HIS FATHER'S SON.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 198, 19 August 1908, Page 10

HIS FATHER'S SON.

By Mary Roberts Rinehart.

COMPLETE STORY. j

M rs . Priestley put down the cup of coffee at her son's elbow, and stood hesi- | tatinflv beside h.s chair. . "When you're through, Jim,' she said, slowly, "I'll—l have something to tell He put down his cup hastily, and half turned toward his mother. "What is it?" he said. "Anything about Molly r" "No, it's not Molly. Jim, your father s Coming home." She drew back a little then, frightened by the expression in her son's eyes. Her still rounded face lost some of its colour, and she seemed to shrink in her plain, o<rly calico dress. At the crash of Jim's overturned chair she put out her hands deprecatingly. "Don't, now. Jim," she begged. "Don't carry on about it! It would have been only a year or so more, anyhow." Speech did not come easily to Jim Priestley. Like his father before him,! he was a silent man. to whom a blow! ceme more quickly than a word, and 1 whose rage was of the brooding, sullen, kind. Now, as he walked past his | mother and took his hat from its nail on the kitchen-door, there was no outburst j of anger; only the straight line of his I lips showed that her words had any effect' on him. He was a tall, loose'- limbed young fellow, with heavy black hair, and eyes that were- almost childishly blue— eves like those of the little old woman who watched him. At the door he stopped and turned around. "He's not coming here," he said, the very lack of inllection making his tone menacing. "It's the only place he's got, Jim!" she pleaded. "I know it's yours now, but where else can he go? You wouldn't turn your own father out in the street, would" you ? He was a good father to. you for fifteen years, Jimmie." There | was a haunting note of reproach in the thin o!(! voice, and the corded, calloused hands under the gingham apron were twisting desperately. "I've seen trouble," she went on in her strained treble, "but I never thought to see the day a child of mine would turn his father out in the street." Jim opened the door with an air of finality, then he closed it again, and came slowly back into the room. "He's been a good father, has he?" he sneered. "He wu a fine one, he was—a credit to his family! We're proud of him, aren't we? Ten years I've walked the street and seen people turn to look at mc. because my father killed a man and was doing time for it. And if you think, after nil that, that I'm going to have any shave-pated, lock-stepping exconvict in my house—my house," he repeated, "you're wrong, that's all. He doesn't come here!" The painful tears of-pld ngc came into her dim eyes, and she fumbled in the bosom of her dress for a handkerchief. Her son watched her irritably, with the unreasoning anger we feel at those we have wounded. "You know as well as I do, mother,'' he said more mildly, "that Molly's people wouldn't let her look at mc if he came back here. You know what her folks are." "Molly wouldn't give you up, Jim, if it was her father, she'd stick to him. Every one knows it was an accident; it was a quarrel, Jim —just the kind of a quarrel your temper may get you into any clay. It wasn't murder. You know that Ragan had pulled his revolver, and it was his life or your father's. And he's an old man now—an old man, JiLa: ' She dropped weakly into a chair beside the table, still set with the remains of supper, and rested her head on her hand. The young fellow stood for a moment, creasing the crown of his straw hat; then he came over and put an awkward hand on his mother's shoulder. "Just forget about it, mother," he said, not unkindly. "He spoiled your life and mine, and he isn't worth worrying about. He can't come here, that's settled. Now just don't think about it any more." He closed the door behind him quietly; but, once away from his mother's pleading voice, all the wrongs of tne last years, ali the shame, all the covert malice of his associates, all the burning humiliations, came over him in a tidal wave of resentment; and the ebb, when it came, left h'"m sullen and ugly. 11. It was Saturday night. The corners around the market-house and the city hall were crowded with men, loud-voiced and laughing, w-ith here and there a Teeling, tottering group, who punctuated their unsteady progress with noisy, bxaggish oaths. From somewhere out of sight came the rhythmic beat of a drum and the shrill song of the Salvation Army, and a waffle-vender was crying his wares with the metallic jangle of a beaten triangle. Through the crowds Jim Priestley, his mind a seething whirlpool of shame and pride, walked alone, savagely brooding, past women with babies and men with -baskets, shouldering the loafers aside, ruthlessly deaf to the men who called to him. When he finally met Molly, she was not alone. Two or three girls were with her. and just behind them, keeping up a running tire of compliments and small talk, were as many young men. "Good evening, Mr. Priestley," she said pertly. Jim lifted his hat and passed on, black anger and jealousy in his heart. He knew the men; one of them—Hallowell, a mechanic like himself—had been his rival for Molly's favour, and had boasted that he would oust him yet. And so he swung along the street, his head down, seeing nothing of the crowd around, occupied always with the pictures conjured up by his own brooding fancy. Now, it was his mother, sobbing at the table. Now, it was his father as he remembered him, standing to receive that awfnl sentence of imprisonment for what promised to be the remainder of his life. Oftenest of all it was Molly he saw —Molly, with bcr mischievous brown eyes and sensitive red lips; and finally the face of Hallowell, his hated rival, would come between him and the picture of the girl he loved. !t \ras two hours later when Jim, after standing sullenly with a crowd in the pool-room dowu the street, came back through the market-place. The streets were less crowded now; the late buyers bad gone home with their baskets; the sleepy babies were tucked in their beds; the butchers, after twenty hours of work; had shut up their stands and gone away. Molly had disappeared, and the percentage o! drunkards among the corner loafers had increased. Then Jim saw Hallowell. Tlie ruunnlatire rage of. the evening ■nrged up in him and maddened him. Ho walked up to the other man with tho iust of battle in his face. For a moment each glared n chnDcngo at the other.

Neither had been drinking, but both were s blind with the intoxication of passion. - Hallowell greeted Jim with a taunt, and then, mistaking his rival's speechless i fury for moderation, grew facetious for the benefit of the bystanders. "Say, stripes," he said sneeringly, "next time you go down to the pen I wish you would have your father knit I mc some socks. They make But Jim's heavy tist had gone home on , the point of his chin, and he went down with a crash and lay still. Some of the men around Stooped over his prostrate figure. The crowd began to grow rapidly, although street-fights on Saturday | night were too common to cause much ( excitement. Jim leaned against a post with folded arms, disdaining escape, although a policeman was rounding the j corner. Then one of the men who had been examining Hallowell straightened j up and came swiftly toward him. "Run! Get out, quick!" he said under his breath. "He's dead!" j. i 1 nx t Jim didn't run. He stepped quietly ' |through an open door into the darkened | market-house, which was just closing for i i the night, went through it and out into 1 ~the deserted street beyond, took a detour i | through alleys familiar from childhood, J ' and so made his way home. He was ; i dazed with, the revulsion of feeling—too | numb with horror to think of escape. He 1 did not rouse his mother, but made his i4\-ay over the roof of the coal-shed to an upstairs window, and crawled through. For a while he stood there, the cold night air blowing in on him, the deadly languor of reaction creeping over him. Across' the narrow strip of hall he could hear his mother moving about, as if he I had awakened her. He brushed back his damp hair, and tried to steady his voice. "Go to bed, mother," he called. "I'm here now." He went to his own room and lighted the lamp. Then he blew it out again suddenly. Ihey would be after him I soon, liid he might want to get away— , i might, because from the chaos of. his mind he had not been able to evoke a . plan for the future. He sat by the window, leaning out, watching the street to see if he were pursued, not knowing or caring that it was raining, and that he was wet and cold. He could remember, sitting there in the ■ dark, every incident of his father's arrest ten years ago —the crowd of neighbours that gathered at the door; his . mother's sobs; his father's bowed white hciid and hopeless face. Then the long ' days of waiting, the trial and conviction, | the appeal, which took their last permy — ; and failed. i Someone came down the street, looki ing at the numbers. When he was oppoi site the house, he crossed the street and . knocked. In an instant Jim was on his feet and at his mother's door. "Tell him I'm not here!" he whispered hoarsely. "Call out to him —don t go i down!" . "He's not in his room," she qunvered from the window, in answer to an in- ; quiry. ; The man below hesitated and turned away. "I'll be back," he said briefly. She turned to Jim, but he was gone. ! Back in his room he was turning over • feverishly the litter of neckties and handkerchiefs in tho upper drawer of the f yellcw-pine bureau. When he had found his revolver, he went cautiously past his t mother's door, climbed the attic stairs, i entered the attic, and shut and bolted the > door at the top. r He groped his way through the dark--1 ness to the window beneath the sloping I roof. The rain was coming down heay- ' ily now, close to his head, and the attic i was musty and heavy with the smell of ' drying soap. Jim settled himself on his knees at the window, the revolver on the floor beside him. Through all the tur- ' moil in his mind, one thing was clear — [ he would never go to'the living death of the penitentiary. The six chambers of ! the revolver were six sure roads of ! escape. ; Below, the gutters were filled with - water that sparkled and bubbled in the ; electric light. Someone was standing across the street, in the shadow of a doorway, and Jim knew at once that the • house was watched. ; After a time the rain slackened, and : the man across the street sat down on a ■ door-step, an umbrella over his head. t Jim watched him steadily. He grew cramped in his constrained position; his knees ached when he tried to straighten them, and his eyes burned from peering through the darkness. Below, through , the thin flooring, he could hear his , mother walking. A sudden shame for [ this new trouble he had brought on her _ came over him. He who had been so i self-righteous, who that very night had refused to give his convict father a home • —he was a murderer! When he looked out again, the man across the street had gone. It was dawn j now — a cold, wet dawn, grey and cheerless. Here and there the chimneys of the houses around began to show faint blue lines of smoke, in preparation for the early breakfast of the neighbourhood. He heard his mother go stiffly downstairs/ heard' the shutters open, and the rush and yelp of his setter as it dashed into the little yard after a night in the kitchen. . Then there were voices. He picked up the revolver and held it clumsily, his fingers stiff with cold; but no one came up the stairs, and he relaxed again. The trunks and boxes around him were takin" shape now. He saw things he had not seen for years. There was the quaint , high chair, battered with the heels of lusty babies. He could remember his '■, youneest brother, dead long ago, sitting in it. There was the old squirrel-cage, ! rusty now, and over in a corner, still showing traces of its gorgeous paint of • years before, was the . red waggon his I father had painstakingly made for him t from a wooden box. The tongue was . gone, and one clumsy wheel lay forlornly 1 in the waggon-bed; but Jim could see, - .with the distinctness that long-past 1 events sometimes assume, his father's t head, grey even then, bent over that unli couth waggon, painting it with unaccuse torued fingers and lettering a name on .. the side. The name was quite clear still .. —the "Jim Dandy." c Jim got up and sat ou a trunk to rest his cramped muscles. The walls of tlie r narrow room began to oppress him, like c the walls of a cell, and the little red < waggon stood out. a very passion of col--3 our, in the grey of its surroundings. He 3 could not escape it; it was a symbol of ? the joy of the past in the hopelessness of ; .the-present. i * Jim turned his back to it and gazed . down at the street. Men with dinner- - buckets —the Sunday shift at the mill— • were leaving the houses around, their ' hats drawn down, their coat-collars turned up around their ears. When they ; overtook oue another they fell into step . silently, morosely. One man stopped, i just* across, and looked over at the Priestley house. Jim opened the window , and whistled softly. The other man

stepped to the curb and made a trumpet witn his hands. "I hung around here half the night, waiting for you.," he called. "Say, Hallowell's all right. He came around in half an hour, and went home." The revolver clattered to the floor and lay there. Jim nodded silently and closed the window. As he turned, a thin, watery shaft of yellow sunlight came through the window, and the little red waggon gleamed joyously. When Jim went into the kitchen, the table wa» laid for breakfast. The setter leaped at him with moist caresses, but Jim's eyes were on a stooped figure in a chair by the stove. His mother held out a pleading hand, but Jim did not see it. He went across the room to the old man in the rocking-chair, and leaned over him, his hands on the bent shoulders. "Welcome home, fatner," he said huskily. "Welcome home!"