II

THE JUDSONS

II

Sixty miles southeast of the mountain drowsed the town of Jackson, sinew of the old South as surely as Adamsville was brawn of the new. Gettysburg and even Appomattox had said their words before the earliest Ross had squared the logs for the first shanty over Ross Creek, from which the iron city grew; and at that time Jackson had already counted its half century.

It lay in the crotch where the river forked. Protected by water on two sides, and by open barrens on the third, its location had attracted wandering Cherokees into building here their huts and log stockades, until guarded Tallulah became the Indian heart of the region. The persistent seeping of pioneer migration from the eastern seaboard eddied around it; the white interloper treated here with the native, coveted the prosperous red fortress, and made it his own. Its name was changed later to that of the popular hero who drove back the redcoats from the rich levees of New Orleans, and scattered before him the redskins of the palmettoed peninsula at the southeast land's end. When the young nineteenth century brought statehood, bustling Jackson became the capital. It is hard for those who remember Jackson, or Charleston, or Richmond, in the sleepy glamor of their later years, to think of these as uncouth pioneer clearings: but such was their beginning. The first town hall in Jackson was a blockhouse, and more than once the straggly strings of huts at the split of the river, which constituted the settlement, had seen marauding Indians repelled from its main street.

Political dignity transfigured the village out of its buckskin and bowie-knife existence, into a leisurely civic siesta. Governors and legislators peopled its walks; pillared mansions grew at the heads of long avenues of water oak. The hilly barrens and sedgy river-fields were combed into ordered rows of large-bladed corn and stocky cotton bushes. Slavery came early, and the slave quarters stretched behind the mansions and in the parched treeless opens. The anomalous shanties of the poor whites sprang like fungoids on outlying poor lands, and bunched near the river pier, where the fussy side-wheelers, the Tallulah and the Southern Star, churned the muddy water, eager to paddle away past swampland and sandy waste to the gulf. Idling negroes sprawled along the pier, and on the bales before gin and compress; vehement orators in the Capitol fisted their defiance to the dastardly Liberty Men coiled like vipers in the arid North. The heavy pour of the sun, and the formal courtesy of the lords of the dark soil and the dark soul, mellowed the manner of the place, shaped it into that unhealthy beauty and charm men call the Old South.

One of the earliest white settlers had been a Potomac planter, Derrell Judson. His vigorous descendants had grown up with the town, and left their touch upon the whole somnolent section. There was a disused Judson's Landing three miles up stream, and a ramshackle Judsontown on the Greenville Road to the southwest. Two of the family had been mayors of the village; there had been a wartime lieutenant-governor, and at least one congressman, with a proud host of lesser officials. None of the family had meant more to Judson eyes than a grandson of the early settler, Judge Tom Judson, whose flashing spirit had broken from his last year at college, in the troubled early spring of '61, to enter the gray cavalry. A year later, a captain now, he had hurled himself in daily desperate charges against the imperturbable Army of the Potomac, following his beloved Stonewall. At last an exploding shell carried off an arm, and with it his military usefulness to the Confederacy. When he walked weakly out of the hospital, two years later, the cause had become too hopeless for his capable direction to be of value.

With the war's end came the order, signed by his own governor, calling for emancipation. In front of the weather-etched pillars of the portico, Judge Judson lined up his slaves, and dismissed them from servile happiness into precarious freedom. Close beside him were his three sons, Derrell, Pratt, and Paul, the eldest only six; their young minds were black with tearful rage against the "damn Yankees" who were causing the exile of the loved negroes. The black faces were grimed with tears; this changed social condition seemed nothing but a calamity to the well-tended household.

Many of the slaves could not be persuaded to leave. Old Isaac, the coachman, hung onto the reins until he dropped dead at the cemetery, one broiling Decoration Day. Aunt Jane, who superintended the cooking, dared "them Bureau-ers" to meddle around her kitchen. The younger negroes gradually straggled away; but their places were filled with servants as well known to the family. The masters' attitude toward them, as might have been expected, remained almost the same as during "slavery times."

The judge built out of the empty days an enviable practice of law, and trained one son to aid him in this. The three brothers gradually took their father's place in Jackson living; and at the beginning of the last decade of the century, they were essential to the well-ordered existence of the community. The Jackson Hotel, where the present Derrell Judson had succeeded an uncle, had been the center of the town's visiting life for fifty years. The time-specked shingle, "Judson & Judson, Practitioners in All Courts of Law and Equity," still hung above a run-down office entrance, where Pratt Judson kept the firm name in use, although there had been no partner for more than fifteen years. The youngest brother, Paul, had graduated from the State University at Greenville the year of his father's death. With an initiative tendency unpromised by his blood, he determined to lead off into a new line, deciding upon real estate, through a belief in the physical expansion of the river town.

Two doors from the Judson house was the Barbour "city" place. It was during the solemn painfulness of his father's funeral that Mary Barbour first impressed herself upon the sorrowing youngest son's imagination. They had been boy and girl together; in those days they had decocted frequent mud confections with Pratt, and Jack Lamar and Cherokee Ryland. But the girl had grasped a rare chance to attend an art school in Philadelphia, just after Paul started to college; and now, after the absence, he found her grown into a new and surprising grace of person. There was a hint of shy primitive beauty in her irregular features. The hair was chestnut, and as straight as an Indian's; the eyes possessed that quality of sympathetic comprehension that spoke the mother-soul. His heart, emptied by the gap of his father's absence, needed a new object to cling to; and she was attractive, obvious, and near.

Mary Barbour had already admired Paul with an artist's aloof gaze; she saw in him a tall, black-eyed young beau, the best shot in the Jackson Grays, the invariable cotillion leader. Now she began to know him as the ardent lover as well. With characteristic determination, he elbowed all tentative rivals out of the way. The girl found herself escorted with gallant insistence everywhere by this headstrong and heartstrong wooer; dances, picnics, gossiping church suppers,—for eleven months his attendance delighted heart-coupling minds in the little town.

One cool June night he caught her hands within his, in the honey-suckled dimness of the Barbour side-porch.

"Mary, dearest, dearest,——" His assurance deserted him for a moment, his throat gulped. He clung to the relaxed fingers. "We—we've waited——" he paused lamely, then finished assertively, "It's been long enough!"

A caressing smile went with her answer. "It's not a year, Paul,—mother was engaged almost four."

"I can take care of you now," he urged with affectionate crispness. "We've had enough of this, honey. You fix the date—to-night!" His arms bound her closer.

"Paul—you hurt——"

"Then do as I say," he laughed, triumphantly passionate.

He won her answer.

The wedding helped christen the new Baptist Church. The systematic sweetness of the honeymoon included a flashed glimpse of Mammoth Cave, and a short stay at Niagara. Upon the return followed eager days and nights in which she was allowed to grow into his plans. He discussed his projects fully with her, taking her to see the houses, lots, and subdivisions from which their living was chiefly derived. She marveled at his ceaseless energy. Drive, drive, drive,—in a fading community dozing in the enervating aroma of decaying days: no wonder he succeeded so well! The business constantly broadened in importance and scope.

Mary had her plans and dreams too,—intimate visions that left small room for the old desires toward artistic success; and these she soon shared with Paul. The husband was anxious that the first baby should be a boy. He had not tired of his grinding work; but he had begun to realize that the slowly maturing schemes would inevitably open out further opportunities; business was a never ending, slowly widening game. He could, of course, confine his activities to the simple beginnings. But he realized that this could only mean that some one else would take advantage of what he had started; and he wanted to keep his fingers clamped upon the pulse of it all. The time would come when a son who could fit into his visionings would be an invaluable aid.

The days plodding toward the birth, when Mary walked, more and more alone, down the narrowing road to the ultimate taut gate of motherhood, made the warm-eyed bride even dearer to him. It seemed so unfair, this voluntary tempting of death required of the woman—there were hours when he hated himself for the summoning of the ancient curse upon woman, and would have put himself in pledge to recall the irrevocable act. The dragging schedule of pain should somehow be altered. But the thought of the tiny son on his insensate way was a consolation.

The elaborate layette, with ample contributions from friends and relatives, was threaded with tiny blue ribbons; the baby's arrival, like a human alkali on litmus-paper, changed the significant shade to pink. Eleanor, his first born, gradually claimed her father's regard; but, although Paul never referred to it, the perversion of his hopes was a tremendous disappointment.

The second girl, Susan, followed two short years later. By this time the father had pushed into the management of the Jackson Street Railway, and had seen to it that the persistent dummy duly puffed and creaked through Newtown, a cheap suburb he had plotted out around the cotton mill to the north. Absorption in this scarcely left him time to regret the second daughter; he accepted the fact as a matter of course; he did not waste regret upon a thing he could not change.

Then came Pelham, the first boy. Mary never forgot the days of packed happiness when she sang over his crinkly head, in the creaky yellow rocker that had been her mother's. They had been waiting for him so long,—the father was so boyishly happy and proud of the wrinkled pink bundle that her mother put in his arms for a precious moment, even before Mary had seen her son,—somehow making a man child seemed a big achievement. And he had been her boy from the first; the fourth baby, fat little Hollis, never touched her strung heart chords as did the earlier son.

They were indeed lovely children, Mary was fond of telling herself. But they were a constant drain upon her time and attention, and upon Paul's bank account. Sheer desire to accomplish had driven him at first; with the coming of the boys, he had to buckle down for their sakes.

The renewed vigor of his enterprise lengthened the reach of his dealings. Among the real estate men throughout the state who measured themselves against him, he found none shrewder or more alert than an Adamsville operator, old Nathaniel Guild. This man, interested in some state grants, stopped at the Jackson Hotel while the legislature was in session, and thus met Paul. The local operator felt the calculating scrutiny of the other during all of an all-day barbecue and junket taken by the law-makers at Tallulah Shoals. Evidently satisfied at last, on the ride in the elder man leaned over, and said with hesitating gravity, "You've been to Adamsville?"

"Why, yes.... Not only pleasure trips; we handle lots out Hazelton way."

Guild waved this aside. "An excrescence. Have you noticed the mountain—the one west of the city?"

"Recently I've only been there on business——"

The gray eyes narrowed and sparkled. "I'm talking business. There's land for sale there, that will quadruple in value in ten years. The development must be in that direction,—that is, for the first-class residence section. I've got a little to invest; I want some one to go in with me. What do you say?"

"I like to watch my money. I'm tied up here——"

"Come to the iron city: it needs iron men." Appraising admiration spoke in his glance. "I think you'd fit. Why, man, Jackson hasn't added a thousand people in forty years; Adamsville has fifty thousand now, to your five."

The idea startled Paul. Leave Jackson! It was one thing for Dr. Ryland to go away, or the Lamar boys, or even Judge Roscoe Little and Borden Crenshaw. They were comparative newcomers; the earliest Crenshaw dated back only sixty years. But the Judsons were a Jackson fixture: his place was here. His black eyes clouded uncertainly; at that, he might invest a little....

The other's words continued; "... chance of a lifetime. It's big!"

"When can we look it over?" A spurt of eagerness spoke in the tone.

"Come up next week.... Bring Mrs. Judson?"

"I doubt if she could make it."

"You'll come?"

"Ye-es. I may bring the eldest boy."

After dinner he told Mary of the conversation. "We couldn't pull up stakes, I'm afraid. Anyway, Pelham will enjoy the trip. How about it, son?"

"Oh, father!" The bright-eyed face was expressive enough.

Her consent was assumed, Mary noticed, as had been her husband's custom for the last few years.

He did not tell her how his mind kept recurring to the other suggestion that Guild had made. If he were ever to leave Jackson, the time had come. The state capital stood still. Adamsville, founded since the war, already crowded New Orleans as the commercial center of the gulf region. Judge Little had moved his law office there; at least a dozen prominent Jacksonians were prospering in the iron city. The iron city! He could find room to stretch his visions there!

Nathaniel Guild stayed over and made the trip with the two Judsons. It was a tiresome journey for all of them; at length, his attention worn out with the dizzying panorama of the sunset hills, the boy's head nodded forward on his hands, his eyes closed, his breathing became deep and regular.

Some time later, the father reached over and shook the sleeping boy kindly by the shoulder. "Wake up, Pelham,—Adamsville!"

The tired child straightened quickly, showering a drizzle of cooled cinders from Paul's linen duster, tucked around him. "Are we there?"

"Just about.... I'm afraid it's too dark to see the mountain. These are the furnace yards.... Watch for the coke ovens!"

Pelham needed no urging.

The train was slowing. The heavy coaches bumped over uneven places in the roadbed. There was a subdued hissing scream where wheel met track.

At first he could make out nothing through the window. The light from the smelly kerosene lamps above fell on the dull sides of freight cars; he could see only a vague darkness between them.

Abruptly the string of cars ended. Beyond a wide open space he saw sinister black buildings, grotesque, bulging with vast tanks. Above, a trellis-work of ladders ended in ungainly smokestacks that crowded the sky. Suddenly a burst of flame, a piercing tongue of reds and yellows, broke from the top of one of the wider tanks. Dense smoke and steam shot out. The whole yard was washed in a red glare.

"Charging the furnace," Paul said. He was as thrilled as his son at the sight.

Guild, in the window corner, shriveled still farther into his seat, his lined face crackling with pleasure, as he observed the boy's intense astonishment.

Pelham did not answer his father. He greedily absorbed every sharp detail of the burning picture. The metallic buildings seemed made of flame. The occasional windows just passed flickered redly,—as if the night, within and without, were on fire. The light dimmed, burned brightly for a moment, then startlingly went out. The vacant night was blacker than ever.

Dim thoughts struggled within the mind of the child,—clouded fancies of the mouth of hell, the pit of eternal burning and damnation.

Then, as the train ground to a standstill, again the night flared brilliantly. The tracks glowed like pulsing, living gold. Just beyond the third pair, and parallel to them, ran a long mound, hardly higher than the train. Every few feet leaping fire twisted up from it. The smell of the smoke stung his nostrils.

A man with a lantern ran shouting past the window, and disappeared; his face was coal-smeared, red, horrible, in the sudden glow. The boy shuddered. There were black figures standing around the fire holes. Three or four were dumping a squat-bellied car into one of them. The waiting train was stiflingly warm. It must be frightfully hot above the fire! Those devils there emptying cargoes of lost souls into the brimstone pits,—surely they could not be men!

"Coke ovens," explained the father.

Pelham pressed his nose more tightly to the pane.

The other man drew out his bulky wallet, and was lost in the intricacies of some creased maps. Paul Judson pointed here, there, upon their surfaces, arguing vehemently. The boy paid no attention to any of it.

This was his first sight of the iron city. He never forgot it....

The mountain, when they reached it the next morning, was marvelously different. The steam dummy passed the last house, and the negro shacks sprawling beyond, and began to puff and cough up the steep slope.

It was May, and the boy's dreamy fancies were caught and tangled in the green vistas that endlessly opened and closed on both sides of the track. Below the fill on the town side a succession of heavy-fruited blackberry bushes ran close to the tracks. The broad leaves and waxen flowers of the May-apple carpeted unexpected clearings. A shapeless negress, four babies clutching her skirts, balanced her heavy basket on her head, and blinked stolidly at them.

At last they struck the level gap road, and the end of the dummy line just beyond.

Pelham gathered wild flowers, as they climbed up to the northern crest of the gap. They were for his mother, if they could be induced to last until night. On the top overlooking the wide valley he found a convenient rise of rock steps, shaped out of the solid iron ore; while his father and Mr. Guild talked and pointed, he sat down, fanning himself with his sailor....

The men strolled back, Paul's face flushed. He gestured impetuously from the elevation to the citied valley below. "A magnificent chance, Nathaniel. Your mountain grips me."

"It'll take a long time, remember. Don't go off half-cocked."

"The thing's here before my eyes!"

"Adamsville won't really touch the mountain for ten years. It's good ... fine residence property, but.... That's the Crenshaw land, just beyond. They have four eighties; they run all the way to this road." The heads bent over the map again.

"We've simply got to take it all," Paul reiterated.

Guild's familiar cautions and objections came forth again. "Not that I wouldn't like to, but...."

"That's all you can see in it, then?" Paul asked finally.

"Frankly, it's all I can put in anything now."

"I'm going into it hard. How will this do? We'll take half of this eighty together, and the nearest Crenshaw one. I'll buy the rest of this and the Crenshaw land, and the Logan place on the south.... I can raise it somehow. Pratt will help me.... It will be first mortgage."

With this settled, they circled down to the gap, and back by dummy to the Great Southern Hotel.

On the way down to the dummy station, Paul picked a dogwood blossom. It was still fresh in his lapel when he and his son arrived at the pillared home in Jackson.

Pelham's flowers of the morning had withered; his moist clenched fingers had reluctantly abandoned most of them on the seat of the tardy Dixie Flier. But the limp remains in his grimy handkerchief he carried into his mother's room, and left on her dresser.

The boy was asleep when she found them. After pausing above a half-emptied scuttle, she arranged them in a small green vase, and replaced them in the bedroom. All night their quiet odor upset the ordered room with a word of wilder life.

III

Paul Judson came back from that trip on fire with the mountain. On the creased blue-print he traced for Mary the outlines of the sections and quarter-sections, wooing her interest, a thing he had long ceased to do. His pencil shaded the curving paths to the crest, and aimlessly roughed in a design for a house; this he eyed from several angles. "Guild agrees that this would be the best location for a home."

Her mind pieced out the half-uttered wish. "Not for us, Paul!"

"Mm ... maybe."

"But—to leave Jackson!"

He grew argumentative, with an expansive selflessness. "It's only fair to the children to give them the wider chance. There are nice people in Adamsville ... big people."

Her every objection was met by an urgent answer; she resigned herself at last to his insistent determination. Sometimes, lately, she had felt a little afraid of this masterful husband, the incarnation of courtesy away from home, the slave-driver with his family. His father had been the same type, as Paul had once reminded her. It stirred in his blood; Derrell and Pratt, the older brothers, had ordered him around, as a boy, as dictatorially as if he were a negro; he, in turn, had bossed the neighboring children, and the servants. "Bred in the bone," Mary had once said to her mother. "He can cover it; he can't change it."

On occasion, he was considerate and tender; but if there was work to be done, he attacked it with impetuous ferocity. Negroes, children, even his wife, became tools to be picked up, used, and laid down as quickly. In her heart Mary resented the attitude, even while defending it to her family.

It was in this mood that he plunged at the acquisition of the mountain lands, and the planning of the new house. Mary found little of the chummy spirit that had warmed the first few married years; instead, the hold that the hill had taken upon his imagination intensified his usual dominance. Adamsville, the mountain, called him. He had a recurring, varying vision of the iron city brought to the feet of the mountain; of country estates climbing up to his crest home, overlooking the whole city, the state, the South. He saw himself filling coveted public offices.... The shifting details spurred his determination. With the mountain his, he could do anything, be anything.... He gave slack rein to these fancies; for he knew that man spent more hours upon these preparatory visions, desire-spun solitaire conversations and imaginary victories, than upon any other activity: even sleep was filled with a continuation of the day's longings, altered but unmistakable. He would differ from the usual man in that he would drive or bend to completion these airy plannings.

His secret dreams he shared with no one. Mary may have suspected their existence, from his silent spells of brow-knitted thought, but he denied her the confidence her cordial sympathy had hoped for. His desire blueprinted the future unassisted.

At times he sought to weigh this push that quickened his nature. He began to think of himself as one of the iron men out of whom the New South was being forged, painfully but surely. He was a Judson in all of it; but he possessed, more than the rest, a driving ambition too strong to be satisfied with the unfruitful life of a Southern aristocrat. Changing conditions were rapidly eliminating this impossible and antiquated incongruity. He was more than a Judson. His nature reacted away from the typical Southern vices, which neither of his brothers had escaped. He was continent, even in drinking. The endless object lesson that had been given him by his crotchetty old father, who toward the last drank himself into a daily querulousness, was not lost on the son. Paul rarely took even a toddy; and the clear mind that this gave should be of value in whatever harsh, lean years might follow.

All of his energy went toward the mountain. It was Mary whose embroidering fancy christened the new home "Hillcrest Cottage," on her one visit to the place, just before the completion of the interior. Beyond this, she found her counsel unheeded in the designing, even in the complicated arrangements for the moving.

What a time is moving! A self-willed chaos to familiar routines and associations, an involuntary revisiting of dead hours and buried sensations. It brings an endless plowing up of forgotten once-hallowed trifles, which the fond heart would fain reject, but can not; it is a rooted and ample world fitted into packing cases, hustled and baled into temporary death. The old life was and is not, the new life is still to begin. It warns of the shaky foundations beneath rooted habitudes; and at the same time calls forth adventure and daring in the soul of man.

Such thoughts thronged Paul Judson's mind, in disjointed sequence, as his busy steps took him through the large littered rooms of the family mansion. He wore his old garden shoes, stained by grass and lime, scuffed by cinders: a pair of carefully patched brown woolen trousers, the lower half of a once prized suit; and a blue-figured shirt, turned to a V at the neck, with a green paint blotch on one side which strenuous laundryings had not been able to efface. A wall mirror gave him a passing reflection of himself; he smiled as he pictured what would have been his father's horror at such ungentlemanly garb. Boxes of books, ropes for the extra trunks, piles of straw for the china—all these must be arranged under his eyes. He packed the fragile Haviland and the shaped fish set, used only on unusual occasions, with his own hands. He knew negroes; you couldn't trust them with a thing.

He looked irritably under lumped old quilts, piles of table linen, and cloth-shielded pictures. "Mary!" he demanded, sharply.

"Yes, dear?" She dropped what she had been doing at once.

A free hand gestured nervously. "The hammer—I had it just a moment ago."

An experienced gaze interrogated the room. It was the ninth call for that hammer since breakfast had been cleared away.

Just beyond the door an empty packing-case gaped. She put her hand on the missing implement, cached within it.

The troubled line left his forehead. "We'll take the pictures next," he said curtly, bending again to his task.

Mary Judson stood watching his efficient activity. She had stayed unnoticed at his elbow nearly all the morning, to anticipate these calls. He continued hammering energetically, unconscious of her observation.

He straightened his still youthful shoulders a moment, to lift a stack of heavy books from the mantel. Paul Judson, as she loved best to remember him, furnished the food for her musings; they dwelt in haphazard inconsecutiveness upon his erect figure at the head of the Decoration Day line of his company, upon his ardent face bending over tiny Pelham's crib, upon his wry expression yesterday while she bandaged a cut wrist; then to the alien admiration her kindly brother felt for the husband's driving vitality.

"Mary, did you get those quilts to cover the piano?" His crisp query broke into her thoughts.

With a start, "On the cherry table, dear."

A contented mumble reached her; evidently the mislaid coverings had been found.

She stirred herself, and called the girls, Eleanor and Sue. "Will you bring father the pile of pictures on my dresser, children?"

They skipped quietly up the stairs.

In a few moments they chattered back through the dining-room, where Mary was adjusting the linen into a cedar chest. Sue stumbled over a corner of the carpet; several unframed photographs slipped out of her arms. Her father looked up impatiently. She recovered them in a moment, and spread them on the bare table.

"Mother, this is me, isn't it? 'N' this is Pelham, 'n' the baby picture is Hollis—isn't it, mother? Nell says it's Pell too."

"That's Hollis, children. Hurry: your father is waiting; he's ready to pack them."

The girls reluctantly went on, arguing over the identity of a befrizzed, balloon-sleeved aunt.

She heard her eldest son in the kitchen now, asking Aunt Sarah if she too were going to the new home. Sarah had been her mammy, and had taken care of all four of the children.

The rich black voice laughed hugely at the question. "Is I gwine? Is Aunt Sarah gwine? Is you gwine! Better ask yer maw if she gwineter take you. Whar Mis' Mary Barbour goes, I goes!"

Pelham persisted, "But Aunt Jane isn't goin'."

Precise Sue took him up at once. "Of course she isn't. Aunt Jane's very, very old, Pell. She's 'mos' a hunderd. Aren't you, Aunt Jane?"

The aged cook snorted contemptuously. "What I is, I is, Miss Susie. I'se gwine ter yer Uncle Derrell's, I is."

The children gazed open-eyed. "Are you goin' to cook for him 'n' Aunt Eloise?" asked Pelham.

"Sho' I is, honey! Dey gotter have mah cookin', Mister Derrell he says."

The noise of the creaking wagons drawn up at the side door claimed the children's attention. They ran out to watch the first loading, hoping to be allowed to help.

Paul followed briskly, thoroughly at home as an executive, issuing his orders with precision. His active mind ranged even at this absorbing moment. Well, he was leaving a slate wiped clean! All of the Jackson investments had turned out finely; he has sold the real estate to advantage, so as to cover a large part of the mountain purchase money. The street railway stock he was still carrying; its regular income furnished a safe fund to fall back upon.

After the last load had been urged away, he walked with Mary through the echoing emptiness.

"We've been happy here, Paul," she observed quietly.

"Mm ... yes. Did that box of books in the spare room go with the last load?"

He hurried up to make sure.

Mary saw the children into their heavy wraps—it was unusually chilly for a Jackson October—and young Ike drove them down to the Great Southern station in the old carriage. It had been sold to Shanley's Livery Stable—it would hardly be the thing in Adamsville; but the wife had had her way for once more, due to Paul's expansive satisfaction at the smooth-running plans, and they were to make their last trip as citizens of Jackson in the accustomed conveyance.

When they became settled in the train, Pelham retold to the sisters the story of his trip to the mountain. They had never seen it, and his colorful narrative fascinated. Mary listened attentively, adding an occasional touch.

Paul went forward into the smoking car. The Dixie Flier was a political exchange for the state, just before the legislature met. There was always some one to listen, though usually unconvinced, to his insistence on the future prosperity of this dormant section. Mary heard his nervous, energetic laugh sound out, when the train stopped at some crossroads station to pick up a giggling group of ginghamed farm-girls and stooped country elders.

The children were quiet now. Across the aisle the baby lay with his head in Nell's lap; Sue was stretched out on the seat facing them, flushed cheek pillowed on cindery hand, brown eyes closed. Pell sat beside his mother, his dreamy face pressed against the smudged car pane, watching the flickering landscape sway by.

They were beautiful ... her children. But the cost to her ambitions had been heavy. Her vague dreams of a career, cherished while she was at art school, had been shoved far into the future. She realized, with a sigh, that she could never overtake them. Perhaps some one of the children,—perhaps the little son at her side,—would show the same talent; in him she might realize her own hid longings.

It hurt her to leave the quiet home town she had always known and loved, for the restless, youthful city, big with the future. It was the second time that she had felt wholly uprooted from her former life. Home days with Paul and his urging aggressiveness were vastly different from the placid, considerate atmosphere of the old Barbour plantation. There, a sharp word had been unknown. Her kindly, courtly father, the sweet quiet mother, the gay-hearted brothers and sisters,—there was an unbridgeable chasm between these and the push of her married life.

And now again a change....

Paul had a grasp of things, a will to shove his way over all obstacles, a single-ideaed vision of a high goal, that, she believed, could not fail to win for him the success that he sought. She sometimes wondered if the gentler bringing-up that had been hers would not have been better for the children. But that could not happen. They, she, were to be a part of the swell, the hurried, assertive course of Adamsville. She was glad she would be there to guard her little ones: they would need all she could do.

A long whistle woke her from her reverie. She looked out; the dusk had softened the countryside until it was a dull blur, shot with irregular streaky lights.

Her husband shouldered briskly back from the smoking car. "This is Hazelton, Mary," he said eagerly. "Adamsville next!"

IV

The Judsons blended easily into the life on the mountain.

Paul took it upon himself to plan and arrange all the details of the new home. Mary found her wishes unconsulted, when furniture was to be placed or purchased.

Much of the furnishings of the Jackson house he used in the new "Hillcrest Cottage." The dining-room suite, with its stately, ornate sideboard and carved chairs, was rearranged in the bay-windowed corner room, overlooking the long vista of Bragg Valley. The diners looked out on the pigmy furnace smokestacks punctuating the dun smoke-mist. The children's rooms, the three chief bedrooms, and the living-room furniture remained unaltered.

Upon the other things, Paul put down his foot. The library set, its antique bookcases and desks curling up toward the ceiling, must be relegated to the attic. The mahogany and bird's-eye maple suite, which had furnished the spare bedroom, must accompany it. The family portraits, the china heirlooms, and the odd judge's musty home library, in the same crates in which they had come from Jackson, were pushed into the odd-shaped angles of the twilight garret. These had no place in the elaborate simplicity of a country home.

The study and library were fitted up afresh in dull quartered oak, with sectional bookcases. New porch chairs and lounges for the wide verandas, Persian rugs for the rooms where the old carpets would not suffice, he listed, viewed, and finally purchased. Mary's heart ached these days as she realized how she had been pushed out of his living.

The phone rang one afternoon. "I'm sending out a rug for the library, Mary. Abramson's promised to get it there before five."

"Did you look at the one at Hooper's I told you about?"

"We'll talk about that when I get home." He rang off sharply.

Mary had it spread out before he arrived. It was a beauty, she thought ruefully; but it must have cost a mint. And it didn't go too well with the new bookcases and desk.

Paul reached home a little early, tired and cross from a big deal that had hung fire for ten days. "Well, how do you like it?"

"It's a lovely piece of goods. How much was it? The tag was off."

He walked in to observe it, altering its angle slightly. "It's just what we wanted. I think we'll have another for the parlor, too." He ignored her anxious eyes, and she did not press the question.

On Sundays Nathaniel Guild usually dropped in, for a stroll over the place, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee at seven.

There was so much they must plan together; this could be done only on the ground. Paul, of course, was living on the mountain, and his share in the land was much the larger; but both were interested in the projected development, the wide boulevards curving with the contour of the ground, the advantageous grouping of sites naturally adapted to sloping lawns and well-placed residences.

"You see, Nate, every shrub I set out, every walk we put in, every flight of steps, will increase the value, when we put it on the market."

"Waiting a few years,——"

"Now's the time to begin. Adamsville is spreading fast; it's course is bound to be this way. East Highlands is the residence section now——"

"I see Mrs. Friedman's building on Haviland Avenue——"

"And three new houses to go up on East Thirtieth!"

"... It'll take a lot of money." His eyes roamed reflectively over the gray, jagged outcrop, almost concealed by a tangle of grape and blackberry vines and rangy sumach bushes.

Paul tugged vindictively at a nettle that had encroached upon the path winding up to the house,—he carried his garden gloves for just such purposes. "It'll be cleared before next summer,—all this half of it."

On weekday mornings the master of the mountain was up earlier, hoeing the flower beds that frilled the verandas, and seeing to the setting out of trees and vines. After seven o'clock, he superintended the gangs of negro laborers who were filling and grading the gap road, and the extensions that bent down to the railroad spur on the west.

At times, that first winter, there were more than forty workmen remolding the mountain's resisting face. Quartz blasted from the quarry above the tracks, on the Logan land, made a permanent roadbed. The winter's settling would have it ready for the final surface of dirt after the spring rains. The negroes worked for a dollar a day; and Paul often observed disgustedly, after inspection of the day's work, that four-fifths of the job had been done before eight-thirty, when he left for the office in the city.

Pelham, just beyond his ninth birthday, found his spare time provided for. He spent his afternoons and Saturdays assisting in the overseeing of the grading. His father believed in getting him to work young. The mountain would be his some day,—his and his brother's and sisters',—it was none too soon to begin now to learn its problems.

When not at school, he was started in, before six o'clock, at weed-picking. Nell and Sue, and even the baby, could help here, when the work was near the house. In order to give a material incentive, the children were paid one cent a bucket for the weeds. Their earnings were banked with their mother, who kept the accounts in a little red book, an object of especial reverence to the involuntary depositors.

Pelham was especially sharp at locating the big weeds, their roots matted with moist earth, and spreading fan-like over the rocks never far below the surface. Five or six of these, and his bucket was full. Then he would lie on his back, dreaming, his body registering, through the blue cotton pants and thin shirt, each rock and hump on the ground. He followed the clouds sailing, like misty Argoes, over the placid blue sea of sky; he watched the crimson-capped woodpeckers tapping industriously at a nearby oak or hickory trunk, or the bouncing flight of flickers from clump to clump of bluegum and white-gum, or the distant descending spirals of a lazy buzzard, answering some noisome summons to a hidden and hideous feast.

"How you gettin' 'long, Pell? My second bucket's full, an' Susie's almost finished."

He would reluctantly carry his weeds to the pile, and go back to the work and his dreaming.

He was a problem to his energetic father. He would start industriously enough, but the day's toll always fell far below what was expected. The parents had many conferences over him.

"I don't know what to make of the boy, Mary. I never used to loaf like Pelham does. He's as bad as a nigger."

"He's only a boy, Paul."

"He's got to learn to work."

The mother sighed.

The son received ten cents a week for keeping the bedrooms supplied with coal. Several nights he had been routed out of bed, and made to stumble down to the coalhouse, while his father impatiently held the lantern, to do the neglected task. He was perpetually losing things. Hammers, saws, dewed in the morning grass, a saddle that he had forgotten to hang up,—these would furnish damning indictments of his carefulness.

To teach him responsibility, the three newly-purchased crates of Leghorns were put in his charge. Many a time a dried water-trough or a suspiciously pecked-up chicken-run, its last grain of corn consumed, brought him into trouble. Perhaps he had spent the afternoon whittling a dagger, or carefully cleaning an old horse-skull discovered under the green valley pines. He was very proud at the idea of possessing the chickens, and grew fond of them; but remembering to attend to them was a very different matter.

"I don't never have any time for myself, mother," he would complain, after a scene with Paul. "The Highland boys don't have to work all the time."

"Your father is very busy, Pell; if you don't help him, who will?"

Continued repetition of these negligences caused tingling reminders to be applied to the boy. Paul hated to whip his son; he almost despised himself for causing suffering to a smaller human; but what was he to do? Pelham grew familiar with the feel of his father's belt; and still did not, or could not, change his ways.

He could hardly remember when there had not been some friction between them. Consciously and unconsciously he patterned himself after his father in many things. Paul was jolly and companionable, whenever he wished to be; he was an unusually clean representative of a class that prided itself upon its chivalry and courage. These traits the boy followed.

Then, too, his father had shown him inordinate attention, as the first son, ever since his birth. This masculine approval, added to the adulation of adoring women relatives, exalted his already high opinion of himself, made him selfishly demand more than his share.

His mother's love, for instance,—there were times when he wanted to feel he had all of it. When his father was off on business trips, he became, young as he was, the head of the house. It fretted him to be reduced again to a humble subordinate position.

He could sleep in Mary's room, when Paul was away; this privilege he lost on the return. He hardly realized how this tinged his thoughts with dislike of the father. The parents had a vast, almost a godlike, part in his life,—as in the lives of all children. Whatever daily good or ill he received, came primarily from them; his own efforts counted only as they pleased or displeased the deities. What he did not receive, he blamed upon his father; and he often dwelt upon the happy home life should Paul die, or disappear. He could earn a living for mother, and make a loving home for her....

These things created an unseen and growing breach between the two.

When he first came to Adamsville, Paul had had to go out and make business for himself. He had allied himself to James Snell, a fidgety, pushing real estate operator who was familiar with the newcomer's success in Jackson. "The Snell-Judson Real Estate and Development Company" came into existence; Paul joined the Commercial Club, the Country Club, and met here as many people as he could. Before the winter was over, he found his hands full. Perpetual application to the complications of real estate problems throughout the county was wearing; which made him less liable than ever to put up with Pelham's shortcomings. As the spring grew on, and the matter did not mend, he called his son into his room early one morning. "You left the cow-gate unlatched last night, Pelham."

The boy sensed the gravity of his father's tone, and grew at once apprehensive. "I thought I shut it, father——"

"Peter had to spend an hour looking for them, this morning. This is the second time in a week."

The boy became voluble. "The other time, father, you know I told you——"

"Yes, you told me. You're always telling me. Did you take that scythe down to be sharpened yesterday?"

"I meant to—I'll take it this afternoon, sure."

"You'll take it before you go to school this morning."

"Father,—if I'm tardy,——"

"You can explain to Professor Gloster you made yourself late."

The boy's lip pouted; a whimper trembled behind it.

"Twice this week you've failed to hoe the spring garden. Do you know who watered your chickens last night?"

Pelham was silent. The list was growing too large to explain away, apt as he had become in excuses.

"I had a talk with your mother yesterday." The father sat on the edge of his bed, his eyes down, thumping a yard-stick against his left thumb.

So it was going to be the yard-stick! That wouldn't hurt,—not like the belt, or a hickory switch, anyway. Pelham began to frame his voice for the proper mingling of crying and entreaty. The more you seemed to be hurt, the less you got. Only, you had to take the first two or three quietly, or father would see through you.

The elder walked over to the bureau, and placed the measure beside the rose-shears and the spraying can. No, it was not going to be the yard-stick. The boy looked furtively around; there was no other weapon in sight.

Paul continued, "Your conduct bothers your mother as much as it does me. We don't know what to do with you. You're almost ten now ... old enough to be trusted. You know you can't be. Your mother thinks I ought to give you another chance. I promised her I would." His tones grew crisper, more biting. "I know what's the matter with you. You're dog mean. You think you can impose on me. I know it. And I'll have no more of this slovenly work-dodging around my place."

He had worked himself into a rage, by this time; but his tones were icily cold and correct. "This confounded laziness has got to stop. It's your job to stop it, do you hear? And if you don't do it within a week,—you know I mean what I say,—I'll thrash you every morning, until you do!"

He rose menacingly. Pelham shrank from him.

"I'm not going to touch you,—this morning. I promised your mother I wouldn't. But this is a last warning."

For the first few days, the son's conduct was unimpeachable. He attended strictly to his duties, and accomplished all of them passably. But one afternoon, he stopped at the foot of the hill to play ball with the East Highland boys, and entirely forgot to leave an order for linseed oil and chicken-feed at the food store near the livery stable. When Saturday came, he worked irritably around the tomato plants until eleven o'clock. Then he sneaked off to Shadow Creek with some boys from the Gloster School. He was back by four, and tried desperately to finish his tasks by nightfall; but several were forgotten entirely. When no punishment followed, he grew careless again.

Paul was detained at the office Monday night. Just before eleven, the telephone's tinkle aroused Mary. "Coming right away, dear."

With a start she wondered if Pelham's tasks had been performed. She made the rounds. Not a thing done! Skuttles empty, water-trough unfilled, and the hungry chickens pecking desperately among the hard pebbles in the run, after her light had aroused them. There would be time for her to do them, if she hurried....

She had hardly finished washing coal-grime and cracked cornmeal from her hands, when Paul's call sounded in front.

Through the opened front door came his faint voice. "Come down to the steps, Mary." She caught up the lantern, and picked her way down to him.

"I told that boy to oil these hinges, sure, this afternoon. And look at that pile of trash,—he hardly touched it. Here's the shovel. He hasn't done a single chore since I left the mountain."

Mary lighted the way back to the house, thoroughly upset.

Two mornings later, Paul called the boy. "Come into my room, Pelham." The boy followed, a sick feeling at his stomach.

His father twisted a hand within Pelham's shirt-collar, and snapped off his own belt. The loose end of the belt danced and stung against the boy's bare legs. His father's words came to him brokenly and explosively. "Pay no attention to what I say.... Your confounded negligence.... Continually soldiering on me. You're mean as gar-broth."

By this, Pell gave way entirely. The agonizing pain burnt his bare calves, and radiated up his legs. He punctuated the blows with sobbing explanations, and promises never to let it happen again. At the intensity of the pain, he tried to intercept the blows with his hands. Half of the time the lashings left red welts on his wrists and arms, and one stroke caught a little finger, twisting it back until he was sure it was broken.

"I'll teach you to impose on your father.... You won't obey me, will you?..."

At last it was over, and Pelham crumpled, sobbing and shuddering, against the footboard of the bed.

"Go down to the chicken-house, and attend to your work," his father ordered him. Paul Judson, torn with anger and self-disgust, turned back to the boy. "I'm going to thrash you every morning for a month. Maybe that will do you some good."

After a few minutes, gulping down the stinging memories and black bitterness against what he felt was rank injustice, Pelham limped out to his duties. As he watered the hens, and scattered cracked corn before the fuzzy yellow balls scratching around them, waves of self-pity flooded him. He wept into the chicken-trough and into his handkerchief, until it was a damp salt-smelly wad.

Morning after morning this kept up. Now it was in his own room, his father's, the stable, or by the spring duck-houses; now a slipper, a shingle, the hated belt, or a freshly cut withe. Once it was the stable broom, which broke over his back at the second stroke,—that morning the whipping ended abruptly. He wept, pleaded, excused himself, begged to have another chance; nothing could shake the stern will of his father, and the merciless schedule of pain.

Mary tried to keep busy at some place where she could not hear his cries. But they pursued her from room to room.

Pelham wore his stockings to school,—they hid the old bruises, and the fresh welts. Night after night he cried himself to sleep. And the mother, stealing in to see the children safely in bed, would feel all the agony seared on her heart, at the sight of the tear-channeled boyish cheeks. She worried and brooded over the favorite son, until bluish depressions pouched beneath her eyes, and a hard look came into them as they followed her husband around his home tasks. He, in turn, became boisterously loud-spoken, and made a vast amount of noise stamping on the halls and porches. It was a gruesome three weeks for all.

At the end of this period, Pelham could stand it no longer. He kissed his mother good night, clinging around her neck and pressing passionate kisses upon her lips,—it would be the last time he would ever receive this parting kiss, he told himself. Then he knotted up, in an old sweater, his clean shirts and a change of underclothes, three handkerchiefs, his stamp album, and "Grimm's Fairy Stories," and hid them under the bed. To-morrow he would leave home forever.

While his mother was seeing to the breakfast table, he slipped into her room, his eyes still red from the morning's session with his father. He unlocked her drawer, and took out of her purse the three one dollar bills he found. On the red book, he knew, he was entitled to more than eight dollars, but this would do. He slipped in a note he had written the night before, and hid the bulging sweater in a rock beside the front path.

Walking to school with Nell, he pledged her to silence and then told her he was going to run away that afternoon.

"That's wicked, Pell." Her wide eyes were horror-filled.

"Would you let them whip you every day of your life?" He turned on her fiercely.

"Where are you going?"

"To Jackson, or Columbus, or somewhere,—anything to get away from here. You'll look after my little chickies, won't you, sister?"

She promised.

The girls were dismissed for lunch at twelve, and as Pelham had only half an hour, their mother usually met them at the big gate, and walked back to the house with them. Nell waited till Sue had run ahead, then betrayed the morning's confidence with maternal conscientiousness.

Mary went at once to her drawer,—she guessed how Pelham had gotten funds. She put on her hat and hurried in to the office, carrying with her the boy's note.

Her lips were set, and her voice difficult to control, when she faced her husband across the bevelled glass that covered his desk. "Read this, Paul," handing him the crumpled message.

It was written painstakingly in the boy's unformed upright script, a youthful imitation of his father's distinctive hand:

"Dearest mother:—

I can not stand any moar whipings. Hollis can have my things wen he growes up. I will come back as soon as father is ded.

Affexionately your son, Pelham Judson."

Before he had time to comment, the mother spoke. "You know I advised against this—this brutal, cold-blooded punishment of my son. This is what has come of it."

"Where is he?——"

She bit her lip to keep from crying. "He's gone; he may be dead, for all I know. He told Nell he might go to Jackson...."

"I'll go down to the station. He can't leave before the 4:17."

"Promise me you won't whip the baby any more...." Her voice shook, in spite of herself. "I'll go with you."

He shook his head. "I'll study it out.... I'd better go alone."

At the far end of the waiting-room,—it lacked half an hour to train-time,—he saw at once the slight figure. Pelham had invested in a bag of bananas, and was disconsolately eating the second. As he saw his father's figure approaching, he wilted weakly back in the seat.

"Going away, Pelham?"

"Yes, sir."

He was surprised at the lack of interest in his father's voice.

The older man sat down beside him, and spoke carefully. "As soon as you want to leave home, Pelham, you may. If you're going to Jackson, or anywhere else, father'll be glad to write on and see that you get a job of some kind. But you are pretty small to be starting out now."

The boy choked a wordless assent.

"I think you'd better come home to-night, and think over the matter. If you want to go to-morrow, I'll be glad to help."

Pelham rose obediently, clutching the draggled bundle, and slipped a confiding hand into his father's. Nothing was said about the whippings; they ceased.

V

When summer came, Pelham spent his vacation at Grandfather Barbour's home. He made the journey alone, in the conductor's care.

Joyfully he hopped out at the station, and drove up the leisurely oak avenue to the big house. He had his own cool little room again, fragrant with the honeysuckle blossoms beneath the window, and the scent of peach blossoms from the near end of the orchard.

Every summer that he could remember, he had spent with these adored grandparents. Edward Barbour and his young wife had come to Jackson two decades after the first Judson. At first their home had been only a large bedroom and dining-room. Then a porch had been added, and two more rooms to the south, where the orchard began now. The first pantry had been the piano box, connected by a shed to the kitchen and back porch. The north wing had followed, and the upstairs,—until now the sectional house fitted so well into the trees and vines, that it seemed to have sprouted and grown as easily and naturally as they.

His cousins, Alfred, his own age, and Lil, a year younger, came up every day while he stayed here; Uncle Jimmy's house was visible beyond the last pear tree, down nearer the Greenville Road.

There were strawberries in the garden, big luscious fruit soppy with the dew and gleaming like scarlet Easter eggs in the damp leaves.

He learned to help old Dick harness up the buggy, or watched 'Liza spurt the warm creamy milk pattering into the wide-mouthed pails.

After breakfast, Grandma let him trowel in the pansy or salvia beds,—her flowers were the talk of the neighbors,—and she gave him a little bed of his own, where portulacca, larkspur, sticky petunias, star-flowered cypress vines, and rose-geranium and heliotrope slips formed a crowded kaleidoscope of shape and color.

There were other occupations for restless mind and fingers. His father might have laughed at his sewing, and openly despised him for it. But Grandmother took time from her embroidery to teach him the briar-stitch and cat-stitch, and the quick decoration of the chain. His mother kissed the grimed, badly embroidered pansy and wild-rose squares that were folded into his occasional happy notes.

On rainy days the children played indoors. Spools,—was there ever such a house for spools! Grandmother had been saving them since the war. Endless cigar boxes rattled with spools of all sizes, big red linen thread ones, handy middle-sized ones, baby silk-twist bobbins. These were emptied upon the sitting-room floor: houses, trains, forts, whole cities flourished in the narrow boundaries of the rag carpet. Grandfather kept crayons, scissors, and a store of old Scribners' and Harpers', which were his without pleading. And parchesi boards, and backgammon—the place was a paradise to the boy.

He delighted in long rambles with his grandfather. The old gentleman, after the war, had combined managing his small farm with running the main village store in Jackson. He had long given up the latter; his simple, honest Christian methods of dealing with his neighbors had been supplanted by more up-to-date ethics, although the store's old name was preserved.

The two visited the corn and cotton fields behind the house, the level swards of the pebbly river, the solemn privetted walks throughout the cemetery. Here generations of dead Jacksonians restfully scattered into the prolific, dusty mother that gave them birth.

Pelham learned much on these walks,—the birds, trees, stories of dead heroes, episodes of the war, and the stirring times when the raiders had overrun the village. Grandmother had hidden two brothers, one wounded, for weeks in her cellar, all unknown to the Northern visitors who forced themselves upon her. The boy absorbed indiscriminately the accumulated store of eighty years of active life.

After supper, the sweet-faced grandmother would slip a knitted wrap over his shoulders, and walk out with him in the great oak-surrounded square before the house. She taught Pelham how to find the North Star, from the bottom of the Big Dipper; and then the Little Dipper, that had been twisted back until the Milky Way spilled from it. He learned to recognize the big Dragon waddling across the summer heavens, and many of the dwellers in the strange skyey menagerie. These were days and nights of wonder and beauty.

He longed to stay here forever, away from the acidity of his father's commands, and the ever-present fear of the belt. But as the autumn came, he wept his farewells and went back.

Until his return from that first absence at Jackson, he did not realize how the mountain had claimed him. He maintained a mild, glowing regard for the grandparents' plantation; it was free from the irksome paternal irritations that scarred his home days. But its appeal did not go down to the deepest parts of him.

With the mountain it was different. Not merely Hillcrest Cottage, although he felt bound to every board and stone of it; not even merely the Forty Acres, the family name for the fenced, pathed, and parked half of the original eighty on which the house stood; but the whole mountain, its rises and unexpected hollows, and the thicketed valleys that drooped sharply away toward the East,—he responded to all of these. The rest of the Judsons had taken the cottage and the Forty as their home. But this was only a small part of home to the eldest son.

The mountain became his castle, his playground, his haven of refuge, the land of his fancy. He was its child, and it was his mother.

He got along better with his father that winter. Diligent application to his school work and his tasks at home was the price of liberty on the mountain. Two weekday afternoons, and Sunday after midday dinner, were allowed him. He filled every minute of these respites.

The little Barbour cousins spent Thanksgiving week with the children. Pelham showed them all the treasured spots on the mountain. To them, even the walk up the hill was an adventure, as they explored the long sloping dummyline road, through stiff palisades of golden rod and Flora's paint-brush, the stalks silver-dusty from the nipping November winds, and ready to scatter at the tentative poking of a rotting stick, or the breath of a skimmed stone.

One wonderful picnic they had to Shadow Creek, before the relatives returned home. All drove over in a wagon to the deserted mill dam, Aunt Sarah, grumbling her good-humored threats to return to Jackson and leave "dis mountain foolishness," riding along to mind the children. Jimmy learned the first few swimming strokes in the cool, brownish pond; Pelham and the older girls had long been going in regularly with their father, and were fast becoming expert.

A baby came in April,—another boy, named Edward after Mary's father. This kept the mother from joining their rambles, so it was necessary for Pelham to devise the games without her resourceful assistance.

Here the boy's impelling imagination, added to his knowledge of fairy stories, came to his aid. All the myth-creating urge of the past moved in him. He peopled the varied crests and valleys with these volatile companions, visible only in the dusk out of the corner of a friendly eye. The V-shaped slope from the gap to the railroad was Dwarfland; Hollis was their prince. Crenshaw Hill, clear to the Locust Hedge, was Yellow Fairyland; a chum, Lane Cullom, a year older than Pelham, assumed leadership over these beings. Black-haired Nell, when she could be got to play, was the princess of the Black Fairies, whose haunts were in the outcrop before Hillcrest Cottage. Sue was anything needed to complete the story,—a mere mortal, the queen of the moon-fairies, or of the rock gnomes. Pelham, himself, in crimson outing flannel cloak, was the king and lord of the Red Fairies. They were the real spirits of the mountain, and of fire, and came in their red chariots down the flaming lanes of the sunset sky, to battle for their dispossessed heritage against all the forces of night and darkness.

The fights were not all bloodless. On one of these assaults, as he charged with brittly reed lances up the precipitous quartz quarry, he stumbled and drove a stiff bit of stubble into a nostril. It bled furiously, until his stained handkerchief was the hue of his crimson mantle. But even the three stitches which the doctor took were only an incident in the noble warfare.

The endless sieges, ambuscades, tourneys and adventures filled volumes—literally volumes; for Pelham wrote, on folded tablet paper, a history of the fairy occupation of the mountain, copiously illustrated with pencil and crayon. It was one of the regrets of his later years that this history had disappeared completely; even its details vanished from his memory.

Always he directed the sports. They varied with his invention; spear-tilting at barrel hoops around the circle of the daisy bed, bow and arrow warfare at Indian enemies hulking and skulking behind pokeberry bushes, cross-country running to Shadow Creek and back, when he became interested in this at the high school,—these were only a few of the games.

His name-giving had a curiously permanent effect. Dwarfland never lost the title he gave it, nor Billygoat Hill, where he and Lane surrounded a patriarchal billy and almost caught him.

When his father became busied with planning the subdivision of the mountain lands, to throw them upon the market, the imitative boy divided Crenshaw Hill into "Coaldale the Second." He borrowed, without permission, enough deeds and mortgages from the real-estate office to run his city for a year, and acted as seller, probate judge, and clearing gang. The streets, two feet wide, were carefully walled from the lots by the loose outcrop stones. There was a hotel, a court house, a furnace, and multiplying homes and stores.

Finally the sisters and brother lost interest, since only Pelham could untangle the intricacies of the allotments. It was all cleared away three years later by a real clearing gang, although this part of the hill continued to be called Coaldale Second.

The mountain was a lonely place for children, after all. Even though Lane braved the temporary isolation, and the girls occasionally had spend-the-day parties at the cottage, it was usually deserted except for Pelham and his imaginary companions.

He learned all of its moods. There was the plentiful springtime, when it blossomed a flood of unexpected beauty. Rich summer brought blackberries, dewberries, and hills rioting with azalea and jasmine. Autumn furnished muscadines by the creek beds, hydrangeas, and the sudden glory of changing leaves. Winter was a black-boughed multiplication of the hilly vistas.

The boys lived in dog-tents several summers. Old Peter built them a tree house in a big oak near a fallen wild cherry tree; when they slept here, the floor rocked and swung all night; they were like sailors buoyed upon a sea of restless leaves. Thus the nights revealed the mountain as personally and intimately as the days.

This close contact with it had another effect. It cut Pelham off effectually from the city boys, and forced him to a high degree of self-reliance, both as to body and mind. The wiry legs toughened, the arms grew long and able to swing him from bough to bough of the big trees, the shoulders spread strongly apart. His surplus energy was transmuted into an adaptable, powerful body.

Greater than this was the other effect. He felt safe, with the mountain as ally; not even his father could touch him, in its secret haunts. An unconscious sense of self-completeness, a rooted belief in his own and every person's liberty, became an integer of his faith.

Thus he grew away from all other people, except his mother. To her he was drawn closer, particularly when her relationship with Paul grew strained. This had been especially obvious after the birth of Ned, the fifth baby; the father had had sharp words with Mary about it.

"It was all right for Mother Barbour to have six; people had more children then. Two of them died, anyhow. It's different now."

"But, Paul,——" The calloused injustice of it silenced her.

He watched her averted face. "I see Mamie Charlton's getting divorced. Jack got tired of her and her eternal children. I saw her the other day.... She's getting old. Too many children responsible for it."

She flinched dumbly before his brutality.

He spoke savagely, through clenched teeth. "It's your fault. You ought to be more careful."

Her womanhood rose in rebellion. "Any time you're tired of me, Paul,——"

"It's easy to talk." He laughed abruptly. "And since the business is doing so well, there are always younger women,——"

He did not finish—her look silenced him.

With no woman to confide in, Mary turned to her son, rather than to the girls. His whole horizon was filled with love for her mellow brown-eyed beauty, and for the mothering mountain that came to stand for her in his fancies.

On the walks with his father, Paul's mind was filled with thoughts of the planned development of the land for residential purposes, while Pelham was busied with fantasies of fairies and knightly escapades. Father and son were continually jarring over little things; the estrangement widened.

"I think we'll continue the gap road as an avenue to the railroad tracks. Logan Avenue, we'll call it. Mr. Guild thinks that would be a good place."

"Down Dwarfland?"

The father was plainly irritated. "'Dwarfland' ... what poppycock! Why can't you get your head down to business, Pelham?"

He would meekly smother his wandering imagination, and listen to long monologues about grading, restricted allotments, and similar boring topics.

The father's sympathy went no further than to approve, in the boy, the things which the man himself liked. His son should naturally take to those things which the father cared for. Fishing trips to Pensacola or beyond Ship Island, which Pelham enjoyed more for the novelty of scenes and faces than for the tedious sport, called forth Paul's gusty admiration when the boy succeeded in holding to a game mackerel, or in a skillful handling of spade fish or mullet. The boy's undistinguished prowess in swimming and tennis, his fumbling success with a shotgun after bull-bats or meadow larks, were magnified in the father's eyes.

The pleasures that Pelham devised for himself were scoffed at. The imaginative reliving of knightly days or frontier activities was as distasteful to Paul's matter-of-fact mind as the embroidering at Grandmother Barbour's. The boy's collecting craze found no response in the parent; when the haphazard interest in tobacco tags, street-car transfers and marbles gave way to a real absorption in stamps, that consumed the son's spare money and time voraciously, Paul issued a ukase on the subject. "Get rid of them. Collect money, as I do, if you want to collect anything."

Pelham rehashed his arguments. "They teach you geography, and history...."

"They're trash; cancelled stamps, worth nothing."

"People pay lots for some stamps."

"You've got something else to think about. Sell 'em, or give 'em away; get rid of 'em. You understand?"

Pelham finally sold them to a local barber, from whom he had bought many of the unused South American specimens. "Sure, I buy 'em," Mr. Lang smiled. He went through the scanty pages, repeating all his stock jokes: "You're a guy, and a pair of guys," as Uruguay and Paraguay were reached, being his favorite. "They're not worth much to me. Tell you what, I give you thirty-two dollars."

The boy had to be content with this.

Less than a year later, he surreptitiously bought back the collection for forty, keeping them concealed in a corner of the attic.

The third summer brought weekly target practice upon the mountain. This grew out of a lynching at nearby Coaldale, following a brutal assault upon a white miner's wife by a negro. The Judson arsenal contained three rifles, several shot guns, and half a dozen revolvers; they were all put into use in the hollow behind Crenshaw Hill. The girls of course took part, and Mary, a good shot, thereafter carried her pistol in her handbag whenever she went to the foot of the hill. An exaggerated account of this spread among the negroes; only the boldest vagrant would think a second time of daring the unerring gunfire of the Judsons.

This constant reminder of the danger to women, from men, drove the boy's mind to consider this problem. Pelham had matured slowly; his mother had been his chief sweetheart, as long as he could remember. But the association with girls at the new Highlands High School made the matter more personal to him. With eager avidity he took to whatever reading he could find upon the subject. There were pages in his presentation Bible, and in an old "Lives of the Popes," that were creased and yellowed from his frequent reading.

Occasional newspaper stories moved him strangely. He lay awake almost all of one night, on the canvas cot in a tent near the crest, going over the details of one of these accounts that he had torn out of a paper and kept folded up in his purse. It was from some upstate village,—and the house servants of the mistress had aided in the attack upon her. What would he have done if he had been near? Usually he portrayed himself as the rescuer, nobly driving off the wicked assailants. But infrequent gusts of emotion colored his fancies differently: he saw himself successively in the rôle of each of the participants. He particularly dwelt upon the woman's part. If he were only a girl now,—His body warmed at vague visions of surrender.

He was a clean boy, in the main, bodily and mentally. His mother had impressed purity upon him, as a thing to be always striven for; and he had implicitly followed her, as far as he was able. This conversation with Mary was connected, although he did not know it, with an incident that had happened at Jackson on one of his earlier visits there, when Aunt Lotta, Jimmy's mother, had found him under the porch hammock with Lil—two babies beginning to scorch their untaught fingers at the bigger fires of life.

There had been no punishment for this. Aunt Lotta had merely told the children that only common boys and girls were naughty. This had been enough.

Several years afterwards, when the cousins had visited the mountain,—Pelham was hardly ten at the time,—his mind had been somewhat disturbed by the loose talk of the bragging East Highlands boys. He had discussed it with Lil on the comfortable pampas grass above the chert quarry not far from the cottage.

"You know, Lil, all the boys and girls we know do these things.... Think how bad I would feel, if I were with a girl, and didn't know how! If we could find out ... together...."

"I suppose it would be all right, Pell."

That, however, was all that had come of it.

Now he had reached his last year at the high school. His marks had been good, particularly in mathematics and English Literature. It had long been assumed that he was to go to college, and fit himself to assist his father's business in civil or mining engineering. He wanted to go to the state university, but Paul's larger plans included a northern education; after much balancing of catalogue advantages, Sheffield Scientific School, at Yale, was decided upon.

Most of this summer too was spent at the grandparents' place; but he came home early, to help his mother get his things ready for the longer separation.

The last night, before his departure, when Mary came in for the customary kiss, they conversed restrainedly at first. Soon she was crying, and he was sobbing as if his throat would break.

"Mother's little boy! I don't know who I will turn to, when you're so far away."

"It won't be for long, mother. And I'll write all the time."

He went to sleep finally, his head pillowed upon her breast, as when he had been her baby, her only son.

She could not go to the station to see him off,—there was so much to be done on the mountain; but he held her tightly against him for a long, long hug and kiss, and walked bravely away.

He sat down on the big stone by the dummy gap-gate. A racking tendency to cry tore at his throat. He was a man, going out into the world of men. He beat the rock with clenched hands.

He was not bidding good-by to his mother, and the mountain. He shut them from him when he went to sleep each night; in the morning they were his again. This was only a longer separation. He was going north not to leave them, but to make himself a better son of his mother, a better son of the mountain. He would return, and then,—

One of his youthful magic rites came to him. Standing on his toes, facing the mountain,—stretching to his full height, with head thrown back and hands spread above his head, he posed, a taut, slim figure, poised beneath climbing tree-trunks of gray, and the leafy clouds above them. For a long moment the world stood still for him. This was his farewell and his benediction.

He slung his raincoat over his shoulder, adjusted the tennis racket and shiny suit-case in his left hand, and passed through the gate.

VI

The temporary heroic mood, that had marked his departure from the mountain, wilted on the long railroad journey. He was very lonely at first, in New Haven. The town was dead and deserted, as he took the entrance exams. In the interval of uncertain waiting, he brought out his disused stamp album, and spent solitary evenings rearranging every stamp in the book.

With the next week, he began to feel at home. Every train vomited a riot of eager boys,—recent alumni back for the opening fun, self-conscious upper classmen, timid beginners like himself. The excitement of making new friends, and learning the immemorial lore of Yale, pulled him out of his shell of seclusion. He became one of the crowd, an atom swirling through unaccustomed channels of a fresh social body.

He grew at once into Sheff's boisterous feeling of superiority over the placid, plugging Academic grinds. He snorted when compulsory chapel was mentioned. Why, he would be a junior next year, when these staid classical freshmen would be mere sophomores. That was what Sheff did to a fellow!

His letters home were full of imposing details, gathered at second hand. There was no place like this in the world!

The first big night came,—the night of the Sheff Rush. Pelham felt a peculiar interest in it. He was not very athletic, although in wrestling, as in cross-country work, he was above the average. And this occasion was sacred to the wrestlers.

His wrestling pictures, dating from Adamsville days, had been properly admired by his room-mate, Neil Morton, a strapping, likable Texan, who had prepped at Hill. Pelham, a mere graduate of a city high school, could not expect to be ranked with the products of Lawrenceville, Taft, Hill and St. Paul's.

After the heavy-weights and middles had been annexed by the juniors, there was a lull. No freshman light-weight could be located.

Neil rose to his feet. His yearling bellow rang over the heads of the crowd. "Judson! Try Judson, here!"

Another group was singing out, "Claxton! Claxton! We want Claxton!"

Others near him joined Morton's cry. "Judson! Pell Judson!"

Claxton did not materialize.

The new crew captain squatted under the nearest torch, and peered at the group. "Judson there?"

Pelham, protesting and nervously laughing, was shoved forward, stripped by the big Y'd team men, and edged into his corner. He found himself facing Ted Schang, of last year's wrestling squad, one of the promising light-weights of the University.

The derisive juniors gobbled their war cry. "Go it, Teddy boy! At 'im! Eat up the dam' frosh!"

Teddy ate him up, the first fall, by a swift half Nelson, and a quicker recovery when Pelham tried to turn over and wriggle out.

"Yea 'Twelve! Kill 'im!"

In the brief rest, he ground his fingers into his palms, and determined to show what 'Thirteen could do. He was the crest of the class wave for the moment; an aching loyalty shook him.

This time he was more cautious. The team sub was confident now, and left a careless opening, which Pelham seized at once. After a long, tough tussle he won; but this left him winded; so that the third fall, and the match, went to the upper classman. But he had won one fall; and he was a figure in his class from that night.

His mother was inordinately proud of the boy's participation. Her elaboration of his night-letter home, which she wrote to her sister, fell later into his hands, and he shook delightedly over it. "Think of the honor, Lotta! Selected from all of Yale to represent his school on the opening week, and landing the second fall in the whole University! We are surely proud that God has given us such a strong, manly son. Paul is very pleased, and is sending him a check for fifty. Jackson can show those Yankees something yet."

Paul's pride showed in more definite and characteristic fashion. He had a story run in the Times-Dispatch, and the Evening Register; Pelham's picture headed the account, which stressed the fact that he was a product of the local high school, "the son of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Judson, of Hillcrest Cottage, and a grandson of Judge Thomas F. Judson, the distinguished jurist of Jackson." All these things advertised the family, and the business.

Neil Morton was frankly critical. "Do they do that sort of thing in Adamsville often, sonny? Why didn't your old man run his own cut too, and a picture of home sweet home, with the Judson family grouped around a lawn-mower in the front yard? Pass her over!"

But Pelham shame-facedly held on to it; and both clippings were later pasted into his scrap-book.

At the end of a hard year, Pelham, fully three inches taller, counted the days before he got home to his mother and the mountain.

He enjoyed the mountain as never before, in the summer following. At New Haven, his had been the subordinate lot of the hundreds like himself. Only unusual qualities could hold the top there; and he, younger than most in his class, was far from the envied heights. Once these younger sons scattered to their home cities and villages, their importance grew amazingly. Adamsville held young Judson to be in a fair way of becoming the biggest man in the northern university.

His home became an appendix to the Country Club, as the festive center of the younger crowd. The tennis courts were never out of use; sport frocks and flannel trousers peopled them from eleven till dusk fell. Along the bridle paths leading to the road and beyond, the leaves were set dancing by laughing couples; benches and rustic seats beneath flowering rhododendrons, beside the winding lanes of the Forty Acres, invited languorous love-making. And after a brisk session of men's doubles, the pool which Hollis had urged and finally constructed, below the chilly chalybeate spring behind the cottage, was better than all the club showers in the world.

Both of the sisters were popular. Nell danced well, and never lacked eager escorts. Sue, on the contrary, had no outstanding good feature. Her brown hair was somewhat sandy, her nose turned up a trifle, and she was not as quick-witted as the other Judsons. But the girls realized she was safe; there was no fear she would annex any of their suitors, and she shared the confidences of at least half a dozen best friends at all times.

Early in the summer, Pelham was paired with one of these intimates, Virginia Moore. The girl was tall and slim, almost gawky. Her habit was to serve a direct overhand ball, then permit her partner to win the point. Her caustic tongue made her generally disliked; but he found this an alluring novelty, after the insipid small talk of the others.

When the set was over, he led her to his chosen rock seat carved out of the outcrop beyond the gap. The talk became personal, Virginia shrewdly deferring to his superior masculinity, with flattering attention.

At last his stumbling tongue blurted out, "V-virginia, do you want to wear my frat pin?"

She hesitated, and smiled encouragingly.

He blushed under his heavy tan. "We can only give it to mother, or sister, or—or—or the girl we ... we're engaged to."

"Well, we're not related." She twisted a spray of hydrangea into her hair.

He unpinned the black enameled symbol, his heart jumping violently, and moved closer. With a pretty gesture, she indicated where he should place it.

The cool fragrance of her made him giddy. One loose strand of hair brushed against his forehead, causing him to tingle and tickle all over.... He wanted to bruise her against his body, as on mad moonlit nights he had flung himself around some rough-barked oak on the summit. Ignorant that girls, not in books, at times felt such emotions, he affixed the pin with impersonal decorum. Then he slid to the ground beside her feet, and stared against the burning sunset.

When the sun dropped back of his hill, he rose gropingly. It was hard to phrase some things; he was desperately anxious not to appear ridiculous in her eyes. Yet, unless all of his reading was wrong, something more was expected of a man in love.

"I—I ought to kiss you, if we're engaged."

She closed her eyes, docilely.

He held her lithe cool body, and he felt the rapture of brushing his lips against her own.

He led the way down the path, exaggeratedly attentive.

For the remainder of the brief summer he spent every spare moment with the girl,—mornings on the courts, long afternoon walks, whispering evenings in the rock seat. He would come home after a day with her, and lie, tumbling sleeplessly on his bed, living over the delicious last moments spent with her, and elaborating intenser fantasies of love-making. Her eyes obsessed him; they were like his mother's.

Another friendship marked the summer. Old Nathaniel Guild did not come to the place as often as before; the winter had been hard on him, and the steep paths were often too much for his frail strength. As Paul was kept close to his desk, it was the son who accompanied Guild on his infrequent rambles over the grounds, and the rougher land beyond the fence.

"You notice the tilt of these outcrop rocks, Pelham?" he asked, one afternoon. "They slant forty degrees on this hill, and forty-four beyond Logan Avenue, on the other hill. Last week I was over beyond West Adamsville; all of these strata are there; only they angle to the west, instead of to the east, as here. Like this."

He diagrammed roughly on a sheet in his note book.

"Here are the two Ida veins,—the big veins here; here is the soft hematite under them, and a thin harder vein. Then comes bedrock, and under it a heavy clay deposit. Above the Ida vein there was quartz,—the same quartz we take from the back of the place. Now, on the west part of town,"—he indicated with sweep of his hand the hazy distance beyond the furnaced city,—"there the same strata were once. But the erosion has gone further. There is only a trace of the quartz, and the three top veins. Only a few thin streaks of the bottom hard ore are there. Even the bedrock has been washed off some of the hills...."

Pelham nodded.

"If we could have gotten hold of that iron too!... All gone, all washed away."

"How does it happen that the strata are the same?"

Nathaniel looked at him sharply from under bushy gray eyebrows. He turned again to the paper, and continued the two lines until they met, high above what was now Adamsville.

"Wait.... This point is the sand hills,—there to the east. There are more of them beyond the West Highlands range. See,——" and a firm stroke of the pencil continued their lines until they arched above the former peak.

Pelham watched the moving pencil, fascinated.

"Was the mountain ever like that?"

"The rocks are absolute proof. This valley,"—he gestured toward the city,—"was once the hidden center of the hill."

"... How long ago?"

Nathaniel chuckled gently. "Ah, that's beyond us. Hundreds of thousands of years, maybe."

Somehow this made the mountain more real to Pelham. Though he might climb, under the midnight stars, to the highest crag on Crenshaw Hill, he was just at the beginning of what had once been the peak. He fancied he could trace its towering crown, blacker than the surrounding blackness, lifting up to the sky and the sparkling stars.

What a fleeting second of time, to the mountain, were the eighteen laborious years that meant so much to him! This hill would continue to jut toward the clouds when the last trace of man's restless activity had crumbled into dusty forgetfulness.

He formed the habit of circling up to these crags, after a night at the club or the park with Virginia. They supplied the needed solitude for his crammed fancies. Some nights, after he had been with her, his body would burn like a torch. The pelting passion that shivered throughout him frightened him. He needed the mountain and the stars to calm him for bed. Love was becoming an overmastering torrent; it threatened to upset his whole equilibrium.

His father got wind of the affair, through some chance comment. He went straight to the point with the boy. "You're seeing a lot of that Moore girl, Pelham."

"Yes, sir.... I like her."

"L. N. Moore has four daughters, all unmarried. He is worth about twenty-five thousand dollars. That's all they will get."

"I—I hadn't ever thought about that, father."

"You've got to think about it. Here Tom Dodge's children have married millions—every one of them. Sarah married Jack Lamar; he owns the steel works. The boys connected with the Vanderventer and the O'Ryan money. There's an intelligent family."

Pelham got hot all over. He muttered something about not marrying for money.

"Who wants you to marry for money?" his father interrupted. "The Dodge crowd managed to fall in love with folks who had money. It's a big difference. I'm going to leave the girls well fixed; they ought to marry well. I want you to keep your eyes open."

The talk left a bad taste in Pelham's mouth.

Even though his mother did not care for Virginia as much as he had thought she would, his attentions continued until vacation ended, and he returned to the muggy northern city.

Nell responded to the open life almost as fully as Pelham. Hollis was busy at school, and Sue preferred staying with her mother; so the older sister frequently had her favorite mare saddled, and covered fifteen miles before she turned the horse loose in the spring lot.

Paul was on the mountain frequently, mornings and afternoons; Hillcrest Subdivision had at last been put upon the market. Most of the work fell on his shoulders; his roadster buzzed up and down the avenues, displaying the place to prospective purchasers. The lower lots sold well from the start. After six months, the investment had almost paid for itself, with less than an eighth of the land disposed of.

In the early spring, Nathaniel came to Paul with a proposition to take the land off the lists as residence property, until the iron could be mined.

"As soon as we sell any of the crest places, it will be too late. Now's the time; we can form our own mining corporation, and sell to South Atlantic Steel. Ore's reached the highest point in twelve years. It will mean a fortune, Paul, and the land will be just as good after the iron's out."

Paul was set against the plan at first. There was more ready money in the other; it would spoil the face of the subdivision; they didn't know the ropes.

The older man was insistent. "It'll mean money—big money. We can't overlook a shot like this."

He went over the suggestion for Mary's benefit; she too protested. "Why, Mr. Guild, the mountain's our home; it would be dreadful to spoil it. What would happen to the cottage?"

Paul cut in, shortly; his mind was quickened by opposition of any kind; and the chance for a quiet public dominance of his wife was not to be overlooked. "We don't intend to touch this part of it, Mary.... I'll tell you, Nate; we'll go over it with Ross and Sam Randolph. If there's as much in it as you say, we can't afford to neglect it."

After the visitor had gone, he walked out to the front, and stared at the red smudges that marked the furnaces and rolling mills. When Mary joined him, a wrap thrown around her shoulders, he was chewing the end of an unlighted cigar. She laid her hand on his arm.

"Paul, dear, you weren't angry at what I said at supper?"

"Of course not. Women can't be expected to look on a business matter as men do."

She shrank from the implied rebuke. "You—you aren't serious about this mining, are you?"

He waved toward the dark foot of the hill with the cigar. "D'ye know what we cleared from the bottom of the Crenshaw lands, Mary, on these first sales?"

She was silent.

"Our share was ninety thousand dollars! And the place didn't cost fifty."

"I'm sorry to see any of it go, Paul. It would make such a wonderful home for our children—when they're grown up and married, and have their own little homes within reach——"

He crushed the cigar beneath his heel. "You're much too sentimental, sometimes, Mary. The children wouldn't thank me to hold on to the land, when I can get a hundred and ten a foot for inside lots."

"We have all the money we can possibly use now, Paul. You must have made a hundred and fifty thousand this year——"

"That hardly touches it."

"It makes me afraid, sometimes—our having so much, when so many people have so little. If we could just keep Hillcrest as it is——"

"We haven't anything," he answered sharply. "Jack Lamar and his brother came here just before I did; they've five million apiece. And God only knows how much Russell Ross has made out of iron. He's in with that South Atlantic Steel bunch; he could sell out for twenty-five millions to-morrow, I verily believe.... I'd be lucky to get a million."

She stubbornly returned to what was on her mind. "And now you are willing to take this wonderful estate you have worked over for ten years, and throw it away, because Russell Ross has more money than you! Think what the Rosses were."

"My father wouldn't have wiped his shoes on them. And any one of them could buy out Jackson three or four times now. This mountain—if it's handled right—it will simply mint money. It will be a mountain of gold."