CHAPTER 1

OVER THE FERRY

A NOVEMBER day, twenty years ago. A chilly, pale, weak-breathed, deadening day everywhere; up where the sun glimmered feebly along through a cold, watery sky: yonder, where the sea yawned to the horizon like lead: up the bay where the water moodily lapped the beach, while pink gentians and saffron weeds mildewed and rotted in the salt hay of the marshes.
Nothing had life in it but a frosty air, which, as afternoon came on, drove up the Delaware, nipping and sharp; it found the great flat Quaker City locked in by the two lazy rivers, going off into a sleep, as it always did on the first hint of night, like a ship becalmed in a fog. Inside of the houses there were a million of centres of heat, or love, or passion, but they all turned the same decorous, impassive red and white faces to the pavement. Down on the wharves, as twilight approached, the piled blocks of importers' warehouses, dark, steep, white-shuttered, stared over the hucksters' wagons, swarming at their feet in the shadow; chilly lines of bare masts shivered in the wind over the uncouth bulky vessels hugging the shore for warmth, for miles.
All the dreariness and dankness of the day grew dankest and dreariest at the close of it. The keen wind tore and grated its way through chinks and crannies. Even the boards of the ferry-boat began to creak and crack with the frost, though there was a Maine lumberman on one side, and a lime brig on the other, wedging and warming her between their great hulks, which threw ponderous shadows far up the wharf.
Josh McNabb, the little ferry man, after bobbing about in these shadows, rolling trucks and baskets aboard, dived down into his cubbyhole of a cabin to light a smoky oil-lamp, and pulling on his overcoat, and coming out, heartened himself by a took across at the upper windows over the tin shop on Race Street, where a sconce, hung over the red half-curtains, showed that Jane had the pepper-pot and coffee, piping hot for him. One more run, and he could turn off before night.
There were but few passengers; a little apple-cheeked woman, coarsely dressed as a Quaker; a mulatto boy, lying on his back on some barrels tussling with a dog; and his master, a thin, subdued gentleman who sat in a chair, tilted back, smoking, and keeping a steady watch on the streets abutting on the wharf
"A country parson come up to town," Josh thought, "or else," spitting knowingly, "a leg. A regular leg. Well gotten up."
Whenever he passed he scrutinized the man after that with a policeman's eye; the high velvet-collared overcoat and trousers he wore were of dust-colored cloth, new, but old-fashioned from having been long laid away; his head was bald on top, a thin fringe of red hair and whiskers framing a sandy-skinned face, the features of which had never been compacted together by any definite meaning; round, lightish eyes looked through a pair of spectacles at Josh, at the dull town, and the inhospitable air, with a polite and deprecating smile.
When he turned his head, still looking uneasily up the wharf, the Quakeress called to him with a surprised chuckle of a laugh, something between a chirrup and a hen's cluck, "Jeems Strebling, is it thee, or thee spirit?"
The gentleman threw away his cigar, got up and came to her, his hat in his hand, his eyes going gravely over the pudding-shaped little body and doll's face with its dancing blue eyes.
"Miss Yates! Ann Yates! This is-positively this-!" with a shallow laugh. "Yours is the first familiar face since I left Alabama," bending over it with assumed rapt attention. "It makes me young again-yes."
"Young again? How's that? Eh, how's that?" sharply. "Thee's well kept, Jeems; while I'm scrubby, and shabby and gray-haired," jerking back the scuffed bonnet from her frowsy white hair with the same little chuckle.
"Well, well, well! I'm an old hack, friend Ann; an old hack. Consider, it's twenty years. But," with a sudden exaggerated sprightliness, "when I see the spirit in your eyes, I feel that I have found the fabled fountain of youth. I feel-"
"Yes," dryly. "Thee used to carry a good supply of feeling about with thee, Jeems. Like Turnagon's ointment, 'warranted to suit all cases.' Thee's not altered, I think," with a shrewd, quick scanning of his face.
"And you?" with a bow, while he looked anxiously over her head at the dusky streets.
"No, I'm Ann Yates still," tying her bonnet with a natty little bow. "I'm that goose without feathers, or crab without a shell-a Friend without money. But the Lord provides-provides."
"Times have been rough, then?"
"Only when I tried to earn my own bread and salt. I've taught in my day, and lectured, and scribbled for the 'Liberator.' But I am not a self-supporting agent. Once that I had made up my mind to that, I put myself to higher work. Our society is a pioneer in the world's progress, thee knows, and while it is clearing the land, Ann Yates can grub, if nothing else. Grub. The victuals come. Sometimes in the shape of com-bread and apple-sauce, week in and out. But they come. He takes care of that."
He adjusted his hat, but said nothing. Every man has a religion of his own, and Strebling did not fancy hearing his God, who was known to him through the music in the chapel, and some vague grand notions of His old dealings with the Jews, degraded into a purveyor of apple-sauce for this leaky-brained Yankee old maid.
"What's thee been doing, Jeems? I've seen thee name in Congress. Serving thee country?"
"According to my lights," smiling, good humoredly. "On the other side from yours."
"Yes? Thee's had a wife? And children?"
"I lost Mrs. Strebling several years ago; she was one of the Jarratts, of Kentucky. But I have a boy, I thought I had told you. Bob is eight years old, now," a quick, pleasant laugh in his face, and a sudden color.
"Ta-ta," slowly scanning his face again, "I've heard it said that the Messiah comes to everybody. I'd like, Jeems, to see thee boy-"
"Yes. I've been bringing Bob some trifles," pulling out a small watch. "Do you like this, now? It's Lupin's. The seals are flashy, but it is for a boy's taste, you know," turning the glittering trifles over and over in his hand. "It's a thing Bob needs-a watch."
"No doubt," looking at him with a quizzical, sad smile, "I've had but little to do with children. Thee never had but one?"
Strebling put the watch in its case, and coiled the chain about it. Then he dropped it into his pocket, slowly looking up.
"Never but the one? No. Never but the one." He turned the uneasy, frightened look again to the wharf, where the scattered groups grew dim in the twilight.
"What's thee here for, Jeems? Whew! this wind has a snap in it!" getting up, and marching up and down, with a mannish, clipping step, her fat hands clasped behind her round, little body, her chin perked out. "What's thee here for? Just to look back a bit, heh? Unrolling Clotho's ball of yarn, I call it. Well, that's hearty. It does old fellows like us good to smell the air of our youth if it was raw, like a foggy morning. So thee came all the way from Alabama for that? Peeping in the chinks at thee old boy's play-ground? Well, well, that boy of thine would keep thee nearer to thee youth. But I never had a child. Never will," passing her forefinger thoughtfully over her eyebrow, again and again, as she walked.
"The boy's old play-ground? Yes, that is it," said Strebling, taking off his hat, and settling it on his head, nervously preparing to go back to his seat. While she shook hands, chirruped and clucked about him, keeping the shrewd, blue eyes on his, his face suddenly looked as if he had found the boy's old play-ground, full of damp, unclean ghosts enough.
Yet all that he saw was an old man and a child coming through the dusky cold across the wharf. One on each side of the great Conestoga wagon, with its lumbering canvas top swaying from side to side, and team of eight roadsters, each with his chime of belts arched over his back. Strebling, when it came fairly in front of him, drew himself back, growing yellow under his jaws; he took off his spectacles, as if to dim the sight; he took snuff, he rubbed his cold hands together. You would have thought that some dead woman or man freed from the grave, for only that minute, was struggling to reach him from behind the drover's red face, or to speak in his ponderous Whoas, and Gees. He went back stealthily to where the bow of the boat pawed up and down in the muddy water, and stood shivering in the clammy fog off of the river.
There never was anything less uncanny or ghostly than the hurly-burly they made in getting that wagon on board; in fact, there never was anything more wide-awake or jolly than the whole turn-out. Any child along the Pennsylvania mountain roads could have told you there were no beasts better fed, or sleeker haired than Joe Burley's; and every bell on their backs had a special cheery ring of its own. Nothing of the ghost in little Ross Burley, trotting about, watching the operation, with a square basket of herbs on each arm, just as her grandfather had picked her up from her stall in the Pine Street Market. Marketing was dull work for Ross. When she had hung her bunches of sage and thyme behind her, the fun was over.
"Two for five pennies;" or, "Seasoning for your capon, sit?" was as much as she said. Generally, she went to sleep. Old Scheffer, the butcher, would laugh when this happened, and sell her herbs for her; he never woke her up.
To-day, however, some fish-brine had been slopped over her bench, and Scheffer's boy jeered at her whenever she put her head out. So, being a cleanly little thing, with a dogged temper of her own, she had cried instead of sleeping, tasting the tears to see how salt they were.
Suddenly the market was filled with the sound of bells, as if a holiday had broken loose in the air, and there, at the end of the street, was the great Conestoga. The sun shining on its broad, red body, and white tent-top, and the swinging trough underneath, and the dog Brouse, and her grandfather, looking somehow like one of Scheffer's sirloins of beef. Then everybody looked, and laughed, and nodded at her, and Scheffer's boy told her to "look alive!" and jumped about, sorting and packing her herbs.
Ross walked off beside the wagon, proud and swelling as a pouter pigeon. The fact was, boarding about, from one alley to another, she never had had a home like other children. Nor mother; just Joe and the wagon. She was used to see people crowd about it. The hucksters in the market, as here at the Ferry.
"How was beef in Berks?" "Would poultry be down before Christmas?" etc. The great clean, stately wagon, with its train of horses, its music, its smell of far-off fields and dairies, was a different affair, rumbling through the city streets, from the pert little cabs and stages slying around it. No wonder everybody looked after it with queer and friendly smiles. But what did they know of the wagon? Josh, the ferry man, might bustle about it as he pleased, and even know the trick of dropping the canvas, but Ross had crossed the great snowy mountains on it, more than once. While they were pulling, and shouting, and swearing, to bring the horses on board, she stood near to Strebling, thinking of the snug little kitchen inside, where she had cooked, and her bedroom in the sweet-smelling hay, and her tiny house up by Joe's high seat, where he told her stories all the Winter's day until night fell, as they plodded through the solitary forests and black hills glowering closer on either side, while the bells chimed in front, and the backs of the horses grew dim in the thick falling snow. She hugged herself with a snug sense of possession. It was nothing but a wagon to Josh, and she was glad of it.
Meanwhile he and her grandfather were at work with their sleeves rolled up.
"Them dog-goned critters," Joe said, "ud balk at this boat, if 'twas ther last gasp."
Sap, the mulatto boy on the deck, plunged into the midst of them with a shrill "whoop!" He was a born hostler, that was plain; so long as he slapped their haunches, dabbed at their necks, swarmed over them like a katydid on a log, they pricked up their ears and made headway.
"Well done, boy!" called out Ann Yates, at which the lad gave a piping yell, and worked until the veins in his neck swelled. It set his blood boiling with pleasure to be noticed by the white folks. When wagon and horses were on board, he found Ross playing with his dog, and stood, with his hands in his pockets, laughing all over, opening and shutting his mouth without making a sound. Mr. Strebling came near, looking down at the water swashing up against the sides of the boat.
"I never saw a better dog thatn this," said Ross, with a grave little nod to the white man.
"Him's name's Luff," said Sap, "Ya! Luff! He's my dog. Me and Kunnet Strebling hyur, fetched him from Alabama."
"I wish he was mine, then," said Ross. "I wish you would stand off," in her shrill little voice to Sap. The dirty yellow skin of the mulatto made her sick, she was sure; it was the same as if a toad or snake had stood upright, to see his grimaces and monkey tricks of delight at being kindly spoken to. She wished he was dead, and out of the way on the boat, and was sure that, if she had been a boy, she would have thrown the yellow, grinning thing into the water.
"Go off! They want the horses again," with a domineering nod. Sap only drew back, watching her with a sullen, jealous scowl, as she "wrestled" with the dog. There was a good deal of the material of the man in Ross's little body; her quiet little face grew red, and she lost her breath, in holding the big brute down; she was determined that the beast should know that she was stronger than he. When she thought that he knew it, and lay with his jaws between his fore paws on her knees, she patted his neck, and put her arms about it.
"He's a very good dog, I think," she said to Mr. Strebling.
"Ah? the dog? What's your name, now? What did you say your name was, my child?" in a cowed, frightened way, passing his hand rapidly over his foxy bit of moustache as he spoke.
"Ross, Rosslyn Comly," with a sober, surprised, look.
"Comly? You're a blue-eyed girl, Rosslyn, hey? No? Brown? And yellow hair? Yel-low hair," beating a tattoo with his silver pencil on his square, white teeth, his gray eyes set and watery behind his spectacles, as if the dead face had succeeded in coming very near, indeed.
Ross never had been scanned so keenly before. "It is yellow," the little girl said, and as she was a thorough woman, though yet in the calyx, she looked down, hot to her feet, with sharp shame and guilt in that her nose was a snub, and that there were no eyebrows as yet on her freckled face, worth mentioning.
"And You sit in the market? Selling herbs, and radishes-yes? My black people sit in the market"-
The boat was under way; it was growing darker; nobody saw him as he caught the little red, rough hand under the dog's shaggy hide, holding it tightly a moment.
"God help me!" said James Strebling.
Then he caught a whiff of the fish-brine on her frock, and dropped the hand, putting his glove on his own, which shook like a drunkard's, as he walked away. "It is a most unpleasant odor-that from the markets," he said to the Quakeress. (It was noticeable that he stood at ease again when talking to her.) "An unusual combination in this little girl's face, eh? brown eyes, and clear, yellow hair."
"Um-Yes. There's a good deal of outcome in the face," looking at Ross through her half shut eyes as if she had been a curious beetle.
"Mrs. Strebling had a strong antipathy to yellow hair. I used to wish to bring home a little girl. But if she had looked like this one, now, Mrs. Strebling would not have tolerated her. It would have been a hell upon earth for the child."
Ann Yates continued to patrol the deck with him, thinking that twenty years inside of the fences of his plantation had starved poor jeems Strebling's brain to inanition. Meanwhile, he stopped once and again near Ross, talking to her, the mulatto lounging near to listen. One thing, Mr. Strebling said: "I mean to be a good friend to you, child. It is not my fault if I have been late," looking over her head, into the muddy depth of river fog and the scattered red sparks of light along shore, as though there was another than the child before whom he pleaded not guilty. Stepping off with the Quakeress again, he stiffened his lean, padded body complacently, as if an approving conscience within cried, Bravo. There was a wide gap, he knew, between the little herb-girl, with her briny smells, and the easy-going planter, half of whose days were spent with the rare old dramatists of Anne's time, and the other half on the race-course. But he had crossed it, and she was grateful, doubtless.
Ross was pulling the dog about, contriving a saddle for him, now that he was hers. Sap came in front of her, standing erect. "He's my dog, Luff," his sullen face sharpening savagely, as he spoke to the "poor white trash."
"I gave him to the girl just now," said the colonel, carelessly, in passing. Ross laughed tauntingly, glad that she was white, and stronger than this yellow monster of a boy; except a pet fox of her grandfather's and Scheffer's boy, she never had hated anything so much before; never. She put her foot on the dog's neck, just to vex him. Luff licked her hand.
Sap stood quite still a moment, then he went to his master, following him, step by step, cringing, his stealthy, dangerous eye on his face, his tones unusually clear:
"Mars' Jeems, Luff kent go. He's mine." Coming closer, the voice sharper and more wiry, when there was no answer, "Luff's not one of the Strebling dogs, Kunnel. He wur a pup of Cap'n Grant's as had the distemper, and Cap'n, he give him to me. 'Hyur, Sap,' he says. I've nussed him dese two years; he's well, now. He's mine."
Mr. Strebling would have passed on, shaking off the fellow with a lazy look of annoyance, but the Quakeress stopped to look at him.
"Well, well, boy, suppose the dog your's-though it's plain it's a lie hatched up to trip me. You shall be paid for it. Leave the girl alone."
"You'll give it to her, Mas'r Jeems?"
Strebling looked at him. Something in the gleam of the light-gray eye made the mulatto cower back.
Ross stood up, her face burning. "The dog is not yours," she said to Mr. Strebling, fierce as a little game pullet. "The black boy is not so mean as you. Be gone!" driving Luff from her.
Strebling stroked his beard delightedly at the blaze of temper. "It's a sign of good blood," nodding knowingly to Ann Yates. "The dog shall not belong to Sap again, my good girl."
"Mars' Jeems never goes back of his word," laughed the mulatto, shrilly.
"No. I never do."
As the Quakeress and his master passed the boy from time to time, they saw him standing quite quiet, his hand on the dog's head, looking out steadily into the river, not conscious that they were near him. Ross had gone over to her grandfather, sturdily turning her back on them.
"But Luff is her's, boy," snapped his master. It angered him to be thwarted in the first kindness he showed to the child.
"Yes, mars'," submissively.
Ann Yates looked at the boy sharply. Nothing but an animal which a few dollars could buy or sell; shambling, under-sized, loose-jointed, a puny, yellow face, out of which stared the treacherous, melancholy eyes of his race. Yet some trick of expression caught her shrewd eye; the knobbed, protruding forehead, the discontent, the appetite for something better than his brute life had yet known.
"It's the white blood in him!" she said aloud. "Eh! How?"
"He'll balk thee yet."
Mr. Strebling smiled superciliously. "Poor Sap!" he said. "The boy has a curious mechanical talent. My wife brought him in from the stables. But these niggers won't bear coddling. He has the insolence of the devil."
The Quaker was right. just before the boat grated on the shore, they heard a whine from the dog, and saw a rill of scarlet blood creeping over the planks. The little mulatto knelt with staring eyes beside him on the deck, his arms about Luff's neck, smelling his breath, just as they had slept for two years in the stable-loft at home. The boy's colorless face looked unusually small and childish, yet clammy sweat had come out on it, such as pain wrings from a man. The poor brute's dim eyes were fixed on it, and he tried feebly to lick the boy's sleeve where it touched his jaws.
"Did you do this?" said Mr. Strebling.
The mulatto nodded; but he did not take his look off of the dog's face until its eyes grew glassy; then he lifted one paw, and let it fall heavily to the ground.
"He wur all I had," he said. His teeth chattered, his eyes closed, a chill crept over the limp little body.
"Dear me! dear me! Epileptic. These half-breeds are terribly diseased in body and mind!" said good-humored Mr. Strebling, who hated a scene; and he walked away, nervously, a moment after.
The Quaker looked down at the forlorn little figure with the muddy water oozing up about it, then out at the dusky river, at the plane of gray, unanswering sky. It seemed to her as if they opened to her suddenly, dark, dateless years, before either she or this boy was bom; slow generations of slavery and vice which had conceived and brought forth this diseased little animal, and left him at her feet. Washed him there, a dreg of the great ebbing tide. "And I'm Ann Yates, half crazy, they say, and kept by charity. What should I have to do for him, in God's name?" would have been her thought nakedly put in words. But she only stood, her restless head for once quiet, gravely looking down at him, while Ross, who had stolen round, stooped across the dog, her lips apart, tugging at his coat. He opened his eyes at last, and got up slowly, pulled the dusty felt hat on his head askew, and clasped his hands behind his neck, a trick the boy had when tired.
"He'll never lick anybody's hand but ole Sap's now, I reckon," with a grin.
Ross waited a moment, growing red and pale by turns. When she came a step or two closer to the little mulatto:
"I think that was a very good dog," she said, in a weak little quaver; and then, after one or two breathless gasps, she put out her hand and took the yellow fingers in hers.
The boat was moored by this time with a heavy jerk. Through the darkness you could hear the rumbling of the great Conestoga wagon going on shore, the jingling of the bells, and Joe's bass voice shouting for Ross.
"Well, good-night," she said, gently, and ran off, gladly enough.
Sap, who had stood cringing as long as she talked to him, sat down again, and put his face on the dog's cold hide. He heard his master calling, but the sound came to him dully through the dark and cold. It was dark and cold, that was all he knew; that, and the weight of old Luff, who would not creep close to him to-night for warmth. He would never waken to bark at the moon, and then snuggle into the straw, licking his hand, again. Never again.
Presently a warm hand touched him. "Here, boy, I must have a word with thee," said Ann Yates.

CHAPTER II
ECHOES

THE tiny square house among the bags up by Joe's high seat never was so cosy or warm as now, when the wagon with its ringing chimes in front plunged into the mysterious night, turning its back on the dull river, and the greasy lamps and dog's red blood and trouble there. Ross turned the back of her thoughts on them, too. She had meant to cry a great deal immediately for that dog, and perhaps stay awake all night. But first she and her grandfather had an anxious time to find Brouse, and when they were once started, there were so many subjects of interest lying over since he went out to Berks County on Saturday, that she hardly could find words fast enough.
She had not heard yet how Bet's lame foot was, or if Geoff had got rid of that cough, or how often the Major had contrived to fall this trip. There certainly never were eight horses that contrived to pick up so many ailments, she was sure. Joe's growl broke in deprecatingly:
"I dunno, Sweetheart-about that. I wouldn't go so far as that. They be a good lot, 't seems to me. Seems as if they wur old friends, to me," tapping the broad backs of the wheelers.
"Oh, of course-I know-I didn't mean-" the words tumbling out headlong, she not being sure how much the "old friends" had understood, or been hurt. "They're good stock, too, Josh McNabb says. They're blooded horses, every one, he says."
"Blood don't weigh so much with me as with other folks-blood don't," said Joe, hastily, a sharp twang in his tone. "Don't you ketch them notions, Rossline. When you've got a horse," meditatively, "with a good pull from each jint, and a clear eye, and a stiddy gait, starting from the hanches, it be better'n your high pacers, full of nerves and tricks. As with horses, so with men."
Ross nodded emphatically. Joe Burley fell into a profound silence, chewing the cud of his remark. Once his conscience stung him, apparently. "Was I rough with you, gal?" turning his broad, red face on her quickly.
Ross only laughed for reply, laying her head in its woolen hood on his knee, which was broad and soft as a feather pillow. Joe touched her shut eyelids with his stubby finger, smoothed the lashes.
"So? So? You and your grandad be good chums, hey, Sweetheart? But them notions about blood be like pison-to me."
Now and then, afterward, Joe coughed, and mumbled something more about "blood." The unusual idea in his brain was as troublesome as a pike floundering in a muddy pool; it would neither go out, nor be quiet. Ross, with a vague notion that he was in trouble, patted his knee with her hand, as if she beat a soft tune. But it was a very good place up there. What with her fragrant baskets at her feet, and Joe's mountainous figure bounding her in, and the supper she knew of at home, she was filled with a general herby, affectionate, enough-to-eat perception of the world, as warm and relishing as was possible.
Yet the night yawned about them outside of the wagon, cold and immeasurable. There were no stars overhead; no landmarks of fences or houses; they were plunging into a gray, empty gulf that extended, very likely, clear to the edge of the world; there was nothing to define it but the timed ringing of the horses' bells and the baying of a dog, far off. Whether out of sympathy with his master, or for some other cause, Brouse, under the wagon, barked restlessly again and again. Ross cuddled in closer to her grandfather; it was colder and silenter than any night that she remembered. And to make the silence more intense, she had a vague consciousness of stealthy footsteps following them along the road; steadily, now near, now further off. It was but fancy; when she set her ears to listen, the noise was gone, or proved to be only her grandfather's stertorous breathing.
Once, however, Joe raised his head from his yarn jacket. "Did you hear anything a foller-in, Ross?" pulling up the horses, but not looking back. Ross thought he was afraid; he did not wait to hear her answer; put his hand up behind his ear, to listen.
"It's nothin'," with a whistle to the horses of relief. "Once or twice in my life I've heard steps a fotlerin' of me," he said in a subdued voice, when they were rumbling on again. "Different ones has different signs sent when death's comin', you see. Some hears a piping like a whistle in a high wind, and some hears a crack like a whip-handle laid on heavy on the door-post. But I don't look for no warnin' of death. My fears don't lie that way; I kin be soon ready when the Good Man sends word. I've done my dooty to the beasts and my customers. I'll say good-by to the little gat and-" he stopped there to pat Ross' head.
Joe had painted this heroic exit of his so often that he rather enjoyed it. But it was always new and bitter to the child.
"Well, don't you fret, little Sister. I'm rugged yet, thank God. But there has been steps a follerin' me, more than once," in a whisper. "It was no living foot as made them."
"Well, now, grandad, death did not come," said Ross, wetting her dry lips with her tongue.
"No. Not death. Wuss. Never you mind what it was," rousing himself. "There's been times when I thought it would touch you. But your grandfather's body's big enough to put between you and that."
The night became less vague as he spoke, a gray, luminous line defining the horizon where the moon was rising-buildings, trees, the old mill began to loom out of the space, yet, it was but as shadows of their real, daylight shapes. The silence grew painful to Ross' strained ear; then there struck across it a man's step, far off, tight, furtive, coming nearer-nearer. It was gone as suddenly as it came.
She looked up into Joe's face; it was vacant. He had heard nothing.
"I fancied I saw a thing to-night as brought old times up," said he, trying to force back his old cheerfulness. "That's what set me on this graveyard talk, and to thinking that tramp-trampin' was behind us."
Ross said nothing.
They were beyond Camden now, turning off into the turnpike road, which ran through patches of wood, and Jersey truck farms. The moon shone out clearly. The steps were no longer heard. The air grew wholesome and life-like.
Ross sat up looking at the cobwebs on the fences, white and rimy in the moonlight. When she was young, she used to believe in fairies, and that they dressed themselves out of that stuff, somehow. She was very sure there were no such things now. Quite sure.
Down along the sea-coast, where her grandfather went in Winter to buy furs and wild fowl for the New York market, they used to tell her, in the farm-houses, very different stories from those. About the crew of a Spanish brig, wrecked a hundred years ago, who patrolled the beach every night, guarding their treasure buried in the sand. Sometimes, in the full of the moon, you would hear their knock-knocking, trying to piece together the fragments of their old crumbling wreck, and see their broad plumed hats and cloaks on the shore, but when you came near, the sounds died into the beat of the surf, and the waving feathers, and fluttering mantles seemed to be but the foam and dash of the incoming tide. Now that was a story that one could know was true. And there was a tradition that, if any one would bring a boat to carry them away from this unhappy country, and leave it moored over night, in the morning it would be gone, and heaped on the beach there would be a king's ransom of jewels. Now, that was a good plan to have for the future. She had begun several times to save up her money for that boat. She often talked to her grandfather of the house they would build some day, though she did not enter into the particulars. It would need a good deal of courage to go with the boat alone. She would tell him when it was done.
"Hillo! here be home!" shouted Joe as the wagon drew up in front of a house as square, and short, and dumpy, as Ross herself. Only a month ago Joe had bought that house-but it had a home face from the first day. There was a door-step that children's feet had wom, and beehives and old apple trees in the garden, and wrens in the eaves, and crickets in the broad, stone hearth, and a gray, sleepy cat who came in and lay down before the kitchen fire as soon as it was lighted. A difference between this and boardinghouse in city alleys! A house, and stable, and beehives, and lilacs, and hollyhocks like these, had a flavor of home to old Joe and the girl which they could never have to people who had not roosted over corner groceries, and looked out on vacant lots heaped with ashes and potato peelings, through hot Summer days.
Brouse had all the lazy, life-is-long air of a thoroughbred country dog already; and Geoff, and the Major, and the very old Conestoga itself, knew home, and, Ross thought, really believed they had always lived there. The barking, and creaking, and neighing, when they stopped at the gate, quite broke up the stillness of the whole night, while Ross' laugh and Joe's subdued bellow, formed the ground and top of the confusion.
She danced an impatient little jig on the foot-board of the wagon in her hurry to be taken down. She had no time to waste, she could tell them. There was the fire to stir up and the supper to get, and no makeshift of a supper, either. She ran up the path, pulling off her mittens, stopping to break off some boughs and leaves from bushes near the door; stopping, too, a minute to think this was her ground and her grandfather's, with as keen a sense of ownership as any king's in the great Babylon which he had built. She sunk the soles of her shoes into the tan-bark walk, thinking it was theirs; down to the very centre of the world theirs. Ross was always sure of standing on her own ground, and felt her feet firm under her, though she was but nine years old; which gave her that gracious, hospitable manner toward other people, so curious in her.
It was an hour before Burley had fed and stowed away his horses for the night, and had washed himself, and combed his thin, gray hair into two flat quirls on either side of his sun-baked face. Then he took off his leather leggins, whisked clean his trousers, and muddy shoes. He was dressing, as usual, for supper-part of his vague system of lifting the little girl up out from his own level, to-he scarcely knew where. Coming up on the porch, he stepped softly, and peeped in the window. If any evil steps had followed him, or if any relentless eyes watched him through the night, the sight of his face, set broad and glowing in the square patch of red light thrown out by the window, might have turned them aside. For, broad as it was, and unshapely, a mass of flabby, fat wrinkles, the dullest eyes might have found in it something akin to all that was delicate and tender in the little child within. If little Sweetheart was oddly clean and whimsical in her tricks of movement about her work, or if she threw her whole strength into it, it was from Sweetheart's grandfather the traits came to her; that was plain.
While he stood looking in, no sound apparently reached him other than the crackling of the wood fire inside, or the sputtering of Ross' cookery; but suddenly he straightened himself, and again put his hand behind his ear. Light, stealthy steps came up the moonlit road, and, as Burley crept cautiously toward the gate, the shadow of a man passing fell on it, and disappeared in the dark lane made by the undergrowth along the fence.
Burley followed him. When he came back, he went directly into the house, the dull vacancy gone from his face with which he had talked to Ross of the supernatural terrors.
"Hillo, little un!" he said, cheerfully, and sat down with a hand on each knee, to watch her cookery; but a something in the cool, gray eyes, and heavy, stem jaws, which she had never seen before, made Ross turn once and again to look at him. He was as grave, she thought, as when he spelled out their chapter in the Bible at night. But the truth was, the thing he had feared had come upon him at last; the danger was imminent, the hope of escape small. Burley meant to fight it out like a man; but not then nor there. He barred the windows, shut tight the door; at least she should know nothing until he was safe or defeated.
Meanwhile Ross dished the supper, setting and resetting the blue delft plates on the table with her burned tittle hands. She had a keen palate for good cookery, being a healthy, quick-nerved little body. Her dishes were always seasoned and done to a turn. There was a heap of fried chicken, each piece a golden brown; there was a yellow mound of potatoes; there were creamy turnips, and in the middle, silvery stalks of celery in a tray, bedded in red and bronze beet leaves, and the rich, curled, crisp fringes of green parsley. Joe laughed at this last.
"Your mother was full of such notions," he said, as he putted a chair to the table; "you favor her in all your little whims, Sweetheart. Sech as your fancy for wearing dark blue gowns and hanging bits of moss and flowers in your hair."
The words seemed to give him a hint, which he caught eagerly; during the supper he found a thousand ways to bring up the same theme "your mother;" choking back whatever effort it cost him. Ross had heard her name but seldom before.
"My mother died when I was born. I'm an orphan," with a crave little nod, saying what she had learned by rote, years ago, going on eating composedly.
Burley sat smoking by the fire when their supper was over, until the dishes were cleared away, and Ross came up for her seat on his knee; then he put the pipe up on the clock, and lifted her up, smoothing her yellow hair back.
"It be arly, little sister. You needn't go to bed for an hour. Marget-your mother-was a main hand for sittin' late when she was young, as when she was older, and my old woman give her her own rein-her own rein; too much, maybe. She wur sech a putty creetur, she was so dear to us, that we liked her in sight, that's the truth. So ther she'd sit at nights, as it might be here, and yander ud be Robert Comly."
"My father," said the little girt, parrot-like, with another nod. "He's dead. I am an orphan," taking a string of blue beads out of her pocket, and holding them up in the firelight.
Burley patted her hand in his. When he spoke, it was with an unnatural voice, like an unwilling witness forced before the jury. "Robert-Comly. There was no better carpenters than the Comleys, father and son, in Kensington. Bob was a thorough-through boy from the start. Fond of his joke, but true as steel twice her. After old Comly died, Bob he sort o' turned to me fur advice and the like. But it was his likin' for Marget was at the bottom of it, I knowed."
"So then she married him?" said Ross, looking up from her beads. When she saw her grandfather's face, her eyes did not leave it again- He turned away, looking in the fire, his hand moving restlessly over his stubbly whiskers and hiding his mouth. Ross threw her beads on a chair, put her hands on his shoulders.
"We'll talk of something else," she said, decisively. "This isn't pleasant t alk for you, grandad."
"Ther's nothin' onpleasant to remember about Robert Comly," shaking off her light touch, doggedly. "He got to be like my own son-that lad. You see we never had a son, and when Marget come, late in the day like, it was a disappointment-to me. I wanted a boy. But I was mighty fond of Bob; he was a steddy fellar. Now, Marget was a peart little thing-she never liked advice from the day she went into short clothes. But when she growed up sech a putty creetur, and our hearts was so knit up in her, mother she says, 'Let Marget marry Bob Comly,' says she, 'and then, Joe, you'll have son and da'ater, too. You kin have 'em both,' she says."
"Then they were married," said Ross, gently. "I know the rest of it," her anxious scrutiny never relaxed from his face. "Now the story is done, grandad, will you put coals on the fire? It is cold."
But Burley prosed on. "That's the very hick'ry cheer he used to sit in at nights that Winter. He made this one covered with sheep-skin for me-Bob did. I never knowed a steddier fellar than Bob Comley. There never was a man used me fairer. Ef I ever meet him in the country where he's gone I'll not forget it to him. But it seems to me, to-night, ther's a poor look out for that!" with a sharp, hard laugh, after a pause. He cut a big plug of tobacco and thrust it in his mouth, then clasped his hands over his head, his jaws working, his uneasy eye avoiding hers. "Mother and Bob are safe enough on the other side of the river your hymes sing about, Rossline. But as things is turnin' out, Joe Burley ain't the sort that goes that road. Well, no matter!"
Ross put her frightened little hands about his neck.
"Shall I sing for you now, grandad?"
"No. For God's sake, let me be, Rossline, I've hard lines before me to-night. Let me work it out my own fashion. Talking of Bob Comly and the way he took, 'II be more help to me than all the hymes in the book."
The fire burned low; Ross slid down and replenished it unnoticed; she crept back between his knees, looking up at him. She would be a woman some day, and, after the habit of women, could not leave any one with their trouble in quiet, but must peer curiously into it, to cry over it afterward, and fill her own heart with aching and pity. Burley stared stolidly in the fire; some hard, ugly lines which had marked his face when he was a boy and counted a "black sheep," came out slowly on it to-night; a scar that dragged one eyelid down grew red and sinister; older and more analytic eyes than little Ross' might have fancied that the man, as well as the features that indexed the man, were sinking back into some old mould which they had nearly outgrown.
But the little girl only gathered a vague notion of the best way to soothe him. "So Robert Comly and Margot were married?" she said, using his words.
"Yes; they wait married."
"And my Mother died the day after I was born? My pretty mother! Am I as pretty as Marget?"
Burley smiled at the grave little face. "No, Sweetheart, you kent be that. You favor the Burleys. You've got her eyes and hair, but you're stouter built, tougher grain. It's no loss-its-" he was suddenly silent.
"The day after I was born?" the little girl's eyes grew heavy under the strait lashes. "Did she took at me? Did she take any notice of me, or kiss me? Where did she kiss me?" lifting her hand to her face, uncertainly.
"She give you into my arms," said Joe, slowly. "She kissed you all over your wee face a hundred times, I reckon; then she give you into my arms. I hadn't teched you before. Me and Robert Comly wur alone with her that day. Mother was dead long afore. I'm glad whenever I think of her being gone afore that day. I reckon, maybe, she never knowed yonder of what had happened down here-the Good Man is merciful."
"Well-she gave me into your arms," prompted Rosslyn.
Joe choked a heavy breath that shook his solid chest, beginning to chew violently. "Yes, she did, Rossline. All she'd said that day was 'my little, little baby,' huggin' and cryin' it over you, with the breath goin' fast from her. I didn't know it wur goin'; or I couldn't have left her alone. But I would neither look at her nor tech her." He put Rosslyn off from him and covered his face with his hands, his elbows propped on his knees.
"I often think how we left her alone. Neither father nor husband nor God, agoin' through that dark vally. You was all she had, she knowed that. She clung to you to the last. Then she give you into my arms. 'It's my poor little baby, father,' she said. I tuk you from her. I couldn't help but do that."
He got up and walked irresolutely across the floor.
"But I left her alone agin. I laid the baby down and stood by the chimbley-side, with my back to the bed."
He stopped, leaning heavily on the mantle-shelf, the scar and blotches looking purple on his pale face. "That was Marget-the purty creeter-as had been my only child; I turned my back to her."
Ross stood facing him with bewildered eyes. "But my father-Robert Comly?"
The old man stopped. "No man could have acted fairer than Bob Comly. I said that. He wur very kind. We wur down in Bucks county then; when we come up to town, he bided with me, and kept his own counsel. He knowed as it were none of my fault. He give you yer name, Rossline Comly. It was for my sake he did it."
"He died the next year," said Ross, repeating her long learned lesson. "That was how I came to be an orphan."
Burley held up his hand, sharply, to listen. Ross fancied she heard a man's approaching steps without, slow and light.
"It be late, little gal," said her grandfather, hurriedly. "It's been a messable evening, that's true. Yet eyes are sunk in yet head. You be off to bed, Sweetheart."
He watched her anxiously as she made ready. "Don't you mind, Rossline, if you hear a noise of talking down below; I've got into that way lately when I'm vexed in my mind." When she came to bid him good-iiight, he swung her up in his arms, with one of his broad, hearty smiles breaking out over his red face.
"You're a lucky-looking child, Rossline," turning up her face by the chin. "I reckon the Good Man has a keer of you. Seem' you makes me think I'll get through this bout safely," and kissed her lightly on the mouth as he put her down. He watched her going up the crooked stairs, and listened, half smiling, to her firm little tread overhead listened after he had taken up his place with his back to the fire, and waited for the other steps that had brought worse than death to his threshold years ago, and that, each moment came closer without.
Yet Burley's superstitious terror seemed fantastic enough, for when the footsteps were followed by a knock, and the entrance of a man, it was only the subdued-looking, sandy-haired gentleman off of the ferry-boat, who stood smiling pleasantly before him.
"I knew you were within, Burley"-holding out his hand- "so I came in without a bidding."
"It wurn't likely, James Strebling, as I should call you inside of my door agin."
The other man colored and giggled feebly, rubbing his hands together as if reminded of an awkward mistake. "Now, Burley, you do not keep a grudge for old debts, eh, hey? I came here from Alabama purposely to talk matters over with you, one man of sense with another. I thought, I'm one practical fellow, and Burley is another, and there'll be no trouble in adjusting those old affairs. But, God bless me! how you've altered!" finding his way to a chair, and peering through his spectacles with an attempt at easy carelessness.
The old wagoner remained standing immovable before the fire; he had not lifted his eyes from the floor since Strebling entered.
"Yes, I be altered. For two years after you'd done your work and left here, I hunted you through them Southern States like a weasel in its hole. I'd but one thing to do in life-to put the muzzle of my pistol up to your cowardly brain. Now I hid from you tonight. I'd give my right arm if you and me had not crossed paths agin! yes, I would."
Strebling was not a coward; besides, when men are cool enough to talk about murder, the danger is over; but he was shocked more than he liked to own. Burley looked like one of his own oxen standing there; yet it occurred to the gentleman for the first time to question how much hurt that old peccadillo of his had done to the fellow; just as he might have done if he had struck an ox with his rattan. Then he caught what Burley was saying in a hard, quiet voice, curiously divested of all oaths or roughness.
"You poisoned my life for me once. I was jest beginning to take some pleasure in it when you come agin. I've been tryin' to make myself fit to raise the gal: she's got no father or mother beyont me. Ther' has been times when the world was so friendly about me that I tried to make excuses for even you, James Strebling. But now, as you've thrust yerself in my way-"
He lifted his face, turning the small eyes, bloodshot and red, on him for the first time.
Strebling sprang up, threw down his hat and cane, and coming straight up to the old man, looked him in the face.
"Look here! I'm not a bad man, Burley. That was a damnably shabby trick of mine. I know that. But before God I meant to come back and marry Margaret. I never intended that she should be foisted on another man. Come"-after a pause-"you sowed wild oats yourself once. You know a man does not count on the harvest, when-" He drew back a step suddenly, and stood on guard, watching Burley as he would a beast about to spring at his throat.
"Besides," cautiously, when the old man shifted his position, "let us have peace between us for the girl's sake."
"What is Rossline to you? It's late in the day; Rossline is Marget's da'ater. Ther's not a drop of her father's blood in her body."
"Now, Burley, you are very intemperate. It has not been my fault that I have not claimed the child sooner 'in the day,' as you put it. Whatever James Strebling's faults may be, no one can accuse him of being a harsh father. And this child should have been taken home long ago, and as tenderly cared for as Rob, if my wife had not been living. She's dead now."
Burley turned his ox-like face, baffled and alarmed. It was some time before the fear found its way from his muddled brain into words.
"You be the child's father, an' that gives you some hold on her by law, may be. I don't know. I don't believe that it do. Tber's a lot of common sense in them hard law-words in general. You've been only a curse an' misfortin to Rossline since before she was born, an' I laid myself out to sarve her since I took her in my arms a drooling baby. If she's wanted anything it's been because Joe Burley's wit and strength giv' out in getting it for her. What do you want of her? You've got your friends and your son, and niggers and land; but that little gal's the only thing on 'arth that's worth thrippence to me. I've out-growed all the rest. Mother's dead and Marget-all of them, only that yetlow-haired little 'un that keeps a growin' into me, day by day, like a part of myself. No, I don't believe any law 'ill give her to you. I'll see to-morrow."
Strebling observed him warily a moment, then with a sudden ingenuous air, exclaimed, "You're wrong, Burley-all wrong; the law gives me no claim on her. It is the child's good you should look at. I came here for her; I'm free to say that plainly. I'll not marry again, and I'd like a daughter about me in my old age. Bob is independent of me, from his grandfather. I can afford to give her a child's portion, and I'll do it. I will take her as the orphan child of a friend, so that no shame shall come on her. I would make her an educated, tenderly-reared lady-and you-"
"What then, sir?"
"You are making a market-huckster out of her."
There was a dead silence in the room. Overhead, in the loftchamber, where the moon threw a square light on the bare floor, the little girl sat shivering in her night-gown on the edge of her cot-bed, her yellow hair tucked closely up, her hands clasped about her knees. The voices below reached her now and then; these last words clearly; when she heard them the little freckled face contracted sharply, certain lines which Burley had never seen, came into it; she bent her head to listen.
Her grandfather was silent.
"It is the child you should consider," persisted Strebling. "Not your own selfish pleasure. It is her whole life you are choosing for her."
Still no answer. Ross could hear the clock ticking below, seeming to make a thickened beat through the floor, the plastering, in her own head; but her grandfather said nothing. She slid down, put her brown cloak about her, walked to the stairs. Then Burley's voice, slow and stammering, came up.
"That be a cruel way to put it. But it be true. You're a gentleman, as words go. You've the 'blood' Rossline talked of this very night. Do what I kin, Rossline 'II grow up like her mother's people. A market-huckster, may-be. How kin I know?" He coughed, cleared his throat, his voice swelling out to suit the burly figure out of which it came, not without a certain coarse dignity in it, beside which Strebling's, with its delicate training, sounded thin and flat. "But, huckster or not, the gal's face is honest, an' the Burley blood's clean. I'll keep it so. I've got to answer to God for her some day. I'll not give her to you. I'll not put her where she'll grow tainted an' cunnin' for all the money or edication that 'ud make her a lady."
The child's face bending over the dark stairway grew more sharp and set, her nails whitened where she clenched the railing with her fingers.
"There is no need of heat in the matter," said Strebling, with an unnatural mildness in his tone. "I think I have acted fairly. I can have no especial love for a child that I have seen but once, but I came here to do what I thought right, and your bluster or insult will not put me aside. I will not allow you to decide the child's fate, Burley, without giving her a chance to know what she will lose."
"You want to leave it to Rossline?" with a chuckle. "Well, she don't have a thought beyond her grandad. I'm contented. You kin do that."
"You will find yourself mistaken in her, then," sharply. "I noted her to-day. There are thoroughbred points in her. She wilt turn to the ease and delicacy of life as instinctively as a well-blooded animal would forsake offal for its natural food. I will come back in the morning."
"Jest as you please; I'll be contented to leave it to my little gal."
But there was an uneasy hesitation in his voice which had not been there before.
"I will leave this for her. Give it to her when she wakens," taking out the watch which he had bought for Rob, and laying it on the table. As he turned away, a quick step rattled on the stair steps, and a square tittle figure, wrapped in a stuff cloak that did not hide her bare ankles, stood beside him. She took up the watch and held it out to him.
"I heard that talking. I choose for myself. I want you never to come back here again." She spoke in a whisper, but her face and motions were so angular and sharp, that the voice seemed wiry. Strebling stood, half smiling with amusement, and a certain relief. He was beginning to doubt the wisdom of adopting this pullet of the Burley breed, after all. But he pushed back the watch.
"Whatever you decide, keep that, my dear."
Now, the chain was enamelled with blue, and there was a topaz and a lava seat. It must have been such jewels as these which the crew of the Spanish galleon had buried. She drew a heavy sigh and hesitated. "No, I don't think I will keep it, thank you. I am going to choose for myself. I will not go to be made vile and tainted. You are nothing to me. I understand I am not like other children. I-I have nobody but you!"-tuming to Burley, catching his arm, and beginning to cry in a shrill, tearless way.
"I'll go," said Strebling, quickly. "I've done my duty. But, Burley, this child is but a child; she's not fit to judge. If she ever needs my help, write to me. I'll not keep any grudge about to-day. It is not likely that I will renew my offer; but I will be willing to help her, certainly-quite willing."
He went hastily out of the door, Burley staring after his thin, padded figure as he picked his steps along the path outside with an uneasy sense of defeat, he scarce knew why, forgetting that the door was open, and that Ross' feet were bare on the stone floor. She knew it, and cried a little more bitterly for it, feeling quite neglected and alone. He thought she had no idea of the crisis in her life which she had just passed; but a girl of nine years has keen and horribly real perceptions of the few edges of the outer world which touch her; the sharper, maybe, because all beyond is as misty and unreal as eternity. Then the love, and hate, and pain of youth have always in them a weak, acrid, insipid flavor, like the juices of all unripe fruit; the child, clinging to his knees, had none of the quiet, full consciousness of having chosen the right thing that slowly filled and quieted Burley's brain.
"It be monstrous cold," he stammered, at last, with a sort of heave and gulp, shaking himself, and then lumbering across the kitchen to close the door. He fumbled at the lock when it was shut, looking doubtfully at the forlorn little figure on the hearth in front of the low-burning fire, with her hands clasped behind her back, and her face following him steadily.
"Yer eyes is sunk into yet head like a sleep-walker's, little gal," coming up, and putting his hands on her head. "It's been a messabul night, as I said afore. It's goin' to be the last of that sort, hey? Why, Rossline! Tut! tut! yet skin's cold and dry as death! Why, Sweetheart!"
She cried out, at that, that she understood-that she was not like other children; that it would have been better for them all if she had died on the bed that day with her pretty mother, hugging his knee meantime, and burying her face in his patched trousers.
"Why, Rossline!" picking her up with a hoarse, unsteady laugh, "What a silly little un my gal is to forget her grandad altogether! She puts him clear out of account! Yer feet is like ice; here, give me this un in my hand. She forgets her old grandad! She don't take no count of the old man that has got nothin' but her in the world. Nothin'. If you were dead with Marget, what ud I be? hey, little sister? jest a empty husk with the kernel gone, a moulderin' away. That's it. A-moulderin'-away. You don't know how yer the life of me, Rossline," gravely holding her in his arms as if she were a baby, and rocking her. She had sobbed herself quiet now.
"Ye'r the first one since Robert Comly died-" he began again, when she lifted up her head, her eyes on fire, bidding him never talk of Robert Comly to her again; that he was nothing to her; that she loved her mother, whatever the others did-her pretty mother-with another burst of sobbing and tears. She hated Robert Comly and his goodness; at which the old man only smiled gravely, and rocked her in silence till she fell asleep.
The sky the next morning was filled with that thin, brilliant sun-shine that belongs to the early Winter days; the air cold and exhilarating as iced wine. Ross went gravely about, watching her grandfather fodder the horses and mend the harness; she was quite idle herself, her little body was nervous and trembling like an instrument too tightly strung; she wanted to cry on his neck; to tell him how her heart was full of love for the old man who had nothing but her in the world-now that she was unlike all other children, and stood quite alone with not even a dead father or mother of whom she might be proud, and love. But Burley seemed to have forgotten last night altogether; he swore in his good-humored way as usual at the beasts, and whistled the "British Grenadiers," between times; his jolly face red and perspiring as always.
She had a vague, half-unconscious feeling that there would be a great change in her life, after this crisis was past. But the breakfast waited for her to cook-and then, the dishes for her to wash; and presently her grandfather looked in to say, was she ready? and that he could take her into town if her baskets were packed; and when her hood was on, he hoisted her up among her heaps of sage and sweet marjoram, and drove her as usual into her stall in the market.
It was a frosty, cheerful morning, and he kept up a hearty joking with everybody they met, and with Ross herself, and she answered him in kind.
But she began to remember what splendor of fairy-like good fortune had come near her last night, and been turned away. It was just as if she had seen and touched the cavaliers with their floating plumes and golden spurs, and that now they were gone, and nothing was left but the muddy beach and incoming tide.
They reached the market at last, and she mounted her high stool. There it all was; the low, dirty-blue roof overhead; the brick pillars pasted with bills; the tiresome, muddy street, with the old wagon carrying off its pleasant music; there was the crowd of untidy women in front of her with their baskets; Scheffer haggling with one of them over a bone of meat on one side, and Kit Vance, slimy and red-faced, diving into her filthy mackerel hogsheads, on the other. Kit was a "market-huckster;" Kit was "honest and clean-blooded." Her grandfather meant her for-this. This market and that woman-there she could see herself, twenty years from now. He was very fond and kind, but she knew he would never go beyond that; it was his way. Never beyond that.
That day Ross did not go to sleep; she did not laugh at the squabbling about her; but sat, puckered up in an old-womanish fashion, her chin in her hands, selling a bunch of sage now and then, and dropping the pennies in her pocket.
The windows of a house down the street were open, and she could hear a violin within. The boy only played some simple little air over and over, but it made her cry, with a homesick, lonely feeling, new to her.
At last it grew clear to her. She was going to help herself. Then she sat straight up, her peaked, sharp face and soft, brown eyes staring into the fish stall. She would be a woman out there in the world some day. She would be educated; stand higher than Strebling could have placed her.
She would have no help, not from the living man who called himself her father, nor the dead one who had loaned her his name.
Her chin sunk into her hand again, and she sat quiet and unsmiling. In the course of the morning Kit Vance called to her for some change. "Ross! Rosslyn Comly!" she said.
"Ross Burley's my name," said the little girl, handing over the money. "My mother's name's good enough for me."
"Why, you ben't agoin' to make that of yerself!" cried Kit, shrewishly, at which they all laughed. For there had been some ugly rumors about Burley's daughter, which were not yet forgotten.
"Ross Burley's my name," steadily arranging her herbs. She thought, hot with her purpose from head to foot, "I'll go just as I am, shame and all. They shall see what I can do. I'll borrow nobody's name."
When the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, she grew sleepy, thinking of the purpose; one thing forever is tiresome, so she got out her thimble, and a little box of purple and green silk rags, and began to make her doll an entire new suit. She had it finished when she went home that evening, and tried it on to show her grandfather, thinking of it more than anything else. Old Burley saw no change in her, and she knew of none.
It was only a trowel's weight of earth that had been lifted, but the ground was broken for the building that was to be, and no man could lay it straight again.

CHAPTER III
THE DISPATCH

FIFTEEN years have passed: the market stall, and the yellow-haired little girl in it are gone. But the child cannot be as far off, and unreal to us, as she is to the Ross Burley of to-day.
Instead of market and herb-girl, then; a road cut through a farm lying in the rich river-bottom of the Cumberland, in Kentucky. A mere belt of yellow clay; grass-grown, and full of the ruts and holes made by the hoofs of the cattle, with high banks on either side; a badly-kept road, only used as a drift-way by which the mules and cows of the farms inside were driven down to the ford yonder. But a lonely, pretty bit of landscape for a picture, with the low October sun slanting over the bronzed stubble-fields on one side, throwing a maze of black lines of fence shadow down into the dry road, and shooting level lances of light into the thick under-growth of the opposite bank, and the dark oak and ash woods beyond, out of which the autumnal tints are just fading, scarlets and chrome yellows alike sinking into a dull copper color. The strip of road, the mosses of red and blackish green mottling the banks, the sumach bushes with knobs of maroon velvet, reddening in the sunlight where they were thrust out from the green; blackened maple leaves blown along by the wind; the rustling of the trees; the thrum, thrum of the wood-pecker; that was all that there was to see or hear.
Yet Miss Conrad, taking her evening walk, pacing along in her usual grave, steady fashion, was conscious of an unwonted stillness and loneliness in the road. There were no brown chippeys hopping before her as usual in the ruts, or squirrels peering down from the fence-rails with beady black eyes; her own, gray and straightforward, which seemed to observe nothing, suffered no trifles like these to escape them; the senses, too, with which Nature had endowed Margaret Conrad's slow, solid, white body, were keen as those of a hound or an Indian. She noted a peculiar stillness in the air, a faint sweet smell, which disappeared when she tried to give it name. Here and there, too, as she passed along, the grass was darker, and damp in spots under her feet. There had been no rain, and it was too early for dew. She went to the other side of the road, disliking, as usual, what she did not understand. When she came to the river, and sat down there, she had a certainty in her mind that she had left something behind her in the narrow strip of road, other than the underbrush, and yellow clay, and red October sunset.
She sat for an hour or two on the pebbles of the beach, her hands clasped about her knees, as motionless as any tree-stump near her, until the melancholy twilight came, and darkening, gave place to a clear, cold moonrise. Neither twilight nor moonrise suggested any of the usual delicate, flavorless reveries of young maidens to her brain; she was fully occupied in watching a frost-bitten bee creeping home. She made a bridge of her firm finger for it once or twice across perils in the way; at home she was a successful bee-fancier, because, perhaps, the bees fancied her, as they always do people of cleanly, sweet habit and kindly temper. Margaret never had read a Hymn to Nature in her life, but she was a keen judge of cattle; had found out that caterpillars would move to music, and a hundred traits of the Kentucky fishes and wild fowl that are not in the books. "They were better company than most people," she said, with a dogged scorn of her lovers, and of grammar.
Coming back through the road, she stopped now and then to listen; but the silence was unnaturally deep; once she startled a black, ill-looking bird from a spot among the bushes, and flapping its swings heavily, it flew away, circling through the moonlight. The falling dew had almost chilled the weak odor out of the air. Yet at times she caught it faintly; once or twice a swarm of black beetles scattered before her feet; the maze of shadowed lines on the moonlit road looked to her like mysterious writing. She halted, then presently shutting her mouth closer as if she had read the writing, and comprehended it, went on out of the road at an even, steady pace, to the lane beyond, in which she heard voices approaching.
She stopped, and in a moment saw the red spark of a cigar as it was thrown away, and two men coming toward her. She pulled on her hood impatiently.
"Neither will do; the book-worm would make as miserable a bungle of the matter as poor Rob," she thought.
"Stop. Turn back with me. We will go to the house; there's something uncanny down that road," gathering up the heavy folds of her dress as she stepped up on the long grass.
One of them removed his cap, showing a lazy, good-humored face, and bending six feet of loose-jointed, broadly-built body deferentially as he spoke to her, with a turgid sort of tenderness in voice and look.
The other, a tall man, who looked grave and middle-aged beside the dashing young soldier, fell back.
"I mean," she said abruptly, "that there's a wreck down yonder, which I have found; and I wam you off from it, Rob. That was all."
"It is fortunate that you found nothing worse, strolling about so late, with our army at Monticello, and the Yankees at Somerset. Zollicoffer can rein in the bushwhackers no better than Schoepf. A stray shot-If you have no thought for yourself," lowering his voice, "for me-"
"That will do, Rob," dryly. "There! I knew you'd stumble if you did not pick your steps."
The young man drew himself up, muttering angrily.
"I had no wish to snub you, Rob, boy, if that is what you mean," in the same grave, motherly manner. "Not more than I would old Rover. You're not unlike a good breed of Newfoundland, after all," looking up into his flushed, handsome face, with a laugh. "You're as honest, and as game, and as dull! I never thought of the likeness before," and again she laughed good humoredly, and swept on with her firm, free step, complacent at having at last hit on the true estimate of Rob Strebling, and set it out so nearly.
He fell back beside the older man to give her the path, following her large, compact figure with a baffled, feeble smile, and dog-like, affectionate eyes. Once, helping her through a stile, his hand lingered unseen on the folds of her dress. It was corded satin, of some dark, warm color; heavy, rich, and quiet, as was all her drapery; to Strebling it seemed a part of herself. The man beside him bit his thin lips, and buttoned his coat nervously, wishing in his soul that the day was come when these guests would be gone, and he could be quiet again with his book and his laboratory; acids were never coarse, nor alkalies vulgar; and if a book was a vapid companion you could put it down; but these people were guests and kinsfolk. He had an alarmed sense of especial antipathy for this remarkable young woman who knew no more of the winsome little affectations of other girls than would a Normandy draught-horse; but be she what she might, it was contrary to his Virginia notions of decorum to annoy any woman, even by homage, or to lay a finger unpermitted on the hem of her garment. No gentleman could act as Rob Strebling had done; no Kentucky gentleman, at least.
They reached the veranda of the house; Rob stood, hat in hand, to say good-night a dashing, soldier-like figure, he well knew, with the moonlight full on his curly brown hair and beard, and frank face. Inside of the major's uniform of the C. S. A., he suffered to be seen the waistcoat of rich Lyons velvet, the delicate shirt front; his studs were diamonds; his sleeve-buttons emeralds; his ring a ruby; a heavy rose perfume stirred about him; the year of the war had not materially changed either his clothes or tastes.
Miss Conrad sent him off as a boy to school. "You're on guard, Bob, you say, to-night. It is quite time you were gone;" giving him her hand as if it had been a bit of wood-turning to the other man with a relief in her eyes, as they fell on his scrupulously quiet dress and face.
"You are severe in your discipline of Strebling," he said, with an amused smile.
"Of the dead and absent, no evil," dryly. "But I wanted him safely set on his way-" An uneasy glance at the road ended the sentence. The moon had drifted behind heavy clouds-clouds of the opaque gray, that prophesy snow.
"Your wreck will be hid before morning?" opening the door for her to pass in.
"Yes. But we cannot go down. There is a patrol by the ford at night," anxiously knitting her brow.
"What is it? What did you see?" startled by her face.
"I saw nothing. When you start out gunning in the morning, Garrick, I will go with you down to the road. There will be less risk of interruption then than now."
She spoke in a tone of quiet authority which amused him. The man who had spent his life in a library was but a boy, in her opinion, when work was needed.
They went into the warm, lighted hall. Without, the moon threw a white light over the farm-house, and fields, and the woods and tents of the outposts of Zollicoffer's army. But in the lonely road there was a shadow. The moonlight, which framed all else into a quiet home picture, ignored, and left unfound the alien, unwelcome thing that lay under the drifting maple leaves, with its face upturned. When the morning air lifted the clouds, and, driving them apart, showed the arched blue overhead, and the veiling snow whitely folded over tent and farmhouse and field, a few flakes had found their way through the thicket, down to the wreck beneath, vainly trying to cover it with the decency of their charity.
By day-break, Garrick Randolph, game-bag slung across his back, and gun in hand, was breaking the snow down to the cattleroad, followed by Miss Conrad, who shivered inside of her heavy cloak and hood.
He asked no questions, seeing that it was her mood to be silent. Her mood was not only silent-it infected him with a gravity which he tried in vain to shake off, humming a tune briskly to himself when he had left her any distance behind. When they reached the road, however, she took the advance, going on quickly until she came to the spot from whence she had chased the beetles. It was covered now with snow.
She pointed into the bushes. "Put down your gun and bag."
"What is it? What did you see?"
"Nothing. I told you I saw nothing. But I felt death in there. I always know when there is a dead body near me. How could I tell you-how?" impatiently. "Hold back this grape-vine-it is across my foot," as she thrust her way beside him into the thicket. She was as strong a woman as he was a man; and she kept step with him. But when they had come to a heap of clothes covered with dead leaves and the melting snow-flakes, she turned aside.
"I knew this work would be to do. I'm sick. But give me a minute, and I'll help you, Garrick."
She was of women, womanish, after all, a fact which Garrick sometimes doubted; her grave, high-featured face was colorless, but for the blue scoring about her mouth and eyes, and her hands cold as the dead man's body which she helped to carry out of the thicket. But she did help to carry it, and when it was laid on the road, took the head on her lap to keep it out of the snow.
"Who is it, Garrick?" after he had busied himself about it-she with her head turned away.
"A scout, I suspect, shot by some stragglers from one or the other army. He has been wounded here in the side, and escaped so far to creep into the thicket and die."
"North or South?"
He scanned the butternut clothes, the square, compactly-built face. "The garb is the garb of Esau, but the face is Jacob's."
She made an effort to fold the ragged coat over his breast, while Garrick kept his thin, nervous fingers on the cold forehead, taking time leisurely to philosophize. He was looking at the great mystery of Death through this poor shell: thinking how, perhaps, an eternity of joy or suffering already lay between himself and this man; thinking of the hour when he-
"Look here, Garrick! Only this thin cotton rag between his chest and the snow! God help us!" She was unfastening her cloak and making a shroud of it as she spoke.
"What matters the fate of this husk? Life never seemed so real to me as now in this unexpected-wreck, as you call it. Your wreck is a bark now on an infinite tide-"
"I don't know much about the tides in the other world, Garrick. The good Lord gives me so much to do here. I suppose He takes care of us all through. I think this man was a mechanic," her gray, absorbing eyes passing over his face and horny hands with their peculiar quiet gaze. "It is a Northern face, and manly-manly."
She looked up to the range of low hills bounding the northern horizon. "I suppose," she said slowly, "he has an old mother, or a wife maybe, somewhere, who think nobody else in the world is like him. I wish they knew that I'll do all I can for the poor fellow. I wish they did."
Something in the deep, slow voice made the man's nerves unsteady, and brought tears to his eyes; he did not brush them away, not thinking whether she noticed them or not. He felt himself to be an unsteady sort of fellow in a practical work like this, and began fumbling with the man's feet, which were clogged with snow, ashamed to acknowledge he was waiting for a suggestion from the girl.
"I see no reason for not calling some of the people down from the house," she said, doubtfully. "If he had been a Northerner, and Rob Strebling's father there-unless it should be one of his loyal days, after a Union victory- What is this clenched in his hand?"
"Nothing. A bullet only. I think," mildly, "you are unjust to Strebling; he is a sincere man, though vacillating-"
"Let me look at that bullet; for a Minié rifle, eh? As for Mr. Strebling-wherever there's weakness, there's crime, before or after. Garrick! there is something wrong with this bullet-it is too light," weighing it in her palm. In another moment she was at work on it with her teeth, twisting it in the centre. A screw suddenly opened, and the bullet fell into two pieces. She drew out a fine stip of paper, which was covered with minute writing.
"This is your business. You are the man of us two," she said gravely, handing it to him.
He took it, and turned aside a moment. When he came back, she was watching him. "He was one of our people?"
"Yes."
"Whom can you trust"'
Garrick stopped in his uneasy walk up and down. "Cole," after a moment's pause. "He is the blacksmith; you will find him in the quarters, Miss Conrad, if you will help me so far. He can smuggle a box from the shop here, and we can put this poor fellow out of sight."
She was going, when he added, "You had better not return. It will attract notice from the house."
"Yes." She turned back then, and stooped over the dead soldier, silent for a few minutes. When she looked up, Garrick was standing with his cap lifted.
"I was not saying any prayer," quickly; "I am a heathen, I believe; but there are so many different sort of people in the world! I was trying to remember his face, in case-there might be such a case, you know-I should ever find out any of his kinsfotk. I could tell them-" She stopped.
"It is an honorable face," said Garrick, looking down on it with his sensitive, speculative eyes; "though I should judge the man to be illiterate and of low birth. It is thoroughly plebeian, but full of purpose-observe. I never saw aim or persistent effort so stamped on features."
They were both silent, standing on each side of the body. The gleam of blue sky at dawn was already overcast; thick, gray clouds muffled the heavens from horizon to horizon; the snow began to fall, in a few large, drifting flakes.
"Well! that is the end of it-to be shovelled under this snow," she said, bitter, on the dead man's behoof.
"I should think," said Garrick, his voice thin and sharp, "that his balked purpose would taunt a man like this always, whatever may be his new work in eternity, yonder. I-I cannot submit to think of the poor fellow's life being thwarted in what was doubtless its one heroic deed, when I could have helped it."
"You?"
"I could finish his work."
"You mean-"
"These are dispatches from Schoepf. The fate of the Army of the Cumberland may depend on them. I judge this from a word or two which I have deciphered. There are few ciphers which I cannot read, and this is the contrivance of a school-boy. I can carry them, and, delivering them without giving my own name, discover his."
"What then?"
"He would lose no credit-don't you comprehend? The mother or wife you spoke of would believe his errand done before he died."
Margaret's gray eyes rested for a moment or two on the thin, glowing face before her. "I understand," in a lower voice. "But do you know the risk of crossing up into Ohio? I do. There is not a scrub-oak on the barrens, behind which you may not wager you will hear the twang of a musket, and you, Garrick Randolph, will be a doubly-marked man. There are none of your neighbors who do not know that, long ago, you would have been in the Federal army, but that you would not bring ruin on your father's head. Even I knew it, in Pennsylvania."
"There is no cause to keep me now," he said quietly. He did not glance at the black clothes he wore nor did his eyelids tremble. Whatever his father and he had been to each other was known to them-the one dead, the other living-this woman should not lay her meddling hand on it.
"If you wish to join the Federal ranks, there is Schoepf at Somerset," she persisted. "See, Mr. Randolph, I am a stranger to you. If we had been twins, and sat on our mother's knee, we would have been strangers. But I do not want to see you throw your life away on a fool-hardy bit of Quixotism, such as this. I crossed the Ohio a month ago to come here; but even I, though passed from one outpost to another with a flag of truce, knew that we came through the barrens at the risk of life. And you-look at this," pointing to the man at her feet.
"You are going back again."
"That is for the help of the living," quickly, "not the dead."
She was turning off, when she came back hastily. "Give me the paper. I am going back. I hate anything underhand; but I'll smuggle it through-in the gauntlet of my glove, in my boot-heel. Give it to me, Garrick."
"No," putting down her hand gently. "I have a fancy to do this myself for the poor fellow."
She stood silent a moment. "So be it, I am glad You told me of the dispatch," in her ordinary slow, grave tones. "I am glad you trusted me. I will keep the secret."
Garrick lifted his cap, looking after her with a quiet smile. "I think I told you," he said, when she was out of hearing, "because you knew it already."

CHAPTER IV
THE DEPARTURE.

"'Now stir the fire, and draw the curtains close,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.'

Ah, Cowper! Cowper! Let your Tennysons or your Göethes probe human nature as they will, it is the bard of Olney that soothes us-soothes us; like Summer air, or sleep, or-um! Yes, Cowper for me, Miss Conrad."
"Very likely," was her not very relevant reply, not looking tip front her sewing.
It was Rob Strebling's father in one of his sentimental veins, standing on the hearth-rug beside her, his back to the glowing fire, still lean, padded, glossily dressed; not a day older, apparently, than he was fifteen years ago, for a sandy wig had replaced the sandy hair, and the whiskers, which might have betrayed telltale touches of time, were gone from his clean-shaven face; one white, wrinkled hand was held behind him, the fingers of the other gently patted his lips as he looked, affably smiling, down at her.
"The mission of the poet is to soothe. Surely, to soothe. He shares the office of the fair sex when we turn from the fray and heat of the world's struggles to the sanctities-sanctuary of home. Neither poet nor woman should look into the morbid depths of human nature. Ah, vexed human nature!" said Mr. Strebling, struggling to get back to land, finding himself in deep water.
"What should a young creature like Margaret know of frays and human nature?" said a sweet voice, and an old lady beside her put a delicate hand, in a half-scared way, on the heavy folds of lustreless black hair, eyeing her furtively, as a mild, motherly old puss might the young hound just imported to the fireside from some world of which she knew nothing. Young women of the present day were different from those she knew. It was owing to the "march of mind," perhaps, or transcendentalism, which was the same thing, she believed; they had not penetrated into the old Virginia houses in which she had lived; among the light-hearted, clear-eyed young girls there; girls whose literary tastes were formed on the Spectator, and Scott's novels; who dispensed the hospitality of their fathers' houses in a gay, gracious way, going to Richmond in Winter and to Greenbrier in Summer, dancing with their cousins until they married some of them, and became housekeepers, and mistresses, and mothers. Perhaps they did not keep up with the run of current books, but they were tainted with no vulgar radicalism about slavery or spirit rapping, and there was a repose, a thoroughbred air about them which she had never seen in the restless New England women. As for this new-found relation, she was of another species-if her mother was a Page; and the old lady's mild, faintly-colored face turned from time to time wistfully toward the girl, while she smiled graciously in assent to Mr. Strebling's lecture on the poets. Margaret's quiet, downright, unsmiling face was very attractive to gentlemen she had heard; she was thankful her nephew, Garrick, had escaped!
"How peculiarly you sew, dear Margaret," she putted. "Your threads are so long, and your needle moves so steadily and swiftly. Now my niece Lou has so many finical little ways, it is quite a play to see her; but you sit there always quiet, and strong as a machine-"
"Ah! here comes Garrick!" said Mr. Strebling, peeping out through the crimson curtains into the snow-covered avenue without. "Out gunning since morning! He will bring in a gust of cold air presently. These people who are capable of dragging all day through snow for such game as rabbits, have no comprehension of weaker nerves," shivering back to the fire. Margaret did not lift her face from her work; she had heard the quick nervous step on the snow long before. Randolph had been gone since morning; the man was buried then, she concluded, and the hastily formed plan of the morning was to be carried into effect; the day had been spent in arranging matters on the plantation before his departure. He would start that night. When he came into the room a few moments later, carefully shaved and dressed, as usual, her wide, gray eyes rested on him with a sincere pleasure. He must know that there was every chance that he was going to his death; and he was so quiet about it! Who would have believed that there was such thorough pluck in the nervous, awkward fellow?
But there was a drop of gallant blood in everybody if you only touched the right vein! She got up suddenly, and held out her hand to Garrick, as one brave man might to another; there was something generous in the touch of the hand, which was both large and warm, that was like a hearty cheer to him starting on his forlorn hope; it brought a heat to his thin check, and a cheerfuller greeting for them all, for Garrick, when touched, was always most apt to be playful and joking. Mrs. Page knew that, and looked uneasily from him to the girl's gray eyes, which had burned for a moment with a sudden splendor of meaning.
"Dear! dear! if Garrick should be snared, after all!" she thought as she bustled out to order his supper. "They say old Conrad had Indian blood," and then grew quiet, remembering how delicately fastidious he was in the matter of family, how he cherished his pure descent back to the Champenouns of Elizabeth's time, a lineage on which there had fallen no stain of dishonor. Cultured, honorable gentlemen, the Randolphs, all. "And poor old Conrad-going from horse-racing to itinerant preaching at a jump! No, no! he's safe!" and she trod lightly back, rustling her gray silk dress, followed by Viney with the tray of devilled turkey, corn-bread, and coffee.
She had no trouble in forcing Garrick to eat; he established himself cosily in a corner, made her wait on him, brought the tears to her eyes, laughing at his jokes. He was always her darling, but it was not often he was boyish and light-hearted as to-night.
Margaret, whose eyes did not apparently leave her work, saw that Randolph's face never lighted with his laugh. There was a worn easy-chair by the fire which had been his father's; when he died and Garrick came home to the house in which there was only left poor old Aunt Laura to welcome him, he had taken it for his own; judging himself, it may be, as he sat in it night after night, whether he filled the place of the true, honorable gentleman who was gone.
He did not sit in it to-night; did not trust himself to look up once at the shrewd, benevolent face of his father above it on the wall. "He thinks it is his last night in the homestead," thought Margaret.
But presently Garrick and his undertaking faded out of her mind as she sewed. Her own affairs had trouble enough in them; and as for heroism, she had come out of a hurly-burly in which the very air, she had fancied, was made up of the breaths of men dying heroically for causes which they thought good.
Mr. Strebling meanwhile watched her critically as he sat, and chafed his hands softly. He was a connoisseur in woman, but this was a new type. He could not make up his mind whether the pale, full, high-featured face was German or Indian; he could not make up his mind whether it was dull from stolidity or from the repression of passionate, electric energy; at times he called the large, firm, white figure with its slow and strong motions, its heavy crown of black hair, its solitary expression in full, half-closed gray eyes simply coarse; and again he doubted whether a true artist would not have chosen it as a rare type for a grand primeval woman; whether any petty graces could equal this absolute freedom, this power in rest or motion.
"You are going to leave us to-morrow, Miss Conrad?" breaking silence, "your filial affection supports you through great perils."
To which she made answer in her slow, grave way, bringing all down to the levellest commonplace, that a flag of truce prevented all difficulty, and that it was not filial affection that brought her to Kentucky, but to sell the mules.
Aunt Laura gave an hysteric little scream. "But, Margaret, I did not understand this before. Surely it would have been better for your father to have risked all greater danger for himself, than to have suffered you to engage in such unwomanly work."
"I do not know about that; when there is work for me, I very seldom think whether other women have it to do or not. Some of them would not like it, perhaps; but I am a very good judge of mules, and the stock on the farm had to be sold or we should have lost it all. One army or the other had carried off half of it. I saw a dealer in Monticello, and told him he could have the remainder for a certain sum, and he paid me the money. As for Mr. Conrad, it was not fear that detained him; there was a reason why he could lot come." The face looking up at Aunt Laura was as simple and honest as a child's, and looked child-like, for the moment, from some inward trouble that mastered it. But she dropped her eyes and kept her pain to herself.
"Dear! dear!" The old lady tapped the ends of her fingers together. Garrick was looking attentively at the girl, who had seen more of the world and of action in the past month than had entered into his whole life. Aunt Laura's wrinkled cheek grew hot; the lace strings of her cap fluttered; it was as well that he should be reminded of Miss Conrad's antecedents.
"What did your father do with his turf-horses when he entered the Methodist Conference, Margaret? Very finely blooded, his stock was, my brother always said."
"He kept the best of his stud," said the girl, folding up her work. "Black Hawk gained a dozen premiums at State fairs before the war began. There is no reason why he should not own a good horse because he works for God?" with a smile.
Aunt Laura's lace fluttered more violently, but she only replied by a furtive glance of triumph at her nephew.
Mr. Strebling felt called to bring a soothing element into the conversation. He was a good-humored man, and dreaded the clashing of women's tongues.
"Fairs? Ah yes, my dear. That was another good thing to which this miserable war put an end. There's not a turn you can make from morning until night in which you are not met by inconvenience growing out of this gigantic mistake."
"I told you how it would be," sighed Aunt Laura, mildly. "My hands are clear-"
"But the most amazing point is the blindness of the North," pursued Mr. Strebling hastily, determined not to give up the track. "If we suffer in this manner, how much greater will be the loss there!
"And all for free soil!" Aunt Laura brought in when he stopped for breath. "To prevent slavery on ground where it could not exist. An ideal negro in a hypothetical territory, as Alexander Stuart put it. I never understood the matter until I heard him. Now I do."
"Yes, my dear madam, yes!" blandly nodding. "But, as I observed, what is to become of the North shut off from us? It is a shop without patrons, a market without customers. Cut off from our supplies, too. Cottons, sugars, tobacco. Their mills will close, their operatives will rise their streets will flow with blood!"
"I thought Philadelphia and New York unusually alive with business when I left," Margaret said, quietly.
"What could a child like you know of political ruinl" said Aunt Laura, with acerbity.
Mr. Strebting was suddenly silent; he began pacing up and down with long, uneven strides. The weather-cock, which he called a brain, was pointing another way. When he stopped, which he did presently, chafing his hands and smiling feebly, there was something in his voice which made Garrick look up, and reminded Margaret that it was an old man who stood before her.
"Philadelphia, my dear? You are going back again, ehl I had some friends there-some friends. I have often asked about them, but nobody seems to know them. Nobody seems to know if they are dead or alive."
"Who were they?" with a sudden deference in her tone. "Perhaps, I may know them. Unlikely things happen."
"No, my dear, no," resuming his slow walk. "There was a Quaker named Yates a queer little body, who took an odd fancy to a mulatto boy of mine. But he died-Sap died."
"Was there any one else"' asked Margaret.
"No. A little girl that-I took an interest in; a little girl. She would be a woman now-Rosslyn."
"A curious name," said Miss Conrad, kindly, humoring the old man's fancy. For the first time it occurred to her how little was done by anybody to humor him, how empty of pleasure and interest his life was. "If I should meet Rosslyn there, I will tell her that you remember her?"
He stopped on the hearth-rug, drawing his thin figure erect, and rubbing his chin nervously.
"You will not meet her, madam. Her name is Rosslyn Comly. Comly was a blacksmith. She was a market-huckster-she sold fish, I think. There is not one of my house hands that is not better clothed. They would look down on her work, and her company. No, Miss Conrad, you will not meet Rosslyn."
He spoke vehemently, and when he had finished an awkward silence fell on the little party.
It was broken by Cole, a middle-aged, watchful-looking negro who came through the half-open door. "Yer horse is ready, M's Garrick, ef yer goin over to Wairford's to-night."
"Why, Garrick! I thought you meant to sleep at home," cried Aunt Laura. "It is late, child," pulling out her watch.
"I ought to go," said Randolph. He rose slowly and stood with his hand on the mantle-shelf, glancing out at the night, with his grave, reserved, schoolmaster air, as Miss Conrad called it.
"He flinches!" she thought. "But many a good horse balks at the starting post."
She and the negro watched him keenly as he drew on his overcoat, slowly looking around the room. The fire light shone warmly on the cheap carpet; on the glossy, patched old sideboard with its display of massive plate; on the Copley and Allston hung over the faded wall paper; at Aunt Laura herself, with all the weight of the honor of the Pages in her lean, little body, and feebly dogmatic face. Commonplace furniture, and a weak old woman, to Miss Conrad, but they had a different meaning to him. They were sentient with the clean, sweet childhood he had spent among them, and the youth that followed.
Shrewd, wide-awake, town-bred fellows, full of pluck and energy, who pant for the day when they can cut loose from "the governor" and make their own way, can hardly understand what it cost the young Kentuckian to leave this homestead, never, in all probability, to come back. He thought to himself with a quiet, inward smile that it was like tearing a shell-fish fresh from its rock; some of the flesh and nerves would be left. Miss Conrad did not understand the meaning of the blue eyes that met hers as she bowed good-night, and went out to her own room.
"Afraid?" she said, astonished, to herself
The Professor was not afraid. But it was such a short matter to say good-by! If he never came back, Aunt Laura would cry for a week or two, and his experiments on albumen with his class would never be finished; that was all. There was no enemy for him to leave behind, no woman's tips to kiss. "If the pitcher be broken at the fountain, it is one that has held but little water," he thought. All of Randolph's thoughts ran formally like sentences in books, and sounded to him generally, as if some one else had spoken them, there had been, so far, so little live pleasure and pain in them.
While Cole brought his horse to the steps, he stood looking out into the moonlight, holding his gloves in one hand, Aunt Laura and Mr. Strebling's patter of talk dully sounding behind him.
Once before, a boy fresh from college, he had left home, gone North to make a fortune. He crept out of the world he knew, the little clan of Lees and Pages, with their mild refinement, old rules, habits, anecdotes, even gestures, handed down from generation to generation. He was a crab, raw from its shell, bruised at every turn. He was stunned, bewildered with the jargon of new theories and facts; every man he met was a radical; the air, the language, the ideas were crude, untempered, coarse. What could he do? What he did do was to creep back home again; give up the idea of making a fortune and go back to his college classroom to teach instead of learn. He was going from under cover again, and if he won death in this venture it would be the first real stroke of work he had ever done, he thought, turning into the room to say good-by, with a sad, quizzical smile.
He kept the face of the dead man in the road before him as he would hold liquor to his lips to steady his nerve. This venture of his was a manly thing to do, a deed of derring-do, on which his old father would have smiled grimly. "I would rather my son would die in a great cause, than live to comfort my old age," he had said, once.
When the war began, his son had theoretically called the struggle of the Government for life a great cause, but practically the Federal German mercenaries were laying waste his friend's plantations, so he had not gone to die with them.
He said good-night now, with another slow look around the room, and went out to mount his horse. As he settled himself in the saddle, "Oh, by the way, Cole," in his usual indolent drawl. "If I should not come back you'll find your free papers, yours and Viney's, made out, in my bureau drawer."
Cole touched his forehead. "I was aweer dey was drawed out accepable, M's Garrick. However, it might have been safer like if dey wos in our hands. We'd hev been here all de same of de day of your return."
"Aunt Laura has charge of them. Bring me a light." As he lit a cigar, the blacksmith stood, passing his stumpy, yellow fingers over the young man's leg, smoothing down the trousers. Randolph stooped suddenly, looking into the old man's face. His own changed.
"Why, Cole! You are not making a woman of yourself over me?"
The negro passed his hand over his eyes, standing up stiffly, "No, sah! But I nussed you, if you remember."
Garrick paused a moment; then he nervously straightened his hat and drew the bridle; holding out his hand, "Well, good-by, uncle," with an altered voice.
The old man gave him his blessing, in a whisper at first, then as he cantered off, rising into a class-leading voice, so loud as to bring Miss Conrad to an open window beside him. Cole improved his chance of an audience. "He's gone down into de plains of de great battle," swinging his hand toward the dusky horizon line at the north, and uttering the words in a shrill drone. "He's gone what de smell of his brother's blood shell sicken his heart, and his horse shell tramp among de slain of his people. But de young man's eyes is blinded. He knows it is God a treadin' out de wine press of his wrath, but he forgetteth de cause."
"Well, Uncle Cole, what is the cause?"
Margaret's cool, amused smile sobered him. He dropped the nasal twang, held up his old fur cap to his face, eyeing her shrewdly over it, as if doubtful how far to venture. "What am de cause why de rivers yander run wid blood, and de whole earth groan and am not quiet? In de meetin' our people asks dat of me. But I cannot tell. Dere is dem dat say" -the dull, black eye laid motionless on hers- "day say I am de cause, an my wife-not Viney, but de one I lef on a Georgy rice-field-she am de cause, an my boy, Pont, who was hunted wid dogs in de swamp down dar, he am de cause."
Miss Conrad's face hardened, and she looked through the man as though nothing interposed between her and the moonlight; the keen physical disgust in her blood to the black skin, as plain to his instinct, as if it had showed (which it did not) on her face.
"As if," she said, pointing to the figure of his master, cut clear against the sky as his horse rose on the hill-road, "as if God would bring countless young heads like that to the dust, that you might leave your corn and pork here, and starve in a Northern city!"
"You've seen de cullored people up dar," said Cole, breathlessly not heeding her words. "I would like to see what freedom does for dem, Miss Marget."
"It does nothing for them," carelessly, remembering to whom she was speaking, "There are few of them like you, Uncle Cole-your people. They are like Mose. He does light work here; he shaves beards, or whitewashes walls, or steals; he does the same in Philadelphia. He is thick-lipped and thriftless and affectionate, go where he will; only in the South they hunt him with dogs, and in the North they calculate how many years of competition with the white race it will need to sweep him and his like off of the face of lie earth."
"Tank you, Miss Marget. Mose was allers a drefful lazy nigger;" and Cole put on his cap over his bewildered face, and shambled off to the kitchen.
Miss Conrad looked after the broad, squat figure. "I let him feel bit," she said, laughing to herself. "Cole was beginning to fancy himself one of God's people going out from Egypt, and Garrick's cattle would have suffered the loss." As she stood listening to the beat of Randolph's horse's hoofs on the far road, it occurred to her that Death was coming into almost every household in the land, as in the days of Pharaoh. Could it be in order that this thick-lipped,
thriftless, good-hearted Mose should go free? The horse's feet echoed dully, going down on the other side of the hill, carrying his rider into the plain of the great battle, as Cole called it, justly enough. "And blood like his is to pay their ransom? If God does not make better use of Mose, free, than slave, He will have been a bad economist of the world's strength," she thought.
The last echo died faintly; she closed the window, and the farmhouse and sleeping fields were left in the night and silence; beyond the hill a grave, heavily-built man on horseback made his way cautiously, through thickets of scrub-oak, where sudden danger lurked past the slopes where glittered the white tents of the outposts of Zollicoffer's army.

CHAPTER V
HUNTED DOWN

ONE damp, drizzly evening in November, a lumbering old family carriage was drawn up on the muddy bank of a little hill creek in Marion county. The mulatto boy who drove it had watered the horses, and climbing up under shelter again, sat snugly wrapped in a man's gum overcoat, peering out at the dreary, darkening evening; the muddy sheet of water in front, swollen with the Fall rains; the low hill on the opposite bank overgrown with pawpaw and haw-bushes. It was a lonely, untravelled road; nothing of life was in sight but a rusty blackbird, that flew with a hoarse call over his head, and left him alone in the darkness. Pitt whistled shrilly and began to tug at the reins for a start, when a motion in the weeds on the opposite shore caught his rolling eyes. He stopped a moment, then the whistle grew louder, and he squatted down, tying his shoes, watching the bushes from under the shadow of his hat. Presently he saw a white man, dressed only in muddy trousers and flannel shirt, his hair and beard ragged and uncombed, raise himself cautiously from behind the rock where he lay, listening, with his ear to the ground.
Pitt bent his own head; he fancied he could hear the beat of men's feet heavy in the soggy mud; they were on the other side of the scrub-grown hill, coming closer rapidly. The boy's whistle continued shrill and even; he lazily scraped the lumps of mud from the apron of the carriage, his eyes contracting like a cat's on the watch.
This was in November, 1861; the month when North and South met in a hand-to-hand fight to force her sham of neutrality from Kentucky. Their forces grappled each other in every county of the State, while the Kentuckians, compelled to take sides, stood, defiant, suspicious of each other; had not many a man found an enemy in his brother or son, or an assassin in his neighbor? About the fireside, or at the family table, there was a chill of rancor in the air, more terrible than the heat of any battle. The keen sense of danger in all the border States made the atmosphere electric; the very children stood on guard; this mulatto, a dull drudge about the stables, before the war, took the life of the man yonder in his hand at an instant's challenge cool, alert, cautious. There was not a breath of time to lose; the man crept to the bank feebly, while the steps behind him were both heavy and swift.
"Dem is Drigg's men; dey show no quarter, an' he's nigh run down;" while he scraped on at the mud, giving a quick, furtive sign to the man to take to the water, and indicating the course of the current by a swiftly-aimed bit of clay. "Dar's but one chance," drawing his breath sharply as he whistled. On this side of the creek, one or two miles inland, were the pickets thrown out by Thomas, then at Lebanon. On this side, he would be safe. But to reach it? He had plunged into the muddy river; only his face and hands, as he swam, were visible; but the boy's eyes were sharp. "He's starving. They've run him hard. He'll not make shore." The current was not deep, barely neck high, but, in the middle, strong. "He'll not make shore," seeing how it sucked him in, and that his strokes were ineffectual.
The men's voices could be heard coming round the bend; there were half a dozen of them, laughing and cursing the mud. The thicket detained them a moment, two being mounted. There was yet half of the width of the creek to cross, the man struggling in the current. The yellow water curdled thick in rings away from him; the drizzling mist which had been falling cleared off, leaving him barely within their guns' range.
The whistle came out of Pitt's dry mouth in one or two thin gasps, then stopped.
"Gor-a-mighty! he'll not make the shore!" he cried.
The silence lasted long after that. The thin face, with its draggled hair, set jaws and staring eyes, but slowly worked its way toward the bank, while fast and faster the steps hurried behind. Through all, he held something clenched in his left hand as he swam.
"What kin the man set agin his life?" Pitt, down on his knees in the mud with a log pushed out, snarled to him savagely to open his fist, and give himself headway, but Garrick smiled coolly. In the two weeks in which he had been dogged for his life, hungry, with frozen feet, creeping on his belly through thickets beset with Zollicoffer's scouts, this bullet in his hand had come to mean duty; to mean a good, high deed for the world's help, in the doing of which his life was a paltry thing to sacrifice. He had grown morbid about it, perhaps. Yet in the Kentucky parlors, with a bevy of commonplace women about him, he had always been a grave, diffident, reticent man; now, when Death had him by the throat, he smiled back gayly, brain and blood on flame with a new fire, the very essence of youth, freshly come to him.
He had almost gained the shore; the end of the log floated within his reach. He threw himself forward, missed it, and sank.
Pitt crept out on it cautiously, and, lying flat, thrust out his hand. Garrick caught it. He could hear the rustling of the dead leaves on the opposite bank, the men were so close upon him.
The icy water drove him back, lapping his legs and chest; the thick mud choking and blinding him, when, with all his gathered strength, he fought for footing on the shelving bank.
Death, was it?
He was on flame, possessed, shaken with that fierce animal courage which maddens men in the thick of battle; yet with it there was the vague consciousness that it was not his pursuers , nor the clammy current that he grappled with, but that treacherous thing whose dull weapons they were. A struggle, wrenching the breath from him, a leap, a yell of triumph, which died, fortunately, silent in his exhausted lungs, and then he dragged himself slowly on shore at the mutatto's feet, among the weeds and slime. He pulled up his knees, clasping his hands about them; the bullet rubbed rough in his shut palm; the face of the Yankee mechanic, dead, yonder, in the drift-way, rose plain before him. "I said I would do his work for him, and I've done it," muttered the Kentucky gentleman.
Pitt threw his rubber coat about him, his teeth chattering with excitement. "Gor-a-mighty, get up wid ye. Drive de wagon up to de house yonder. Don't mind me. Dis nigger'll be safe enuff!"
Garrick rose, stiffly, pausing a moment to co