Chapter VII: Part 7

He did not answer; nor did he stop. A wild pagan stir whipped her blood, giving the blasphemous counsel that she should throw herself into his arms. It was the proximity of the male calling to his mate; it was more--it was the answering tremor of the woman of a lower, darker race, the mountain wildness dominant in her blood, when chosen by the man of the higher, lighter strain.

The stern Puritanism of her training fought against this. She must save herself whole for a man of her own color; she thought of the negro poet's magnificent lines about the black Mary, who was to bring forth the black Messiah to lead his brethren out of bondage....

"Gimme your lips, honey."

She pulled back, trembling, from the dominant triumph in his voice. His arm swept tightly around her, she was dragged against him. Her weakness melted to nothing in the presence of this mighty outer and inner strength.

Slowly she felt herself losing. Her prisoned hands struck out feebly against his face; yet even in her fighting she fancied that the man whose face was hidden in the night before her was not the repulsive, leering mine foreman, but the dim white knight of her hid dreamings.

With startling suddenness she yielded to his command. His lips fastened to hers, clung there. She felt that the whole universe became a kiss; melted, eddied together into one point of mad moist contact. Her struggles to free her lips drew her closer to him. She was conscious of his hot hand pressing against her body, burning through the thin calico waist. Then she lost consciousness of bewildering details.

With rude courtesy Jim Hewin steadied her feet as she walked down the last sharp slope to the road.

He turned to leave; an arm detained him. Her tones were low and pleadingly sweet. "A good night one, now."

Head bowed, tired blood pounding, she slipped with furtive haste toward the darkened windows of the shack that was her home.

IV

THE CLASH

XVIII

Jim Hewin picked his satisfied way over the ramp's top and along the road below, toward the gap and the gap offices. He eyed the midnight stars with unseeing animal contentment, sluggishly at peace with the world.

A voice from the watchman's hut blurred upon his hearing. "Hey, where you going?" The man peered closer. "Where the hell have you been? The old man's been looking for hours----"

"I been right over in Hewintown."

"He wants you, now."

"What's up?" Reawakened briskness bristled in his tones.

"Bringing in them carloads of miners."

"Oh!"

"He's in the guard auto by the machine house. Better hump yourself."

Jim idled off, then changed his gait to a run as he heard the preliminary whirr of the engine. "Hai!" he shouted, as the lighted nose turned up the hill. "Hai! Wait! It's Jim!"

Tom Hewin made room for him on the front seat. "Take this rifle. Got your automatic?"

They joined the three other cars, ran on too far by the viaduct, and doubled back. The thin pop of fire-arms reached them, then the distant crackle of a volley. The men hunched together excitedly, blood tingling at the prospective ambuscade of the man-hunt.

The wash of the headlight on the tall pines beyond the cut located the engine.

"There!" came Tom's stabbing whisper.

The cars coursed to the curve, and turned parallel, facing the tracks. The angry glare of four searchlights burned against the black figures huddled above the stalled train.

The startled crowd eddied together, then scattered in headlong panic. Gunfire thunder and pelting lead poured from the rows of rifles toward the fleeing bodies.

Jim sprang out, crouched beside the searchlight, blazed away. He ran forward, stumbling against a pungently resinous stump. He rested his rifle on it to aim. Crack! The clumsy figure halted, raised wild arms grotesquely, fell spinning toward him. He caught up with the foremost guards, and stood with them for a volley across the narrow railroad gulch.

"Come on," boomed Huggins, the deputy sheriff in charge, running to the top of the cut.

Jim followed.

A wounded miner on the left trembled to his knees; his pistol aimed uncertainly at the man ahead. Jim's automatic plupped; the man's face butted against the rocky ground.

"Hey, there," Huggins bellowed, "Whatcher stop for?"

"We're goin' on," a gunman below shouted back. "We're goin' on, I say."

"Go on, then," he replied, disgustedly.

"Don'cher hear him, Ed?" to the engineer. "Go on, he says."

"Ain't I going?"

The whistle wailed against the sky, the gunmen piled on cowcatcher and carsteps. The train choked laboriously up toward the company depot at Hewintown.

"None left," said Tom reflectively, joining Huggins on the crest.

"A few," the other grinned casually, his arm indicating the awkward blotches against the searchlit hillside. "Go back," he called to another deputy, "phone from the gap for a truck to carry them stiffs to the main office. It's been a morgue afore."

The shaken eight in the shadows beyond the fill saw all of it. Dawson kept his hand beside Wilson. "No you don't," as the hothead raised the pistol again, when the train coughed its way toward them. "Wanter make us all swing?"

"We could manage a get-away----"

Dawson pushed him into the car; the rest crawled in, sobered, sorrowing, fiercely resentful.

"God! What a story!" whispered Brant, the reporter.

Jensen's big voice shook tearfully. "Shot 'em down like rats, the black-hearted bastards! If I'd a gun----"

"No, you wouldn't," said the big organizer savagely, squeezed beside the silent son of Paul Judson. "You can't lick 'em that way. It's the last thing.... They'd call out their soldiers--where'd we be then? Oh hell! If we can just hold all the boys together, we can make 'em come crawlin' to us----"

"Can you?" whispered Pelham.

"I ... don't ... know," an answer as low. "We'll try."

Brant dropped off to catch the last edition of his paper; the others, for their various home car-lines. Only McGue accompanied Dawson to the Mecca, to sleep armed beside him. Pelham noticed the gray warning of daybreak staining the east, before he pulled down his shade and adjusted his splitting head on the chill pillow, to writhe through somber dreams.

The careless truckmen, satisfied with their load of thirteen, overlooked the black body hurriedly flung against the ties of the switch track. It was one of the Lilydale children, berrying in the early grayness, whose frightened tongue brought Stella the answer to her long night of uncertainty.

The other Cole boys had gone off to work, sure that Babe would turn up somehow.... Stella got a man from the Judson stable to help her carry over the dewed body on an empty barrow.

Babe's funeral was simple. "Suffer little chillun tuh come untuh me," said Brother Adams unctuously, "fuh ob sech is de Kingdom ob Hebb'n." A second fresh earth mound disturbed the irregularity of the Zion Cemetery meadow, with the name "Cole" painted on the scantling driven beyond the head.

This first-hand contact with the bloody struggle made Pelham hurl himself with dynamic energy into the strikers' cause. Dawson used him to make the Board of Trade endorse the conflict. Flaring headlines in the _Advertiser_ and the _Times-Dispatch_ warned of a general strike, which would tie up the whole industrial machinery of Adamsville.

"They'll never do it," Dawson repeated pessimistically. "We can't dislodge that Pooley bunch. But this hot air helps."

The young mining inspector, as yet unassigned to his duty by the State, preached organization to the miners of Coalstock, Hazelton, Irondale, and Belle Mary mines; he never failed to wind up with a stirring appeal for unity on the political as well as the industrial field. "Strike at your jobs, when you must; strike at the polls every chance you get! Let's drive the scabs out of the city hall, out of the sheriff's office, out of the legislature! The government isn't going to leave you alone; why not make it your government?"

In hardened Democratic ears the brilliant insistence made little impression, although mining locals sprouted and flourished.

"He don't do any harm," Dawson confided to John McGue who had attached himself as the big man's private guard. "Let him spit fire if he wants to. My God, man! A state mining inspector as organizer! We'll have Paul Judson in the local yet!"

Sullenly the strikers held to their Hewintown homes, cowed by the armed guards from interfering with the spasmodic attempts of the convicts, negroes, and strike-breakers to keep the mine product up to normal. Formal notices of eviction came to them; but Ben Spencer reassured the disheartened committee. "They've got to follow the state law; that means delay. Tell the boys to sit steady till hell freezes over. They're sewed up."

Henry Tuttle rendered an exhaustive report upon the same matter to the managing committee of the directors. "We can go ahead, if you say----"

Paul Judson, at Judge Florence's nod, shook his decisive head. "Wait. We're not quite ready. When we are----"

After a thoughtful pause, the vice-president went on. "It's a good time to appropriate enough to outfit the State National Guard. We can't pay them directly, as the companies did in Colorado; the law's against that, Henry?"

The counsel nodded corroboration.

"But they'll appreciate new uniforms and guns.... You can never tell, you know.... I had a talk with Adjutant-General Rice last week; he approves heartily."

The matter was left to the vice-president, for action.

During these weeks of comparative inactivity, in spite of the details of strike work, Pelham found time to debate "Socialism the Remedy" with Burke Horton, an energetic lawyer-politician of near-radical views. The debate was the first of a newly opened community forum, under the auspices of Dr. Gulley's Free Congregation, which met in Edlin's Hall. The crowd was packed with Horton's followers, but the young Judson made his points tell.

This was one of the meetings to which Jane Lauderdale could go; she had followed every motion of Pelham's with her large, intimate eyes, from a wall seat to the right, not far from the platform. Continually his own eyes sought hers, to test the effectiveness of an argument, or to draw approbation and inspiration from the source that meant most to him. Whenever there had been opportunity, she had been in his strike audiences, a vivid, sparkling fountain of encouragement and enthusiasm. Pelham's watchfulness drew from his random hearers antagonism or sympathy, a groping for his meaning, a tardy stumbling after his flying feet; of her he drank cordial understanding and abounding love.

They left the hall together, and rode straight to her house. Lacking a home of their own, this house furnished an abiding-place for far-flung dreams and precious intimacies.

In her very restfulness he found a spur and a stimulus. Chin cupped in her down-turned fingers, seated in her favorite wicker chair, she mused above him, as he slouched on the rug at her feet.

"You were splendid to-night, boy; you're a cannibal at debating."

"I'd be sick of the whole bloody business," she smiled indulgently, "if it wasn't for you."

"Anyone would do just as well;" a denying finger caressed his hair possessively.

"Am I that unappreciative, Joan of Lauderdale?"

"Now you're poking fun. You don't deserve the taffy."

"It was only taffy?"

"I'm a good cook, you'll have to admit. No; you earned every word. I should think your father would have to be proud of you!"

"The oratorical prodigal ... whose far country is the heaven your slim oxfords print."

"Not even wings?"

"We are forging them together."

Hearty delights these hours with the vibrant girl always were; but they were not as heady and intoxicating as he had imagined love would be. Perhaps too heady, in another sense; there was a lack somewhere, he meditated ruefully, as his car picked its way past the guarded entrances to the entrenched mountain. A prodigal son, he had called himself; but this was one of those itching hours when he envied the erotic mire of the earlier vagrant. His body hungered morbidly for the barely sampled flesh pots of the Meade bungalow, the perilous soilure of Butler's Avenue.

Night's dead peacefulness was the only reality. The moon froze ramp building and sagging shack into silver immobility; there could be no hour when bleeding forms lurched and died on this eternal background. Day's conflicts were shadowy impossibility; he could not take further part in the fantastic strife that meant death and suffering; he was caught in the midnight spell of the silent world.

But a gush of warm-blooded hatred welled over him--hatred that turned this silver heaven into an iron-red hell. No; he was pledged fighter in the cause of the mountain that must be all men's. He was vaguely aware that this reborn fealty came from two mothering, radiant eyes, that watched his steps in light and darkness, and waited with shadowy arms to welcome him at war's end.

The morning's headlines obtruded on Paul Judson's attention, at his usual early breakfast. They caused no lightening of his accustomed frown. Uncertainly he fumed around the place. When he saw Pelham about to start for the city, he walked over and intercepted him.

"Your car woke us up at three last night."

"It was shortly after two when I got here."

"You'll agree with me that such hours are a bad influence on the boys. Your mother and I go to bed at ten. I can't have it."

Pelham did not answer, an ugly surge of anger up-boiling within him.

"It won't do for Hollis and Ned. It isn't decent. They're bound to imagine you are keeping bad company--of both sexes----"

The wrath boiled over. "Father! You know I've been busy speaking--last night was the debate--you know I've been busy----"

His father's mouth closed to a thin line, then opened. "I can't have it. They don't know what you do with your time; I am glad of that. You'll have to leave the mountain."

Pelham stood his ground against the menacing stare. "I shall be glad to." There was a blank wrench of anguish within him, at the thought of leaving the familiar home; the mere difficulties of moving and settling again loomed mountain-high. "Your suggestion that I am going with bad companions is trash, and you know it." He hesitated, then drove on. "I'll leave by Saturday."

Paul turned away. "It will be a good thing."

His soul stinging with the father's injustice, he waited until the other had gone in leisurely certainty down the hill, and went in to his mother. "I'm to leave the mountain next Saturday, mother."

"It's necessary, Pelham. You have distressed your father in so many ways, I cannot see anything else for you to do."

Hurt pride spoke within him. "He said my late hours set a bad example for the boys."

"Yes ... that too...."

The words crowded out. "He said that I was late because I was going with bad companions, when he knows that's a lie!"

"Pelham, you shall not speak that way of your father to me."

"Mother, you know I've been at meetings and debates; you know how straight I've been. If he'd had his way, I wouldn't have been," he added with heated significance.

"What do you mean?" The unrehearsed query came against her will.

"When I was visiting at the Meades, he advised me to go to Butler's Avenue, mother--to go to the Red Light district--to go to the women there. That was his fatherly advice to me!"

Her face assumed a Puritanic severity, an alien look; she masked the tumult of her heart with this outward symbol of incredulity. "I cannot believe you, Pelham."

This was not the first occasion in which he had detected Mary's mobile features solidified into a harsh and unreasoning insensibility to fact. Whenever he or one of the other children had cornered the mother into a situation demanding condemnation of Paul, this self-gorgonized expression hardened upon her; it hid any admission of surprise, any criticism of the husband, for the moment. And he had observed that it served a second function--persisted in, it gave time for the breach in the confidence in Paul to heal without apparent scar; henceforth she seemed to live in the self-imposed delusion that her husband had never been at fault. She would have held as a model wife the Red Queen, who had trained herself to believe six impossible things--presumably to her royal husband's advantage--before each breakfast.

Pelham had come to despise this obvious scouting of reality, this sentimentalizing which called facts what it would have them, not what they were. He retorted rather sharply, "There's no use not believing me. You know I am not lying; those were my father's words."

The smug overcast of unbelief became glacial; in serene security in her husband's impeccability, no matter what the facts might be, she turned toward the house. "I do not wish to have you discuss the matter any further." Then, a softer look in her eyes, she came back to where the son stood, and slipped an arm around his shoulder. "I'm doing this for your own best interest, mother's dearest boy; just as your father has decided in his wisdom that the time has come when you must leave the cottage."

There was a preliminary catch in her voice, affectionate, affecting, and not consciously affected. "God only knows, my son, how much I love you...." She did not say any more, as if with a moment's clarity of insight she doubted the appropriateness of the inevitable formula. She threw a half-puzzled glance at him, that seemed rather to survey herself through him, as she left off talking, passed up the steps, and through the screen door--for all the world as if to screen herself further from his, and perhaps her own, searching scrutiny.

Well, that was ended. Pelham prepared to move. He found a vacant room with Mrs. Hernandez, wife of a comrade. The outlook on symmetrical suburban homes, in a cheap section near the mountain's foot, was far different from the rolling vistas he had been so fond of; but at least his books and Sheff pictures reminded of the old place.

Jim Hewin, whose attentions to Diana continued, although without his first impetuous insistence, questioned the girl about the matter on one of their infrequent meetings under the dumb oaks on the crest. "Young Judson left home?"

"Last week."

"Squabbled with his old man?"

"I reckon so.... He just left." She continued listlessly to stare at the burning breath of the far furnaces.

At length her moping could not be ignored. "What's the matter, gal? What's on your mind?" He tried lightly to shake her out of her melancholy.

She responded weakly to his clumsy friendliness, her tongue locked as to its real trouble. She had come to-night to tell him; it seemed so easy, as she went over the matter in the cleared kitchen, waiting for the supper preparations to begin. She must tell him; he was entitled to know.

And now an icy self-disgust tied her. This man at her side--what could it mean to him, but a new peg for his obscene jokes? She had gone into this thing, at the last, willingly; she must see it through. It was not for him to guess at the faint unstirring life which her mad yielding had summoned within her.

She pretended to meet his mood, and left him sure that she had "got out of her spell." She cried herself and her hidden secret to sleep.

A spirit of lassitude lay over the mountain activities, with the departure of Pelham and the cumulative effect of drenched days of torrid July sunshine. The dusty mornings were dry and crackly, the sullen summer air clung within the house at night. Futile breezes spurted uncertainly, emphasizing the arid discomfort. Twice thunder clouds massed over the nervous swelter, but were swept on before they could spill their desired comfort. Dust-weighted leaves hung limp, shrubs sickened and browned; only the weeds pushed blatantly upward.

Paul came out early the second day of the spell. The weight of the weather was unbearable. It was as if heavy blankets of heat were continually drifting down from the blazing heaven, too piercingly hot to be drowsy; it was as if he walked through these thick palpable layers of living, seering fire ... like walking undersea of a vast liquid ocean of seething heat.

"You'd better get out of this," he announced shortly to Mary. "How would the Thousand Islands do?... The girls, and Ned too; his school doesn't open till late in September. Hollis had better stay with me; I need some help.... Shall I make reservations for Tuesday?"

Paul took Hollis with him, ten days later, for a run up to Washington connected with the delivery of steel to supply Allied orders, a mission in which all of his driving sympathies were enlisted. Nor was he out of key with his home city in this. Adamsville was one of the few Southern cities whose sympathies had been against the Central Powers from the beginning of the war. For the first two years the rest of the South fussed and thundered against English interference with the profitable pre-war cotton trade with Germany; an anti-English "freedom of the seas" became the day's slogan in the one section of the country where English blood still predominated. But the iron city never joined in this clamor; its spokesmen, its suave senators and publicists, could waive the blockaded deflection of cotton, when the iron and steel demands of the Entente doubled the output of the mineral region. As the warring months marched on, quick shipments commanded untold bonuses; as of old, where a man's purse was, there was his heart. For commercial and patriotic reasons the company fretted impotently at the continuance of the strike at this time, especially when rail congestion became serious throughout the country. Paul's trip was one of many that the metal magnates had to make, to keep the wheels running as smoothly as possible upon the twice interrupted tracks.

This trip left the mountain home in the care of old Peter, who stayed on in his cluttered servant's room behind the kitchen. Diana Cole came in to clean up once or twice a week. Jim Hewin's persistent curiosity about the movements of the Judsons found full answer in her.

Two days after the master's departure, Peter hitched up and drove into town, to bring out two boxes of books from the office, and some sacks of cotton seed meal and oats. He dawdled around from store to store, showing off his temporary responsibility and dignity. The hot hours passed; he found relief in the cool shade of a side of the ice factory, where frequent squabbles among intent young negro crap-shooters were referred to him for his ponderous adjustments.

Diana, late in the afternoon, brought a pan of peas out to the mended yellow rocker on the front porch of the Cole shack, and commenced popping the viscid spheres out of the parched pods. At length her hands slowed; she stared into the red sunset beyond Hillcrest Cottage on the hill across.

She was struck by the odd reflection of the fiery glow in the kitchen windows. It was as if the late sun shone clear through the house. She rose agitatedly to her feet, the peas littering the steps, the pan halting against the wilted morning-glory vines. "Maw!" she cried, panic in her voice. "Maw! Will! Come here----"

A thin shimmer of smoke jerked restlessly above the kitchen end of the big house. "That ain't--fire?"

"An' Mr. Paul an' ev'ybody gone!"

"Will," she turned hurriedly, "run to Hewintown--the men can save lots. I'll phone the Fire Department----"

She raced up the familiar road, her mind working feverishly. Far behind Stella panted. There had been no fire in the kitchen range since morning, when Peter cooked his own bacon and coffee. At noon it had been cold; she had seen it; Peter had started then for town.... Unless he had come back.

The sun had almost gone down; it was dark in the hall. She threw open the doors, and started frantically tugging at Miss' Mary's chiffonier and washstand. The men arrived, coatless, willing. They piled furniture around the big cedar north of the house. The heat of this burning wing became blistering; the things had to be moved down the road.

Diana remembered the telephoning.

"We got an alarm," a gruff voice scolded. "Engines ought to be there now."

Two neighbors from the base of the mountain came up, and began helping. Armed guards at the entrances to the estate kept many away; these watched the holocaust from beyond the gap, or from their own homes. Dried wooden walls flamed up against the dark sky like giant fireworks; massed smoke bellied and spit sparks as if the mountain vomited in fiery discomfort.

Someone led a group of helpers up to the dim door of the garret, crowded with carefully covered family treasures from Jackson days. The dusty packing-cases promised little. "Nothing here," he said, closing the door.

The north end was an oven now; the rescuers turned to the dining room, parlors, and the boys' rooms on the south.

Diana ran back to the closet where Miss' Mary's silver was locked. She left this to hurry to the window, and then the door.

Huggins, Jim Hewin, and a knot of guards stared at the hectic activity. "Hey, niggers," one called to Will Cole and another, who were steering the hall clock from the Jackson home through the door, "drop that clock. You can't steal Mr. Judson's things."

Will and the other reached the porch.

"Drop it, I say," rang out Jim's ugly voice, as he balanced his pistol tentatively. "You bastards, burnin' down the house, to steal the stuff!"

"That's a lie," Will called, shortly. Others took up the cry.

The guards raised menacing pistols.

A striker, his temper on fire from continuing irritations, dropped behind the nearest steps, levelled his pistol, and shot toward the armed group.

Diana ran out flying, shielding Will. "Don't shoot my brother, you scoundrels----"

Jim's pistol, carefully aimed at the black striker, crackled viciously. Tongues of flame spoke from the armed deputies.

"You plugged the gal," Huggins grinned casually, aiming again. "We got both coons."

The astounded citizens ran between the sudden murderous combatants. "This won't do!"

"The house is burning, while you're killing each other!"

The chemical engine swung around the southern curve of the road, jetting ineffectually against the greedy insanity of the flames. The strikers took up the four bodies, and carried them somberly to Hewintown, Stella Cole following, dry-eyed and shivering with uncomprehending hatred.

Pelham and Jane walked among the smouldering ruins the next day, their hearts bitter at the headlines which blamed the strikers for the burning. "There's no dirtiness they won't stoop to," he raged. "Hanging's too good for those editors."

When Paul Judson arrived, to what had been home, in answer to Mr. Kane's wire, it was to find that Tom Hewin, whose sub-contract still controlled this part of the estate, had begun removing the rich outcrop where the north end of the cottage had rested.

"This is outrageous, Hewin! We don't want this touched----"

"It's the contract, Mr. Judson. In section seven. I supposed----"

Paul left him, agonized at heart.

An injunction the next day stopped the theft of the outcrop, and removed the Hewins from their connection with the property and the strike.

Only Ed was left to his mother to arrange for the burial of Diana and Will. Neither of them knew, although Stella suspected, that there were three dead in the two graves.

XIX

Life at the Hernandez home had its definite compensations, Pelham found. A nearby garage held the indispensable car; and there was now no one to censor his comings and goings. As long as he slept on the mountain, Mary clung to this role; the relief of the lifted restraint was immediate.

His mining inspector's badge gave him the run of the mountain property, although he was careful not to use it in direct union propaganda.

One afternoon late in August, Jim Hewin came up to him on a downtown avenue. "Howdy, Mr. Judson. Say," and the shifty eyes nervously agitated toward Pelham's face, "I could do you a good turn if I wanted to."

"What's that?"

"I got some dope you'd give a heap to know."

The other regarded him with suspicion. "What about, Hewin?"

"I know what the company's got up its sleeve. I can put you wise, all right. What's in it for me?" He waited, expectant.

Pelham choked down his disgust. "Not a cent. If you'd sell out my father, you'd sell us out as quickly." He walked off in impotent anger against the go-betweens seeking to fatten on the bitter struggle.

The local mining board assigned Pelham to the property he was most familiar with: either for that reason, or through a grim irony. As mining inspector, he secured access to all the books of the company. This gave him needed statistics for his report on the strike situation, and kept him busy, and, against his will, away from Jane, and the solace and spur of the hours with her.

The problem began to shape itself more clearly, now that he had become to a greater extent weaned from mountain and family. The whole opposition to the miners' demands was summed up and centered, in his mind, in that dominant personality of Paul Judson. Similarly he felt that he embodied the opposing forces. Without his presence, his thinking told him, the strike would have come just the same; but he knew that his cordial efforts had stiffened the fight of the workers more than they imagined.

It was a stake worth fighting for, that vast prone bulk overshadowing Adamsville, rich with the congealed essence of the ages. His father fought for himself, and for the group of spoilers who sought to bleed it for their selfish sakes. The son's cause was the cause of the people--of the toiling, inarticulate herd fettered by ignorance and immemorial adjustment to serfdom. Democracy against oppression--it was the real fight which the Adamsville press short-sightedly claimed was being waged over sea and sky and land against the war-mad encroachment of autocracy. The warring causes abroad were cloudy; the local situation was clear. So he told himself; and the parallel spoke strongly in his stirring speeches to the patient union fighters.

A new masterfulness radiated in his utterances. As a servant of the State, as well as a contender for the people, he was close to the tangled heart of the intricate struggle. He felt surer of himself than ever.

The mood of restrained audacity found itself cabined and confined in the irritation of mining statistics. The card for the University Club summer dance came opportunely; he went, too, through a perverse joy in embarrassing the good people of Adamsville by his disconcerting presence, and in studying their varied reactions to his new role.

He joined the group in the grill, a little diffident as to his reception. Lane Cullom, unchanging adherent of old, caught him by both hands. "You darned stranger! What'll it be?"

Lane led him and Hallock Withers, a clubman Pelham knew casually, to one of the cosy benched tables. "Never forget that you're in the presence of His Honor the State Mining Inspector, Hal. He's a nut in politics, but he can play tennis."

"Haven't lifted a racket in four months."

The friend laid an affectionate hand on Pelham's flannels. "I brought a girl you've just got to meet, Pell! She's from New Orleans, and she is some trotter! Visiting the Tollivers----"

Pelham grimaced.

"Nothing like Nellie, don't worry! Her name is Louise Ree-sharr----"

"What in the world!"

Lane grunted defensively. "Something like that. Old New Orleans family, and all the rest----"

The prospect did not attract; but the girl did. She had an opulent fulness that stopped distinctly short of being plump. Her large eyes reminded him at once of Jane's, and then of his mother's; but there was an artistry about their seeming candor that seduced his fancy. The burst of red roses at her waist did not outshine the glow of her complexion; vivid dark brown hair sparkled with brilliants set in a quaint tortoise shell comb. Each of the unimportant details assumed significance as contributing to the totality of full-blown charm.

She laid a proprietary arm in his, as they passed through the rainbow glimmer of Oriental lanterns swaying between the lawn trees. "Is Adamsville always as deadly as this? New Orleans is bad enough--but this!"

His throaty chuckle answered her. "I assure you I don't know."

"You live here?"

"I'm not a clubman. Life's too busy."

"Sounds imposing. What do you do, besides dance and use those serious eyes?"

"That's all my regular vocation. At off times I play tennis, wave my hair in the breeze, and inspect mines."

"It's nice hair." She regarded it thoughtfully.

"You can pull it."

With amused tolerance she smoothed it, then yanked it suddenly.

"Ouch! I treasure that."

An egotistic restlessness urged him. He thought once or twice of Jane, as he monopolized this girl. By an emotional vagary he connected the other with the clipped and forbidden rigors of the mountain life, which he had divorced finally.

"How about dinner at the club to-morrow night, and the dance afterwards? Or a ride?"

"But I'm to go out to the James', at Meadow Valley. Are you going?"

"Ethel James'?... I haven't been asked."

"Would they include you? Could I suggest it? It's an informal affair. It'll break up early."

"I think it will be all right. She's here to-night.... We could have dinner first."

He found an infrequent sparkle in her conversation, a pretty froth of talk that pleased. But it was not for this that he sought her out. The urge to wander that the mountain had sown in his blood impelled him most of all. He felt his imagination inflamed by the stimulus of her presence, the vivid challenge of her eyes, the audacious invitation of her lips. He had met no woman hitherto who so invited love-making. She seemed a rounded vessel brimfull of soft airs and caressing modulations of speech, that promised more than the bare words warranted.

On the return from the James' country home, they shot ahead of the other cars, purring in poised flight down the smooth macadam of the county road. He turned off into the upward slope above Hazelton that led to the mountain; he regarded himself as its privileged showman. In front of the drowsy trimness of farm houses they pulsed, until at last he stopped the engine where the road rounded over a steep outcrop dropping a jagged hundred feet to the steep tree-y declivity below.

"There's a bench. It's a wonderful view," he said, his speech thickened--the old timidity at the moment when passion possessed him again struggling against his desire.

She took the seat he indicated. The cool whip of the breeze sprayed him with the faint suggestion of _lilas_ that hung about her person. He tried to pull his senses from her overwhelming fascination.

"Isn't it wonderful?"

She nodded, lips apart, eyes starry. Discarding his shield of constraint, he turned swiftly on her, catching the filmy fabric covering her arms and bringing her face toward him.

Her voice was level, conventional. "You mustn't." She tried to squirm away.

"Yes!" He whispered his urgent triumph.

His lips avid from long self-denial, he blent with the wild sweetness of hers. She remained quiescent a moment, then sought to free herself. He clung to her, as if his life depended on retaining the warm rapture of her kiss. She thought he would never end.

At last she pulled away, a trifle dazed with the force of his passion. His lips fell lower, kissing her shoulder, her arm, the hand squeezing the taut ball of her handkerchief. As she took even this from him, he fell to his knees beside her, pressing long kisses on the handkerchief, any symbol to satisfy the aching hunger of his body.

She watched him in wonder. Her hand faltered out and pressed back the damp hair from his forehead. "You poor boy! You poor, starved boy!"

The paroxysm over, he sat at her feet, moodily watching the lower reaches of the valley. He realized the breach of faith with Jane; but there was a perverse part of him that rejoiced at the duplicity. The other love was chaste, beside this; after all, he could love more than one woman.... Should he stop with one wrenched rose, when the bush was on fire with red beauty?

Again he sat beside her. "You know, Louise," he urged tentatively, enough withdrawn from the scene to study her reaction to his conduct, "I've been straight with women.... You are the only girl I have kissed in a year."

It trembled on her tongue to say that he had made up for lost time; no, that would sound too flippant. "I know, I know," her answer rang rich with soft understanding.

It was the next night that she reverted to the matter, the fluent voluptuousness of her body still tingling from the harsh tenderness of his arms. "You're a funny boy.... What you said last night...."

"I said so much!"

Her thought could not be laughed away. "About your keeping straight, you know.... I have a friend--she only married last Mardi Gras--who always insisted she wanted a man who had had experience.... Girls have queer notions, haven't they?"

"I should think the girl would feel soiled ... that way. I should hate to have my mind filled, on my wedding night, comparing the wonderful girl I had won ... with ... other women I had had."

The perverse infidelity shook him again. "And yet I kiss." He turned the word into fact.

"There's no logic in it," he persisted, his body eased with the lip-contact. "Kissing shouldn't be wasted, any more than the rest. It's only a prelude to the more wonderful finale...."

"I enjoy the prelude," she temporized, in lazy content.

"And afterwards----" he breathed on his hand pausing fearfully on the tantalizing silken softness of her cool ankle, then straying with restrained gusto toward the edge of the lacy fabric above.

"No," she smiled. He solaced an obedient spirit with the touch of the denying lips.

The next afternoon he never forgot. They started early for Shadow Mountain, promising the Tollivers to return with mountain azalea, if it was still blooming. She dismissed this as an excuse.

Over the iron bridge curving above Shadow Creek's muddy bluster they hummed, and then up the hill. They left the car in the shade of a sandy lane, and clambered up the steep intricacies of sandstone, to a wide table-rock slipped from the hoary buttresses above. Beyond this were the azaleas.

The sun-splashed slope was a dizzy riot of the rosy blossoms. A fringe of the stocky shrubs curved over the jutting shelf of the rock, burning with timid pink blossoms at the crest of their blooming. A few of the individual flowers had passed maturity, and hung in the woodland wind, perilously pendent from the long pistils. Louise, rejoicing in the soft gray-green of her smock, lifted a big spray of the scented beauties and nested her face in them. A brown shimmer of hair caught on a nervy twig: Pelham undid it with unnecessary deliberation, and took pay for his chivalry.

They turned to the flowers. Uneven ripples of color spread from the gray rock's knees toward the blue crest horizon, a fragrant carpeting of pink and white and every modulation down to a deep ruby. To the right a veritable tree of speckled petals, frilled and dancing on airy feet in the sun-drizzle. A curveting breeze blew up a spray of flowery snow, dusting their footing. The farther blossoms seemed, by some trick of vision, a flowery fabric clinging veil-like above the gay green beneath. It was a restless pool of glowing color and odor.

From bush to bush they zigzagged, until her face was bowered in the bright sprays, and his fingers weary with whittling their stems. He took them from her, left her on the rock, and piled the flowers over the rear seat.

As he returned, his eyes rose restfully from her blossomed opulence to the lake of blooms. "There seem to be more here than before! They grow faster than we pick."

She made room for him beside her. Her head found a soft pillow in his coat; lazily she stretched her body on the natural couch of lichened firmness.

His lips burned greedily against the soft flush of her neck. He let his torch-like body rest half upon hers, for a long silence of tantalizing rapture. At length, repentant at the thought of Jane, he swung to a seat beside the other girl. In a moment he was conscious only of her, proud with an inner satisfaction in the man's role he was sure he was playing; more strongly than either of these feelings, afraid--afraid of himself, afraid lest the urgent emotions writhing within him would drive control from him, and force him into a situation which would be, no matter its outcome, unsettling, disquieting....

Man's innate tendency to mate as freely as the vast mountain oaks, shaking their pollen broadcast on every breath of breeze, was in him; but this had been tamed and sublimated, by his mother's overfond molding, by her pricking desire to keep him hers and no other woman's as long as possible, into an ingrowing chastity, a morbidly re-fondled rejection of sex, except for the arm's-length wooing of Jane. But the very opulence of his flowering mountain spoke against this, urged an abandon to the fierce ecstasies of yielding and taking. The warring wills found a sanguine battle-ground within him. There was a throbbing zest in tantalizing himself, by postponing the inevitable necessity of some choice. He must think it out carefully; he could wait....

Shaking her skirts free of littering twigs, she rose. He was a puzzle. She steadied herself by his arm. "I like it here," she summed up softly.

The wild azalea filled the glassed sunroom of the Tollivers with a faint echo of the glory of the distant mountain.

XX

"What do you think of _that_, comrade Judson?" Mrs. Hernandez asked, pushing the morning paper over, and watching his expression closely.

The first sheet of the _Times-Dispatch_ held a page-wide display headline, concerning a dynamiting conspiracy unearthed among the leaders of the strike. With furious amazement Pelham read of the finding of a bundle of the explosive sticks on the tracks just before a trainload of workers was to arrive, and of a heavy charge, its fuse lit, in an upper opening of the second ramp. Company guards, he read, had testified to seeing four strikers sneak down the gap, away from the entry. Wilson, Jensen, and two other active agitators were already in jail; other arrests were to follow. A two column editorial bitterly assailed the "un-American" laborers, and demanded the militia to end the reign of terror.

"It's a plant, I'm sure. They're aching for an excuse to bring on the soldiers."

"They got four of the boys," she reminded him.

"It's outrageous."

He hurried around to the strike headquarters. Ben Spence, Dawson, McGue, and four others broke off their tense discussion as he entered.

"Why didn't you phone me about this?"

Spence answered, his tone not too friendly. "Couldn't find you."

"We haven't seen you for a week, Mr. Judson," blared out Dawson. "We been readin' the social news, too. You've been busy."

"Yes.... I've been busy on my report." A flash of his father's acidity spoke in the tones. Then he asked more quietly, "What about bonds?"

"You can help there," Spence mollified him. "We've got most of 'em arranged for. When will your report go up?"

Pelham twisted forward on his chair. "It'll contain this latest plant. I'll finish this week. I suspected something of the kind." He told them of the offer made by Jim Hewin.

"It's an old stunt," said Dawson, unbending a little from his suspicion of "white-collar" meddling in labor troubles. "They ought to be ashamed to pull such stale gags. But here in the South----Those blackguardly uglies will swear any of us into jail."

"There's the jury," said Spence, a fighting flash in his eyes. "We can play a trick or two. Corporations ain't popular in Adamsville. Well, we'll get the boys out first."

The whole thing brought Pelham up sharply to his neglected work. He got one more maddeningly brief sight of Louise, before she continued her round of visits. "I'll be back, lover boy, around the holidays."

"How can I stand your being away?"

But the Tollivers were too close to permit his saying more.

Nursing his unsettling sense of guilt, until he was sure his face must publish the amorous errancy, he took himself to Jane on the accustomed Friday evening. She had not marked his absences, accepting the explanation that the report had kept him busied. To his wonderment, she was as dear and essentially desirable as ever; her range of attractiveness lay in ways so remote from Louise's red and feverish charm, that he sensed no conflict between them; he could love both wholly for their differing appeals.

Yet the evening was different, to him. The memory of intimate contacts with the brief love who had gone left a mental stigma upon his body; he was less willing than ever to touch Jane, or think of kissing her; she must be kept all the more congealed in icy protection. As defense against unnerving personal confidences, he had brought his report, which had begun to trouble him, to ask her help and counsel. "I'm afraid of it, Jane. You see, it goes all the way ... about my own father. It'll be bound to make trouble for him ... and me. I could have another inspector frame the final wording----"

"You back out! You must be a changeling some corporation elf has dumped off on me!"

"Don't tease. The thing bites too hard; it has nothing but teeth."

"Of course you'll make it! Give it here; we'll fix it so that it can masticate the toughest corporation board. What if it does make trouble? It's the truth...."

She went over the whole of it, toning down the vituperative rhetoric of the opening and conclusion, adding force to his presentation of facts. He was startled at her ability to vivify the abstractions symbolizing the red rage tearing apart city and mountain. Before she was done, he was re-converted to faith in his eloquent accusations.

At length it was finished. He saw that advance copies reached the papers on the day it was received by the governor. The _Advertiser_ and the _Times-Dispatch_ did not even mention it. But the ever-helpful _Register_ more than made up for their censoring. The slashing indictment of the companies for their disregard of the protective laws, the startling story of their lobbies to defeat safety measures, even the account of his father's activity at the State Federation of Labor, with the advertisements in the _Voice of Labor_ as exhibits, were given in full. This was a new frankness in Adamsville politics. From this Pelham passed to a treatment of starvation wages on the one hand, and prodigal salaries, surpluses and dividends on the other. He featured that the strike was for the enforcement of existing laws, and that the companies refused any arbitration. The conclusion recommended that the state enforce arbitration, or, if the companies could not be controlled, that the profiteering be ended by the state's taking over the mines and running them.

The lonely editorial voice of the _Register_ backed up even the most radical demands of the document.

The answer of the companies came promptly. Both of the other papers broke silence by denouncing the report as dishonest propaganda, with a demand for the removal of the offending young hothead. They called again for the militia to end the disorder at the mines.

Pelham received a wire from Governor Tennant the same night, suspending him from the state's services under charges of misconduct in office. The two hostile papers gave the details, the next morning; his strike activities were set forth, and given as reasons for his dismissal.

"You'll get your hearing," Ben Spence told him, "but that'll be all. It's good-bye with you, my boy. And you've drawn just two pay checks!"

His father descended on him in proxy during the afternoon, in the person of Pratt Judson, who had run up from Jackson, at Paul's suggestion, after interviewing the governor, to act as intermediary. Pelham listened with ill grace to his uncle's suave attempts to cloud the matter.

"Bob Tennant is a friend of yours, as well as mine, Pelham. It would certainly hurt him to remove you; but what is he to do?"

"Does my father demand the removal?"

"You know better. He stood up for you, even against the whole board of directors. Family means a lot to Paul. But they're out for your scalp. You've played yourself into their hands."

"I don't see how," the boy repeated doggedly, curving a steel-edged ruler until it cracked alarmingly. "I don't see how."

"If you'd gotten anyone's advice, my boy, you would know that a state official can't take sides in such matters. You've actually served on the strike committees, haven't you?"

"Heretofore inspectors haven't failed to serve the companies. They weren't fired."

"Let's not beat around the bush. Here's the best that Tennant can do. The charges need never come up, if you don't kick up another row. The suspension can go for the present, and then in due course you can resign. Mary tells me you've wanted to take up advanced work in sociology. You know I'm not a rich man, Pelham; but I'll be willing, to pull you out of this hole, to stand the whole expense."

"Would you advise me to retreat under fire? Resign, with charges hanging over me?"

The portly uncle thought a minute. "They'll be withdrawn now, Pelham, if you'll agree to resign in six months, and take a vacation until then. There'll be nothing against you."

The ruler splintered abruptly, littering the ordered desk. "It's running away from a fight, Uncle Pratt, and you know it. I can't do it."

"Think of the family--a black mark like this----"

"I'm thinking of the miners ... of my duty to them and the people."

"We're practical men, Pelham. You know enough about politics to know that you're butting your head against a stone mountain."

"Then I'll butt, damn 'em! Talk straight, Uncle Pratt. Would you advise me to back out of a fight in the middle of it?"

The elder man grinned in defeated sympathy. "You're a young fool, Pelham. We've got to do this quickly, or it's too late. I could give you until to-morrow to think it over----"

"I don't need the time. This is the only answer I could make."

"Well, I'll tell Paul. If you ever get into a scrape of any kind----"

"I appreciate that, and I'll remember it."

The strike committee heard what had occurred within an hour, as far as Pelham's decision was concerned.

"Good boy!" said Spence. "Give 'em a run for their dirty money."

Serrano, an unofficial member of the group, broke in excitedly. "Why not run Judson as labor candidate for sheriff, and elect him? That's the best answer to make to the crooks! You'd run, wouldn't you?"

Pelham thought rapidly. It would at least give a wonderful chance for propaganda, even if they couldn't overcome the big odds against them. "I don't think we could win----"

"Win? We'd lick the lights out of 'em! Man, Adamsville's waking up! With the strike going on, you could beat out Dick Sumter hands down! Look how he's turned the sheriff's office over to the companies! Will you do it?"

There might be something in it; his heart expanded sharply from the excitement. He kept his voice level. "I'd be willing to, of course. What do you think of it, Ben?"

The cautious labor lawyer was not so enthusiastic. "You might do it, Judson. You'd have to have union labor entirely behind you----"

"We can make 'em endorse him!"

"Socialist and all?" quizzed Spence, smiling doubtfully.

"Sure! Think what it would mean to the strike, if we had the sheriff's office! We could enforce order then.... They'd have no chance to call out their brass-buttoned Willies."

"Well, it's a big chance."

The hearing at Jackson, the next week, was the cut-and-dried farce that Pratt Judson and Spence had predicted. The governor was friendly but firm. "It's my duty, Mr. Judson, as a servant of all the people, to remove you."

Jane, on fire with the idea of the campaign, caught his hand impulsively when he hurried back to tell her. "Don't mind it. We knew what they would do.... Now--show them!"

The thing moved slowly. There were countless obstacles. Pooley, Bowden, the regular machine, would not hear of it. An uproarious meeting of the Trade Council shoved through an endorsement. The leaders changed their talk then, but Pelham felt their hidden antipathy working against him. So far there had been no open announcement of the race, and it was now the last week of August.

"Ben Spence, you've got to put this thing over. Hire Arlington Hall--the socialist local will put up the money--and start it next Sunday afternoon."