Chapter II: Part 2

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 role 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."

She shuddered. "Paul----"

"I can imagine what you would say, if I hadn't made what I have out of it. You spend what I make quickly enough."

"I save everywhere I can----"

"Oh, you, and the place, and the girls; and it costs a lot to keep Pelham going. We need every cent of it. I tell you, this mountain is worth millions! And I won't stop until I've gotten every red cent out of it."

It was in that mood that he went to the conference with the iron men.

One Sunday morning, when the negotiations had been carried over until the next week, Nathaniel's housekeeper phoned that the old man had died shortly before daybreak. Paul took charge of the funeral, saw to the shipping of the body to the Ohio home, and turned the matter over to the lawyers for the estate.

Within a month he had secured his partner's interest in the whole property, and was the sole owner of the mountain.

"If we do mine," he told Mary, "Pelham's mining engineering course will make him the man for the place. He'll get Nate's share, if he's worth it."

In June Snell and Judson threw open another large subdivision, in a cheaper suburb near Hazelton, and Mr. Snell's incapacity put the burden of this on Paul's shoulders. Further plans for Hillcrest were laid over until he could find time to take them up again.

VII

The day after the next Thanksgiving, Paul, excited and jubilant, drove up the graveled path to the side door of Hillcrest. "Read those," he pushed three papers into Mary's hands, as she rose from the veranda rocker.

Her eyes blurred, so that she had to take off her glasses, as, sick at heart, she realized what the documents were. Her husband spread them out on her lap, explaining rapidly. "This is the certificate of incorporation of the Mountain Mining Company. Here's my contract with them--I hold fifty-one per cent of the stock, counting twenty shares in your name and one in Pelham's, so we retain the controlling interest--which provides the terms for the taking out of the ore. This last is a carbon of the letter I got off to the boy this morning, giving all the details."

She had lost her fight after all. "The cottage," she whispered, "how long now before we must leave it?"

He slapped a pointing finger at the center of the second paper. "Section seven--here it is--we won't move at all! This part of the mountain is not to be touched, until all the rest is mined. As long as the house stands, we're safe." He smiled, in conscious self-approval.

She raised dimmed eyes. "That's good of you, Paul. It hurts me to see any of it disturbed.... I suppose you could do nothing else."

Refolding the sheets, he slipped them into an envelope with enthusiastic finality. "The thing grows bigger and bigger every time I go over it. If it pans out, we can buy Adamsville! I said a mountain of gold, remember.... Ground will be broken in the spring. We'll put Tow Hewin in charge of it now--he's the man poor Nate spoke of--and when Pelham comes back in June, he can put his M. E. degree right into harness.... God! It means millions!"

"You're sure the cottage is safe? It would break my heart to think we'd have to give it up. It's such a splendid home for the children----"

He pushed out his lips. "It is a lovely place, Mary; but you've gotten rooted here. By the way, I'll wire to St. Simon's Island to-night for rooms for you and the girls for the summer. It will be a fine change. The children can go, too. Pelham and I will stay on the job here."

Her lips trembled; leave before Pelham came--not see him all summer?...

The son's reply was an enthusiastic endorsement of the affair. He had gone over the plan with his father on the previous holiday, before returning to take a year's graduate work, and the enterprise appealed to his imagination. It was sacrilege, in a way--like disemboweling a parent for the money that could be made out of it. But what an invitation to his trained activity! A marvelous chance to show what he was made of.

He explained the project to Neil Morton, who had also returned for graduate work, after a summer's practical experience in a Wyoming smelter.