in the tests. But the trephining of dogs became a very serious cause of worry to him. He had an absolute horror of causing an animal any suffering, and no matter how short was to be the duration of an operation, Pasteur insisted that the animal, dog or rabbit, be under the influence of chloroform.

"He would attend without much protest a simple operation like a subcutaneous injection," writes Roux, "and yet, if the animal growled in the least, Pasteur was at once filled with pity and would console and encourage the victim in a way that would have seemed comical if it had not been so pathetic. The thought that the skull of a dog was to be perforated was almost unbearable to him. He wanted the experiment to be made and yet he feared to see it performed. I did it one day that he was absent. The next day, as I was telling him that the intracranial inoculation presented no difficulty, he pitied the dog: 'Poor animal, his brain is probably injured; he must be paralyzed.' Without answering I fetched the animal into the laboratory. When Pasteur saw the dog full of life, nosing in every corner of the room, he showed the greatest relief and satisfaction."

Pasteur himself even said that he would never have had the courage to hunt and kill a bird! Darwin, like Pasteur, could not admit that animals be made to suffer needlessly; in a letter dated April 14th, 1881, in which he was approving of all measures which could be taken against acts of cruelty, he added: "On the other hand, I know that physiology cannot make any progress if

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the experiments on live animals are sup-
pressed, and I have the sincere convic-
tion that to retard the progress of physi-
ology is to commit a crime against
humankind. Unless all that science has
done for man is ignored, we must be
convinced that physiology is called upon,
in the future, to render incalculable ser-
vices, not only to man, but also to
animals. Witness the results obtained
by Mr. Pasteur in his work on the germs
of contagious diseases; are not animals
the first to be benefited? How many
lives have been saved, how much suffer-
ing avoided through the discovery of
parasitic worms after the experiments
made by Virchow and others on live
animals!"

Indeed, had not Claude Bernard, one
of the greatest physiologists of the last
century, written, in August 1863: "You
ask me what are the principal discov-
eries made through vivi-section, that
they may be mentioned as an argument
in favor of this method of study. There
is to be cited all that which has been
accomplished in experimental physi-
ology; there is not one single fact which
is not the direct and necessary sequence
of a vivisection. From Galen who sev-
ered the laryngeal nerves and thus
learned their function in respiration and
voice production; from Harvey who dis-
covered the circulation of the blood;
Parquet and Bellis, the existence of the
lymphatic channels, Haller, the excita-
bility of muscles, Bell and Magendie,
the functions of nerves; in biology, all
that we know on digestion, circulation,
the liver, the sympathetic nerves, bones,
development, everything, absolutely
everything, is the result of vivisection,
either alone or combined with other
means of study."

It was on February 2t4h, 1884, after
a little over three years' work on the
subject, that Pasteur announced at a
meeting of the Academy of Sciences,
that he had succeeded in immunizing
dogs against rabies. He asked that a
commission be appointed to control and
verify his experiments and results. The
Commission, named by the Government
at the end of May, was composed of

Béclard, Dean of the School of Medi-
cine, Paul Bert, Henri Bouley, Villemin,
Vulpian, all men whose word was law
in the scientific world, members of the
Academy of Sciences and Academy of
Medicine, and M. Tisserand, Secretary
of Agriculture. In August of that year,
Pasteur went to Copenhagen to represent
his country at the International Medical
Congress. Five general meetings were
organized to give a few servants an
opportunity to speak on subjects of uni-
versal interest. Pasteur was begged to
inaugurate the series. Not only all the
members of the Congress but all those
who had any interest in things scientific
had come to hear from Pasteur himself
the exposé of the method which had al-
lowed him to progress with so much
certainty and precision, step by step,
towards the solution of the problem of
rabies. He first declared the fallacy of
the so widely spread notion that rabies
can occur spontaneously. Whatever the
conditions in which a dog or any other
animal may be placed, rabies will never
appear if there has been no biting or
licking by a rabid animal: a new proof
of the germ theory. Rabies is so far
from being spontaneous that it is un-
known in certain countries. In order
that a country be entirely free from
rabies, it is sufficient to have a law, as
in Australia, imposing a quarantine of
several months for every dog coming
from a foreign land. Thus a dog just
bitten by a rabid animal would die in
quarantine. A few prophylactic meas-
ures and the danger is avoided. Vainly
will the objection be raised that there
must have been, one day, the first rabid
dog. "That is, said Pasteur, a problem
which is insolvable in the present state
of science, inasmuch as it is part of a
great unknown, of the origin of life it-
self." And there is nothing to be added
to the statements made by Pasteur him-
self thirty years ago: they are as true
to-day as they were then.

It may be mentioned here that this
disease, rabies or hydrophobia, the exis-
tence of which is still doubted by a few
inadequately equipped individuals, was
known many centuries ago. The oldest

PASTEUR AND RABIES

trace of it that we have found is in the history of the death of Akteon, a son of Aristeus, about thirteen Centuries B. C. Aristotle, three Centuries B.C. speaks of the disease in dogs and how it is communicated from one dog to another, but he adds that, in his opinion, man cannot be afflicted; while Celsus, who lived at the beginning of our era, gave the first detailed description of the disease, which he called hydrophobia. "A man afflicted with this disease, said he, is tortured by thirst, and at the same time evinces an uncontrollable fear of water." He advised treating the bites inflicted by dogs by suction and cauterization with the actual cautery. Later, many fantastic remedies were advocated. Pliny the Elder advised the patient to eat the liver of the dog inflicting the bite. This met with but little favor. Galen, who was opposed to it, recommended another remedy: eating the eyes of crawfish! Later it was recognized to eat "an omelet prepared with ground oyster shells;" it was specified to discard the outer scales of the shells and use only the inner layers of scales. Then, not so very long ago, there was the pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Hubert in Belgium. In the 17th Century ocean baths were advocated. I could go on mentioning scores of other remedies supposed to ward off this disease dreaded by everyone. When it had developed—and it was known that this meant sure death—it was customary to smother the poor victims between two mattresses in order to end their sufferings and keep them from harming others.

One of Pasteur's childhood remembrances was that of the terror spread in his native town when he was nine years old, by a rabid wolf which had passed through it, biting men and animals. He had seen a neighbor's wounds cauterized with red-hot iron at the nearest blacksmith's shop; a dozen people were bitten: eight of them bitten on the hands or on the face, had died of the disease. This souvenir and the absolute incurability of the malady were the reasons which led Pasteur to attack

the problem of finding a preventative for it. The Commission appointed in May, 1884 testified to the fact that he had succeeded.

On July 6th, 1885, a Monday morning, a little boy of nine, Joseph Meister, was brought from Alsace by his mother. He had been bitten two days before by a rabid dog. When Pasteur saw the boy's fourteen wounds on the hands and legs, he was deeply concerned and perplexed. What was he to do for this child? Could he take the risk of giving him the treatment which he had so successfully used with dogs? Pending his decision, he proceeded to give the mother and child, practically lost in Paris, all the comfort possible, and procured a room for them near his laboratory. Then he communicated with Prof. Vulpian and Dr. Grancher, laying the case before them. They came to see the child and it was decided to administer the treatment; the injections were given by Grancher. During the ten days of treatmen, Pasteur was unable to work; he could hardly sleep at night and was feverish. His anxiety was extreme, in spite of his firm conviction that he had conquered the virus of the disease. As to the little patient, his wounds were healing rapidly and his days were spent in the yard of the old Collège Rollin, where Pasteur had his laboratory, playing with rabbits and guinea pigs. Little did he realize that he was the first human being to receive the direct benefit of the discoveries made by Pasteur—discoveries which were epoch-making in the history of science—in the history of the world!

Three months later, on October 26th, Pasteur was describing to the Academy of Sciences the treatment which had been administered to Joseph Meister, who was then perfectly well. Several members made speeches, expressing their admiration for the genius of Pasteur. Bouley, the President, said:

> "We can safely assume that the date of to-day's session will forever be a memorable one in the history of medicine and a glorious one for French science, since it is the date

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of one of the greatest progresses made in medicine: that of the discovery of an efficacious means of preventing a disease, the incurability of which has been recognized for centuries. From today on humanity is armed to fight successfully against rabies. This we owe to Mr. Pasteur, and we could never have too much admiration and gratitude for the efforts which have led to such a brilliant result."

Of course, space does not allow me to go into the history of the polemics which had been suscitated by the new theories advanced by Pasteur, no matter how thoroughly they were demonstrated by facts. "Convince a man against his will, and he is of his own opinion still." Pasteur's opponents were rapidly convinced one after another. The most bitter one was Peter, one of the best clinicians of Paris at that time. Peter had been a successful teacher and practitioner; his results—for the time—were as good as could then be obtained. What need had he of such a revolution? It was Peter who, at a meeting of the Academy of Medicine, where a discussion of the Brand cold bath treatment of typhoid fever—which had been successfully used for ten years and was for many years thereafter one of our most efficient therapeutic means against typhoid—was in order, and during which the theory of the microbic origin of the disease was advanced, said:

"I do not believe in this invasion of microbes that is threatening us as the eleventh plague of Egypt!"

And taking to task the "chemists sprinkled with a grain of medicine," he added:

"They have come to see in the typhoid fevers only *the* typhoid fever, in the typhoid fever only the fever, in the fever only the heat. So they have had the brilliant idea to fight heat with cold. The system is on fire? Throw cold water on it. That is a fireman's doctrine!"

However, at the next meeting he acknowledged that it was "but fair to confess that we owe to Mr. Pasteur's researches the most useful applications in medicine as in obstetrics."

And yet he would—most illogically—declare in the next breath that "the discovery of the causative elements of virulent diseases would not throw such heralded great light either on pathological anatomy or on evolution or on treatment, or especially on the prophylaxis of virulent diseases."

"It is," he added, "a curiosity in natural history, interesting to be sure, but which can be of no benefit to medicine and which is not worth the noise that is being made about it. After so many arduous labors and researches, nothing will be changed in medicine: there will be a few more microbes, that's all!"

But the opponents grew scarcer and scarcer. From 1880 to 1885 there had been sixty deaths due to rabies in the hospitals of Paris. From November 1885, since the application of the treatment, to August 1886, there had been but three deaths;* two of these cases had not been treated. In July 1887, at the Academy of Medicine, Charcot, whose name will always remain among those of the greatest authorities on diseases of the nervous system, exclaimed:

"The discovery of the preventative treatment of rabies, due entirely to the experimental genius of Mr. Pasteur, is one of the greatest discoveries which have ever been made, both from a scientific and humanitarian standpoint. Expressing the opinion of all physicians who, without preconceived ideas and without prejudice, have studied the question, I proclaim that the inventor of antirabic vaccination can to-day, more than ever, be proud and pursue the accomplishment of his glorious task without allowing himself to be in the least disturbed by a systematic contradiction or by disparaging utterings."

Through national subscription, 2,586,680 francs were given by the people of

PASTEUR AND RABIES

655

France, with which to build an Insti-
tution bearing the name of Pasteur,
where the antirabic treatment would be
administered and where adequate lab-
oratories would offer ample opportuni-
ties for research work. The Govern-
ment added a sum of 200,000 francs and
several foreign countries contributed
most generously.

Need I add that Pasteur never gained
financially from his discoveries? One
day, Napoleon III expressed to him his
surprise that he did not derive some
legitimate profit from the application of
his works. "In France," he answered,
"scientists would feel that they incur
demerit in doing so."

On November 14th, 1888, the Institute Pasteur was inaugurated, and its subsequent history is an open book to all.

* Compare these figures with those
cited in the May TREND article.

I cannot give here detailed statistics concerning the prevalence of rabies which, I must say right now, is one of the rarest communicable diseases; anyone interested in the subject can secure full data from any medical library, or from the State or Federal Department of agriculture. But I shall give a few figures, taken at random, to illustrate that, whereas it is a relatively rare disease, yet it is one to be seriously reckoned with; that it can be greatly reduced through simple prophylactic measures and that the results obtained with the Pasteur treatment are among the most constant and satisfying in medicine.

I must again remind the reader that
rabies is essentially a communicable dis-
ease; that it cannot possibly occur with-
out being conveyed, usually through a
bite, from one animal to another. In
human beings, the disease is almost al-
ways the result of a bite inflicted by
that most faithful companion and
friend, the dog, when he happens to be
inflicted with the malady. If proper
measures are taken, the spread of
the infection may be greatly dimin-
ished, and, under certain conditions,
chiefly geographical, entirely eliminated.
The principal measures are: quarantine,
muzzling, destruction of vagrant, home-

less dogs. The advocation of muzzling
usually raises an uproar of protest from
certain quarters. Those who object to
it are usually ill-advised persons who
allow their sympathies to interfere with
the sound reasoning they might other-
wise display. What is the first result
of dogs wearing properly constructed
muzzles while allowed at large? They
cannot bite—they cannot fight with and
bite other dogs. Therefore, my own dog
and yours will not suffer from wounds
inflicted by some of their kin; they will
not be exposed to rabic infection and
therefore will not have to go through
the agonies of the disease. Moreover
my children and your children, who are
in daily contact with our pets, will not
be exposed to the danger of rabies; they
will not need to undergo the Pasteur
treatment. Furthermore, a good muzzle,
properly put on, need not be a source
of discomfort to a dog. Even if it
should be a little annoying, the advan-
tages to be derived from its use are of
too great importance. Do we not al-
low ourselves to be often incommodated,
and that without necessity? Look at
our wearing apparel—ladies and gentle-
men! Do horses enjoy the bit? Do
they appreciate being squeezed, un-
mercifully sometimes, by the surcingle?

As to the killing of vagrant dogs, I
think no one can object to it, inasmuch
as it can be done in a very humane man-
ner. Quarantines are efficient in check-
ing epidemics and in the case of islands
serve to eradicate completely the recur-
rence of the disease: in Australia for
instance.

In 1853, after an epidemic of rabies,
a muzzling ordinance was passed in
Berlin; the number of cases of rabies
in dogs decreased from one hundred
seven to nine. Thanks to the enforce-
ment of this ordinance, there were but
eleven cases of human rabies in Berlin
in twenty-seven years, whereas in Paris,
in one year (1878), twenty-four persons
died of the disease. Of course this
muzzling is of value ony if stray dogs
are destroyed.

In 1874, in the district of Baden
(Germany), there were fifty cases of

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rabies in dogs and forty-three cases in 1875. In 1876 a much higher tax was levied for a dog license and the animals had to wear a license tag. The results were that in 1876 there were but twenty-eight cases of rabid dogs; in 1877, three cases; in 1878, four cases, and in 1879, 1880, 1881, each, two.

In 1889, in London, there occurred one hundred twenty-three cases of rabies in dogs. An ordinance prescribing the muzzling of dogs and the capture of stray dogs was passed and enforced. In 1890, the number of rabid dogs had decreased to thirty-two; to thirteen in 1891; and three in 1892. So that in November 1892 the ordinance was rescinded; result: eight cases of rabies in 1893, twelve in 1894, forty-six in 1895, sixty-seven during the first three months of 1896!

An unusual epidemic was that recorded by Prof. Adami, then Pathologist at Cambridge University: in 1889, in a private park, at Ickworth, Suffolk Co. England, among 650 deer, 500 died of rabies. The trouble was started by a single rabid dog.

As to frequency, statistics show that, in England, in 1890, there was one rabid dog to 177,000 inhabitants; in Denmark, in 1886, one to eight million inhabitants; in Switzerland, 1889, one to 250,000 persons; in France, 1894, one to 30,000 inhabitants; in Germany, 1894, one to 100,000 inhabitants. It is easy to understand that where no strict measures have been taken to check the disease, the natural tendency is towards an increase in the number of cases.

The proportion of persons who, after being bitten by rabid animals, develop hydrophobia, has been variously estimated. Tardieu and Bouley, in France, collected 855 cases, of which 399 or 46.6 per cent. died. According to the report published by the Pasteur Institute of Kasauli, India, in 1908, 262 cases of persons bitten by supposedly rabid animals and not treated, had been observed: out of 108 bitten by dogs, 44 died of rabies; out of 154 bitten by supposedly rabid jackals, 48 died of rabies—a total mortality of 35%. On

the other hand, out of 1398 cases treated, the mortality had been 0.36% Generally speaking, the more numerous and the deeper the wounds, the greater is the danger. Furthermore, statistics show that the mortality is greater when the bites are inflicted on bare parts; the reasons are obvious. Bites on the face are the most dangerous—owing to the fact that the virus reaches rapidly the central nervous system through the cranial nerves. For, the poison of rabies is not, like that of snakes, a mere highly toxic organic chemical hich, thrown into the circulation, acts immediately in paralyzing the heart or respiration. It is a germ which has to develop and multiply and reach vital centres before it shows its effects. And it has this peculiarity: that it does not go into the general blood circulation but travels wholly along the nerves and lives among nerve tissues and nerve cells. Hence, the relatively long period of time which elapses between the infliction of a bite and the development of the disease. This varies from about three weeks to one year, the average being five to twelve weeks. Fear has absolutely nothing to do with it. In my experience of twenty-two years, I have seen but two cases of pseudo-hydrophobia (lyssophobia) which, I must add, were cured within the hour, whereas I saw 150 cases of true rabies in New York City and vicinity, all ending fatally. Of course, many persons are uselessly frightened after having been bitten by dogs. There are so many weird stories in circulation, nearly all of them remnants of old superstitions! We have tried our utmost to dissipate a number of the most current ones, but it takes a long time to properly educate the public at large along certain lines. For instance, after twenty-four years of efforts, we have been unable to make it generally understood that a dog biting a person should not be killed; and we are often rendered unable to give a scientific opinion on account of a lack of observation of this rule. In fact, rabies, as I said before, is rather rare, and in many instances the dog which inflicts a bite is not a rabid

PASTEUR AND RABIES

657

dog; he may be simply angry; he may have distemper, or epilepsy, or worms, etc. If the animal has been destroyed and disposed of, how can any one find what ailed it? On the other hand, if the animal is simply kept under observation for one week or ten days, all doubt is easily dispelled. From 1900 to 1912, inclusively, 11,800 patients came personally to the New York Pasteur Institute to ask for advice and treatment. Out of these 1,800, 2,780 received the Pasteur treatment, which means that in 9020 cases we could assure the patients that they had not been exposed to rabic infection and did not need our treatment. In 1584 cases the dog, or other animal, had been proved rabid; either it had died after having shown all the symptoms of rabies, and this had been verified by laboratory experiments; or it had been killed and proved rabid; or animals or persons which it had bitten had developed rabies. In 323 cases, the diagnosis of rabies had been made by a veterinary surgeon. In 873 cases, no diagnosis was made, the dog having either disappeared or been killed or disposed of, so that its carcass was not obtainable. In most of these cases, however, the symptoms shown by the animal and its behavior were very suspicious; in these cases, we could offer no definite opinion.

The 11,800 persons mentioned above were not the only bitten ones to seek our help, for we receive daily, from two to eight and more telephone calls from persons asking for advice.

Out of the 2,780 persons treated, four died as the result of failure of the treatment (0.14%) and six died during the course of treatment, or within a few days thereafter, showing that they had come to us too late. Now, applying to these figures the death rate shown by statistics among persons bitten and not treated, it is safe to say that among these 2,780 persons who received treatment at our hands, from 800 to 900 would have died of rabies. Since the creation of the New York Pasteur Institute we have treated a total of about 4,400 cases. There are now about

twelve places where Pasteur treatment is obtainable in this country. In Paris, 34,971 cases were treated, with 97 deaths. For the past ten years the mortality among persons under-going the Pasteur treatment has averaged from one to two per thousand in the various Institutes scattered throughout the world. With all the evidence which we have to-day, and of which the figures which I have just quoted give but a small idea, it is inconceivable that there should be any one of average intelligence to doubt the need and efficacy of the Pasteur treatment. I wonder what any of these wise ones would do if they were bitten by a really rabid dog? The possibilities offering themselves to my mind in such an emergency remind me of the poor fellow who came to me about three years ago with his own diagnosis already made. He was a dog fancier and dealer in a near-by city. He had been bitten over a hundred times in his life, he told me, and had never paid any attention to the bites. His last experience was about four or five weeks previously, when he was bitten on the hands by a dog which was sick at the time and was killed the next day. The man's wounds had healed entirely and he had forgotten the incident till the day before I saw him. He had then manifested the first symptoms of hydrophobia and while I was talking with him, he had the characteristic spasms every few minutes. He knew he had rabies, he knew it was incurable and yet he had come, hoping against hope that I might do something to save him to his children. He died the next day.

In conclusion, I beg the indulgence of the reader for having in this article quoted to such an extent the views held about the works of Pasteur and upon vivisection by men who expressed them so long ago. But they were and are men so great in the scientific world and they have all accomplished so much for the welfare of humanity that anything I might add would be superfluous. So long as the world exists the struggle for life will always be, and the survival of the fittest the rule. Only a few days

658

THE TREND

ago, I had a vivid example of what man
will do when he is in distress. I was
asking a tubercular patient if he was
taking regularly the meat juice which I
had prescribed: he was to take the juice
of one pound of lean beef daily. He
told me that he was too poor to afford
this but that he took meat juice as regu-
larly as he could: he would go out at
night and slaughter the biggest cats that
he could find, and in this way managed
to get supplied fairly well with the
necessary meat. I was astounded and, I
must confess, at first shocked. But,
while looking at this man, I could find
nothing to say: what is the life of a
few cats when compared to a human
life? Do you realize, reader, that the
number of human lives which have
been saved through the discoveries of
Pasteur, many of them thanks to animal
experiments, would represent many
times the total number of men in all
the armies of the world? And yet, we
are all horrified, and justly so, when a
few hundred men are killed in battle.
Would there be so many anti-vivisec-
tionists if they would only stop for a

moment and reflect on this? Especially
when it is a fact that the greater part
of the vivisection which is being carried
on is done in a most humane way, by
men whose susceptibility is usually as
great as theirs? whose ultimate aim is
to relieve suffering and disease and bet-
ter the conditions of life, not only for
men but also for animals? You, who
love your dog as I do mine, would you
not rather sacrifice the life of one rabbit
to save your pet from developing and
dying of rabies? And you, the proud
mother of two young children, would
you rather see your dear little ones die
of lockjaw, or diphtheria, or meningitis,
etc. than to see a few ounces of blood
withdrawn from a horse which is none
the worse for his experience?

Is the opinion of a score or two of
men going to supersede that of one
million? Could it be possible that there
should be but a score or two of intel-
ligent, fair-minded, cautious, learned
men in the medical profession and
among scientific men and that the other
million should be simple, deluded fools?

# My Brother's Keeper

## Adapted from the French

BY FRANK ALVAH DEARBORN

## V.

In the course of a few months Commandant George had become celebrated in the Antilles Sea. The Governor had kept his word. George had been made captain of the frigate and officially commanded the Thetis. From all sides came reports of his audacity and good fortune. It seemed that leaving port and driving his frigate through the enemy's fleet in foggy or tempestuous weather was but play for the intrepid mariner. Nevertheless on board his own vessel in spite of his success he was feared and respected rather than loved. It is true that in the hours of combat he fascinated his crew; his face shone with a sinister beauty; his forehead with its contracted eyebrows was clouded as by a storm; his dilated nostrils inhaled the odor of powder and his eyes gleamed with fire. Impassible during the cannonading he was the first to leap to the boarding. Once upon the deck of the enemy he marched straight before him striking with a savage delight to the right and left and without respite until the enemy had lowered its flag. He was never wounded and seemed to be invulnerable. He soon became so in fact through the terror that he inspired in his adversaries. His pallid face stamped with an implacable resolution produced upon them the effect of a Gorgon. Their blows falling short were ineffective and some of them even, finding themselves unexpectedly in his path, threw down their arms and begged for mercy. But these terrible moments passed and in the ordinary life aboard the frigate his sailors were afraid to look at him except on the sly and with a sort of superstitious fear. His dark and unfeeling visage frightened them. George conversed with no one, not even with his officers. In matters of the ser-

vice he gave his orders in writing in order not to be forced to give them by word of mouth. He passed long hours walking up and down the deck, his hands crossed behind his back, or in looking at the sea while leaning his elbows upon the bastingage. During the night watches among the sailors assembled in the gangways strange rumors were circulated concerning the commandant. The helmsmen related that several times they had seen him come out of his room in his shirt-sleeves, his arms extended in front of him, his eyes open and staring, his features agitated; arriving near to them he stopped, passed his hand over his face, allowed his arms to fall and leaned forward in order to look through the binocle at whatever cape was visible and then returned to his apartments. They also affirmed that the sight of the smallest mirror gave him a start. He had had the large glass at the end of his room screened with canvas. One morning while he still slept his servant attempted to clean the mirror, George suddenly awakened, ordered him to replace the canvas in a tone so threatening that the poor man trembled and was for a few moments unable to obey him. The old sailors aboard the frigate asserted that the commandant had been in this condition ever since the death of Raoul. There were but few of these old sailors left for under one pretext or another most of the crew of the Thetis had been changed; as for the officers only one remained of those participating in the Trinity Island expedition. On the whole, the common opinion aboard the vessel was that the memory of his deceased friend was grievously afflicting Commandant George.

This supposition was correct. Since the officers' dinner at Guadaloupe the remembrance of Raoul had been con-

THE TREND

660

stantly in his mind. It is not with im-
punity that two men, intimately united
in their thoughts and affections, share,
for several years successively, the same
existence, the same joys and the same
sorrows. At every moment George
fancied he saw Raoul. At meals he per-
ceived him in his usual place. When
taking a walk he involuntarily turned
round in order to speak to him; during
a battle, even in the midst of the mêlée,
he still looked for him. He saw him
with two faces each very distinct, one
gentle and dreamy, a little melancholy,
such as Raoul had during his life; the
other sardonic and menacing, such as
he had assumed after his death. It was
especially with the latter expression that
Raoul appeared to him during the night.
His sleep was troubled by frightful
dreams similar to those he had had the
night following the capture of the fort.
An insurmountable terror tore him from
his bed and rushed him still asleep out
of his room; scarcely had he touched the
deck than he recovered his senses and
returned to his apartments. At the
same time he imagined that he saw in-
crease every day that fated resemblance
which Raoul had mentioned as he was
writing out his last wishes. He was
astonished however that it could be so,
as he detested Raoul with all the violence
of the terrors which filled his soul and
he had hoped that this hatred would
aid him in effacing the last vestige of a
resemblance which an ardent sympathy
had alone created; but it accomplished
nothing. On the contrary, if he hap-
pened to look at himself in a mirror,
even at the moment when he was think-
ing of Raoul with the greatest wrath,
he again found more accentuated in his
own face, which suddenly became grim
and contracted, the features of his old
comrade. His imagination had in some
manner transformed his visage into that
of the dreader likeness.

George had a heart of bronze and an
iron will. In the face of such symptoms
he realized that unless he could re-act
against the terrors which assailed him it
would inevitably end in his insanity.
This constant remembrance of Raoul
was but a diseased imagination against

which he resolved to struggle and he im-
mediately set about the task. Desiring
to have no witnesses of his past weak-
nesses about him, he had successively
changed all of his officers. As his voice
often gave the same intonation as Raoul's
he decided to almost never speak. He
had until then worn his hair long as
Raoul had worn his; he had it cut short.
He constantly surprised himself by mak-
ing the same gestures as Raoul made and
using the same locutions that he em-
ployed; he carefully rehearsed these ges-
tures and methods of speech in order
always to avoid them in the future. He
went to the length of imagining new
motions and a new language which
should be wholly his own. All of these
precautions taken, he fixed a limit of one
year before seeking to know the result
of his efforts. At first the physical con-
straint to which he had condemned him-
self was almost insupportable. His
members and his muscles could not shake
off the bondage of a long habitude and
adjusted themselves badly to the poses
his will pretended to give them. His
step and the expressions of his face
were full of incoherency but he tri-
umphed in the end and forced his body
to obey; but it obeyed like a slave in a
manner entirely passive and seemed ani-
mated only by an artificial life. The
moral constraint was still more painful.
In order to obliterate the memory of
Raoul it was necessary for George to cut
off from his life the ten years which had
just flown away; for during these ten
years Raoul had been constantly by his
side. Thought has in its evolutions some-
thing of the flow and ebb of the tide; it
pauses a little upon the present, but is
carried back over the past or darts
toward the future. George restrained
his thoughts from dwelling upon the past
but in depriving his mind of the neces-
sary repose he soon felt that, weary of
projects and dreams, it had given way,
powerless and troubled. By long read-
ings and computations purely mechanical,
he endeavored to produce a condition of
mental supineness. At night, however,
his mind escaped from the control of his
will. It spread its wings; but after hav-
ing roamed for sometime amid souvenirs,

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

661

far-off and replete with charm, it soon
fastened itself upon the frightful catas-
trophe of Raoul's death. Then came the
sinister dreams and funeral visions:
George resolved to conquer sleep as he
had conquered wakefulness. He had
himself watched over at night by his
personal servant. When the man saw
his forehead covered with perspiration,
his breathing becoming difficult or his
limbs move as if in pain, he awakened
him. George arose, threw a cloak over
his shoulders and for an hour walked
with long steps up and down the deck;
then, broken with fatigue, he returned
to his bed. Thus his nights were passed
in cruel insomnia or in short rests dur-
ing which he slept like a brute. He
might have succumbed to this horrible
existence if he had not from time to
time some hours of respite in battles and
storms. At such times he no longer
feared to be like Raoul: he became him-
self again and felt the life-blood, strong
and powerful, coursing in waves through
his veins. He delighted to remain bare-
headed in rains and tempests, intoxicat-
ing himself with the scent of powder
and crash of arms. He was conscious of
his strength with the elements in which
he cheated the Furies, or in the human
mêlées which he directed and precipi-
tated at his pleasure. He thus strength-
ened himself for the daily and nightly
struggle against the fatality which pur-
sued him.

The most terrible day of this struggle
was the anniversary of Raoul's death;
furthermore George had foreseen that it
would be so. Since the morning he had
felt that his body and mind were revolt-
ing and that no effort of his could re-
duce them to obedience. Calling to his
aid, resignation and immobility only, he
stretched himself out upon his canapé,
folded his arms over his breast and
waited. Then, all of the fatal hours of
the day with their slightest incidents pre-
sented themselves to his mind. Each one
came in its turn and George without at-
tempting to resist saw the mournful
drama slowly unfold itself before him as
if he had not been one of the actors.
Thus it was that he again saw the Thetis
drop her anchor in the harbor of Trin-

ity Island, that he witnessed the recon-
naisance which Raoul and he had made
in the mountain, that he again heard the
dull sound of Raoul's body striking the
the ground at the bottom of the crevasse
and that finally after the heat of the
battle and the capture of the fort, he
contemplated as he had formerly the
body of his friend. At this moment his
memory evoked with perfect clearness
the face of Raoul. His friend appeared
distinctly before his eyes in a manner as
clear and palpable as if his presence was
real. Suddenly he perceived that in spite
of the impassibility he had endeavored
to impose upon them, the muscles of his
face were changing place and assuming
a fixed position. Like a flash of light-
ning he intuitively divined what was hap-
pening. He realized that his imagination
was exalted to such an intense degree
that his own face reflected the face of
Raoul. For a moment he was seized
with an irresistible desire to look at him-
self in the glass in order to be certain
of it; however, he restrained his desire,
and, not satisfied with restraining it, he
attempted to obliterate from his features
the dreadful resemblance which he sur-
mised had been stamped upon them; he
contracted them violently and in turn
burst into laughter or assumed a serious
expression. He succeeded beyond his
expectation. Long tremors which he
could not control ran over his face upon
which he felt prickings and an extreme
heat while slight shivers agitated other
parts of his body. George watched these
phenomena with a sort of joy for they
seemed to him the symptoms of a mal-
ady wholly physical, more restrainable
than those of the mind, and with which
he would be able to struggle; they dis-
appeared in a short time and were fol-
lowed by a profuse prespiration and a
complete annihilation of his strength.

Upon coming out of this ordeal,
George resumed his ordinary life; but
he awaited with a febrile impatience the
expiration of the year he had fixed for
his experiment. He doubted the result
of his efforts and desired to know where
he stood. The day finally arrived. The
same morning, George, who had re-
appeared after a voyage, anchored the

662

THE TREND

Thetis in the roadstead of Saint-Do-
mingo. A convoy of captured vessels
had preceded him by a few days and
they had prepared a magnificent recep-
tion for him. The frigate had scarcely
cast anchor when an aide-de-camp of the
Governor came to beg George to come
ashore. The Governor, surrounded by
the authorities of the island, received
him, and, after having thanked him for
the services he had rendered to France,
presented him with a beautiful sword
of honor. The remainder of the day
was passed in fêtes and George escorted
by the Governor, promenaded through
the streets where the entire population
overwhelmed him with applause as they
pressed forward to look at him. When
he returned to the Thetis he was stirred
by the most lively emotions. His heart
was equally divided between pride and
fear. He hoped, however, that the vague
resemblance formerly existing between
Raoul and himself had not progressed
and that he would soon see the terrors
which had tormented him for a year
vanish like the chimeras of his diseased
imagination. He waited until night to
attempt in complete solitude the dreaded
test; he walked back and forth in his
room now and then glancing at the large
mirror which was still covered over.
They brought him his letters and news-
papers which had arrived at Saint-Do-
mingo before him and which had been
taken from the postoffice while he was
ashore. The letters contained felicitations
from his comrades and promises
of advancement on the part of the Governor
of Guadeloupe and the Admiral of
the Naval-Station of the Antilles. After
having read them, George picked up the
package of papers; he opened it mechanically
when he noticed a letter that had
escaped his attention; the sight of it
made him shudder. The address was
written in a course, somewhat lengthened
and slightly trembling hand. The letter
bore a French postage stamp and a large
black seal: George divined that it was
from Raoul's father and it was not until
he had held it in his hands several moments
that he decided to read it.

"Sir," said the letter, "I have de-
sired to write to you for over a

month but it is only today that I
have the courage to make the at-
tempt. It seems that one does not
die of sorrow, otherwise the news
of my poor Raoul's death would
have killed me. I may not, how-
ever survive it long and I have a
quest to make which with clasped
hands I beg that you will grant. I
would like to know how my poor
boy died. He often spoke of you as
a friend and brother and told me
that he had charged you, in case
misfortune came to him to give me
an account of his last moments. It
is this sad account that I ask of you
today in the name of that friendship
which you have for him. Have
pity, sir, upon an unhappy father
who craves this supreme consolat-
tion, and please believe in his grati-
tude, the only sentiment he can feel
here below."

"Oh! certainly not," said George to
himself trembling, "I shall never give
him the details he asks of me."

The reading of the letter had filled him
with sorrow: "Come!" added he, "it is
time; Alas! Alas! I believe indeed that
I have struggled in vain."

He quickly removed the canvas which
covered the mirror and let it fall to the
floor; then eagerly he stopped to look at
himself. At first he was transported
with delight. Raoul's face which he had
had constantly before him for over a
year was always pale and encircled by
his long, curly hair. In observing his
own likeness in the glass he did not
recognize himself. His hair in fact was
cut short and his complexion tanned by
the sea; but his joy ceased when he ob-
served himself more attentively. His
will, immovable for a year, had deepened
between his eyebrows that perpendicular
wrinkle which habitual and peaceful rev-
ery had stamped upon Raoul's fore-
head. His eyes, formerly light-blue, had
assumed a darker shade, and, if they
were not melancholy like Raoul's, they
often had an expression of gloomy sad-
ness. As George smiled bitterly he fan-
cied he saw in the glass that smile of
despair which the dead Raoul had re-
tained upon his lips.

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

663

"Oh!" said he as he drew back, "My
doom is sealed!"

But almost immediately he revolted.
That indomitable soul refused to ac-
knowledge defeat.

"No! No!" cried he to himself. "The
resemblance is not real. It is my weak-
ness that makes me afraid. This im-
placable spectre which constantly pur-
sues me is but a figment of my own imag-
ination. That ridiculous will could not
have predicted the future. I must have
misunderstood its meaning. I will read
it once more."

He ran to the secretary and took from
the drawer, which he had not opened for
a year, the white-wood box which con-
tained the Last Will and Testament of
Raoul. He seated himself, rested his
elbows upon the table and with his head
in his hands commenced to read. The
first paragraph, in which Raoul had
charged him to write to his father relat-
ing the smallest details of his death,
made him shudder. He was no longer
doubtful; the coincidence of these lines
with the letter of Raoul's father had de-
destroyed all ambiguity. However, he con-
tinued to read, repeating each word in a
low voice so as to better understand its
meaning; thus he reached the last sen-
tence in which Raoul had said to him:

"I wish to incarnate myself in you in
order that I may be sure you will never
forget me."

"No," said George, calmly, as he rose,
"I was not mistaken, this will is perfect-
ly clear but it disturbs me and I have
read it today for the last time."

He returned the paper to the box,
pushed the cover into the grooves and
with a violent motion threw the box
itself into the sea by an open porthole.

Scarcely had he thrown it when he
heard a cry of pain. George had just
passed through such cruel emotions that
he was not certain that he had not
uttered the cry himself. He rang the
bell and waited anxiously for some one
to come. One of the helmsmen soon
appeared.

"Who was it that screamed?"

"A man of the rear guard in the long-
boat. He told me that you had thrown
this box through the porthole and that

it struck him on the head," and he held
out the white-wood box.

"Since I threw it away it was useless
to bring it back," replied George, hesi-
tating about taking it.

"But I opened it, commandant, and
there is a paper inside."

"Did you read it?" demanded George
excitedly.

"You know very well, commandant,
that I cannot read," replied the sailor.

"Very well," said George.

Then remembering his duty as an
officer, at the moment the helmsman was
leaving he added, "Is the man in the
long-boat seriously hurt?"

"No, commandant, it doesn't amount
to much."

"No matter, let someone take his
place and have him see the doctor."

"Now," said George, when he was
alone, "since the Will has come back to
me I am going to adopt a surer way to
rid myself of it. I will burn it and un-
less it rises from its ashes, I shall never
see it again."

He intended to destroy both the box
and Will at the same time but a material
difficulty prevented him for a moment.
The fireplace, unused for a long time,
contained no wood. George tore the
Will apart and with his knife he easily
cut the box into long and thin pieces
which he placed crossways upon the
hearth; applying a match, the flames
mounted upward bright and clear. Then
George placed the Will over the flames.
For an instant it remained poised, its
two ends curving into scrolls. Lighted
up as it was at this moment the black
letters stood out distinctly upon the white
paper. Suddenly it blazed up but as it
slowly blackened, dotted in red by a
thousand sparks, there was reproduced
here and there by a singular effect of
combustion a word or a letter. George
was thus able to read his own name and
that of Raoul, also the words of friend-
ship, of resemblance, and of death; the
ones repeated most often in the Will. In
a few moments the paper and box were
entirely consumed and only a handful of
ashes remained upon the hearth.

George felt a sort of shame for what
he had just done; it was to his mind a

664

THE TREND

childish action. But while with his hands crossed upon his back, he slowly walked up and down his room he perceived that he was mechanically repeating the first sentence of Raoul's will. At the instant he discerned it the second sentence came to his lips and before he had time to be astonished his memory with an extraordinary precision and lucidity brought back to his mind the entire will from the first to the last word. Furthermore, he recalled the paper itself with its margins, its lines, its shape and the size and inclination of the letters. At first George thought that this over-excitement of his memory was due to his recent emotions and that it would soon pass; but in this he was mistaken. Little by little, on the contrary, the recollection of the will which he had hoped to destroy assumed in his mind the proportion of a fixed idea to the dominion of which his senses were bound. He vainly tried to become absorbed in other thoughts, to evoke some other picture; but he invariably saw the will with its coarse and elon gated writing and a monotonous voice murmured in his ear the sentences it contained. This obsession continued for two days when George imagined that he could escape from it by transcribing with his own hand Raoul's will. He took a sheet of paper and commenced to write; but scarcely had he written the first words when he was a prey to a new astonishment. His writing had become similar to Raoul's. His hand, obedient to a secret impulse traced of itself the characters which for two years had blazed before his eyes. He continued to write under the influence of a sentiment of curiosity which drove him on to examine his misfortune to the bitter end and it seemed to him, as he wrote, that the sentences flowing from his pen were little by little leaving his memory. When he finished writing and had placed this strange copy of the will in the secretary from which he had taken the original he felt himself in truth relieved.

At this moment his eyes fell upon the sword of honor they had presented to him at Saint-Domingo. He took it up and for a long time admired the hilt

adorned with brilliants and artistically chased.

"It is a beautiful reward," said he, shaking his head sadly, "but I learn better each day what it has cost me."

VI.

George passed in Saint-Domingo the next few days in receptions and fêtes and succeeded in forgetting his troubles. It was not, until again at sea, that he asked himself whether or not he should continue the struggle. He resolved to make one more effort, but the contest was brief. In the course of scarcely a month the symptoms of illness which had surprised him on the anniversary of Raoul's death reappeared with violence. He was attacked with a general uneasiness. Cold chills ran through his limbs alternating with fever. His greatest suffering was in his face which seemed to be on fire; at times tears came to his eyes, his facial muscles twitched and his teeth were shut so closely that he was unable to take food. Thus the material which he desired to cast into a new mould or at least sentence it to immobility triumphed over his efforts and his will. George realized that the struggle had become impossible under pain of death and he ceased his effort as he had commenced it with full consciousness of the resolution he had taken. He resigned himself, not to travel the road which had been traced for him in Raoul's will, but passively to allow the unheard of phenomenon of a posthumous resemblance to work itself out. Starting from this moment his sufferings disappeared and he even experienced a certain degree of contentment. His limbs no longer constrained, resumed their former movement and his features again reposed, so to speak, in their natural arrangement. From this time forward he left his mirror uncovered and no longer refrained from conversation. In a word he again became such as he was eighteen months before. In observing with what rapidity he gained possession of himself, George again felt the bitter joy of completed misfortune; furthermore his mind was relieved of a horrible constraint and he no longer thought of Raoul with that frenzied rage which had

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665

wasted his strength and troubled his
imagination. He was living thus from
day to day, resigned to his fate, constant-
ly at sea in voyages or expeditions, when,
learning that the peace of Amiens had
just been signed, he received an order
to return to France. This order caused
greater happiness than he had ever ex-
pected to enjoy. No longer would he see
that Trinity Island within sight of which
he never passed without a shudder, those
nights calm and serene which recalled to
his mind the intimate causeries with
Raoul, and the days of an eternal sum-
mer when the fiery sun seemed irrevoc-
ably doomed to glow in a cloudless sky.
He would again find the comrades whom
he formerly loved and all the souvenirs
of a happy childhood with which were
not mingled the baleful thoughts of
Raoul; finally he would again see France,
the very name of which thrills those who
are far away from it.

He did not, however, drop anchor at Brest until after a voyage of considerable length as he had been ordered to convoy to Ferrol the galleons from Mexico. For two months he was occupied in dismantling the Thetis. He was impatiently preparing for his return to Paris when his servant brought him a letter which had just arrived. From its large black seal and coarse writing he immediately recognized it as coming from Raoul's father. He tremblingly opened it. The old man stated he had learned of George's return to France and was writing to him again in order to be informed of the details of Raoul's unfortunate death. He reproached him gently with a sort of solemnity for having paid no attention to his first letter and finished by notifying him that he counted this time upon a prompt response. George promised himself that he would reply to the letter when he reached Paris but he was gloomy and disquiet during the entire journey. Once in Paris he postponed the task from one day to another as he was dominated by a secret fear. In fact he dared not relate the scene at the precipice or pretend that he was ignorant of the manner in which Raoul came to his death. His time was thus passing his time in painful

irresolutions when he was sent for by
the Naval Department.

The Minister of the Navy was at that
time Admiral Decrès. He had already
officially received George, complimented
him upon his successful campaign in the
Antilles and had with marked kindness
promised to keep him in mind for future
advancement.

"My dear commandant," said he as he
saw him enter, "are you ready to go to
sea again?"

"Always ready, Admiral," responded
George.

"Very well! I am going to put you upon the road to your épaulettes as commandant of a man-of-war. The Emperor has otained from Spain her agreement to prepare at Cadix a fleet which he wishes to combine later with Admiral Villeneuve's; but the Spaniards left to their own resources are not capable of doing anything at this moment. I need an intelligent and zealous officer to attend to the organization of that fleet; I have chosen you. When the Spanish fleet is ready you will be second in command upon one of the vessels of Villeneuve and at the first battle you will pass him."

George thanked the Minister and
twenty-four hours later was en route.

The combat which Admiral Decrès saw in the future must have been the battle of Trafalgar. On the morning of that sinister day, the 21st of October, 1805, George, although he had never until then held a higher position than captain of a frigate, was commandant-in-chief upon the *Enterprise*, one of the vessels in the fleet of Villeneuve. The former commandant under whom George has served for a year had fallen ill and had been obliged to return to Paris. The year which had just passed had been a most active and fatiguing one for George. He was successively occupied in fitting out the Spanish fleet and his own vessel. The *Enterprise* was mentioned along with the *Intrepid* and *Redoubtable* commanded respectively by Lucas and Infernet. Furthermore he exercised over his crew the same fascination that he had exercised over the sailors of the Thetis. Physically he had changed but little;

666

THE TREND

only from time to time some of the offi-
cers who had known him in the Antilles
and whom he met again upon vessels of
the fleet remarked to him that he resem-
bled Raoul. George smiled sadly. His
ordinary appearance was frigid and
gloomy. In fact he had constantly in
mind the same cruel recollections; they
no longer obsessed him but they were
never absent from his thoughts. He was
in this respect in the situation of a man
with a bullet in his head which if dis-
placed might cause death. The bullet
does not change its position and the
man continues to live. It was thus that
George watched the slow progress of a
resemblance from which he no longer
sought to escape and he awaited at any
moment the return of the terrors which
had not long ago agitated him and forced
him onward with a never-failing energy
in that career of honors and rank which
his crime had opened to him. At the
moment when the battle was about to be-
gin, George stood upon the dunette, his
countenance grave and sad and looked at
the two fleets facing each other. The
Franco-Spanish fleet was coasting the
Andalouse shore; its line was badly
formed and many of its vessels had
fallen under the wind. George with his
seaman's instinct saw running through
all of this line the indications of irresolu-
tion and distrust of oneself. The Eng-
lish fleet divided into two columns, one
conducted by Nelson upon the Victory,
the other by Collingwood upon the
Royal-Sovereign, advanced with the
wind astern perpendicularly toward the
French line as if to divide it in the
middle. It sailed less to a battle than to
a victory. When Collingwood covered
his vessels with sails, George could not
restrain himself from turning to his offi-
cers and repeating without suspecting it
the same words which Nelson spoke
aboard the Victory; he said to them with
deep bitterness:

"See how this Collingwood bravely
conducts his vessels to the battle!"

A moment later a shot was fired by
the *Bucentaure*, the vessel of Villeneuve
and the combat began.

After three hours of struggle and car-
nage, when the French and Spanish

fleets were partly destroyed, when Nel-
son was dead and the tempest threaten-
ing since morning had burst forth in all
its fury, George found himself still en-
gaged with two English vessels. At the
beginning of the action he had received
a painful wound upon the head, but he
refused to leave the deck. Wasting no
time in aiming at the masts or cutting
some useless ropes, he fired point blank
at the hulls of the enemy's vessels; the
cleverness of his gunners gave him the
advantage. Under a final broadside one
of these vessels gave way and hastened
to rejoin her fleet. George was to the
windward of the other; he brought his
ship about and laid her alongside the
enemy; then hurling his men on to her
deck he crushed all opposition in one of
those overwhelming boardings to which
he was accustomed. He next took the
captured vessel in tow and holding his
own in the offing, he struggled for two
days and two nights with the tempest, and
succeeded in retaining the prize. At the
end of these two days the fine weather
returned and shortly afterward George,
dragging the English vessel in his wake,
entered the roadstead of Brest in sight
of the entire population; they had al-
ready learned of the disaster of Trafal-
gar and with shouts of joy and sorrow
they hailed George as the only success-
ful commandant of that terrible day.

The Préfet Maritime immediately
ordered him to Paris. George started,
though still suffering, and was received
by Minister Decrès who in turn presen-
ted him to the Emperor. Then followed
the proudest days of his glory. When he
entered a salon he became at once the
object of attention from all sides and
the women leaned forward to look at
him. His manly beauty, of a character
sad and almost timid, attracted attention.
At thirty years of age, he was such as
Raoul might have been but without the
aureole of innocent and radiant happiness
which would have crowned the brow of
his friend. Alas! He had become re-
nowned but had long since and forever
lost his calmness of conscience and his
repose of heart. A dull sorrow op-
pressed him in the midst of his triumph.
For five years he had traveled through

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

667

life alone and now he was appalled at this solitude. From time to time he surprised himself by regretting that intimate family happiness which Raoul had formerly extoled. He was in this mental condition when Minister Decrès on behalf of the Emperor suggested his marriage to a young girl whose family had emigrated during the Revolution and who had just returned to France. Napoleon liked these marriages which mingled the blood of the old aristocracy with that of the young nobility which he desired to create. He endowed the young girl and bestowed upon George the title of Count. George gratefully accepted the proposal. He had met the young lady several times in society and had found her charming and agreeable. Mademoiselle d'Epagny, beautiful, brilliant and intelligent, was well suited to his ambition and he hoped to find with her when she should become his wife that domestic peace and happiness of which he had sometimes dreamed. Sailors and soldiers who have passed their lives upon the sea and in camps easily believe in the happiness of marriage.

The veiled love offered by Hymen has for them a charm of mystery and modesty such as they have never met in the free and easy adventures of their wandering life. Once the marriage was decided the details were hastily arranged. The Emperor needed the services of his fighting men: he allowed them to marry and to love their wives between two battles.

The same day the marriage contract was signed Admiral Decrès took George aside.

"The Emperor," said he, "wishes you to be ready to set sail in a fortnight."

George gave a start.

"Oh!" continued the Admiral, "you may take your wife also if she has the courage to follow you. This is the matter in question. For a few years there will be nothing for our navy to do in Europe. We must have time to construct and equip one hundred vessels; but India remains open to us. A man of talent ought to have great success there. Look at what Surcouf has accomplished and he is only a corsaire."

"What facilities shall I have?" required George.

"You will have the harbor of Tranquebar which Tippoo-Saeb offers us. It will be for you to make it a shelter for the vessels which will join you later and the point of departure for the expeditions you will attempt to make into the interior. You will have all the money you require to enable you to accomplish miracles."

"And upon what ship do I leave?"

"Upon a frigate, fully equipped, which awaits you at Rocheford. What say you?"

"Yes, Admiral," replied George whose imagination leaped as he saw opening before him a future of adventures, riches and glory.

He crossed the salon and walked straight to his fiancée.

"Mademoiselle," said he smilingly, "if in a fortnight my duty obliges me to go to America or India and remain there two or three years, will you consent to accompany me?"

"The wife of Commandant George will follow her husband wherever he goes."

The words, spoken in a loud voice, were welcomed by those present by a complimentary murmur. George bowed with gratitude before the young lady.

A few days later they were married. George was in his study, seated in a large arm-chair near the fireplace with his feet upon the andirons. He had sought this peaceful solitude in which his mind, overflowing with too vivid emotions, might become collected. As a beneficent rain causes the beautiful flowers to bloom upon an arid soil, so love with its sweet dreams and charming hope had at last opened that poor heart for so long a time closed. George found again the deep joy, which he had almost forgotten, of loving and being loved. Little by little his heart was moved and his eyes were filled with tears. At the moment when he rose from his chair smilingly and was about to go to find his wife, a servant entered and handed him a letter. George carelessly took the letter but noticing the writing and seal he

THE TREND

was struck to the heart. It was from
Raoul's father.

"Adieu to my happiness!" murmured
he to himself.

The letter was severe, almost threatening. The old man stated that he could not understand George's long silence. There must have been some mysterious circumstances in the death of Raoul which restrained an intimate friend who was doubtless present, from revealing then to a despairing father. The old man terminated his letter by saying he would wait one week and if at the end of that week he had received no response he would come himself to Paris.

"He will not find me here," said
George to himself.

If, in fact, two years before he did not
have the courage to write to Raoul's
father, then less than ever in the face of
the suspicion manifested in this letter did
he dare to brave his presence. Driven on
by a superstitious fear and believing that
only in flight could he retain the intoxicating and tardy happiness which he had
enjoyed scarcely two hours, he ran to
the Admiralty Department and requested
his order for departure. The order was
ready and the Minister handed it to him,
at the same time complimenting him
upon his zeal. Before the end of the
week George sailed from Rochefort upon
the Bellone.

During the entire day of sailing
George remained on the deck in turn
watching the sails of his frigate and the
coasts of France which were effacing
themselves too slowly to suit his impatient desire. He seemed to fear that he
would suddenly see a signal calling him
back.

"My dear," said his wife to him smilingly as she observed his restlessness, "you are really ambitious. You are in as great haste to leave France as if you were pursued."

George did not reply except as he tried
to smile. For the first time he had be-
trayed himself. His wife had almost
read his thoughts. It was the effect of
the remorse which was pursuing him as
it had pursued him for five years.

Upon arriving at Tranquebar, George
realized the magnitude of the task he had

undertaken. He had to construct entirely an arsenal, a dockyard, the fortifications and the town itself. But he did not recoil from the duty. In order not to be disturbed in his operations he first had the narrow channel which shut in the harbor bristling with cannon, thereby rendering futile any attack by the English. Having at his service workmen of all trades and some under officers whom he had captured at different times in their small boats which had become separated from the enemy's cruise, he placed upon the stocks different vessels, even a frigate equal in size to the Bellone. He also organized and disciplined a native army. Sometimes he went out with his frigate in order, as he said, to divert his mind. He had designed and constructed the new vessel so skillfully that she easily escaped the men-of-war that he encountered. He did not however wish to attempt anything serious until the great preparations should be finished and he contented himself with capturing a few merchant-men. He built for himself a fine wooden house, almost a palace, in which he assembled many marvels of European luxury and Asiatic art. In the evening, after the days of prodigious effort, he rested for a few hours. Through the open windows he perceived on one side the roadstead of Tranquebar already covered with vessels, the arsenals which were resounding with the final blows of the workmen and the troops returning to their barracks to the sound of the fifes and drums; on the other side he saw the golden rays of the setting sun half drowned in the darkness and the monstrous vegetation of India full of dull murmurs and strong perfumes.

Within a few steps of him his wife,
dressed in white muslin, was rocking her-
self in a hammock. Three years before
she had given him a son and the child,
blonde and rosy, was playing and rolling upon the matting. George's looks
went alternately from his wife to his
son. He admired in turn the nonchalen
development, a little haughty, of the first
and the graceful movement of the second.
He remained silent for a long time, slowly
inhaling the smoke from his houka,

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

669

then suddenly calling his son, he took him upon his knees, and smiling at his childish talk he covered his face with kisses. Sometimes, however, with a singular pre-occupation he pushed the child's hair aside and examined his face attentively. Then little by little he became gloomy and bestowing a final kiss upon the forehead, he placed him gently upon the floor.

George had made every effort to be happy but without success. His reason, so cold and lucid, had not permitted him to entertain long illusions as to his conjugal happiness. His wife was his companion, but she was neither his confidant nor his friend. Ambitious as she was for herself, she loved him for the splendor of his name, for his marital prowess, in a word, because he was strong. George understood her feeling toward him and the unfortunate man, agitated at times by such cruel sufferings and foolish terrors, remained impassible and smiling before her. He realized that if he had yielded to the need of expansion which the most energetic man experiences at times, and like a frightened child had taken refuge in the arms of the wife whom he loved he might have found her astonished, perhaps disdainful. In losing his prestige he might have lost the only love which that brilliant and haughty woman could have for a husband. He resigned himself to the situation but he continued to live facing his sinister impressions of which the affection of his wife might perhaps have cured him. They slumbered sometimes for entire months, but at the smallest circumstance they would awaken, greedy and implacable, forging for him new torments. If from time to time he happened to look steadily at his son it was because he fancied that he found in his features a distant resemblance to Raoul's. The child had the same silky, curly hair, the same dark eyes, already pensive, and something in the tone of his voice recalled that of his former friend. George said to himself again and again that such ideas were only chimeras but these chimeras supported by a thousand souvenirs of Raoul's early youth assumed, in spite of himself, a form clear and def

inite. Thus he was struck even in the affection for his son. Raoul's spectre, in turn smiling or menacing, as he had never ceased to see it, raised itself up between him and the child.

For sometime his health had been declining. He had sudden prostrations and violent headaches. The energy of his mind resented this unhealthy condition. He became without reason morose and irritable. In the intervals of his attacks he again became the man he had always been, an affectionate husband and an officer, upright and kind to his sailors and soldiers. A violent shock was necessary to draw him from this marasmus but unfortunately he was for the time being condemned to inactivity. The fitting out of the frigate which he had constructed still required two or three months and the same length of time was necessary for the frigate which the Minister of the Navy had promised him to arrive at Tranquebar, if she succeeded in eluding the enemy's cruise. Then he would move at the same time on land and sea. He would have a fleet sufficiently powerful to enable him to assume the offensive and his troops, united with those of Tippoo-Saeb would be able to attack the English possessions. George awaited this moment with the most lively impatience. The day finally arrived. On the fifteenth of August the look-out signaled the frigate and toward noon she entered the harbor. It was the Emperor's birthday. All of the vessels were adorned with flags and the batteries of the fort fired a salute of 101 guns. The colony was filled with cheerfulness and noise. After having received the commandant of the frigate with considerable display, George, who had been occupied all the forenoon by the celebration of the mass and other formal ceremonies, did not find himself alone until nearly two o'clock. He was gloomy and disturbed by melancholy presentations. He feared, in fact, that at the height of his career, some unexpected even would happen to recall the fatal beginning of his fortune. He seated himself in his garden under an arbor, the dense foliage of which sheltered him from the sun, and opened the despatches

670

THE TREND

from the Minister of the Navy. "Your most difficult ordeals are past," wrote Decrès; "you are finally going to march forward. I await your first success to name you as Admiral." George's face lighted up and the ambitious man stamped his foot as if he had already taken possession of the future. To these official despatches was added a personal letter. The Minister wrote to him in the kindest and most affectionate terms of his long exile; he assured him that it would soon be terminated for the war with England could not last forever, and then he would return to France and enjoy the fruits of his labors.

This letter contained a postscript.

"I forgot to tell you my dear commandant that a wealthy manufacturer of the environs of Strasbourg, a very old man, Monsieur Barnard has spoken of you to me. You were the intimate friend of his son, a young officer who unfortunately died in the Antilles some years ago. He desires to be recalled to your memory."

George was chilled to the heart in reading these lines. Since his arrival in India this was the first time that anyone had mentioned Raoul's father to him. He had hoped that he was no longer living. The letter escaped from his hands and he allowed it to fall to the ground.

At that moment his son came running to him and climbing on his knees looked into his father's face. George took him by his little arms and holding him some distance off gazed at him steadily for a moment; then he abruptly placed him on the ground.

"Go away," said he in a harsh voice, "leave me."

The child ran off greatly astonished, almost frightened.

"Oh!" said George wringing his hands, "his infernal memory will never leave me. What shall I do to rid myself of it?"

Scarcely had he uttered these words when he heard the voice of his son crying frantically, "Papa! Papa!! Papa!!!"

This dear little voice seemed to come from the depths of the earth. George ran in the direction of the place from which the cries proceeded. He arrived

at a well, the dark, yawning mouth of which was nearly level with the ground. He again heard the cries coming up from the well. He leaned over the curb but it was some seconds before he became accustomed to the darkness; finally he perceived the child who was clinging to of the ropes with both hands while his body was supported upon one of the buckets. By a providential fortune the other bucket which naturally would have mounted to the top, had become caught on an iron bar at the bottom of the well.

George looked but remained motionless. He was struck dumb with horror. The obscurity into which his eyes plunged enlarged the objects and it seemed to him that he saw Raoul. He finally seized the other rope and bearing down upon it he disengaged the bucket from the bar with which it had become entangled. In this manner he felt the child, so to speak, suspended in his hands. George experienced a vertigo of hatred and vengeance against the memories which had obsessed him and for a moment he was tempted to let go of the rope.

This thought, however, was but a flash; the father realized he had almost killed his own child; the reaction set in; pallid, his face covered with perspiration he convulsively clasped the rope with both hands as if he feared it would escape him; then he started gently and with infinite precautions to hoist the child to the top; he pulled on the rope a little at a time for fear the boy would hit the sides of the well. When he had raised him to the level of the curb he took him in his arms and wild with joy, pressing him to his breast, and muttering incoherent cries, he ran with him to the arbor.

There, for some moments he showered him with tears and caresses. Then seating the child upon the bench he knelt in front of him bowing his head and sobbing.

When he raised his head he perceived that the boy who had not spoken a word was looking at him with his big eyes sad and staring. This look was so strange that George shuddered. He suddenly realized that while he was leaning over

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

671

the curb of the well his face was in full
light for the child whom he could not
see below and that the murderous
thought which had agitated his features
must have been as visible to his son as
it had been to Raoul when he was sus-
pended in the mountain precipice.

"Oh! my God!" thought he, "could
he have divined that for a moment I
wanted to kill him?"

He seated himself and again took the
child upon his knees.

"You tried to play with the ropes,"
said he caressingly, "and you fell?"

The boy nodded his head.

"Fortunately I came in time," added
George forcing himself to smile.

His son remained silent but continued
to look at him with wide-open eyes.

"Why don't you speak to me," said
George in a supplicating tone, "don't you
love me any longer?"

For answer the child threw his little
arms about his father's neck and sobbed
bitterly for a long time: nothing could
calm him and he appeared to suffer be-
yond his age.

George did not dare to interrogate him
further and took him to his mother.

During the next two weeks he was
occupied without relaxation in preparing
for his expedition. He found no mental
repose except in excessive activity and in
the prospect of new battles and brilliant
success. At night when they put the
child to bed he remanied near him for a
full hour. Sometimes he passionately
embraced him, sometimes he regarded
him with his eyes full of tears. He had
for his son, for his caprices and plays
an extreme affection. In appearance the
child had become for his father what
he had been formerly but from the time
he fixed his eyes upon George with that
indescribable expression which troubled
him to the bottom or his heart. George
started upon his expedition disheartened,
less inclined to fight than to take his
own life.

Scarcely outside the harbor, he met an
English cruise of five men-of-war. The
sight of this fleet, the aspect of the sea
which he had so much loved and the ap-
proaching battle partly restored his
energy. He resolved to add to his glory

by employing every expedient known to
him. But glory itself must have passed
him by. During the night while the fog
was dense he became separated from his
two frigates which had accompanied him
and he remained isolated upon the Bel-
lone. At daybreak he heard toward the
East a lively cannonading and started in
that direction. The breeze was very
feeble and his vessel moved but slowly.
At noon he found himself becalmed. The
fog lifted and a brilliant sun illumined
the waves; then George perceived, be-
yond the reach of his guns, his two frig-
ates surrounded by the English ships.
They were half unmasted and had low-
ered their colors. Not wishing to repeat
this disaster he resolved to wait for the
enemy. He remained upon the deck
gloomy and impassable. About two
o'clock a breeze favorable for the En-
glish fleet, sprang up, carrying it toward
the Bellone. As soon as it was possible
to fire the battle of artillery commenced;
but with the first shots a cannon ball
killed two men upon the dunette by
George's side and detached from the bar-
ricade a splinter of wood which struck
him on the shoulder. He fell to the
deck unconscious. The second officer,
deprived of the services of his chief, did
not consider it his duty to continue such
an unequal combat and taking flight re-
turned to Tranquebar. Scarcely recov-
ered from his wound, George resolved
to make an attack on land. His troops
during his absence should have united
with those of Tippo-Saeb. He hastened
to take command of them when he was
informed that the Indian Prince, deciding
to proceed without him, had attacked the
English and had been defeated. George
had only the fragments of that little army
which he had so much difficulty in form-
ing. Thus his lofty hopes were dashed
to the ground, and, cheated in his ambi-
tion, it only remained for him to recom-
mence his task. He wrote to the Naval
Minister in noble language, without ac-
cusing anyone, the recital of his mis-
fortunes and simply told him that he
was going to work to repair them. In
fact he set himself at the task in a man-
ner patient and continued but he no
longer had faith in the future.

To be concluded.

# The Biggest Law Office in the World

BY CHARLES STILL.

N every big criminal case public attention is focused on the trial. With the preliminary accounts of the crime the public has been well informed by the newspapers, and it is only natural that public interest should be fixed on the solution of the crime and the individual or individuals responsible for it.

How much attention is paid by the public, and what is the public's knowledge of the processes followed by the law's representatives in preparing for the trial? It (the public) may know something of the so-called big cases. What does it know of the ones considered insignificant, but of tremendous importance to those concerned?

The city of New York has the biggest law office in the world for the preparation and trial of criminal cases. Naturally it has the cases which furnish startling headlines for the newspapers and those not considered worth even an obscure line in the same newspapers. The city's criminal law office deals with both, and those in between.

For instance—and the humble shall be considered first—a woman with a babe in her arms walks timidly and hesitatingly to the door of the District Attorney's office. The woman tells the story not new to him! Abandoned, with a child, and unable to support herself, she seeks her husband. She is referred to an assistant district attorney. He listens to her story patiently. Then he sets out to find her husband, using every agency the big law office has. The neglectful husband is found and brought back. Often he is convinced that he should live with his wife and support her and their child. Thus a kink in the life of the everyday world is straightened out. If he is stubborn, as may happen—well, he repents in jail.

The public does not hear of this, but there is no arm of the District Attorney's office so strong or important that it may not be used in a case of this kind.

It is a different matter when, with lights shining and the gaiety of the town's liveliest district not yet stilled, a gambler—an informer to the District Attorney against an important and powerful police official—is shot down. The police alertness is none too evident. The gunmen who killed the gambler had disappeared in an automobile.

The District Attorney, who had been notified of the murder, went to the police station and took charge. Strangely enough the one witness who had the correct number of the gunmen's car had been thrown into a cell by the police.

Had not the District Attorney personally secured from this witness the number of the car, which made the capture of the gunmen possible, a now celebrated murder trial might not have taken place.

And from the moment the chief took charge every agency of the city's big law office began to hum.

New York's big law office is sheltered in the gray pile, called the Criminal Courts Building at Centre, Franklin, White and Lafayette streets. The two upper floors of the building are occupied by Mr. Whitman. Owing to the limited space in the building two and three assistants are sharing a single office.

There are employed in the office 165 lawyers, clerks, process servers and others necessary to its conduct. In round figures, $500,000 is spent annually to prosecute crimes in the heart of New York City.

A large part of this sum is spent in investigations. Experts in handwriting and mental diseases; private detectives and other agencies are often required

672

THE BIGGEST LAW OFFICE IN THE WORLD

673

preliminary to the presentation of a case to a jury. The extradition of prisoners from foreign countries contributes largely to the annual expense of the District Attorney's office. Just at present three detective-lieutenants are abroad awaiting the turning over of three prisoners. One is in London and accused of the larceny of about $90,000 from a marine insurance brokerage house, where he was employed. The two others—a man and a woman—defrauded Maiden Lane jewelry houses of hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling goods obtained by them on memoranda. They are under arrest in Paris.

From statistics compiled in the office of the chief clerk during the year 1913 there came within the jurisdiction of Mr. Whitman's office 14,853 charges of crime—felonies and misdemeanors. In all more than 16,000 proceedings were disposed of in the office last year.

The District Attorney of New York County is represented in one day, personally, or by his assistants, in twenty of New York. Of course, the chief of courts of the city, county, and State the office cannot have personal knowledge of the daily conduct of each trial or proceeding. But the responsibility and accountability for every word uttered by his representatives, for every step taken, and for the disposition of every case, so far as his office is concerned, rest with the District Attorney, and upon him alone.

Mr. Whitman freely admits that it does not make so much difference who the District Attorney may be if the heads of the various bureaus or departments in his office form a competent working organization. Such men carefully selected and trained by years of experience feel little interest in political changes in the community. Many of them were in the office long before Mr. Whitman was elected to the post.

The business of the District Attorney of New York County is the prosecution of all crimes committed within the boundaries of New York County. With the prosecution of the City of New York's interests in the civil courts, he has nothing to do. That lies with the Corpora-

tion Counsel, an appointee of the Mayor. The Corporation Counsel's office is the legal arm of the city's civil government. It has nothing to do with the punishment of crime.

The crimes prosecuted by the District Attorney are divided into two classes—felonies and misdemeanors—the former punishable by imprisonment in the state prison, the latter by imprisonment in the instances by fines. Felonies are prosecu-county jail or penitentiary, and in some cuted after indictment. This provision is in the Constitution of the State of New York.

In the Court of General Sessions of New York County Grand Juries are empanelled each month. During the last few years two grand juries have been appointed at each term of the Court of General Sessions. Frequently the volume of business is so large that the matters before the Court of General Sessions cannot be handled by these grand juries, and a third is empanelled from time to time in the Supreme Court, Criminal Term, which sits nine months in the year. One regular term of this court is assigned for the hearing of criminal cases.

In the Court of General Sessions there are five parts regularly in session from Oct. 1 until June 30. An additional part—Part V Continued—is in session nearly all of the calendar year. During the summer months three of the parts sit constantly for the disposition of those cases in which persons are confined in prison. The creation of a sixth part of the Court of General Sessions has recently been effected by State legislation.

Most of the cases handled in the Court of General Sessions are felony cases. Usually misdemeanor cases are tried in the Court of Special Sessions, another tribunal located in New York's Criminal Courts Building.

The volume of business prosecuted by the District Attorney in General Sessions is enormous. In 1912 there were 6,551 cases disposed of by the grand juries upon evidence brought out or presented by members of the District Attorney's staff. During 1913 the number of such cases disposed of by the grand juries was 7,006. That does not mean, however,

674

THE TREND

that 7,006 persons were indicted by New York County grand juries. About one out of every four felony cases submitted to the grand juries is dismissed. A great variety of crime is represented in those 7,006 actions. More than forty distinct crimes come within the felony cases alone.

In order to expedite the handling of the various proceedings brought before the criminal courts Mr. Whitman's office is divided into numerous departments or bureaus. The criminal complaints, from the time they are first submitted, either in the magistrate's courts or for investigation by the District Attorney's office, until the final judgment of the court has been carried out, are handled by these bureaus. Sometimes their work is continued even after the judgment of these courts has been made, for frequently the office of the District Attorney is called upon to investigate applications for clemency that are being made to the Governor. Mr. Whitman's office is also called upon to investigate the cases of first offenders who have applied to the State Parole Board for release upon the expiration of the minimum of their term of sentence.

The bureaus of the office in their order, from the beginning of a proceeding until its final termination, follow: the City Magistrates' Court bureau; the bureau of complaints; the grand jury or indictment bureau; the homicide bureau; the arson and insurance bureau; the Special Sessions Court bureau; the bail bond bureau; the appeal bureau and the bureau for the investigation of applications for pardon.

There is in each of the seven police magistrates' courts a member of Mr. Whitman's staff. This is an innovation since Mr. Whitman took the office of District Attorney. To accomplish this he had to get a special appropriation that enabled him to appoint more assistants to the staff. The new system has worked out exceedingly well from the view point of the community.

A large number of minor cases, which otherwise would have been sent by the magistrate to the Court of Special Sessions or to the grand juries, are now dis-

posed of in the lower court. Thus the courts and grand juries are relieved of additional burdens. Frequently a preliminary investigation by a representative of the District Attorney in the police court reveals the fact that no crime has been committed at all. In such instances, the time of the magistrate has been saved.

When it appears that a crime has been committed, and there is evidence which calls for the submission of the case to the magistrate, the assistant in the police court, investigates the facts and files with the papers a written memorandum for those in the District Attorney's office who subsequently are to prepare the case for the grand jury or for trial.

Similar work is done in the Complaint Bureau of the office. This office handles direct the complaints that do not go to the police courts in the first instance. Thousands of such complaints are investigated yearly. The majority of such cases prove to be matters calling for the action of the civil rather than the criminal courts. In this way the time of the judges in the criminal courts is saved by the work done by the district attorney.

The work of the Indictment Bureau calls for painstaking investigations. Infinite care is taken in the framing of indictments so that the crime may be properly stated. All felony cases must be passed on by the grand jury and a defendant is held to await their action.

Rarely is an innocent man indicted in New York county. In fact, more frequently a guilty man escapes through the inability of the prosecution to obtain strong enough evidence to warrant a conviction by a trial jury. During the year 1912 more than 3,000 persons were found guilty of crime in New York county. Of these 2,300 admitted their guilt. Last year 3,251 were adjudged guilty, and of these 2,683 admitted their guilt.

In the case of a misdemeanor the defendant is held for trial in Special Sessions. The District Attorney's office prepares pleadings on behalf of the people in criminal trials. In felony cases such pleadings are termed indictments

675

and in misdemeanor cases they are called informations. The grand jury or indictment bureau conducts careful investigations of all crimes committed and triable in the county where it appears that the defendant has left the jurisdiction of New York county and has been located in some other state or country from which he can be extradited.

In the Homicide Bureau a number of detailed policemen do detective work. Immediately upon notification by the police department of a homicide an assistant district attorney proceeds immediately to the scene of the crime. He is accompanied by a stenographer and the evidence that is gathered figures later in the trial. The assistants and the stenographers are subject to call day and night and the bureau is largely responsible for the successful prosecution of murder and manslaughter cases.

Suspicious fires, where claims may be made upon the insurance companies, are Insurance Bureau. Last year when a thoroughly investigated by the Arson and crusade was carried on with the help of the Fire Department one member of the staff spent his entire time in detecting and running down "firebugs" and crooked brokers and adjusters.

As a result of this work, two fraudulent fire insurance adjusters, a crooked broker, and several incendiaries were sent to Sing Sing prison for long terms. These prosecutions followed the confession of a notorious firebug, Isidore Stein, known generally as "Izzy, the Painter." Following the relentless prosecution of these gentry some fifteen persons fled the jurisdiction and are now fugitives from justice. By ridding the city of professional incendiaries, who have either been convicted or who have fled, the fire loss in New York City has been reduced several million dollars. The number of fires last year dropped more than 2,000 as compared to the preceding year.

In the Court of Special Sessions, presided over by three justices, where misdemeanor cases are heard, more than 10,000 actions were heard last year. Pleadings prepared by the District Attorney in the form of informations numbered 8,188.

In the trial parts of this court some 7,000 cases are disposed of annually. Few cases of general popular interest, however, are tried there. The public knows little of the tremendous volume of work handled in the two trial branches of this court in New York County. Among the cases classed as misdemeanors and heard by the Special Sessions Court are violations of the excise law, the laws respecting disorderly houses, petit larceny, gambling, simple assaults, and so on.

In the Bail Bond Bureau of the District Attorney's office a high degree of conscientious work is required. Each bond offered to guarantee the appearance of a defendant when wanted for trial must be thoroughly investigated by this bureau. Inspection of the property offered on a real estate bond is one of the important parts of the work of the department. During 1912 some $142,000 was recovered by Mr. Whitman's assistant in this bureau through the forfeiture of bail bonds. The money so collected is turned over to the City Chamberlain. During the last four years in excess of $319,000 has been collected on forfeited bonds and deposited in the city treasury.

The layman may suppose that the duties of the District Attorney end in a specific case when the defendant is convicted of a crime and the sentence is imposed. But that may be only the first step. For instance, the convicted defendant may appeal to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, where the District Attorney either in person or by one of his assistants, must appear and argue to sustain the judgment of conviction. If a judgment in such a case is affirmed by the Appellate Division, the defendant, under certain conditions, may carry his case to the Court of Appeals. There, too, the District Attorney must appear in opposition.

There is an erroneous impression that many convictions are reversed on appeal. Such an impression is created largely because reversals of the higher courts are advertised more widely in the newspapers than are the affirmances of

THE TREND

676

such tribunals. The following figures
may be of interest:

Last year in a total of ninety-eight
cases carried to the Appellate Division
from the county of New York, decisions
of the lower courts in three instances
only were reversed. Thirty-four of the
ninety-eight appeals were dismissed and
five were withdrawn.

In the Court of Appeals, out of a total
of thirty-two cases last year, only one
decision of the lower court was reversed.
In 1912, eleven cases carried to the Court
of Appeals were affirmed; none was re-
versed. Out of 115 cases carried to the
Appellate Division in 1912 only three
were reversed.

The Appeal Bureau handles also all
applications for certificates of reasonable
doubt, which would, if granted, enable
a convicted defendant to get out on bail
pending termination of his appeal. Writs

of habeas corpus, too, are taken care of
by this department. When one realizes
that out of 130 cases in the Appellate
Division last year there were only four
reversals it can be seen that there is
very small chance of a person, pending
appeal, being unjustly confined in prison.

The great bulk of work in the Dist-
trict Attorney's office is the investiga-
tion, preparation, and trial of the felony
cases that are submitted for the action of
the Court of General Sessions and the
criminal term of the Supreme Court. On
the members of Mr. Whitman's staff the
responsibility is great. They are called
upon to exercise keen analysis, the care-
ful weighing of evidence, and they must
be absolutely trustworthy.

The criminal law brings to the bar of
justice all classes of persons. Nearly
every profession is represented in the
mass of records of the office of the
prosecutor.

# The Trend of Events

## A NEW GERMANY

Almost before the war has begun it would seem to be ended. Outnumbered by Great Britain on the sea, hemmed in on either side by Frenchman and Russian, and with her other neighbors none too friendly, the chances of Germany in this unequal strife would seem to be slim. Yet so powerful is the German army and so united and patriotic her people that the Fatherland may yet rise up and assert her supremacy as none outside of Napoleon has ever done.

And if not—if humiliation and disaster follow in the wake of her perilous course—what then? Will it mean a new Germany, an empire founded on the belief of the divine right of man, a Democracy and the death of war and fanatacism? or merely the old order of things, fresh alliances and war without end?

## WHAT NEXT IN MEXICO?

When the little iron humorist, Huerta, stepped down and out of Mexico, President Wilson's policy toward that country won the first skirmish in the "diplomatic" battle of words and waiting. To hail Huerta's resignation as a decisive victory for Washington is like claiming a game of chess after taking the first pawn. All Mexico is still in the game and it behooves the manipulators of our side of the border to watch carefully the moves of the men on the other side. Huerta was our avowed and outspoken enemy. Those now marching to Mexico City profess friendship with the one condition that we allow them to do as they please. Huerta would have done no less under the same condition. Allowed to do as he pleased he would have saluted separately all of the little American flags on all of the Fourth-of-July Celebration cakes in Washington.

With a man to take charge until the victorious Constitutionalists march into

the capital, the Mexican people await their fate. They know better than we possibly can that the battle cry of a revolutionist does not necessarily mean the watchword of the administration of a new president. They have heard the battlecries before; they have seen the rebel of yesterday become the president of today. The intelligent ones know that a Mexican revolutionist must have something more than a patriotic soul to stand a chance. Usually he fights to free the people from the kettle so that he may put them into the pot. Usually he wants to put the X. Y. Z. company of concession holders out that the Z. Y. X. company of concession holders may come in. And when Z. Y. X. is in X. Y. Z. gets busy in the north with a few more Mexican patriots and another revolution. Its bread and butter business to the patriot and the same thing more or less to the stock holders of the concession holding company, for when Z. Y. X.'s rebel becomes president there is nothing in Mexico for X. Y. Z.

Villa, be he pure hearted patriot or the purchased tool of a foreign corporation, has been considered favorably in some quarters here and the reason for that favorable consideration seems to lie in the fact that he has had a better press agent and more diplomatic advisers than the recognized head of the revolution in which he has played so prominent a part. When he was proven to be a bandit his defenders did much to show that he had been a very good bandit. When his photographs showed him to be a wild and wooly looking person, another photograph was produced to prove that he could be quite handsome with a shave, a hair-cut, trimmed moustaches and a military cap in place of his crushed service hat. And much was done to have it understood that he had a real affection for the United States, a difficult thing to prove of any Mexican.

677

678

THE TREND

To get Huerta out the United States
has made it possible for Villa and Car-
anza to walk in. With our recognition
of their government and the money they
can borrow they may be able to keep
the other revolutionists out of Mexico
City forever. But they are not likely
to be without revolutions while the dis-
possessed foreign corporations are will-
ing to gamble on the chances of getting
their men back in power. Ever willing
patriots will rise to their country's sal-
vation so long as the companies are will-
ing to pay their soldiers. There must be
bloody strife in Mexico until its govern-
ment becomes more powerful than the
corporations that seek to develop its won-
derful resources for their own profit and
the profit of their hirelings in office.

SAMSON BARNES.

William Barnes, Jr., the New York State Republican machine leader, is suing Theodore Roosevelt for $50,000. "He called me a corrupt politician," says Barnes, "and he must prove it."

On the face of it such a challenge may seem less difficult to Mr. Roosevelt than many of his previous successful undertakings. If the suit ever is tried in a public court the question at issue is very likely to be an open one to the jury until all of the evidence is heard. Leaving the possible conclusion to the trial contingency, the question now seems to be: Why has Mr. Barnes started suit against Mr. Roosevelt? What wonderful cosmetic has changed that previously imperious skin to a texture like unto the damask cheek of a blushing damsel. The shafts of campaign orators, muck-rakers, newspaper and magazine writers have rebounded blunt from the hide that Roosevelt has pricked so deep. Has Mr. Barnes decided to prove his political honesty to the people or is he using the suit against Roosevelt as a gauntlet to be cast down before the men of his own organization who have tried to win him over to fusion with the Progressive forces in the coming gubernatorial campaign? Undoubtedly there have been men in his own councils who have tried to trace out to Mr. Barnes the glaring handwriting on the wall that he will not see. There

have been those who, selfishly or other-
wise, have pointed out the superior value
of half a loaf to no loaf at all. And Mr.
Barnes, harried within his own ranks
and consumed by a hatred of the man
who has been his chieftest political an-
tagonist, has tried a Samsonian spectacle
to send the walls of fusion talk a clatter-
ing... The defeat of the whole Republi-
can organization by the Democrats would
be a sweet morsel in the mouth of Barnes
in comparison with the victory of a
single Roosevelt candidate in New York
State.

No fusion between the Republican ma-
chine and the Progressive party is pos-
sible while Barnes is the leader of the
Republican side and Roosevelt is the
prime mover of the Progressives.

THE PURDY PIG FARM.

A good many people will think twice
before saying grace for the food they
eat after reading Alfred McCann's *Globe*
disclosures of conditions on the Purdy
pig farm at Ossining, N. Y. In fact,
there are not a few who will agree with
the old prophets that the pig is not a
proper article of diet.

Pigs raised on the carcasses of dis-
eased horses, pigs raised on the remains
of tubercular cattle, pigs raised on gar-
bage, filth and every other conceivably
unwholesome thing, was the sight which
greeted the *Globe* investigator when with
six armed assistants, including Dr.
Joseph A. Shears of the New York
Health Department, he pounced down
upon this farm of horror.

"The skulls, ribs, vertebrae, pelvic bones, long bones and hoofs of horses littered the earth in every direction. In the mud along the edges of a pool of water 100 feet down the hillside a number of sows were wallowing. In the water floated the head of a horse. The sows were gnawing at parts of a carcass." And so on.

If it were possible to convict Purdy
for his callous contempt of society it
would be a blessing second only to the
conviction of those officials even more
guilty than he. But probably nothing
will be done about it. The facts of the
case have been known for a half year.

THE TREND OF EVENTS

679

On December 4, Dr. Shears investigated the farm and found it to be filthy with decomposed animal matter, bones and carcasses of horses and cattle.

On December 10, I. M. De Varona, Chief Engineer of the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity, gave Dr. Lederle further information, and on December 12 the commission of the State Department of Agriculture, notified Dr. Lederle that the State Department of Health had turned the matter over to him. After which the incident was forgotten.

Mayor Gaynor was once appealed to. A neighbor of Purdy's who had been trying for years to bring the stench of the farm to the proper official noses, wrote to him with an accurate description of the place. She said that the pigs were unhealthy, that Purdy was unhealthy, and that the one pool of water was unhealthy also. She made one mistake, however, and that was in mentioning that she was the wife of a prominent apothecary. Mayor Gaynor could not see why the wife of an apothecary was writing to him and not the apothecary himself. He said so. He said further that the writer in his opinion must have animated by spite. That ended the correspondence.

Now Governor Glynn has been appealed to and the Governor promises definite action—"if it is in his power."

## POLITICAL GRATITUDE

When William Howard Taft appointed an ex-Confederate soldier to the Supreme Court and raised another from Associate Justice to Chief Justice, probably he had no thought that his action would resolve itself into one for his own good. That sometimes there is gratitude in politics is proved by the attitude of the great rank and file of Southern people on whom Mr. Taft's signal of Northern good-will made more deep and lasting impression than all the prefunctory returning of Confederate flags, Gettysburg reunions, and talks of the war being over, to which they had been accustomed.

Now that there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court Bench, these Southerners are petitioning President Wilson to

appoint ex-President Taft to the place. What is more, the papers of the South, of which the Atlanta Constitution is one, have taken up the issue, as this representative daily states, with the purpose of "exemplifying the characteristic Southern trait of matching generosity with generosity and breadth with breadth."

Whatever the outcome of this movement, it is worth a great deal to the country to have had it arise and may perhaps succeed in linking the last gap—however small—which has still stood out between the North and South.

## GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP OF BASEBALL.

They are now predicting Government Ownership of baseball, which brings to mind the fact that our National Game is in much the same condition as was that of the railroads a few years ago. Millions had been spent to oust competition, a country-wide monopoly existed, and the magnates, people and players were all the losers.

Today a great many people will not ride on the New York, New Haven and Hartford roads and for similar reasons a great many people will not go to see the National and American League games. It will be argued of course that the reason people prefer not to ride on the New York, New Haven and Hartford is that they are afraid of losing their lives. But what with baseball strikes in the brewing, internal dissensions on every side, and war to the last ditch lustily declared between the magnates and players, a feeling of security is not likely to be carried with us to the baseball game.

One of the repeated outcries against organized baseball was that it was not honest. There were those who never would believe that games were not thrown from time to time for the sake of the gate, that the standing of the various teams was not artificial. This has been many times disproved. But what does it matter to the public whether or not the game is honestly played, when it is shown that dollars and cents are the only standard that it followed.

680

THE TREND

The cause of the present "psychological depression" of baseball may be laid directly to the Federal League. It is the Federal League which has shown up the grasping, sordid conditions which prevail in the older organizations. It is the Federal League which now asks us instead of keeping in automobiles and finery the players of two major leagues to do the same for three. Gradually the public is losing all interest in the game.

Retrenchments will soon be in order, we are told. Perhaps after all Government Ownership will be the best thing for baseball.

A PIED PIPER NEEDED.

A Pied Piper of Hamlin is evidently needed in Hungary. In 1905 Prince

Colloredo-Mansfield liberated ten pains of Canadian muskrats on his imperial estates, and today "there are 200,000 muskrats in Hungary." The original despatches had it Bohemia, but whether Bohemia or Hungary the pests have multiplied in outrageous fashion and done dire damage to the carp and crayfish which form the native industry.

In some parts of this country muskrats have made trouble by undermining embankments, but our own pests, outside of the sparrow, consist of the San José scale, the gypsy moth, and the white fly of Florida. All these things have been wished upon us.

Just where the housefly came from nobody knows. But woe to him who first imported it to any country.

STEINWAY IDEALS

FROM the inception of the busi-
ness of STEINWAY & SONS
there were certain fixed ideals
ever kept in mind which were ex-
pressed in the one thought—to
make the best possible piano irre-
spective of cost, effort and time
spent in the attainment of this end.

Steadfastly and unerringly
those ideals have been adhered to
by succeeding generations of the
STEINWAY FAMILY as a sa-
credly guarded legacy, and in consequence the STEIN-
WAY PIANO has gained a pre-eminent position in the
world's centres of music and art.

In recognition of their great achievements in the realm
of tone, honors and distinctions have been showered upon
the STEINWAYS by the crowned heads of Europe, and
the sway of the STEINWAY PIANO has been gratefully
acknowledged by leading musical and scientific societies
everywhere. It is generally conceded that to-day the
STEINWAY occupies a supreme place in art circles in all
lands—a position that is not only unique among pianos
but among every phase of American art.

STEINWAY & SONS
STEINWAY HALL

107-109 East 14th Street

Subway Express Station at the Door

Also London; Hamburg, Berlin; Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton, Ohio; Indianapolis and Terre Haute, Ind.; Louisville, Ky.; Charleston, W. V.; and represented by the Foremost Dealers Elsewhere Throughout the World.

NEW YORK

In answering this advertisement it is desirable that you mention THE TREND.

CONTRIBUTORS TO THE SEPTEMBER TREND

MARY FARLEY SANBORN (“The Valor Ranch”), the well-known novelist, begins the publication of her latest novel in the current issue of THE TREND.

DONALD EVANS (“The Shadows of Desire”) is a poet who has won recognition through the originality and courage of his writings.

JOSEPHINE MEIGHAN (“The Old War and the New”) was educated in a Paris convent. Her reminiscences of stories heard in childhood of the siege of Paris by the Germans possess a special interest to the reader today.

WALTER C. ARENSBERG (“Portrait”) is a young American poet of growing fame.

A. E. THOMAS ("The Champion and the Petticoat"), though best known as a playwright, is also the author of novels and short stories. Some of the latter THE TREND is privileged from time to time to publish.

WITTER BYNNER (“Out of the Sea”) is one of the best known of the younger American poets.

PERCY A. HUTCHISON (“Off and On at Vera Cruz”), a graduate of Harvard and some time instructor in English in that university, has recently visited Mexico.

EDNA KENTON (“With Bell, Book, and Candle”) is widely known as a writer of novels, short stories, and essays.

JOHN MACY (“Reckoning”) is the literary editor of the Boston *Herald*.

DJUNA CHAPPELL BARNES (“The Philosophy of Elimination”) is a new TREND contributor.

BURTON KLINE (“From Beyond”) is a member of the editorial staff of the Boston *Transcript*.

WALLACE STEVENS (“Carnet de Voyage”) is a new TREND contributor.

HENRY FITZGERALD (“The Edge of the Bog”) is the author of several plays on Irish subjects.

ROYAL DIXON and RAYMOND COMSTOCK (“The Folk Lore of Plants”) are widely known for their collaborations.

HUTCHINS HAPGOOD (“The Story of a Singing Soubrette”) has cast several of his social studies into the form his story now running in THE TREND assumes.

FRANK M. WALTS (“Sketches from Life”) is continuing his striking pictorial series.

HELEN HOYT (“Converse”) is a new TREND contributor.

A. H. MICHELSON (“A Walloon Idyl”) is the American Consul at Hanover, Germany, and was formerly American Consular Agent at Charleroi, Belgium.

EDITH M. WHITMORE (“Woman Suffrage”) is a prominent feminist.

FRANK ALVAH DEARBORN (“My Brother’s Keeper”), lawyer and writer, is a frequent contributor to THE TREND.

THE TREND—ADVERTISING SECTION

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THE TREND—ADVERTISING SECTION

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THE TREND—ADVERTISING SECTION

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# War Number of the Trend

The October Trend will offer its readers authoritative articles on various phases of the present world conflict. Allan Dawson, the eminent political writer, will lead the number with a study of the causes and philosophy of the war.

## ESCAPING FROM EUROPE

Eye-witnesses will narrate in detail their adventures in escaping from the war-ridden countries. Exact conditions in Europe at the outbreak of hostilities, the frantic haste of mobilization, and the plight of those left behind will be described.

## BELGIUM PORTRAYED IN FICTION

The opening scene of the titanic struggle was the eastern, or Walloon, section of Belgium, where opposing legions clinched at Liége and Charleroi. A. H. Michelson, formerly the American consular agent at Charleroi, will contribute another of his intimate studies of Walloon life and character.

In addition, fiction, articles, and verse by such well known authors as Walter Prichard Eaton, Edna Kenton, Hutchins Hapgood, Mary Farley Sanborn, Walter Conrad Arensberg, etc., and illustrations of special interest will be features of the OCTOBER ISSUE OF THE TREND

As a SPECIAL INDUCEMENT to those subscribing to the TREND before October 1, 1914, we are able to offer this 25c. magazine at the remarkably low yearly rate of $2.50, checks payable to TREND MAGAZINE, Long Acre Building, New York.

THE TREND

Vol. VII

SEPTEMBER, 1914

No. 6

# The Valor Ranch

BY MARY FARLEY SANBORN.

## I.

THE train wound along its narrow ledge on the side of the foothill like a tired snake, dragging its tail wearily round the curves. There had been spatters of light rain at intervals ever since noon, but now the sprinkle had given place to a more searching form of attack—an onslaught of fine yellow dust that came rolling in cloudlike masses before the wind. It drifted past the car windows, obscuring the view and even blurring the sunlight; inside it settled thickly on the window-sills and in the folds of tumbled pillow-cases. In greater or less degree, it seemed to be everywhere.

The inmates of the sleeping coaches resigned themselves to this visitation with the passive distaste of the seasoned traveler, who meets his discomforts with good-humored tolerance oftener than with carping and complaint.

True, the tourist of today comes near to being spoiled by an almost infinite perfection of detail, so far as this can be achieved by competing railway lines; but there still remain a few disciplinary features en route—the smoke and grit, the withering atmosphere of steam heat, and the coffin-like proportions of the sleeping boxes in which, when disposed for the night, one may behold oneself reflected at full length

in a polished surface hardly more than three feet from the tip of one's nose.

Added to these are the insistent voices of one's fellow-passengers, who talk in loud tones when one wishes to sleep; delays, when the whole course of one's future seems to depend upon one's arrival at a certain point on time; shuntings on to sidetracks, where, for what seem interminable periods, one's outlook consists of the blistered wall of a car-house, or the uncommunicative side of a freight car. The burden of eating without appetite, of studying to avoid the wandering gaze of one's vis-a-vis, of making a final decision as to which one dislikes most in the porter, his obsequiousness or his insolence—these flaws still exist, and are likely to remain as tests of one's power of adaptability to imposed conditions.

Here and there, however, is to be found an exception to the general rule in the person of some individual who has reached the limit of his own particular endurance. Such an instance might have been observed among the trio of men who occupied together a stateroom in one of the toiling Pullmans.

Thick as was the tempest of dust outside, it was almost exceeded in density by the cloud within, a veiled appearance consisting of blue layers of tobacco smoke that hung in long, sagging, fine-spun threads across the com-

681

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partment the door of which had been kept carefully closed for two days, except when it had opened to admit the dining-car porter with glasses on a tray, or to allow the occasional passing out and in of one of its occupants. These persons, when exposed to public view, showed impassive faces of saluted complexion, lusterless of eye and close-lipped. The characteristic expression was that of secretiveness. You could not have picked the winner from the loser, so thoroughly had the habit of guarded concentration accomplished its result. Fair specimens they were of their own type of devotee, men who gave their allegiance to the spirit of the game, regardless alike of her friendliness or her disfavor, profiting or losing with equal imperturbability.

In the case of two of these, at least, does the generalisation hold good; of the other it may be said that he varied slightly upon the species.

The man of chance often owes his betrayal to a single feature. There are faces of youthful contour in which the eyes appear frank and candid, the habit of concealment being shown only in a certain droop of the lids. The tightened nostril, white where it is tensest; the under lip thrust up and protruded with the fixity of an iron clamp; the insinuating eye gleaming a cold defiance—any one of these indications may exist as a solitary sign where there is otherwise no intimation of that inborn spirit of curiosity which is an irresistible appetite in the characters of some men.

Curiosity. The word is, perhaps, as expressive as any word could be of the internal force that makes the gambler what he is. Life in its normal course is too slow, too deliberate, too chary of surprises. The reduplication of one day by another begets in certain na-tures an exceeding restlessness which breaks forth in a feverish desire for something novel, unexpected, unexpe-rienced.

And there is ever a provocation and an allurement in the glistening bits of cardboard that slip between the fingers

and lie face downward on the table. A new story is told with each juggle of the pack. What will it be? The breathless moment is when they are gathered up and viewed as the player's outfit, his stock in trade for a space of time. Having been played, they are dead things, until fate, sweeping them together again, creates a new mystery. Each time the grouping is different and the pack is ever more and more tantalising in its recombinations, in the new aspects that quicken the blood like the sudden yielding kiss of a hitherto resisting mistress, or fill it with sparks of daring, urging to its utmost effort the mettlesome will of the spirit to win in spite of odds.

Curiosity. Thirst. The restless craving to force the pace of life to its highest speed, to turn fate as a swift wheel. The pursuit of the well-beloved—the woman, Chance—as perhaps no veritable woman was ever pursued.

The requirements of the well-equipped gambler are many, but each one is important, and he must, first of all, be without fear. Further down in the scale is the knack of stealthy observation, with its accompanying ability to repress every telltale gleam of eye or quiver of lid, the stern power of control over the facial muscles that enables any emotion to mask itself under a sardonic grimness which might mean anything from crowning success to fatal defeat.

This last had become accomplished in lines of concealment that were of themselves almost lines of revealing, in Brace Leverfield's face.

He was the youngest of the party, though by no means a youth. Terms of years do not convey the effects of those ageing processes which may be partly due to the action of alkali dust and the blinding glare of the sun on desert plains, and partly to the climatic conditions of certain arid countries through which the soul has progressed. There were fine lines cut deep at the corners of Leverfield's eyes; the eyes themselves had faded from the sunny blue of childhood to a flinty tone, and

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683

their lids were habitually contracted. An unpleasant expression, made up of contempt and disbelief, lurked about his mouth; his hair had thinned at the temples, and the lankness of his cheeks showed muscular protuberances where the jaw had set itself.

There was no elasticity in his motions as he leaned across the table to deal the cards or change the position of a pile of chips; he swung forward with an insolent laziness, as if every movement were an effort which he might at any time find too irksome to repeat. The other two men looked fagged but cheerful; his manner was morose, and gave intimations of a pentup irritability that was mounting by degrees to a positive belligerence, and would, when it broke bounds, be likely to include in its anathema the dust outside, the smoke within, his two companions, the run of the cards, and probably also, his own sick and sorry soul that looked hag-ridden out of the dull eyes.

It found voice presently.

"Shove up that window, Fales. For God's sake, let's have a breath of clean air."

"How many?" inquired the man addressed, picking up the pack.

"Two, if you do as I tell you. Otherwise, not a damned one!"

"We should have the place full of sand," argued Fales, pleasantly, giving two cards to Leverfield and taking three himself. "Have to get Charley in here with a shovel."

Leverfield pressed the button in the wall and the porter appeared, promptly, for the poker party was worth his while. "Open that window."

"Leave it as it is," Fales countermanded, in soothing tones. He winked at the porter, who glanced at Leverfield with a flash of his white teeth.

"All right," said the latter. His eyes shot at the hesitating darkey a gleam as of cold steel. "Leave it as it is, do you hear?" and the man went out grinning.

They played the hand through and Leverfield rose, sweeping his chips off

the table into a corner of the seat he had been occupying. "We'll continue the game later on," he said.

"What do you mean?" demanded the others, aghast at this ruthless violation of professional etiquette.

"What do you suppose I mean? I said we'd continue later. At present I'm sick of the cards and I'm sick of you." He took his hat from the hook.

"Well, I must say—" began Fales. But he left his sentence unfinished; he was a man slow to rouse and cautious to act.

"Say it, and be hanged," returned Leverfield, menacingly quiet.

The other two looked at each other silently, and Leverfield went out unhindered.

He passed through another sleeper and gained the observation car, where he flung himself into an unoccupied chair. He had no idea of having taken a final leave of the game; there was in his mind no definite conception of what this reaction of feeling meant. He was only sharply aware of the fact that at present his whole being was in a turmoil. He was sick, he was weary, he was suffering an impassioned revolt against everything that made demands upon him. If he didn't break something and get free he would fight, and to fight with Fales or his companion would be to soil his hands. They were two or three strata below himself in the world of chance which they all inhabited; between his teeth he resigned them to oblivion as a low-lived pair.

The sandstorm had cleared a little, and sunlight lay in patches over the bare hills. Just now the train was passing through a level valley where ranches were to be seen in a fair state of cultivation, row upon row of fruit trees—straight rows, crossway rows, diagonal rows, whichever way one looked. Their foliage showed grey-green under a coating of dust.

Leverfield's eyes idly followed the scene as the train sped by, hurrying to make up for loss of time, and without carrying the analogy very far, he dis-

THE TREND

684

cerned in the sand-blown orchards a few points of resemblance to his own life. He had once been a fresh green tree, and he knew that now he was begrimed with the dirt of the world. Unlike the trees, however, he had not borne fruit; he could not hold up his head, as the phrase goes, with the men who had worked to create or to produce, and he felt for the first time in his life the disadvantage of not being able to challenge criticism. He was a fighter; and he roused to the dawning consciousness that it was enough merely to avoid the evil opinion of his fellow-men, or to be able to choke it back in their throats with the grip of his fingers.

He had never supposed himself to attach any importance to his standing in the world at large; he knew he was an honest gambler—incidentally others knew it, too. Nobody had ever wished, or would have dared, to challenge the fact. But was that enough? Other men were doing things that showed for themselves. Look at those trees— every one in its proper place, where five years ago, or less, there had been only a wilderness of sage-brush. These men had it in their power to point to him and say that he had done nothing which proved his right to live. It was true; he could not give the lie to their words. What a position for a man who had met the followers of his own trade with a fearless eye!

At this point he became aware that the actual dust of the desert had got into his throat and down inside his collar. His fingers felt gritty as he rubbed them together; his clothes had a rusty appearance beyond that which was warranted by their state of wear. He went to wash in the lavatory, and to rinse his throat with a glass of Apollinaris, then he hunted up the porter.

"Brush off some of this confounded dirt, will you? I look like a sand heap."

The man was all tenderness. He felt a sympathy for Leverfield, whom, with a remembrance of some experiences of his own at craps, he judged to

have been losing at the cards. The youngest of the poker party was his favorite; although the other two might not be so variable in temper, they were at once less liberal and less considerate.

Thus refreshed, Leverfield went out to the platform of the observation car, and stood with his clean hands thrust deep in his pockets, watching the track as it spun itself out of the bowels of the train and receded in two glittering threads far away into the distance. On either side the tracts of orchards alternated with fields of alfalfa; across this the wind made waves of a paler green as it turned over the young leaves. But Leverfield was not actively interested in the agricultural aspect of the country; he regarded sullenly the prosperous ranches, conscious only that they represented a certain return of profit, and that money was a necessary lubricant to the operations of the great machine. If he had been pressed for his views on the matter, he would have said that he would cheerfully put a pistol to his head rather than commit himself to the life of a rancher. But he did not carry his thoughts so far; he was only aware of a queasy feeling which told him that he hated his companions and the loathsome atmosphere in which they had their being.

It was not a moral reaction, at least he did not now regard it as such. It was a physical one, the first of its kind that he had ever experienced, and quite enough of a proposition in that light alone.

His head ached, by no means an unusual symptom after a protracted sitting at the cards, and in this case a little feeling of nausea accompanied the dull throbbing. He cursed these sensations quietly under his breath.

The train, beginning to evince some process of selection in its wanderings, was running alongside a narrow river whose low banks were fringed with young trees clothed in the fresh green of early summer and dripping from the recent shower. The sand storm had been left behind, and the sun, half way

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685

down the west, was sending out long shafts of light between fragments of broken cloud. The leaves danced and glittered, while the river, hurrying over its bed of stones, showed ruffles of foam at the edges.

Following up a narrow gap between the bluffs, the train emerged into a broad and irregular but level valley inclosed on all sides by low foothills, the spurs of a mighty mountain range which lay far beyond. Gathering speed, it flashed by one small farm after another, prosperous young ranches with their trim, neat rows of buildings, economically adapted to the exact needs of their inhabitants, and the inevitable rows of trees, straight, crossway and diagonal, forming quickly into new lines as the spectator shifted his point of view.

Leverfield, luxuriating in the smooth feeling of his clean hands and inhaling deep breaths of the rain-washed air, was beginning to find a soothing influence in the regularity of the fruit orchards. The nausea had subsided; he thought with disgust of the two other men shut up in the ill-smelling saloon where dregs of whiskey, dead cigar stubs, and stale smoke blended in a villainous composite odor.

A nerve still throbbed in his temple; and as he pressed his finger to it he could feel the beating of the full pulse. He did not know whether the headache had given him the nausea, or whether the nausea had produced the headache. Someone, not a doctor, but a man who knew the faces of other men as a surgeon knows his instruments, had told him once that the cards would be the death of him if he didn't quit. He recalled now, as he half sat on the rail of the platform with one leg swinging, the time and circumstances of the brief conversation. He saw the unclean light of kerosene lamps turning ghastly in the dawn of a summer morning, and heard the dull clink of glasses as the slipshod waiter, heavy with sleeplessness and crawling about the room like a half-dead fly, collected them on a tray.

"You'll kill yourself with the cards as surely as if you put a pistol to your head and fired it," said the man who had come into the game merely to oblige, and who had got up as fresh as he sat down.

Leverfield, without taking the trouble to argue the point, had replied that a few more years at the gambling table was exactly the price at which he held his life.

"You may not always see it that way," the man had said, standing up and shaking the cramp out of his legs. Then he had covered Leverfield with a single appraising glance. "You must have been rather a slick-looking fellow—once," was his suggestive comment, and he went out as if it mattered little enough either way.

Leverfield had responded with a mirthless grimace, and had hardly thought of the words since that day. Now they came back to him as distinctly as if they had just been uttered, and bearing a significance which he had not sought to find in them at the time.

"Odd," he muttered, and brooded over them for a few minutes, as his eyes followed the changing lines of the country through which they were passing.

The houses were nearer together now, and were surrounded by small fenced inclosures instead of by spreading orchards. Finally an arrangement of streets became apparent, and above the nearer groups of dwellings rose the tops of taller buildings, chimneys, towers and steeples, cut irregularly against the background of hills. The train was making its way into a thriving town.

The engine rounded a curve, and gave forth in a long, triumphant whistle the announcement of its approach. It swept in among lines of freight cars, rumbled across the main thoroughfare of the town and pulled up panting at the station.

Leverfield leaned forward and read the name of the place on a swinging sign suspended from the roof of the

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building: Salvia City. The title rather attracted him.

He stood with his hands still in his pockets for protection, scanning the faces of the throng upon the platform. They were those of idle spectators, mostly, amid the press of whom those who had business to transact were obliged to force their way. Far up at the forward part of the train, which was throbbing from end to end with the heavy breathing of the engine, crates and boxes were being hurried on board. The passengers of the Pullmans had graciously descended and were airing themselves outside, displaying that assumption of an immense worldly superiority which is the admitted prerogative of the first-class tourist.

Leverfield had the spacious rear platform of the observation car entirely to himself. With his eyes on the scene before him, he again called up the mental picture of his late companions sprawled out in their compartment sleeping away the interim of his absence, and another spasm of that deadly nausea contracted his nerves. Professional honor demanded that he should return to them—to the stale smoke (he had never realized before that the smell of a cigar stub could seem so vile) to the rank odor of drained whiskey glasses, and the feel of grit on his fingertips, to the sight of Fales's coarse, puffy face with the visor of his soft cap resting on the bridge of his nose, and a black cigar dragging at the corner of his brutal mouth. The other man was thin-lipped, with a one-sided, satiric smile, maddening when you were out of temper. They were both indifferent to the state of their nails, and Leverfield had been born with an instinct for cleanliness, which he had fastidiously cultivated. His lip curled with disgust at the reminiscence.

His car had stopped just opposite the lower end of the station platform. This was a position which afforded him a direct view up the main street, an unpaved thoroughfare, rutted by wheel-tracks, but of generous breadth and

not lacking in dignity. The vista was closed by violet-shadowed foothills.

A load of alfalfa dangling its clusters of purple blossoms, came down the avenue, bumped over the tracks, and disappeared behind the freight house. At the same moment, Leverfield heard the sound of horses' feet, and two spirited animals guided by a single rider dashed side by side into view. They were skilfully brought up at the end of the platform, where they stopped, as no horse east of the Mississippi knows how to stop, with the instantaneous precision of a mechanical device.

Their rider dismounted as quickly, and, throwing the reins over the head of her own horse, walked toward the train.

She was dressed in a short divided skirt and blouse of dark-blue. Her white linen collar, fastened by a soft knot of black ribbon, was low at the throat; her brown hair was braided and looped up at the back. On her head was a slouch hat of grey felt, her gauntleted hand carried a riding-whip. She pushed her way in among the crowd of loafers, using her elbow to some purpose if they failed to make passage. Her gaze, as eager as it was fearless and unembarrassed, seemed to scan the whole platformful of people with one comprehensive look.

Leverfield watched her; she was a woman to command attention. He noted that her strong brows were drawn together in a frown of expectancy, that her underlip was caught between her teeth, that her grey eyes searched anxiously among the shifting groups of faces for the one she desired to see.

He observed the change in her expression as the confidence resolved itself into wistfulness, and the underlip was released from the grip that had held it to be thrust up in a valiant protest against disappointment. A man who was passing just then turned to address her.

Leverfield did not catch the first words. "Expect him today, did you?" was all he overheard.

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687

"Yes," she answered. "He hasn't come; I don't understand why. He's badly needed, he knows that. There's a lot to be done at the ranch just now."

"You alone out there?"

"Yes, except for the dogs. I left them to watch the place. Well, he hasn't come," she said again.

"He'll show up tomorrow, likely."

"Ah, yes, I'm not worrying about him," she answered with a slight smile; "he looks out for himself pretty well. It's the water I'm thinking of."

"Got to take it this week?"

"Day after tomorrow. You don't know anybody I could get to help me, do you, Mr. Trayner, in case Cecil shouldn't come?"

"N-no, don't know as I do." He turned his head, looking over each shoulder as if there were a possibility of some candidate for the work being discovered in their immediate neighborhood. "You can generally pick them up on the street, somewheres. I guess you won't have much trouble about getting somebody." He reiterated his hopeful conviction that the missing Cecil would appear most any time, probably in the next train.

The girl nodded at him with a friendly smile, and walked away toward the horses, who had been standing quietly with the reins hanging on their breasts.

Leverfield had been as motionless as they; his consciousness now returned with a shock. In the meantime, however, a process of detachment seemed to have taken place; he felt himself to be no longer a part of the train that had borne him thus far up the valley.

What was the meaning of this change? It was a question that called for instantaneous reply. The train was preparing to move; the confusion of traffic at the far end was already subsiding. Empty trucks were being pulled back; there was a general air on the part of the bystanders that the principle part of the show was over.

The tired snake was about to rouse itself and crawl away; it would slide

through the gap and be lost to sight among the hills. That girl would ride back to the ranch where there were only the dogs to keep her company.

Leverfield heard up and down the length of the train the cries of "All aboard!" The porters had helped their passengers into the coaches. The hissing of the escape valve had ceased; a tremor passed through the train and the links that held it together sprang taut. The first stealthy movement could be felt, the sinuous glide of a creature that can increase its speed with incredible swiftness.

The man on the rear platform swung one leg over the railing. No one appeared to notice him. The other leg followed immediately, and he dropped to earth. There was not time to calculate nicely, and his descent was ill-judged; he sprawled for an instant on the farther side of the track. As he picked himself up he caught the sound of flying feet, and saw the blue streak of a riding skirt which flashed by. The girl and the horses were off and away, and of the train he could see only the rear end of the car where he had lately been standing, rapidly becoming smaller along the line of rails.

His sense of severment was complete. Fales was a lewd phantom haunting his repulsive corner in the shut-up Pullman. Foul air?—he felt that he could never breathe it again. He took as deep a breath' as his contracted lungs could hold, and plunging his hands again into his pockets he rounded the ranks of freight cars and stood looking up the road where only a cloud of dust marked the passage of the blue riding skirt.

When he came back across the tracks a few minutes later, the northbound rails glistened bare in the afternoon sunlight. The station was deserted except for two elderly idlers who were occupying an empty truck and busily violating the ordinance that deals with the emitting of tobacco-juice. Leverfield overheard bits of their conversation as he sauntered past; they were solemnly discussing the weak points

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688

in the management of the N. P. R., and telling each other what improvements ought to be made in the train schedule.

Leverfield listened to them with the ear of pity; they were in utter ignorance of the fact that fate, and not the managers of the railroad, had brought him here in Number One and dropped him in Salvia City to fulfil his destiny.

## II.

Our adventurer passed the night as a guest of the Hotel Salvia, a public house which is undoubtedly surpassed in elegance by the more pretentious hostelries of the great Northwest, but which also has its inferiors, houses which are still more in need of the paint-brush outside and the scrubbing-brush within, which wear a less convincing air of virtue, and smell even more obtrusively of what is going on in the kitchen.

Leverfield was able to sleep, and he made an average breakfast, after which he smoked a pretty good cigar, sitting tipped back in an arm-chair before the glass front of the hotel office where, with his hat brim well over his eyes, he carelessly observed the passers-by.

But his mental vision was by no means wholly occupied by the external images which came and went before him. The look in that girl's face had arrested his flaccid attention; his spirit had responded to the shock by a sudden tightening of the nerves. He felt that something had happened, and twenty-four hours ago he would have declared confidently that there was nothing left to happen, that no new note could ever be struck in his life.

Just what note had been sounded he could not yet determine. He was frankly puzzled by the failure of all his previously deduced principles to apply to the case in point. There were two distinct tributes that a man could pay a woman—the respectful willingness to view her from a distance, and the desire to pursue her at full speed. The two never combined. It was respect, probably, that this girl had in-

spired in him; that, and a certain admiration for the intrepid spirit that he had recognized in her. Certainly, it was not the other thing.

Yes, it was respect, undoubtedly, the sort that a man accords to a woman who is altogether out of his sphere. This girl's face had impressed him as being cool and virginal, not in the least sensuous or seductive. He recalled the boyish swing of her shoulders as she had turned, the ease and strength of the spring with which she had regained the horse's back, riding across saddle according to the custom of the country.

He allowed his fancy to picture her in warlike guise, seated on an armored charger with a spear in her hand, her gaze narrowed upon some distant point of scrutiny, disregardful of the danger that might lie about her. Then he tried whimsically to fit the vision into certain other surroundings, interiors where the light shone through pink lampshades, and where the air was heavy with perfumes. It was useless, this last attempt; she refused to lend herself to that effort of the imagination; he could see her nosrils quiver with distaste at the sickening odor. He smiled to himself; he liked the mettle that he believed she was made of.

After a while he put his hat straight and went out into the street. It was ten o'clock, and he had some business to transact at the post office. He knew Fales's temporary destination; he had also been able to calculate pretty nearly how much he had stood to the bad when he had so unceremoniously quitted the game. He made out a money order for as much more as would be sure to cover an underestimate, and inclosed it in a blank sheet of paper to the address in Seattle.

This act accomplished, he was square with the world. He had, with a hundred others, more or less, been driven out of Kibbee before the whiplash of a law which prohibited further gambling in the state of Arizona. Prior to leaving town he had settled all his financial obligations, departing with a clean slate and a bit in his pocket. But

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689

after forty-eight hours of poker he
owed the others a good part of his sur-
plus; now, having cancelled this in-
debtedness, he was left with the in-
considerable sum of seventy-six dollars
to represent his fortune. In other
words, he was face to face with the im-
mediate necessity of deciding in what
direction his next move was to be
made.

It was a novel situation in more respects than one, because, as it seemed to him, he had, without premeditation or warning, abandoned the cards forever.

He was not built upon the virile
plan, and he had never undertaken the
task of correcting nature's evident in-
tention with regard to him. A fatalist
in theory, he had regarded himself as
having taken an irretrievable direction
from the start. He had followed his
fortunes along the lines which re-
quired the minimum of effort, holding
that in accordance with this principle
of conduct the best results would be
achieved. A certain negative selfish-
ness which is becoming only when it
possesses the grace of youth and beau-
ty, had engraved itself in fine lines
about his mouth. The lips, in a wo-
man's face, would have been those of
a vixen.

He was not ill-looking, however, and
his general air of cynicism and indif-
ference had piqued the women of his
shadowy circle into a more or less
open admiration. Too open. He valued
their preference too lightly to be flat-
tered by it. He had been the cause
of more quarrels among women than
any other man in Kibbee, partly be-
cause of an air of breeding which dis-
tinguished him from the others of his
set. This had even enabled him to
move tentatively on the borders of a
society which considered itself super-
rior. But he found the atmosphere of
drawing-rooms too rare; his lungs felt
cramped in it, and he soon turned an
indifferent shoulder to all advances
from the wives and daughters of bank-
ers and professional men.

So it was that in the free air of the
lower social circles his refinements of

taste and manner lent him a certain
distinction. His sense of chivalry may
have consisted largely of a purely self-
ish fastidiousness, but none the less it
won the appreciation of the ladies of
the half-world, who are far more sen-
sitive to such appeals than they are
crudely supposed to be. Few women
are insensible to courtesy and consid-
eration, even when in the general esti-
mate they are without title to such fa-
vors; perhaps, indeed, the tribute gains
in value for the very reason that it is
undeservedly bestowed.

It was to Leverfield's credit that he
held his prestige without acquiring
that form of folly known as conceit.
Sometimes it was a good deal of a bur-
den, as life itself was pretty much a
bore. But he played the game square-
ly, and would as soon have thought of
stacking the cards as of trying to win
the favor of another man's mistress.
Fate and his own brain were the two
things he held worthy of respect; he
treated them with an equal sense of
their sacredness as the possession of
the other man.

Among the men he had been known
as "Lucky Lev," a title at which he
quietly sneered, for he knew that in
poker no man is more lucky than an-
other, and that when it comes to faro,
the bank has always the advantage.
Howeyer, his bank was good of its
kind, the most honorably conducted in
Kibbee, and he did not deny himself
whatever credit might lie in that.

His past career had not made of him
the sort of man one expects to meet in
the streets of an agricultural town
looking for work—even allowing for
the fact that in a newly opened coun-
try one does come in contact with
many sorts of men in a great variety of
dubious situations. But he was not a
man to be daunted by a sense of incon-
gruity. A wave had cast him upon the
shores of Salvia City, a wave of chance,
if you wish to call it that, but what do
you expect? The professional gambler
knows that chance and will are inter-
changeable terms.

Coming out of the post office he re-

690

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gained the Avenue by a side street. The upper part of this thoroughfare was devoted to the refinements of commerce—department stores, footgear, millinery, and jewelry shops. Toward the lower end, as it approached the railroad station, it shaded down to pure utilitarianism by way of banks, hardware establishments, pharmacies, and clothing emporiums in the windows of which men's outfits were displayed, all kinds of apparel being included, from the banker's business suits to the coarse togs of the ranchman.

Leverfield regarded these last with a humorous eye, telling himself that he would probably have to don them, as he had no fancy for a clerk's position, and knew nothing whatever of the technique of bookkeeping.

All the time there stood quietly in the background of his mind the figure of the girl who had ridden to the station the day before in the hope of meeting a man called Cecil, and who had gone away disappointed because he had not come.

Who was Cecil? What, in a man's plain expressive language, were his relations to that woman?

Was he her husband?—damn him! Or, possibly, her brother, for she had not what he should call the married look. But as to that, there was no knowing. A healthy out-door life can keep any woman fresh and young. He reminded himself that it was nothing to him in either case, his most important consideration being of earning an honest living. He laughed aloud at the conventional phrase, and a little boy with his feet dangling, who was holding the reins in a wagon, turned and stared at him.

He played with the term as he had with the image of the girl, turning it over and over in his mind. What did the blamed word mean, anyhow? He had always contended that a perfectly square poker player was as honest a man as walked the earth. Could it be possible that his standards were changing without his will?

As he strolled down the avenue he

kept an observant but guarded eye abroad for any sign of an agency at which he could apply for work. He would not inquire, for he did not wish to court attention as a person new to the town and its ways. He might have dispensed with this precaution. No one noticed him. Most of the people he met were wholly preoccupied with their own affairs; the idlers were too well-used to strangers to bestow any special regard upon him. He was merely a man from somewhere, looking about for some vague possibility—the commonest of sights in a place like Salvia City.

Such fragments of conversation as he overheard related for the most part to the subject of land, unreclaimed or already under cultivation; its cost, and what it would produce, the number of trees to the acre, the quantity of fruit to the tree, and the price per box that it would fetch from the consignee.

But Leverfield observed that here and there in groups of two or three along the curbing men were gathered who appeared to be waiting for something that might at any moment be expected to happen. These men were engaged in scanning expectantly the wagons covered with dust that had come in from the country, and if their eye encountered that of the driver, a look of inquiry and answer would be likely to pass between. Sometimes the man on the curb would raise a finger, and the man in the wagon would shake his head; or, possibly, he would draw up alongside, and a brief colloquy would ensue. Leverfield looked on, while, in one of these cases, two of the seekers got into the wagon and were driven away, one of them sharing the seat with the driver while the other sat behind with the bags and boxes, his legs hanging over the tailboard.

Without any premeditation, but just as he would have put a pile of chips on a certain card, Leverfield sauntered up to one of these groups and carelessly attached himself to its outer edge. There he stood, viewing, as before, the busy street, and feeling a sort of exhilaration.

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691

aration in the novelty of the scene.

He was not prepared for what he presently saw, the veritable figure of the girl in blue riding slowly up the street on her buckskin pony, and still less prepared for what followed—a sudden leap of his heart that threw the blood up to his face and set it singing in his ears. He took himself sternly in hand, and by an effort of will managed to get his pulses under control before she had ridden up and drawn in her horse at the edge of the curb, close to where he was standing.

"Any of you want work?" she said, addressing the group.

They signified that they did, not only in words, but by a concerted forward movement in her direction. As Leverfield did not stir, he was left slightly in the background.

"What can you do?" she went on, interrogating with her eyes each one in turn. "All round ranch work? It's a superintendent I want, a working superintendent." She looked from one face to the other, and her frown seemed to say that the inventory hardly satisfied her. "It's a job of irrigating first," she said, and paused again, taking her under lip between her teeth. "I must have an experienced man at once."

"I think I will do, miss," one of the men said, and the other two spoke in the same breath.

The girl's eyes, wandering over their heads, met those of Leverfield. "Are you looking for work?" she asked, with the slightest perceptible emphasis on the pronoun.

He signified that he was.

"Do you understand irrigating, cultivating, spraying, all there is to be done on a fruit ranch?"

"I can do all kinds of ranch work," he returned.

There followed a few crucial seconds during which she looked him over, and although he felt that she was also looking through him, he held his bluff without wincing.

"Well," she said at last, "I suppose I had better try you." Her tone was a little doubtful, but she straightened

herself in the saddle with the air of one who is resolved to make a hazard. "Will you come tomorrow?"

He replied that he would do so, and she gave him directions how to find the ranch, which was two miles out of the town, away to the north. He said that he would walk—naturally, as he had nothing to ride—and he was informed in business-like terms as to what road he should take. He would follow this till he came to a big red barn, where he would turn first to the left and then to the right and continue up a long hill, passing orchards on either side. At last he would notice a more open space on his left, where there was a setting of young trees. Hers was the next gate, painted white, and the house, a bungalow with a front porch that ran all the way across the front, faced the road about an eighth of a mile back. It was the Valor Ranch, if he needed inquire of anyone.

It was necessary, she added, that they should begin the very next day their preparations for turning on the water. Some of the troughs had to be mended; the channels were to be laid.

"There will be steady work," she said. "Mr. Valor may not be at home for some time. We shall have all we can do for a while."

"I understand," he replied, trying to address her as if she were an employer rather than a woman. This was difficult, because her "we" had shaken his poise with a distinctly novel thrill.

At that moment her face brightened suddenly at sight of someone who had come into view from a point behind Leverfield. Instinctively he turned and saw a shortish, thick-set, middle-aged man with hair and close-clipped beard of iron-grey, who was just raising a jaunty straw hat in return to the lady's salute.

"Oh, Mr. Jansen, how do you do? A splendid day, isn't it? I'm in town looking for someone to come out and help me on the ranch. I've had a wire from Cecil— What do you think?— he has sprained his ankle in Spokane; the doctor says it will be a matter of

692

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three weeks at the very least. I shall
have a letter tomorrow, with the par-
ticulars. Too bad, isn't it? I'm get-
ting a man to do the irrigating. Poor
Ces! I can't go to him, for I'm need-
ed here, this year's crop means so
much to us. And so far, you know,
things have gone better than we could
possibly have expected. I musn't leave
anything undone."

Leverfield, all at once realizing that
he should consider himself dismissed
for the present, moved away at this
point, and left her talking with the
man named Jansen. But he had not
failed to observe a certain contrast be-
tween the wistfulness of her eyes and
the valiant tones of her speech. He
knew she was really anxious about the
welfare of the ranch, and felt that she
had unconsciously taken him into her
confidence with that first magnetic
look, the one which had so quickly
singled him out from the other candi-
dates for service. Her brave talk to
Jansen was partly bluff.

"That girl has been well schooled,"
he said to himself. "Valor— that's
her name too, of course, as it's her
husband's—or brother's. It's like her,
anyway."

It was characterisitc of him that,
though he might easily have informed
himself as to her special connection
with the absent Cecil by a little casual
inquiry about town, he chose not to
make the discovery in that way. Fate
would reveal the facts, as it revealed
all things, in their ripeness, not in
their immaturity.

He did, however, improve the first
opportunity to engage in conversa-
tion with two practical ranchers who
happened by good fortune to share his
table at dinner, and in the character of
an interested stranger he led them on
to give him a few points about laying
channels for irrigation, running the
cultivator, and managing the spraying
outfit. He went out and invested in
some books and periodicals which he
was told would afford him further in-
formation, and he stayed up until the
first light of morning to study the rules

and suggestions that they laid down.
It proved somewhat perplexing that
neither the books nor the two men
wholly agreed with one another in
particulars, but he stuffed himself with
theory, trusting to his own intelli-
gence to render it practicable.

III.

Leverfield was nailing up a trellis
at the end of the front porch, and the
mistress of the house was watching
him.

He had been ten days in her employ,
and had found her habitual mood re-
mote and her temper exacting. Her
mind was centered upon her trees;
from their topmost leaf to their deep-
est root, her existence seemed to be
merged in theirs.

The only other subject on which
she found time to bestow her atten-
tion was that of Cecil, who was still
nursing his sprained ankle in Spokane.
She watched for his letters every morn-
ing—not that they arrived nearly so
often. Leverfield watched for them
too. They were not, in his opinion,
as frequent as those of a husband ought
to be, though he was aware that many
otherwise attentive husbands are apt
to fail sadly in this form of devotion.

His own position retained its attri-
bute of novelty. Personally, he was
of no consequence; he figured only in
so far as he was able to minister to the
welfare of the trees. This was indeed
the relation that should exist between
mistress and servant; but it was the
humorous side of the situation that
appealed most strongly to Leverfield.
His lips curled in their grim smile as
he viewed his broken fingernails and
blistered palms.

From the first his employer had
manifested a slight distrust of his gen-
uineness as a ranchman, a doubt which
he had justified rather than discredited.
She had told him where the farm-
ing implements were to be found, and
given him general orders as to laying
the channels for irrigation, but when,
half an hour later, she came to see
what had been accomplished, he real-
ised at once that he had either mis-

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693

conceived or misapplied her directions.

"You would drown the whole orchard at that rate," she told him rather sharply, taking the hoe from his hands.

She measured off a distance with the handle of the implement and deftly opened a channel.

"About five feet and a half. That allows for two channels between the rows. Some people would tell you it was too far from the trees," she added a little more graciously, "but I have learned by my own experience." Her tone implied that she would credit no form of judgment that came otherwise.

He felt in her no warmth of co-operation, though they worked by the hour together, side by side—for in a fruit country, when matters are pressing in the orchard, household affairs become secondary. Her instructions were often delivered in this wise: "Mr. Valor does so-and-so;" and she never referred to the master of the ranch in terms of relationship.

He did not feel in any undue haste to learn what Cecil's part might be in the household economy. He had the gambler's patience, as well as his respect for the unknown. He preferred that the cards should follow each other in natural sequence; if you knew the other man's hand to start with, there would be no sport in the game. To peer over the shoulder of your fellow-player was to meddle stupidly with a destiny which was much wiser than yourself.

Leverfield was picking up information bit by bit. Already he had learned by means of a visitor who had ridden up the lane like a Valkyr one day, and been served with tea on the front porch, that the christian name of his employer was "Lisle." Afterwards he had found it written on the fly-leaf of a book she had lent him. The full name, Lisle Valor, was inscribed in bold handwriting.

His sleeping quarters were in a tent —Mr. Valor's tent, he was informed— which was pitched a couple of rods away from the house. This shelter was simply, though sufficiently furn-

ished with a cot, one chair and a table with a lamp on it. Here he passed his evenings, while the lady of the ranch entertained her guests on the front porch, or perhaps mounted Primrose, the buckskin mare, and rode away, either alone or in the company of friends. He was not left solitary, for he enjoyed the society of one or both of the two friendly collies, Trump and Joy, who had attached themselves to him warmly at first sight—not altogether, he fancied, to the satisfaction of their mistress. At bedtime Trump was called into the house, but Joy was allowed to please herself, which she did by curling up on a pile of sacking at the foot of Leverfield's cot, thumping her tail with delight at being allowed to stay.

If he wished to ride himself, he had the gracious permission of the mistress to make use of Mr. Valor's horse, Trojan, and availing himself of this privilege, he sometimes saddled the animal and rode off into the open country where as yet nothing had intervened to break the friendly intimacy of the stars and the sage-brush, except the scampering coyotes whose cries sounded from the foothills in the silence of the night. He found a certain beauty in the barren slopes of dry sand and parched shrub which lay silvertoned in the moonlight, or deepened into purple in the shadows of the ridges. They were not really barren, since they only waited a redeeming touch to waken them to life. A few runnels of sparkling water trickling over the ground under the forceful sun, and there was hardly a limit to their productiveness.

If the relations of Leverfield with Lisle Valor were strictly those of employer and employed, it was as much by his consent as by her wish, since in his own view of the matter, he had by no means fallen in love with her, either that day at the station or since. She only represented one feature of the reaction which he was undergoing, and which had begun at least an hour before he had seen her face. It was true that she harmonised strikingly

694

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with the spirit of the change, as well
as with the character of the country
where Number One had dropped him
to work out his own salvation along
the new lines. He gave to all three
of these influences his measure of ad-
miration and approval, that of a jaded
man who had never before awakened
to the spiritual beauties of nature,
whose occupation had been one that
could not be followed under an open
sky or in the company of cleareyed
women.

Lisle Valor was invigorating to look
at. She stood and moved with the
quick, nervous vitality of the thorough-
bred horse—not the vitality that
wastes itself in futile action, but that
which either expends itself wisely, or
is laid by and conserved. Her com-
plexion had kept its fineness of tex-
ture and purity of coloring under the
usually triumphant test of a withering
climate. The cool, boyish outline of
her cheek, chin, and throat gave Lev-
erfield a sense of unhackeneyed pleas-
ure. He found, however, no thrill in
her beauty; one could not be deeply
moved by a pair of lips that opened
only to emit the tersest orders for the
day's work, remaining otherwise for-
mally closed.

Neither had he been able to read
any possibilities of tenderness in her
grey eyes. She showed, so far as he
was able to judge, only one indication
of feminine softness. This was in the
movements of her hands, which were
deft and facile. Her fingertips looked
as if they might perform tricks of mag-
ic wherever they touched; her wrists
were flexible, with a dimple, or dent,
at the base of the forearm.

When she poured his coffee in the
morning, he watched furtively her ev-
ery movement from the time she lift-
ed the pot from the stove till she set
the steaming cup beside his plate, and
paused to stroke a fold of the table-
cloth smooth before leaving him. He
did not know where or when she took
her own meals. He was abundantly
supplied with food of a delectable qual-
ity, which he was allowed to enjoy at

his leisure. He never entered the
house at any other time than the hour
for refreshment; in fact the supervi-
sion of the ranch, a thirty-acre tract,
mostly in apples, with a few peaches
and cherries, left him very little time
for recreation, even at this compara-
tively quiet season.

Letters from the master of the house
were deposited in the rural delivery
box at the bottom of the lane. He had
offered to fetch them, but Lisle Valor
declined the service; with Trump
bounding before her she set forth every
morning as soon as the carrier's wag-
on with its brown canvas umbrella
was seen pursuing its leisurely way up
the road. Leverfield observed the
swing of her shoulders and hips as she
walked; there was a boyish freedom
in her movements, which were unim-
peded by restrictions of dress. What
a splendid mother she would make!
She could pick up a child and toss it
to her shoulder as he had seen the
Mexican women do. All her motions
were free when she ran down the lane
with Joy and Trump; she could stoop
she could dart, she could reverse her
course as quickly as the dogs them-
selves. It was a little exasperating
that although she was a girl with them,
she should be, with him, so strictly
a woman of affairs. And behind that,
there was something else. It did not
come out at all in her daily life; she
kept it locked away. He was sure that
there was something folded out of sight
under that clear-eyed exterior.

She puzzled him, and for an active
mind to be puzzled is to be challenged.
Still, he persisted in telling himself
that she was interesting only in rep-
resenting a different type from any
that had heretofore offered itself to his
notice. She affected him just as she
had done at first, like a sweep of au-
tumn wind down the valley, or the
forceful current of an irrigation ditch
full to the brim with rushing, ice-
cold water. And he felt her mettle
as something that stirred his own like
a doubtful hand at cards.

But that morning while he nailed up

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695

the trellis, whose flimsiness she had accounted for by saying with a little shrug that it was of her own construction, her eyes, as she stood watching his work, seemed to reveal in their depths a certain stirring of the emotions. Meeting them fairly once, he would almost have ventured to say there were tears behind them. She had not been actually crying, but there were signs of an impending crisis which might, or might not, occur.

Her manner was, however, cheerful and impersonal, as usual. She was even a little more gracious than had been her wont. "That is very nice, thank you," she said, when he had strengthened the frame. "I think it will hold now."

She came down the low step of the porch and began to twine up some of the straying branches of the honey-suckle which had fallen loose.

"Oh, but I really think the vine will need more support. It is growing so fast. I wish the frame were a little wider," she said, moving back to study the effect.

While she surveyed the trellis, Leverfield regarded her. Her brows were drawn straight and her lips shut together as she took account of the work with that careful deliberation which she accorded to every detail of the ranch, great or small.

"Could we nail up one more piece, do you think?" she asked, turning her head suddenly and surprising his fixed look. Her upper lip had lifted the least bit at one corner in something like a smile. He asked himself if there had not even flashed a tiny spark of coquetry in her eye. But no, if there had, it had been quickly extinguished.

The sprays of vine drooped over their support, swaying gently in the morning air which shook the fragrance from their blossoms. She lifted a cluster between her thumb and finger and drew it toward her, inhaling its perfume. Was there a hint of self-consciousness in the manner of the act? He thought not. She was unaware of

his presence except in his capacity of servant.

Leverfield had returned no answer to her question, nor, if it had been to any extent an order, had he moved to obey it. That "we" of hers had fallen upon his hearing as it had done once before, like a vibrating chord which had dulled his ear to other sounds. But, of course, she knew nothing of this.

"There are more laths in the barn, up on the shelf beside the door of the carriagehouse. Won't you get one, please—or two would be better." She was still sniffing at the cluster of pink bloom.

He swung about and strode to the barn, returning with the strips.

"Oh, I forgot," she said, when he was back again, "we shall need some cross pieces. They ought to be about a foot long. You can saw them at a guess. Four will be enough."

He could hardly help believing that a part of this was deliberately provocative—in another woman it certainly would have been—and the thought put new life into him. The shadows on the hills looked more brilliantly purple as he departed on this second mission.

At his return he found her sitting on the step of the porch. A spurt of wind was blowing her hair; she had her eyes half shut to keep out the dust which had started up from the dry, bare ground under the trees. As he placed the first lath in position she came silently and held it straight at the top while he fastened the lower end to the porch floor. Her foot was close to his hand, and the breeze wafted a fold of her skirt against his sleeve.

He attached the cross-piece—only the first nail got bent to one side and had to be pulled out and replaced by another. She forebore to say that she had thought it was only a woman who was not able to drive a nail straight, and he did not know whether the thought was in her mind; but all the same, he realised that he was not quite master of his powers of concentration.

"I suppose the trellis ought by good rights be painted," she was saying

696

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half to herself, in the tone which people acquire who live too exclusively in their own society. "Never mind," she added; "the vine will soon cover it. We won't bother to paint it now."

Again the tantalising inclusive pro-
noun.

The fourth cross-piece was some-
what above the level of his head. Lisle
Valor, on tiptoe, held the end of it,
and he drove the first nail with three
smart, resounding blows. He put all
his force into them, because he told
himself that if she used that word
again he could not be held responsible
for consequences.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," was her exclamation, as a strand of her hair suddenly detached itself and blew lightly across his eyes.

For an instant he was blind. Did
she know that she had spoken to him
as an equal—for the first time? Well,
at any rate, she was now to him simply
and solely a woman, and when, having
secured the errant lock in place by a
deft manipulation of the comb, she
raised her arms to set the crosspiece
again in position, he saw, not the
breadth of her shoulders, but the soft
rings of hair at the nape of her neck,
and took account of the slenderness,
the easy grace and pliancy of her fig-
ure, which before had appeared to him
in lines of strength rather than in
rounded curves.

Defiantly he put the next nail in
place and threw all the force of his arm
into one effective blow. Effective, it
was. The hammer, energetically
driven but imperfectly aimed, descend-
ed smartly upon the side of his thumb.

He gave an involuntary exclamation
which was checked even in the utter-
ance. But Lisle finished it for him.

"Oh, oh!" she cried, "that will be a
bad bruise. Does it hurt? Not now,
perhaps, but it will. Oh, how sorry I
am. Let me look at it. Oh, what a
shame. It is a bad bruise." Her voice
thrilled with compassion.

She had taken his wrist in her hand
and was holding the injured member
between her thumb and finger as she

had held the honeysuckle spray a few
moments before. "It is a cruel hurt,"
she repeated; "come into the house
and let me do it up."

His eyes clung to her face as she
bent over her work. His arm lay
across the dining table in the room
where he ate, which was also the kit-
chen. Her lips were set with preoccu-
pation in her task as she dipped the
bandage in a saucer of arnica and
wound it deftly, having first plunged
the bruised thumb in a bowl of hot
water. The pain was running up to
his elbow, and was lively enough to
occupy the greater part of a man's at-
tention, but to him it was only the in-
significant price that he was glad to
render for the inestimable advantage
of sitting close to her and feeling the
touch of her warm, soft fingers on his
wrist and inside his palm.

The pain acted as a stimulant; it
excited his nerves. At the same time
it disarranged and unstrung him; he
wondered if presently he should be-
come hysterical. All the while there
was surging in him a mad desire to
take this woman in his arms. She was
not Lisle Valor, his employer; that as-
pect had suddenly changed; earth and
sky had been transformed along with
it. She was a woman, beautiful and
desirable. The pain had effected this
foolishness in him; he knew that he
was yielding to folly, but the pain was
like fire. Preposterous fancies were
dancing about in his brain, mocking
his scruples. They dared him to let
his fingers close over those whose tips
were brushing his palm; they defied
him to touch her lips with his and see
if they would respond to his kiss.

Cursed helplessness! He was not
the man he had been a month ago.
Did this lack of compliance with the
riotous desire mean a noble self-con-
trol, or a mere contemptible laxness?

He drew a quick breath between his
teeth. The hurt was almost too much;
it was making him a little sick. Damn
her hair! how thick it was at the tem-
ples, and what a golden glint it had at
the crest of the waves! Her brows

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697

were thick, also darker than her hair, and so were her lashes. Her nose was that of a handsome boy, straight and authoritative, not too thin. Leverfield, who usually had good ground for his prejudices, distrusted a thin nose.

He felt that no man would blame him for acting precipitately under the stress of those fiery spasms that were half anguish and half brutal satisfaction. Whether she were married or not, she was a woman, and near. She was not afraid of him, certainly; fear did not belong in those eyes.

There was a twisted ring which she sometimes, but not always, wore on her third finger. It was there today. Leverfield looked at it savagely, longing to pluck it off.

He caught his breath again, not so guardedly this time. The sound was that of a sharp inprecision, and as he uttered it some devil of destiny impelled him to pull his hand away from hers. He did this with an abrupt jerk that disturbed the bandage and Lisle Valor looked up in dismay. His eyes were dark and forbidding; She made just the slightest movement to draw back. The quick, sympathetic color flooded her face.

"Oh, I have hurt you. How clumsy I must have been."

"Let me finish," he said, brusquely, amazed, even as he spoke, at his own stupidity. Throwing away that golden chance, it was a miracle of luck if the same cards ever fell to him again.

She looked grieved, but not resentful. "Yes, you had better do it up yourself, it will hurt less. I am not skilled at that sort of thing."

"It is not that," he muttered, feeling the hot blood of discomfiture burn his forehead. She had gently laid beside him the outer strip of bandage which he had been about to adjust, and a piece of string to fasten it.

"Thank you," he murmured, foolishly.

She seemed to have an immense advantage over him as she moved away, carrying with her the bottle and the bowl. She did not appear hurt, or offended, or even surprised. She had only become again the mistress of the ranch, the woman who paid him his wages.

Leverfield wound the strip of cloth about the injured member as best he could. He made a clumsy job of tying the string, but though she could hardly have failed to realize his difficulty, she did not come to offer her assistance.

"Do not try to work any more today," she said, as he went out.

He disregarded this injunction deliberately, harnessing the two horses into the cultivator, and driving them up and down between the rows of trees all the rest of the forenoon. When he saw her again at night, the look of tearless weeping had got back into her eyes. She inquired about his thumb with formal solicitude, and set the bottle of arnica out for him to take to his tent.

When he threw himself on his cot to sleep, he felt exhausted, saddened, weary of his pain, and, in some inexplicable way, drained of self-respect.

*(To be continued.)*

THE TREND

THE SHADOWS OF DESIRE

BY DONALD EVANS

Your hat was of an angle, and the veil
Was impudent with seven maddening spots—

With the mouth left free to drink the cool sunlight,
That amber-laden swept the afternoon.
Your gown caressed you, and your level gaze
Fed on the greenness of the cleansing Spring—

Peacocks and yew trees mirrored from your eyes.
I walked beside you, and my hands were glad—
They ran the lines that make your body's sweet

"Why not tonight?" I asked, and then you smiled,
Half-flattered by my wish, but with poised wings
You gave unyielding answer, "You forget
Only five days ago I came to you;
We wait two more." And there was in your tone
Urbanity that showed a steady pulse.

I was not rebuked—you paid acknowledgment
For the fluttered voice that broke with stressed desire,
Still this was no hour for the faggot-fire.
Miracle woman, you were far astray—

Your mouth is wine, and all your tender flesh
An easeful meadow for my tired feet,
But it was not flame I asked for. It was talk,
The winding minutes of great friendliness,
And the immense companioning of you,

I have waited twenty years to talk to you,
And all that empty time I have searched for you.
Now that I have found you shall I wait five days,
And fill the interval with other things?

There is nothing else—the world's dropped away.
For twenty years I have slept upon your breast—
You did not know me, but you felt me there!

The Old War and the New

BY JOSEPHINE MEIGHAN.

WHEN the Duke of Richelieu went on board the reservist ship San't Anna the other day (August 8), a chauffeur followed him along the pier from his auto, laden with smart suit cases and bags. At the foot of the gangplank the man put down his bundles and shook hands with his employer.

"Goodbye, you sail next week hein? Don't miss your boat!" said the scion of the kings and princes, and then he shouldered his own luggage and toiled up the gangplank, just as did the thin-faced, shabby fellow behind him, who carried his poor belongings in a clumsy newspaper bundle, and whose young wife and three black-eyed babies stood at the foot of the gangplank and wept. He had been working in the kitchen of one of the big hotels as a scullion for $15 a month. The duke (and his wife, who was pretty Miss Wise of Baltimore), had been pleasure-tripping all winter, but the two men were merely French private soldiers from the minute they set foot on the cheering, singing, wildly happy ship that was carrying to arms as many Frenchmen under forty-six years of age as it could hold.

Richelieu, like every young Frenchman, had served his country in arduous, humble fashion for three years as a conscript—a piou-piou with baggy red trousers and badly fitting blue coat, who has to sweep and play hostler and wait on his superior officer, although the piou-piou may be the linear descendant of Saint Louis and the superior officer the heir to some soap-making bourgeois. This absolute levelling of classes during the years of military service, this taking the snobbery out of a boy at the very age when

it is apt to become a rank weed, is one of the finest things the French republic has to its credit. The present Comte de Paris, then Duke of Orleans, (who would be King of France today if France had not given his sires their walking papers a few years ago), entered France when he was supposed to be in exile, and demanded that he be allowed to serve his country like any other Frenchman. They promptly put him in prison, up on the heights of Clairvaux, and there was the deuce of a time until he got out again, but he was taken at his word and given a baggy suit and an iron cot and allowed to sweep the floor and groom the horses with all the other peasants and poets, princes, millionaires and paupers—all the raw material of a democratic republic.

On the pier nearly two thousand men, women, and children stood, subdued, smiling mistily, or weeping silently—a huge and quiet throng disproving, to the amazement of the Americans among them, the popular idea that all Latins are irrepressibly excitable, that they “lose their heads” over everything and nothing, that they can’t talk without using their hands, and that they live in a perpetual state of emotion. To be sure, Bernard Shaw has assured us that the Irish are the most excitable and emotional race on the face of the earth, and for genuine simon-pure, unadulterated hysteria a strongly moved American crowd of Saxon and Teuton descent is not to be surpassed, but for a French crowd to be self-contained under stress of parting with its nearest and dearest, perhaps forever, seemed one of the strange phenomena of these strangest of war times.

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The men who were going away were almost without exception radiant of mien. Even the burly chap whose two bright-faced children climbed all over him to say goodbye, blinked and smiled at the same time and murdered something about the care of the "gosses," as his young wife clung to him, and one youth, whose mother told those standing near her, that she had gone down on her knees, begging him not to go, laughed at her fears and held his head high, although tears stood in his very young blue eyes.

"Would you be the mother of a runaway skulker?" he demanded with the arrogance of youth. "Would you have me make a fortune in this country, and take you back to France some day to be flung into prison for having left my country to perish because I was deaf when she called for help? Would you?" and the trembling woman nodded "no," because she couldn't speak. Later in the day she stood on the wharf and waved a flag at her boy as he leaned over the rail of the wargrey ship singing the "Marseillaise."

While the great crowd waited for the ship to sail—and it waited seven hours in the hottest sun of this summer—there was hardly a hum of voices. Patient, proud, determined it stood on benches and packing-boxes hour after hour, waiting, waiting. Once in a while the reservists on the boat started the "Marseillaise" and the crowd on shore joined in the stirring chorus. Once or twice the white clad sailors of the Hamburg-American liner in the adjacent slip shouted some waggery through a megaphone and a fiery replique was flashed back from the French crowd broiling in the sun. There was no chatter, no fighting, no drinking, no peanuts—as un-American as it was unlike one's idea of what a French crowd should be.

A boy wriggled through the throng with a box of chewing gum and wriggled out again without making a sale. He returned with bottles of cold water, and found some customers. The movie men were on hand, and when

they held up a great French flag made of roses, cornflowers and carnations to get it in their pictures the crowd on shore wept quietly. Those on the ship cheered with delight.

The ship had a warrior air with its extra bridge in the stern, its metallic grey paint and its inspiring emblem at its mast-head—the French and English flags intertwined. Many of the men carried Belgian and British flags and one American boy who had come down to see off his French friend, a fellow-student of Columbia, wore a tiny flag in every buttonhole of shirt and coat—American, English, Belgian, French, Dutch, Italian and Russian! Alliances were popular with him.

All manner of men were among those flag-waving, "Marseillaise"-singing thousands that sailed away from their new world homes on the "Rochambeau," the "Lorraine" and the "Sant' Anna." Few Americans who saw them off and wished them luck had ever stopped to think how many Frenchmen there were in this part of the world. One popular, but not large or fashionable, restaurant sent sixty men, and one factory sent fifty more. College professors, music teachers, engineers, chauffeurs, merchants, importers, designers of fine jewelry, engravers, architects, woodcarvers, chemists were represented in that great army.

Aeronauts Didier, Masson and Edvard de Mulae, who had been sailing above the enemies of General Carranza and casually dropping bombs from the skies from time to time, were on board the Sant' Anna ready for their death-dealing work in the clouds for their own country. Count de Bertier de Sauvigny, military attaché of the French legation at Washington, was going home to join his regiment, and Ellen Buffet wept because she did not have money enough to pay her passage to the land where she knew wounded soldiers need her ministrations. They passed a cup around to help eke out her too-slim purse, but Ellen had to wait for another boat.

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Ellen was doubtless inspired by the example of her famous namesake, Eugénie Buffet, a typical Parisian beauty, who sang the songs of Paul Deroulede —the French soldier's laureate—in the streets of Paris during the Madagascar affair, wearing the short red gown and the blue silk apron of the woman of the people, and let the crowds fill her pockets with gold—for the wives and children of the soldier men.

The temperament of Jacques Bonhomme seems to have changed since 1870. Long years of peace and prosperity have sobered him. He marched to the war of 1870 singing and boasting of his prowess as a swordsman and a shot; his brave bayonet would bring the Prussians home en brochette; his artillery—was it not the finest in the world—and it is today—would mow down the enemy like the wheat in their own fields—and so the serried ranks that marched through Paris went gayly, filled with confidence, courage, and mockery.

France has not gone into the present war in the same spirit. The country of many victories had a terrible lesson and paid a staggering price for its insouciance. The news of war was received in Paris the other day in silence. Mobilization was effected with confidence, dispatch, thoroughness, but solemnly. There were no scenes of wild excitement along the Boulevards, no hysterical outbreaks against the German citizens. A special train was provided for the German Ambassador. German residents were given time to vacate the city in decency and in order. Relief funds were organized and money appropriated quickly. The life of the city today is going on with machine-like regularity. France was ready.

"Like all French children who were at the time of or after the war of '70, we were taught that his Satanic Majesty's special ambassadors to this world were the Prussians," mused Jean Paul Louis, as he gazed dreamily through the blue grey mist of his cigar after a

stimulating reading of eight thousand Germans having been mowed down in a country upon whom war had not yet been declared. "But as one grows older one understands these things better. All those killed and wounded yesterday, for example—they are called the enemies of my country. Enemies! A great host of poor devils, mostly young, whose youth and courage are equalled only by their sorrow to leave their wives and sweethearts, and their complete ignorance of why they are to kill the soldiers of the other country—young men like themselves, who have been taken from their plows and their looms, their homes and their friends, herded in strange places, marched thirty and forty miles a day (I have known chasseurs to march fifty miles in a day, knapsack, heavy uniforms, hot sun, all the accompaniments), to be shot at, wounded, piled on rough wagons, jolted over rough roads, hacked at by young and frightened surgeons, just escaped from the medical schools, tortured by thirst and pain, hunger and homesickness. Is it any wonder that this saturnalia of madness to the young and unlettered peasant seems like a boiling cauldron into which he has fallen?

"When I was about ten years old I met my first Prussian. France was still occupied by the men from across the Rhine, although hostilities had ceased. My mother was a widow with a brood of five. She had a little house and a little garden, so only one soldier was quartered with us. He was a big black-bearded man from the Hartz Mountain, and he used to shed tears when he thought of twelve children and the wife he had had to leave to shift for themselves when he was called from his wood-cutting to help kill my countrymen. He was with us only a day when he was stricken with enteric which was ravaging all the regiments already weakened by fatigue, scant rations and bad water. My mother nursed him. The first great black charcoal draught she prepared for him he refused to touch. until she

702

THE TREND.

drank some of it first, so afraid was he to be killed in the enemies' house after escaping with his life from the enemies' shot and shell. When he began to get well he behaved like the historic lion from whose paw the traveler cut the thorn. The giant skeleton in his ragged Prussian uniform was pitiful in his gratitude. He used to sweep the house and wash the clothes. He dressed the children and took them to school. When wood was rare and dear he stole it from the Prussian stores—stole it, mind you, for us, the enemy. For eight months that great faithful, grateful dog worked for us, thinking all the while, doubtless, of his own twelve little children struggling along as best they could in their faraway home. He never learned but three words of French and those were the three which formed my mother's perpetual command to the young children at table, 'Mange ta soupé,' or 'eat your soup.' One day a section of a regiment passed on its way to Paris. We rushed to the door to see them. Our Prussian amazed us and the regiment by leaning from a window and shouting at them, 'Paris! Capital-er! Mange ta soupe!' which wasn't as inappropriate an injunction as it might have been to men on their way to a city recently besieged and almost starved to death."

The wife of Jean Paul Louis sighed, "I was born in a cellar of a house on the Boulevard Magenta during the siege of Paris," she said. "The cannonading of the Prussians outside the walls was driving my mother crazy, so they made her take up quarters in the cellar—a deep cellar cut out of rock, noise-proof. My father was fighting in the trenches. He did not see me until six weeks after I was born. He had fever and was so worn and thin she did not know him. Thank God, Jean Paul Louis is too old to go—but he is also too old to leave, or I should enlist as a nurse."

At few miles out of Paris, on the great East road that leads to Germany, is a

rambling old stucco house with a slanting blue slate roof. The side walls huddle under a mantle of ivy as an old and sorowful woman crouches under a shawl, but the unbeautifull yellow face of the old house looks out boldly, as if it were proud of its countless bullet scars.

We children used to say the front of the house was pock-marked, and one child I knew very well indeed, was once held literally by the heels while she leaned out of a window to draw a face on the smooth stucco, two bullet holes serving for eyes, a third for the round, frightened mouth. A crown slid perilously toward one ear. This chef d'oeuvre was supposed to be Plon-Plon—the unheroic last of a heroic line.

This old house had stood dreaming in its garden for many troublous years. It had seen Napoleon's soldiers stagger by when they came back frozen starved, in rags, from Moscow. It had sheltered Louis Phillippe when he and a gay party were hunting in the nearby forest of Livry. Jean Valjean stayed here the night he walked over the hill to find Cosette. Erckmann and Chartran, the famous collaborators of stories of the Franco-Prussian war, lived and worked here together for some years.

In the great panelled salon with its porcelain stove and tapestried chairs, we used to sit, pop-eyed and open-mouthed, and listen to tales of the terrible six months from July to January, 1870-71, and later in the evening one of our hair-raising tests of courage was to dare each other to go downstairs backward through the hall where the Prussian soldier had been killed by the ten-year-old girl. This child and her family were to start for the sea coast the day a detachment of Prussians invaded the little town.

A number of officers and men appeared at the old house, ordered rooms made ready for them and dinner cooked at once, the officers clanking around the big drawing room, throwing lighted cigars on the brocaded chairs, play-

THE OLD WAR AND THE NEW

703

ing the piano, singing, and sampling their host's wine while they waited. Dinner served, the officer in command lifted his glass and drank the health of his hostess in courteous words, but bad French. "But," he added, "the storm which rages outside will oblige us to accept your hospitality for a few days. We shall require all the rooms. You will be glad, I am sure, to remove yourself and your family within half an hour."

The family hurriedly gathered a few belongings together and were ready to depart. Some say that the child could not find her favorite doll and became convinced that the Prussians had stolen it; others thought that her mother's tears caused the tragedy, but all agree that as she stood in the open door ready to leave she suddenly turned and shot through the heart the soldier who held the door open for her to pass. In the excitement and confusion and under cover of the storm the family escaped, but the rage of the invaders vented itself in setting fire to the house. The rain, which was coming down in floods, frustrated the attempt to destroy the house entirely, but the interior was in flames before its former occupants had found refuge in the nearby woods. The ten-year-old's victim was buried in the garden of the old house and has never been disturbed. The family silver, buried in the garden, was found by the Prussians and insulting notes written on scraps of paper affixed to upright sticks flag-fashion marked each hole where the valuables had been concealed. One veritable art treasure escaped and it is now in one of the public museums in Paris—a complete outfit of silver kitchen utensils in miniature, wrought with infinite cunning by some old Dutch silversmith and presented by some courtier to King Louis XV, aged five years.

One of the curiosities of the panelled salon was a glass cabinet filled with odds and ends from all over the world—bits of leva from Vesuvius, sparkling stones from Colorado, mosaics from

Italy, pressed flowers from the Holyland, Russian enamels, Chinese ivories, and bits of opaque white spa from Niagara. But the most treasured bibelot was a little white box, the kind in which wedding cake is packed, with lace-paper inside and a ribbon holding on the cover. This box was called the life-saver of Monsieur—and no considerable personage was Monsieur in the Department of the Seine et Oise. Three times Mayor of his town, had he not married and buried every one of any consequence for two generations? Had not the townspeople presented him with a bronze statue of Mirabeau addressing the Senate, and had not the face of Mirabeau borne a flattering resemblance to that of Monsieur?

But Monsieur had not always been majestic and rotund. In 1871 he was a rack of bones who slept and starved in the trenches while the Prussians battered at the walls of the city. I have heard Monsieur say that during those awful days he had but two ideas in his dizzy head, one was to keep the Prussians out of Paris, the other to have one more good meal before he was shot. On New Year's day he received a gift—the little white box in Madame's curio cabinet. Under the lace paper lay a sewer rat, dead of course, but fat. Monsieur did not see anything ghastly or gruesome about this joke. He roasted that denizen of the underworld and ate him, to the envy of the ravenous spectators around him who had no friends to send them New Year's presents. "And who knows?" Monsieur would say with a quizzical smile. "The world goes round. Perhaps the Hohenzollerns may one day usefully and peacefully till the soil and the crepe be removed from the statues of Alsace Lorraine."

Tucked away in a green lane near the old house of Monsieur was a white walled convent with a red clock tower surmounted by a gleaming cross. The little blue nuns who lived here worked hard during the summer of 1870. They nursed wounded soldiers, harbored

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refugees whose houses had been sack-
ed and burned, and cared for all the
orphan babies of the countryside, in
all of which works of mercy they were
aided by a great, blond giant of a Ger-
man whom they had enslaved. He had
been brought to the convent after the
battle of Avron (that green plateau
where no flower has grown since
1870). The little blue nuns nursed him
well and kept him prisoner. He was
as helpless among them as was Gulli-
ver among the Liliputians. They made
him wash dishes and make bandages
and wait on the sick French soldiers.
The latter were allowed to leave the
convent as soon as their wounds were
healed, but the big German stayed.
He was too strong and useful to lose.
Passersby used to see him digging in
the garden, drawing water from the
well, sweeping imaginary dust from
the speckless convent floors. He wore
a blue blouse over his ragged uniform
and sabots on his bare feet. (The little
nuns had taken away his shoes for fear
that their good servant would run
away.) A dozen orphan babies were
among the charges of the overbur-
dened nuns toward the end of the
summer, and the big German was in-
stalled as nurse maid. It was one of
the sights of the town to watch the
babies out-manoeuvering the big be-
wildered soldier as he chased the more
active ones from the well, pulled them
out of the brook, or, broom on shoul-
der, went solemnly through his sol-
dier's drill to keep them quiet, while
his audience sat awed, open-eyed,
thumb in mouth, watching this strange
performance. But one day the babies
conspired and defied their nurse. They
were all naughty at the same time, and
the big German lost his head and
spanked them all around. Shrieks and
wails brought the blue nuns flying—
all that was left of the village popula-
tion—old men, women and children.

The little nuns hustled their prisoner into the convent, locked him up and barricaded the door, and then went out to calm the villagers, who by this time were clamoring to be admitted so that

they could torture, hang and burn the
brutal Prussian. Sister Felice pleaded
for the life of the big German. "He is
so strong," she said; "he is so useful;
he has never chastised one of the ba-
bies before and even French babies are
wicked, sometimes, you know. We
will have to send our sick French sol-
diers away—you will have to care for
them among yourselves—if this Prus-
sian goes. We cannot get on without
his strong arms to carry water and
chop wood. We cannot care for our
sick without him," so the crowd went
grumbling home and the big nurse was
restored to the babies.

Near St. Quentin, even as short a
time as ten years ago, the visiting
stranger driving along those wonder-
ful roads that Napoleon built for his
artillery, was often electrified at the
sight of men in Prussian uniform
working in the fields, or rolling along
to market atop a two-wheeled cart. A
soldier ploughing is a sight unfamiliar
enough to make anyone sit up and
take notice, but a soldier in black
trousers, blue tunic and high boots,
such as only cavalrymen wear in
France, tugging away at a plough in
the heart of France, thirty-five years
after the war, is a sight to make the
senses reel.

Of course, you applied to the first
peasant you met to give yourself one
more chance before the insanity expert
arrived and the broad grin of the blue-
smocked one was reassuring. "Ah,
ben, oui, that gars there is a little—
little—son of the good braconnier who
shot that Prussian convoy driver when
he was entering the village with his
great wagons of uniforms for those
cut-throats from that strange country
where no one has the wit to speak
French. Of an ignorance those sav-
ages! Yes, Blaise met that convoy.
Blaise hid behind a bush and the
driver and his men were half asleep.
They rolled from their seats after
Blaise shot, and Blaise called his sons
and they stripped the wagons of the
uniforms. There were many of them,
and they were of good cloth. The

Champion and the Petticoat

BY A. E. THOMAS.

IT'S not soon that I'll be forgetting that night. It was a cosmic occasion. I had gone over to Brooklyn to see a certain Person. I use the capitals because any person on whose account you are willing to go to Brooklyn is well entitled to them. As I was coming away from a Certain Person's house for the purpose of boarding a wandering trolley car which I hoped would, in the course of time, bear me again to the shiny side of the East River, I passed one of those places. It had swinging doors beneath and one could see the feet of those that libated. Just before I reached the place I saw Tim Devlin going in. He didn't see me but I could tell from his rolling gait that Tim was again hunting trouble and, I judged, with every prospect of finding it.

When Tim Devlin starts out to seek trouble he isn't easily discouraged—wherefore, he had been forbidden, and strictly, mark you, the pleasures of the chase. By whom, say you? Why, by James Xavier McGlory—no less.

Yes, I know—Mac has been beaten since. I was at the ringside that night in 'Frisco when the Welshman landed the punch that did it. And don't tell me I'll be excommunicated for not saying San Francisco. Frisco it is with the sports and most of what I knew of that attractive town, I learned from them. I saw that punch, I say. I'd been waiting for it for years. It was the old story—the pitcher and the well—youth and old age. Mac had grown old but he didn't know it—they never do till they get the punch. Thirty-seven, he was—thirty-seven and five months—and for a fighter that's pretty near senility. He ought to have

seen it coming when it took him 23 rounds to stop the Welshman the time before at Goldfield. But he didn't and there was a purse of $20,000 and the gate besides and he went after it. Small blame to him. Suppose you'd been fighting for twenty years and never been licked but once and then by a lucky poke in a break-away. How do you suppose $20,000 and the gate would look to you—easy, or wouldn't it? Anyhow it did to Mac. "Me for it," said he. So he reached for it and the Welshman stood the terrible pounding for sixteen rounds and stopped him in the seventeenth.

But at the time of which I write, Mac was twenty-seven and at the height of his career. Picture to yourself a lank, lean Irishman, as hard as nails, as tireless as a timber wolf, as quick as a panther, as game as a bull terrier and afraid of nothing under heaven except a mouse, and there you have him. He wasn't pretty. He'd a head like a tack and little beady blue eyes and very little hair and his body was punctuated from dome to basement with perfectly enormous freckles. He certainly was unusual as to his complexion. But the shoulder muscles of him. It's hard to tell you about them but I suppose if you took the shames out of that statue of the Laocoon and tied them up in a bunch and wrapped them up in speckled silk and then poked them up to see them squirm, that's about what those shoulder muscles looked like in action. And they were what gave him that terrible punch he had—that and the mortal quickness of the man, and the steam of that punch. Shall I ever forget the night at Butte when he land-

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707

ed it on the Marine? I thought he'd never get his fist out of the man's stomach. And three doctors sweated over the Marine for an hour and a half before he opened his eyes and asked if the engineer jumped.

Perhaps this will help explain why it was when Mac told his brother-in-law to abstain from the pleasures of the bowl his advice occasionally carried weight. Mac didn't particularly care what happened to Tim Devlin except that he was the brother of his wife and held dear by that remarkable woman. When Tim drank he did things that were to say the least unusual and it used to grieve Mamie McGlory more than a little when brother would come home walking on his bands, and making entrance by the window, insist on biting the ears off the cat.

Now every saloon keeper within half a mile of Mac's house was well aware that the edict had gone forth. Well they knew that the joys of the flagon were not for Tim, for Mac had been at some pains to promulgate his order. In turn he visited every saloon in the neighborhood and to the proprietor of each he said in part:

> "Any man that sells to Tim Devlin I'll sure have to hand it to that guy." And so for Tim it was Bensonhurst that became as the Great Sahara.

So that's how it was that that ton-sil-varnishing parlor into which I happened to see Tim Devlin entering the night I was about to take a sleeper back from seeing a Certain Person was so far from Bensonhurst. When the thirst came upon him he had to go where he wasn't known. In any other town it would have been perhaps a mile from there to where Mac lived. In Brooklyn I suppose it was about five miles. But I made it in the course of time. There were lights both upstairs and down when I got there and in answer to my ring the door was presently opened and there appeared a notable figure. It held a lamp high over its head and the light revealed its naked, freckled, hairy torso and

the fact it was clad exclusively in the inferior half of a suit of pajamas—silk pajamas, if you please—and pink, at that. Truly, thought I, how we have gone on since the days when we dug coal half a mile underground in the mines of South Wales. Pink pajamas and silk.

> "Wot's wanted?" he growled in the voice of a peevish brontosaurus, as he opened the door about the width of a shaved note. I stuck my foot hastily into the aperture.

> "Oh. 'tis you, is it?" he added a trifle more gently, though there was still to be noted a lamentable absence of any marked cordiality. I could see that trouble of a sort was heavy upon him.

> "It's Tim," I whispered. "He's loose again."

Mac scowled. Then I fancied I heard the creek of an opening door at the head of the stairs. Mac heard it, too, and cocked his bullet head a bit and listened. But the noise was not repeated.

> "Oh, that's it, is it," said Mac soft ly after a long silence. He took another look upstairs, then came out and almost closed the door behind him. "An' where might that foolish kid be?" he inquired. "If 'tis anny o' that Bensonhurst bunch I'll—" I hastened to give him the particulars. "Come on in," he said when I had finished, "an' stow the blab else ye'll be wakin' Mamie."

So he led the way into the little parlor. Here changes of import met my gaze. The centre table with the stuffed duck beneath the glass cover was shoved into a corner and in the middle of the room stood an iron cot. The carpet was covered with cigarette stubs. Raiment strewed the floor. It was clear this state of things had existed for days.

> "What the devil—" I began.

> "Hist," whispered the champion. He tip-toed hastily to the door and noiselessly turned the key. Then he came back and bent over my ear.

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“Tis Mamie,” he murmured huskily. “It’s on the outs we are—ain’t spoke in a week.” He glanced uneasily at the door. “W’y it is is dis way—” A step, none too light, sounded on the floor above our heads. The Big Fellow stopped as if struck and not another syllable did he utter while we were in the house. He tip-toed about the disordered room with a stealthiness amazing for 190 pounds. The place might have been knee-deep in eggs. Now and then he glanced fearfully at the ceiling and once as the light from the lamp fell right I saw that all about his left eye the skin was smeared a sickly yellowish green. Gloom reigned upon his countenance. Heavy indeed sat trouble upon him. Occasionally he sighed like a blast furnace.

From somewhere in the mess upon the floor he fished out a turtle-necked sweater that had once been white and a pair of trousers. This he accomplished with an air of abstraction, but with little loss of time. Then he sat down on the cot and scratched his head with that terrible left of his. I knew that he wanted his boots. I looked about but I couldn’t see them. He was ten minutes finding the first one—on the mantel behind the clock. The other he didn’t discover till he picked up the plush covered lounge bodily. These with a slouch hat he found under the cot comprised his entire costume when at length we fared forth into the night.

We sallied out with elaborate precautions. Mac unlocked the door as cautiously as a second story worker. He listened about half a minute. Then he beckoned to me, blew out the lamp and we slid out like a pair of criminals. As we gumshoed down the steps I looked back. There was still a light upstairs and I thought that someone lifted a corner of the curtain. We traveled on that trolley car for half an hour in a silence which I made no attempt to break. I had seen Mac in marital grief before. We had pretty

nearly reached our destination before he spoke.

“She soaked me wit’ a rollin’ pin,” he said solemnly.

It was pretty near closing time when we walked through the swinging doors. Tim over in the corner and I could see that his lee scuppers were awash. Mac ambled over to his brother-in-law, took the glass from his hand and threw it crashing to the floor.

“Tim, ye bloody little fool,” he said, “ye’ll be comin’ home wit’ me dis moment.”

But Tim, though startled at the untimely appearance of his distinguished brother-in-law, was not abashed. He knew what Mac would get from Mamie if ever he laid a hand upon him, save in the way of kindness, and well he knew Mac knew it, too.

“I’ll not, ye big loafer,” he said sulLENLY. “I’ll just be havin’ another drink instead.”

One of the two bar-tenders, with an agility born of long practice in like emergencies, had come over the bar in a single leap at the sound of the breaking glass. The other reached for the bung-starter and looked extremely well prepared. It was clear that Mac had not been recognized. It didn’t appear to me that my services were likely to be required. I took a comfortable chair in the corner and awaited what might happen.

“Listen, now,” said Mac, turning slowly to the two bar-tenders. “Is anny man here tired av livin’? If so, let him hand this lad another drink.”

With that he swept the hat off his head.

“Just wan,” he pleaded softly, “just wan little bit av a drink.” And in his face I saw for an instant the deadly gleam that flared across it just the moment before he struck the Marine the blow that almost killed him that night in far-away Butte. The bartenders recognized him in a flash.

“It’s Jim McGlory,” they gasped, drawing back.

“It is,” said the champion easily.

709

There was a moment's silence. Then Tim Devlin, knowing his immunity, took heart to sneer.

"Him a champeen," said he. "Ast him who blacked the eye fer him. Ast him that—ast him."

Mac cast at his brother-in-law a glance of calm disdain.

"I'm thinkin'," he said, "that nobody here presint is asking anny questions av James McGlory in this comp'ny. I," he added, "so be I am mistook, I sh'd wish fer to be corrected." And he smiled sweetly on the bar-tenders. Those gentleman maintained the silence of the frozen.

"Very good," said Mac. "Very good indade. An' so sayin', I will add, fer fear anny gent might git the wrong dope, that there's jist wan t'ing that keeps me from givin' this here moon-faced youth a slap on the wrist that he'll be after carryin' to his grave and that's the fact that me wife is sufficient misfortune fer to have him fer a brother."

"Well, I'll be—" said one bar tender.

"Well, I'm—" said the other.

As neither of them seemed to know just what he was or would be, we carried Tim off between us, bound for the nearest Raines Law hotel. He wept a little on the way and said we'd shamed him and made a mock of him and predicted tearfully that he'd be dead pretty soon and then he guessed we'd be sorry for what we'd done. But Mac only laughed and told him it would be all right in the morning. And we hired a room for him and locked him in it and departed, Mac carrying the key.

"'Tis me that'll be comin' for the little ass in the mornin' before he's awake," said the champion.

"'Twould niver do fer to take him home ter night an' him in that state. 'Twould wake Mamie wid the row, an' her not slapin' anny too well, at that."

With which suggestive remark he relapsed again into gloom and said not another word till we reached the

house. The place was in darkness. Mac sat down on the curb and took off his shoes. Without a word I did the same and so stole into the house as silently as we had left it a couple of hours before.

It may be imagined that I had not returned with the Big Fellow for no reason. Far from it. I knew that he had need of me. He was bowed beneath his load of misfortune. Presently in his own time and in his own way, he would speak and I would listen and thereafter he would be grateful. And I had reason to know that the gratitude of McGlory was worth while. Wasn't it at Valhall Hall on the night of the Steam Fitter's Masquerade Ball that— But no matter about that.

Once inside he house, Mac relighted the lamp, took off his clothes and resumed the pajama trousers. Then he softly opened the folding doors at the back of the parlor and together we slunk back to the kitchen. There he took a long breath.

"'Tis better here," he said. "Mamie's room is to the front o' the house so 'tis not wakin' her we'll be wid the gab."

I sat on the kitchen table and lighted my pipe. Mac explored the ice-box, produced a ham and cut three huge slices about an inch thick each. Next he lighted the gas stove, placed an enormous skillet over the flame and set the ham to frying.

"An' now," he said finally, "av ye have a weed I'll thank ye fer it." I had. He lighted it and keeping a weather eye on the sputtering ham, remarked:

"I mind I was mentionin' to ye some matther av a rollin' pin." I said that I recalled the remark.

"Well," said Mac, "'twas a nifty wallop an' a well-placed. It sure done Mamie credit." He rubbed the injured eye solemnly. "'Twas wan week ago the day that I goes into Daly's over by Thoid Avener fer t'git a glass av beer an' who is it I find standin' before th'bar wid a highball in his hand an' foolishness on his face but

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that imbecile av a Tim Devlin. Fer
wan moment I am fer spankin' that
bar-keep, fer 'tis wellknown by Daly
that he's not to sell to Tim. But I take
a squint an' I see 'tis a bran' new
booze-slinger that I niver see before
an' I see that av I murdher 'im on the
spot 'tis like I'll be doin' 'im some
slight injustice, bein' as he prob'ly
don't know Tim Devlin from Tim
Sullivan.

"Consequently I keep me remarks
fer Tim. 'What's all dis nonsinse, ye
fool boy?' I says. 'Have I not forbid
ye the booze? Cut it out now an'
come home wid me like a nice little
lad,' I says. But Tim' he's balky, just
like tonight. I disremember just what
he says but, the drink bein' in 'im,
'twas marvellous unpolite. Well, ye
know me. Ye know that I don't git
much av loose-talk in the course av a
forenoon an' whin I do git a harrsh
wurrud it's to scrape me a bit. So I
takes the fool boy be the collar an'
we're out on the street pretty quick an'
mebbe I'm a trifle rude wid 'im. I'm
t'inkin' mebbe 'twas so. It's no dñress-
maker I am.

"Well, Tim goes snivellin' away an'
I goes over to Forty-second Street.
Whin I comes back home I goes in the
kitchen an' I finds Mamie fryin' dough-
nuts on dis here stove. She don't speak
t'me till I makes her. Thin she says:

"'Tis a foine kind av a bully ye are
fer to be beatin' up a mere boy.'

"'What lies has that kid been tellin' you?' says I.

"No lies," she says, proud as a bird
o' Paradise. 'He's my brother,' she
says. 'An', she says, 'I'll trouble ye
not t'fergit t'remimber it.'

"Well," says I, an' some sharp I
says it, fer I'm feelin' a bit ill-used,
mind ye, 'well do I remimber it,' I
says, 'an' tis a foine line av gratchitood
I'm gittin' fer tryin' t'keep him from a
drunkard's grave,' I says.

"'Ah,' she says, turnin' sudden on
me, 'an' I suppose 'tis gratichood I
owe ye fer beatin' up me brother in a
public street an' shamin' him before

strangers. 'Tis small gratichood I'll
iver be owin' yo, James Xavier Mc-
Glory, av that's the best ye can do fer
me an' mine. I ast ye fer to help me
brother, not for t'make a mock av him
in a public place.'

"An' by that I sh'd a-knowned she
was mortal angry. Else she'd have
niver worked in that 'xavier.' But I'm
some riled mesilf an' I says: 'Tis
a lie,' I says. 'I niver hurted him at
all. An' from now on he can go to the
divvle fer all o' me. 'Tis sick an' tired
I am playin' nursegirl to that cali-
headed brother av yours.'

"An' I turns away, manin' fer t'
march from th' room wid me dignity
flyin'. An' at that moment she picks up
th' rollin' pin from the table, all over
sticky wid dough it was, an' she hits
me a swipe on the conk that would
sure ha' put me out av I hadn't ketched
it acrost me arrm. But the ind av it
slips aroun' me gyard an' pokes me
fine in the eye. So I grabs both her
arms an' holds her off, ragin' like a
wild woman.

"'I'll tache ye,' she hollers, 'fer t'
call me brother a liar. Her purty blue
eyes is fair blazin' an' she begins to
joopm up an' down on me feet. So I
lets her go an' she says: 'Ye'll git no
more meals off'n me in dis house,' she
says. 'From dis time fort', she says,
'the upstairs fer me an' you can stay
downstairs or go to the divvle. 'Tis
little I'm carin' which.'

"So she bolts upstairs. Purty soon
I hears a terrible row an' I pokes me
head out into the hall. They was this
foldin' cot standin' in the spare room
an' she's throwin' it downstairs, piece
be piece. Follers most o' me clothes,
pants, shirts, coats, shoes an' other
junk. An' I can hear her sobbin' all
the while."

He stopped and sighed—a cavernous
sigh. Then he went to the stove and
turned the ham. It was a curious sight
—the great towering bulk of him, the
enormous hairy, freckled, naked torso,
bending over the sputtering ham and
below—silk pink pajamas. He return-

71

ed to the ice-box, got out twelve or thirteen eggs and broke them one by one into the spider where the ham still sizzled. He poked at the mess miserably.

"'Twas wan week ago the day," he mourned, "siven days exact—an' I ain't saw her since." He gave himself up to weep and the ham.

"Well," he sighed at length, "dis here pig is now did complete. Lave us eat it. Me stummick t'inks me t'roat is out."

He seized the sputtering spider, poured off the hot grease and headed for the table. At that instant a tiny gray shadow flitted out from under the stove and across his bare feet. Mac gave a bellow. of fright and bounded into the nearest chair, brandishing the spider far aloft. The chair, none too strong at best, resented the sudden intrusion. One weakened leg gave way and down came the Big Fellow amid the ruins with a crash that shook the house. The ham flew all ways over the floor. The eggs, fried soft and dis-integrated by the shock of the fall, had instantaneously amalgamated themselves into a yellow paste and which emptied itself from the spider upon the fighter's shoulder and thence ran down his naked, hairy breast, like lava from some young Vesuvius, until it mingled caressingly with the pink pajamas.

It was in this attitude, the empty skillet still poised by one mighty arm above his startled countenance, that Mrs. McGlory beheld her lord as she abruptly opened the kitchen door, hold-ing a candle over her head and clad only in her nightgown, from beneath whose hem certain pink toes twinkled pleasingly. She took in the attractive spectacle in one scorching glance that was pleased to include my miserable carcass with the rest. Mac and I were alike frozen into stone.

"Fine doin's, Mister James Xavier McGlory," she cried at length. "Fine doin's fer the home av a respectable marrid woman in th'middle av the

night. Fine, indade. An' you, Bill Bagley, av ye've nothin' betther t'do than t' help me husband make a drunk-en wreck av his wife's home, I'd sug-gest that ye be movin' on. As fer Mister James Xavier McGlory, he'll be in bed in ten minutes or 'tis worse fer him, 'twill be."

The door slammed viciously behind her. I looked at Mac. He still sat just as his wife's entrance had found him, plastered with the yellow ooze of the broken eggs, the skillet still poised in one huge hand above his bullet head. A titanic grin spread over his freckled face from the cauliflower ear to the good one. His blue eyes were closed till they showed mere gleams through a pair of slits. He began to heave and wheeze there amid the ruins of the broken furniture. He shook and gurgled and swayed with the power of the suppressed emotion that possessed him. It was long before he spoke but eventually he managed it.

"She—she— t'inks," he gasped at last, "she—she—t'inks she—can lick me."

I found myself rolling helplessly on the kitchen floor with the fighter. One thought possessed us both. We simply must not laugh—and we didn't. But the pangs we suffered—there on the kitchen floor. At last we sat up. We still writhed—but the worst was over.

"Holy saints!" said Mac. "Did ye iver see the like av her? But," he added hastily, with an anxious glance at the door, "I'm t'inkin' ye betther be on your way."

I stood not upon the order of my going. It was broad daylight when I got to bed on the other side of the river.

"Certain Person or no Certain Person," I said as I dropped off to sleep "I hope I choke before I cross the East River again."

The very next Sunday, as a Certain Person and I were doing Coney Island, we saw Mr. and Mrs. McGlory. They were shooting the chutes. A crowd that clearly recognized the champion

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was doing him homage from a respect-
ful distance and from the look on the
lady's face as the toboggan hit the

water and she clutched her husband's
arm I inferred that the iron cot no
longer stood in the parlor.

OUT OF THE SEA

BY WITTER BYNNER

With your sun-white hair and your smile
And your body as white as a white sea-bird,
I took you and watched you and held you a while
And never a word.

Nothing to say, to explain
Or to answer, nothing to hear or be heard,
Only to kiss you again and again,
With never a word.

Even lately I cannot be sure.
It seems in my sleep that we neither have stirred
So silent you vanished, so sweet you endure—
And never a word.

# Off and On at Vera Cruz

From the Random Notes of a Correspondent With the Fleet.

BY PERCY ADAMS HUTCHISON.

It was 6 o'clock on the morning of a day early in June, when the captain's orderly of the U. S. supply ship *Celtic* came to my room and said that the captain wished me to come on deck. Not a little puzzled I dressed hurriedly and went up on the quarter deck, or, as we generally called it, the "topside."

The captain, immaculate in his "whites," was standing near the rail. As I stepped on the deck he pointed to the west, saying: "I thought you might like to see Orizaba. It is seldom visible for long after sunrise."

I looked in the direction his hand indicated, but saw only what my land-lubber eyes took to be a high coast line, running north and south. I saw no Orazaba. Then, in a moment, I realized that no land was in sight, and that I was simply looking into the high bank of clouds along the horizon. That gave me the clew, and, turning my gaze higher, I discerned above the clouds the mountain's cap of perpetual snow.

It was suffocatingly hot, although so early, for the tropic sun was already of burning intensity, and dead calm lay upon the sea.

"How would you like to be up there?" queried the captain; "the old hill is eighteen thousand feet high."

I would well have liked being "up there," or at least half way up; for I knew from previous experience in the gulf that the trade wind would not begin coming in until 11 o'clock or so, and that until then life would be unbearable in the pitiless heat. But mountain-climbing being out of the

question, I went in to breakfast. When I again came on deck Orizaba had disappeared.

It was about 9 when we first "lifted" the basket masts of the battleships; and soon after the great grey hulls of those farthest out began to grow visible. The flagship was already signaling us with the "blinker"—that is, with flashes on the searchlight, heliograph fashion, and soon we were "talking back" with flags and semaphores. The navy had four signal systems (exclusive of the radio, which is not used for close work): the blinker, the semaphore, the human wig-wagger, and the Morse flags to the mast head. And only the wig-wagger is put out of business by darkness for the flags are replaced by lights, and the semaphore arms are illuminated. What the conversations were about I did not know; but I cared little, for I was much more interested in the battleships.

They lay in two long lines, a wide lane between each ship, 100 yards from the next, and, because of the tide at the moment, at right angles to the lane. We steamed slowly the length and came to anchor at the point ordered by the commander-in-chief. Soon the big motor-sailing launches and barges of the battleships were swarming along the port side to take off the seven hundred thousand odd pounds of dressed beef, and the no fewer pounds of other stores that we had brought for feeding the jackies; and the captain, wearing side-arms, was going over starboard to pay his official visit to the admiral. On his return he informed me that I was to report

713

714

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HOW THE HARBOR BEHAVES.

aboard the fleet flagship, the *Wyoming*, for assignment to quarters while at Vera Cruz.

The commander-in-chief very obligingly asked me if I had any choice of ships, to which I replied that if convenient I should be greatly pleased if I might have the experience of living aboard a dreadnaught. But Admiral Badger did better for me than that, for I was assigned to the *Arkansas*. Admiral Fletcher's flagship, sister ship of the *Wyoming*, and a super-dreadnaught of twenty-six thousand tons. I was made comfortable in one of the rooms that are usually reserved for a member of the admiral's staff, and given a place in the wardroom mess, the War Department very courteously having decreed that correspondents with the fleet should have the same status socially as officers.

I was tempted to believe that the *Arkansas* and the *Wyoming* must have been designed by an Irishman, since they present the anomaly of having the quarter decks forward, and made some remark to that effect. But I

was sternly rebuked for my facetiousness, and told that it was provided for in navy regulations that “the commanding officer should define the limits of the quarter-deck.” As if that made any difference, with an age-long tradition at stake.

And as a matter of fact, the location of the quarter-deck and the officers' quarters, is a bone of contention with the navy at the present time. On the two thirty-thousand-ton ships now building—the *Nevada* and the *Oklahoma*—the designers have returned it aft; whether to remain there or not is to be seen. Naval officers are divided on the question. On a ship with sails the place of command is, of course, astern; on a ship with steam, it is forward. Some argue that the captain's deck and his quarters should correspond to the point of command; others hold to tradition, and to maintain that exclusiveness which is only possible with the quarter-deck astern. For living purposes I preferred the arrangement of the *Arkansas*; but I must admit that it lacked “tone.” It

OFF AND ON AT VERA CRUZ

715

smelled of utilitarianism in the spacious quarter-deck (aft) of the ships of the *Minnesota* type. I was conscious of something distinctive. It suggested Drake and Nelson: the Spanish Main, and Trafalgar. And perhaps it is worthy of note that the English navy has not moved it forward.

It was easy to forsee that to my civilian eyes left on a great battleship was going to offer a continuity of novelty. But I preferred to postpone my nautical education, for I was eager to go ashore. This was easy of accomplishment. Each warship carried a number of steam picket-boats and launches (for convenience all called steamers) and each of the ships at anchor had its schedule of boats to the shore. I decided to take the first steamer. Two or three officers who were off duty were going ashore also, and I observed that each asked of the officer of the deck, who had stationed himself at the head of the gangway as the launch came alongside, for permission to leave the ship. This was, of course, granted; the question being but a matter of routine. And there was no reason to suppose but that I was even more free as to my movements. But it pleased me to imitate them; and to the end of my stay I scrupulously repeated the formula whenever starting for the pier.

The harbor of Vera Cruz is not land-locked. In fact, Vera Cruz did not have a natural harbor, for the coast line is not even dented in at that point. Excellent anchorage there is, to be sure, protected to some extent by small islands and coral reefs. But these are mainly to the south, and the outer harbor has little or no protection against the "northers," which, especially in winter, often sweep down with considerable fury.

The inner harbor, on the other hand, the one that has been created through the construction of breakwaters and jetties, is a fine achievement of engineering skill. Many millions of dollars have been expended on the work,

and amplest protection is afforded ships from every kind of wind and sea. The piers at which ships load and unload are provided with the latest and most powerful types of cranes for handling cargoes safely and expeditiously, and are unsurpassed by any docks of New York. The "Sanidad," or, as the American newspapers call it, the "sanitary" pier, is a fine example of concrete work.

This was the pier at which all the launches landed their passengers; but it is not the pier that was taken by the landing forces. Its great warehouses had become barracks for the American marines; and the marine bands gave open air concerts there afternoons and evenings. In the late afternoon it was the chief promenading place of the town, for it was much cooler than the plaza, back from the shore, and shut in on every side.

As I had been in Gulf ports before —although not in Vera Cruz—the town itself offered nothing of novelty. But the sight of a town in actual state of military and naval occupation, was decidedly new. The pier, and the streets swarmed with American jackies (every man in "whites") many of them just landing for a few hours of "liberty;" others seeking their boats to return. Every fifth man (at the least) carried a huge bunch of bananas, or a great basket of mangols and aligator pears. Many had boxes of cigars tucked under the arm; and here and there came a great bronzed chap swinging a parrot in a shining cage. If the trade in parrots continued at the rate it had established when I was there, the jungles of the American tropics will soon be desolate, and the American navy will become a floating aviary. I can't see where they were all stored, unless the crews of some of the ships had taken to eating parrot. There certainly will be one great glut in the bird market when our navy gets back north!

But Jack did not spend all of his money either on parrots or on fruit. One would suppose that the sailor,

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"AND I LEARNED ABOUT WOMEN FROM HER"

confined for weeks at a time to the
narrow range of a deck, would wish
to stretch his legs the moment he
was ashore. But, on the contrary,
his greatest ambition and delight
seemed to be to get aboard of some-
thing to ride. Perhaps it was be-
cause carriage-hire was so cheap and
he could feel like a lord perambulat-
ing about in a barouche, that he kept
the hacks of Vera Cruz on the go.
But I doubt if this was all. I think
he has a deep-seated fondness for mo-
tion. Horses, and donkeys hardly
larger than mice, gave him infinite
pleasure. And he did not utterly
scorn the humble trolley car that bum-
bled you around (doesn't the German
call a slow train a bumblezug?) for
a two cent (American) fare.

Jack also spent a large share of his
time and money in the numerous
cantinas, hobnobbing with the sailors
from the various foreign ships of war,
everybody drinking everybody's health
with great gusto and a complete ig-
norance of languages. Verily, one
drop of alcohol makes the whole world

kin! But of real drunkenness I saw
never a case, either among our own
forces, land or sea, or among the for-
eign sailors that came ashore. Some
few were "lit internally with wine," as
Stevenson has it (although here it was
beer, or bad whiskey) and some were
rendered quarrelsome. But, taken all
in all, it was a wonderful record of
sobriety.

Five other nations besides our own
were represented in Mexican waters
while I was there, England, Ger-
many, France, Spain, and Holland.
Now only Spain remains beside our-
selves. I did not become intimately
acquainted with the foreign officers,
but I sat with many of them under the
arcade of the Diligencias hotel, where
they hob-nobbed with the officers of
the American ships, and I met them
frequently when they came to our
"smokers" and boxing bouts. Where
are they now, those great, bubbling,
good-natured fellows from the *Dres-
den*? The finely courteous and smil-
ing men from the *Conde* and the
*Descartes*? The clean-featured, firmly-

built Bristo-
grimly
clear
at the
tion of
Vera
For
Even
ing, a
have
ships
force
supre
give t
was o
view.
ing do
The M
tent; a
exist
justice
ter th

OFF AND ON AT VERA CRUZ

717

MARINE CAMP AT LA GARTA.

built chaps of the *Suffolk* and the *Bristol* and the *Berwick?* Are they grimly walking their decks, already cleared for action, or are they already at the bottom of the sea? The thought of them brings me nearer to a realization of war than did anything I saw at Vera Cruz.

For, indeed, our landing was no war. Even had I been present at the fighting, as I was not, I doubt if I should have been impressed. Our array of ships was too overwhelming; our land-force too well-drilled, too alert, too supremely competent for any task, to give the observer a feeling that war was on. It was more like a vast review. It was not even a big boy laying down the law to a smaller one. The Mexican was not merely impotent; it was as if he was absent, nonexistent. It was not only a sense of justice that compelled us to administer the laws of Vera Cruz in the in-

terest of the inhabitants· the feeling of pity for these children played its part.

Much has been written about the cleaning-up of Vera Cruz by the Americans. But navy men who had been in the port before the occupation told me that it had always been a clean town, for a city in the tropics, unusually clean. A gang of "white-wings" that certainly ante-dated our occupation was frequently to be seen about the streets. And the signs on the buildings prohibiting the posting of bills, and the notices in the parks against defacement, and the littering of walks, had certainly been placed there long before we came. On the other hand, the screening of the fish and meat markets was evidently an innovation which we had brought about; and I have no doubt that we saw to it that such sanitary regulations as the city had were more rigidly enforced. I have seen plumper buzzards than those

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718

which perched on the crosses and
spires of the Cathedral; and we doubt-
less were partly responsible for their
meagre diet. The northern corre-
spondents, seeing the buzzards there,
naturally concluded that Vera Cruz
must be a very offensive place. But
I have seen many more in parts of our
own South, over places of great clean-
liness. The buzzards would be far
more numerous over New York than
they are over Vera Cruz if only they
could withstand the rigors of our cli-
mate. Let us not plume ourselves too
much, or be unjust to the Mexican.

Although Vera Cruz is a city in fact
(the governing body of which took to
their heels on the landing of our
forces) it is in reality hardly more than
a good-sized town. And to judge all
Mexico by Vera Cruz would be vastly
unfair, although I fear that many judg-
ments printed have had only that lim-
ited foundation. One who has not seen
Mexico City has little right to judge
Mexico. And as General Funston
would not allow correspondents to pass
the lines (two or three who did so
having made great trouble for him)
I did not get to Mexico City. Vera
Cruz bears to Mexico City about the
same relation that Hoboken bears to
Chicago. It is a point for the tran-
shipment of merchandise, nothing else.
With the breaking of the broad-gauge
railroad nine or ten miles inland, and
the abduction of the locomotives of
the narrow-gauge line by the fleeing
army of General Maas, Vera Cruz lost
all immediate excuse for remaining on
the map.

The town is a curious, and not un-
interesting mixture of the old world
and the new, of the civilization of the
temperate zone with the semi-civiliza-
tion of the tropics. The natural occu-
pation of the town and its inhabitants
is sleep: its natural formula, manana.
But as a point for the expediting of
foreign and domestic goods, money
was to be made: and for money, even
the Mexican is able to curtail sleep,
and to act today. Of course, with the
interruption of rail traffic, and the con-

sequent withdrawal of shipping, all
"big business" came to an end. But
the shops, the cafes, the restaurants
and the hotels are doing a larger busi-
ness than ever before in their lives.
It was like finding a gold-mine in the
streets—five thousand Americans (and
even the poorest American is a spend-
er) among them day and night, and
probably a thousand more daily from
the ships!

The buildings of Vera Cruz are of
adobe, as a rule, or of small stone set
in plaster and covered with plaster.
A few frame houses are to be found,
but not many. For the most part the
walls are white; or, rather, were white,
for time and dirt have done their work.
The consequent glare is intense. Some,
however, are painted blue or red or
yellow or buff, giving a touch that is
picturesque, but not beautiful. Two
stories seemed to be the rule for height,
with an occasional extension to three.
Four-storied buildings were a rarity.
As in European cities, shopkeepers in-
variably live above their shops. I was
surprised to find the flat roof, so com-
mon in Spain, not much in evidence.
And the patio, or inner courtyard, was
invariably disappointing. An excep-
tion to this was the patio of the school-
building (if I remember, it had been
the grammar school of Vera Cruz)
which had been taken over by the ex-
peditionary forces for use as a hos-
pital. Every house has its balcony
(usually painted green) and in the
cool of the day, and in the evening,
these balconies become the scene of
much domestic life. In Vera Cruz,
however, one seldom sees Romeo and
Juliet in their famous scene. There
is little Castilian blood there, and,
hence, an absence of Castilian man-
ners. However, the serenader was oc-
casionally to be found twanging his
guitar in the street, and wooing his
lady above.

What was the attitude of these Mex-
icans of Vera Cruz toward the Ameri-
cans?

Outwardly they were deferential, but
not, as a rule, servile; and, apparently,

friendly,
the Pho-
in con-
the nat-
double
for fri-
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helped.
ing fro-
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Americ-
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even th-
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land.

Never
not tak-
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withsta-
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were ac-
went u-
or six n-
drive f-
peso or
one, th-
prices!
the ta-
on my
much in
able.

And
Vera C
shop-ke-
der the
ing tha-
them, a
mosity
that fro-
and fift-
our for-
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there no
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But t
placed t
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Maas.
fled the
peacefu-

OFF AND ON AT VERA CRUZ

friendly. A large proportion of the American force had served either in the Philippines or in Cuba, and could in consequence converse freely with the natives. This ease of intercourse doubtless removed many small causes for friction, and so made for better feeling. And, of course, our money helped. With the Mexican not knowing from day to day whether his paper currency would be worth a penny, American "gold" (the term was used to include nickels, silver, and greenbacks) was worth in his eyes more even than its exchange value; it was the one stable thing in an unstable land.

Nevertheless, the Vera Cruzian did not take advantage of his extravagant interlopers and overcharge them unduly, many reports to the contrary notwithstanding. Some of the necessaries of life—such as beer and parrots—were advanced; but food and clothing went up but slightly. And when five or six men can pile into a barouche and drive for an hour for the sum of one peso on an exchange rate of three to one, there's little room to talk of high prices! To think of what I paid for the taxicab that brought me up town on my arrival at the navy yard, I find much in the Mexican that is commendable.

And yet, as I walked the streets of Vera Cruz, or talked to the obliging shop-keeper, or the genial waiters under the arcade, I could not help thinking that down in their hearts some of them, at least, must cherish deep animosity towards us. It is estimated that from two hundred to two hundred and fifty Mexicans were killed when our forces went in. In those groups on the piers or about the plaza must there not have been husbands or sons or sweethearts who would have liked to have revenge?

But the citizens as a whole have placed the blame for those deaths, not on the Americans, but on General Maas. They realized that had he not fled the occupation would have been a peaceful one. And their hatred of Maas

is far greater than their hatred of the Americans. When he and his two brothers and Senor Moheno came down in June to board the French ship Espangne at Vera Cruz, the people would have killed them but for the protection of General Funston. As it was, a Vera Cruz newspaper got out handbills exciting the populace to riot. Of course, the rioting was quickly suppressed: and the paper was suppressed, or suspended, likewise. Funston not only had the lid on: he had it clamped down.

This incident alone, even if I had not found other confirmation of my views, would have led me even to support more strongly than I had, the ends and the methods of the administration. In spite of the refugees (whose bitterness against the revolutionists and Washington knew no bounds, and who spoke of Huerta as if he had been the angel of God), in spite of the men of the army and the navy (who, very naturally, wanted action), and in spite of the correspondents who reflected these views, mainly because they were popular, I am convinced that the policy of the Administration not only was the right policy, it was also the only policy.

And this is leaving out of account entirely the moral aspects of the situation. I had held from the outset (and made myself unpopular more than once in holding it) that the United States would be taking a moral step backward if it were to recognize on the North American continent a government founded upon assassination. My opponents retorted that Europe had done so; why should we be more finicky than Europe? And as they backed their contention with utilitarian arguments, and as utilitarianism and ethics are not the same thing (despite John Stuart Mill) there had been no way of changing their minds, for we talked different languages.

It was a great pleasure to me, therefore, to find evidence that on practical grounds alone our stand not only was justified, but necessitated. I am con-

THE TREND

720

vinced from what I saw and heard that Huerta, even had he had the support of the United States (barring, of course, the actual support of the army and navy) could never have put down the revolution. Except for a very small following, concentrated mainly in Mexico City, he had not a friend in all the country. One would suppose that Vera Cruz, since in its business life it was dependent on Mexico City, would have been solidly for Huerta. And yet the contrary was the case. The hand-bills referred to above had this very significant phase: "These (men) are friends of Huerta and as bad as he." The italics are mine; but does not this cast a world of light?

Instead of the United States being "the laughing stock of Europe," I venture to believe that we have taught Europe a salutary lesson as to diplomacy and the relationships of nations. In the case of Mexico it was Europe, not the United States, that could not see over the rim of the dollar. And perhaps the next time that delicate questions arise on this continent Europe will ask first what we propose to do about it. Our prestige, instead of having diminished, has been enhanced. Moreover, I believe that Mexico, as a nation, has at last come to birth. Dis sentions, even small revolutions, there probably will be; but it is on the road at last. And a bright future lies be fore it.

But the Mexican is not capable of self-government?

Capable immediately of self-government intelligent in all its details he probably is not. But is the American? We have only to think of our Tammanies and our Bath House Johns to realize that even we had better not crow. But to say that the Mexican is absolutely incapable is to spread abroad one of the most malicious falsehoods ever perpetrated. The Mexican has a very keen perception of what he wants; and with a chance to get it, he will grow amazingly. The trouble has been, he has not in the past been articulate. How many of us would have

been under the conditions? With the ghastly door of the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa yawning to receive us if we opened our mouths in protest, would we vociferous Americans have been articulate?

Porfirio Diaz may have been a great man in his way: he may have been necessary in the evolution of Mexico. But he sowed a terrible whirlwind. Huerta was not great, even in the ways of Diaz. Huerta was an anachronism; and, unfortunately for him, he fell upon a time when the harvest and his predecessor was ripe for garnering. That "the world is marching on" may be a platitudinous statement. But the trouble is that too few critics have noted the fact that Mexico has "caught the step."

But I fear that I have digressed from Vera Cruz, for there is much I have not mentioned. For instance, I have forgotten to speak of the milkman, to be seen morning and evening, ragged, bare-footed, astride his diminutive donkey (the donkeys of Vera Cruz are certainly smaller than elsewhere) his pails swinging either side the saddle. He was picturesque very; but I could not bring myself to sample his wares.

Nor have I spoken of the flower girls, mere children all of them, that were always about the Arcade with their trays of red and white roses. There was one of eight or nine years that I remember particularly. She was ragged, and, I fear, a bit dirty, but she had wonderful black eyes, dimples, and the most roguish smile in the world. Some one had taught her that the American word for money was "chicken-feed," and when you asked the price of her flowers she would invariably give that for answer, to her own supreme delight and the amusement of her customer. And whenever she received a few American coins they seemed such a fortune she immediately pinned a rose on everyone in sight.

But there was one tragedy, of almost daily repetition, at the hotels—the failure of the ice supply. Many were the wails that went up from

thirsty bering h
the follow
Whittier
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OFF AND ON AT VERA CRUZ

721

CORNER OF PLAZA. CITY HALL AT RIGHT.

thirsty throats, and one man, remembering his third reader, was moved to the following mournful parodying of Whittier:

> "Of all sad words tongue can reply,
> The saddest are these, 'No peilo hay.'"

Of course, I went out to San Juan de Ulúa, the Castle of Chillon of Mexico, and the living tomb of more than one Bonivars. The prisoners had already been removed by the Americans, and the prisons and dungeons cleaned and disinfected. But it made one's flesh creep to go through it. There was dungeon after dungeon either utterly without air or light, or admitting these only through the merest aperture. On the walls of several of the larger prison-rooms in which many prisoners had been kept perched together were scratched rude crosses, with initials and dates, telling of the only release to which most could look forward, and for which all must have longed. If anything in Mexico justified American intervention, San Juan de Ulúa justified it.

And of course, also, I made the tour of the outposts. All the Americans,

including the refugees, did that. They offered the one hope of excitement: excitement which never materialized. These stretched in a semi-circle around the town, either end resting on the sea, and for the most part the guarding companies had a pretty tough time of it: burning sun and burning sand by day; mosquitoes and torrential showers at night. Those along the railways were a little better off, for freight cars with screen doors fitted to them made fairly good living quarters, and did not blow down in squalls. But the outposts have been the theme of every writer, and so have become a hackneyed subject for the reader.

On the eleventh of July the *Florida*, a dreadnaught of twenty-two thousand tons, received sudden orders to proceed north.

In preference to going ashore I had remained aboard the "Ark" during a week of fleet manoeuvers, but as we had not gone very far from land even that was not quite real sea-going. It had been intensely interesting, however, especially as the captain had given me the courtesy of bridge from which to watch the great ships wheel

THE TREND

and circle; from line of battle, circle and wheel. The precision of their movements had been beautiful to behold: the sense that they gave one of power in leash, appalling.

But there was no knowing where the *Arkansas* would come up. And as I was eager to make the trip on one of the large battleships, I took the opportunity to return on her.

The *Florida* came up under forced draught. Not that there was pressing need of her immediate presence at New York. It was merely one of the countless tests going on all the time in the navy for tabulation of just what a given ship, or a given part of a ship, can be relied on to do under given conditions. The *Florida* had been in tropical water for more than six months, and was, consequently, very foul of bottom. The question to be considered was: With the engines making revolutions for a certain speed, what speed will the ship make "over the ground"? Obviously, the knowledge gained might be of the utmost value to an admiral going into battle.

The *Florida* is one of the flag ships,

but no admiral was aboard. But in the admiral's cabin was a silent passenger, the flag draped above him, and flowers, and a guard standing at his feet. Like the nineteen Blue Jackets that came with the *Montana*, Captain Owens, of the Marines, was going home. There was to be no parade for him, and no oration by the President, for he had succumbed to disease, not to a Mexican bullet. But he had given his life in the service, nevertheless; he was as much of a hero; and his were the honors of war. Only three or four days had Captain Owens been ill; it was not all child's play at Vera Cruz. In the main, however, the health of the men gave way but little before the usual diseases of the tropics, all reports to the contrary being greatly exaggerated.

We docked early on the morning of Sunday, the nineteenth, and I said goodbye to the navy. After two months aboard ship I am wondering if I shall ever again have so interesting and so illuminating an experience; and with such genial companions.

# With Bell, Book, and Candle

BY EDNA KENTON

IT was an understood thing after Sasscer left the Marlowe and went to teach music in some miserable mid-West girls' school that little Mrs. Sasscer was staying on through the loving kindness of some other rent payer—especially after the baby came, and Sasscer didn't.

The night he left, he went hunting through the place, for Nichols to give him power of attorney in matters of moment that might come up. Nichols was one of Sasscer's best friends, and Sasscer, when he found him in my rooms, overlooked the insignificant fact of my presence, and blurted out his sorry business, which carried with it the outlines of a sordid little tale made during his recent absence on an unremunerative concert tour.

There is a play somewhere, on the stock stage yet at least, whose plot hangs on the item that a man with a high silk hat paid some visits to a lady during her husband's absence in the East. The plot is not convincing, and high silk hats here are not so rare or visiting gentlemen and compliant ladies so uncommon as to excite such unkind comment. But as it befell, both Nichols and I had seen this particular high silk hat on too many occasions to be surprised at Sasscer's heavy judgment—we ourselves having pre-judged little Mrs. Sasscer. She had the doubt-exciting face of the Madonna type, with lips a little too full, and eyes set too far apart for perfect beauty or moderate sincerity. And once in a while she forgot her ingenue rôle and told a story that only an adventureous lady should relate, and that not on any family stage. So we were not surprised as Sasscer talked montonously; only sorry that his fool's paradise should have ended.

“I found them,” he repeated dully. “I

don't go through the motions of killing the man in a case like this, where the woman knows what she does. I'd walk out forever, if it wasn't for one thing— there's to be a child—she swears it's mine—but that's easily settled. I came back just two months ago, after that six month's tour—I want you to keep track of things, Nichols. I haven't got two cents to leave with you now, but the rent's paid, up to the first, and I came across a lot of money in an old pocket book of hers a few days ago, so there's enough to last till I get something in hand. In spite of her heavenly race, she's shrewd, and I'm mistaken it she hasn't foreseen this, and feathered her nest in advance. It the child by any chance is mine, give it the benefit of the doubt, poor little devil! But I never want to see her again. What's the use! Here's my address—let me know when the child comes, and I'll keep you supplied with funds in case she gets thrown down—”

Four months later Nichols wrote Sasscer that a bouncing baby boy had appeared in Mrs. Sasscer's apartment, which she still held, and where the high silk hat passed in and out with commendable regularity. And Sasscer wrote back that that settled it; that the West was hell, and life in it the nethermost limbo. After that there was silence. Nichols wrote him a year later, to say that Minnie Sasscer had disappeared without a word to any of her old friends, but Sasscer never replied to that, and for another year there was silence.

Until one morning, when I looked out of my library window, and beheld Minnie Sasscer passing, hesitantly. Our eyes met, and after a few seconds of evident consideration she turned back, and rang my bell.

She was rather thin and pathetically

THE TREND

724

shabby. Only from outward signs might one gather evidence of her life during the past year, for her lips were shut against personal confidences. She came to the point directly—being always de ceivingly direct. She wanted Sasser's latests known address, simply that, and, after a moment for reflection, I gave it, reasoning that by refusing what she knew was known to me I became more a party to what was none of my business than by giving her what was only too apt to be none of her business to have. That, however, was on the knees of the gods, not on my shoulders, heavily though the burden has since weighed me down. In deed it began to press grievously when I caught the light in her eye as she left. To some lovers of women it would have shown the beam of incipient happiness; to me it took on the shadow of the coolest sort of calculation. And when I chanced, in the dead of the next night, to recall that Sasser had gone out to his new post, with the avowed and utterly mad intention of declaring himself free and unwed, I shuddered in my bed. For I had a certain sense of the unelastic moral boundaries in which he was to move out there, and I foresaw trouble and undue excitement—if it were calcu lation that shown from Minnie Sasser's eye. I found peace in sleep only after promising myself to admit my indiscre tion to Sasser, should occasion ever arise, and to no one else. And after two tranquil months I forgot my fears.

Then Nichols had to go West on a will case that involved a deal of private laundering of extraordinarily dirty linen, and he called me up just before he left.

"Wasn't Petersburg the name of that Western hell where Sasser burned?" he asked. "Then I'll look him up. Some female seminary, wasn't it!"

Nichols went out to Petersburg. He stepped from the filthy local train into the least filthy hack at the shanty-like station, and said, "Danby's office." Un til this trip he had not thought of Danby since the days when they met in various classes for the elucidation of torts, con tracts, sales, equity pleadings, and the like. For after they got their degrees, Danby had mysteriously chosen to go back to his sordid, ugly, native town.

Danby was not in his office, so Nichols went back down the creaking stairs to the main street of the town that held close the dirty secret of old Dan Graham's death and will. At the foot of the stairs, beneath Danby's swinging sign, he asked a town loafer to direct him to the old Graham place. A survey of the battle ground might not come amiss, and would waste an hour of his waiting; and, following his directions, Nichols turned off Main street, two blocks below, into a shady, meandering lane, guiltless of curbing, or of any pav ing other than rotting wooden walks.

Along this street he walked for some blocks before he discovered himself to be keeping unwitting pace with the slow advance of a dingy hearse. He looked behind him. Turning in from a side street, the funeral procession poured its way, seemingly an endless line, and along the sidewalks, on either side, came the stream of people, walking. On they came, a tramping horde of dull-faced men, with their women—but the women were tense and curious-eyed, and as alert as rats.

Nichols's pause made him fall ever so slightly behind the hearse, and as he looked again at the sordid pageant, his gaze fell through the open window of the first mourner's carriage upon its single occupant, a man in his mid-thirties, of remarkable beauty, over whose face, in this hour, a pallid masque had slipped, and seemed to hang awry. In that moment of amazed recognition, Nichols felt a hand upon his arm, and turned to meet Danby's eye.

"You, Nichols!" he said briefly. "I've not been a free agent since noon, and couldn't get back to the office. And with it all I've got to see this thing through."

His haggard face made Nichols put a question, to which Danby's grim laugh was answer.

"None of mine! The dead woman yonder came to town two months ago, unknown of any one but her husband." He jerked his head toward the single mourner's carriage, where Sasser rode. "She died here two days ago, after an illness that brought out more jelly and beef tea than any other sick woman ever drew from this bloodless town. It's a

WITH BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE

725

bad case as it stands, and if it doesn't turn out a worse one, I'll thank the high God for it tonight."

They fell into step, slightly back of Sasscer's carriage. Suddenly Danby spoke again:

"She brought a two year old child with her—it's lying there too, with its mother."

A short turn in the street brought them to an ugly, barn-like structure, a frame church, around whose door men and women were standing thick; waiting with curiosity nailed to every face for the crux of the hideous ceremonial. Danby strode pass the mass of his neighbors, with not a glance to right or left, and took his stand, with uncovered head, near the door. Already the pall bearers were busy; some hysterical women began to weep; and the raucous voice of the minister rose above the whispers and shuffle of feet.

For a moment the solitary mourner fumbled unaided at the rusty door catch, before he stepped out to fill in the swiftly increasing gap between himself and the coffin. No one stepped forward to assist him, but there was not an eye that was not turned full on him, eye of ferret, of vulture, of wolf and cat and crocodile. Even after the ancient door had creaked apart, he stood, wavering, on the step, as if he shrank from the line of white faces that stretched between him and the door. It might have been fear that prompted the pause; it might have been disdain. For a glance at the man would tell that he was fated from birth to disdain most of life. Not only might grief set him apart, as now, from his fellows; joy would as easily find him separate. We had known all this before; it was given to Nichols to see it in its truth.

As Sasscer stepped from the carriage to the sidewalk, a young woman coming hurriedly up, dragging a frowsy child after her, stepped to one side with a gesture of repugnance she could have shown to no lesser thing that leprosy. Sasscer lifted his hat involuntarily even as she swerved markedly aside, and a slight smile curved his lips as he walked quickly through the lane of tense faces and healed the gap in the procession at

the church steps. His head was still bared, and the pallid masque of grief hung more awry as he smiled.

Danby's hand fell once again with heaviness on Nichols's shoulder, as Sasscer, without perceiving friend or foe, passed after his dead into the chilly church.

"That girl yonder, Kate Jenks," he muttered violently, pointing to the woman who had all but spat upon the mourner, "is a girl of varied pasts, but with a respectable marriage to her credit now. Look at her—look at them all! They come—Great God, how they come! From Dan to Beersheba, and even from Gath where the thing should not be told! This is a strange town, this town of mine; stand by, and you may see what a sordid people will do under stress. I have a feeling that my fellow townsmen are running with the last turn of the wheel, and that within an hour something will be wrecked beyond repair."

Then it was that Nichols found voice for his amazement: "That man is my friend, Danby."

"You know him!" Danby uttered.

Nichols repeated: "He is my friend; in God's name, what does this flock of vultures mean?"

"You've seen our town," said Danby with a sneer. "And our townspeople—they are all here—look at them! If he is your friend, you can judge of how much sympathy his life and views would find here. He has lived according to his simple doctrine—that speech and the pursuit of happiness are free to him in Petersburg, and today his creed and Petersburg's gospel are to fight their crowning battle. Look at the slinking eyes, the narrow, pinched lips, the ravenous hunger after the hidden life of the man they hate that lurks in these faces here and tell me what hope there is for Sasscer, who came out here—to Petersburg!—to conceal past villainies and plot new ones, and seek—among us!—the flower of the world for his rapacious clasping!"

Before Danby's transcendent scorn Nichols was dumb. After a second's pause Danby added:

"I think he has found her—a young woman whose fate drove her here, also

WITH BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE

726

to teach music to our young, in the conservatory where he was supposed to be chained to the code of Petersburg. They have been much together, until the deserted wife and child loomed big two months ago. Then broke the storm! Petersburg had supposed him unwed—since then it has picked the marrow from his bones—and from hers, the girl's. The woman was ill when she came—all the housewives of the town have spent their best hours since in concocting messes. Like Greeks bearing gifts they came, rabid for reward in some sick room confidence. She told a story of desertion, of struggle unaided to rear the child, finally ot despair and seeking him out. Since her death the town has been a furious hive—men have whipped their fellows to ribbons under less stress."

He turned abruptly and entered the church, into which people were crowding with ill-concealed avarice for forward pews. Nichols followed him, down a side aisle, and around one side of the rostrum, beneath the organ already rasping out some mournful air, where they sat through the whining song and nasal Scripture reading and elongated prayer. Nichols could see Sasscer plainly, sitting in the front pew, alone, beside the coffin. His head was bowed upon his hand, and his steady eyes did not move from the open coffin where Minnie Sasscer and her child were lying. Nichols could even see the blue lined face against the cheap satin puffings, Minnie's pretty, weak, utterly sweet face. He wondered how it came that Sasscer could consent to the solemn mockery of this small-town funeral, and then it came to him that Sasscer looked somewhat like an ineffectual Prometheus, bound upon his rock; while about him the vultures waited. Petersburg, not Sasscer, had planned this mummery.

And then, as the long, lean minister rose before them, for the funeral address, Nichols knew, as he felt Danby tighten in his place beside him, that Danby was right. These people were running with the last turn of the wheel—and the smash was bound to come—

For half an hour Nichols did not take his eyes from Sasscer's face, which within a few moments raised itself from

the face of the dead wife to that of the judgment court of Petersburg above him. A quick hissing of breaths indrawn, the clenchings of Danby's fists, and Sasscer's face upraised—these were all the outward signs that marked the moment when the speaker turned from his stringing of the polished pearls of Scripture along the worn, thin thread of mortuary eulogy, to hurl fulminating philipic against the living. Rake, liar, seducer, moral murderer, and blackguard—the raging dervish lacked no words for pronouncing the flaming judgment of Petersburg. From his first appearance among them to this day of final untrocking, Sasscer's story was read aloud as Petersburg had spelled it out in trelight and secret. The bell was rung, the book was shut, the candle blown out, and his name was anathema. Of those who listened to the scorching excoriation, none could doubt the hyperphysical sincerity of the lean fanatic, or his courage, even though he was holding up between him and this spiritual enemy Minnie Sasscer's thin, dead body. And none might doubt that her face was no quieter than Sasscer's, though none save Nichols perceived that at the end his spirit was as detached from the life about him.

"When the most that we can say of her," Nichols said to us later, "is that she did no more harm than lies at her door, because she was too weak to count in great things."

We murmured here, and Nichols answered vigorously:

"What *could* one do! For there lay Minnie Sasscer, smiling that ghastly, dead smile, with her love-child in her arms; for the first time since she was at all, unable to strike back. What could one do, then or ever! Even as we joined him, in that awed triumphant hush as the coffin was borne through the satisfied throng, Danby wrung at his hand, and I put my arm about his shoulder to the sound of scattered hissing. What could we do but what we did, get them out of town that night by carriage to the next station—he would not leave without the girl, and Danby married them. What could one *do*!"

Nothing, of course; yet we smiled over the faulty enthusiasm that called Minnie

WITH BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE

727

Sasscer the pearl and Sasscer swine of
swine. If earthly eulogy help the dead
in their ghostly march to whatever lies
beyond, it is well for Minnie Sasscer that
she made her passing in unperceiving
Petersburg. From a certain standpoint

it is pleasant to think that she was can-
onized so thoroughly, and that the good
she did not do lives after her. All the
pleasanter because she had no sense of
humor, and therefore is not smiling, if
she knows.

RECKONING

BY JOHN MACY

I care not for the struggles I have won,
Save as they guide to others not begun:

I care not for the struggles I have lost.
If I can lose again and bear the cost.

# The Philosophy of Elimination

*(Some Summer Flirtations)*

By DJUNA CHAPPELL BARNES.

I F one were to desire a successful song of sixpence a sixpence should be in one's possession; so if one were to sing a song of Summer flirtation, one should possess an episode. Therefore admitting that I have had five or six episodes I will pass on.

It is not only a worm that turns during Summer months—a young man's fancy does that little thing, and sometimes it turns to thought of love and sometimes it turns sour—however that may be, out of the dim haze of midsummer, the hand of the man reaches for the hand of the woman, and there, upon the sand, mingling atom with atom and inarticulate speech with speech as inarticulate, life and love go on.

Nobody knows the duration of love; that is, regular ordinary November love, but love that is born in spring time, or rather early daisy time, can be estimated to the minute. It will last just as long as the water is comfortable off Manhattan beach or until all the boarders leave Mrs. McGuire's porch for New York and New Jersey.

When a girl sings in September, the tune is a little broken because it comes from the heart.

This doesn't last, however.

I sat out a dinner with a man once. who had lived fifty summers to a close and he—reaching for the salt—said:

"Love-making has changed — the club is in use. Things move too swiftly for sentiment; sentiment needs time; it takes time to think up endearing things; clubbing is natural, swift, comprehensive."

He looked at me out of satiated eyes "All women are a little wanton in their souls," he said, "and they never love so much that man who has won them

with soft caresses as they love, yea freeze, to him who has propped the mahogany against his dresser for thirty days, anticipating her coming."

"Ah," I answered, "but that is November method once again—in June—"

He laughed and spread out his hands, palm up. "In summer one has nothing to do; no exertion is necessary, the girl proposes."

And yet again—

Listen; it's like this. You get up in the morning, sip a cup of tea, languidly get into something white, and cool withal. You take up a tennis racket; you slip a novel in the curve of your arm; you take a last over-your-shoulder look at your hair in the mirror; you saunter out, banging the screen door after you. The tennis court is empty; dusty, too, is the tennis court. You turn about; really, truly, breakfast won't be ready for an hour yet. You throw down the racket, seat yourself in the only rocker on the porch, put your feet up on a hassock. Open the book. It is the wrong one and deals with the state. You throw it down; once more you approach the tennis court; it is still empty, still dusty. At last, wishing that you were the possessor of an interesting book of verse, a loaf, or some crackers, and a passible "Thou" you give yourself up to despair because you may never achieve the turban and the rotund simplicity of an Omar Kahyam or what not, while you bat mosquitoes off your tan stockings that are positively guaranteed never to—you look up, you see that it is a man approaching. You don't wait to discover if he is married, handsome, ten or thirty. You make a lunge at him.

Perchance the picture is correctly

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73º

laid with a jack knife, a bottle of sarsaparilla and a loaf along with the grass and the spiders, and the “Thou” must not escape. Of course he is drawn into the composition, of course you arise upon your knees, of course you lay sundry hands (nice word) in his bay—rummed locks, of course you gently shake him to and fro, until, if he is married he forgets marriage vows, or if he is single, he avows adoration for wedlock, or you sit and beat your breasts and cry out wild and hectic things to a sun-burnt sky.

You bet you don't.

You say, in a butter fed voice, “Is that you, Charlie? For the love of Mike don't sit on my parasol, and if you are going to stay, don't make love, because I'm sleepy; and now fan me while I try to take a nap, and keep the mosquitoes off before they get on.”

That's about the way it goes, only it doesn't make a story, and a story, like a bed, must be made.

All right—it's noon-day at the beach. Six hundred and sixty-six children have littered their bread and butter crusts over your new mohair bathing suit and its breast-clinging rubber rose.

You have been trying to keep out of the water all the morning and in the picture all the afternoon; you are lying on your back, perfectly miserable, with a noon extra of some red-inked murder over your peeling nose, and the sky keeps crowding you out of place and your knees hurt as though they were breaking, which is small wonder when three hundred and forty pounds takes you for a mound of uninhabited sand, and you are wondering if hot dog would seriously put you into the discard when he comes over and sits down. Of course he doesn't know you from Adam or Eve, but he takes his toes into his handsome brown hands and looks in a jack knife attitude out to sea.

There are two fat women wabbling at the slack line out there and one little banter running up and down in the surf, and four children filling sand pails, a sedate only-daughter playing

with a sedate old man in a placid pool of sand-held water, and there is a can-vas sail about twenty miles (or less) away, and the sea-weed keeps coming up and crowning your big toe as though you were a Benjamin Franklin or Elbert Hubbard or some body—and it isn't satisfying.

So at last he turns to her in a de-lightfully unconventional way and says that he knows that he has no right to speak to her, because nobody has introduced them, hopes she won't be mad, but he is terribly lonesome and won't she come out into the sand where it is less populated, and tango.

She sits up abruptly, her family convention and historic social order and the method "that keeps them off" coming into her eyes.

She says, "How dare you?" and "What do you mean, sir?" and "I'm a perfect lady" and "I shall slap you in a minute?" and then, "Of course I will."

Five minutes later they are seen doing an intimate imitation of all those dancers who have dammed ordinary motion upon the South end of the beach. His arm is very tight about her, and her rubber rose is beginning to wilt; this does not affect either of them, because presently they will be all dressed up, with some where to go, and that some where a soda fountain or a shooting gallery, or perhaps they will lend themselves to a piece of machinery in the picture gallery for a second, to come out later, apparently driving a wildly careening biplane through clouds, rather more or less.

So much for that phase of summer life and summer love. There's still another kind which gets its sentences mixed with the whip-poor-will and holds onto a bar of a rustic fence and says "Beloved" in soft, husky tones. It says, "Will you be mine?" (which no decent fifteen per would say in his right mind), and she murmur that she will for sure, and there ensues a sort of groping because it is dark, and little screams and fluttering of hands and a "You mustn't muss my hair—oh, I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ELIMINATION

731

thought that was a cow right behind me; no, I'm not frightened," and "yes, I do," and—

"You don't," he teases, and she has to admit and then aver that she does, and then he slips his father's mother's sister's niece's cousin's, half-gold, half-composition ring over her finger, and it is too large, and they laugh; then he tries it on her thumb and still it does not fit, and so, in the end, he puts it back on his own finger and is inwardly (no doubt) glad that it will last another season of love-making, if he is careful not to pick out a buxom person.

All these kinds are the simple, charming types that we read about. Now listen to the passive love-making of the man over fifty to the woman under sixty.

Probably she is eccentric by this time and wears scarlet shoes (senile femininity likes to ape the passions of youth) and sits long hours in a high-backed chair. She looks like Sarah or the devil, it matters little. She is a woman with a past, she says things with long drooping eyelashes over long onyx eyes. Her hands are severe and thin and the nails would cut if she loosed her passion (dead but still desired).

She says everything slowly, this is best. He—who probably wears fancy vests and spats, and carries a cane more for use now, than looks, sits at her feet and wonders why.

He admits that there is some compelling lure about her, but it is the lure of the broom dead upon the mountain side, only good when stacked for the sweeping away of dead desires.

"And oh my heart" he says—dear God but this is unholy affection. "How I long to make your life whole and happy and full. How I long to make those wonderful eyes light up with the wisdom of love. How—"

"Hush," she says, laying a hand on his gray hair. (This is a good attitude for bishop sleeves) and he hushes.

It is not well to stifle the yearnings of fifty in the heat of mid-summer and

so she rings for a bottle of ale or something sparkling and he sips tentatively.

Sometimes this love lasts into the autumn, because the object is autumn and the foliage is nearing its glorious riot of color just before brown death. If so, he has given her, by apple time, two heirlooms and she has permitted him one platonic lean of her forehead.

Then there's the love of the summer boarding house. The worst part of this is, that there are several dozen girls and not one of them knows which is "IT" chiefly because he doesn't—perhaps it's because he has learned over-well, the call of the tall grass, and he whom you care for—let him not discover it, for in the days gone by it knew no faithful love. And again, let

SAT FOR LONG HOURS IN A HIGH-BACKED CHAIR

732

THE TREND

ONE TYPE OF FLIRT.

him not discover buckwheat, for it
smacks of the tall grass, and the tall
grass knew no faithful love in the years
of the ape and the fireman.

Perhaps the best reason of all the
reasons that are, is that the persons in-
volved are away from home, and there
is no freedom like that. Being fully
assured that neither parent is near to
swing the red light at the danger mo-
ment, they accept the danger moment
and flirtation riots.

Let us continue.

The scene shifts. It is the deck of
an excursion boat.

Girls in middy blouses are doing
America proud in their Hungarian-

Jewish-Russian-Irish Italian way. They
stand up when the "Star Spangled
Banner" is played, and sit down when
it stops that they may arise once
more.

They eat the product of their mother's love out of sandwich or lunch boxes. At last they are reckless and heave something into the sea.

Every time, in fact, that you see
someone throwing something over-
board, you can be perfectly sure that
they are happy.

There are a lot of things that go by
the mast when man is young. In fact,
when a human being gets an impulse
by the sea he or she or it, always de-
sires to add something to the Atlantic,
and if it is not rocking the boat
and adding (unintentionally) Mrs.
O'Brien's daughter then, it is beer-
mugs and eggshells.

People who ride on excursion boats
have read a lot of O. Henry and Gouv-
erneur Morris, or at least the girl por-
tion, so when at last a young man in
a nine-fifty suit, a ten-cent necktie, a
last improved tower hat and rubber
heels, places himself at her side by
the rail, she knows that he is a cotton
king, or the son of a cotton king, or
a rubber manufacturer from Peoria,
or has rights in a silk mill over on
Staten Island, and that he is doing this
disguised poor-boy act merely to locate
her loyalty and true affection, and she
feels that the odor-eu-de onions was
taken on merely to make the picture
more truthful to life.

Instinctively she feels that he is go-
ing to ask her to drop "Gee" from her
knowledge and that "Gawd" must here-
after be spelled without the "w." She
breathes deep, her name is Sadie, but
she will do the name of Montmorency
proud and will not shut the screen door
upon the Drive with a backward kick
of her two-fifty gun-metal shod foot.
Also she intends to remember which
side of the street the man should get
next.

He is looking at her now, evidently
searching among the undergrowth of
much Latin and college-day verbs for

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ELIMINATION

733

a simpler language that she will understand. And she is silent because she knows that his simplicity is not hers. Hers would begin, “Gee, kid, spit it out!” His must be of another order.

He passes his hand across his hair, his eyes are full of that look that is called noble. Also he has a lot of George Washington about him—he is full of truth.

“I have never seen anything so wonderful, so beautiful,” he says at last, and his heart is in his eyes, the depot of all lovers’ souls.

“I have dreamt,” he continues, “of finding you, a woman like you, unspoiled by the conventions of the wiser world; I have hoped, so sincerely, to find you, that this is like an answer.” He comes nearer and leans where the sun catches the purple of his tie and jerks its pitiful radiance across the waters till its purple gleam strikes the shores of the Palisades.

“How I have searched! I knew that I should not find you in the parlors of the Four Hundred, nor in the castles of Europe. I knew that some day, some time at low tide, in a back street, I should lay eyes on just such a type—dear Lord, I have found it at last!”

He bows his head.

Her breast is rising and falling under the impact of a suspense so fully filled—this has always gone with emotion since the time the first fire was lit beneath the feet.

“I will try to prove worthy,” she murmurs.

He raises his head. “The salary?” he inquires.

“What!” she cries, for this sounds like traffic work. She even beats her breast with her fist. “What?”

“Yes,” he said, undisturbed, “what salary? I generally give five per day for starters. The Semi-Quick-Film Company won't stand for more than ten. So, now, if you are willing to take the position and part of 'Wilhelmina the Outcast,' or 'Picking Eugenically Perfect Shrimps,' I shall be glad to sign you up for a contract. I'm sure you can act before the camera; your dramatic power is splendid. You can begin tomorrow. What are you doing now?”

“Waking up,” she says harshly; “an' I thought youse was a gent—you long-legged piker—think I look like a actress, do yer? Wanted to associate me with the back streets in the moving picture woidd. Why, you cheap guy, me mother and me go to the movies every week, and what do you think she would do if she saw me come out in one of them things as 'Sally Nobody in the Ghetto?' No, I scorns yer offer; make it Lady Cholmondely's daughter with an affair with a Dook and I'll think about it; otherwise, you are canned—see?”

And so, on and on go the flirtations of Summer. Sometimes intentional, sometimes not flirtations at all, just misunderstandings, always a bit too tarnished, or too hectic, yet always somehow sweet.

My dear—nail the one who proposes in December!

All of which is merely to elucidate the philosophy of elimination.

From Beyond

BY BURTON KLINE

A
T sunset the wind that had swept
over the trees like a peal from
a prodigious organ had drop-
ped to a whisper; and by nightfall it
had stilled to such a silence as can
prevail only in the far October woods,
when the chill of the air has stricken
dumb all bird and insect life, and the
leaves are not yet sere enough to rat-
tle of their own nervousness. While
the cook was preparing our supper we
had sat out on the rough piazza of
our hunting lodge, our shooting fin-
ished for the day, and we smoking in
that luxury of physical weariness
which professional men are so rarely
permitted to enjoy. But even had we
not been too comfortable for speech,
that stillness, likewise so rare a luxury
to those perennially condemned to the
racket of the streets, would have dis-
couraged our chatter.

Though we five sat within five feet
of each other, the silence seemed to
divide us by thousands of miles. It
forced each of us inward upon himself.
It seemed to be the very voice of
Vastness, laughing at tiny Earth, and
laughing at us upon it. Even the
cheer of supper availed but little
against the sombre hush that had us
in its thrall. It was then too cold to
sit out and brave the thousand starry
stares of the night. Instead we
lounged deep in our rustic chairs,
watching the fire, watching our
shadows writhe in grotesque shapes
on the bark walls of the living room.
The heads of deer and bear jutting
out over the doors seemed to grin and
jeer at us in the uncertain light,
seemed, too, to writhe, as if wrenching
to be free and escape to the old ele-
ment that was calling them. It was
one of those seasons when the wind

is lured into unwonted travels and
roves far away to the outskirts of ex-
perience.

"I wonder if this shack too has its
personality," said the College Profes-
sor at length. His words broke upon
our brooding with the shock of a shot.

We all stiffened up—Dr. Claverson
in his huge birch armchair, Orchard-
son, the Boston lawyer, Wingfield, the
rising young architect from New York
—and I too.

"Did you ever notice," Professor
Bridge spoke on, "the particular spell
that each house you enter casts over
you? It's something apart from the
atmosphere that its occupants impart
to it—with the arrangement of chairs
and pictures, and all that. It's a flavor
that each house has all its own.
Houses differ precisely as human be-
ings differ. Each has its moods, that
differ from time to time. Ever notice
it?"

None of us had the energy to reply
at once, but finally the other lawyer,
West, had an answering idea.

"Yes, I've noticed it," he assented,
out of the shadow in which he sat.
"And other inanimate things seem to
exert the same spell. Ever notice
that? A good deal is said about the
power of mind over matter, but what
of the power of matter over mind?"
The question seemed addressed to
himself.

But West became aroused. He
leaned forward in his chair and went
on:

"Did you all ever hear of a man
called Prentiss Mulford? . . . Mul-
ford was a strange fellow who lived in
New York some years ago. Invented
a new religion—a precursor of mental
healing, in its way. He got the no-

tion that
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Instead
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Finally

FROM BEYOND

tion that the srtong among us exhale
their strength, and that the weak can
recoup themselves by imbibing this
strength. He rigged up a Temple of
Silence, where people went to prac-
tice his creed—the strong and the
weak, to sit in quietude and help each
other. In time he built up something
of a following, and wrote books, and
went about proselyting. Somehow
he had the love of the sea in him, too,
and built himself a boat—a craft as
odd as himself. He used to cruise
along the Long Island shore, and be-
came a familiar figure in its harbors.
If people showed an interest, at the
places where he put in and anchored,
he would preach his doctrines in a
gentle way.

"One day he hove to in one of these
haunts and anchored as usual. His
strange craft was noticed, but no great
attention was paid to him until it be-
came apparent that the boat had been
abandoned. Finally, when several
days had passed without signs of life
aboard of her, a few of the curious
rowed out, and found Mulford—dead.

"They notified his friends in New
York, and two of these came out to
take charge of the body. Later they
came back to look after his boat. It
seemed to them a sacrilege to sell her.
Instead they had a mind to sail her
out into deep water and scuttle her—
bury her in the sea. That is, they at-
tempted this.

"They hoisted sail—or rather tried
to; but a halyard broke, although the
line looked new. They spliced it and
tried anew, and again it broke, in a
fresh place. The main sheet jammed
in the block. Then the rudder took a
notion not to budge. One thing after
another went wrong. Each mishap
they patiently repaired, until it broke
over them that all this seemed a stub-
born protest on the part of that inani-
mate object. The thing had developed
a will of its own. It refused to budge
from the spot where its owner had
anchored it.

"All this at last got on their nerves.
Finally they had the patient, faithful

old tub towed out, and sank her; and
so they got rid of her . . . But what
do you make of it?" West abruptly
concluded.

"Simple hysteria," the Professor
pronounced, with the finality he used
in his classes. "It's distinctly interest-
ing, however. Unconsciously those
fellows persuaded themselves that
they couldn't move that boat. They
created their own difficulties within
themselves. Of course they couldn't
budge her then."

For a space we all sat and smoked,
and listened to the comment of the
fire.

"Well, then, what do you make of
this?" said Orchardson, the Boston
lawyer. "A year or two ago my wife
and two daughters went out to Brook-
line to look over a house that we saw
advertised. It was a handsome place
—I've seen it frequently, and as often
wondered why no one snapped it up.
For several years it had remained
stubbornly vacant. The agents had
gone frantic. My wife and daughters
were shown over it obsequiously, and
they liked it immensely. It was
roomy, elegant, and furnished in the
very best taste—and it was ridicu-
ously cheap. They went over it from
top to bottom—in silence. There was
nothing they disapproved. I was all
agog to know what they thought of
it, but they still were glum at dinner
that evening. But I said nothing,
awaiting their verdict.

"Finally, when dinner was nearly
finished, my younger daughter, Es-
ther, burst out:

"Well, I don't know how Mother
and Anne feel about it, but I shouldn't
live in that house, if we got it for
nothing. All the time I was in it I
had an inclination to fly out of it, in a
hurry. There was something oppres-
sing me. I don't know what it was,
but something told me to fly."

"'Did you notice that?' my wife
asked. 'I did myself, but I thought
it too foolish to speak of.'

"They all had noticed it, independ-
ently. That was the first they had