The Trail of the Tangler

THE “Electric ” left the Fifteenth Street Terminal in Kansas City in the yellow dawn of an October morning; the car, with its snub nose and projecting forward cage, nosing on like a great catfish across bridges, railroad switches, and cross streets up to Ninth Street, where it headed toward the town of Independence, Mo., at a smooth, swimming gait. Just beyond the Belt Crossing the motorman glanced back at the conductor for an inquiring half second, the inquiry being, “Do I dare? ” and the conductor flashed back at the motorman, “Sure, dare!” The motorman’s eyes were shining and the conductor’s eyes were shining. The car began to go faster. Beyond Sheffield, in the open stretch with its sprinkling of country houses, the speed was a thing to question, and, quitting the rear cage where he had been talking to two men, the conductor passed through the car to the motorman out front. Two or three of the few passengers aboard, who were noticing, were glad to see that the conductor was disposed to put a stop to the motorman’s foolishness.

In the forward cage the conductor, his breath issuing explosively in steamy whiffs, was shrieking to the motorman : “Jimmy! Mr. Shore says a hundred more if we reach Shore Station in fifteen minutes! Let her go! Let her go! ” Then he passed back through the car, humming, to hide his excitement from the passengers.

“ See here, ” said an uneasy man, plucking at the conductor’s sleeve as he passed, “what’s this for? Ain’t we a-going too fast? ”

“Fast?” repeated the conductor, with a look of competency betrayed, “ fast ? ” He passed on haughtily, but turned, on some charitable impulse, to say behind his hand, “We are runnin’ on skedaddle time, but that’s an expert at the motor, need n’t worry, no matter how fast we go.” With that, he went on back to the rear, where the two men were waiting for him, the eyes of both burning with impatience and distress. One of them, a big fellow, who seemed to carry one arm with a little nursing care, and who looked ill despite his great size, thundered impotently at the conductor: —

“See here, Henry, what are we crawling along like this for? If this is the best you can get out of this damned snail ”–

“Well, I tell you, Mr. Shore,” interposed the conductor soothingly, “I ’ll let you come through and stand by Jimmy. Then you can see how fast we are goin’, and mabby that ’ll quiet you.”

“Let’s do that. Let’s move up there in front, Hardin.” As he spoke the slighter and taller of the two men stooped for a medicine case that sat at his feet, and with the case in one hand steadied the big man with the other until they reached the front cage, where they took up positions behind the motorman, their urging for speed becoming like the crack of a whip about the motorman’s ears.

Ahead of them Jackson County stretched into the pale, gleaming east with the limitless, dipping roll of the Missouri country. Fields where the corn had been shocked stretched off on the right, up the curve of a hill, into the sky, the line of small dun stacks like so many space markers to the watchers behind the motorman. The tiny red station sheds, the gleam of the silver-white mail boxes on the fences, the three or four big houses of gray stone, the numerous natty houses of brick and shingle, all marked space in running laps for the watchers behind the motorman. Woods tipped with the blood-red sumach, flaunting hillside sweeps of golden-rod, long, lean pastures, switches of rank horseweed, –all were etched out, clean and sharp, against the eastern light, only to be succeeded by other woods, other sweeps, other pastures, other switches, in a ceaseless, merciless duplication for the two behind the motorman.

“Great God! ” cried the big man at last, “there is no agony on earth like the agony of waiting to learn whether you are going to be agonized or not.” He forgot the trouble that his lame arm caused him, and flung both hands out in front of him in a tortured helplessness.

“Careful, be careful,” said the other man warningly, “be careful with your arm, Hard.”

“Careful, nothing! ” groaned the big man, his heavy hands working convulsively; “what’s the use of being careful about me, what’s the use of anything when she –Now here, Jimmy, you’ve got to do better than this, we ’re walking, walking! ” He turned upon the motorman with irresponsible vehemence, but his companion laid a restraining hand upon him.

“Well, you see, the road being so full of curves, Mr. Shore, ” began the motorman in a faint demur, but letting his car out a little more, his eyes straining toward the weird veiled dawn in the east, his muscles tense with the might of his endeavor to reach Shore Station in the appointed fifteen minutes,– “road being so full of curves, I don’t dare go too fast.”

“Go just as fast as you do dare, Jimmy.” Shore’s lips shook so that he could hardly talk, and he turned his wide, well-featured face to the man beside him, in a dumb reliance that seemed to be habit with him. Unfortunately for him, just at that moment the look in the other man’s eyes was appalling. “G-r-r-r-h! It’s no great comfort to look at you! What’s the matter, what do you mean ” –The words, begun as a cry of protest, were beaten into a hopeless mumble by Shore’s tempestuous despair. “ If you give up, if you lose hope, you! ” he cried, and the other drew up quickly under some lash of self-control. His face stayed as gray as wood ashes, but his tone was quiet and his eyes were steady.

“No, oh no,” he said earnestly, his low voice rich and warm and confident; “it ’s not that I have given up, not that I have lost hope. Only, you know, I have not seen her myself, I have had to take your impression for my impression, and it’s hard to wait till I see her and can get my own impression ; that’s all.”

“Oh, it’s awful, –to keep riding on and on, –and we don’t get there at all.” Shore’s thought was submerged by his tears, and came out in fragments like drowned flotsam. That he was dramatically unconscious of the moment’s drama, that he was as simple and direct as he was big, was evident from the loose way in which he went to pieces, careless of appearances, shaken inside and out by the emotion that possessed him. The motorman scratched his ear, and the other man looked off into the silver-yellow light in the east. “I ought n’t to have left her,” sobbed Shore, “but I could n’t seem to stay in that house any longer until I had you there with me. You know how it goes with me in my own sickness when I have n’t you about,–it’s infinitely worse now with her sick, ” –he took his hand from his eyes and sought the eyes of the other imploringly.

The other, as though beating about for relief, began to ask questions that had been asked and answered many times before on that same morning. “When did Carey see her first? ” he unclamped his teeth to say, and while his arm steadied Shore, he was conscious of a twitching tremor all over his own body.

“Why, seven or eight days ago, ” answered Shore, moistening his lips and leaning nearer his comrade with that same insistent appeal for help, that same close reliance, that same gigantic helplessness. “This was the order of things: We had had a good summer at Mackinac, after that last séance with my arm in the spring, and we left there three weeks ago, she and the boy and I, all well. I was getting along shipshape, so I came straight through from Chicago, and she went down to that forsaken Illinois town of Dixburn. She has a married friend there, and of course she was interested in the place because you had once lived there. Well, she stayed there a week, and came on home with her head aching. It did n’t quit, so I brought Carey out, and he said malaria. And though that fool’s been out every day since, he never once said danger till last night. Last night he said typhoid, and I wired to Penangton for you. This morning she –Why, why, she does n’t know even me ! ” All his profound assumption of her love for him was patent in his inflection. “I could n’t stand it. You don’t know what it is to a man married like I am to be without her, –without her consciousness of herself and of him,– without her spirit ” –He stopped trying to talk, and gnawed at his lower lip.

“And Dr. Carey thinks that this turn for the worse –thinks that she is in danger ? ” Shore’s emotionalism seemed hard on the other man, whose questions clicked out sharply.

“Why, that’s just it, –that’s why I’m done with Carey, –told me to be prepared,–aw, I can’t talk, –Carey ’s a fool! ”

“How many nurses have you out there, Hard? ”

“Oh, two or three shifts of them; seems to me I ’ve seen four or five girls around. ”

“We ’ll let all but one go. I ’ll nurse and you can nurse, and we don’t want to be cluttered up with too much checked gingham and white apron. How nearly there are we now, Hardin ? ”

“Just around that curve yonder. Go on, Jimmy, go on ! Go on ! ”

The motorman yielded helplessly, and the car, obedient to his daring, all but leaped from the track around the curve, slid, lock-wheeled, on a down grade for a rod, and stopped.

Afterwards, the rush of that ride across country always stood out in the mind of one of the men as a part –the beginning –of the longer, doubling, twisting trail over which he was to go.

“Thank God and you, Jimmy! ” cried Hardin Shore, as he and his comrade leaped through the gates that were thrown open.

“Get the doctor’s case there, Tom, ” commanded Shore to the servant, who stood waiting beside a light trap at the station shed. “Don’t let that nigger tell me she’s worse,” he snarled on in a stiff-lipped agony, as he read through the gloom on the negro’s face. Hurrying into the trap beside the doctor, he gathered up the reins in his well hand and guided his horses across the car track, speeding the strong, clean-limbed animals down the country road for half a mile, without word or pause, then up a long driveway to a stone house.

As they came on under the overhanging grove of young walnut trees, the yellow light of the morning sifted through the leaves and fell upon the house beyond with a pallid illumination hateful to see, and the prescience of the house’s disaster lifted like a visible thing and drifted toward the men in the trap, lodging in the trees overhead with a low and mournful rustle. There was a chilling sense of a lost presence in the air, a sense of something gone, something that had vitalized and irradiated, whose absence left an oppressive emptiness. At the corner of the house a group of negro women stood in nerveless fright, their hands working in their aprons. Behind the women some small black children gaped wonderingly. The fright, the stricken expectancy, was hard to bear, and Shore got down from the trap with a sick inward trembling; but fright and stricken expectancy were acting like a challenge upon the other man, whose eyes had narrowed into long steely gleams, and whose bearing showed fight.

Inside the wide hall, one of the nurses came noiselessly to meet them. “Yes, seventh-day crisis, I reckon, or fourteenth-day, ” she whispered to the physician, and then drew Shore into a chair, “Sit there for a moment, won’t you, until you feel better, ” she said, taking charge of Shore with an expert recognition of the latent invalidism showing plainly now in the drawn lines of his face.

“That’s right, don’t come for a second, Hardin. But don’t be afraid. You have not lost her; you are not going to. Wait here till I send down for you.” The physician went up the stairs on his quick feet, and into the typhoid patient’s room. Carey, the doctor in attendance, stood at the foot of the bed, looking at his case in gloomy helplessness, while over at the window one of the nurses was putting crushed ice into an ice-cap. The little tinkle of the ice intermingled with the murmuring voice of the woman on the pillow, and the two sounds were like the tumbling unrest of a hill stream.

“Can’t stop that,” whispered Carey, holding with relief to the hand of the newcomer, who nodded understandingly, slipped past him, and put his hand on the woman’s hand, outwardly the physician only, perceptive at once of the crucial untowardness of the outlook, the thready pulse, the short breathing, the hurrying delirium. With his ear close to her lips he caught the words : —

“A long trail, twisting and turning.” Then a rhythmic pause, and the beat of the words again : “Don’t forget Hardin, he will suffer –that’s true– I am far along on the tangling trail– ah me! we go fast, too fast! ” A flickering, frightened cry! The physician’s hand tightened on her hand, and for a troubled second she was quiet, then her eyes opened staringly, flashed, and steadied. “Garth! Garth! ” she cried, and tried to leap up, her eyes wide open upon his eyes, her arms lifted to his shoulders ; but he laid her back, and held her with firm, detaining hands, a sudden illumination in his eyes, as wild, as delirious as that in her own. Little by little her head ceased to roll upon the pillow; her lips stopped twitching, and her thick lashes drooped till the fiery gleam beneath them was quite shut out. Carey came around softly from the foot of the bed.

“Wonderful past any ’pathy, that touch of yours! ” he murmured, looking down upon the woman’s hypnotic calm. Over at the window the nurse was watching, a trained blankness on her face.

“She will have a conscious moment when she rouses. Will you have Mr. Shore here; she will ask for him, ” said the doctor in low, resonant tones that glided across the air with a musical suggestion more effective than a command. His eyes stayed brilliant, full of a strange, white radiance. An hour later the woman, after a briefly conscious interval, was sleeping; Hardin Shore sat in the next room with a look of hope on his face; in the lower hall the two doctors were talking the case over softly, Carey telling what he had done and had been just about to do, the other not listening, but acquiescing and approving, all after the dicta of the Code ; in the room assigned to the nurses the two who were to go were packing their traveling cases in open rebellion.

“Who-all is he anyway, this new man, I wish you ’d say, ” grumbled one. She was the girl who had been last on duty in the sickroom, and there was a significant resentment in her tone.

“A country doctor, from that little town of Penangton down the river where Mrs. Shore used to live, that’s all the who, ” answered the other, equally petulant; “a friend who runs the Shores, if I can read anything, –sending people away! ”

“And what’s his name?” pursued the first speaker, that trained blankness again on her face.

“Henderson.”

“But his first name? ”

“I d’n’ know, —Garth, I believe.” “Oh, I see! ”

“ See what ? ”

A look of ostentatious discretion passed over the face of the first nurse; she would not say what, and presently the two went out of the house and back to the city with Carey.

The people who were left ranged up, watchful and alert, under Henderson’s leadership, for their fight with the fever.

“ It’s treacherous, typhoid, ” Henderson told Hardin Shore in the very beginning; “it will double on us, it will let us hope, it will cheat us, it will lead us on a long trail, the old tangler.” He had got immediately at the woman’s notion that the dizziness of her head was the ceaseless twisting and turning of an aeriform Something that flew with her, and he expressed himself with an unconscious assumption of her fancy. “All we can do,” he told Shore, “is to keep up with it, keep a hand on it, till we tire it out, then pull her back to us.”

The Shore child was sent away, and from morning until night there was no sound in the great house, save the coming and going of careful servants and the low whispered word; but through it all, up to the day of the last crisis, the household having responded confidently to Henderson’s presence, the house seemed less sensitively prescient that disaster hovered over it; the servants smiled sometimes, and in far corners of the grounds the small black children laughed gayly.

“I feel that I ’m unfair to you, a regular burden, Henderson, ” said Shore, who stayed near the sickroom helplessly but enviously; “still, I don’t know where to begin to stop it. I’m foolish about you. I want you to be in there with her all the time, and when you are not with her, I have to have you with me.”

For a number of years Shore, through a long fight of his own with disease, had been expressing this sort of dependence upon Henderson ; for years, through long tests of friendship, he had been utterly trustful; for years, through blinding mists of passion, Henderson had been entirely reliable, entirely true; for years the woman had stood between them; until now, her eyes always insistently upon Hardin Shore’s eyes, her hand sometimes in Henderson’s hand in secure friendliness, a delicate protective aura playing from her consciousness like a luminous ether, through which Henderson could not look, and would not have dared look if he could.

That had been the way for years. But now, out on the red range of the fever, had not the luminous veil fluttered raggedly back, and for once, whether he would or not, had he not seen beneath it? “Garth! Garth! ” she had cried, and had clung to him. Was it all the craziness of the fever, –had she not known him ? The mad question became a companion thing of that hurrying delirium of hers, leading him on and on after her, twisting, turning, coiling. And over and over he put his hands upon his shoulders as though he must push in deeper the burn of those hands of hers; over and over, as her eyes opened staringly upon him, he told himself that the question reached her and was answered, that off on the devious trail of her delirium she came face to face with him and knew him for himself. When he was not beside her, his forehead would grow cool, and he would explain the whole thing to himself; remind himself of the generic truth that the revelations of delirium were reliable for the purposes of the pathological novel only, not for any honest weighing of things; that instead of being taken as signal flashes from the sub-consciousness of the patient, they should be taken for what they were, distorted gleams, refracted through the red, obstructive media of the fever-hot brain cells. And finally, and specifically, whatever this particular woman said in her delirium, the fact remained that in the full possession of her faculties, she handed herself and her great power of loving to her husband more unequivocally, more fully, and more beautifully than any woman in the world. –Then he would go back to her again.

The cycles went by, from seventh day to fourteenth day, to twenty-first day, in the weird rhythm of the fever, and as he sat beside her, ceaseless in vigilance, meeting the disease, symptom by symptom, fighting, nursing, quieting, a strange thing came to pass, –he began to see that there were two of him, one, the physician at the bedside, watching the zigzag climb of the fever, his hand on the jerking thread of the patient’s pulse ; the other, a dreamer who, following a red trail daringly, found what he sought in a tumultuous, sublimated freedom overhead. To the physician below the woman’s broken words were formless and void, but the dreamer up above shut his soul about them and made life of them.

“I must be going! ” she would cry. “Are you here? Are you ready? ”

“ Oh yes, I am ready, ” he would say, that mystical quieting force of his in the smile that he turned upon her. As she grew still, he would talk on, without the spoken word or the need of it: “Now we are flying free! Now the trail leads us higher, higher! Now we are in our place of dreams! ” He would lie back in his chair then and close his eyes, as softly as hers were closed.

“ That Thing went fast over the tangling trail! ” The fever would be driving her on again.

“ Did you get tired ? ” he would say, “I never tire coming up here.”

Sometimes the physician was sorry for the dreamer, thinking of the awakening that was to come, but the dreamer was heedless. It was so real to him, he followed the trail so often, that it came about that he recognized his sensations like landmarks along the way, –the first uplift of his spirit, the wild strength of his soaring, the tremulous joy of finding her.

“The end of the tangling trail,” she would mutter.

“I am here at the end. I shall be here always, always waiting, ” he would insist, a great calm satisfaction on his face, and would open his eyes to find Hardin Shore standing beside them.

“Asleep, Henderson?”

“No, more awake than ever before in my life.”

“Is she better, old man? Every time I hear you speak like that I think she must be better, must be coming back to me, there ’s such a singing joy in your voice, Henderson. Is it true? Is she coming back ? ”

“Oh yes, she is coming back, not quite yet perhaps, but she is coming back.”

“ What is it that she repeats like that all the time, Henderson ? Can you understand it ? ” “It ’s dream - talk, — I would n’t bend too close, Hard, it disquiets her. You will hear only fragments about the tangling trail of the Thing that flies with her.”

“Keeps muttering,” repeated Shore wistfully. He put his great hand over his wife’s hand in a nerve-racked frenzy of love, and she opened her eyes and gazed at him for a moment, then some bewildered effort at control shivered through her and she lay still.

“Oh, get away, Hard! That ’s had, that ’s bad ! ” Henderson pulled Shore up with an irresistible hand and drew him into the next room. “You see, Hardin,” he explained, driving himself on to comfort Shore with a singular consciousness that the woman was directing him to the explanation, “her thought has come to be so constantly of saving you anxiety because of your own illness that now she is ill her chief worry is that you are in the way of distress about her. It is n’t that she does n’t know you; it’s that she does, –comprehends just enough to be trying to protect you.”

The grieved look on Shore’s face lifted happily. “That’s right, you old conjurer, ” he said. “ Put me back upon the thought of her love of me. I know, –trying to think of me, even when she can’t think.”

From twenty-first day to twentyeighth day! In the blackness of that last night, Henderson, the dreamer, passed out of the Shore house into the grounds. He walked, blindly anxious for motion, over the soft, thick turf, with its shaggy mat of leaves, to the wall around the young orchard behind the house. The night was in the deep after-midnight lull, infinitely quiet, but Henderson pressed his hand to his head as though to shut out great noises, and peered out into the dense, clinging darkness as though to sight the flight of something that swept past overhead.

If she died! Foolish, futile thought! He would not let it keep form ; he sent it hurling as it hovered, vulture-like, about his mind. She need not die. He would not let her die. Had it not been his again and again to rescue the sick, to hold back the dying ? She need not die. His the power. He knew himself. He was not afraid.

And if she lived! His the power,– to bring her back to the other man, to bring her back now, bring her home from the wild trail of their going, from the high realm of his fancy, reëstablish her in her old relations, not as the free, flying spirit that he had known in that upper living, –ah, God, to do that!

Across the black quiet of the night another figure was vaguely outlined at the orchard wall. Shore was standing there forlornly, his lame arm across his knee, his eyes burning into the darkness, seeking, seeking.

“I am so lost, Henderson,” he groaned, as Henderson came up silently. “I followed you out here. I can’t stay in that house. You see, with her unconscious, it ’s as though she is n’t here. I’m so used to having her here, Henderson. She has had always the strangest, fullest capacity for being here, all around and in and through me, everything that a man needs to finish his comprehension of himself and everything else, –Henderson, if you only understood what I feel, you would n’t let her go, you could n’t.”

“ Oh, stop, Hardin ! ”

“Time and again, Henderson,you’ve interposed that will of yours, that power of yours, between death and me; time and again I’ve felt it like a thing to touch and see; time and again you’ve kept me here when I should have gone but for you ”–

“Hardin Shore, do I need this urging ? ” cried Henderson, the clarion ring of his voice piercingly clear in the night’s quiet.

“It’s because I know your ability, Henderson,” went on Shore, bungling miserably, “that I want to know that you are using every ounce of that ability. You will save her for me, won’t you, old man — you will save her — for me ”–

“Yes, I’ll save her for you, ” answered Henderson, with that final assured confidence which he always used to compel confidence. “Come on back to the house, Hard. It’s hour by hour till dawn now.” He put his arm through Hardin Shore’s arm, and they went into the house together.

Back in the sickroom Henderson, the physician, took up his vigil again alone. He made Hardin Shore wait in an adjoining room with the nurse, and, alone, he sat down beside his patient, the strength of destiny in his eyes. The seconds went by with a little clicking catch in their going, marked by the flicker of her breathing, and she gave no heed to the compulsion in the physician’s touch upon her hand. The seconds went by with a little clicking catch in their going, and the physician became the dreamer and began to talk to her, urging himself far out after her, matching the red range of the fever with his own tenacious swiftness : “ Come back, come back! We may not stop at the place of dreams! It is all over and ended! Come back! ”

Tossing, rocking, her head, with its great, tumbled mass of soft hair, came nearer, and her cheek cradled into the hand that he stretched out supportingly.

“ Oh, ” she cried, “ the end of the trail at last? The real? ”

He put his hand on her shoulder gently. “The real,” he said. The last of all reality, it seemed to him the finish of the wild dream-fancies that had been for him so long the fullest and richest reality.

Her eyes opened, shut, opened and fixed upon him, her tension relaxing, her mind clearing, her breathing quieting, the mystic fever cycle ended.

“Why, it’s you, dear old doctorboy ! ” She had come back, the sane, strong, delicate-fibred woman, who for years had been the flower of his fancy, the root of his morality, his courage! The craziness, his and the fever’s, was a thing of the past, the mad aerial journeying was over, she had come back! The physician was sorry for the dreamer as Henderson laid his hand upon her lips and looked once into her earnest questioning eyes:—

“Don’t talk; you’re back, that’s enough; you ’re saved, that ’s enough.”

“It was good of you –to save me– for Hard, ” she said softly, brokenly, fast growing drowsy again, but comprehending still. Hardin Shore tipped to the door, his wide face lit with joy, and even as he bent and kissed her forehead worshipfully, his wife was safely sleeping.

Long, quiet days followed, and at the end of one of them, Henderson, still neglectful of his Penangton practice, sat at the window across the room from her bedside. Hardin Shore was in his own room, sleeping off the exhaustion of those weeks of anxiety for which he had been so illy conditioned, and the nurse was out in the young orchard, methodically measuring off her evening exercise. Beyond the window the sun had set, and a soft, thickening gloom lay over the room. Through it the two figures, the woman on the pillow and the man in the chair by the window, were barely visible to each other. She lay with her hands above her head, the new thinness of her face softened by the fall of lace from her wrists. He sat in his chair with his head thrown back wearily, the worn fatigue of his face lifting and floating away like a gossamer whenever his eyes rested upon her. The physician had stayed sorry for the dreamer; the memory of an illusion is hard to bear.

“You are all tired out,” she said.

“You are all wrong,” he said.

“Do you hear the sleepy things outside? ” she asked. The katydids were crying and the crickets were chirping in a drowsy remoteness. “It’s strange to hear things and see things and know them for what they really are.”

He glanced at her comprehendingly, thinking to let her know that he understood the little shock of amusement with which she was finding herself again, but seeing how beautifully her hair lay about her face, and how subtly her grace showed in the languid, swinging movements of her long arms, he was not sure what he had let her know.

“That trail, that tangling trail!” she began next, as though feeling her way, and Henderson sat up and bent forward, his eyes fixed upon her.

“Well, what of it? ” he asked, his breath hard and short.

“Well, I don’t know, do you? ” She smiled at him, but the little shaking span of her voice showed that she was using it to bridge some chasm that yawned before her. She raised her arms and let the laces tumble more thickly about her face, then looked at him through the veil in an uncertain flare of bravery. “Did it tangle you, too?” she asked.

He leaned forward on the arm of his chair and his eyes burned through the laces into her eyes. “Did what tangle me ? ”

“ Why, the trail that we followed,

–did it tangle you, too ? ”

He had a sudden mannish impulse to candor, absolute and entire, –“Then there was a trail for you, as for me! ” he cried hoarsely, “and you realized,”

–he stopped in that impulse to candor, for she had drawn the laces closely about her eyes. Seeing her do that, seeing the hurt to her, he dropped back in his chair with a low, sighing breath. “I understand,” he said, “ you need not be afraid.” “No, not of –not of a sick woman’s fancies, need I ? Need you ? ” The voice quivered, and the hand above her head closed tightly. “There was one fancy, ” she went on, as though to an appointed task, “ there was one about– the place of dreams –at the end of the trail –where somebody –Hardin, I expect –always found me. Did I ever –did I ever speak of that?” Her intention to define for him their old rightful relations touched him like an accolade, raising him a bewildered knight-errant, to go whither she pointed.

“ My, yes, ” he answered her evenly, “and next you would cry, ‘Hardin! Hardin! ’ and we should have to scamper after Hard.” The laces pressed close to the eyes and the tight hand relaxed. “Oh, you were a nuisance about Hard, ” went on Henderson in a resonant, songful tone now, his eyes flashing fire to the west, “ ‘ Hardin! Hardin! ’ you were always crying.”

She began to laugh, tremulous with success under her laces. “I suppose it must have been like that. I could n’t always tell what I was doing and saying, whose name I was calling, I was whirled about so, –it was such a long trail, that old tangler’s. But if it did n’t tangle you, if you understand ”– Her slender clasped hands were raised to him, her voice swayed to him with a fine, remote music like a wind-blown bell.

“Yes, I understand. And it did n’t tangle me, ” answered Henderson, folding his arms and striding to the window, where he stood for a moment, a lean young figure, erect and powerful, cleanly cut against the light in the west.

R. E. Young.