EVER SO LONG AGO

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 9, 2 March 1925, Page 19

EVER SO LONG AGO

<3B? JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

Wolv a Me!er-do'Well found his Soul

A NUMBER of white dwellings with small, bright gardens, a brick courthouse with a shallow portico and classic columns, stores that were mere painted facades masking long, wooded galleries, and churches with insistent bells! So much and no more constituted Greenstream, except for the fact that it was divided by the barriers of four mountain ranges from the world. The Virginia upland, where it was cleared, responded with pure emerald grass, and the village, in a valley broader than those beyond either mountain wall, lay in fields cut and stacked early in July and incredibly fragrant.

Above Greenstream, somewhere to the west, the road that slipped down the eastern range and through the village climbed in sharp angles through stony fords and matted wild grape-vines towards the sunset. The top was treeless, with scant underbush and sterile expanses of rock, and in an unobtrusive corner, thick with moss and ferns, a man lounged, with the brown barrel of a rifle across his knee. He was slender and dark, with restless, sharp black eyes and hollow cheeks that accentuated the grim expression of an obstinate jaw. Shifting his position, he skilfully twisted a cigarette from a small muslin bag, but, lighting it, he suddenly paused, rigid with attention. The slow hoof-beats of a walking horse were mounting beyond, approaching. Assured of this, he calmly resumed the operation with the preserved flame; then he rose, with the rifle drooping forward over an arm. The clatter grew louder, until the horse and a rider appeared sharply projected against clear space. "That's far enough," the man with the rifle called. The other stopped abruptly.

"Hospitable!" he commented dryly. He, too, was thin, but very tall, and clad in a worn gabardine coat with plaited leather buttons and cord breeches, and his face was sparer of flesh than that before him. Together with a projecting, curved nose and cold, firm lips, it gave him the expression of a Caesar on an old bronze coin. Across the flat pommel of his hunting saddle a wire-haired fox terrier puppy was wriggling, and he bent over easily, dropping the dog to the ground. "Where did you come from?" the first demanded, with a sombre, close regard. The expression of the man above him grew curiously bitter. "It's none of your damn' business," he replied deliberately. "I'm set here for just thaty" the other told him. "I can shoot you, too, finding out." That, further, he was prepared to do this was evident in his voice. The horseman was apparently absorbed in the gaiety of the released puppy. "Well?" There was a tightening of the hand about the rifle. "Back hellwards." "You'll have to be more particular. Maybe you know"he made a gesture towards the west —"there's smallpox in the lumbering camps." "I didn't. I came up the Crabbottom Valley; but I can understand your interest." "Anywhere near Traveller's Repose?" "No," the other answered shortly. "I said that I was in Virginia." "Did you see anybody in the settlement — Long Jim Abner, the blacksmith?" "Tol'able Long Jim keeps the blacksmith's shop, and I had dinner with him." The interrogator nodded. "I have to find out. Greenstream is only below the mountains, and we don't want the plague there. But I reckon you're all right. I can tell a

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER HAS RAPIDLY GAINED PLACE IN THE FRONT RANK OF MODERN WRITERS, AND OUR READERS WILL FIND THIS STORY AN EXCELLENT SPECIMEN OF HIS SKILL

stranger, and how else would you know about Long or Tol'able Long Jim if you weren't there among them? West Virginia is the other road." r T T HE afternoon was declining to a gold haze. It grew cooler, and the choked murmur of a stream was audible. The man on foot resumed his coat. "I'm just about done here for to-day," he said. "Are you coming on down?" The other made a gesture of assent; he leant over and, from the saddle, secured his dog. They moved forward together until, from an opening in the descent, there was a clear view of the village far below. Tenuous blue threads of smoke rose wavering from minute chimneys; the peaks were in sunlight, but already the village was darkening with shadow. The rider stopped his horse and gazed at the remote village, everywhere shut in by range succeeding range. He breathed deeply, a breath at once weary and sharp with pain, and spoke: "I reckon this is where I'll stay." Charles Bramwell held his horse against the uncertain road; the dog lay across the saddle, panting. The man beside him, he learnt, was Barton Cleeve. They crossed a bridge of echoing planks laid over a broad, sliding stream and were in the village. There were only a few people about to gaze with frank curiosity; a cross-roads held three stores with elevated platforms, and the courthouse set back on a shaded lawn of thick turf. And there. Barton Cleeve halted. "I live out here by the Presbyterian Church," he said. "The hotel is right ahead on the left. I might see you later at the mail." Charles Bramwell slowly passed the small, freshly-painted structure of the Bank of Greenstream, a house more pretentious than the others, with an encircling verandah, and a

dingy, shed-like building, the office of the Greenstream Messenger, against which a number of men sat in tilted chairs. The hotel was square, white, and had a secondstorey gallery and an outside stair. The office, with split-hickory chairs, a contracted, scarred counter, and iron stove, was on the left; there he found Patterson, the hotel proprietor, and wrote his name, but with only the vague locality of Virginia, in an informal, dilapidated register. He accompanied the proprietor to the stable in the rear, where he discovered a comfortable stall and ample feed for his horse; then Bramwell had a supper of fried chicken, potatoes, poached eggs,

salt-raised bread, and green-apple pie. Afterwards he sat alone on the gallery outside his room facing the serene length of the valley. The heavy shoes of Patterson mounted the stair, and he approached over the rounding gallery. "I don't want to disturb you," he said pleasantly, "but this is a dry county, and you said you'd brought nothing, and so I thought " Bramwell rose. "Thank you." He made a formal acknowledgment. Below he poured a large measure from a stone jug. "Drink hearty," Patterson pronounced. The latter wiped the mouth of the jug with his hand and dispensed with the formality of a glass. "Any time ; you want a gallon," he continued, "just say the word to whoever's driving stage, and they'll bring it up from Stanwick." ' "I shall," Bramwell responded, "to-morrow. I expect questions will be asked about me," he went on. "It looks strange, my coming here like this without a thing but the horse and dog. And when I stay, as I

hope to do, it will be stranger yet. Well, there is no answer." His gaze, directed at Patterson, took on a sudden glitter; his mouth was pinched. The other's pale blue eyes met his without wavering; his voice was slow, unconcerned. "It's all that. I won't ask nor answer. I judge we'd better have another." When Charles B ram well returned to the gallery, the jug was empty. He walked slowly, portentously, and his face was grimmer than any metallic imperial profile. He sank again into the chair outside, neglecting to go to bed. The silence was absolute. HPHE night grew more profound, and almost cold, and then a faint shimmer of light touched the western mountains; the sky lost its quality of a starred velvet curtain and became space; faint, pure films of colour appeared; the valley was filled with green gloom, while the extreme peaks of the west flushed like roses. There was a stir in the hotel and a movement towards the stable. The puppy at Charles Bramwell's feet whimpered, and he waked and rose sharply, gazing about utterly confounded. Pain shot through his shoulders and knees as he stood with hands hard clasped on the railing before him. The shadows retreated in a sparkling rush of immaculate morning. He found himself after a noon dinner occupying one of the chairs before the building of the Greenstream Messenger. Edward Stample, the proprietor, short and dark and quiet, sat beside him. The somnolence of the day, as golden as an orange, filtered into Charles Bramwell's soul. He was extraordinarily weary, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and flooded with indifference. He told himself that he could sit here for the rest of his life. But Stample, concerned with the issuing of his weekly paper, rose and went within. "See you to-morrow," he said. Bramwell discovered him in the morning seated before a small footpower press, rapidly printing a box of envelopes. The interior of the office was as dingy as the outside. The Messenger press, back on the left, rested on the earth. At the right by the entrance were two typesetter's cases elevated on insecure legs; behind them a handpress for proofs raised wooden bars like a rimless wheel. Old handbills littered the walls and floor; the heavy, battered chases of the paper were piled on a rough table, and carefully laid on pegs in the wall were a number of fishing-rods in green baize covers. Stample nodded silently, and Charles Bramwell lounged in the doorway, soothed by the smooth clicking of the machine and the monotonous passage of the printer's hands. A gloom deepened withinlow, aqueous clouds hid the mountain-tops and drooped into the valley, closing Greenstream in a grey solitude. "Winter," Stample said abruptly, "comes like this. Rain." As if in answer to his words, there was a hesitating patter. He lighted a glass

lamp and stood it at his elbow. "You might wash the window," Bramwell suggested. There was an answering flicker of smile. "Can't get the work done now. I hear you're going to stay a while yet " "Do you want me to clean up?" "You'd never get done. I'd like to have you help about, though. Try this." He moved, and Bramwell occupied the stool before the press. The first envelope bore the address, on the upper left-hand corner, staggering below the centre. It was not, however, difficult, and, although he worked comparatively slowly, he finished before noon. Early in the afternoon but Greenstream called it evening—a hulking individual with a dull countenance entered, bowed his heavy shoulders, and grasped a handle, and the Messenger went to press. They returned after supper when the edition was finished and folded and the gummed addresses added. Then, through the rain, Bramwell carried the canvas sack that held the papers to the post-office, preceded by Stample with a swinging lantern. About to return, the latter paused. "Might as well come home with me for a little," he said. "Nice and quiet. No infernal women to bother about. Silence became so marked that he turned in inquiry. Bramwell, it appeared, had not heard him and he repeated the suggestion. "I'd like to," Bramwell said at last, collecting himself. They moved away,, shoulder to shoulder, the. lantern casting a vaporous radiance immediately at their feet in a blackness without form or bounds. CTAMPLE'S house had the curious stillness and bare simplicity of a purely masculine dwelling. The sit-ting-room had a single student-lamp with a green-glass shade on a table without a cover, a hickory Windsor chair with a high, fanlike, delicate

back, a substantial rocker with a haircloth seat, two other stiff chairs, a walnut chest of drawers with old brass handles, a sofa with a worn cover and fluted mahogany ends, and on the floor a crumpled heap of newspapers. He produced a demijohn of whisky, a small brown pitcher of water and single glass, and waved Bramwell towards the Windsor chair. The latter, falling gratefully into Stample's habit of taciturnity, gathered that the other did not care to drink. He poured out a measure, and idly picked up a slender book bound in

stained boards. It was a volume of "Poems, Chiefly Lyrical," by Alfred Tennyson. Stample's face took on a darker colour. "Funny for a man to be reading that," he admitted. "I like it. Romantic nonsense; but you can shut it up," Silence flooded the room; Stample was seated on the couch, and Charles Bramwell took another drink. It had been, he realised, returning to the hotel, a very satisfactory evening. The rain was now driving in chill gusts, and a wet leaf struck his face. Winter! In the morning it was clear, with a high, pale-blue sky and blustering assaults of the wind. Patterson informed him that it was as good an afternoon. as any for quail, and with a borrowed gun — stopping at a store for cartridges—he accompanied the hotel-keeper up a faintly-marked path to a steep field of buckwheat stubble. Patterson's dog cast out in a short circle and stood almost immediately; Charles Bramwell got a quail and the other a pair. They tramped through the short, purplered stems to the covers along the fences, made their way higher to avoid clearings, and returned at dark with fourteen brace of quail. Then, to his surprise, he awoke to a morning filled with silent accumulating snowflakes. They set a wide screen against the mountains and valley, and the purity caused a breathless contraction of his heart. The stove in the Messenger office was a glowing cherry-red, and the snow on his shoes made little rivulets over the boards. Stample said: "I've thought of this two or three times latelyyou might as well live with me as be at the hotel. You could pay your share; it's not much." He hesitated awkwardly: "Like to have you, besides." It would, Bramwell acknowledged, be far pleasanter than the present arrangement. "Why not give me a share in the paper?" he went on. "A little capital would be more useful than I am now. If you agree, I'll put in a gas-engine for the press." "I don't know about an engine." The other hesitated. "Do you think they are reliable, as good as handpower?" Bramwell dryly thought they were. He was conscious of Stample watching him with a hidden curiosity. For a moment it seemed as though the other were about to question him, as indeed, he now had some right to do .There could be no , answer, and it must be the end of their growing familiarity. But Stample said instead: "If you say it's right, go ahead. I hope it won't pull the roots out of her." He was referring to the cherished press. "There will be a new head on the Messenger: 'Edward Stample and Charles Bramwell, Proprietors.' " nHHE latter moved his few belongings and Trouble, the dog, at once. He had a room of spotless white plaster walls with a window looking across a grassy lane towards the

west, scant furniture, and a strip of brilliant rag-carpet. His companion was an extraordinary cook; the bacon never relapsed from a crisp perfection, the biscuits were a notable accomplishment. Bramwell's duties were less ornamental— washed the dishes and swept and cleaned the house. Each man made his own bed, while the house-linen and their personal things were taken away to a neighbour's for washing. There was nothing neglected in Edward Stample's house; its order was relentlessly maintained, except for the newspapers that gathered on the floor by the table where they sat in the evening. ALMOST as unexpectedly as the first snow Bramwell saw the trace of spring in the brightening underbush; and as soon as the "law was out," Stample took down the rods from the wall, inspected his leaders and flies, and locking the doorj of the printing pffice, left hanging in the window —dimly visible through the grime—a sign: "Gone fishing." With Bramwell in the hooded buggy he drove through a gap into a small subsidiary valley with a clear, turbulent stream at the base of the steep mountain range. The water poured through narrow stone cuts, rippled over shallows and slipped into dark eddies flecked with bubbles. Tying the horse to a fallen tree in a clearing, they put the rods together, knotted on the leaders and flies, and dropped the lines into the pools. Bramwell was soon left alone his companion was infinitely more skilful; but the former had no difficulty in catching the brilliant and voracious brook-trout. He descended the stream, stopping at specially promising water, at one place losing his flies in a willow tree. He made a vain effort to disentangle them, and then, suddenly losing interest, sat on an inviting tangle of roots. Behind him a cow was deep in vivid grass, and he could see the smoke from a chimney behind a dark group of pines; the sun was almost below the serried horizon, and shadows lengthened down the western slope until they almost enveloped him and the whispering stream. THE cow drew nearer to him; there was a clear, youthful call from beyond; but the animal was, for once, inattentive. The girl who appeared held Charles Bramwell's gaze simply from the fact that she was, he thought, so splendidly representative, not of the harried mountain people, but of a large aspect of Nature itself. She strode vigorously with bare legs and a print dress, like a gay moulding of a sinuous young maturity. Her cheeks were a clear rose; her eyes, and hair in two heavy shining plaits, were the same candid brown, like autumn oak-leaves, and she had a

crimson mouth with a trace of innate mockery. There was no confusion in the manner of her approach. "If you have more than enough," she said, "and would spare us a trout or two, I'd thank you." "Take them all," he replied. ."We have plenty without mine." He regarded her with a palpable indifference. Greek, he told himself, at her heroic freedom of body. She stood for a moment frankly meeting his eyes, holding the fish strung on a green withe; and then a shadow, a vague trouble, invaded her expression. She lingered for a breath more, then took a backward step. There, as though beyond the circle of a disturbing influence, she nodded abruptly and with her hand on the flank of the retreating cow, left him. Bramwell's face was void of any interest; he turned immediately to the hurrying stream, but he failed to rise until Stample sounded a thin whistle in the distance. They fished until dusk, until dark and the pale glimmer of stars, and then drove back over the ridge to Greenstream. The mountains were white with dog-wood; then, in the magic of the seasons, the woods were gold in the crispness of the fall. There were still days veiled in blue mist, sudden rain, wind and winter. Stample laid his rods on the pegs; the stove in the office glowed with its famous energy; the Messenger appeared, printed by machinery, each Thursday; and the two men sat through the long evenings under the single student-lamp, Edward Stample lost in the primrose fields of English lyrics and Bramwell sunk forward over his glass. This, he felt, would continue for a very long time; he had a powerful constitution, and no more tonic existence could be devised. There was, apparently, nothing transient in the life of Greenstream. The graveyard, a stony clearing behind the village, seemed to have lain undug for countless years. At this realisation Stample rose, complaining of the cold. Bramwell looked up indifferently. "It seems all right to me." The other was irritable. "No one could say whether it was you or the whisky," he replied. "I'm stiffened up, too, this winter." "It's those trout-streams you wade in every spring," Bramwell told him. 11. TjTVE years after, Bramwell remembered clearly the winter evening when Edward Stample had admitted the edge of a chill. They had been fishing through an afternoon of cold rain and were driving back in a wet vapour to Greenstream. "Charles, did you bring any of that rum of yours along?" He had not, and regretted the omission. He was suddenly aware

of the fact that Stample was shaking violently, and that his lips were drawn and livid. The latter made a vain effort to assist in the cooking of supper, but collapsed weakly, and Bramwell got him into bed. The doctor, McAleer, with an entire confidence in the power of narcotics to alleviate as well as soothe, wielded a ready needle, shook his head doubtfully, and returned the following morning. Stample was talking in a rapid, harsh voice: "Winds creep; dews fall chilly: in her first sleep earth breathes stilly: Over the pools . . . the water gnats " "It's pneumonia," McAleer told Bramwell beside the bed, and before dark Edward Stample was dead. Everything Stample had possessed was willed to Charles Bramwell; with the notable exception of Stample's absence, life and the Messenger went on as they had before his death. Bramwell himself was now an adequate printer; he sat before the foot-power press with the boxes of envelopes; he contracted for the stereotyped plates, set up the remainder of the paper; and for the second time the notice of ownership was changed. Bramwell, a little grimmer about the mouth, sparer of spare cheek, kept the house in its old order, with Stample's poets on the table. He was indifferently conscious that he was drinking more. The curtain which hid the past grew thinner, and at that old vision Bramwell's hands clenched and his forehead was wet. Drink, he knew, would be powerless to shut it out. Searching mentally for relief, for oblivion, he thought surprisingly of a girl he had seen while fishing with Edward. She had been very young and superbly sturdy. Greek he had called her, finding a resemblance to the freedom and sweep of the mountains, the silver vitality of the streams. He wondered what had become of her, for he had never seen her since then, and if, as was probable, she had married, thickening with maternity and cares. The following afternoon Bramwell was tying His horse to a limb by the stream that Edward Stample so loved, and fishing the familiar water. No one appeared; there was no cow in the pasture, but the smoke mounted from the chimney behind the pines. At dusk, driven by his new uneasiness and nameless searching, he made his way up to the low, irregular dwelling on the west slope. An old and bent woman stood at

the open door, and there was a sound of vigorous wood-chopping from the rear. The forest reached down to the very eaves of the house. "I'm Charles Bramwell," he said directly, "the owner of the Messenger in Greenstream. I have fished along here for seven years, and it's time you saw me." "I can no more make you out," the woman replied. "My spectacles are in the kitchen. Reba!" The girl of Brartiwelljs memory appeared, fuller than when he had first seen her, but no less rosy and heroic in implication. He saw at once that she, too, remembered. Reba sat on the rough edge of a contracted porch with her hands clasped about strong knees. Little was said, and when Bramwell slowly crossed the thick grass to his horse he was invaded by a sensation of disappointment. Later, in the luminous interior of his moonlit sitting-room, he drank savagely and kicked his terrior on his progress, in the grey dawn, above. '"FHE following afternoon was lowering, an ideal condition for trout-fishing, and, hanging in the dirty window of his office the old sign, he locked the office-door and rode over the spur to the reach below the Welsteeds'. He tied his horse where it would be visible from the house, and fished without energy until he saw Reba Welsteed standing on the bank under the drooping willows. The declining sun at her back shone in her lustrous hair and defined her lithe grace. Later she said: "I didn't like you that first time. Something about you hurt me. I'm not right sure it doesn't now. I don't believe you're kind." A fever that he had thought for ever dead burnt in him; in a temporary brutal impulse were seated on the woven roots — held her shoulders and kissed the scarlet lips. She was motionless for a stunned second, and then, with a sob, she dug her eight fingers into his throat, leaving gleaming and wet red furrows, and freed herself with a desperate abandon. She vanished like a figure of a dream, and Charles Bramwell, washing his stinging, blood-stained throat in the stream, laughed with an amazing renewed animation. HPHE procession of these events returned to him, obscurely touched with bitterness, as he sat below on the night his son and first child was born. The thin cry of the baby sounded from above, but it didn't simplify

his feelings; he regarded it with a speculative surprise. This had not been a part of his considerations. He rose and moved to a wall-cup-board for a drink. The responsibility of parenthood weighted upon him. A child of his and Reba's would have a difficult inheritance, and that last word drew his attention to the fact that probably later stupid legal consequences would arise and demand his presence back in . He drank again. It was, he thought grimly, a moody celebration of the birth of a Bramwell. He watched his wife, really superb in her rosy maternity, with their son, unable to escape the feeling that they had no more innate connection with him than Greenstream. They were a part of a life he had assumed, but which, except perhaps for Edward, had never entered his fibre and dreams. A daughter was born the following year, and then another son and Charles Bramwell grew into the habit of staying at the Messenger office far into the nightin winter, by the glowing stove, with a lamp making a vague flickering in the dusty gloom; in summer, outside. Reba kept his house adequately; she was neither so thorough nor so good a cook as Edward Stample, but he was comfortable, and the food was always palatable. She annoyed him singularly little, and prevented the children from obtruding on his silences. Yes, on the whole he was surprisingly comfortable. His son Charles was a strongwilled, contrary boy, with his mother's flawless health and Bramwell's sceptical habit of mind. He was large for his ageat eight he was taller than other children of ten, and Reba, it was clear, had a difficult time in keeping smooth the boy's relationship with his father. In this state Reba moved about the house as quietly as possible, and he was dimly aware of her voice whispering affectionate or cautioning words to the children. However, on an evening when he marched into the house for supper, he stumbled over a barrier of wood blocks that Charles had arranged in the sitting-room. The boy instantly raised a protest, and Reba hurried in, "Take out that trash," Bramwell directed, and his wife swiftly gathered up the offending blocks. "Go with your mother," Bramwell ordered. The boy stood with rebellious eyes, and Charles Bramwell, in vicious, cold anger, swung a hard, unsparing hand on his head. It sent the child with an audible thud against the angle of the door, where he fell limply to the floor. The man stood gazing down on the small, prostrate figure, while Reba, with a cry. dropped on her knees beside her son. In a moment she was up in a rage transcending any he had thought possible. She flung herself on him with pounding fists and a white face with slipping hair. He attempted to hold her, but she easily broke away from him, and her blows became actually painful. The confusion dimmed his vision; he only saw her as an inarticulate fury, but from the sharp impact that cut his temple he realised that

she had struck him with one of the blocks. The shock dazed and sickened him; then the attack stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Reba stared at him, wild-eyed and terrified. Bramwell stooped and, picking up his son, mounted the stair to the boy's bed. He had broken the child's arm. After he had fetched McAleer, Charles Bramwell proceeded to the sitting-room cupboard, and carried the jug of whisky he found there through the kitchen to the yard. Sitting dizzily on the well-curb, he reversed the jug; the liquor, gurgling out into the lush grass, sounded as though, mystically, a part of himself were ebbing, never to be resumed. 111. TT was a hot, vaporous morning in August; already a thunderstorma contracted purple-black shadow lighted with pale flashes, sweeping over the mountain—had passed, and Charles Bramwell took outside his office a handful of newspapers from Virginia cities. He read them, clipping items of interest for the Messenger. Then suddenly his casual gaze fastened on a paragraph of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. His hands, holding the paper, grew rigid, and the chair descended to its four legs. He laboriously read the lines again: ". . . death of David Kingscot Bramwell. Mr. Bramwell, who had long been partly paralysed as the result of an accidental shooting, leaves a widow, Allan, who before her marriage was Miss Fraley." Bramwell laid the papers in an orderly pile beside him and rose, walking mechanically through the village and up the eastern slope. He saw nothing of his surroundings. The cleared fields gave way to underbush and an occasional cabin in a patch of scant corn, followed by the heavy, sultry silence of the forest. He walked on and on until he was almost at the watershed. David dead—an accidental shooting! He sat on a bare stone, careless of a rattlesnake that dropped into cover below. Accidental! He laughed unmirthfully. Then, for the first time, the fact occurred to him that Allan was at last free. She would expect him! Allan! A tempest of blood and longing and desire beat into his brain. She had been his all the while—no, from the moment when, engaged to David, she had seen him. Allan was courageous; she had admitted to them that she could not then marry David, loving his brother. What a cursed, unfortunate tangle it had been! Accidental shooting! All the Bramwells had such bitter tempers, and David had tried to kill him; but he had been quickerin the side passage—with a shotgun. When it was evident that David would survive, but with a permanent injury, Allan— courageous Allanhad at once announced her determination, and on the night of her wedding to David he. Charles, had picked up Trouble, his dog, and ridden away. A choking, overwhelming nostalgia seized Bramwell for the entire past, summed up in the utter delight

of Allan. She became, strangely, a presentment of that whole existence —musical voices, smooth lawns and shining fountains, snowy expanses of damask and dinner silver in the hooded radiance of candles. An insane argument possessed —the claims of the present against the past. There was, of course, nothing to uphold the hope of. return; he had Reba, three children. It was impossible for him to remain here; Reba would have the children, forget. If there were, after all, a hell, he would accept —with Allan first. He had become a stable quality in Greenstream Greenstream that, in his mental agony, had accepted him with alleviation of its simple peace. Edward had loved him. If he deserted so much, he would be eternally, in the changeless mountains, damned as a lie. But he was Charles Bramwell; it was in his blood an alien here, and Allan would want him. He could leave Reba and the children sufficient money for any need. And, after all, they would miss little; he had been an unsatisfactory husband and father, for years sodden in drink. The eldest boy had a shortened arm with which to stigmatise him. AT last he descended, stumbling, inattentive, to Greenstream. It was fortunate that he had not, as he had planned, built a stable at the rear of his place, but kept his horse at the hotel stalls. His saddle was on a rough tree, and taking the bridle from the wall, he swung the girth over his horse and slipped the bit into its mouth. His manner of leaving Greenstream, he thought, was peculiarly fitting, in harmony with his approach —he had come unexpectedly, and he was leaving without a word in the night. His horse walked silently through the village. He climbed the familiar western road easily; the night was breathless and the stars dim with heat. On the left was the buckwheat field where he had first shot quail in Greenstream. At the top of the range the stream, that he had heard gurgling where Barton Cleeve had stopped him, choked and murmured about its stones. His mind cleared a little, and he realised that a great deal of his desire would be unattainable he could not, for instance, enter again into his old life in Virginia. Allan and he would go abroad. Then an ironic recognition possessed him his future life with Allan would exactly resemble the existence in Greenstream; it would be maintained against an utter silence and void. TJE rode slowly, still like a man in a dream, remembering Allan's perfections, her shoulders in a din-ner-dress, her charming freedom of speech, and narrow, white hands. The memories were mixed, but the intoxication! Charles Bramwell was in the valley now; the road widened, cleared of stones, and the fields on either side were cultivated. Houses, he knew, stood back of the smooth acres. For that reason he was not sur-

prised when his horse nearly shouldered aside a man walking heedlessly along the road before him. He could dimly see the plodding figure, and was passing on when the other fell forward on his knees. There was a blurred cursing, and the prostrate figure rose. Bramwell stopped. "Did we brush you with a hoof?" The man made no answer to the query, demanding instead: "Where will this take me?" "Almost anywhere West Virginia is just on the left, and the world beyond." He was startled by the dismay in the reply: "But it's the Bull Pasture road; that can't be West Virginia." He swayed, and clutched at a stirrupleather. "Crabbottom," Bramwell answered him, "you're two valleys out of reckoning." Even in the dark he was aware of the dread, almost a seizure of horror, that swept over the other. He turned and ran in the direction from which he had come, but he had hardly been absorbed in the night before Bramwell heard him fall. Sick or mad, he thought; but, since there was no sound of stirring, he couldn't leave him lying in the middle of the road. He would shift him over to the bank and go on— Allan. He dismounted, and, coming to the fallen man, raised a heavy, limp body and carried him with dragging heels to the side. As he did this he was aware of something vaguely familiar in the weight in his arms. Eluding definition, it was yet strong enough to trouble Bramwell. It was evident, too, that the other was seriously ill; he lay where he had been placed with supine limbs, breathing hoarsely. His head was fiery hot. All this annoyed Charles Bramwell excessively; he must get on, he told himself. Still he lingered, held by a faint impulse of humanity, but more by the curious sense of something that touched himself. Dawn, he saw, was diluting the night, a visible greyness trembled in the air, trees took on form, distances widened, and the figure on the bank was defined against the rank grass. Bramwell bent over him, but suddenly straightened with a sharp intake of breath —the face below him was mottled and splotched with revolting marks, consumed with fever. Charles Bramwell said aloud:

"Smallpox !" It grew lighter rapidly, and, with an incredulous gasp, he saw what had troubled himthe sick man had on his (Bramwell's) coat. He recognised beyond question the stained gabardine and sleeves fastened with plaited buttons that he had worn on the hopeless day when he rode away from life. In a sudden energy he grasped and shook a lax shoulder. "Where did you get this?" he cried, his hand on a sleeve. The other whispered: "Lady gave it to me. Honest; Said husband didn't use it." Apparently he slid off into unconsciousness. But Bramwell was unrelenting: "Where?" "In a —beyond. Is this neat West Virginia? I wanted to go away from— as possible. Smallpox in the camps." "A woman in a small white house with children about ?" "Children about," he echoed faintly. "Boyarm." Charles Bramwell stood erect; with a grim face he turned to the morning. There was smallpox again in the lumbering region, but Greenstream did not know it. The man before him had tried to escape; Reba had given him that old coat; the children had been close to him. He had then grown confused, wandered back over his way. All this happened while heßramwellwas up on the mountain with his memories. However, he had left Greenstream behind; he was hurrying to Allan and unutterable delights. Simultaneously with this realisation he thought with profound pity of —not for herself, but unconsciously exposing her children to death. All at once his emotions transferred his conception of life. The compassion folded everyone alike Allan and David and Reba and himself ; it stilled the ache in his heart and drew desire away into an infinity of distance. There was an audible shudder among the stems of the bank, and the stricken body was rigidly dead, meeting in a hideous travesty of flesh the sparkling day. "Not like that!" Bramwell cried, in a strangling spiritual need to escape corruption. And he made preparation to return to Greenstream.