Part 41 (1/2)

”Are you sure it was a gun? Which end did you see, the b.u.t.t or the muzzle?”

Mrs. March only gasped. She was too refined a woman to mention either end of a gun by name. ”I saw--the--front end.”

”He didn't aim it at you, or at anything, did he?”

”No--yes--he aimed it--sidewise.”

”Sideways! Now, mother, there I draw the line! No man shall come around here aiming his gun sideways; endangering the throngs of casual bystanders!”

”Ah! John, is this the time to make your captive and beleaguered mother the victim of ribald jests?”

”My dear mother, no! it's a time to go to bed. If that fellow's still nosing 'round here with his gun aimed sideways he's protection enough!

But seriously, mother, whatever you mean by being embargoed and blockaded----”

”I did not say embargoed and blockaded!”

”Why, my dear mother, those were your very words!”

”They were not! They were not my words! And yet, alas! how truly----”

She turned and wept.

”O Lord! mother----”

”My son, you've broken the second commandment!”

”It was already broke! O for heaven's sake, mother, don't cave in in this hysterical way!”

The weeper whisked round with a face of wild beseeching. ”O, my son, call me anything but that! Call me weak and credulous, too easily led and misled! Call me too poetical and confiding! I know I'm more lonely than I dare tell my own son! But I'm not--Oho! I'm not hysterical!” she sobbed.

So it continued for an hour. Then the lamp gave out and they went to bed.

The next morning John drove his mother to Suez for a visit of several days among her relatives, and rode on into Blackland to see if he could find ”a girl” for Widewood. He spent three days and two nights at these tasks, stopping while in Blackland with--whom would you suppose?

Proudfit, for all the world! He took an emphatic liking to the not too brainy colonel, and a new disrelish to his almost too sparkling wife.

As, at sunset of the third day, he again drew near Suez and checked his muddy horse's gallop at Swanee River Bridge, his heart leaped into his throat. He hurriedly raised his hat, but not to the transcendent beauties of the charming scene, unless these were Fannie Halliday and Barbara Garnet.

XLV.

A LITTLE VOYAGE OF DISCOVERIES

For two girls out on a quiet stroll, their arms about each other and their words murmurous, not any border of Suez was quite so alluring as the woods and waters seen from the parapet of this fine old stone bridge.

The main road from Blackland crossed here. As it reached the Suez side it made a strong angle under the town's leafy bluffs and their two or three clambering by-streets, and ran down the rocky margin of the stream to the new railway station and the old steamboat landing half a mile below. The bridge was entirely of rugged gray limestone, and spanned the river's channel and willow-covered sand-bars in seven high, rude arches.

One Christmas dawn during the war a retreating enemy, making ready to blow up the structure, were a moment too slow, and except for the scars of a few timely sh.e.l.ls dropped into their rear guard, it had come through those years unscathed. For, just below it, and preferable to it most of the year, was a broad gravelly ford. Beyond the bridge, on the Blackland side, the road curved out of view between woods on the right and meadows on the left. A short way up the river the waters came dimpling, green and blue in August, but yellow and swirling now, around the long, bare foot of a wooded island, that lay forever asleep in midstream, overrun and built upon by the winged Liliputians of the sh.o.r.es and fields.

The way down to this spot from the Halliday cottage was a gra.s.sy street overarched with low-branching evergreen oaks, and so terraced that the trees at times robbed the view of even a middle distance. It was by this way that Fannie and Barbara had come, with gathered skirts, picking dainty zigzags where, now and then, the way was wet. The spirit of spring was in the lightness of their draperies' texture and dyes--only a woman's eye would have noticed that Barbara was in mourning--and their broken talk was mainly on a plan for the celebration, on the twenty-second, not of any great and exceptionally truthful patriot's birthday--Captains Champion and Shotwell were seeing to that--but of Parson Tombs's and his wife's golden wedding.