Part 6 (2/2)

As Barclay stood in the door of his car debating whether or not to go in, the light from the chimney of the sawmill on the hill attracted his attention, and because he was in a mood for it, the flying sparks trailing across the night sky reminded him of the fireworks that Fourth of July in 1873, when he and Jane Mason and Bob and Molly spent the day together, picnicking down in the timber and coming home to dance on the platform under the cottonwood-bough pavilion in the evening. It was a riotous day, and Bob and Molly being lovers of long acceptance a.s.sumed a paternal att.i.tude to John and Jane that was charming in the main, but sometimes embarra.s.sing. And of all the chatter he only remembered that Jane said: ”Think how many years these old woods have been here--how many hundred years--maybe when the mound-builders were here! Don't you suppose that they are used to--to young people--oh, maybe Indian lovers, and all that, and don't you suppose the trees see these young people loving and marrying, and growing old and ugly and unhappy, and that they some way feel that they are just a little tired of it all?”

If any one replied to her, he had no recollection of it, for after that he saw the dance and heard the music, and then events seemed to slip along without registering in his memory. There must have been the fifth and the sixth of July in 1873, for certainly there was the seventh, and that was Sunday; he remembered that well enough, for in the morning there was a council in his office to discuss ways and means for the week's work in the county-seat trouble. Tuesday was the day which the new law designated as the one when the levy must be made for the court-house improvements that would hold the county-seat in Sycamore Ridge. At four o'clock, after the Sunday council, John and Bob drove out of Sheriff Jake Dolan's stable with his best two-seated buggy, and told him they would be back from Minneola at midnight or thereabout after taking Jane Mason home, and the two boys drove down Main Street with the girls, waving to every one with their hats, while the girls waved their parasols, and the town smiled; for though all the world loves a lover, in Sycamore Ridge it has been the custom, since the days when Philemon Ward first took Miss Lucy out to drive, for all the town to jeer at lovers as they pa.s.s down street in buggies and carriages! And so thirty years slipped from Barclay as he stood in the doorway of his car looking at the Arizona stars. A flicker of light high up in the sky-line seemed to move. It was the headlight of a train coming over the mountain. A switchman with a lantern was pa.s.sing near the car, and Barclay called to him, ”Is that headlight No. 2?” And when the man affirmed Barclay's theory, he asked, ”How long does it take it to get down here?”

”Oh, she comes a-humming,” replied the man. ”If she doesn't jump the track, she'll be down in eight minutes.”

Inside the car Barclay heard a watch snap, and knew that Lycurgus Mason didn't believe anything of the kind and proposed to get at the facts. So Barclay sat down on the platform; but his mind went back to the old days, and the ride through the woods along the Sycamore that Sunday night in July came to him, with all its fragrance and stillness and sweetness. He recalled that they came into the prairie just as the meadow-lark was crying its last plaintive twilight trill, and the western sky was glowing with a rim of gold upon the tips of the clouds. The beauty of the prairie and the sky and the calm of the evening entered into their hearts, and they were silent. Then they left the prairie and went into the woods again, on the river road. And before they came out of that road into the upland, Fate turned a screw that changed the lives of all of them. For in a turn of the road, in a deep cut made by a ravine, Gabriel Carnine, making the last stand for Minneola, stepped into the path and took the horses by the bridles.

The shock that John felt that night when he realized what had happened came back even across the years. And as the headlight far up in the mountain above the desert slipped into a tunnel, though it flashed out again in a few seconds, while it was gone, all the details of the kidnapping of the young people in the buggy hurried across his mind.

Even the old anxiety that he felt lest Sycamore Ridge would think him a traitor to their cause, when they should find that he was not there to sign the tax levy and save the court-house and the county-seat, came back to him as he gazed at the mountain, waiting for the headlight, and he remembered how he made a paper trail of torn bits from a Congregational hymn-book, left in Bob's pocket from the morning service, dropping the bits under the buggy wheels in the dust so that the men from the Ridge would see the trail and follow the captives. In his memory he saw Jake Dolan, who had followed the trail where it led to Carnine's farm, come stumbling into the farm-house Tuesday where they were hidden, and John, in memory, heard Jake whisper that he had left his dog with the rescuing party to lead the rescuers to him if he was on the right trail and did not return.

And then as Barclay's mind went back to the long Tuesday, when he should have been at the Ridge to sign the tax levy, the headlight flashed out of the tunnel. But these were fading pictures. The one image that was in his mind--clear through all the years--was of a wood and a tree,--a great, spreading, low-boughed elm, near Carnine's house where the young people were held prisoners, and Jane Mason sitting with her back against the tree, and lying on the dry gra.s.s at her feet his own slight figure; sometimes he was looking up at her over his brow, and sometimes his head rested on the roots of the tree beside her, and she looked down at him and they talked, and no one was near. For through youth into middle life, and into the dawn of old age, That Day was marked in his life. The day of the month--he forgot which it was. The day of the week--that also left him, and there came a time when he had to figure back to recall the year; but for all that, there was a radiance in his life, an hour of calm joy that never left him, and he called it only--That Day. That Day is in every heart; in yours, my dear fat Mr. Jones, and in yours, my good dried-up Mrs. Smith; and in yours, Mrs. Goodman, and in yours, Mr. Badman; maybe it is upon the sea, or in the woods, or among the noises of some great city--but it is That Day. And no other day of all the thousands that have come to you is like it.

Why should he remember the ugly farm-yard, the hard faces of the men, the straw-covered frame they called a barn, and the unpainted house?

All these things pa.s.sed by him unrecorded, as did the miserable fare of the table, the hard bed at night, and the worry that must have gnawed at his nerves to know that perhaps the town was thinking him false to it, or that his mother, guessing the truth, was in pain with terror, or to feel that a rescuing party coming at the wrong time would bring on a fight in which the girls would be killed. Only the picture of Jane Mason, fine and lithe and strong, with the pink cheeks of twenty, and the soft curves of childhood still playing about her chin and throat as he saw it from the ground at her feet,--that picture was etched into his heart, and with it the recollection of her eyes when she said, ”John,--you don't think I--I knew of this--beforehand, do you?” Just that sentence--those were the only words left in his memory of a day's happiness. And he never heard a locust whirring in a tree that it did not bring back the memory of the spreading tree and the touch--the soft, quick, shy touch of her fingers in his hair, and the fire that was in her eyes.

It was in the dusk of Tuesday evening that Jake Dolan's dog came into the yard where the captives were, and Jake disowned him, and joined the men who stoned the faithful creature out to the main road. But the prisoners knew that their rescuers would follow the dog, so at supper the three men from the Ridge sat together on a bench at the table while Mrs. Carnine and the girls waited on the men--after the fas.h.i.+on of country places in those days. Dolan managed to say under his breath to Barclay, ”It's all right--but the girls must stay in the house to-night.” And John knew that if he and Bob escaped with horses before ten o'clock, they could reach the Ridge in time to sign the levy before midnight. Darkness fell at eight, and a screech-owl in the wood complained to the night. Dolan rose and stretched and yawned, and then began to talk of going to bed, and Gabriel Carnine, whose turn it was to sleep because he had been up two nights, shuffled off to the straw-covered stable to lie down with the Texan who was his bunk mate, leaving half a dozen men to guard the prisoners. An hour later the screech-owl in the wood murmured again, this time much closer, and Dolan rose and took off his hat and threw it in the straw beside him.

He was looking at the time anxiously toward the wood. But the next moment from behind the barn in the opposite direction something attracted them. It was a glare of light, and the guards noticed it at the same time. A last year's straw stack next to the barn was afire.

Jane Mason was standing in the back door of the house, and in the hurried blur of moving events John divined that she had slipped out and fired the stack. In an instant there was confusion. The men were on their feet. They must fight fire, or the barn would go. Dolan ran with the men to the straw stack. ”We'll help you,” he cried. ”I'll wake Gabe.” There was hurrrying for water pails. The women appeared, crying shrilly, and in the glare that reddened the sky the yard seemed, full of mad men racing heedlessly.

”John,” whispered Jane, coming up to him as he drew water from the well, ”let me do this. There are two horses in the pasture. You and Bob go--fly--fly.” The Texan came running from the barn, which was beginning to blaze. Dolan and Carnine still were in it. Then from the wood back of the camp fifty men appeared, riding at a gallop. Lige Bemis and General Ward rode in front of the troop of hors.e.m.e.n. Carnine was still in the burning barn asleep, and there was no leader to give command to the dazed guards. Ward and Bemis ran up, motioning the men back, and Ward cried, ”Shall we help you save your stock and barn, or must we fight?” It was addressed to the crowd, but before they could answer, Dolan stumbled out of the barn through the smoke and flames crying, ”Boys,--boys,--I can't find him.” He saw the rescuing party and shouted, ”Boys,--Gabe's in there asleep and I can't find him.”

The wind had suddenly veered, and the crackling flames had reached the straw roof of the barn. The fire was gaining headway, and the three buckets that were coming from the well had no effect on it. As the last horse was pulled out of the door, one side of the straw wall of the barn fell away on fire and showed Gabriel Carnine sleeping not ten feet from the flames. Lige Bemis soused his handkerchief in water, tied it over his mouth, and ran in. He grabbed the sleeping man and dragged him through, the flames; but both were afire as they came into the open.

Now in this story Elijah Westlake Bemis is not shown often in a heroic light. Yet he had in his being the making of a hero, for he was brave.

And heroism, after all, is only effective reliance on some virtue in a crisis, in spite of temptations to do the easy excusable thing. And when Lige Bemis sneaks through this story in unlovely guise, remember that he has a virtue that once exalted even him.

”Gabe Carnine,” said Ward, as the barn fell and there was nothing more to fear, ”we didn't fire your haystack; I give you my word on that.

But we are going to take these boys home now. And you better let us alone.”

That John Barclay remembered, and then he remembered being in the front yard of the farm-house a moment--alone with Jane Mason, his bridle rein over his arm. Her hair was down, and she looked wild and beautiful. The straw was still burning back of the house, and the glow was everywhere. He always remembered that she held his hand and would not let him go, and there two memories are different; for she always maintained that he did, right there and then, and he recollected that as he mounted his horse he tried to kiss her and failed. Perhaps both are right--who knows? But both agree that as he sat there an instant on his horse, she threw kisses at him and he threw them back. And when the men rode away, she stood in the road, and he could see her in the light of the waning fire, and thirty years pa.s.sed and still he saw her.

As the headlight of the train lit up the cinder yard, and brought the glint of the rails out of the darkness, John Barclay, a thousand miles away and thirty years after, fancied he could see her there in the railroad yards beside him waving her hands at him, smiling at him with the new-found joy in her face. For there is no difference between fifty-three and twenty-three when men are in love, and if they are in love with the same woman in both years, her face will never change, her smile will always seem the same. And to John Barclay there on the rear platform of the car, with the crash of the great train in his ears, the same face looked out of the night at him that he saw back in his twenties, and he knew that the same prayer to the same G.o.d would go up that night for him that went up from the same lips so long ago.

The man on the car platform rose from his chair, and went into the car.

”Well,” he said to Lycurgus Mason as the old man reached for his watch, ”how about it?”

Lycurgus replied as he put it back in his pocket, ”Just seven minutes and a half. She's covered a lot of track in those seven minutes!”

And John Barclay looked back over the years, and saw a boy riding like the wind through the night, changing horses every half-hour, and trying to tell time from his watch by a rising moon, but the moon was blown with clouds like a woman's hair, and he could not see the hands on the watch face. So as he looked at the old man sitting crooked over in the great leather chair, John Barclay only grunted, ”Yes--she's covered a long stretch of country in those seven minutes.” And he picked the Biography off the table and read to himself: ”I sometimes think that only that part of the soul that loves is saved. The rest is dross and perishes in the fire. Whether the love be the love of woman or the love of kind, or the love of G.o.d that embraces all, it matters not. That sanctifies; that purifies--that marks the way of the only salvation the soul can know, and he who does not love with the fervour of a pa.s.sionate heart some of G.o.d's creatures, cannot love G.o.d, and not loving Him, is lost in spite of all his prayers, in spite of all his aspirations. Therefore, if you would live you must love, for when love dies the soul shrivels. And if G.o.d takes what you love--love on; for only love will make you immortal, only love will cheat death of its victory.”

And looking at Lycurgus Mason fidgeting in his chair, John Barclay wondered when he would die the kind of a death that had come to the little old man before him, and then he felt the car move under him, and knew they were going back to Sycamore Ridge.

”Day after to-morrow,” said Barclay, meditatively, as he heard the first faint screaming of the heavily laden wheels under him, ”day after to-morrow, Daddy Mason, we will be home with Colonel Culpepper and his large white plumes.”

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