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The Lonely Light

By Edith Macvane

Illustrations by George A. Faul

ON a warm afternoon in early May "Black Jack" Pennrhyn sat at his desk—or rather before a deal table with a dictaphone to the right, a telephone to the left, and a ticker in the middle. Otherwise furniture there was none, excepting the caned swivel chair in which the millionaire sat, and the double thickness of heavy green baize that covered walls, doors, and floor.

On the other side of the sound-proof door was the private office with his name on the door, with the antique Mir rugs, the old Flemish paintings, and the carved cinque-cento table where two secretaries sat attending to the other ends of the two instruments before him. Every two hours the two confidential attendants were changed, like the watches on a ship; for Pennrhyn's pace, when he started in, was a lightning one, and he was merciless of errors.

His nickname had been given him on the day when he had stroked a winning crew in the waters of New London. At the end of a grueling race, his black bullet head and blue jowl had alone remained upright, among the collapsing forms of his exhausted mates. Black Jack he had been dubbed; and Black Jack, after nearly twenty years on the Street, he still remained. In this interval he had contrived to increase his cash capital by about 200,000 per cent.—that is, from the fifty dollars that the old Vermont farmer, his father, had bestowed on him the day he took his degree from Harvard, to the fortune that was variously estimated by friends and enemies, but that was never placed below ten million dollars.

As for the methods by which he had grabbed so notable an amount of its treasure from an unwilling world, perhaps his nickname may best explain their nature. In point of ruthlessness and precision he had nothing to learn from the buccaneers of the old days; and when his pirate flag was descried flapping in the offing of a deal, the lesser craft scuttled to shelter and the other full-sized sea robbers mounted their big guns.

SUCH a moment was this present; and, like a chief of staff in his secret bombproof cellar, Pennrhyn sat alone in his baize-walled den and across the tenuous thread of an electrolized wire turned his siege guns against Roanoke Central.

The Roanoke Central was a little mountain railway which, for the first time in its thirty years of existence, had become interesting and important. Through private sources of information the ever restless Pennrhyn had assured himself that the long neglected copper workings in the Roanoke Central territory might, at the present war prices for the metal, be reopened and worked at a tempting profit. A swift investigation carried on along the same noiseless lines verified the report that the Pennsylvania had lately been casting eyes of regard on the Roanoke Central system.

With Pennrhyn, to think was to act. Within two weeks, acting through dummies, he had taken options on the copper property, acquired a controlling interest in Roanoke Central, and sold it to the Pennsylvania Company at a figure based on a selling price of 62. Delivery was to be made on May 20. And from the 12th of May to the 18th—the day on which we now behold Pennrhyn seated at his desk—he had been engaged in battering on the stock downward from 80, the price where, barring trifling fluctuations, it had hung for the past six months.

The assault had been like that of a submarine—as masked as it was furious. In every stock exchange in the United States, blocks of Roanoke Central stock had been flung simultaneously upon the market, bought up by Pennrhyn's agents, flung on the market again, bought up, flung out again, in ever increasing quantities; while Pennrhyn, alone and unseen in the baize-lined room that served him as conning-tower, directed the operations with long tried skill and a murderous audacity.

IN spite of the secrecy in which he had covered up all tracks that might connect him with the business, Black Jack's bludgeon-like methods were too spectacularly original to go unsuspected. Every day, in order to down the swelling rumors, Pennrhyn, reeking with the sweat of the battle, emerged from his lair; and twenty breathless minutes later, his hulking form clad in immaculate spring raiment, with an unlit cigar between his teeth and a baffling, defiant smile lighting his deep-set eyes, he would stroll in at the Stock Exchange for an hour. Echoes of the battle—excited buying and selling, breathless discussion, suspicious glances—surrounded him on every side. When he returned to his thronged, sumptuous offices, he was aware that he was being shadowed. His black cords of eyebrow knotted in the middle, and his breath came quick, as after the New London race long ago. So they were trying to run him to earth? He'd show them!

But nevertheless, to his suffocating surprise and black rage, the difficulty of showing them proved suddenly increasingly difficult. In the early afternoon hours of the fifth day Roanoke Central, which had been sliding down the scale as surely and trippingly as a grand opera star, suddenly halted at 67 and stuck there.

That evening the 60-horse-power car waiting for Pennrhyn in the street twenty-five stories below was sent back to the garage for the night; while the owner, calling up Greenwood Lake on the long-distance wire, informed Mrs. Pennrhyn in a few perfunctory words that he would not be home that night. In the baize-lined room the green-shaded electric lamp burned till dawn.

Linton—ostensibly the "Co.," in reality a kind of responsible foreman—was admitted to share his partner's midnight counsels.

"It ain't the Roanoke people," remarked Pennrhyn, savagely biting in two the remains of an unlit cigar. "They're just a set of spineless country millionaires who think more about horse-breeding than railroading, anyhow—no, I don't see their thumb-print in this hitch we've struck, somehow. But, if you ask me—"

"Who?"

"Grausteins!"

Linton took in his breath with a hissing sound and a surly nod of acquiescence.

The Grausteins were a family of Pennsylvania copper magnates who the year before had fought Pennrhyn to a finish for a tract of mining property on the shores of Lake Michigan. In the end the duel had suddenly ended in a defeat for the Grausteins—a humiliating, costly disaster. Pennrhyn, on the other hand, had gloried openly over his triumph. And the Grausteins bided the hour of their revenge. Had it come?

Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?

From some unused fiber of his brain the terrible words came thrilling into Pennrhyn's consciousness. As a matter of fact, this unaccountable defense that

he had encountered, as dogged and as fierce as his own assault, could be explained only as the work of some enemy. Enemies? He had dozens of them, men whose pride and whose purses he had gouged, and who were ceaselessly prowling on the outlook for their revenge. If it were not for the hand of Grausteins behind the unexpected, unexplainable opposition that his Roanoke Central deal had suddenly encountered, then it was the deliberate work of some other enemy, as powerful and as ruthless as they.

"I'll show them!" repeated Black Jack between his teeth.

ALL the metaphors of battle reach their climax in the assault which, on the following morning, had been dashed against the fated railway system. Not only Roanoke stock itself, but the copper holdings in the territory it served, had been flung in wholesale blocks into the ruthless mêlée of the conflict. For a conflict, contrary to expectation and probability, it had suddenly become.

Pennrhyn, the hidden brains and nerve center of the attacking forces, found himself suddenly expending his savage aggression against a defense as highly organized, as stubborn, and as secret as his own. As fast as his blocks of stock were thrown out into the various markets of America, they were bought up at their offered price and slid into security. At the end of the financial day Pennrhyn sat with lagging limbs and lolling tongue, like a used-up prize-fighter. His black eyes

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in their deep-set sockets were bloodshot; the veins on his forehead stood out. And Roanoke Central stood like a rock at 67.

Grimly, with the ragged remnants of his bruised brain, Pennrhyn calculated his possible losses. One more day remained. The day after to-morrow the goods were to be delivered to the buyer. Should his bear operations to-morrow prove as fruitless as to-day, the result would be to wipe out the entire capital accumulated in his fifteen years of desperate hazard and strain. Instead of the five millions clear profit on which, with almost mathematical certainty, he had counted, he faced ruin—just that and nothing less.

For a moment the meager equipment on the deal table before him blended its glittering points in a kind of reeling swirl. For the first time in a week, Pennrhyn was conscious of his own overpowering weariness. So there he sat, staring motionless at his telephone, while the warm May air blew in through the open window and touched his left cheek and temple with a soft coolness. The right side of his head, turned away from the window, burned with a dull fever. In that moment he realized the powerlessness of even his devastating will power to whip his nerves and flesh to further effort. From the street far below him came up to him faintly the hum of the city's chase after work and play and life. The breeze that fluttered through the window was faintly edged with salt, bearing with it the haunting glimmer of shining waves, of dipping mainsails, and of rest—limitless, monotonous, soul-steeping rest.

For the first time, Pennrhyn realized that he had fought for a week; that he had not been in bed for two nights; and that the limit of his iron strength had been reached. And, like a groggy champion sparring for time, he had just enough vital essence left in his befogged brain to realize that, if he wished to make further use of his powers, he must conserve what was left by immediate repose. When his partner entered the office ten minutes later, Pennrhyn announced his intention to return home for a night's sleep.

"And to-morrow," he added heavily, "we'll eat 'em alive!"

Linton nodded shortly. His keen eyes were running swiftly over the jottings on his partner's table, of matters to be attended to that evening. Otherwise all operations in the final desperate assault of to-morrow were held inside those complicated, over-magnetized brain-cells of Pennrhyn—that wearied machine which a night's rest in the keen mountain air was to restore to its normal activity.

"WHAT'S that light up there on the other side of the lake?" Pennrhyn inquired of his wife, with a jerky gesture made visible by the glowing tip of his cigar.

They were sitting, after dinner, on the wide, dim veranda of the largest and most expensive cottage in the summer colony. Between them was a gold coffee service and a liqueur set of painted Bohemian glass. The burnished gold and crystal glowed with tiny points of reflected light in the darkness.

In the deep, velvety pile of the wide oriental rug beneath the feet of the Pennrhyns, the tap of their cushioned rattan rockers was softened to a mere squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak, as regular and mechanical as the ticking of a clock. All the dry, cynical dullness to which the enforced companionship between two persons can be reduced was in that small, ceaselessly repeated sound.

Not that they had ever actively disagreed. The tie that bound them together was not close enough even to admit of chafing. Yet, in spite of the obvious advantages of money on one side, of beauty and race on the other, their marriage ten years before had been indubitably a love match. Then came their little son's birth and death, Mildred's absorption in her grief, and the gradual drifting apart. The successful business man, like the successful artist, is perhaps not the man best fitted to make a woman happy. And certain it was that in spite of her beauty, in spite of his pride in her social triumphs, John Pennrhyn's wife did not present to him a very burning point of interest in his life. She was there; he was faithful to her; he supplied her lavishly with money; and he considered himself—when he considered the matter at all—as a good husband. And, according to the standards of his race and epoch, perhaps he was.

Mildred Pennrhyn stifled a yawn before replying, "I don't know." She responded to her husband's query in the toneless voice of one whose thoughts are miles away. "The same house that's up there in the day-time, I suppose, only lighted up."

"I've never been here in the day-time since we took the place—" Pennrhyn's voice, which in his office seemed the liquid distilment of energy itself, at home took on the same flat, lifeless intonation as his wife's. Then, pursuing the topic, not so much because it interested him as because it was a topic, he added: "But the light's there every night, isn't it?"

Mildred answered: "Until about ten o'clock. Then it goes out. Every light in the place goes out, because everybody goes to bed."

HER voice rather than her words expressed her utter weariness with her surroundings, with her life, with the man before her, and with herself. And yet, as the forward motion of her rocking-chair brought her head and bare neck into the range of a bar of pale orange light falling out through the open door behind them, there was revealed a fleshly presentment which denoted no deficiency in life or in the power of living. The bright blond coloring, the shining, heavy-lidded eyes, the high-bridged nose, the clear crimson outlines of the full lips—here was power both of intellect and of passion.

Of these facts the man beside her was totally unconscious. With all the forces of his being, he continued to grapple with the problem of Roanoke Central and his hidden antagonists.

With a lifeless, dawdling grace, Mrs. Pennrhyn rose slowly to her feet.

"Bed-time," she observed briefly, with a yawn that her husband recognized as assumed. He made no effort to keep her—only observing with perfunctory politeness, as he stooped to pick up an open letter she had dropped:

"How are you getting on, Millie? The air seem to be doing you good?"

For they had taken the place, as a matter of fact, because after her strenuous New York winter Mrs. Pennrhyn needed a change of air.

"Splendidly!" she answered mechanically. "Next week I'm thinking of starting our week-ends."

As she lifted two slim white hands in a genuine yawn, the ermine coat fell open, displaying her beautiful arms and the long, flat, charming lines of her exquisite figure. Her husband, drained of all nerves and physical energy by the exhausting claims of his business, surveyed her loveliness with a coldly appraising eye, and reflected that if his deal went well he would buy her the tiara he had seen on Fifth Avenue the other day; which, poised on her golden hair in their box at the Metropolitan, would serve to choke his triumph down the throats of his enemies. On the other hand, if he failed— A grim but undeniable shudder ran down his backbone as he reflected how unpleasant it would be to face his family-in-law, the haughty Van Ordens, who had permitted their beautiful daughter to marry the millionaire—not the man.

"Good night, Jack!"

"Good night, Millie. Pleasant dreams!"

Still she lingered for a moment. Her attitude, had the man lifted his eyes to observe it, was that of expectancy—while in the liquid depths of her dark eyes floated for an instant the spark of a sudden fire, the reflection as it were of a guarded flame within her. Pennrhyn, leaning forward, lit a fresh cigar at the little electric burner.

"Damn the pikers, I'll show 'em!" he muttered violently.

"Jack!" cried his wife, with an indignant start.

He looked up. His glazed and frowning eyes, lighted by the beam of light, showed the utter remoteness of his thoughts. "Beg y' pardon, dear," he returned absently; "I never meant to swear out loud. But, you see, business—business—"

"It's always business," muttered his wife under her breath.

In the instant of silence that followed, their two right hands were eloquent of their utter separation. Pennrhyn's hairy fist doubled up menacingly and shot forward a hair's breadth, as if directed against some unseen enemy. Mildred, who had been holding her letter carelessly between her fingers, suddenly clutched it to her bosom with the desperate, caressing gesture of a woman who seizes life itself. Disdainfully she flung her head into the air, and, turning her back on Pennrhyn, retreated swiftly into the house.

As yet, Pennrhyn felt no sleepiness. This fact surprised and even vexed him, since his chief object in coming home to the mountains had been to obtain the refreshment of a sound night's sleep. But his overstrained nerves refused to relax their quivering tension into the soft ease that leads to sleep. Every fiber of his body seemed to twang; while his brain, like an elastic strap that has been stretched too hard and too long, refused to contract itself to its normal measure. With the whole force of his powerful intellect and will power, he continued to grapple with the enemies who were bulling Roanoke Central, to force them from their ambush, to bring the stock down with a crash about their ears, to crush them to the earth, with a gain of fabulous millions to himself.

All about him was the silence of a spring night—a quiet made up, as it were, of a thousand tiny noises of the humble growing life in the earth and tree. Somewhere on the mountain-side above the cottage, an owl hooted plaintively. A faint breeze stirred below him, paling the birch leaves and the surface of the unseen water to a dim silver. Pennrhyn's cigar, consuming itself slowly between his fingers, suddenly burnt his nail to the quick. He tossed it away, and continued to plan, to scheme, to dramatize conversations and to arrange the hundred details of a master stroke for the morrow.

An hour went by—then another hour. Still the man continued to sit there, a jarring center of violent and transient life among the brooding harmonies of everlasting nature that surrounded him.

SUDDENLY, mingling with the other noises of the night, the far-off stroke of a bell came floating dimly to his ears. By some caprice of his twanging nerves, Pennrhyn started as violently as if a fireman's gong had sounded in his ears, instead of the distant bell of the church clock in the village a mile and a half away. And he remained quivering, sweating like a startled horse as he counted the strokes that followed. It was midnight!

Stiffly he rose to his feet. "Hang it!" he reflected regretfully. "Only seven hours left for sleep, if I want to get that half past eight train to-morrow!"

He turned to go into the silent house; then paused for an instant, seduced in spite of himself by the beauty of the night.

The windless waters of the lake, inky black before him, were pierced here and there by pale white gleams, the watery reflections of low-hanging stars. In the midst of these stabbed a glowing orange streak. Pennrhyn, mechanically lifting his burning eyes to seek the huge and flaming star that should account for this last reflection, suddenly encountered the lonely light which earlier in the evening had taken his fancy and concerning which he had questioned his wife.

A vague curiosity stirred within him. On that side of the lake, as far as he remembered, the looming bulk of the mountains rose bare of habitation. Certainly it was devoid of any settlement of "rusticators" bringing the nocturnal habits of the city into this as yet almost unspoiled wilderness. Beyond a doubt, in a quiet country place like this a midnight light was a surprising event, explainable only by some exceptional condition of affairs. Besides, had Mildred not said that as a usual thing it was out by ten o'clock?

Pennrhyn, stretching his stiffened limbs, made a violent effort to yawn. "I'm turning into an old gossip!" he grunted to himself. "However, anything's better than to keep on thrashing my brain about Roanoke Central, if I want to sleep tonight!"

Sleep, however, was far from his eyelids. In spite of his sinking weariness, the mere thought of bed was abhorrent to him. The overstrained forces of life drove his aching limbs forward, forward. And, hoping to quiet his over-galvanized nerves by the simple remedy of counterirritation in the form of exercise, he set himself to walk up and down the darkened veranda. Up and down, up and down. No, he would think no more of Roanoke Central—that was one sure thing. He began to speculate concerning that light on the other side of the lake—that light that burned alone on the empty mountain-side in the blackness of the silent midnight.

BUT an over-stimulated. brain, like an over-excited horse, may be more easily set going in one direction than reined in after it has been started. Tramp, tramp, up the length of the veranda. Tramp, tramp, down again. Of all the exceptional conditions that a midnight light may connote in a simple community, which might be ascribed to the human being or beings now lit by that lamp? Did its rays light up the features of drunken revelers? the pale head of an ambitious student? the tear-stained eyes of watchers beside the dead? or the crafty, lowering gestures that foreboded crime?

Crime! At the mere flash of the word, with its suggestion of violence and of mystery, the boy that still survived within the skin of the heavy-shouldered stock-plunger was alive and tingling. And the question of the mysterious light, which he had propounded to his brain as a mere sedative against the engrossing excitement of his business problems, became in itself an obsession that rendered repose impossible. In a sudden twanging jerk of nerves and mental irritation, he knew that it was impossible for him to quench thought in sleep till he should have solved the mystery of that solitary light.

Even to himself, however, he did not condescend to confess his own weakness.

"I've got my nerves in a devil of a state," he soliloquized. "A good stiff paddle on the lake'll be just the thing to set them right. A good sweat, then a cold plunge—and if that doesn't make me sleep—"

Accordingly he tiptoed upstairs, changed his Tuxedo for a heavy knitted jacket, slipped a small safety revolver into one pocket and an electric torch in the other, and began his cautious descent down the unlit garden to the boat-house at the edge of the inky waters.

PENNRHYN paddled with a precise violence that drove the slim craft cutting through the water. A wind of his own making fanned his hot forehead. All the muscular and nervous power that by day went to bucking the mighty inertia of financial values now served to force the frail canvas canoe across the darkened lake in the shortest possible space of time.

Suddenly the opposing shore loomed close. With a stiffening of his huge muscles, Pennrhyn threw his weight against the paddle. The water beneath the canoe seethed and eddied as he backed water. Then the tiny craft, shooting gently in under the dark alder bushes, grounded her bow against the pebbles.

The next moment Pennrhyn had leaped ashore, drawn the canoe up on the bank, tied his handkerchief to a willow bough for identification of the tot when he returned, and strode with swift caution up the darkened hillside.

Twigs crackled beneath his feet, low growing branches slapped his face, pebbles dislodged by his step started their tiny echoing course down the hillside. The man pushed up with the stride of a mountaineer. Suddenly, as with the aid of his hands he scrambled up a projecting ledge of rock, he saw that he had arrived

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at the point in space whither his thoughts had preceded him. Straight before him was the bare oblong of an uncurtained window; and in that window stood a small table on which was a large unshaded oil lamp.

After the darkness of the lake and hillside, the yellow rays of the kerosene flame were no less than blinding. All the suggestions of the place, beyond a doubt, were those of poverty. But of the house or its surroundings the blinking Pennrhyn could see nothing. As a matter of fact, now that he was on the point of gratifying his curiosity, he felt rather ashamed of it. And, as sheepishly as a school-boy, laughing at himself in the dark, he strolled leisurely up the sandy path with the intention of passing by the unshaded window, just glancing in to see if there were anything to be seen, then returning home again as quickly as possible, to sleep—to sleep—

SOMEWHERE in the night a cock crowed. Almost simultaneously, from inside the house came the rending thrill of a woman's scream.

Pennrhyn, outside, pressed a white face against the lighted window. Inside the bare, ill furnished room, lit by the yellow glare of the unshaded lamp, a woman was struggling as if for life with a half naked man.

The man outside, dashing open the unfastened sash, was aware of the light glistening on the woman's disheveled blond hair, and on the naked knees of her antagonist. Pennrhyn's fighting blood, which till that moment had gone to feed his straining brain, flashed red-hot through his limbs. With a howl that was that of an enraged animal and nothing else, he pulled out his revolver and hurled himself through the open window.

"Ah-h-h! Drop that woman or I'll kill you!"

"No—no!" screamed the woman.

Her pale eyes, as she turned them wildly toward the newcomer, were glassy with sudden terror. A singular fact, and one that rather chilled Pennrhyn's heated blood, was that the man's livid face, as he continued to struggle, remained as immobile as a mask.

"No—no!" gasped the woman again. "Don't touch him! Don't you see he's sick? This is the third time he's tried to git out o' bed. Come, help me put him back again!"

The next instant the revolver, uncooked, was back in Pennrhyn's pocket. And, with a gentleness of which none of his associates would have suspected him, he adapted his powerful muscles to restrain the convulsive lunges of the sick man and to lay him down again in his narrow iron bed.

"Fever?" he asked briefly, though the scorching contact of the man's skin had already answered the question.

The woman nodded as she gulped out the response:

"He's be'n ailin' f'r a couple weeks. But he always says, 'It ain't nothing, it ain't nothing!' You never can git him to think of himself, anyhow! Day before yisterd'y I just made him go to bed, an' made him a good mustard plaster—"

"He ought to have the doctor!" interrupted Pennrhyn sternly.

"Yes, sir. Mel's gone to fetch the doctor now. Mel's our hired boy. That's why I'm alone. I'm hopin' the doctor'll be here in the morning! There, there, lay quiet, dearie!" and she stooped to smooth the forehead of the sick man as he lay collapsed in his bed, barely breathing after his outbreak.

In a corner of the room an infant's voice raised itself in a sudden whimper. Distractedly the little woman turned her head toward the rival claim to her attention. Then, as the little wail ceased as suddenly as it had begun, she stooped again with a despairing caress toward the motionless head on the pillow.

"He's jest burnin' up!" she whispered helplessly. "An' when I try to put a mustard plaster on him he chucks it across the room. An' when I try to make him eat some pork an' beans I fixed extra special, he jest shet his lips tight's a drum-head. So I dunno what to do. Oh, sir, what had I ought to do f'r him, do you think?"

IN a highly variegated career, this was the first time that Black Jack Pennrhyn had ever been appealed to as a physician. He stood pondering, while his keen eyes took in the woman's haggard, ashen prettiness, her neat gingham blouse, the gleam of the ring on her left hand. The man, now that he lay in bed, was by no means

a bad looking chap. A black stubble darkened his gaunt, handsome face. On each cheek glowed a shiny vermilion patch. He now lay limp and unheeding, in a stupor that even to Pennrhyn's unprofessional eyes appeared unmistakable.

"Don't be scared," he said, with unusual gentleness, "but I guess he's in for typhoid, all right." Then, in answer to her little gasp of horror: "I had it myself seven years ago, and look at me to-day! Your husband'll be fit as a fiddle in a few months, too. But he's got to be taken care of right; that's one sure thing!"

He stopped short, suddenly aware that the woman's wide-open eyes, fixed in earnest pleading upon his face, had in some inexplicable way placed the responsibility of the present moment in his powerful, adequate hands. Helplessly she repeated her last words:

"Oh, sir! what do you think I'd ought to do for him?"

Pennrhyn answered promptly. The memory of those long-drawn, weary hours while his own fever burned its course remained clear and ineffaceable in his brain.

"The first thing we've got to do is to pound that fever down. Have you got a thermometer?"

Running to the window which Pennrhyn had left open behind him, the little woman unhooked a rusty Fahrenheit nearly a foot long, which she offered timidly to Pennrhyn. He shook a grim head. Then, putting out his hand, he touched the patient's forehead. It burned like heated metal. Pennrhyn took in a sharp breath.

"See here, I'm not a doctor, but I remember what they did to me. Have you got a bath-tub?"

The woman's pale lips quivered as she shook her head.

"Got any ice?"

"Oh, sir! we ain't had a piece in the house since we left the city!"

Suddenly there started up from the pillow a hoarse, flat-toned voice, coming as it were from an immeasurable distance underground:

"Kitty, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!"

"Oh, Jim, I'm here!"

But to her outcry of anguished tenderness the sick man gave no sign of response. Instead, he flung himself forward in a convulsive leap, and started to climb out of bed. In a moment Pennrhyn's powerful hands had forced him back on his pillow again.

"We've got to do something! Listen. You've got a well, anyhow?"

"A splendid well!" the wife fluttered in desperate hope. "And so deep, the water's like ice even in August."

The prompt resourcefulness that moved capital at its sources, that built up or wrecked systems of industry, sent Pennrhyn striding through the open door into the kitchen. With the sure instinct of the country-bred boy, he looked behind the door for a row of pails; then darted out the door and up the hill in obedience to the woman's gesture.

Vague memories of boyhood stirred again in Pennrhyn's mind as he pushed the heavy old bucket from the stone ledge and sent it hurtling down to the bottom of the well. Its depth was vouched for by the space of time that elapsed before he heard the hollow splash.

THE little woman looked up wildly from the bed over which she bent as Pennrhyn reëntered the room, a dripping pail in each hand.

"Oh, do something!" she gasped. "Do it quick! He's awful bad!"

Expert skill was lacking to Pennrhyn, and of the implements that modern science has provided for the relieving of suffering he had none. Armed only with the glimmerings of memory and with a powerful natural intelligence, he hurled himself single-handed against the blind forces of disease and looming death. His own overpowering fatigue was forgotten. The instinct of combat which for Black Jack was life itself awoke in his veins; and, had the fever-crazed man beneath his hands been his brother instead of a nameless stranger, Pennrhyn could not have struggled for his life with more tireless and indomitable a resolution to conquer.

A moment later, in spite of the frantic remonstrances of the wife, he had stripped the quivering body of the patient to the night air, and with dogged clumsiness had begun to wet it down with a towel dipped in ice-cold water. The result was almost immediately apparent. The hoarse mutterings ceased, the twitching limbs relaxed into comparative tranquillity. Pennrhyn, picking up the two pails, dashed back to the well to refill them with the ice-cold water. Then, having inaugurated a clumsy system of cold packs for the burning head and body, he studied his next step.

"How long since he's eaten? A little tea yesterday and nothing else? Say, he's not so delirious as he seems, to renig on pork and beans! Listen; what they gave me was milk. Got any milk in the house?"

The young woman, in the act of wringing out a towel in the icy water, motioned toward the rear of the house. For the first time Pennrhyn became conscious of a cow's lowing.

"Poor old Whiteface—just listen to how she's cryin'! She ain't be'n milked to-night. Mel was helpin' me with him, an' then I sent him off f'r the doctor. If I das' leave him, I could go an' milk, myself. But—"

Her eyes roved despairingly toward the bed, then to the tiny crib against the wall.

Pennrhyn drew a long breath. This thing must not be done by halves. "I'll milk!" he said.

In the little byre, lit by the greenish flame of his electric torch, Pennrhyn obstinately set himself at a work that he had not attempted for nearly thirty years. The cow switched a nervous tail across his face as he clumsily seated himself on the milking stool. A long forgotten oath of the farm rose spontaneously to his lips:

"By heck, I'll learn you!"

And he tied the tail to a rope that hung from a ring in the wall for that evident purpose. Then, sitting down on the three-legged stool, the financier set his smooth, well manicured fingers to the accomplishment of mankind's most primitive task.

A SARDONIC grin twisted Black Jack's shaven lip as his thoughts flashed back to his unknown antagonist in the Roanoke Central deal. Graustein or an-

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other—how was he spending this vigil of battle, and what would he say if he could see the great Pennrhyn laboring here in the cow byre?

Half an hour later he held a cup of warm new milk to the lips of the sick man in the little house below. The effect of the nourishment, following the reducing of the temperature induced by the cold water, was instantaneous. Slowly the heavy lids rose from eyes no longer fixed in the wild glare of delirium. The languid glance, passing over Pennrhyn, fixed itself on the little yellow-haired woman beside the bed. Without pausing in her work of wringing out the towels in fresh cold water, she bent over the sick man.

"Feelin' better, dearie?" she asked in tones that broke with tenderness.

A feeble voice answered her:

"Feeling—great. Say, Kit, but you're—some nurse!" Then, pausing as if to, gather strength: "Say, but you're a darling! Lord, girl, what a darling you are!"

The wet towel dropped from Kitty's hand.

"Oh! Oh!" she uttered in a little weeping cry of pure ecstasy; and her head went down on the pillow beside her husband's. Something caught at Pennrhyn's throat. With an inarticulate grunt, he picked up the two pails and went to fill them anew at the well.

IN the surge of his over-active mind two currents of thought seethed, as it were, side by side. One was the abiding problem of to-morrow's conflict in Roanoke Central, the ever-present obsession of his ambushed foes; the other was a verse read out in a little country church more years ago than he cared to think about—a lovely, surprising kind of verse that had caught a young boy's fancy and had set him snuggling with awkward fondness up to his mother's side:

If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

The chain ran out and the bucket plashed hollowly in the depths of the well. A moment later, as Pennrhyn slowly poured the dark, shining water into the pails, his eye went roving back to the lighted window beside him on the hillside. For the first time in many years, he felt himself small, inefficient, helpless. His swelling muscles and electric brain, the pride of a moment—what were they in the face of the eternal forces by which he was surrounded? There in the hovel beside him was love, fighting out its endless duel with looming death. Above him were the silent stars.

Picking up his two pails, he returned slowly to the house. Outside the open door he stopped short for a moment. Inside the sickroom some one was singing—a little untrained soprano voice singing an old hymn with plaintive softness. Pennrhyn paused a moment, then entered almost awkwardly.

Kitty had installed herself beside her husband's bed, with a shawl about her shoulders and an infant clasped to her bosom by her left arm. Her right hand and arm, by an ingenious arrangement of the basin on a chair beside her, she was able to plunge into the cold water, then lay it softly along the sick man's forehead; moving always with the most anxious caution, so as not to disturb the sucking infant at her breast. Looking up at Pennrhyn's entrance, she blushed deeply.

"I beg your pardon," she faltered, "but—but you're a married man, ain't you?"

"Yes!" returned Pennrhyn gruffly. Then, abruptly changing the subject: "Let me fill that basin fresh. But won't you hurt yourself, chilling your arm like that?"

"He's kind o' taken a fancy to this way—jest for a minute!" she answered apologetically, and plunged her bony little arm into the icy water that Pennrhyn had just poured into her basin.

The sick man moved restlessly.

"Sing! Sing!" he murmured hoarsely.

Again the apologetic blue eyes were lifted to Pennrhyn's face. "It keeps him quiet—maybe he'll sleep!" she explained deprecatingly. Pennrhyn saw the gooseflesh roughening her thin blue arm as she raised it dripping from the icy water and curled it softly around the head on the pillow. The little soprano voice, taking up again the old camp-meeting tune disturbed by Pennrhyn's entrance, sang faintly on:

"On the other side of Jordan, in the sweet fields of Eden,
There is rest for the weary—there is rest for you."

REST! The word struck on Pennrhyn's consciousness so sharply as to wipe out every other impression; and suddenly he realized his own weariness. He was tired—utterly, desperately fagged out. Overstrained nerves, exhausted muscles—every fiber of his body thrilled and throbbed its own special message of fatigue.

Suddenly he flung out his hand to clutch the iron railing at the front of the bed. His head had fallen sideways on his shoulder. A little more and he would have collapsed into helpless slumber where he stood. With fierce resolution he gripped his mighty hands. No; till the doctor came, he must not desert his post! A couple of hours' sleep would put him into condition again for to-morrow's fight. After all, what was it, that fight of to-morrow? A struggle to turn ten millions into fifteen. And if he succeeded in getting his fifteen millions, what would he buy with them? What could he buy with them to compare with what that lean, humble, fever-stricken chap on the cheap iron cot had for nothing?

Sudden anger stirred in his heart. His own marriage—what was the matter

with it? When, since the first year or two of their married life,—since their little son had died, since society had claimed Mildred and business himself,—when had he ever seen her beautiful eyes look at him as the little woman in the gingham blouse had looked down just now at that long chap in the bed?

Pennrhyn's powerful mind, softened by excessive fatigue to a recognition of its own human weakness, thrilled with sudden pity for his own life. Hang it, what did Mildred mean? Did he let her lack any attribute of luxury that money could buy? Heavens, didn't he give her enough? As if by way of response, the remembered verse echoed again through his mind:

If a man would give all the substance of his house for love—

With a gesture of impatience, Pennrhyn flung off these haunting, useless thoughts—mere phantoms, he told himself, of his overstrained nerves—and, dominating the sleepiness that began to paralyze brain and limbs, continued to perform the obvious and necessary labors that confronted him.

Slowly the hours of the night drifted by, and the pallid light of coming dawn began to whiten the walls of the humble room. Still Black Jack, driven not so much by a philanthropic tenderness for his brother man as by a congenital disability to "lie down" on any conflict once entered, labored on. He gruffly forced the pallid little mother to sit still in her chair. With awkward hands he continued to perform all the necessary tasks.

AT last, through the morning chorus of the birds without, broke the sound for which his straining ears had been listening—that of human voices and approaching steps. Then a shock-headed young fellow, followed by a bearded man with a black bag, entered the room.

Kitty, laying her sleeping infant in its bed, stood white and rigid by the bedside; while the financier, gripping his failing powers, waited with irrepressible interest for the doctor's verdict.

"Typhoid—a serious case. But don't worry. He'll pull through, I guess. Why didn't you send for me before?"

Pennrhyn, pulling the doctor aside, muttered hurriedly in his ear:

"See here, doctor. My name's Pennrhyn—John Pennrhyn." The country practitioner bowed respectfully at the name of the well known millionaire. Pennrhyn went on quickly: "I want that fellow in there made comfortable, d' y' see? When you get back to the village, call up my Fifth Avenue house—1000 Central Park. Ask for Jenkins, my man. Tell him to take the last year's touring car, and rush it up here with all that's needed for a typhoid case. A bed, linen sheets, blankets—tell him yourself what's needed; a trained nurse—no, two nurses! That little woman must get her rest nights. A servant. A tent for them all to sleep in—Jenkins 'll fix it. Jenkins'll—I guess I'll have to lie down for an hour—just an hour or two."

His lips stiffened, his head fell sideways. Sleep, vainly wooed and long defied, had him by the throat. Led by a kind of animal instinct, he stumbled toward an angle that led to the kitchen, where he had noticed another bed, probably the hired man's. Nobody disturbed him as, with blind, heavy jerks, he dragged the mattress out on the porch and flung himself down upon it. Vaguely he noted the clear saffron tint of the sky behind the house and the scarlet rim of the sun just peeping up from behind the mountains above him. The next moment he was gone. On a mattress of shavings, covered with a red-and-white patchwork quilt, Black Jack Pennrhyn slept that sleep which resembles death in everything, but that is the rebirth of life.

WHEN he woke, the saffron had turned orange, and the glowing disk of the sun hung splendid above the dark silhouette of the mountains. From limbs and brain the twanging weariness had disappeared. Pennrhyn yawned and stretched himself in the ruddy sunlight like a huge bear, congratulating himself on the splendid renewal of the vital fiber that an hour or two of sleep can work. Fiercely his mind pounced to the imminent conflict over Roanoke Central which awaited him. Like a gladiator, he girded his loins.

"I'll show 'em!" he muttered with set teeth. "I'll smash 'em!"

Around him the house was silent. Yawning, he pulled out his watch. It marked nearly half past seven. Swiftly his brain laid its plans: A quick paddle back to the house, a shower, a change, a cup of coffee—he had just time enough before making the half past eight boat.

Where was that poor little woman with the thin elbows, and how was the sick man? No time to see about them now. He'd send a man over to inquire this evening when he got home again from the city.

But beneath this rushing current of thought, as he shook himself awake; persisted a teasing consciousness of something askew—a haunting sense as of lost direction. As he turned hurriedly to look for the path down the hill, suddenly his blinking eyes flew open before the phenomenon that confronted them. The sun—what had happened to the sun?

When he had gone to sleep the sun was just rising above the mountains that rose darkly behind the little house where he stood. Now it hung, a fully risen ball of fire, just above the mountains on the opposite side of the lake. What had hap-

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pened while he slept? Had the world turned around? Or was it possible that—

At the bare thought of such a possibility his head swam.

The porch door behind him opened, and a trained nurse, all starched blue cambric and white linen, stepped out.

"I hope you slept well, Mr. Pennrhyn! The doctor told us who you were, and said we were not to disturb you. So we've been awful quiet on purpose—"

For the first time in his life, Pennrhyn felt the need of support; he clung to the post beside him.

"What's that sun doing?" he asked.

The nurse laughed.

"Say, that's a funny question! It's just doing its little old stunt of going down, to be sure, the same's it's always done every night since I've known it!"

Going down! It was evening, and the day was gone! Something like the sensation of death itself, when all the days of life slip away, was on Pennrhyn as the fact penetrated his befogged consciousness. And, clutching his head in his hands, he sat down carefully on the wooden stoop; and he heard his own voice saying, huskily and elaborately:

"I ought to have asked some one to call me. But I was so tired, I didn't think."

He sat looking at the setting sun. Why hurry? There was nothing left to hurry for any more. He had lost a day—the day. The fight had been already fought to a finish while he lay asleep.

What had happened? How had things gone? What had his friends thought of his desertion of them, and how had his enemies profited by his absence?

A sense of nausea overcame him. With a glazed eye he surveyed the starched splendors of the nurse, and wondered if enough would be left from the ruin to pay her and her companion. He was done for—and by his own arrant stupidity.

"Mr. Wiley's better this morning," said the nurse. "I guess he'll pull through. Mrs. Wiley's lying down—she's worn to a frazzle. She ain't very strong, anyhow. It seems it was on account o' her lungs they left the city an' came up here to the mountains. She certainly seems grateful to you—says you saved her husband's life, an' I guess you did. Do you want I should call her, so's you can say good-by?"

With a gesture that vaguely embodied a refusal and a good-by, Pennrhyn jammed his cap down on his head and turned to the path leading down the hill to the undisturbed canoe, then, slowly, with the dragging paddle of an old man, across the lake.

What safety, what rest, at the bottom of those cold green waters! What was it, that old hymn that the little woman had sung last night?

There is rest for the weary—there is rest for you.

So he had rested; and, resting, had brought himself to ruin. And now, to rest again! But no. Life must be lived. Mildred must be faced. Linton must be faced. The sneers, the mockery, the wonder of the Street, must be faced.

A HARSH sound between a snarl and a groan was wrenched from his lips' as his canoe floated to the landing-place beneath the huge cottage that was his summer home.

On the little pier a white-capped maid was airing her mistress's two toy dogs. In sudden terrified recognition of him, she flung her ruffled apron over her head.

"Howly Mother!" she screamed. "It's himself!"

At her cry, the captain of Pennrhyn's electric launch came running out of the boat-house. His jaw dropped.

"For God's sake, sir!" the man gasped. "We've been dragging the lake for your body all the afternoon!"

"I'm all right," returned Pennrhyn gruffly. "Had a little accident up in the woods. Didn't that fool doctor telephone? Here, catch hold of the canoe!"

His heart beat thickly as, with slow steps, he climbed the steep garden path that led to the cottage. Around him formed a little group of agitated servants. Suddenly, as he mounted the veranda steps, the screen door at the far end opened violently, and the white-capped maid who had first perceived him ran out, holding the door open behind her.

"Here he is, 'm!" she shrilled. "Come, ma'am; he's alive 's you or me!"

And Mildred, in a floating white dressing-gown, with a crimson crape shawl clutched around her shoulders, stepped swiftly out upon the veranda.

Her face was pale; her beautiful eyes were haggard with a kind of haunting terror. She tried to speak, but appeared unable to find her voice. Pennrhyn addressed her with desperate jocularity.

"I hear they've been dragging the lake," he said. "Well, they've got me, you see. Here's the remains!"

MILDRED steadied herself against a high-backed veranda chair as she held out her cold cheek for her husband's perfunctory salute.

"Don't joke," she said in an undertone. "It—it's been horrible. Your bed never slept in—the canoe gone. We thought—"

She stopped short, and Pennrhyn saw her smooth white throat ripple and swell.

"It's—it's been horrible!" she repeated.

Pennrhyn surveyed her in vague compunction. Who would have thought that she would take it like that? However, more important questions were pressing than the words and feelings of a woman, even of his woman. He spoke with a harsh intensity:

"Is there any news from the office?"

Mildred's face hardened.

"The office? Ah, yes; that's the important thing, isn't it! I beg your pardon for mentioning anything else. Yes; heaps of people have rung you up. You'll find the list there. Mr. Linton especially—he's been calling you up every hour or so all day long. He seemed quite wild. I'm afraid your staying up here all day will have made lots of trouble."

She broke off abruptly.

"Jack, what's been the matter? Where have you been?"

He uttered a few brief sentences of explanation. Then, sinking into a wicker arm-chair, he sat silent; and, with his unshaven chin in his fists, he stared at the water—at the future—at nothingness.

The woman, seated at a little distance, surveyed him with enigmatic eyes. The crimson shawl fell over her white dress. Finally Pennrhyn spoke:

"Mildred, it's all up. I'm done for. There—there won't be a cent left. It'll take every copper I have to meet the liabilities. I'm sorry, for your sake!"

She narrowed her dark eyes at him, but otherwise gave no sign of emotion.

"You mean—you've lost all your money?"

He gripped the arms of his chair.

"That's about the size of it. Just how bad it is I can't say till I've seen Linton. There may be enough left to pay off everybody. But it's a mess—a terrible mess, Mildred!"

His wife continued to stare at him.

"I can't seem to realize it. You, Jack, ruined! You, so strong—so successful! Why—why—"

Her voice trailed away. Her husband surveyed her in a kind of numb curiosity.

"You lose millions, and take it like that!"

"I don't know," she returned, "that the millions have bought me so much happiness that I should cry for them!"

The bitterness of her tone was lost on Pennrhyn. With a grimy thumb-nail he scratched the aim of his chair. His stalwart shoulders were bowed; his whole aspect was that of shame and defeat.

A sudden rush of pity came into his wife's dark eyes.

"I'm sorry!" she cried. "Oh, I'm sorry—for you, Jack! Another man might have something left. But you, without your millions and the power that went with them—what is there left for you? If—if baby had lived, it might have been different. You could have lived for him, anyhow. But now—you've got nothing!"

"I've got you," he responded dully.

She laughed, and twitched her crimson scarf like a moving stain of blood.

"Me? Oh, I'm nothing!" she returned.

But there was that in her laugh which pierced even the man's absorption in his own man's affairs. He raised his heavy eyes, suddenly aware of the feminine richness of her presence, and its contrast with that of the meager, blue-elbowed little creature in the hovel on the hill. An unaccustomed pang shot through his heart.

"And you, Mildred, what'll you do? I can't expect you to remain tied to a beggar! You'll leave me? Divorce me?"

She looked at him a trifle wildly. The red blood surged into her face like a flame, then passed, leaving it whiter than ever.

"No," she said unsteadily. "I'm not a quitter. I won't leave you—not this way, Jack."

"Thank you," he said, and bowed his head on his hand.

His eyes, fixed in a fierce abstraction, did not notice Mildred's sudden and strangling agitation. Equally unnoticed remained her action as she rose slowly to her feet, crossed the veranda to a little rattan writing-table, and from a leather blotting book drew out a letter stamped and sealed. Her upper teeth gripped her pale lip, and her eyes—the eyes of a wrenched and tormented soul—cast a furtive glance at her husband. He still sat sunk in the desperation of his own grief. Swiftly Mildred tore the letter across; then across again. Then, with a slow and resolute step, she returned to the chair beside her husband's.

"No," she said quietly; "I'm not a quitter, Jack."

HAD her words held less of pride and more of tenderness, they might better have served to bridge the gap between them. John Pennrhyn, for the first time in many years, was conscious of a lack in his life, and a longing that the woman before him alone could assuage. Deep down in his heart, beneath the dominating instincts of the fighting, predatory male, still throbbed the chord stirred by the spectacle of last night: the humble lullaby crooned over the sick man, the thin elbow chilled in ice water to cool his fevered head, the baby on the woman's arm. And a tempest of longing rushed over Pennrhyn, a devouring hunger and thirst for those things—just those plain, human-divine things—that the sick man had. Inevitably, inexorably, humiliation and defeat drew him, as they have uncounted myriads before him, to the age-old refuge of the race, a woman's arms.

He raised his head. "Mildred!" he said.

She threw her head back. What was that new tone in his voice?

"Yes," she breathed.

"Mildred!" The words came thickly, awkwardly. "I haven't much to hold a woman with. Take away my money—as you say yourself—and what's left? Nothing. Even if—if things are as bad as possible—you'll stick to me just the same, Millie?"

"Yes!" she responded with a sudden thrill as of eagerness in her voice.

The man raised his eyes to her suddenly kindled beauty; then halted, confused. In that instant it seemed to him that he read in the face before him all that his soul longed for. But how to know?

His tongue fumbled in desperate awkwardness.. And in this supreme hour of his life Black Jack Pennrhyn, ruler of men, trampler of human destinies, found himself good for nothing more than to parrot the words of the poverty-stricken wretch whom he had tended last night:

"Say, Millie, but you're a darling! Lord, girl, what a darling you are!"

Mildred stared at him. How many years since she had heard love words from the man before her? How many years since she had felt herself other than a side issue in his busy life, a mere appanage of his success, a kind of display board—like his horses and his yacht and his automobiles—on which he might advertise his triumphs in the bull-ring of finance? But at the passion in his voice, unheard since so many years, her answering passion woke. And her heart, after vainly beating its wings on strange and dangerous ways, fluttered home.

With no questions or conditions, demanding nothing but the inalienable right to give, she flung out her arms. And, for the second time that day, Pennrhyn heard the love cry that those humble, awkward words evoked from a woman's lips.

IT was when they had finished dinner, and Mildred had already returned to the veranda without, that the butler entered with a summons:

"Mr. Linton on the telephone, sir."

Pennrhyn scowled. At this moment the summons to the tragic and sordid reality of life came as an ugly blow.

He bent his head to the little instrument that the servant placed on the table before him. For the first time in his life he saw himself compelled to take a humble and conciliatory attitude toward the man he had always treated as an underling; to apologize and to explain. For was not Linton ruined too, and by his partner's fault? Linton's voice came:

"Is that you, Black Jack? I say, what an old pirate you are! But why didn't you let me into your game? You'd have saved me the most infernal day of my life; I can tell you that!"

"I know!" returned Pennrhyn huskily. "Wait till to-morrow. I'll be down early. I'll explain everything. I'll explain—"

"Explain? You don't need to! Your bluff has worked, I tell you! It worked!"

"What?" gasped Pennrhyn. And his keen mind grasped the essential thread. "Where did Roanoke Central close?"

"At 57 1/2"

The words spoken in New York City came to the listener's ears as clear as if Linton sat at the table with him. Nevertheless, Pennrhyn's reason refused to accept the evidence of his senses.

"57 1/2, you said? Sure it's not 77?"

"Ha, ha!" A burst of laughter emphasized Linton's exalted nervous condition. "You can bluff the Grausteins, old top, but you can't bluff me! Don't tell me you haven't been in communication with the city every single instant since the Stock Exchange opened!"

"Maybe I have." Even in his bewilderment, the financier's habitual caution asserted itself. "But that doesn't alter the fact; I'd like to hear from you just what happened."

"It was the Grausteins all right—all three of them!" the excited voice in the city went on. "So you were right, there. It seems they've been laying for you ever since you got away that Michigan copper mine from under Abe Graustein's claws last year. And when they had heard the rumors that you were out after Roanoke Central, they swore they'd tan your hide if it took the last dollar in the family! And they did some clever team work in bulling Roanoke Central, you've got to admit—just for their personal spite against you. So yesterday, when you did your great disappearing act, you just shot the target right away from under their guns."

Pennrhyn began to understand.

"So when I just plain stayed away they knew it couldn't be me, so they just dumped the stuff out on the market again?"

"That's the idea! They waited till an hour of closing time, to see if they could smoke you out of your hole. Well, they couldn't! Then it came—a regular landslide! Roanoke Central on the toboggan in every stock exchange in the country. It closed at 57 1/2. Say, make your own calculations! I figure it means a trifle of six millions profit for us when we deliver!"

PENNRHYN'S hand trembled as he put down the receiver. And his match, as he lit his black cigar, was so unsteady that the butler stepped respectfully forward to perform that office for him.

As he went out into the night to join Mildred, something of last night's awe caught and held him—a sense of the nearness of infinity, of the mighty interlocking machinery by which this world's life is moved. And his eyes slipped from the waiting white form of his wife to the gleaming light on the distant hillside, which last night had drawn his restless steps: the lonely light that, like the star in the East, had guided him to the brightness of a new day.

What Worry Does to Your Body

By H. Addington Bruce

WORRY has been called the disease of the age. It has also been described as "the Satan of our time more than any other." Assuredly it seems to be a fact that more people yield to worry to-day than was ever the case before.

Doubtless this twentieth century of ours, with its complex, strenuous life, offers exceptional occasions for worry. But this is only additional reason for fighting worry with all the means at our command. That more people do not fight it successfully is not because they are weak: it is rather because they do not fully appreciate the harm worry does them.

If people could only look inside themselves and see the abnormal physical conditions that are set up every time a person worries, it is safe to say that worry would soon be much less in evidence than it now is. For it is essentially a controllable, preventable malady. And people would be more interested in learning how to prevent it if they knew exactly why it is important for them to do so. This knowledge can be gained only by familiarity with the facts of what may be termed "the physiology of worry."

And, fortunately, these facts are to-day available in abundance for public knowledge. In the past few years science has devised ingenious instruments and tests for ascertaining just how the internal bodily organs and processes are affected by different emotional states. To a considerable extent the modern physiologist is able literally to peer within the physical structure and watch what goes on inside it. The results of his experiments, made both on animals and on human beings, are of great importance to all of us—and are of particular importance to the man or woman who worries.

Worry Affects the Body as Does Anger

FOR one thing, the physiologist has found that worry has precisely the same paralyzing effect on the digestive mechanism as has anger. Observations on cats, dogs, rabbits, and human beings show conclusively that every time an animal or a man gets angry the apparatus of digestion is thrown completely out of gear. Ordinarily when food is eaten there is an immediate flow of saliva and gastric juice, the muscles of the stomach and intestines contract, and there is a secretion of pancreatic juice and bile. But let a person eat when he is angry, or soon after he has been angry, and this usual action of glands and muscles does not take place.

Likewise with worry. Even in the lower animals, and when occurring in comparatively slight degree, worry puts a stop to stomach movements and digestive secretion. Only the other day Professor W. B. Cannon, the foremost American authority on the physiology of the emotions, in discussing with me the effects of worry, said:

"To give a significant illustration of how worry affects animals as well as people, I might mention the case of a young male cat, the movements of whose stomach I studied by the aid of the Röntgen rays.

"For observation purposes it was necessary to attach the cat to a holder. He made no resistance, but kept up a slight twitching of his tail from side to side, indicating that he was at least somewhat anxious as to what was going to happen to him.

"For more than an hour I watched his stomach by means of the rays, and during that time there was not the slightest beginning of peristaltic activity, the waves of muscular contraction being entirely absent.

"I have observed the same thing in dogs and guinea-pigs. A very slight emotional disturbance is enough to affect their digestion unfavorably."

The bearing of these observations on the occurrence of chronic indigestion in many men and women is obvious. So-called nervous dyspepsia might better be termed "worry dyspepsia." In the light of what the physiologists have found, it is impossible for worriers to have normal digestion.

And, note well, the fact that worry upsets the apparatus of digestion is of prime importance not only to the health of the body but also the health of the mind.

It Impairs Mental Efficiency

WHEN food is not properly digested, products get into the blood stream. By it they are carried to the brain, the supreme organ of the mind. Irritating and poisoning the brain, they lessen its working power, weakening the memory and causing rapid fatigue when the effort is made to concentrate attention. Hence the mental efficiency no less than the physical health of worriers is in some degree impaired by reason of this singular influence of worry on the organs of digestion.

The stomach, moreover, is only one of several parts of the bodily organism that are profoundly disturbed by worry. A New England physiologist, Professor George Van Ness Dearborn, is about to publish the results of a long series of observations demonstrating that states of anxiety have the effect of causing a rise in blood-pressure. Professor Dearborn has even found that the pressure rate rises if a person simply thinks of some imaginary situation that would naturally create feelings of anxiety.

They leave no doubt that worry may be, and often is, a direct cause of heart disease and arterial sclerosis, besides being a most dangerous indulgence for any one afflicted with a weak heart or weakened arteries.

Now, physicians are well aware that the death-rate from degenerative diseases of the heart and arteries is steadily rising. Quite evidently, in view of the observations by Professor Dearborn and his fellow physiologists, there can be little hope of appreciably checking this rise until people more generally recognize the necessity, not simply for leading physically hygienic lives, but still more for controlling their emotions, and in especial for successfully combating the tendency to worry.

Again, recent researches by physiologists make it virtually certain that worry at times brings on other serious bodily diseases, notably goiter and diabetes.

Goiter is a term applied in medicine to a swelling in the neck caused by the

enlargement of the thyroid gland. This gland, it has been found, is stimulated to abnormal activity by worry. In diabetes excessive accumulation of sugar in the blood, through abnormal activity of the liver, is the immediate cause of trouble. It has repeatedly been proved that the sugar content of the blood rises in marked degree when a person worries.

Thus, to cite the results of some of the latest investigations, nine students in a medical school, just previous to a hard examination, were tested for sugar by Doctor W. G. Smillie. All nine were entirely normal in this respect. But after the examination four of them showed sugar in excess, or glycosuria. After an easier examination, providing less occasion for anxiety, only one of the nine gave evidences of glycosuria.

A similar investigation was made among students at a woman's college. Of thirty-six second-year students who had no excessive sugar the day before they took a hard examination, six showed excessive sugar in a test immediately after they finished their examination papers.

In both of these instances, to be sure, there were no indications of glycosuria a few days later. It was a temporary resultant of temporary worry. But the inference is unescapable that chronic worriers, by constantly overloading their blood with animal sugar, are liable to develop the disease known as diabetes.

Affecting specifically the brain, heart, arteries, stomach, intestines, liver, and glands of internal secretion, worry also has a general adverse effect on the nervous system.

Appearance of the Habitual Worrier

THIS adverse effect is unmistakably expressed by the haggard, drawn, gaunt aspect of the man who habitually worries, and by his persistent sensations of fatigue. What has happened is that his nerve-cells are being deprived of the nutrition they need in order to energize him properly. When, on the contrary, the worrier succeeds in changing his mental state,—when he contrives to look at things confidently and contentedly,—then, in the words of Professor Dearborn, there is a resultant and most beneficial increase in "the operative enthusiasm of the nervous system and of its affectors, the muscles and the glands."

The problem, of course, is, How can the worrier be cured of his bad mental habit? Being mental, the method of cure must essentially be psychological. It is a question of securing a new and wiser point of view through psychic re-education. At once, however, there is this to be added:

If worry, a mental state, has a damaging effect on the health of the body, it is equally true that unhealthy bodily states often play a large part in the creation of a worrying tendency.

The relation between mind and body is not one-sided. It is an inter-relation. Everybody knows, or ought to know, that if through hygienic indiscretions a man lowers his vitality, it will be harder for him to maintain a roseate state of mind than it would be if he were in perfect physical condition. Consequently, the first thing every worrier who would cure himself ought to do is to take stock of his mode of life.

Hints to the Worrier

IF he has been working and sleeping in badly ventilated rooms, he must make a change. His occupation may be such that it is impossible for him to secure sufficient ventilation in his working quarters; but he can at least make it a point to sleep with his window open at top and bottom. If he can arrange to sleep outdoors, or with a window-tent that will give him a maximum of fresh air, so much the better.

The kind and, even more important, the amount of food he eats must be given careful consideration. It has been estimated that most of us could cut our diet one third with beneficial results. Overeating, by causing digestive troubles, is unquestionably a direct or contributory cause of worry in thousands of instances. The man who habitually over-eats, and whose brain is necessarily more or less poisoned by the toxic substances forced into the blood through indigestion, inevitably finds it hard to regard difficulties and reverses in a philosophic spirit. Allowing them to become occasions for worry, he sets in motion what doctors call a "vicious circle," his worry increasing the weakness of his digestion, with consequent increased poisoning of his brain, and therefore still greater liability to give way, to worry.

Eating in moderation, avoiding dissipation of any sort, keeping work-place and house as well ventilated as possible, the man who would conquer worry must also contrive to get a certain amount of physical exercise every day, preferably in the open air. If he will adopt this program faithfully, he will be giving himself a solid foundation for the psychological part of his cure—the part that depends on his ability to grasp and to act on the basic truth that threatened evils can never be averted by dwelling on them in anticipation.

Some worry is natural and inevitable—such as worry about the severe illness of a beloved relative. But most worry is as wrong as it is useless, and when analyzed will be found rooted in a peculiar form of egotism. The average worrier is unduly self-centered. He is more interested in himself than he ought to be. What he needs is to become so interested in something outside himself—his daily work, for example—that he will not be forever thinking how this, that, or the other thing may conceivably turn out badly for him. If at first he find it impossible to externalize his interests, let him make a beginning by adopting the Dubois plan of psychic balance.

Every night, the last thing before he to bed, let him pass the day's happenings in review. On one side he is to put everything that has actually been unfavorable to him, on the other everything that has been favorable. He will find, if he is entirely honest with himself, that the favorable usually outweighs the unfavorable. And the chances are that before long a "don't worry" habit will be as firmly grounded in him as the habit of worrying used to be.

Girls for a Day

In Spite of Everything

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Bunco Dames and Their Games

Tungsten—the California War Baby

By Bertha H. Smith

A YEAR ago Atolia was an unheard-of speck on the map of the Mojave desert, with a population that could be counted on your fingers and toes, and no future in sight. Its chief distinction was its nearness to Randsburg, the home of the famous Yellow Aster gold mine.

To-day Atolia is the tungsten capital of the United States—perhaps of the world. It has an area of eighteen square miles, has gobbled up Randsburg, and is making money at the rate of half a million dollars a month. It has a population of two thousand madmen, a few women, no children, and several hundred automobiles.

Why? When the war broke out tungsten was worth about $6.50 per unit of one one hundredth of a ton. In February, 1915, it had dropped to $5.75 per unit. In March, 1916, it was worth $90 per unit. That's the answer.

England put an embargo on tungsten, which cut off the big supplies from Burma and Australia. Came rush orders for war materials and munitions; followed by overwhelming demand for high-speed tools of all sorts, which require steel alloyed with tungsten; and this metal, which for so long had had few uses except for the filaments of incandescent lamps, made a spectacular jump.

Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Dakota, have all had a share in supplying the demand, but the unheard-of speck on the Mojave desert has broken all records in tungsten production. The Atolia Mining Company alone makes shipments averaging a quarter of a million a month. And hundreds of little fellows—old-time miners and prospectors, ranchers, men from Los Angeles and San Francisco with a little money in the savings bank, other men out of a job and with nothing but their two hands—rushed to Atolia.

The madness and the romance of it sound like the days of '49 and the Klondike rush. A jitney driver stopped to change a tire. He scraped a place in the sand to place his jack, chipped off a piece of scheelite, and slipped it quietly into his pocket. His heart beat a tattoo on his ribs while he delivered his passengers, then he hustled to the recorder's office and filed location papers.

S. E. Vermilyea, a Los Angeles mining man, went out and bought a lease for $2000, and hoped he would be lucky enough to get back his $2000. Three days later he struck high-grade tungsten, and the next day refused an offer of $25,000 for his lease.

The Sunshine Mine has been producing gold for years. A few weeks ago Jess Jewett, who has the lease with C. G. Illingsworth, started to dig a ditch on the property, and struck tungsten. The gold mine was shut down and all hands went to work on tungsten, and in four days $7500 had been taken out.

Wooden shacks, tents, and every hybrid form of habitation have sprung up among the sage-brush and cactus since the tungsten boom came on, and those who have been too busy to build roll up in a blanket or sleep on the cushions of their automobile or the bed of a motor-truck. There is a general feeling in the air that the days of Atolia's prosperity may be numbered, and everybody is madly making gold while the war cloud glooms, thinking little of personal comfort, dreaming a lot of the things they'll do when they can ease up a bit in their digging.

Tungsten is California's lustiest war baby.

Catching Spies in England

By W. C. Betts

SHORTLY after the war broke out, a spy was tried in London, and a day or two later a firing squad carried out the sentence in the Tower. The newspapers were full of the story. Then for a long time no other executions were reported in their columns.

Later the Home Secretary, when questioned in the House of Commons, stated that, "Up to now only one spy has been executed in this country."

It was a perfectly true statement, and the newspapers commented on it; and every man, woman, and child who could read English was thereby given notice that the business of being a spy in England was no very dangerous business. For, if only one spy had been executed, who should be afraid?

Immediately the activities of spies were increased everywhere. Male spies, female spies, male spies in female clothing, and female spies in trousers went busily about their trade. And, one by one, the silent "muddling" British government gathered them quietly in.

For what the Home Secretary had failed to say in the House of Commons was this: that the reason "only one spy has been executed in this country is that we have sent the balance over to France and have had them executed there."

It has all been done so carefully and so quietly that few people in England know anything about the very clever work which has been done by the Secret Service agents in ridding the island of undesirable visitors.

When the British Army Disappeared

IT was immediately after war broke out that the Telegraph Department of the government did a clever thing. No one who knew what had become of the British army was willing to tell. All that was realized was that it had vanished. But what its strength was, when and whither it had gone, were just what Germany wanted to know. Would it land in Ostend, Havre, Antwerp, Boulogne—or somewhere else?

According to the answer she received, Germany could release troops from this or that point where they were awaiting the British.

Spies were expected to furnish correct information—not merely from one source, but from many, each confirming the others.

Direct cablegrams to Germany had been suspended. Of course, this step the German Secret Service had foreseen, shaping its plans accordingly. But, as often happens, the preparedness had been overdone. The moment the "contemptible little army" left England for parts unknown, secret orders were issued by the Telegraph Department that all telegrams for any foreign country were to be diverted to a central point, no matter where they originated.

Hundreds of messages were compared, and this comparison resulted in a strange discovery. Nineteen cablegrams, some for Spain, some for Sweden, some for Switzerland, handed in at various points, all conveyed the same touching information.

Their terms were almost identical, namely: "Uncle George and Caroline reached Kensington safely on the 8th." At a time when the distracted Belgians were seeking refuge everywhere, this news looked innocent enough.

In reality, it was nothing else than the German "family code" at work.

In these words nineteen observers were seeking to convey the information that the British army had sailed for Havre on the 8th of August!

Were these nineteen spies immediately arrested? No. Their telegrams, too late to do any good, duly reached nineteen persons abroad, and all the nineteen, in turn, were put under immediate surveillance. Contrary to the usual belief, there is no hurry about arresting spies, as long as they think they are not known. They can not get away; and if carefully shadowed they generally help to catch others.

As usual, luck plays a great part in these captures. For instance, there was a haul brought about by a most innocent-looking cablegram. It happened just after the censorship was established. Every one has called the censor by harsh names, and, as far as the public knows, there is little to his credit. Yet he is responsible for at least one arrest.

Under the new rules that he laid down, all cable messages had to be in plain English, free from code. That is, they had to mean just what they said.

One day a lady handed in a cablegram that read:

"Regret inform you Jane died under chloroform last night."

Somehow, the censor must have suspected this bit of news; so he changed its wording while preserving its meaning.

His authorized version went off somewhat as follows:

"Sorry to say yesterday night operation proved fatal to Jane."

Of course, given an innocent message, the modified wording was quite intelligible.

The censor's suspicions became convictions when, within two days, he read the following reply to his doctored cablegram:

"Can not understand your message; please explain."

Of course, the message as originally handed in was in code. Evidently the code-book that contained a line beginning "regret" had none starting off with "sorry." In due time an arrest followed, and still another spy was set to wondering what was wrong about his infinite precaution.

Why Picture Film Shipments Were Stopped

THE newspapers thought they explained why the British government suddenly prohibited the shipment of moving picture films and gramophone records to neutral countries when they said that films were made of celluloid, a highly explosive substance used in ammunition.

The real explanation is far more simple.

Some moving picture films have been handed in somewhere for shipment to Sweden. There had been similar shipments before, all harmless-looking. But, that day, some one with a scent for contraband must have been suspicious.

The reels were taken out of their fireproof boxes and removed to a local picture theater. First reel, second reel were innocuous enough—just the usual love-and-kiss drama. But, all at once, the play came to a stop, and, as big as life, the screen began to reveal a most precious picture of an arm of the sea on which, as the panorama unrolled, one could quite distinctly recognize many ships resting at anchor, and, worse still, ships proceeding to sea in a way that gave the clue to the lanes through the mine-field.

The whole picture had evidently been taken from a roof-top or tower commanding a view of the waters thrown on the screen. In the hands of the enemy this information might easily have proved of tremendous value.

Naturally, after that discovery many more articles came under suspicion. That the gramophone records could be full of trouble was conclusively shown when one day a seductive fox-trot which was being tried came to a stop all at once and turned into a gruff voice calmly giving information as to the strength, distribution, and destination of certain English troops. After that it really did not matter whether the bees in Germany were making wax or not; neutral countries would get no more records from England.

How many of these photographic views and conversations in wax have left England for Berlin, via Barcelona or Stockholm, only certain secret "agents" can tell. But one thing is certain: still another form of spy activity has ended in the ever-widening sweep of the British net.

And yet, the more "agents" are caught, the more successors must be sent to Britain, and the more effective must be the measures to keep them out.

Try to land in England to-day. Your boat reaches Falmouth, let us say. She anchors off-shore. Soon a swarm of soldiers and marines clamber aboard; then you and your fellow passengers are corralled in the main dining saloon, British and alien alike. One by one, you pass before an examining board of five keen-eyed questioners. Nothing perfunctory about this; the examination lasts a whole day.

As your name is called, you show your passport. The attached photograph is closely compared with you. Then comes the quick-fire of questions: "What address are you going to? What for? What do you do in America? How long are you going to be in England? Why? Did you have to come? Show me the letters. What does this mean, that . . . ? Is this your signature on the passport? Well, just sign before me, here. Where were you born? San Francisco? Oh, oh!"

And now the catechism is likely to grow worse for you; lucky if you get through in half an hour. Because, you see, the public records of births disappeared in the great fire that wiped out San Francisco, and a few people have been caught who, in order to slip into England, had thought it convenient to be born there!

The Girl Beyond the Trail

By James Oliver Curwood

Wladyslaw T. Benda

NOT until afterward did David realize how terribly his announcement of Tavish's death must have struck into the soul of Father Roland. For a few seconds the missioner did not move. He was wide awake; he had heard; and yet, he looked at David dumbly, his two hands gripping his blanket. When he did move, it was to turn his face slowly toward the end of the cabin where the thing was hanging, with only the wall between. Then, still slowly, he rose to his feet.

David thought he had only half understood.

"Tavish—is dead!" he repeated huskily, straining to swallow the thickening in his throat. "He is out there—hanging by his neck—dead!"

Still Father Roland did not answer. He was getting into his clothes mechanically, his face curiously ashen, his eyes neither horrified nor startled, but with a stunned look in them. He did not speak when he went to the door and out into the night. David followed, and in a moment they stood close to the thing that was hanging there in the moonlight.

Not until he had looked at Tavish for perhaps sixty full seconds did Father Roland speak. He had recovered himself, judging from his voice. It was quiet and unexcited. But in his first words, unemotional as they were, there was a significance that was almost frightening:

"At last—she made him do that!"

He was speaking to himself, looking straight into Tavish's agonized face. A great shudder swept through David. She! He wanted to cry out. But the missioner now had his hands on the gruesome thing in the moonlight, and he was saying:

"There is still warmth in his body. He has not been long dead. He hanged himself, I should say, not more than half an hour before we reached the cabin. Give me a hand, David."

With a mighty effort David pulled himself together. After all, it was nothing more than a dead man hanging there. But his hands were like ice as he seized hold of it. They cut the rope and lowered Tavish to the snow, and David went into the cabin after a blanket.

Father Roland wrapped the blanket carefully about the body, so that it would not freeze to the ground. Then they entered the cabin. The missioner threw off his coat and built up the fire. When he turned he seemed to notice for the first time the deathly pallor in David's face.

"It shocked you—when you found it there," he said. "I don't wonder. But I—David, I didn't tell you I was expecting something like this. I have feared for Tavish; and to-night, when the dogs and Mukoki signaled death, I was alarmed—until we found the fire in the stove. It didn't seem reasonable then. I thought Tavish would return. The dogs were gone, too. He must have freed them just before he went out there. Terrible. But justice—justice, I suppose. God sometimes works his ends in queer ways."

"What do you mean?" cried David, again fighting that thickening in his throat. "Tell me, Father! I must know. Why did he kill himself?"

HIS hand was clutching at his breast, where the picture lay. He wanted to tear it out in this moment, and demand of Father Roland if this was the face—the girl's face—that had haunted Tavish.

"I mean that his fear drove him at last to kill himself," said Father Roland, in a slow, sure voice, as if carefully weighing his words before speaking them. "I believe, now, that he terribly wronged some one, and that his conscience was his fear, and that it haunted him by bringing up visions and voices until it drove him finally to pay his debt. And up here conscience is mitoo aye chikoon—the little brother of God. That is all I know. I wish Tavish had confided in me. I might have saved him."

"Or—punished," breathed David.

"My business is not to punish. If he had come to me, asking help for himself and mercy from his God, I could not have betrayed him."

He was putting on his coat again.

"I am going after Mukoki," he said. "There is work to be done, and we may as well get through with it by moonlight. I don't suppose you feel like sleep?"

DAVID shook his head. He was calmer now, quite recovered from the first horror of his shock when the door closed behind Father Roland. In the thoughts that were swiftly readjusting themselves in his mind there was no very great sympathy for the man who had hanged himself. In place of that sympathy, the oppression of a thing that was greater than disappointment settled upon him heavily, driving him from his own personal dread of this night's ghastly adventure, and adding to his suspense of the past forty-eight hours a hopelessness the poignancy of which was like that of a physical pain.

Tavish was dead, and in dying he had taken with him the secret for which David would have paid with all he was worth in this hour. In his despair, as he stood there alone in the cabin, he muttered something to himself. He wanted to cry out aloud that Tavish had cheated him. A strange kind of rage burned in him, and he turned toward the door, with clenched hands, as if about to rush out and choke from the dead man's throat what he wanted to know.

In another moment his brain had cleared itself of that insane fire. After all, would Tavish kill himself without leaving something behind? Would there not be some kind of an explanation written by Tavish before he took the final step? A confession? A letter to Father Roland? Tavish knew that the missioner would stop at his cabin on his return into the north. Surely he would not kill himself without leaving some word for him!

He began looking about the cabin again—swiftly and eagerly at first, for if Tavish had written anything he would beyond doubt have placed the paper in some conspicuous place; pinned it at the end of his bunk, for instance, or on the wall, or against the door. They might have overlooked it; possibly it had fallen to the floor. To make his search surer, David lowered the lamp from its bracket in the ceiling and carried it in his hand.

He went into dark corners, scrutinized the floor as well as the walls, and moved garments from their wooden pegs. There was nothing. Tavish had cheated him again! His eyes rested finally on the chest. He placed the lamp on a stool, and tried the lid. It was not locked. As he lifted it he heard voices indistinctly outside. Father Roland had returned with Mukoki. He could hear them as they went to where Tavish was lying with his face turned up to the moon.

ON his knees, he began pawing over the stuff in the chest. It was a third filled with odds and ends—little else but trash; tangled ends of babiche, a few rusted tools, nails and bolts, a pair of half-worn shoe packs. The door opened behind him as he was rising to his feet. He turned to face Mukoki and the missioner.

"There is nothing," he said, with a gesture that took in the room. "He hasn't left any word that I can find."

Father Roland had not closed the door.

"Mukoki will help you search. Look in his clothing on the wall. He must surely have left something."

He went out, shutting the door behind him. For a moment he listened to make sure that David was not going to follow him. He hurried then to the body of Tavish, and stripped off the blanket. The dead man was terrible to look at. The missioner shuddered.

"I can't guess," he whispered, as if speaking to Tavish—"I can't guess—quite—what made you do it, Tavish. But you haven't died without telling me. I know it. It's there—in your pocket."

He listened again, and his lips moved. He bent over him, on one knee, and averted his eyes as he searched the pockets of Tavish's heavy coat. Against the

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dead man's breast he found it, neatly folded, about the size of foolscap paper—several pages of it, he judged, by the thickness of the packet. It was tied with fine threads of babiche, and in the moonlight he could make out quite distinctly the words, "For Father Roland, God's Lake. Personal." Tavish, after all, had not made himself the victim of a momentary madness. He had planned the affair in a quite businesslike way, premeditated it with considerable precision; and yet in the end he had died with that stare of horror and madness in his face. Father Roland spread the blanket over him again after he had placed the packet in his own coat. He knew where Tavish's pick and shovel were hanging at the back of the cabin, and he brought these tools and placed them beside the body. After that he rejoined David and the Cree.

They were still searching, and finding nothing.

"I have been looking through his clothes—out there," said the missioner, with a shuddering gesture which intimated that his task had been as fruitless as their own. "We may as well bury him. A shallow grave, close to where his body lies. I have placed a pick and shovel on the spot."

He spoke to David:

"Would you mind helping Mukoki to dig? I would like to be alone for a little while."

"I understand, Father."

For the first time, David felt something of the awe of this thing that was death. He had forgotten, almost, that Father Roland was a servant of God, so vitally human had he found him, so unlike all other men he had ever known of his calling. But it was impressed upon him now, as he followed Mukoki. Father Roland wanted to be alone—perhaps to pray, to ask mercy for Tavish's soul. The thought quieted his own emotions, and as he began to dig in the hard snow and frozen earth he tried to think of Tavish as a man, and not as a monster.

In the cabin, Father Roland waited until he heard the beat of the pick before he moved. Then he locked the cabin door with a wooden bolt, and sat himself down at the table, with the lamp close to his bent head and Tavish's confession in his hands. He cut the babiche threads with his knife, unfolded the sheets of paper, and began to read, while Tavish's mice nosed slyly out of their murky corners, wondering at the new and sudden stillness in the cabin and, it may be, stirred into restlessness by the absence of their master.

The ground under the snow was discouragingly hard. To David the digging of the grave seemed like chipping out bits of flint from a solid block, and he soon turned over the pick to Mukoki. Alternately they worked for an hour, and each time the Cree took his place, David wondered what was keeping the missioner so long in the cabin.

AT last Mukoki intimated, with a sweep of his hands and a hunch of his shoulders, that their work was done. The grave looked very shallow to David, and he was about to protest against his companion's judgment, when it occurred to him that Mukoki had probably digged many holes such as this in the earth, and had helped to fill them again, so it was possible he knew his business. After all, why did people weigh down one's last slumber with six feet of soil overhead, when three or four would leave one nearer to the sun and make not quite so chill a bed? He was thinking of this as he took a last look at Tavish. Then he heard the Indian give a sudden grunt, as if some one had poked him unexpectedly in the pit of the stomach. He whirled about and stared.

Father Roland stood within ten feet of them, and at sight of him an exclamation rose to David's lips, and died there in an astonished gasp. He seemed to be swaying like a sick man in the moonlight; and, impelled by the same thought, Mukoki and David moved toward him. The missioner extended an arm, as if to hold them back. His face was ghastly and terrible —almost as terrible as Tavish's, and he seemed to be struggling with something in his throat before he could speak. Then he said, in a strange, forced voice that David had not heard come from his lips before:

"Bury him. There will be—no prayer."

He turned away, moving slowly in the direction of the forest. And as he went David noticed the drag of his feet and the unevenness of his trail in the snow.

FOR two or three minutes after Father Roland had disappeared into the forest, David and Mukoki stood without moving. Amazed and a little stunned by the change they had seen in the missioner's ghastly face, perplexed by the strangeness of his voice and the unsteadiness of his walk as he had gone away from them, they looked expectantly for him to return out of the shadows of the timber. His last words had come to them with metallic hardness, and their effect, in a way, had been rather appalling. "There will be—no prayer."

Why? The question was in Mukoki's gleaming, narrow eyes as he faced the dark spruce, and it was on David's lips as he turned at last to look at the Cree. There was to be no prayer for Tavish! David felt himself shuddering.

Suddenly, breaking their silence like a sinister cackle, an exultant exclamation burst from the Indian, as if all at once understanding had dawned upon him. He pointed to the dead man, his eyes widening

"Tavish—he great devil," he said. "Mon père make no prayer. Mey-oo!" And he grinned in triumph; for had he not, during all these months, told mon père that Tavish was a devil, and that his cabin was filled with little devils? "Mey-oo!" he cried again, louder than before. "A devil! A devil!" And with a swift, vengeful movement he sprang to Tavish, caught him by his moccasined feet, and, to David's horror, flung him fiercely into the shallow grave.

"A devil!" he croaked again, and like a madman began throwing in the frozen earth upon the body.

David turned away, sickened by the thud of the body and the fall of the clods on its upturned face. A feeling of dread followed him into the cabin. He filled the stove, and sat down to wait for Father Roland. It was a long wait.

He heard Mukoki when he went away. The mice rustled about him again. An hour had passed when he heard a sound at the door, a scraping sound, like the peculiar drag of claws over wood, and a moment later it was followed by a whine that came to him faintly. He opened the door slowly. Baree stood just outside the threshold. He had given him two fish at noon, so he knew that it was not hunger that had brought the dog to the cabin. Some mysterious instinct had told him that David was alone; he wanted to come in; his yearning gleamed in his eyes as he stood there stiff-legged in the moonlights.

David held out a hand, on the point of enticing him through the door, when he heard the soft crunching of feet in the snow. A gray shadow swift as the wind, Baree disappeared. David scarcely knew when he went. He was looking into the face of Father Roland. He backed into the cabin without speaking, and the missioner entered. He was smiling. He had, to an extent, recovered himself. He threw off his mittens and rasped his hands in an effort at cheerfulness over the fire. But there was something forced in his manner. He was like one who had been in great mental stress for many days instead of a single hour. His eyes burned dully with the smoldering glow of a fever. His shoulders hung loosely, as if he had lost the strength to hold them erect. He shivered, David noticed, even as he rubbed his hands and smiled.

"Curious how this has affected me, David," he said apologetically. "It is incredible, this weakness of mine. I have seen death many scores of times; and yet, I could not go out and look on his face again. Incredible. Yet it is so. I am anxious to get away. Mukoki will soon be coming with the dogs. A devil, Mukoki says. Well, perhaps. A strange man at best. We must forget this night. It has been an unpleasant introduction for you into our north. We must forget it. We must forget Tavish."

And then, as if he had omitted a fact of some importance, he added:

"I will kneel at his grave-side before we go."

"If he had only waited," said David, scarcely knowing what words he was speaking. "If he had only waited until to-morrow, or the next day—"

"Yes, if he had waited!"

The missioner's eyes narrowed. David heard the click of his jaws as he dropped his head so that his face was hidden.

"If he had waited," he repeated after David. "If he had only waited!" And his hands, spread out fan-like over the stove, closed slowly and rigidly as if choking at the throat of something.

"I have friends up in that country he came from," David forced himself to say, "and I hoped he would be able to tell me something about them. He must have known them or heard of them."

"Undoubtedly," said the missioner, still looking at the top of the stove, and unclenching his fingers as slowly as he had drawn them together; "but he is dead."

There was a note of finality in his voice, a sudden forcefulness of meaning as he raised his head and looked at David.

"Dead," he repeated, "and buried. We are no longer even privileged to guess at what he might have said. As I told you once before, David, I am not a Catholic, or a Church of England man, or of any religion that wears a name; and yet, I have accepted a little of them all into my own creed. A wandering missioner—and I am such—must obliterate to an extent his own deep-souled convictions, and accept indulgently all articles of Christian faith. And there is one law, above all others, which he must hold inviolate. He must not surmise over the past of the dead, or speak aloud the secrets of the living. Let us forget Tavish."

His words sounded a knell in David's heart. If he had hoped, at the very last, that Father Roland would tell him something more about Tavish, that hope was now gone. The missioner spoke in a voice that was almost gentle; and he came to David and put a hand on his shoulder as a father might have done with a son. He had placed himself, in this moment, beyond the reach of any questions that might have been in David's mind. With eyes and touch that spoke a deep affection, he had raised a barrier between them as inviolate as that law of his creed which he had mentioned almost in the same breath.

David was glad that Mukoki's voice and the commotion of the dogs came to interrupt them. Hurriedly they gathered up the few things they had brought into the cabin and carried them to the sledge. David did not enter the cabin again, but stood with the dogs at the edge of the timber, while Father Roland made his promised visit to the grave; Mukoki followed him; and as the missioner stood over the dark mound in the snow, David saw the Cree slip like a shadow into the cabin, where a light was still burning. Then he noticed that Father Roland was kneeling, and a moment later the Indian came out of the cabin quietly. They waited.

OVER Tavish's grave, Father Roland's lips were moving, and out of his mouth strange words came in a low and unemotional voice.

"And I thank God that you did not tell me before you died, Tavish," he was saying. "I thank God for that. For if you had—I would have killed you!"

As he came back to them David noticed a flickering of light in the cabin, as if the lamp was sputtering and about to go out. They slipped on their showshoes, and, with Mukoki breaking the trail, buried themselves in the moonlit forest.

Half an hour later they halted on the summit of a second ridge. The Cree looked back and pointed with an exultant cry. Where the cabin had been, a red flare of flame was rising above the treetops. David understood. Mukoki had spilled Tavish's kerosene and had touched a match to it, so that the little devils might follow their master into the black abyss.

Straight northward through the white moonlight of that night Mukoki broke their trail, traveling at times so swiftly that the missioner commanded him to slacken his pace on David's account. Even David did not think of stopping. He had no desire to stop, as long as their way was lighted ahead of them. It seemed to him that the world was becoming brighter and the forest gloom less cheerless as they dropped that evil valley of Tavish's farther and farther behind them. Then the moon began to fade, like a great lamp that had burned itself out of oil, and darkness swept over them like huge wings. It was two o'clock when they camped and built a fire.

So, day after day, they continued into the north. At the end of his tenth day—the sixth after leaving Tavish's—David felt that he was no longer a stranger in the country of the big snows. His limbs were nearly as tireless as the missioner's; he knew that he was growing heavier, and he could at last chop through a tree without winding himself. These things his companions could see.

"I told you what this north country would do for you," Father Roland would say.

DURING this period of his own transformation David had observed a curious change in Father Roland. At times, after leaving Tavish's cabin, the little missioner seemed struggling under the weight of a deep and gloomy oppression. Once or twice, in the firelight, it had looked almost like sickness; and David had seen his face grow wan and old. Always after these fits of dejection there would follow a reaction, and for hours the missioner would be like one upon whom had fallen a new and sudden happiness. As day added itself to day and night to night, the periods of depression became shorter and less frequent; and at last Father Roland emerged from them altogether, as if he had been fighting a great fight and had won. There was a new luster in his eyes. David wondered if it was a trick of his imagination that made him think the lines in the missioner's face were not so deep, and that he stood straighter, and that there was at times a deep and vibrant note in his voice which he had not heard before.

In these days David was trying hard to make himself believe that no reasonable combination of circumstances could have associated Tavish with the girl whose picture he kept in the breast pocket of his coat. He succeeded, in a way. He tried also to disassociate the face in the picture from a living personality. In this he failed. More and more the picture became a living thing for him.

One evening Father Roland was restless. Hours later, when he was lying snug and warm in his own blankets, David heard him get up, and watched him as he scraped the burned embers of the fire together and added fresh fuel to them. The flap of the tent was back a little, so that he could see plainly. It could not have been later than midnight. The missioner was fully dressed, and as the fire burned brighter David could see the ruddy glow of his face, and it struck him that it looked singularly boyish in the flame-glow. He did not guess what was keeping the missioner awake until a little later he heard him among the dogs, and his voice came to him, low and exultingly, and as boyish as his face had seemed: "We'll be home to-morrow, boys—home!"

Father Roland did not return into the tent again that night. David fell asleep, but was roused for breakfast at three o'clock, and they were away before it was light. Through the morning darkness Mukoki led the way as unerringly as a fox, for he was now on his own ground. As dawn came, with a promise of sun, David wondered in a whimsical way if his companions, both dogs and men, were going mad. He had not experienced the joy and excitement of a northern home-coming, and neither had he dreamed that it was possible for Mukoki's leather face to

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break into wild jubilation. He began all at once, as the first of the sun shot over the forests, in a low, chanting voice that grew steadily louder; and as he sang he kept time in a curious way with his hands. He did not slacken his pace, but kept steadily on. And suddenly the little missioner joined him in a voice that rang out like the blare of a bugle. To David's ears there was something familiar in that song as it rose wildly on the morning air:

"Pa sho ke non ze koon,
Ta ba nin ga,
Ah no go suh nuh guk,
Na quash kuh mon;
Na guh mo yah nin koo,
Pa sho ke non ze koon,
Pa sho ke non ze koon,
Ta ba nin ga."

"What is it?" he asked, when Father Roland dropped back to his side, smiling and breathing deeply. "It sounds like a Chinese puzzle, and yet—"

The missioner laughed. Mukoki had ended a second verse.

"TWENTY years ago, when I first knew Mukoki, he would chant nothing but Indian legends to the beat of a tom-tom," he explained. "Since I've had him he has developed a passion for 'mission singing'—for hymns. That was 'Nearer, my God, to Thee.'"

Mukoki, gathering wind, had begun again.

"That's his favorite," explained Father Roland. "At times, when he is alone, he will chant it by the hour. He is delighted when I join in with him. It's 'From Greenland's Icy Mountains.'"

"Ke wa de noong a yah jig,
Kuh ya 'gewh wah bun oong,
E gewh an duh nuh ke jig,
E we de ke zhah tag,
Kuh ya puh duh ke zoo waud
Palm e nuh sah wunzh eeg,
Ke nun doo me goo nah nig
Che shuh wa ne mung wah."

At first David had felt a slight desire to laugh at the Cree's odd chanting and the grotesque movement of his hands and arms, like two pump-handles in slow and rhythmic action, as he kept time. This desire did not come to him again during the day. He remembered, long years ago, hearing his mother sing those old hymns in his boyhood home, and he could see the ancient melodeon with its yellow keys, and the ragged hymn book his mother prized next to her Bible, and he could hear again her sweet, quavering voice singing those gentle songs, like unforgetable benedictions—the same songs that Mukoki and the missioner were chanting now, up here, a thousand miles away.

That was a long time ago—a very, very long time ago. She had been dead many years. And he—he must be growing old. Thirty-eight! And he was nine then, with spare legs, and tousled hair, and a worship for his mother that had mellowed, and perhaps saddened, his whole life. It was a long time ago. But the songs had lived. They must have spread over the whole world, his mother's songs. He began to join in where ho could catch the tunes, and his voice sounded strange and broken and unreal to him; for it was a long time since those boyhood days, and he had not sung since—

WHEN they came to the missioner's home on God's Lake it was growing dusk. It was almost a château, David thought when he first saw it, built of massive logs. Beyond it was a smaller building, also built of logs; and toward this Mukoki hurried with the dogs and sledge. He heard the welcoming cries of Mukoki's family and the excited barking of dogs as he followed Father Roland into the big cabin. It was lighted, and warm. Evidently some one had been keeping it in readiness for the missioner's return. They entered a big room, and in his first glance David saw three doors leading from this room. Two of them were open, the third was closed. There was a sobbing note in Father Roland's voice as he opened his arms wide and said to David:

"Home, David—your home!"

He took off his things—his coat, his cap, his moccasins, and his thick German socks; and when he spoke to David again, and looked at him again, his eyes had in them a mysterious light and his words trembled with a suppressed emotion:

"You will excuse me, David, and make yourself at home—while I go alone for a few minutes into—the next room?"

He rose from the chair on which he had seated himself to strip off his moccasins, and faced the closed door. He seemed to forget David after he had spoken. He went to it slowly, his breath coming quickly, and when he reached it he drew a heavy key from his pocket. He unlocked the door. It was dark inside, and David could see nothing as the missioner entered. For many minutes he sat where Father Roland had left him, staring at the door.

"A strange man—a very strange man!" Thoreau had said. Yes, a strange man. What was in that room? Why its unaccountable silence? Once he thought he heard a low cry. For ten minutes he sat waiting. And then, very faintly at first, almost like a wind through distant treetops, there came to him from beyond the closed door the gently subdued music of a violin.

In the days and weeks that followed, this room beyond the closed door and what it contained became more and more to David the great mystery in Father Roland's life. It impressed itself upon him slowly but resolutely as the key to some tremendous event in his life, some vast secret which he was keeping from all other human knowledge, unless, perhaps, Mukoki was its silent sharer. At times David believed this was so, and especially after that day when, carefully and slowly and in good English, as if the missioner had trained him in what he was to say, the Cree said to him:

"No one ever goes into that room, m'sieu. And no man has ever seen mon père's violin."

The words were spoken in a low monotone without emphasis or emotion, and David was convinced they were a message from the missioner—something Father Roland wanted him to know without speaking the words himself. Not again

after that first night did he apologize for his visits to the room, and never did he explain why the door was always locked, or why he invariably locked it after him when he went in. Each night, when they were at home, he disappeared into the room, opening the door only enough to let his body pass through; and sometimes he remained there for only a few minutes, and occasionally for a long time.

At least once a day, usually in the evening, he played the violin. It was always the same piece that he played. There was never a variation, and David could not make up his mind that he had ever heard it before. But when there was a visitor at the château the door was never unlocked. No other but himself and Mukoki heard the sound of the violin. This fact, in time, impressed David with the deep faith and affection of the little missioner.

ONE evening Father Roland came from the room with his face aglow with happiness, and, placing his hands on David's shoulders, he said:

"I wish you would stay with me always, David. It has made me younger and happier to have a son."

In David there was growing—but concealed from Father Roland's eyes for a long time—a strange and insistent restlessness. It ran in his blood, like a thing alive, whenever he looked at the face of the girl. He wanted to go on.

And yet, life at the château, after the first couple of weeks, was anything but dull. The house lay in the heart of the great trapping country. Forty miles to the north was a Hudson's Bay post where an ordained minister of the Church of England had a mission. But Father Roland belonged to the forest people alone. They were his "children," scattered in their shacks and tepees over ten thousand square miles of country, with the château as its center. He was ceaselessly on the move after that first fortnight, and David was always with him. The Indians worshiped him, and the quarter-breeds and half-breeds and occasional French called him mon père in much the same tone of voice as they said "Our Father" in their prayers.

These people of the trap-lines were a revelation to David. They were wild, living in a savage primitiveness; and yet, they reverenced the Divinity with a conviction that amazed him.

David understood, after a while, why a country ten times as large as the State of Ohio had altogether a population of less than twenty-five thousand. Men, women, and little children alike were half starved during those long, terrible months of winter, when to keep body and soul together they trapped the furred creatures for the hordes of beautiful barbarians in the great cities of the earth. Just a steady, gnawing hunger all through the winter—hunger for something besides meat, a hunger that got into the bones, into the eyes, into arms and legs, a hunger that brought sickness, and then death.

That winter he saw grown men arid women die of the measles like poisoned flies. They were over at Metoosin's, sixty miles to the west of the château, when Metoosin returned to his shack with supplies from a post. Metoosin had taken up lynx and marten and mink that would sell next year in London and Paris for a thousand dollars, and he had brought back a few very small cans of vegetables at fifty cents a can, a little flour at forty cents a pound, a bit of cheap cloth at the price of rare silk, some tobacco, and a pittance of tea; and he was happy. A half season's work on the trap-line, and his family could have eaten it all in a week.

"And still they're always in the debt of the posts, the missioner said, the lines settling deeply in his face.

And yet, David could not but feel more and more deeply the thrill, the fascination, and, in spite of its hardship, the recompense of this life of which he had become a part. For the first time in his life, ho came in contact with the primal measurements of riches, of contentment, and of ambition: and it stripped naked for his eyes many things that he had not understood, or in blindness had failed to see

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in the life from which he had come. Metoosin, with that little treasure of food from the post, did not know that he was poor, or that through many long years he had been slowly starving. He was rich; he was a great trapper. And his Cree wife, with her long sleek braid and her great dark eyes, was tremendously proud of her lord, that he should bring home for her and the children such a wealth of things—a little flour, a few cans of food, a few yards of cloth, and a little bright ribbon. David choked when he ate with them that night. But they were happy. That, after all, was the reward. And there were many Metoosins, in that Homain of Father Roland's, who prayed for nothing more than enough to eat, clothes to cover them, and the unbroken love of their firesides.

IT was after a comprehension of these things that David understood Father Roland's great work. In that kingdom of his, running approximately fifty miles in each direction from the château—except to the northward, where the post lay—there were two hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children. In a great book the little missioner had their names, their ages, the blood that was in them, and where they lived; and by them he was worshiped as no man that ever lived in that vast country of cities and towns below the Height of Land.

At every tepee and shack they visited there was some token of love awaiting Father Roland; a rare skin here, a pair of moccasins there, a pair of snowshoes that it had taken an Indian woman's hands weeks to make, choice cuts of meat, but mostly—as they traveled along—the thickly furred skins of animals; and never did they go to a place that the missioner did not leave something in return, usually some article of clothing so thick and warm that no Indian was rich enough to buy it for himself at the post. Twice each winter Father Roland sent down to Thoreau a great sledge-load of these contributions of his people; and Thoreau, selling them, sent back a still greater sledge-load of supplies that found their way in this manner of exchange into the shacks and tepees of the forest people.

"If I were only rich," said Father Roland one night at the château, when it was storming dismally outside. "But I have nothing, David. I can do only a tenth of what I should like to do. There are only eighty families in this country of mine, and I have figured that a hundred dollars a family, spent down there and not at the post, would keep them all in comfort through the longest and hardest winter. A hundred dollars, in Winnipeg, would buy as much as an Indian trapper can get at the post for a thousand dollars' worth of fur, and five hundred dollars is a good catch. It is terrible, but what can I do? I dare not buy their furs and sell them for my people, because the company would blacklist the whole lot, and it would be a great calamity in the end. But if I had money—if I could do it with my own—"

David had been thinking of that. In the late January snow two teams went down to Thoreau in place of one. Mukoki had charge of them, and with him went an even half of what David had brought with him—fifteen hundred dollars in gold certificates.

"If I live I'm going to make them a Christmas present of twice that amount each year," he said. "I can afford it. I fancy that I shall take a great pleasure in it, and that occasionally I shall return into this country to make you a visit."

It was the first time he had spoken as if he would not remain with mon père indefinitely. But the conviction that the time was not far away when he would be leaving him had been growing steadily. He kept it to himself. He fought against it even. But it grew. And, curiously enough, it was strongest when Father Roland was in the locked room playing softly on the violin.

David never mentioned the room. He feigned an indifference to its very existence. And yet, in spite of himself, it became an obsession with him. Something within him seemed to reach out insistently and invite him in.

One night they had returned to the château through a blizzard from the cabin of a half-breed whose wife was sick, and after their supper the missioner went into the mystery room. He played the violin, as usual. But after that there was a long silence. When Father Roland came out and seated himself opposite David at the small table on which their books were scattered, David received a shock. Clinging to the missioner's shoulder, shimmering like a polished silken thread in the lamp-glow, was a long, shining hair—a woman's hair.

With an effort David choked back the word of amazement in his throat, and began turning over the pages of a book. And then, suddenly, the missioner saw that silken thread. David heard his quick breath. He saw, without raising his eyes, the slow, almost stealthy movement of his companion's fingers as he plucked the hair from his arm and shoulder; and when David looked up the hair was gone, and one of Father Roland's hands was closed tightly—so tightly that the veins stood out on it. He rose from the table, and again went into the room beyond the locked door.

February of this year in the northland was a month of great storm—the hunger moon; which meant sickness, and a great deal of travel for Father Roland. He and David were almost ceaselessly on the move, and its hardship gave the finishing touches to David's education. The wilderness, vast and empty as it was, no longer held a dread for him. He had faced its bitterest storms; he had slept with the deep snow under his blankets; he had followed behind the missioner through the blackest nights, when it had seemed as if no human soul could find its way; and he had looked on death. Once they ran swiftly to it through a night blizzard. Again it came, three in a family, so far to the west that it was out of Father Roland's beaten trails. And again he saw it in the Madonna-like face of a young French girl, who had died clutching a cross to her breast. It was this girl's white face, sweet as a child's and strangely beautiful in death, that stirred David most deeply. She must have been about the age of the girl he carried next to his heart.

Soon after this, early in March, he definitely made up his mind. There was no reason now why he should not go on. He was physically fit. Three months had hardened him until he was like a rock, and in one day he had traveled forty miles on snowshoes.

The forest people had begun to accept him as a part of Father Roland. He could see their growing love for him, their gladness when he came, their sorrow when he left; and it gave him a satisfaction that he had never before experienced in all his life. He knew that he would come back to them again some day.

NIGHT after night the missioner helped him to mark out a trail on the maps that he had at the château, giving him a great deal of information, which David wrote down in a book, and letters to certain friends of his along the way.

As the slush-snows came, and the time when David would be leaving drew nearer, Father Roland could not entirely conceal his depression, and he spent more time in the room beyond the locked door. Several times, when about to enter the room, he seemed to hesitate, as if there was something he wanted to say to David. Twice David thought he was almost on the point of inviting him into the room; and at last he came to believe that the missioner wanted him to know what was beyond that mysterious door; and yet was afraid to tell him, or ask him in. It was well along in March that the thing happened which he had been expecting; but it came in a manner that amazed him deeply. Father Roland came from the room early in the evening, after playing his violin. He locked the door, and as he put on his cap he said:

"I shall be gone for an hour, David. I am going over to Mukoki's cabin."

He did not ask David to accompany him, and as he turned to go the key that he had held in his hand dropped to the floor. It fell with a quite audible sound. The missioner paid no attention to it. He went out quickly, without glancing back.

For several minutes David stared at the key. It meant but one thing. He was invited to go into that room—alone. If he had had a doubt, it was dispelled by the fact that Father Roland had left a light burning in there. It was not chance. There was a purpose in it all—the light, the audible dropping of the heavy key. David made himself sure of this before he rose from his chair. He waited perhaps five minutes. Then he picked up the key.

At the door, as the key clicked in the lock, he hesitated. The thought came to him that if he were making a mistake it would be a terrible mistake. It held his hand for a moment. Then, slowly, he pushed the door inward, and followed it until he stood inside. The first thing that he noticed was a big brass lamp, of the style brought over from England by the Company a hundred years ago, on a table in the center of the room. Then he looked about, holding his breath.

AT first he saw nothing that impressed him forcibly. The room was a disappointment in that first glance. And then, as he stood there staring about with wide-open eyes, the truth flashed upon him with a suddenness that drew a quick breath from his lips. He was standing in a woman's room. It looked as if a woman had left it only recently. There was a bed, fresh and clean, with a white counterpane. She had left on that bed a nightgown; it had a frill of lace at the neck. And on the wall were her garments, quite a number of them; and a long coat with a great fur collar. There was a small dresser, oddly antique, and on it were a brush and comb, a big red pin-cushion, and odds and ends of a woman's toilet affairs. Close to the bed were a pair of shoes and a pair of slippers with unusually high heels.

The walls of the room were touched up, as if by a woman's hands, with pictures and a few ornaments. Where the garments were hanging David noticed a pair of woman's snowshoes and a woman's moccasins under a picture of the Madonna. On a mantel there was a tall vase filled with the dried stems of flowers.

And then came the most amazing discovery of all. There was a second table between the lamp and the bed, and it was set for two. Yes, for two! No, for three! For a little in shadow David made out a crudely made high-chair, a baby's chair, and on it a little knife and fork and baby spoon, and a little tin plate. It was astounding—perfectly incredible. David's eyes sought questingly for a door through which a woman might come and go mysteriously and unseen. There was none.

And now it began to dawn upon David that all these things he was looking at were old—very old. In the château the missioner no longer ate on tin plates. The shoes and slippers must have been made in the last generation. The rag carpet under his feet had lost its vivid lines of coloring. Age impressed itself upon him. This was a woman's room, but the woman had not been here recently. And the child had not been here recently.

For the first time his eyes turned in a closer inspection of the table on which stood the big brass lamp. Father Roland's violin lay beside it. He made a step or two nearer, so that he could see beyond the lamp, and his heart gave a sudden jump. Shimmering on the faded red cloth of the table, glowing as brightly as if it had been clipped from a woman's head but yesterday, was a long, thick tress of hair! It was dark, richly dark, and his second impression was one of amazement at the length of it. The tress was as long as the table—fully a yard down the woman's back it must have hung. It was tied at the end with a bit of white ribbon.

To be continued next week

Will They Be the Richest Family in the World?

By John Mosher

IN a fashionable New England school a certain handsome young fellow bears a curious distinction. His father tried to have a bill put through the Legislature changing the boy's name from Alfred Victor du Pont to Dorsey Cazenove du Pont. The boy and the boy's mother objected, and the measure was lost. When Mr. du Pont was asked why he wished to take such a step, he answered that in this way he would connect the boy with a more remote branch of the family. He wished to do this, he added, "Because I am afraid he will disgrace me."

It must not be augured that young Alfred Victor has displayed any strikingly ominous tendencies—he is only thirteen. He plays ball and does long division, like any other rational young man of his years. But he has one fault—a fault that his father can not forgive, and which makes that sensitive gentleman desire so radical a change. He is the son of the woman whom Mr. du Pont divorced. That is his crime.

Mr. du Pont's marriage had been thought very successful and much to the credit of both his wife's family and his own. But when the split came he wanted more than a formal divorce: he desired that whole past life to be blotted out. For behind the whole affair lay the pride and impetuosity of a family which for a hundred years has been building itself into a national institution, and which promises to be, by the end of the war, one of the richest families in the world.

They Work in Their Own Mills

FOR a hundred years the du Pont de Nemours family has supplied most of the powder to this country, working personally in their powder mills at Wilmington. Perhaps it is because of this long inherited training, because of the generations that have known the tension of daily work in perpetual danger of their lives,—where a casual friction caused by a box drawn over the floor may blow up a building, where the experimenting with nitroglycerine and dynamite is an hourly peril,—that all the members of this family have temperaments peculiarly explosive, dramatically dynamic.

The du Ponts, perhaps because their business has forced them to be so guarded and controlled at their work, relax in their domestic life with astonishing results. Their quarrels are no transitory affairs. A huff does not pass off after the coffee-cups. It grows; factions spring up on one side or the other, embroiling the family for years in the most futile disputes. At present there are said to be ten feuds in full swing.

Their War Orders

BEFORE the war the du Ponts were very rich—merely that. They had a monopoly of practically all the powder business in the United States. The trust, formed in 1872, paid off in 1902 $9,000,000 bonds and $19,000,000 dividends, and had a surplus of $23,000,000. In 1903, organized under the laws of New Jersey, the Eleuthère Irénée du Pont Company, with a capital of $50,000,000, consolidating under three heads what had formerly been seventy separate companies, assured this family its eminence in Delaware. Then in August, 1914, began to roll in the war orders which will make it not only the first family of Delaware, but one of the richest families in the world.

No one can discover the exact figures of the orders received from Europe; but a few beacon lights, some rumors, some facts, give some idea of what 1915 has meant to the family that controls the powder industry of this country. On June 28, 1915, we note that the common stock, par value $100, has risen to $700. On July 8 it is announced in several papers, on good authority, that Russia has ordered $60,000,000 worth of powder—with a bonus of $20,000,000 for early delivery. On August 13 we hear of a contract for 70,000,000 pounds of powder—mostly again for Russia. On August 20 the company cut a $58,000,000 "melon." On October 21, the New York Times reported that the du Pont contracts exceeded $100,000,000 worth of powder, to be delivered before 1917. Within five months we hear that these orders aggregate $400,000,000. The Standard Oil, the Rothschilds after the battle of Waterloo, did not make money at such a rate as this.

The Family's Outstanding Trait

LET figures like these warn Alfred Victor what power he imperils with "disgrace," possibly what enmity he incurs when he refuses to be Dorsey Cazenove at his father's behest. Probably he knows well enough—and very probably he doesn't care. The du Ponts have been brought up not to care. When the Revolution guillotined autocracy in France, old Eleuthère Irénée fled, bringing to America the spark of the financial genius of Turgot and the pride of the old régime.

"I am the State," said King Louis. Eleuthère said nothing; but, from the day his powder-mill despatched the line of Conestoga wagons that saved Perry the battle of Lake Erie, in the War of 1812, he instilled the gospel that, though he was not, nor wanted to be, the State, there would be no State without him.

Curious, too, was the old autocrat's first comment on his new country. Driven from France by a people made desperate by feudalism, he blandly informed President Madison, when the latter offered him a locality for the mill in Virginia, that he could live in "no country where there is slavery."

It is this spirit of the grandiose that has always characterized the family. It is more, too, than a matter of words. "No du Pont asks an employee to take a risk he would not take himself," they say. And, sure enough, in 1857 Alexis was killed in an explosion; and in 1880 Lamott du Pont. At another time five members of the family entered a burning mill to carry out buckets of powder.

No one can deny their courage. A du Pont is not satisfied with committing suicide: he must select the most conspicuous club in Delaware in which to shoot himself. The skeletons in their closet are all picturesque. Tho beautiful daughter of one branch not only elopes with a college boy, but caps that with a divorce proceeding a few years later that is the gossip of the State. They are not content with a normal family row: they must needs publish it to the winds by refusing to speak to each other or to enter houses where the opposing factions are received. Senator du Pont does not introduce his colleague, as is the custom in the Senate, because he is a family enemy.

The three leaders of the present family illustrate all its peculiarities. Alfred I. du Pont, whose fear of disgrace we have mentioned, stands for that cold, austere "I am the State"-ism that would satisfy old Eleuthère.

The Silent du Pont

SENATOR HENRY A. best of all represents that silent discretion which lies behind all the bombast of their favorite phrases. It took him ten years to get into the Senate; but, like all the du Ponts, he got there. His career, too, had been striking. In the Civil War he was twice brevetted for "gallant and meritorious conduct," and a medal of honor was given him for "most distinguished gallantry and voluntary exposure to the enemy's fire in a crucial moment" during the battle of Cedar Creek.

But his course in the Senate has not been that of a fighter. He is one of the most silent members of the house. During the tariff discussion he made a speech about the white potato—his longest public address. But the good Senator does not waste his time. He is chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department; he is a member of the Committee on Coast Defenses, and of the Committee on Military Affairs, which frames the appropriation bill for the support of the army; and up to 1913 he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He has no official connection with the du Pont powder-mills.

The most picturesque member of the family is T. Coleman du Pont. As president of the powder company from 1902 till last year—when he sold out and invested his interests in the Equitable Life Assurance Society—he was the official head of the family. Incidentally, selling out when he did cost him dear; for the stock he sold for $20,000,000 rose with the boom to be worth $50,000,000. However, as he is said to be worth personally some hundred millions, he probably doesn't suffer.

T. Coleman is fifty-three years old—tall, big-shouldered, with a thin, sharp face. He is a terrific worker. When connected with the mills, he would rise at dawn. Moreover, he has that quality of geniality, that spirit of the "good mixer," which most of his relatives lack, and which gives him a strong hold on followers. He is the kind of man—he did this very thing—who can go to an inaugural ball and dance thirty-seven dances straight. Or he can collect fares on a trolley car for several blocks to relieve the conductor, helping off elderly ladies with children in each arm—and do it with the same interest he would if a vital twenty dollars were coming to him for it at the end of the week.

In Politics

LAST spring T. Coleman started for himself a boom for the Presidency. The other members of the family were quick to let it be known that he had no real hope of getting the nomination. No; he had simply become tired of waiting for Senator du Pont to retire, and hoped to gain sufficient prestige as a candidate for the Presidency to carry the du Pont Senatorship away at the next session of the Legislature.

For years Senator du Pont has been unanimously chosen a delegate to the Republican National Convention from his district. This year he went quietly and silently down to the caucus to see himself elected as usual—only to find that T. Coleman had carefully tied up all the delegates. So T. Coleman went to Chicago with the Delaware indorsement and the Senator stayed at home.

Enter then Alfred I. Dupont. Alfred I. goes quietly to Chicago and works, as the du Ponts know best how to work among T. Coleman's delegates. The result was that, on the evening before T. Coleman was to be presented to the national convention as a Presidential nominee, he was defeated for national committeeman from his own State. The very delegates pledged to support him for the Presidency refused to elect him to the national committee.

Nor is Alfred I. yet satisfied. T. Coleman owns the tallest office building in Wilmington. Therefore Alfred I. will build one just a little higher—just enough higher to cast a shadow on T. Coleman's.

What matters five or six millions while the family fracas waves?

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