Chapter IV: Part 4

"Now," she cried at last, "one more climb, and here we are at the summit! Fine, isn't it? That's Salome Park, all of it, as far as you can see, until you see the Tigmores curving around way off yonder to the west again. Ah, yes, I thought you would like it!"

From the summit of the Tigmore Ridge, on which they had stopped, there spread out an endless stretch of country, with small cleared spaces where the wheat and corn could grow, and with trout glens gleaming here and there through the trees, and with bosky places and woodsy places in between.

"Oh, it's wonderful," said Steering.

"This is the best view in the Tigmores," said the girl. "From here you can imagine that you see the Boston Mountains on a clear day. And away off down there run the Kiamichi--you will have to take my word for it, you can't see them. Cowskin Prairie, where the three States and the Territory come together, is off that way, too."

The big Missouri loneliness hung over it all, shutting them in, shutting the world out. "Psha! there isn't any world outside," said Steering, and drew his horse nearer to hers. "There isn't any world outside. This is all there is to it, and just you and I in it. Don't you believe me?"

"We will play that's the way of it," she said, the spell of the land upon her, too, the spell of the day upon her, her own heart's red spell upon her.

"Oh, me! Oh, me!" He brought his horse up closer, his eyes finding hers, and pleading with them.

"Well?" she cried, "well?" a wavering, waiting smile on her lips. Even like that, even leaning toward him she had a splendid self-trust; she was confidential, but a little remote.

Suddenly the man beside her clamped his jaws together harshly and held his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted by psychic or moral crises, of one kind and another, that used up all the force in him. Here and now the demand upon him was terrific. His love for Sally Madeira had grown upon him daily, hourly, engaging all that was best in him, pulling him away beyond his old best, inspiring, and remaking him. To have to fight it, even for her sake, even because he must protect her from so hard a fate as fate with him promised to be, was like sacrilege. The force of his self-conflict took all the colour from his lips, all the light from his eyes. "My God! My God!" he cried, a short, sharp cry, that beat up the Tigmores and broke and splintered into the big loneliness futilely. Then he jerked his horse about abruptly. "We must go back now," he said.

But the girl, who had been watching, turned her eyes from him and held her horse still for a short moment. The glory of the hills came on across the wide park to her and enfolded her, met in kind by the radiance of her wonderful hair, her sunny eyes, her glowing skin. The joy of the night before, the morning's passionate grief, the ingenuous hope and prayer in her ride after Steering, the sweet, anxious torture of the journey to Salome Park were all giving place to a large, impersonal comprehension of the conflict in Steering's soul. She had known before that there was trouble brewing between him and her father. She knew now, past all doubting, that he loved her, knew it from his face, his voice. And even while her heart filled and quivered with knowing it, some higher power of divination made her know, too, that he was caught between his love of her and his difficulty with her father in an inexplicable, soul-shaking way.

When Steering, a few feet below her, turned again towards her, she looked finer, fairer, more immortally young and strong than he had ever seen her look. She rode down to him fearlessly and put her hand out. "Sometimes the thing to do is just to stand steady," she said, "isn't that it?"--bridging all the unspoken thought and feeling between them, understanding, helping.

He clung to her hand, and its answering pressure was that of a comrade's, strong and reassuring. "Miss Madeira," he said, at last, simply, "things are so bad with me that if I don't stand steady and face them exactly as they come, not giving in an inch anywhere along the line, I shan't be able to stand at all."

"Ah, but you will stand that way--steady," she said, and drew her hand from his, and led the way homeward. She had accepted her fate to wait and endure while he "faced things."

They went back into the sunset together, almost silent. Far and wide rolled the hills in their flaunting glory, and, now and again, the girl's breath trembled and stung her,--that tidal sense of colour leaping and rioting within her, perhaps. Now and again the man's jaws set together more firmly. When they talked at all it was of little things.

"Why didn't I ever meet you at Miss Gossamer's?" he asked once.

"You were in Philadelphia when I was visiting Elsie, that was why. Neither you nor Mr. Carington were in New York that month. I remember that I got an idea that Elsie missed Mr. Carington, or you, or both. Mr. Carington was in love with her, wasn't he?"

"Yes, he's always been in love with her, I think.--Do you like the East?" he asked again, not caring for the subject of Miss Gossamer.

"To get an education in."

"You are well educated," he said, as though making comparisons.

In that matter of education, her selective abilities had been indeed good. She had taken from her opportunities developmental elements and used them within herself wisely. She had fine conceptions of art, she was well-read; and because she had foreseen that she would be too rich to have any separate use for the things of art and learning, she had seized upon and welded all her inclinations and accomplishments into an harmonious, delightful completeness as Woman. In the result, her education seemed to be one of the especial reasons that you liked her.

"But as for that," said Steering, speaking his thought aloud, "reasons don't count. There are plenty of reasons, but one really never gets at the biggest reason of all."

"You hardly expect me to understand that," she said, laughing frankly, a musical laugh that had in it the shaking, white flash of a rock-fluted hill-stream.

"No, no! I don't expect you to understand that," he said.

They went on through the deep, odorous wood, down close to the river's pale, shallow mystery again, and so back to the big gate at Madeira Place. There at the gate the girl put out her hand to him again.

"Good-bye!" she said softly, "good-bye!"

As he bent to kiss the hand his breath came hard. "It is not good-bye," he said. "It shall not be. I swear it."

Then he dashed on down the ridge road toward Canaan, to find Crittenton Madeira.

_Chapter Ten_

WHO'S GOT THE TIGMORES?

That Monday was hard on Madeira. It was his normal mental habit to come to a conclusion instantly, and cut a way for it across other people's ideas and notions with the impetus and onslaught of a cannon-ball. That Monday his mentality was below--or above--normal. He kept telling himself that he was mixed. His desire to crush Steering, pick him up and crumple him and thrust him aside, stood before him constantly, like the picture of the physical thing. Up to the time that he had seen his daughter run out of the dining-room that morning, her face averted, the desire had been steadily taking on colour and size. But, with the girl's brave broken cry, there had come on to him an intolerable question. For a long time he would not let the question get into words, or in any way define itself within his brain. Still, all morning long, he recognised that the question and that desire of his to crush Steering were ranged before him in some sort of fierce competitive effort. A thousand times he wished that he had had the courage to ask Sally candidly just what she had meant, just where she stood with regard to Steering, but he knew that he could never have asked her. Good friends though he and his daughter were, there was between them the definite reserve that lies between all good friends in the sphere of the big things of life. He could not have asked her, and she could not have told him if he had asked her.

He fretted through a busy morning in a terrible uncertainty. When Sally had come by the bank to tell him of her proposed ride with Steering, he had watched her with painful, anxious scrutiny. But the girl's control had become perfect by that hour, and Madeira had to go back into the bank with the uncertainty still thickly upon him. Pausing there in the bank at the plate-glass window for a reflectful moment, he came to a swift resolve. He saw that he could not afford to make any mistake. He resolved to give Steering another chance to get right on the company matter. When he had gone out to the curb to make an appointment for the evening with Steering, he had told himself that it was because the boy might as well have the chance as not have it, and, when he had gone back, he had known that, lie to himself about it as he might, it was because he was afraid for Sally Madeira, afraid that this Steering was about to mean something in her life, afraid that he, as the girl's father, might bring some unhappiness upon her.

All the long afternoon the thing continued to worry him; added to the torment he was suffering from the burning letter in his vest-pocket, it was well-nigh unendurable. He had to work vehemently to make the time pass. Toward six o'clock, he began to realise that he had been shaping the time toward the evening's appointment with Steering. As he got it shaped he grew more peaceful. He was arranging things so that he could win out with Steering. Little by little he came to accept the winning out as an assured thing, and in accepting it his grievance against Steering lightened, finally appearing to him as an easy thing to dispose of. Even the letter in his pocket grew less scorching. Sometimes he forgot, for minutes together, that it was there. Upon the hypothesis that Steering would "come around" everything smoothed out. Resting securely upon that hypothesis, Madeira even formulated the words with which he would take Steering's surrender: "God love us, that's all right! You just trust to me from now on. From now on I'll look out for you, my boy." He could hear himself saying that.

At six o'clock, still shaping the day toward the appointment with Steering, he took a great bevy of men, farmers, stockmen, storekeepers, to the Canaan Hotel for supper. Headed by Madeira,--who kept close to him a man named Salver, to whom he constantly referred as "our engineering friend from Joplin,"--the party stamped into the hotel dining-room. And though various members of the party were heavily booted, big, brawny, and in other ways cut out as assertive, it was much as though they were not there, so completely did Madeira fill the room. In the hotel office, after the supper had been disposed of, though every man had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth, it seemed as though Madeira were really doing all the smoking, so insistently did the smoke wreaths twist about his big face, as the others edged nearer him and closed in upon him. On the outside, on the way back up town, the street seemed full of Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl in Madeira's orbit.

The superintendent of the Tigmore County schools, a long, lean man with a trick of covert sarcasm, happened to be in Canaan that day, and he cracked a joke about Madeira's "galley-gang," as the bevy of men swept past him on their way back to the bank. In Canaan almost any joke had a fair chance to become classic through immediate and long-drawn repetition, and the superintendent's joke was soon going up and down the street as majestically as though swathed in a Roman toga. By seven o'clock the joke had come on to Madeira's ears. At eight o'clock the superintendent was one of seven men who sat in conference with Madeira in the private office of the bank. That was Madeira's way. Besides Salver, the Joplin man, and the superintendent, there were at the conference Larriman, a man who counted his acres by the thousands in We-all Prairie; Heinkel, the German sheep-raiser from the southern part of the county; Shelby, from the cotton lands of the Upper Bottom; Pegram, the Canaan postmaster, and Quin Beasley, from the Grange store.

They were all still there when Steering came in. Fresh from the hills, young, alert, deep-lunged, brown-faced, Steering was a good sort to look at as he strode into the room. He had ridden on into Canaan to the tune of high, purposeful music, after parting with Sally Madeira. His experience with her out there on the hills, his profounder impression of her fineness, had acted upon him like unbearably sweet harmonies, urgent, inspirational. He was this minute keen for something to do, something hard, earnest, momentous. If the whole truth were told, he wanted to fight.

Madeira got up and shook hands with him, the more vigorously and noisily because of a sharp lambent flare that leaped out from the younger man's consciousness like a warning, and, reaching Madeira, stung and irritated him. As they stood gripping each the other's hand, both big, both vigorous, both determined, there was yet a fine line of distinction between them. On one side of the line stood the younger man with his ideals. On the other side stood Madeira, without any ideals.

"Come in, Steering, my boy!" In spite of himself, in spite of the "my boy," Madeira's voice rang harshly. "Lord love us, we are having a little preliminary meeting here. You know all these gentlemen, I think? I'm just reading to them some matter that I have got ready. I'll go on reading, if you don't mind. Sit down over there and listen."

And, Steering, shaking hands with the men nearest him, and bowing to the men farthest from him, sat down and listened.

As Madeira resumed his chair at his desk, he seemed to brace himself toward some sort of finality. His voice, when he spoke, was ominously quiet for a noisy man's voice. "Here's something about the country in general," he began slowly, dispassionately, "that I think might interest a fellow who is considering coming down here either to mine or to farm. See what you think of this: 'It was in 1874 that the first carload of zinc ore went up to the zinc works in Illinois. That was the beginning. Heretofore Missouri had been supposed to be agricultural only, but here was a new Missouri, whose wheat and corn and fruit wealth was found to be supplemented by a mineral wealth of mammoth greatness. Settlers who wanted to mine began to come in, towns to spring up, and capital to be invested. The country was developed with lightning-like speed. From the Joplin stretch as a nucleus, lines of development have been steadily projected since 1874 to this day. There are not a great many undeveloped big acreages of land left in any of the southern Missouri counties. Of the few that remain by far the largest and most promising is the country known as the Tigmore Stretch. A remarkable feature of this region, besides its great agricultural possibilities, is that the surface exposure in the hillsides shows distinct mineral-bearing horizons, beds of zinc carbonates, whose promise of zinc sulphide at a greater depth is absolutely reliable. That it needs only deep shafting and drilling to unearth more remarkable riches than even Missouri herself has as yet yielded up, is evident from the outcrops'--by the way, gentleman," Madeira here interrupted himself to say, still in his quiet, dispassionate tone, "Salver has spent a good many days in the hills lately, and he has decided that the deeper-seated sulphides are just as surely in the hills as are the carbonates. He has done a lot of verifying. Aint that right, Salver?"

Salver shuffled his feet and said yes, that was right, and Madeira read again from his notes, picking out bits here and there, and beginning each time, "Now take this. See what you think of this," his voice staying monotonously even.

"'But, besides the zinc and lead and iron and coal, Missouri's well-improved farms invite the intending settler.'" (Steering thought of the lean hill farms as he listened.) "'There is an abundance of timber, in itself a great saving to the house-builder, and there are innumerable streams and water-courses and lakes. The altitude is over one thousand feet above the sea-level, and the climate is the healthiest in the United States. Both mining and farming can be carried on the year round.' ... And now, lastly, about this form letter that I have drafted for intending investors--it runs like this: 'Dear Mr. So-and-So,' (I mean to have the name filled in in each one, I want it to be a personal letter) 'May I ask you to examine the status of our Canaan Mining and Development Company, as set forth briefly in the enclosed pamphlet. A careful reading will convince you that we are organised for legitimate business and development, rather than for speculation. From personal knowledge, I am able to vouch for all the representations made by the Company. There are a half hundred Tigmore County men already in the Company'--which will, of course, be the fact when the letter is sent," explained Madeira. "'If you are not already one of them, I should like for you to be. I think you know my record in this part of the country, as well as the record of the enterprises for which I have stood sponsor, and I am confident that when you begin to feel interested in the mining developments through this section, you will investigate the Canaan Company before investing with the other companies that are sure to spring up like mushrooms in our track.' ... And then, this: 'The chief working properties of the Canaan Company, the Tigmores, can without doubt be made to pay from one hundred to five hundred per cent, on any investment within the first year. The Canaan Company will not have to depend upon shallow sheets of mineral against dead rock, as do many of the speculative enterprises of the mining section. The Canaan Company will not cut blind. It knows its field, it knows its chances, it knows its future'--and so on, and so on--how do you think it goes, boys?"

They thought it went rapidly, and they said so with loud endorsement.

"Well, I decided I'd get the thing moving here at home first," elaborated Madeira; "when all's said and done, a fellow likes to see his own place and people profit by what's going on. I'm going to send that letter out first to the Tigmore County people, and then move out in wider circles later. Shouldn't you think that was the way to work it out?"

Yes, they thought that was the way. Indeed, the way seemed such a good one, and the work was evidently to be so carefully, so conscientiously performed that, to Steering, as he had listened, the crying shame of it all had been not that it wasn't true,--it might be true, there was no telling,--but that Madeira, its promoter, didn't care a rap whether it was true or not. Or, after all, was he, Steering, wrong about that? Had Madeira changed about? Been himself convinced that the actual prospects were so good that it was senseless not to depend upon them, without any of the wings that his fancy might give them? Had the thing become with Madeira, during these more recent days, something larger, something legitimate? All the other men were taking Madeira's attitude seriously. They showed that they were by the emotionalism, effusive, admiring, with which they hung upon Madeira for a few last words, by their blind dependence, their awe. When the seance broke up finally, they strayed away from him haltingly, like lost sheep.

The impression of Madeira upon the men, as he let them out of the door, was so profound that it came on to Steering with the value of a reflection. He felt himself growing a little hopeful that the thing really was to be right and straight, as he watched Madeira turn from the door.

For his part, Madeira came back toward his desk with a peculiar revulsion of feeling upon him. This effort of his to bring Steering around by strategy was galling him. He resented that any such effort should ever have been saddled upon him. He considered that from the start Steering should have been with him. Most fiercely of all he resented that he, Crittenton Madeira, should have let himself get into the position of trying to mollify Steering. "By God!" he was saying to himself with a convulsive anger, "Me to have to mollify! By God! Me!" Then the thought of Sally came back to him, goading him and confusing him. On a sudden impulse of candour he cried out to Steering, as he came on to his desk.

"Steering! God love you, why do you want trouble between you and me? Don't you see that I have this thing here under my thumb? Don't you see that you mustn't go against me, my boy? Here's your chance back again. I'm handing it out to you. Stand by me. You won't be sorry. All my plans are made now. I have once or twice in my life thought the thing to do down here was to stir up a furore over some of the lakes and the springs and the scenery and make a health resort out of the region, but I have settled away from that now, settled straight at zinc. But Lord bless you! zinc or no zinc we can't fail to make a pile of money out of this. Why do you want to be a fool and hold back from me when I'm willing to pull you along? You ought to see by now that you can't do anything without me, or go against me. 'Tisn't everybody I'm willing to pull along, Steering. Why, boy, from the start, I've treated you on the square, let you know me on the inside--let--and, here and now, I'm still willing to pull you along, if you'll come along!--eh, what?"

With Madeira's words, matching Madeira's excitement, blazing furiously and whitely, out leaped the slower, stronger fire of the younger man's personality.

"See here!" shouted Steering, "twice now I've done my best to hope that somehow, somewhere you were going to throw me one line of commercial honesty and decency. I haven't asked you to measure up to very high standards, I'd have been satisfied with damned little; I've waited on you and hoped for you and let you try to bull-doze me, but by God! I'm done. You hear, I'm done!" He got up and the lean strength of his determination and the long reach of his body were all-powerful. "Don't you try this game with me again, Mr. Madeira! Don't you ever try any game with me again--No! Keep back! Not that either!"

Madeira had gone crazy for the time. Possessed only by that desire to crush the thing that opposed him, he lifted his big clenched fists straight up over his head and came at Steering, fiery-eyed, perfervid with relish of the moment when he could close down on his enemy and make an end of him. He panted as he came, and as he came the veins in his temples stood out, purple and knotted. A little line of froth lay upon his lower lip.

"Eh, God! You!--Wait there!--You!--You!----"

Steering, with the old prowess that had made the boys on the gridiron stand aside and howl for him, reached up and brought Madeira's arms down with a circling, sweeping blow, then caught the bulky, staggering body and thrashed it into a chair, forgetful that it was Madeira, forgetful of Sally Madeira, forgetful of everything for one red instant save a savage masculine joy in his own strength.

Then he took out a cigar and lit it, and his mental readjustment followed quickly. "Mr. Madeira," he said, puffing slowly at the cigar, the match's yellow light on his face showing that he was pale, "I am sorry that you made me do that, sir. Still, I must add this to what I've said,--don't, please, ever try to pull me along with you again. I guess I'm going in a different direction. This leaves everything settled between us. Our paths aren't apt to cross again. You aren't hurt, I hope? There is nothing that I can do for you?"

Madeira made no answer. He was sitting, a wooden figure, in front of his desk where Steering had thrashed him down. His temples were still purplish, but the crazy light was no longer in his eyes. They were dull and fishy. Steering had gone to the office door, then the bank door had clanked to behind him before Madeira moved. He began working his fingers then, watching them questioningly, stupidly. They felt stiff and numb. Suddenly he leaned forward exhausted. His head rolled on the desk. "Sally?" he whimpered, in a furtive, scared way, "Sally?"

Then, all in a moment, he jumped to his feet, clutching at the pocket that held the Grierson letter, while words came from his mouth in vehement staccato yelps:

"Eh, God! He'll go against me, will he? Wait. I'll show him. Who's got the Tigmores? Answer me that now? Who's got the Tigmores?" Off beyond his window tumbled the long Tigmore line. He crossed the room, all his strength back with him, and looked out upon the high black hills. "Eh, God!" he shouted, and beat at his chest where the letter lay, "Dead men tell no tales! _I've got the Tigmores!_"

_Chapter Eleven_

TALL THINGS

One late fall afternoon a man and a boy lingered under the shadow of tall trees and pondered tall things. The boy was propped against the trunk of an oak; his hat was pushed back from his face; his black tumbling hair made his slim brown face seem browner, his long eyes darker than they were; his young intensities of fancy and feeling were aroused, and manifest in the tremble of his lip, the vibrancy of his voice, the shaking light of his glance. The man lay flat on his back with a book spread out over his stomach and his long white fingers interlaced across the book fondly. Down at their feet the Di flowed swiftly, with the eyrie shiver on her bosom, making haste, like a frightened woman, past the lonely Tigmores toward the livelier corn and cotton lands. All around the horizon the sky so throbbed that here and there it rent the sheer cloud-veil that lay in delicate illusion over the blue. Through the trees played frightened flashes of colour, the whisk of a cardinal's wing, the burnt-red plume of a fox-squirrel's tail. In the air there was a palpitancy that was to the dream senses what colour vibrations are to the eye.

The man took up the book and began to read from it, and this was the burden of the reading:

"'Nobody can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional philosophy,--namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence, and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition,'" the man smiled gravely and repeated the last stave with questioning care, "'and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition?--a sudden wakening of that inherited composite memory which is more commonly called passional affinity.'--I have a notion that that may mean something or other, Piney?"

"Don't ast me."

The reader began again: "'Certainly if first love be evolutionally explicable, it means the perception by the lover of something differentiating the beloved from all other women,--something corresponding to an inherited ideal within himself, previously latent, but suddenly lighted and defined,'--an inherited ideal--something differentiating the beloved from all other women," murmured the reader earnestly. He put the book back upon his stomach, and there was a long silence in the woods, broken by a distant reverberation, short, sharp, suggestive. Piney jumped, like the highly strung, alert young animal that he was.

"Whut wuz it, Mist' Steerin'?"

"Uncle Bernique's blasts, Piney. He's on the trail." The silence remained unbroken for another long period.

"Mist' Steerin'," began Piney at last; he had a long spear of sere grass in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,--I couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen happens onst, it oughtn't never to happen agin, hmh?" Piney's long drawn notes of rising inflection were musical. "Simlike, ef a man onst finds the right woman they oughtn't never to be no more right women, hmh?"

"There ought not to be, Piney, son."

"Well, but they gen'ly is, hmh?" Bruce straightened out one foot with an impatient kick. Ever since they had fallen into the habit of abstracted talks on this imponderable subject, Piney had seemed able, with a sort of elfin craft, to make Bruce remember Miss Elsie Gossamer's light, fleeting touch upon his life. He had never mentioned Miss Gossamer to Piney in all their mutual experience, yet the tramp-boy was constantly skirmishing up from afar with a generalisation, like a high-held transparency, that illuminated Miss Gossamer's memory for Bruce. Three hypotheses had presented to Bruce in the way of explanation: one, that he himself was possessed by a little embarrassed consciousness that he should have had any past at all in view of the present; another, that Miss Sally Madeira had just possibly set Piney on to worry him about Miss Gossamer; and the last, that Piney, divining that a man could hardly reach Bruce's age without some pages of romance behind him, was forever, out of his own perspicacity, trying to make Bruce re-read those pages, so that this new page, that had been turned under the hand of Sally Madeira, might not be written.

"Piney," Bruce answered at last regretfully, "it's a pagan world. Men make mistakes. I think it's largely because they want so much to love that they love somebody, anybody, till the right person comes along."

"Should think they 'ud wait," demurred Piney stubbornly.

"Well, n--o, that's the notion of a man who has met the right person exactly in the beginning; or it's a woman's notion; but it isn't the notion of a man who, with a sense for beauty and sweetness, waits, like a harp for its music, out in the open where beauty and sweetness beat down upon him. Out in the open a man gets blind. Lord!" went on Steering, remembering Miss Gossamer again, and trying to explain her to himself, "how can a man help loving prettiness! That's what a man loves often and always, Piney, prettiness, grace, vivacity--and then once in his life he loves a woman--Hah!" cried Steering, as though he had at last got the best of Miss Gossamer, "that's it--that sounds good."

"Well, d'you think," went on Piney, jerking his spear of grass viciously, "d'you think that a man cand fall in love with a lady rat off, just knowin' her a few weeks?" This was one of Piney's ways of manifesting the jealousy that disquieted him, slurring covertly, and with his lips flickering peculiarly, at Steering's brief acquaintance with Miss Madeira. He was always showing in innumerable ways the hold that Bruce had taken upon his young affections, but he could not help showing, too, the sore spot of his valuation of Steering's regard for Miss Madeira. Though they mentioned Miss Madeira between them only casually, Bruce knew for himself that Piney, in his crude but vehement way, was living through a boy's own high tragedy of love for a woman older than he and beyond his reach, and Piney knew for himself that Steering, in the most perfect flower of his capacity, had attained his destiny as a perfect lover, under circumstances most unpropitious. The fact that the woman who was the object of the boy's enraptured fancy had levied royal tribute upon the man's love in the same purple-mannered fashion brought boy and man close. Tacitly they recognised that the bond between them was strong enough to bear the weight of Piney's jealousy, and, both watching, they allowed the boy to depend from it, swing on it and strain it just enough to make both conscious that the bond was there.

"You know what I think, Piney," said Steering after a long wait, in which he had been busy remembering the fulness of one moment in the Bank of Canaan. "I think that if she is the right woman a man can fall in love in one minute. And I think that if she is the right woman all eternity will not give him time to fall out of love with her and no sort of hell of bad situations will ever be wide enough to keep his thoughts away from her." Steering spoke with a well-ordered restraint, but a sense of the combination of situations that he himself had come into lent a ringing, protesting resonance to his voice, and Piney forgot to be jealous and flashed him a long, keen look of delight. Steering realised that he sometimes put into words the things that Piney yearned toward and dreamed, but could not express; and he also realised, from the added satisfaction that he got out of his words because of Piney's satisfaction in them, that Piney sometimes enlivened and enriched his own emotions for him. Their romancing made boy and man delicately complementary to each other. Steering had taken Piney's love for the girl who was beyond him as a fine and simple thing, and, taken in that way, it played up to Bruce's love with the rich imageries and colours of youth, and made Bruce younger, quicker for it. Piney, on his side, had a keen, shy consciousness of immaturity and inexperience that made him attend upon Bruce's outbursts of passion as upon an illumination of what this thing of man's love could be and should be at its biggest and best.

"That's just exactly the truth," maintained Steering earnestly. It was remarkable how earnest he could be on this line of opinion. Miss Elsie Gossamer would have marvelled to hear him. Time was when he had agreed with Miss Gossamer that only people who had known each other a long time, as he and she had, could depend upon their attitude toward each other. The attitude between Miss Gossamer and him had seemed very reliable in those prehistoric days when congeniality of taste, a flower face and the probability of getting through life without much worry on your mind and a good cigar in your mouth had seemed sufficient to him. Things like that seemed pitifully insufficient now. He wheeled about restlessly and considered.

From where he and Piney were they could hear the sound of a steam-drill, thud-thud-thudding into the heart of a distant knob of the Canaan Tigmores. That notion of Carington's and his about getting into the hills had undeniably balled up into the veriest nonsense under the pressure of Crittenton Madeira's control of the Tigmores. Steering pounded on the ground with one fist and clenched his hands tightly about his knees. That was not the worst, and he might as well face the worst. There was also by now the bitterest sort of animosity toward him on Madeira's part. Old Bernique, who was very fond of Miss Madeira and loathed her father, had commented to Steering upon that being Madeira's way with everyone who promised to be too much for him to handle--bah! it made Steering angry to consider that Madeira should ever have tried to "handle" him. He loosed the clench of his hands about his knees and jumped to his feet. That was not the worst, and he might as well face the worst. Naturally enough the daughter had had to go with the father. That ride across the sunset glory of the Tigmores had been good-bye after all. It had been two weeks since he had stood with her on the spur above Salome Park, and he had seen her twice since; once at the post-office, where she had said, "Good-morning, Mr. Steering"; once on Main Street in front of her father's bank, where she had said, "Good-evening, Mr. Steering."

But for all these things, he was not done with Missouri yet. Even now he was waiting for old Bernique. When Bernique should come they would be off again on a long prospect. Bernique and he had been in the hills for two weeks, skirting the Grierson entail, picking, digging, sniffing for ore by day, sleeping long sleeps on forest leaves, heaped and aromatic, by night. He had that day ridden into Canaan for some clean clothes, and was beating back toward Old Bernique now, having picked up Piney down the river road.

"Well, Piney, son," Steering invaded the rush of his own thoughts ruthlessly, "I expect I ought to be toddling. Going to ride part of the way with me? I think we shall fall in with Uncle Bernique up-stream a mile or so."

"Why, yes," assented Piney, rising; he made a keen calculation of the time by the sun, as he got to his feet; "I'll go a-ways with you. I'd like to see Unc' Bernique--aint seen him simlike fer a long time."

Their horses were tethered in a little glade below them and they went into the glade as they talked. "We like Uncle Bernique, don't we, Piney?" suggested Steering, relishing Piney's reference to the old Frenchman.

"Best old man in the world," answered Piney, with the soft, sweet shyness, like a girl's, that was always in his voice when he let his affections find expression.

Before this Steering had heard, from old Bernique himself, the short story that had connected the affections of the tramp-boy and the wandering prospector. Piney, Old Bernique had said, was the child of a woman whom he had known in St. Louis in the old days. Old Bernique, who was only middle-aged Bernique then, had lived as a neighbour to the woman, whom he had loved very much. But the woman had married another man, and had gone away to the Southwest. And, later on, Old Bernique had followed. And in these later days, since the woman's death, it had been given him to keep watch and ward over her child, Piney. Piney's parents had not been Italians at all, so Old Bernique told Steering, just plain, everyday Americans, from up "at that St. Louis," quite poor and always on the move. The father had been known throughout the country-side as a "blame' good fiddler" and the mother had been, oh a vair' wonderful woman, if one could believe Old Bernique. But there was no Italian blood in Piney. His feeling for Italy had to be explained in another way. It was the great sweet note of poetry, music and beauty, of that far country, vibrating across the years and the miles, taken up as a memory in the Missouri hills by Old Bernique and, through him, reaching a Missouri boy's heart, all tuned and pitched for it. That was all there was to Piney's story. It was only a fragment.

Reaching their horses in the glade, Steering and Piney mounted and started up the river road. "Can't you come with us for the rest of the week, son?" asked Bruce, as they journeyed.

"Nope. Goin' trampin' by myse'f." It was Piney's habit to disappear for days, gipsy that he was. Perhaps the habit was growing upon him a little of late. He had no abiding place; sometimes he referred to one hill shanty, sometimes to another, as home; but the home-feeling with him was at its fullest and strongest when he was "trampin'." Ostensibly his vocation was that of a travelling farm-hand, but it was all ostentation. Piney would not work. Not while the pony could carry him from hospitable farm-house to hospitable farm-house. He was a knight of the saddle, the uncrowned king of the woods, and Bruce, riding along beside him now, regarding him, enjoying him, would not have exchanged comradeship with the boy's simple, high-tuned relish of life for comradeship with kings.

"Miss Madeira is going to Europe, I hear, Piney," adventured Steering.

"Yass." Piney said nothing more for some time. He looked very thoughtful. "Y'see," he went on after a bit, "I'm a-thinkin' abaout ridin' off--some'ere--over the Ridge,--bein' gone fer a long time."

"Oh, Lord!" groaned Steering. He very well knew what was taking Piney away. It was hard on him that the boy's plan for absence should pile up on Sally Madeira's plan, but he could understand that it would be harder on the boy to stay in the Tigmores with the inspiration of the Tigmores hushed and gone.

"Not thinking of going to Italy yet, Piney?" It had come to be an accepted joke with them, that penchant of Piney's for Italy. The boy was willing to laugh about it, but his eyes always sobered dreamily in the end, and invariably he wound up with, "but I'm a-goin', all righty, an' don't you fergit it." He did now. "But y'see, whilst I'm a-waitin' I git kinda tired the hills, Mist' Steerin'," he complained, trying to explain how it was with him without telling anything. "Lots er times I go off an' don't come back fer a long time." Not till Miss Madeira comes home, Bruce added out of his own intuition. "Git sorta tired the hills," repeated Piney stubbornly.

"Do they stop talking to you, the hills and the woods and the quiet?"

"Yass, they do, sometimes, when I'm pestered--not as I pester much," he laughed and broke off suddenly in his laughter, with a little sobbing shake in his breath, and passed on ahead of Steering, who looked away from him up the bridle road that cut into the Canaan Tigmores.

"There comes Uncle Bernique!" cried Steering then, glad of a chance to divert Piney. Gazing toward Bernique welcomingly, he was diverted himself. The old man made no answer to the shouts that Piney and Steering sent out to him. He peered straight toward them, through them, his eyes dry and brilliant. He seemed hardly able to sit on his horse, because of a sort of enervating restlessness; he paid no attention whatever to his bridle; both of his hands were in the pockets of the tattered old coat that covered his body.

"Hi there, Pard!" hallooed Piney, with a boy's rich assurance that recognises neither class nor age.

"Found!" the old man tried to speak, but made a dry, clicking sound instead. He took his hands from his pockets and held up in each hand a lump of mineral earth. As he came toward them in that way, both hands upheld, the wild fever light in his eyes, his thin body electrified with a strange new vitality, to Steering, who saw all at once what it meant, his movement was that of the last full strain of the miner's epic. "Found! Found!" he repeated, as though the sound was blessed, and he held up the rocks, as though the sight was heaven. When they reached him, trembling by now themselves, they had to help him from his horse and quiet and rest him by the roadside before he could tell his tale. Waiting nervously, Bruce took the nuggets and regarded them; beautiful specimens, one stratum opaque, and seaming on to that stratum another, reddish and glinting, like the spiked fire of gold; and on that stratum another, grey and silver-faceted.

"Pretty splendid," cried Steering, and sat down suddenly and weakly. It was not to be forgotten that Old Bernique had emerged from the bridle-path in the Canaan Tigmores.

"When did you make the find, Uncle Bernique?" he asked hoarsely.

"Thees minute," control was coming back to the old man, he raised his head from Piney's shoulder and leaned toward Bruce--"only thees minute! And for twenty year I have known that it must be here, the ore, lead and zinc, in the gr-r-eat quantity! For twenty year! And just thees minute have I found it!" At the wailing sound of time lost, life lost, in Bernique's voice, long lines of ghostly, bent-backed miners, with ghostly, unavailing picks and shovels, seemed to defile down the bridle-path from the Canaan Tigmores in historic illustration, conjured up by the hypnosis of the old man's words.

"The troub' has been," went on Bernique feverishly, "that we have not looked for the ore in that place where the ore is----"

"That's always the troub'," muttered Piney. He had got his composure back and he seemed now rather good-naturedly contemptuous. Piney's was not a nature to accommodate itself to the exaltation of an ore find.

"The mother lode runs through the Canaan Tigmores," went on Bernique hurriedly, "of that I am now convince', but it comes to the surface,--it comes to the surface,--ah, God above! I expire with it,--let us go to Choke Gulch, and I will show you where it comes to the surface!"

He was insistent, his breath had come back to him, and they let him have his way, following him up the bridle-path into the long shadow of the Canaan Tigmores. On the top of the first bluff they tied their horses again and took a foot trail where the bluff, having rolled back a mile from the river, tumbled precipitately into a deep yawning gully. From the timbered eminence the prospect below was as dank and gloomy as a paleolithic fern forest. Sodden, mossy, and almost impenetrable, the hill split and dropped into Choke Gulch. From far down within the black and tangled fastnesses came the solemn ripple of slow-running water. A veil of weird loneliness hung over the cavernous place and the air that shivered up to the three was cool and laden with damp, sweet odours. Old Bernique began to descend. As they proceeded, the old man's sense of something stupendous impressed itself more and more upon his companions. Farther on down, the solemn quiet of the Gulch became unbearable, but no one spoke. Little sunlight penetrated the dense curtain of brown and red leaves overhead, and what little flickered through had an electric brightness against the dead brown of the leaf-carpeted ground and the grey and hoary tree-trunks. Every bird that came to the tree-tops sang once, but it was only when he discovered his mistake, lifted his wings and careened away gladly into the upper light.

"Whayee!" Piney found a shivering voice at last, "ef I never git rich till I come down into an ugly hole fer riches I'll be mighty pore all my days." Bruce smiled absently at the boy's susceptibility, but threw a reassuring arm about his shoulder. He smiled again when presently Piney drew away. That was Piney's habit, as affectionate in instinct as a kitten, and as timid of manifestation as a wild doe.

Old Bernique called his little party to a halt at the bottommost dip of the Gulch, where a deep, clear and rock-bound spring wound murmurously over a rocky bed. Two red spots came out in the old man's cheeks, his eyes began fairly to flame again, his breath came in wheezy gasps, and his old face pinched up sharp and sensitive as a pointer's nose. He pointed to the debris of shattered rock about the spring. "The wataire fell over a cap-rock here," he said brusquely, the nervous constriction of his throat making it hard for him to say anything. "The strata underneath were soft and had been worn away by the wataire. I put a duck-nest of dynamite in there this morning,--and--see--there!"

Anybody could see; the zinc and lead ores were disseminated, rich and warm, in the loose rocks of the out-cropping. "It's a vein thirty inches thick and it runs,--it runs str-r-aight through the Canaan Tigmores,--sometimes sinking many feet from the surface,--but always there,--I am vair' sure of that,--str-r-aight through the Canaan Tigmores----" The old man's breath began to jerk with a sick, sobbing sound.

"Well,"--Steering was not so unaccustomed a miner by now but what the sight there in the Gulch had its effect upon him,--"Well," he said gingerly, "if you are right, Uncle Bernique, if the face doesn't cut blind, why, Mr. Crittenton Madeira and old Grierson have a good thing, haven't they?"

"Urg-h-h!" Old Bernique made a gnashing sound and leaned his head listeningly. The thud of the stream-drill reached them faintly from its place afar in the Canaan Tigmores. "They come fas'!" he said mournfully.

"Wisht I wuz aouter this," interrupted Piney, shivering.

"I have been track' thees mother lode,"--began old Bernique again, his feverish gaze again seeking out Bruce,--"I think,"--he stopped and fell to musing,--"What you gawn do, Mistaire Steering," he queried suddenly, with his weary old head twisted to one side, "what you gawn do about thees?"

"Lord, Uncle Bernique, I can't do anything. You might do something for yourself. You might sell your rights of discovery, might not you?"

"Non! Non! There is othaire thing,--there is a most good possibilitee,--thees mother lode, Mistaire Steering, it come out,--I think it come out somewhere, eh?--Mistaire Steering, have you got leetle mawney?"

"That's exactly how much, Uncle Bernique, a little."

"Mistaire Steering, eef you got leetle mawney to buy leetle land, I think I know good land to buy."

"I have told you all along to consider my money your money, Uncle Bernique."

"We must be vair' quiet about all thees, Mistaire Steering,--Piney, you compr-r-ehend that we tr-r-us' you, as I have always tr-r-us' you, absolutement! We must be vair' quiet. Thees leetle piece land run down close to the rivaire, below Poetical, at those Sowfoot Crossing, and eet ees not vair' good land for the farming----"

Thud! Thud! The old man caught his temples with both hands. "I am 'most craze' by that steam-drill," he whispered. "Eet come so close to our secret. Let us get away. That sound cr-r-aze me. Found! Found! Vair' large lode, Mistaire Steering.--Sacre! The sound of that steam-drill is to me the most worse thing. That lode run through and come out by the rivaire, eef I am not mistake', Mistaire Steering. I go to buy that land to-night. You go back with Piney, please sair. Eef you come with me, you excite the question and the price. To me it will be sold without question. I am eccentrique, they say. You return to Canaan and have your mawney ready for me, Mistaire Steering. That bat Grierson, Mistaire Steering! When I think----"

Old Bernique was still throwing out riches of castigation at Grierson, Madeira, himself, fate, still half incoherent, when the three friends at last got back to their horses, and separated. Down at the foot of the bluff again, Steering, a little sore-headed with the ache of anticipation, hope, doubt, sat his horse in Piney's company and watched the old man ride off up the river unattended. Steering felt excited and exalted himself, but the old Frenchman was really, as he said, "craze'." Piney was the only sensible one left. Piney was not at all enthused and stayed very quiet until he parted with Bruce some distance out from Canaan. Bruce went on back to town to wait for Old Bernique at the hotel.

Piney took the path that led up to the bluff behind Madeira Place. As he came through the Madeira grounds Crittenton Madeira came out of the house and stood on the back porch, regarding him quizzically. Piney had a peculiar, poorly hidden dislike of Madeira that, taken with the boy's charm of personality, more or less amused the Canaan capitalist.

"Where have you been, young man?"

"In the woods."

"Look here, learning anything when you are out with that man Steering?"

"Yep."

"What, for instance?"

"Not to talk."