THE LAWTON GIRL

Thessaly! Ten minutes for refreshments!” called out the brisk young colored porter, advancing up the aisle of the drawing-room car, whisk-broom in hand. “Change cahs foh Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce,” he added, upon humorous after-thought, smiling broadly as he spoke, and chuckling to himself.

This friendly remark was addressed in confidence to a group of three persons at the forward end of the car, who began preparations for the halt as the clanking of the wheels beneath them grew more measured, and the carriage trembled and lurched under the pressure of the brakes. But the cheery grin which went with it was exclusively directed to the two ladies who rose now from their arm-chairs, and who gently relaxed their features in amused response.

Whether the porter was moved only by the comeliness of these faces and their gracious softening, or whether he was aware that they were patrician countenances, so to speak, and belonged to Mrs. and Miss Minster, persons of vast wealth and importance and considerable stockholders in this very railroad, is not clear. But he made a great bustle over getting their parcels down from the racks overhead, and helping them to don their outer garments. He smoothed the rich fur of their sealskin cloaks with almost affectionate strokes of his coffee-colored palms, and made a pile of their belongings on the next seat with an exaggerated show of dexterity and zeal. This done, he turned for a cursory moment to the young man who constituted the third member of the group, peremptorily pulled up the collar of his overcoat to the top of his ears, and was back again with his arms full of the ladies’ bundles as the train came to a stop.

“This way, ladies,” he said, marching jauntily under his burden toward the door.

“I will bid you good-day, Mr. Boyce,” said the elder of the women, speaking with somewhat formal politeness, but offering her hand.

“Good-day, sir,” the younger said simply, with a little inclination of the head, but with no “Mr. Boyce,” and no proffer of her gloved fingers.

The young man murmured “so delighted to have had the privilege” between low answering bows, and then stood watching the two fur-draped figures move to the door and disappear, with a certain blankness of expression on his face which seemed to say that he had hoped for a more cordial leave-taking. Then he smiled with reassurance, folded up and pocketed his thin car-cap, adjusted his glossy silk hat carefully, and proceeded to tug out his own valise. It was a matter of some difficulty to get the cumbrous bag down off the high icy steps to the ground. It was even more disagreeable to carry it along when he had got it down, and after a few paces he let it fall with a grunt of vexation, and looked about him for assistance. “How much better they do these things in Europe!” was what he thought as he looked.

All day long he had been journeying over a snowbound country—with white-capped houses, white-frozen streams, white-tufted firs, white-mantled fields and roads and hillsides, forever dodging one another in the dissolving panorama before his window. The train drawn up for the moment behind him might have come in from the North Pole, so completely laden with snow was every flat surface—of roof and beam, of platform and window-frame—presented by the dark line of massive coaches. Yet it seemed to him that there was more snow, more bleak and cheerless evidence of winter, here in his native Thessaly, than he had seen anywhere else. It was characteristic, too, he felt, that nobody should appear to care how much inconvenience this snow caused. There was but an indifferently shovelled path leading from where he stood, across the open expanse of side-tracks to the old and dingy dépôt beyond—cleared for the use of such favored passengers as might alight from the drawing-room section of the train. Those who had arrived in the ordinary cars at the rear were left to flounder through the smoke-begrimed drifts as best they could.

The foremost of these unconsidered travellers were coming up, red and angry with the exertion of carrying their own luggage, and plunging miserably along through the great ridges of discolored snow heaped between the tracks, when Mr. Boyce’s impatient eye fell upon somebody he knew.

“Hello there, Lawton!” he shouted. “Come here and help me with this infernal bag, won’t you!”

The man to whom he called had been gazing down the yard at the advancing wayfarers. He looked up now, hesitated for a moment, then came forward slowly, shuffling through the snow to the path. He was a middle-aged, thin, and round-shouldered man, weak and unkempt as to face and hair and beard, with shabby clothes and no overcoat. Although he wore mittens, he still from force of habit had his hands plunged half-way into his trousers pockets. Even where it would have been easy to step over the intermittent drifts and mounds at the sides of the tracks, he shiftlessly pushed his feet through them instead.

“Hello, Hod!” he said slowly, with a kind of melancholy hesitation, “is that you?”

Young Mr. Boyce ignored the foolish question, and indicated the valise with a nod of his head.

“I wish you’d get that thing down to the house, Ben. And take these checks for my trunks, too, will you, and see that they’re brought down. Where is that expressman, anyway? Why isn’t he here, on hand, attending to his business?”

“I don’t know as I can, Hod,” said the man without an overcoat, idly kicking into a heap of mingled cinders and snow with his wet, patched boots, and glancing uneasily down the yard. “I’m down here a-waitin’—for—that is to say, I’ve got somethin’ else to do. Prob’ly you can get some other fellow outside the deepo.”

Mr. Boyce’s answer to this was to add a bright half-dollar to the brass baggage-checks he already held in his hand. The coin was on the top, and Ben Lawton could not help looking at it. The temptation was very great.

“I ought to stay here, you know,” he faltered. “Fact is, honest Injun! I got to stay here! I’m lookin’ for—somebody a-comin’ in on this train.”

“Well, you can look, can’t you, and do this too? There’s no hurry about the things. If they’re home two hours hence it will be time enough.”

“Yes, I know, it might be so as I could do it, later on,” said Lawton, taking one of his hands from his pocket and stretching it tentatively toward the money. Then a second thought prompted him to waver, and he drew back the hand, muttering feebly: “Then, again, it might be so as I couldn’t do it. You better get somebody else. And yet—I don’t know—p’raps—”

Mr. Boyce settled the question by briskly reaching down for his bag. “All right! Please yourself,” he said. “I’ve got no more time to waste with you. I’ll do it myself.”

Before he had fairly lifted the valise from the ground, the irresolute Lawton made up his mind. “Put her down again, Hod,” he said. “I’ll manage it somehow.”

He took the half-dollar in his mittened hand, and tossed it gently up and down on the striped blue and white surface of yarn. “It’s the first money I’ve earned for over a week,” he remarked, as if in self-defence.

Even as he spoke, a young woman in black who had been wandering about in the dépôt yard came running excitedly up to him. She gave a little inarticulate cry of recognition as she drew near. He turned, saw her, and in a bewildered way opened his arms. She dropped her bundles and bandbox heedlessly into the snow, and threw herself upon his breast, hiding her face on his threadbare coat, and sobbing audibly.

Mr. Boyce had been entirely unprepared for this demonstration, and looked wonderingly upon the couple who stood in the path before him. After a moment or two of silent inspection he made as if to pass them, but they did not move. The girl still hid her face, although she had ceased to weep, and Lawton bent his head down over hers, with tears in his eyes and his gaze fixed vaguely on the snow beyond her, while he tenderly patted her shoulder with the hand that did not hold the half-dollar.

“All right, then, Ben,” Mr. Boyce called out. “If you’ll just let me pass, I’ll walk on. Have the things there by five.”

At the first sound of this voice, the girl raised her head. She turned now, her tear-stained face luminous with a deep, wrathful emotion, and looked at the speaker.

The young man did not for more than an instant try to meet this glance. His cheek flushed and his eyes sought the ground. He lifted his hand with a hurried, awkward gesture toward his hat, made a hasty plunge around them through the snow, and walked swiftly away past the gate into the dépôt.

The girl’s intent gaze followed the retiring Mr. Boyce until he disappeared. Then it shifted suddenly and fell upon the face of Ben Lawton, from whose embrace she had now withdrawn.

The poor man made no effort whatsoever to brave its searching and reproachful inquiry. He balanced the half-dollar on his mitten’s edge, watched the exercise with a piteously futile pretence of interest, and looked as if he was about to cry.

“What ‘things’ were those he spoke of, father?” she asked, after a long pause.

The passengers who had temporarily left the train for the doubtful solace of the refreshment counter were beginning now to return. Some of them jostled past the couple who stood blocking the narrow path; and one of these, a stout and choleric man in a silk skull-cap and a fur-lined overcoat, brusquely kicked the big valise out of the way, overturning it in the snow. Lawton had not found the courage necessary for a complete explanation. He bent over now, set the bag on its bottom again, and made partial answer:

“This is one of ’em.”

The heavy train, snow-capped and sombre, began to draw out of the yard. The two Lawtons stood and silently watched it unfold its length—saw first the broad, plate-glass panes of the drawing-room and sleeping cars, with their luxurious shadows and glimpses of well-groomed heads and costly stuffs behind, glide slowly, sedately by; then, more rapidly, the closer-set windows of the yellow, common cars, through the steam on which visions of hats and faces dimly crowded; and last, the diminishing rear platform, with its solitary brakeman vehemently whirling the horizontal wheel of the brake—grow small, then indistinct, then vanish altogether. A sense of desertion, of having been left behind, seemed to brood over the old clapboarded dépôt like a cloud, darkening the ashen masses of snow round about and chilling the very air.

The daughter looked once more at her father.

“You are going to carry his things!” she said, with a stern, masterful inflection in her voice, and with flashing eyes.

“Hope-to-die, Jess, I tried as hard as I could to get out of it—made all sorts of excuses,” Lawton pleaded, shrinking meantime from her gaze, and furtively but clumsily slipping the coin into his pocket. “But you know the kind of fellow Hod is—” he stammered here with confusion, and made haste to add—“what I mean is—he—well, he just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

She went, on coldly, as if she had not heard: “You have got his money—I saw it—there in your hand.”

“Well, I tell you what, Jess,” the father answered, with an accession of boldness, “half-dollars don’t grow on every bush up this way. I ain’t seen one afore in a fortnight. And to-morrow’s Thanksgiving, you know—and then you’ve come home—and what was a fellow to do?”

The girl turned, as if it were fruitless to say more. Then the necessity for relief mastered her: she faced him again, and ground the words from between her set teeth with scornful sadness:

“You take his money—and yet you knew!”

CHAPTER II.—CONFRONTING THE ORDEAL.

JESSICA Lawton stood on the sidewalk outside the dépôt, and waited for the return of her father, who had gone in search of the expressman.

The street up and down which she glanced was in a sense familiar to her, for she had been born and reared on a hillside road not far away, and until her eighteenth year had beheld no finer or more important place than this Thessaly—which once had seemed so big and grand, and now, despite the obvious march of “improvement,” looked so dwarfed and countrified in its overlarge, misfitting coat of snow.

She found herself puzzled vaguely by the confusion of objects she remembered with things which appeared not at all to belong to the scene. There was the old Dearborn House, for example, on the same old corner, with its high piazza overhanging both streets, and its seedy brown clapboard sides that had needed a fresh painting as long as she could recollect—and had not got it yet. But beside it, where formerly had been a long, straggling line of decrepit sheds, was reared now a tall, narrow, flat-roofed brick building—the village fire-engine house; and through the half-open door, in which a man and a bull-dog stood surveying her, she could see the brassy brightness of a huge modern machine within. It seemed only yesterday that the manhood of Thessaly had rejoiced and perspired over the heavy, unwieldy wheeled pump which was dragged about with ropes and worked by means of long hand-brakes, with twelve men on a side, and a ducking from the hose for all shirkers. And here was a citified brick engine-house, and a “steamer” drawn by horses!

Everywhere, as she looked, this incongruous jumbling of the familiar and the novel forced itself upon the girl’s attention. And neither the old nor the new bore on its face any welcome for her.

In a narrower and more compact street than this main thoroughfare of Thessaly, the people in view would have constituted almost a crowd. The stores all seemed to be doing a thriving business, particularly if those who lounged about looking in the windows might be counted upon presently to buy something. Both sides of the road were lined with rustic sleighs, drawn up wherever paths had been cut through the deep snow to the sidewalks; and farmers in big overcoats, comforters, and mittens were visible by scores, spreading buffalo-robes over their horses, or getting out armfuls of turkeys and tubs of butter from the straw in the bottoms of their sleds, or stamping with their heavy boots on the walks for warmth, as they discussed prices and the relative badness of the various snow-blocked roads in the vicinity. Farther down the street a load of hay had tipped over in the middle of the road, and the driver, an old man with a faded army-overcoat and long hair, was hurling loud imprecations at some boys who had snowballed him, and who now, from a safe distance, yelled back impolite rejoinders.

Among all who passed, Jessica caught sight of no accustomed face. In a way, indeed, they were all familiar enough: they were types in feature and voice and dress and manner of the people among whom her whole earlier life had been spent. But she knew none of them—and was at once glad of this, and very melancholy.

She had done a rash and daring thing in coming back to Dearborn County. It had seemed the right thing to do, and she had found the strength and resolution to do it. But there had been many moments of quaking trepidation during the long railroad journey from Tecumseh that day, and she was conscious now, as she looked about her, of a well-nigh complete collapse of courage. The tears would come, and she had more than once furtively to lift her handkerchief to her face.

It was not a face with which one, at first glance, would readily associate tears. The features were regularly, almost firmly cut; and the eyes—large, fine eyes though they were—had commonly a wide awake, steady, practical look, which expressed anything rather than weakness. The effect of the countenance, as a whole, suggested an energetic, self-contained young woman, who knew her way about, who was likely to be neither cheated nor flattered out of her rights, and who distinctly belonged to the managing division of the human race. This conception of her was aided by the erect, independent carriage of her shoulders, which made her seem taller than she really was, and by the clever simplicity of her black tailor-made jacket and dress, and her round, shapely, turban-like hat.

But if one looked closely into this face, here in the snowlight of the November afternoon, there would be found sundry lines and shadows of sensibility and of suffering which were at war with its general expression. And these, when one caught them, had an air of being new, and of not yet having had time to lay definite hold upon the face itself. They were nearer it now, perhaps, as the tears came, than they had often been before, yet even now both they and the moisture glistening on the long lashes, appeared foreign to the calm immobility of the countenance. Tears did not seem to belong there, nor smiles.

Yet a real smile did all at once move to softness the compressed lines of her lips, and bring color to her cheeks and a pleasant mellowing of glance into her eyes. She had been striving to occupy her all-too-introspective mind by reading the signs with which the house-fronts were thickly covered; and here, on a doorway close beside her, was one at sight of which her whole face brightened. And it was a charming face now—a face to remember—with intelligence and fine feeling and frank happiness in every lineament, yet with the same curious suggestion, too, of the smile, like the tears, being rare and unfamiliar.

The sign was a small sheet of tin, painted in yellow letters on a black ground:=

`````REUBEN TRACY,

````Attorney and Counsellor at Law,

`````Second Floor.=

“Oh, he is here, then; he has come back!” she said aloud. She repeated, with an air of enjoying the sound of the words: “He has come back.”

She walked up to the sign, read it over and over again, and even touched it, in a meditative way, with the tip of her gloved finger. The smile came to her face once more as she murmured: “He will know—he will make it easier for me.”

But even as she spoke the sad look spread over her face again. She walked back to the place where she had been standing, and looked resolutely away from the sign—at the tipped-over load of hay, at the engine-house, at the sleighs passing to and fro—through eyes dimmed afresh with tears.

Thus she still stood when her father returned. The expressman who halted his bob-sleigh at the cutting in front of her, and who sat holding the reins while her father piled her valise and parcels on behind, looked her over with a half-awed, half-quizzical glance, and seemed a long time making up his mind to speak. Finally he said:

“How d’do? Want to ride here, on the seat, longside of me?”

There was an indefinable something in his tone, and in the grin that went with it, which she resented quickly.

“I had no idea of riding at all,” she made answer.

Her father, who had seated himself on a trunk in the centre of the sleigh, interposed. “Why, Jess, you remember Steve, don’t you?” he asked, apologetically.

The expressman and the girl looked briefly at one another, and nodded in a perfunctory manner.

Lawton went on: “He offered himself to give us a lift as far as the house. He’s goin’ that way—ain’t you, Steve?”

The impulse was strong in Jessica to resist—precisely why she might have found it difficult to explain—but apparently there was no choice remaining to her. “Very well, then,” she said, “I will sit beside you, father.”

She stepped into the sleigh at this, and took her seat on the other end of the big trunk. The express-man gave a slap of the lines and a cluck to the horse, which started briskly down the wide street, the bell at its collar giving forth a sustained, cheery tinkle as they sped through the snow.

“Well, what do you think—ain’t this better’n walkin’?” remarked Lawton, after a time, knocking his heels in a satisfied way against the side of the trunk.

“I felt as if the walk would do me good,” she answered, simply. Her face was impassivity itself, as she looked straight before her, over the express-man’s shoulder.

Ben Lawton felt oppressed by the conviction that his daughter was annoyed. Perhaps it was because he had insisted on riding—instead of saying that he would walk too, when she had disclosed her preference. He ventured upon an explanation, stealing wistful glances at her meantime:

“You see, Jess, Dave Rantell’s got a turkey-shoot on to-day, down at his place, and I kind o’ thought I’d try my luck with this here half-dollar, ’fore it gets dark. The days are shortenin’ so, this season o’ year, that I couldn’t get there without Steve give me a lift. And if I should get a turkey—why, we’ll have a regular Thanksgiving dinner; and with you come home, too!”

To this she did not trust herself to make answer, but kept her face rigidly set, and her eyes fixed as if engrossed in meditation. They had passed the great iron-works on the western outskirts of the village now, and the road leading to the suburb of Burfield ran for a little through almost open country. The keener wind raised here in resistance to the rapid transit of the sleigh—no doubt it was this which brought the deep flush to her cheeks and the glistening moisture to her eyes.

They presently overtook two young men who were trudging along abreast, each in one of the tracks made by traffic, and who stepped aside to let the sleigh go by.

“Hello, Hod!” called out the expressman as he passed. “I’ve got your trunks. Come back for good?”

“Hello, Steve!... I don’t quite know yet,” was the reply which came back—the latter half of it too late for the expressman’s ears.

Jessica had not seen the pedestrians until the sleigh was close upon them; then, in the moment’s glimpse of them vouchsafed her, she had recognized young Mr. Boyce, and, in looking away from him with swift decision, had gazed full into the eyes of his companion. This other remembered her too, it was evident, even in that brief instant of passing, for a smile of greeting was in the glance he returned, and he lifted his hat as she swept by.

This was Reuben Tracy, then! Despite his beard, he seemed scarcely to have aged in face during these last five years; but he looked straighter and stronger, and his bearing had more vigor and firmness than she remembered of him in the days when she was an irregular pupil at the little old Burfield-road school-house, and he was the teacher. She was glad that he looked so hale and healthful. And had her tell-tale face, she wondered, revealed as she passed him all the deep pleasure she felt at seeing him again—at knowing he was near? She tried to recall whether she had smiled, and could not make sure. But he had smiled—of that there was not a doubt; and he had known her on the instant, and had taken off his hat, not merely jerked his finger toward it. Ah, what delight there was in these thoughts!

She turned to her father, and lifting her voice above the jingle of the bell, spoke with animation:

“Tell me about the second man we just, passed—Mr. Tracy. Has he been in Thessaly long, and is he doing a good business?” She added hastily, as if to forestall some possible misconception: “He used to be my school-teacher, you know.”

“Guess he’s gettin’ on all right,” replied Lawton: “I hain’t heard nothin’ to the contrary. He must a’ been back from New York along about a year—maybe two.” To her great annoyance he shouted out to the driver: “Steve, how long’s Rube Tracy been back in Thessaly? You keep track o’ things better’n I do.”

The expressman replied over his shoulder: “Should say about a year come Christmas.” Then, after a moment’s pause, he transferred the reins to his other hand, twisted himself half around on his seat, and looked into Jessica’s face with his earlier and offensive expression of mingled familiarity and diffidence. “He appeared to remember you: took off his hat,” he said. There was an unmistakable leer on his lank countenance as he added:

“That other fellow was Hod Boyce, the General’s son, you know—just come back from the old country.”

“Yes, I know!” she made answer curtly, and turned away from him.

During what remained of the journey she preserved silence, keeping her gaze steadily fixed on the drifted fields beyond the fence in front of her and thinking about these two young men—at first with infinite bitterness and loathing of the one, and then, for a longer time, and with a soft, half-saddened pleasure, of the other.

It was passing strange that she should find herself here at all—here in this village which for years at a time she had sworn never to see again. But, when she thought of it, it seemed still more remarkable that at the very outset she should see, walking together, the two men whom memory most distinctly associated with her old life here as a girl. She had supposed them both—her good and her evil genius—to be far away; in all her inchoate specula-tions about how she should meet various people, no idea of encountering either of these had risen in her mind. Yet here they were—and walking together!

Their conjunction disturbed and vaguely troubled her. She tried over and over again to reassure herself by saying that it was a mere accident; of course they had been acquainted with each other for years, and they had happened to meet, and what more natural than that they should walk on side by side? And yet it somehow seemed wrong.

Reuben Tracy was the best man she had ever known. Poor girl—so grievous had been her share of life’s lessons that she really thought of him as the only good man she had ever known. In all the years of her girlhood—unhappy, wearied, and mutinous, with squalid misery at home, and no respite from it possible outside which, looked back upon at this distance, did not seem equally coarse and repellent—there had been but this solitary gleam of light, the friendship of Reuben Tracy. Striving now to recall the forms in which this friendship had been manifested, she was conscious that there was not much to remember. He had simply impressed her as a wise and unselfish friend—that was all. The example of kindness, gentleness, of patient industry which he had set before her in the rude, bare-walled little school-room, and which she felt now had made a deep and lasting impression on her, had been set for all the rest as well. If sometimes he had seemed to like her better than the other girls, his preference was of a silent, delicate, unexpressed sort—as if prompted solely by acquaintance with her greater need for sympathy. Without proffers of aid, almost without words, he had made her comprehend that, if evil fell upon her, the truest and most loyal help and counsel in all the world could be had from him for the asking.

The evil had fallen, in one massed, cruel, stunning stroke, and she had staggered blindly away—away anywhere, anyhow, to any fate. Almost her instincts had persuaded her to go to him; but he was a young man, only a few years her senior—and she had gone away without seeing him. But she had carried into the melancholy, bitter exile a strange sense of gratitude, if so it may be called, to Reuben Tracy for the compassionate aid he would have extended, had he known; and she said to herself now, in her heart of hearts, that it was this good feeling which had remained like a leaven of hope in her nature, and had made it possible for her at last, by its mysterious and beneficent workings, to come out into the open air again and turn her face toward the sunlight.

And he had taken off his hat to her!

The very thought newly nerved her for the ordeal which she had proposed to herself—the task of bearing, here in the daily presence of those among whom she had been reared, the burden of a hopelessly discredited life.

CHAPTER III.—YOUNG MR. BOYCE’S MEDITATIONS.

The changes in Thessaly’s external appearance did not particularly impress young Mr. Horace Boyce as he walked down the main street in the direction of his father’s house. For one thing, he had been here for a fortnight only a few months before, upon his return from Europe, and had had pointed out to him all of novelty that his native village offered. And again, nearly four years of acquaintance with the chief capitals of the Old World had so dulled his vision, so to speak, that it was no longer alert to detect the presence of new engine-houses and brick stores in the place of earlier and less imposing structures. To be accurate, he did not think much about Thessaly, one way or the other. So long as his walk led him along the busier part of the thoroughfare, his attention was fully occupied by encounters and the exchange of greetings with old school-fellows and neighbors, who all seemed glad to see him home again; and when he had passed the last store on the street, and had of necessity exchanged the sidewalk for one of the two deep-beaten tracks in the centre of the drifted road, his thoughts were still upon a more engrossing subject than the growth and prosperity of any North American town.

They were pleasant thoughts, though, as any one might read in a glance at his smooth-shaven, handsome face, with its satisfied half smile and its bold, confident expression of eyes. He stopped once in his rapid walk and stood for a minute or two in silent contemplation, just before he reached the open stretch of country which lay like a wedge between the two halves of the village. The white surface in front of him was strewn here with dry boughs and twigs, broken from the elms above by the weight of the recent snowfall. Beyond the fence some boys with comforters tied about their ears were skating on a pond in the fields. Mr. Boyce looked over these to the darkened middle-distance of the wintry picture, where rose the grimy bulk and tall smoke-belching chimneys of the Minster iron-works. He seemed to find exhilaration in his long, intent gaze at these solid evidences of activity and wealth, for he filled his lungs with a deep, contented draught of the nipping air when he finally turned and resumed his walk, swinging his shoulders and lightly tapping the crusted snowbanks at his side with his stick as he stepped briskly forward.

The Minster iron-works were undoubtedly worth thinking about, and all the more so because they were not new. During all the dozen or more years of their existence they had never once been out of blast. At seasons of extreme depression in the market, when even Pennsylvania was idle and the poor smelters of St. Louis and Chicago could scarcely remember when they had been last employed, these chimneys upon which he had just looked had never ceased for a day to hurl their black clouds into the face of the sky. They had been built by one of the cleverest and most daring of all the strong men whom that section had produced—the late Stephen Minster. It was he who had seen in the hills close about the choicest combination of ores to be found in the whole North; it was he who had brought in the capital to erect and operate the works, who had organized and controlled the enterprise by which a direct road to the coal-fields was opened, and who, in affording employment to thousands and good investments to scores, had not failed to himself amass a colossal fortune. He had been dead now nearly three years, but the amount of his wealth, left in its entirety to his family, was still a matter of conjecture. Popular speculation upon this point had but a solitary clew with which to work. In a contest which arose a year before his death, over the control of the Northern Union Telegraph Company, he had sent down proxies representing a clear six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of shares. With this as a basis for calculation, curious people had arrived at a shrewd estimate of his total fortune as ranging somewhere between two and three millions of dollars.

Stephen Minster had died very suddenly, and had been sincerely mourned by a community which owed him nothing but good-will, and could remember no single lapse from honesty or kindliness in his whole unostentatious, useful career. It was true that the absence of public-spirited bequests in his will created for the moment a sense of disappointment; but the explanation quickly set afoot—that he had not foreseen an early death, and had postponed to declining years, which, alas! never came, the task of apportioning a moiety of his millions among deserving charities—was plausible enough to be received everywhere. By virtue of a testament executed two years before—immediately after the not altogether edifying death of his only son—all his vast property devolved upon Mrs. Minster, and her two daughters, Kate and Ethel. Every unmarried man in Thessaly—and perhaps, with a certain vague repining, here and there one of the married men too—remembered all these facts each time he passed the home of the Minsters on the Seminary road, and looked over the low wall of masonry at the close-trimmed lawn, the costly fountain, the gravelled carriage-drive, and the great house standing back and aloof in stately seclusion among the trees and the rose-bushes.

Most of these facts were familiar as well to Mr. Horace Boyce. As he strode along, filliping the snow with his cane and humming to himself, he mentally embellished them with certain deductions drawn from information gathered during the journey by rail from New York. The Miss Kate Minster whom he had met was the central figure in his meditations, as indeed she was the important personage in her family. The mother had impressed him as an amiable and somewhat limited woman, without much force of character; the younger daughter, Ethel, he remembered dimly, as a delicate and under-sized girl who was generally kept home from school by reason of ill-health, and it was evident from such remarks as the two ladies dropped that she was still something of an invalid. But it was clear that Miss Kate lacked neither moral nor bodily strength.

He was quite frank with himself in thinking that, apart from all questions of money, she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. It was an added charm that her beauty fitted so perfectly the idea of great wealth. She might have been the daughter of the millions themselves, so tall and self-contained and regal a creature was she, with the firm, dark face of her father reproduced in feminine grace and delicacy of outline; with a skin as of an Oriental queen, softly luxuriant in texture and in its melting of creamy and damask and deepening olive hues; and with large, richly brown, deep-fringed eyes which looked proudly and steadily on all the world, young men included. These fine orbs were her most obvious physical inheritance from her father. The expression “the Minster eyes,” would convey as distinct an impression to the brain of the average Thessalian as if one had said “the Minster iron-works.” The great founder of the millions, Stephen Minster, had had them, and they were the notable feature of even his impressive face. The son who was dead, Stephen junior, had also had them, as Horace now recalled to mind; but set in his weak head they had seemed to lose significance, and had been, in truth, very generally in his latter years dimmed and opacated by the effects of dissipation. The pale, sweet-faced little Ethel Minster, as he remembered her, had them as well, although with her they were almost hazel in color, and produced a timid, mournful effect. But to no other face in the entire family gallery did they seem to so wholly belong of right as to the countenance of Miss Kate.

Young Mr. Boyce’s thoughts wandered easily from the image of the heiress to the less tangible question of her disposition, and, more particularly, of her attitude toward him. There were obscurities here over which a less sanguine young man might have bitten his lips. He had ventured upon recalling himself to mother and daughter very soon after the train left New York, and they had not shown any shadow of annoyance when he took a vacant chair opposite them and began a conversation which lasted, such as it was, through all the long journey. But now that he came to think of it, his share in that conversation had been not only the proverbial lion’s, but more nearly that of a whole zoological garden. Mrs. Minster had not affected any especial reserve; it was probable that she was by nature a listener rather than a talker, for she had asked him numerous questions about himself and about Europe. As for Miss Minster, he could scarcely recall anything she had said, what time she was looking at him instead of at her book. And he had not always been strictly comfortable under this look. There had been nothing unfriendly in it, it was true, nor could it occur to anybody to suspect in it a lack of comprehension or of interest. In fact, he said to himself, it was eloquent with both. The trouble was, as he uneasily attempted to define it, that she seemed to comprehend too much. Still, after all, he had said nothing to which she could take the faintest exception, and, if she was the intelligent woman he took her to be, there must have been a good deal in his talk to entertain her.

Even a less felicitous phrase-maker than Horace Boyce could have manufactured pleasant small-talk out of such experiences as his had been. The only son of a well-to-do and important man in Thessaly, he had had the further advantage of inheriting some twenty thousand dollars upon attaining his majority, and after finishing his course at college had betaken himself to Europe to pursue more recondite studies there, both in and out of his chosen profession of the law. The fact that he had devoted most of his attention to the gleaning of knowledge lying beyond the technical pale of the law did not detract from the interesting quality of his observations. Besides listening to lectures at Heidelberg, he had listened to the orchestra swaying in unison under the baton of Strauss at Vienna, and to a good many other things in Pesth and Paris and Brussels and London, a large number of which could with propriety be described in polite conversation. And he flattered himself that he had discoursed upon these things rather cleverly, skirting delicate points with neatness, and bringing in effective little descriptions and humorous characterizations in quite a natural way.

Moreover, he said to himself, it had been his privilege to see America in perspective—to stand upon a distant eminence, as it were, and look the whole country over, by and large, at a glance. This had enabled him on his return to discover the whimsical aspect of a good many things which the stay-at-home natives took with all seriousness. He had indicated some of these to the two ladies with a light and amiably bantering touch, and with a consciousness that he was opening up novel ground to both his hearers.

Still—he wondered if Miss Minster had really liked it. Could it be possible that she belonged to that thin-skinned class of Americans who cannot brook any comment upon anything in or of their country that is not wholly eulogistic—who resent even the most harmless and obvious pleasantry pointed at a cis-Atlantic institution? He decided this promptly in the negative. He had met such people, but he could not associate them in his mind with the idea of great wealth. And Miss Minster was rich—incredibly rich. No doubt she was thinking, even while she listened to him, of the time when she too should go to Europe, and dazzle its golden youth with her beauty and her millions. Now that he thought of it, he had seen much that same look before on the face of an American heiress, on her return from a London “five-o’clock tea,” at which she had met an eligible marquis.

Could it be that her thoughts ran, instead, upon an eligible somebody nearer home? He devoted himself at this to canvassing the chances of her fancy being already fixed. It was of little importance that nothing in their conversation suggested this, because it was a subject to which they naturally would not have alluded. Yet he recalled that Mrs. Minster had spoken of their great seclusion more than once. He had gathered, moreover, that they knew very few people in New York City, and that they had little acquaintance with the section of its population which is colloquially known as “society.” This looked mightily like a clear field.

Young Mr. Boyce stopped to thrust his cane under a twisted branch which lay on the snow, and toss it high over the fence, when he reached this stage of his meditations. His squared, erect shoulders took on a more buoyant swing than ever as he resumed his walk. A clear field, indeed!

And now as to the problem of proceeding to occupy that field. Where was there a gap in the wall? Millions were not to be approached and gained by simple and primitive methods, as one knocks apples off an overhanging bough with a fence-rail. Strategy and finesse of the first order were required. Without doubt there was an elaborate system of defences reared around this girl of girls. Mrs. Minster’s reference to seclusion might have itself been a warning that they lived inside a fort, and were as ready to train a gun on him as on anybody else. Battlements of this sort had been stormed time and time again, no doubt; human history was full of such instances. But Mr. Boyce’s tastes were not for violent or desperate adventures. To go over a parapet with one’s sword in one’s teeth, in deadly peril and tempestuous triumph, might suit his father the General: for his own part, it seemed more sagacious and indubitably safer to tunnel under the works, and emerge on the inside at the proper psychological moment to be welcomed as a friend and adviser.

Adviser! Who was their lawyer? The young man cast up in his mind the list of Thessaly’s legal practitioners, as far as he could remember them. It seemed most probable that Benoni Clarke, the ex-district-attorney, would have the Minster business, if for no other reason than that he needed it less than the rest did. But Mr. Clarke was getting old, and was in feeble health as well. Perhaps he would be glad to have a young, active, and able partner, who had had the advantage of European study. Or it might be—who could tell?—that the young man with the European education could go in on his own account, and by sheer weight of cleverness, energy, and superior social address win over the Minster business. What unlimited opportunities such a post would afford him! Not only would he be the only young man in Thessaly who had been outside of his own country, the best talker, the best-informed man, the best-mannered man of the place—but he would be able to exhibit all these excellences from the favored vantage-ground of an intimate, confidential relation. The very thought was intoxicating.

Mr. Horace Boyce was so pre-occupied with these pleasing meditations that he overtook a man walking in the other track, and had nearly passed him, before something familiar in the figure arrested his attention. He turned, and recognized an old schoolmate whom he had not seen for years, and had not expected to find in Thessaly.

“Why—Reuben Tracy, as I live!” he exclaimed, cordially. “So you’re back again, eh? On a visit to your folks?”

The other shook hands with him. “No,” he made answer. “I’ve had an office here for nearly a year. You are looking well. I’m glad to see you again. Have you come back for good?”

“Yes. That’s all settled,” replied Mr. Horace, without a moment’s hesitation.

CHAPTER IV.—REUBEN TRACY.

The two young men walked along together, separated by the ridge of snow between the tracks. They had never been more than friendly acquaintances, and they talked now of indifferent topics—of the grim climatic freak which had turned late November into mid-winter, of the results of the recent elections, and then of English weather and politics as contrasted with ours. It was a desultory enough conversation, for each had been absorbed in his own mind by thoughts a thousand leagues away from snowfalls and partisan strife, and the transition back to amiable commonplaces was not easy.

The music of a sleigh-bell, which for some time had been increasing in volume behind them, swelled suddenly into a shrill-voiced warning close at their backs, and they stepped aside into the snow to let the conveyance pass. It was then that the express-man called out his cheery greeting, and that Reuben lifted his hat.

As the sleigh grew small in the near distance, Reuben turned to his companion. “I notice that you told him you weren’t quite sure about staying here for good,” he remarked. “Perhaps I was mistaken—I understood you to say a few minutes ago that it was all settled.”

Horace was not to be embarrassed by so slight a discrepancy as this—although for the instant the reappearance of Jessica had sent his wits tripping—and he was ready with a glib explanation.

“What I meant was that I am quite settled in my desire to stay here. But of course there is just a chance that there may be no opening, and I don’t want to prematurely advertise what may turn out a failure. By the way, wasn’t that that Lawton girl?”

“Yes—Ben Lawton’s oldest daughter.”

Reuben’s tone had a slow preciseness in it which caused Horace to glance closely at him, and wonder if it were possible that it masked some ulterior meaning. Then he reflected that Reuben had always taken serious views of things, and talked in that grave, measured way, and that this was probably a mere mannerism. So he continued, with a careless voice:

“I haven’t seen her in years—should scarcely have known her. Isn’t it a little queer, her coming back?”

Reuben Tracy was a big man, with heavy shoulders, a large, impassive countenance, and an air which to the stranger suggested lethargy. It was his turn to look at Horace now, and he did so with a deliberate, steady gaze, to which the wide space between his eyes and the total absence of lines at the meeting of his brows lent almost the effect of a stare. When he had finished this inspection of his companion’s face, he asked simply:

“Why?”

“Well, of course, I have only heard it from others—but there seems to be no question about it—that she—”

“That she has been a sadly unfortunate and wretched girl,” interposed Reuben, finishing the sentence over which the other hesitated. “No, you are right. There is no question about that—no question whatever.”

“Well, that is why I spoke as I did—why I am surprised at seeing her here again. Weren’t you yourself surprised?”

“No, I knew that she was coming. I have a letter telling me the train she would arrive by.”

“Oh!”

The two walked on in silence for a minute or two. Then Horace said, with a fine assumption of good feeling and honest regret:

“I spoke thoughtlessly, old fellow; of course I couldn’t know that you were interested in—in the matter. I truly hope I didn’t say anything to wound your feelings.”

“Not at all,” replied Reuben. “How should you? What you said is what everybody will say—must say. Besides, my feelings are of no interest whatever, so far as this affair is concerned. It is her feelings that I am thinking of; and the more I think—well, the truth is, I am completely puzzled. I have never in all my experience been so wholly at sea.”

Manifestly Horace could do nothing at this juncture but look his sympathy. To ask any question might have been to learn nothing. But his curiosity was so great that he almost breathed a sigh of relief when Reuben spoke again, even though the query he put had its disconcerting side:

“I daresay you never knew much about her before she left Thessaly?”

“I knew her by sight, of course, just as a village boy knows everybody. I take it you did know her. I can remember that she was a pretty girl.”

If there was an underlying hint in this conjunction of sentences, it missed Reuben’s perception utterly. He replied in a grave tone:

“She was in my school, up at the Burfield. And if you had asked me in those days to name the best-hearted girl, the brightest girl, the one who in all the classes had the making of the best woman in her, I don’t doubt that I should have pointed to her. That is what makes the thing so inexpressibly sad to me now; and, what is more, I can’t in the least see my way.”

“Your way to what?”

“Why, to helping her, of course. She has undertaken something that frightens me when I think of it. This is the point: She has made up her mind to come back here, earn her own living decently, face the past out and live it down here among those who know that past best.”

“That’s a resolution that will last about three weeks.”

“No, I think she is determined enough. But I fear that she cruelly underestimates the difficulties of her task. To me it looks hopeless, and I’ve thought it over pretty steadily the last few days.”

“Pardon my asking you,” said Horace, “but you have confided thus far in me—what the deuce have you got to do with either her success or her failure?”

“I’ve told you that I was her teacher,” answered Reuben, still with the slow, grave voice. “That in itself would give me an interest in her. But there has been a definite claim made on me in her behalf. You remember Seth Fairchild, don’t you?”

“Perfectly. He edits a paper down in Tecumseh, doesn’t he? He did, I know, when I went abroad.”

“Yes. Well, his wife—who was his cousin, Annie Fairchild, and who took the Burfield school after I left it to study law—she happens to be an angel. She is the sort of woman who, when you know her, enables you to understand all the exalted and sublime things that have ever been written about her sex. Well, a year or so after she married Seth and went to live in Tecumseh, she came to hear about poor Jessica Lawton, and her woman’s heart prompted her to hunt the girl up and give her a chance for her life. I don’t know much about what followed—this all happened a good many months ago—but I get a letter now from Seth, telling me that the girl is resolved to come home, and that his wife wants me to do all I can to help her.”

“Well, that’s what I call letting a friend in for a particularly nice thing.”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand me,” said Reuben; “I shall be only too glad if I can serve the poor girl. But how to do it—that’s what troubles me.”

“Her project is a crazy one, to begin with. I wonder that sane people like the Fairchilds should have encouraged it.”

“I don’t think they did. My impression is that they regarded it as unwise and tried to dissuade her from it. Seth doesn’t write as if he thought she would succeed.”

“No, I shouldn’t say there was much danger of it. She will be back again in Tecumseh before Christmas.” After a pause Horace added, in a confidential way: “It’s none of my business, old fellow; but if I were you I’d be careful how I acted in this matter. You can’t afford to be mixed up with her in the eyes of the people here. Of course your motives are admirable, but you know what an overgrown village is for gossip. You won’t be credited with good intentions or any disinterestedness, believe me.”

This seemed to be a new view of the situation to Reuben. He made no immediate answer, but walked along with his gaze bent on the track before him and his hands behind his back. At last he said, with an air of speaking to himself:

“But if one does mean well and is perfectly clear about it in his own mind, how far ought he to allow his course to be altered by the possible misconceptions of others? That opens up a big question, doesn’t it?”

“But you have said that you were not clear about it—that you were all at sea.”

“As to means, yes; but not as to motives.”

“Nobody but you will make the distinction. And you have your practice to consider—the confidence of your clients. Fancy the effect it will have on them—your turning up as the chief friend and patron of a—of the Lawton girl! You can’t afford it.” Reuben looked at his companion again with the same calm, impassive gaze. Then he said slowly: “I can see how the matter presents itself to you. I had thought first of going to the dépôt to meet her; but, on consideration, it seemed better to wait and have a talk with her after she had seen her family. I am going out to their place now.”

The tone in which this announcement was made served to change the topic of conversation. The talk became general again, and Horace turned it upon the subject of the number of lawyers in town, their relative prosperity and value, and the local condition of legal business. He found that he was right in guessing that Mr. Clarke enjoyed Thessaly’s share of the business arising from the Minster ironworks, and that this share was more important than formerly, when all important affairs were in the hands of a New York firm. He was interested, too, in what Reuben Tracy revealed about his own practice.

“Oh, I have nothing to complain of,” Reuben said, in response to a question. “It is a good thing to be kept steadily at work—good for a man’s mind as well as for his pocket. Latterly I have had almost too much to attend to, since the railroad business on this division was put in my charge; and I grumble to myself sometimes over getting so little spare time for reading and for other things I should like to attempt. I suppose a good many of the young lawyers here would call that an ungrateful frame of mind. Some of them have a pretty hard time of it, I am afraid. Occasionally I can put some work in their way; but it isn’t easy, because clients seem to resent having their business handled by unsuccessful men. That would be an interesting thing to trace, wouldn’t it?—the law of the human mind which prompts people to boost a man as soon as he has shown that he can climb without help, and to pull down those who could climb well enough with a little assistance.”

“So you think there isn’t much chance for still another young lawyer to enter the field here?” queried Horace, bringing the discussion back to concrete matters.

“Oh, that’s another thing,” replied Reuben. “There is no earthly reason why you shouldn’t try. There are too many lawyers here, it is true, but then I suppose there are too many lawyers everywhere—except heaven. A certain limited proportion of them always prosper—the rest don’t. It depends upon yourself which class you will be in. Go ahead, and if I can help you in any way I shall be very glad.”

“You’re kind, I’m sure. But, you know, it won’t be as if I came a stranger to the place,” said Horace. “My father’s social connections will help me a good deal”—Horace thought he noted a certain incredulous gesture by his companion here, and wondered at it, but went on—“and then my having studied in Europe ought to count. I have another advantage, too, in being on very friendly terms with Mrs. and Miss Minster. I rode up with them from New York to-day, and we had a long talk. I don’t want anything said about it yet, but it looks mightily as if I were to get the whole law business of the ironworks and of their property in general.”

Young Mr. Boyce did not wince or change color under the meditative gaze with which Reuben regarded him upon hearing this; but he was conscious of discomfort, and he said to himself that his companion’s way of staring like an introspective ox at people was unpleasant.

“That would be a tremendous start for you,” remarked Reuben at last. “I hope you won’t be disappointed in it.”

“It seems a tolerably safe prospect,” answered Horace, lightly. “You say that you’re overworked.”

“Not quite that, but I don’t get as much time as I should like for outside matters. I want to go on the school board here, for example—I see ever so many features of the system which seem to me to be flaws, and which I should like to help remedy—but I can’t spare the time. And then there is the condition of the poor people in the quarter grown up around the iron-works and the factories, and the lack of a good library, and the saloon question, and the way in which the young men and boys of the village spend their evenings, and so on. These are the things I am really interested in; and instead of them I have to devote all my energies to deeds and mortgages and specifications for trestle-works. That’s what I meant.”

“Why don’t you take in a partner? That would relieve you of a good deal of the routine.”

“Do you know, I’ve thought of that more than once lately. I daresay that if the right sort of a young man had been at hand, the idea would have attracted me long ago. But, to tell the truth, there isn’t anybody in Thessaly who meets precisely my idea of a partner—whom I quite feel like taking into my office family, so to speak.”

“Perhaps I may want to talk with you again on this point,” said Horace.

To this Reuben made no reply, and the two walked on for a few moments in silence.

They were approaching a big, ungainly, shabby-looking structure, which presented a receding roof, a row of windows with small, old-fashioned panes of glass, and a broad, rickety veranda sprawling the whole width of its front, to the highway on their left. This had once been a rural wayside tavern, but now, by the encircling growth of the village, it had taken on a hybrid character, and managed to combine in a very complete way the coarse demerits of a town saloon with the evil license of a suburban dive. Its location rendered it independent of most of the restrictions which the village authorities were able to enforce in Thessaly itself, and this freedom from restraint attracted the dissipated imagination of town and country alike. It was Dave Rantell’s place, and being known far and wide as the most objectionable resort in Dearborn County, was in reality much worse than its reputation.

The open sheds at the side of the tavern were filled with horses and sleighs, and others were ranged along at the several posts by the roadside in front—these latter including some smart city cutters, and even a landau on runners. From the farther side of the house came, at brief intervals, the sharp report of rifle-shots, rising loud above the indistinct murmuring of a crowd’s conversation.

“It must be a turkey-shoot,” said Reuben. “This man Rantell has them every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he added, as they came in view of the scene beyond the tavern. “There! Have you seen anything in Europe like that?” Let it be stated without delay that there was no trace of patriotic pride in his tone.

The wide gate of the tavern yard was open, and the path through it had been trampled smooth by many feet. In the yard just beyond were clustered some forty or fifty men, standing about in the snow, and with their backs to the road. Away in the distance, and to the right, were visible two or three slouching figures of men. Traversing laterally and leftward the broad, unbroken field of snow, the eye caught a small, dark object on the great white sheet; if the vision was clear and far-sighted, a closer study would reveal this to be a bird standing alone in the waste of whiteness, tied by the leg to a stake near by, and waiting to be shot at. The attention of every man in the throng was riveted on this remote and solitary fowl. There was a deep hush for a fraction of a second after each shot. Then the turkey either hopped to one side, which meant that the bullet had gone whistling past, or sank to the ground after a brief wild fluttering of wings. In the former case, another loaded rifle was handed out, and suspense began again; in the latter event, there ensued a short intermission devoted to beverages and badinage, the while a boy started across the fields toward the throng with the dead turkey, and the distant slouching figures busied themselves in tying up a new feathered target.

“No, it isn’t what you would call elevating, is it?” said Horace, as the two stood looking over the fence upon the crowd. “Still, it has its interest as a national product. I’ve seen dog-fights and cock-mains in England attended by whole thousands of men, that were ever so much worse than this. If you think of it, this isn’t particularly brutal, as such sports go.”

“But what puzzles me is that men should like such sports at all,” said Reuben.

“At any rate,” replied Horace, “we’re better off in that respect than the English are. The massacre of rats in a pit is a thing that you can get an assemblage of nobility, and even royalty, for, over there. Now, that isn’t even relatively true here. Take this turkey-shoot of Rantell’s, for example. You won’t find any gentlemen here; that is, anybody who sets up to be a gentleman in either the English or the American sense of the word.”

As if in ironical answer, a sharp, strident voice rose above the vague babble of the throng inside the yard, and its accents reached the two young men with painful distinctness:

“I’ll bet five dollars that General Boyce kills his six birds in ten shots—bad cartridges barred!”

CHAPTER V.—THE TURKEY-SHOOT.

The compassionate Reuben was quick to feel the humiliation with which this brawling announcement of the General’s presence must cover the General’s son. It had been apparent to him before that Horace would have to considerably revise the boyish estimate of his father’s position and importance which, he brought back with him from Europe. But it was cruel to have the work of disillusion begun in this rude, blunt form. He tried to soften the effect of the blow.

“It isn’t as bad as all that,” he said, tacitly ignoring what they had just heard. “No doubt some rough people do come to these gatherings; but, on the other hand, if a man is fond of shooting, why, don’t you see, this furnishes him with the best kind of test of his skill. Really, there is no reason why he shouldn’t come—and—besides—”

Reuben was not clever at saying things he did not wholly mean, and his good-natured attempt to gloss over the facts came to an abrupt halt from sheer lack of ideas.

“I suppose I shall have to learn to be a Thessalian all over again,” said Horace. “If you don’t mind, well go in. It’s just as well to see the thing.”

Suiting the action to the word, he moved toward the gate. Reuben hesitated for a moment, and then, with an “All right—for a few minutes”—followed him into the yard. The two young men stood upon the outskirts of the crowd for a time, and then, as opportunity favored, edged their way through until they were a part of the inner half-ring around a table, upon which were rifles, cartridges, cleaning rags, a bottle and some tumblers. At their feet, under and about the table, lay several piles of turkeys. The largest of these heaps, containing some dozen birds, was, as they were furtively informed by a small boy, the property of the “General.”

This gentleman, who stood well to the front of the table, might be pardoned for not turning around to note the presence of new-comers, since he himself had some money wagered on his work. He had on the instant fired his third shot, and stood with the smoking gun lowered, and his eyes fixed on the target in concentrated expectancy. The turkey made a movement and somebody called out “hit!” But the General’s keen vision told him better. “No, it was a line shot,” he said, “a foot too high.” He kept his gaze still fixed on the remote object, mechanically taking the fresh gun which was handed to him, but not immediately raising it to his shoulder.

General Sylvanus—familiarly called “Vane”—Boyce was now close upon sixty, of middle height and a thick and portly figure, and with perfectly white, close-cropped hair and mustache. His face had in its day boasted both regular, well-cut features and a clear complexion. But the skin was now of one uniform florid tint, even to the back of his neck, and the outlines of the profile were blurred and fattened. His gray eyes, as they swept the field of snow, had still their old, sharp, commanding glance, but they looked out from red and puffy lids.

Just as he lifted his gun, an interested bystander professed to discover Horace for the first time, and called out exuberantly: “Why, hello, Hod! I say, ‘Vane, here’s your boy Hod!”

“Oh, here, fair play!” shouted some of the General’s backers; “you mustn’t try that on—spoiling his aim in that way.” Their solicitude was uncalled for.

“Damn my boy Hod, and you too!” remarked the General calmly, raising his rifle with an uninterrupted movement, levelling it with deliberation, firing, and killing his bird.

Amid the hum of conversation which arose at this, the General turned, laid his gun down, and stepped across the space to where Horace and Reuben stood.

“Well, my lad,” he said heartily, shaking his son’s hand, “I’m glad to see you back. I’d have been at the dépôt to meet you, only I had this match on with Blodgett, and the money was up. I hope you didn’t mind my damning you just now—I daresay I haven’t enough influence to have it do you much harm—and it was Grigg’s scheme to rattle my nerve just as I was going to shoot. How are you, anyway? How de do, Tracy? What’ll you both drink? This is rye whiskey here, but they’ll bring out anything else you want.”

“I’ll take a mouthful of this,” said Horace; “hold on, not so much.” He poured back some of the generous portion which had been given him, and touched glasses with his father.

“You’re sure you won’t have anything, Tracy?” said the General. “No? You don’t know what’s good for you. Standing around in the cold here, a man needs something.”

“But I’m not going to stand around in the cold,” answered Reuben with a half-smile. “I must be going on in a moment or two.”

“Don’t go yet,” said the General, cheerily, as he put down his glass and took up the gun. “Wait and see me shoot my score. I’ve got the range now.”

“You’ve got to kill every bird but one, now, General,” said one of his friends, in admonition.

“All right; don’t be afraid,” replied the champion, in a confident tone.

But it turned out not to be all right. The seventh shot was a miss, and so was the tenth, upon which, as the final and conclusive one, great interest hung. Some of those who had lost money by reason of their faith in the General seemed to take it to heart, but the General himself displayed no sign of gloom. He took another drink, and then emptied his pockets of all the bank-bills they contained, and distributed them among his creditors with perfect amiability. There was not enough money to go around, evidently, for he called out in a pleasant voice to his son:

“Come here a minute, Hod. Have you got thirty dollars loose in your pocket? I’m that much short.” He pushed about the heap of limp turkeys on the snow under the table with one foot, in amused contemplation, and added: “These skinny wretches have cost us about nine dollars apiece. You might at least have fed ’em a trifle better, Dave.”

Horace produced the sum mentioned and handed it over to his father with a somewhat subdued, not to say rueful, air. He did not quite like the way in which the little word “us” had been used.

While the General was light-heartedly engaged in apportioning out his son’s money, and settling his bill, a new man came up, and, taking a rifle in his hands, inquired the price of a shot. He was told that it was ten cents, and to this information was added with cold emphasis the remark that before he fooled with the guns he must put down his money.

“Oh, I’ve got the coin fast enough,” said the newcomer, ringing four dimes on the table.

“Wait a moment,” said Horace to his father and Reuben, who were about to quit the yard. “Let’s watch Ben Lawton shoot. I might as well see the last of my half-dollar. He’s had one drink out of it already.”

Lawton lifted the gun as if he were accustomed to firearms, and after he had made sure of his footing on the hard-trodden snow, took a long, careful aim, and fired. It was with evident sorrow that he saw the snow fly a few feet to one side of the turkey. He decided to have only two shots more, and one drink, and the drink first—a drink of such full and notable dimensions that Dave Rantell was half-tempted to intervene between the cup and the lip. The two shots which followed were very good shots indeed—one of them even seemed to have cut some feathers into the air—but they killed no turkey.

Poor Ben looked for a long time after his last bullet, as if in some vague hope that it might have paused on the way, and would resume its fatal course in due season. Then he laid the rifle down with a deep sigh, and walked slowly out, with his hands plunged dejectedly into his trousers pockets, and his shoulders more rounded than ever. The habitual expression of helpless melancholy which his meagre, characterless visage wore was deepened now to despair.

“Well, Ben,” said Horace to him, as he shuffled past them, “you were right. You might just as well have hung around the dépôt, and let some one else carry my things. You’ve got no more to show for it now than if you had.”

The young man spoke in the tone of easy, paternal banter which prosperous people find it natural to adopt toward their avowedly weak and foolish brethren, and it did not occur to Lawton to resent it. He stopped, and lifted his head just high enough to look in a gloomy way at Horace and his companions for a moment; then he dropped it again and turned to resume his course without answering. On second thought he halted, and without again looking up, groaned out:

“There ain’t another such a darned worthless fool as I be in the whole darned county. I don’t know what I’ll say to her. I’m a good mind not to go home at all. Here I was, figurin’ on havin’ a real Thanksgiving dinner for her, to try and make her feel glad she’d come back amongst us again; and if I’d saved my money and fired all five shots, I’d a got a bird, sure—and that’s what makes me so blamed mad. It’s always my darned luck!”

While he spoke a boy came up to them, dragging a hand-sled upon which General Boyce’s costly collection of poultry was piled. Horace stopped the lad, and took from the top of the heap two of the best of the fowls.

“Here, Ben,” he said, “take these home with you. We’ve got more than we know what to do with. We should only give them away to people who didn’t need them.”

Lawton had been moved almost to tears by the force of his self-depreciatory emotions. His face brightened now on the instant, as he grasped the legs of the turkeys and felt their weight. He looked satisfiedly down at their ruffling circumference of blue-black feathers, and at their pimply pink heads dragging sidewise on the snow.

“You’re a regular brick, Hod,” he said, with more animation than it was his wont to display. “They’ll be tickled to death down to the house. I’m obliged to you, and so she’ll be—”

He stopped short, weighed the birds again in his hand with a saddened air, and held them out toward Horace. All the joy had gone out of his countenance and tone.

“No; I’m much obliged to you, Hod, but I can’t take ’em,” he said, with pathetic reluctance.

“Nonsense!” replied the young man, curtly. “Don’t make a fool of yourself twice in the same afternoon. Of course you’ll take them. Only go straight home with them, instead of selling them for drinks.”

Horace turned upon his heel as he spoke and rejoined his father and Reuben, who had walked on slowly ahead. The General had been telling his companion some funny story, and his eyes were still twinkling with merriment as his son came up, and he repeated to him the gist of his humorous narrative.

Horace did not seem to appreciate the joke, and kept a serious face even at the most comical part of the anecdote. This haunting recurrence of the Lawton business, as he termed it in his thoughts, annoyed him; and still more was he disturbed and vexed by what he had seen of his father. During his previous visit to Thessaly upon his return from Europe, some months before, the General had been leading a temperate and almost monastic life under the combined restraints of rheumatism and hay-fever, and this present revelation of his tastes and habits came therefore in the nature of a surprise to Horace. The latter was unable to find any elements of pleasure in this surprise, and scowled at the snow accordingly, instead of joining in his father’s laughter. Besides, the story was not altogether of the kind which sits with most dignity on paternal lips.

The General noted his son’s solemnity and deferred to it. “I’m glad you gave that poor devil the turkeys,” he said. “I suppose they’re as poor as they make ’em. Only—what do you think, Tracy; as long as I’d shot all the birds, I might have been consulted, eh, about giving them away?”

The query was put in a jocular enough tone, but it grated upon the young man’s mood. “I don’t think the turkey business is one that either of us particularly shines in,” he replied, with a snap in his tone. “You say that your turkeys cost you nine dollars apiece. Apparently I am by way of paying fifteen dollars each for my two.”

“‘By way of’—that’s an English expression, isn’t it?” put in Reuben, hastily, to avert the threatened domestic dispute. “I’ve seen it in novels, but I never heard it used before.”

The talk was fortunately turned at this from poultry to philology; and the General, though he took no part in the conversation, evinced no desire to return to the less pleasant subject. Thus the three walked on to the corner where their ways separated. As they stood here for the parting moment, Reuben said in an aside to Horace:

“That was a kindly act of yours—to give Lawton the turkeys. I can’t tell you how much it pleased me. Those little things show the character of a man. If you like to come down to my office Friday, and are still of the same mind about a partnership, we will talk it over.”

CHAPTER VI.—THANKSGIVING AT THE MINSTERS’.

I REMEMBER having years ago been introduced to one of America’s richest men, as he sat on the broad veranda of a Saratoga hotel in the full glare of the morning sunlight. It is evident that at such a solemn moment I should have been filled with valuable and impressive reflections; yet, such is the perversity and wrong-headedness of the human mind, I could for the life of me evolve no weightier thought than this: “Here is a man who can dispose of hundreds of millions of dollars by a nod of the head, yet cannot with all this countless wealth command a dye for his whiskers which will not turn violet in the sunshine!”

The sleek and sober-visaged butler who moved noiselessly about the dining-room of the Minster household may have had some such passing vision of the vanity of riches, as he served what was styled a Thanksgiving dinner. Vast as the fortune was, it could not surround that board with grateful or lighthearted people upon even this selected festal day.

The room itself must have dampened any but the most indomitably cheerful spirits. It had a sombre and formal aspect, to which the tall oleanders and dwarf palms looking through the glass on the conservatory side lent only an added sense of coldness. The furniture was of dark oak and even darker leather; the walls were panelled in two shades of the same serious tint; the massive, carved sideboard and the ponderous mantel declined to be lifted out of their severe dignity by such trivial accessories as silver and rare china and vases of flowers. There were pictures in plenty, and costly lace curtains inside the heavy outer hangings at the windows, and pretty examples of embroidery here and there which would have brightened any less resolutely grave environment: in this room they went for nothing, or next to nothing.

Four women sat at this Thanksgiving dinner, and each, being in her own heart conscious of distinct weariness, politely took it for granted that the others were enjoying their meal.

Talk languished, or fitfully flared up around some strictly uninteresting subject with artificial fervor the while the butler was in the room. His presence in the house was in the nature of an experiment, and Mrs. Minster from time to time eyed him in a furtive way, and then swiftly turned her glance aside on the discovery that he was eying her. Probably he was as good as other butlers, she reflected; he was undoubtedly English, and he had come to her well recommended by a friend in New York. But she was unaccustomed to having a man servant in the dining-room, and it jarred upon her to call him by his surname, which was Cozzens, instead of by the more familiar Daniel or Patrick as she did the gardener and the coachman. Before he came—a fortnight or so ago—she had vaguely thought of him as in livery; but the idea of seeing him in anything but what she called a “dress suit,” and he termed “evening clothes,” had been definitely abandoned. What she chiefly wished about him now was that he would not look at her all the time.

Mrs. Minster, being occupied in this way, contributed very little to what conversation there was during the dinner. It was not her wont to talk much at any time. She was perhaps a trifle below the medium height of her sex, full-figured rather than stout, and with a dark, capable, and altogether singular face, in which the most marked features were a proud, thin-lipped mouth, which in repose closed tight and drew downward at the corners; small black eyes, that had an air of seeing very cleverly through things; and a striking arrangement of her prematurely white hair, which was brushed straight from the forehead over a high roll. From a more or less careful inspection of this face, even astute people were in the habit of concluding that Mrs. Minster was a clever and haughty woman. In truth, she was neither. Her reserve was due in part to timidity, in part to lack of interest in the matters which seemed to concern those with whom she was most thrown into contact outside her own house. Her natural disposition had been the reverse of unkindly, but it included an element of suspicion, which the short and painful career of her son, and the burden of responsibility for a great estate, had tended unduly to develop. She did not like many of the residents of Thessaly, yet it had never occurred to her to live elsewhere. If the idea had dawned in her mind, she would undoubtedly have picked out as an alternative her native village on the Hudson, where her Dutch ancestors had lived from early colonial times. The life of a big city had never become even intelligible to her, much less attractive. She went to the Episcopal church regularly, although she neither professed nor felt any particular devotion to religious ideals or tenets. She gave of her substance generously, though not profusely, to all properly organized and certified charities, but did not look about for, or often recognize when they came in her way, subjects for private benefaction. She applied the bulk of her leisure time to the writing of long and perfectly commonplace letters to female relatives in various sections of the Republic. She was profoundly fond of her daughters, but was rarely impelled to demonstrative proofs of this affection. Very often she grew tired of inaction, mental and physical; but she accepted this without murmuring as a natural and proper result of her condition in life, much as one accepts an uncomfortable sense of repletion after a dinner. When she did not know what else to do, she ordinarily took a nap.

It must have been by the law of oppositive attraction that her chosen intimate was Miss Tabitha Wilcox, the spare and angular little lady who sat across the table from her, the sole guest at the Thanksgiving dinner. The most vigorous imagination could not conceive her in the act of dozing for so much as an instant during hours when others kept awake. Vigilant observation and an unwearying interest in affairs were written in every line of her face: you could read them in her bright, sharp eyes; in the alert, almost anxious posture of her figure; in the very conformation of the little rows of iron-gray curls, which mounted like circular steps above each ear. She was a kindly soul, was Miss Tabitha, who could not listen unmoved to any tale of honest suffering, and who gave of her limited income to the poor with more warmth than prudence.

Her position in Thessaly was a unique one. She belonged, undoubtedly, to the first families, for her grandfather, Judge Abijah Wilcox, had been one of the original settlers, in those halcyon years following the close of the Revolution, when the good people of Massachusetts and Connecticut swarmed, uninvited, across the Hudson, and industriously divided up among themselves the territorial patrimony of the slow and lackadaisical Dutchmen. Miss Tabitha still lived in the roomy old house which the judge had built; she sat in one of the most prominent pews in the Episcopal church, and her prescriptive right to be president of the Dorcas Mite Society had not been questioned now these dozen years. Although she was far from being wealthy, her place in the very best and most exclusive society of Thessaly was taken for granted by everybody. But Miss Tabitha was herself not at all exclusive. She knew most of the people in the village: only the insuperable limitations of time and space prevented her knowing them all. And not even these stern barriers availed to bound her information concerning alike acquaintances and strangers. There were persons who mistook her eager desire to be of service in whatever was going forward for meddlesomeness. Some there were who even resented her activity, and thought of her as a malevolent old gossip. These latter were deeply in the wrong. Miss Tabitha loved everybody, and had never consciously done injury to any living soul. As for gossip, she could no more help talking than the robin up in the elm boughs of a sunny April morning can withhold the song that is in him.

It has been said that the presence of the butler threw a gloom over the dinner-party. It did not silence Miss Tabitha, but at least she felt constrained to discourse upon general and impersonal subjects while he was in hearing. The two daughters of the house, who faced each other at the ends of the table, asked her questions or offered comments at intervals, and once or twice their mother spoke. All ate from the plates that were set before them, in a perfunctory way, without evidence of appreciation. There was some red wine in a decanter on the table—I fancy none of them could have told precisely what it was—and of this Miss Tabitha drank a little, diluted with water. The two girls had allowed the butler to fill their glasses as well, and from time to time they made motions as of sipping from these, merely to keep their guest in company. Mrs. Minster had no wine-glasses at her plate, and drank ice-water. Every time that any one of the others lifted the wine to her lips, a common thought seemed to flash through the minds around the table—the memory of the son and heir who had died from drink.

When the butler, with an accession of impressiveness in his reserved demeanor, at last handed around plates containing each its thin layer of pale meat, Ethel Minster was moved to put into words what all had been feeling:

“Mamma, this isn’t like Thanksgiving at all!” she said, with the freedom of a favorite child; “it was ever so much nicer to have the turkey on the table where we could all see him, and pick out in our minds what part we would especially like. To have the carving done outside, and only slices of the breast brought in to us—it is as if we were away from home somewhere, in a hotel among strangers.”

Mrs. Minster, by way of answer, looked at the butler, the glance being not so much an inquiry as a reference of the matter to one who was a professor of this particular sort of thing. Her own inclination jumped with that of her daughter, but the possession of a butler entailed certain responsibilities, which must be neither ignored nor evaded. Happily Cozzens’s mind was not wholly inelastic. He uttered no word, but, with a slight obeisance which comprehended mistress and daughter and guest in careful yet gracious gradations of significance, went out, and presently returned with a huge dish, which he set in front of Mrs. Minster. He brought the carving instruments, and dignifiedly laid them in their place, as a chamberlain might invest a queen with her sceptre. Even when Miss Kate said, “If we need you any more, Cozzens, we will ring,” he betrayed neither surprise nor elation, but bowed again gravely, and left the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

“I am sure he will turn out a perfect jewel,” said Miss Tabitha. “You were very fortunate to get him.”

“But there are times,” said Kate, “when one likes to take off one’s rings, even if the stones are perfection itself.”

This guarded reference to the fact that Mrs. Minster had secured an admirable servant who was a nuisance at small feminine dinner-parties sufficed to dismiss the subject. Miss Tabitha assumed on the moment a more confidential manner and tone:

“I wonder if you’ve heard,” she said, “that young Horace Boyce has come back. Why, now I think of it, he must have come up in your train.”

“He was in our car,” replied Mrs. Minster. “He sat by us, and talked all the way up. I never heard a man’s tongue run on so in all my born days.”

“He takes that from his grandmother Beekman,” explained Miss Tabitha, by way of parenthesis. “She was something dreadful: talking ‘thirteen to the dozen’ doesn’t begin to express it. You don’t remember her. She went down to New York when I was a mere slip of a girl, to have a set of false teeth fitted—they were a novelty in those days—and it was winter time, and she wouldn’t listen to the dentist’s advice to keep her mouth shut, and she caught cold, and it turned into lockjaw, and that was the last of her. It was just after her daughter Julia had been married to young Sylvanus Boyce. Dear me, how time flies! I can remember her old bombazine gown and her black Spanish mits, and her lace cap on one side of her head, as if it were only yesterday. And here Julia’s been dead twenty years and more, and her grown-up son’s come home from Europe, and the General—”

The old maid stopped short, because her sentence could not be charitably finished. “How did you like Horace?” she asked, to shift the subject, and looking at Kate Minster.

The tall, dark girl with the rich complexion and the beautiful, proud eyes glanced up at her questioner impatiently, as if disposed to resent the inquiry. Then she seemed to reflect that no offence could possibly have been intended, for she answered pleasantly enough:

“He seemed an amiable sort of person; and I should judge he was clever, too. He always was a smart boy—I think that is the phrase. He talked to mamma most of the time.”

The Lawton Girl

THE LAWTON GIRL

By Harold Frederic

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

1890

THE LAWTON GIRL

CHAPTER I.—“AND YET YOU KNEW!”

CHAPTER II.—CONFRONTING THE ORDEAL.

`````REUBEN TRACY,

CHAPTER III.—YOUNG MR. BOYCE’S MEDITATIONS.

CHAPTER IV.—REUBEN TRACY.

CHAPTER V.—THE TURKEY-SHOOT.

CHAPTER VI.—THANKSGIVING AT THE MINSTERS’.