A Breath of Prairie and other stories Part 32

"This is the story: did the boy do right?" A life's work--greater than a life itself, hung on the answer to that question.

The girl understood it all. She had always known that she liked him; but now--now--As he had told his story, she had felt, first, pity, and then something else; something incomparably sweeter; something that made her heart beat wildly, that seemed almost to choke her with its ecstasy.

He loved her--had loved her all these years! He belonged to her--and his future lay in her hands.

His future! The thought fell upon her new-found happiness with the suddenness of a blow. She could keep him, but had she the right to do so? She saw in him something that he did not suspect--and that something was genius. She knew he had the ability to make for himself a name that would stand among the great names of the earth.

Then, did his life really belong to her? Did it not rather belong to himself and to the world?

She experienced a struggle, fierce as he himself had fought. And the boy sat silent, tense, waiting for her answer.

Yes, she must give him up; she would be brave. She started to speak, but the words would not come. Suddenly she buried her face in her hands, while the glistening brown head trembled with her sobs.

It was the last drop to the cup overflowing. A second, and then, his arms were around her. The touch was electrifying--it was oblivion--it was heaven--it was--but only a young lover knows what.

"You have answered," said the boy. "G.o.d forgive me--but I can't go away now."

Thus Fate sported with two lives.

THE MADNESS OF WHISTLING WINGS

CHAPTER I--SANDFORD THE EXEMPLARY

Ordinarily Sandford is sane--undeniably so. Barring the seventh, upon any other day of the week, fifty-one weeks in the year, from nine o'clock in the morning until six at night--omitting again a scant half-hour at noon for lunch--he may be found in his tight little box of an office on the fifth floor of the Exchange Building, at the corner of Main Avenue and Thirteenth Street, where the elevated makes its loop.

No dog chained beside his kennel is more invariably present, no caged songster more incontestably anch.o.r.ed. If you need his services, you have but to seek his address between the hours mentioned. You may do so with the same a.s.surance of finding him on duty that you would feel, if you left a jug of water out of doors over night in a blizzard, that the jug, as a jug, would be no longer of value in the morning. He was, and is, routine impersonate, exponent of sound business personified; a living sermon against sloth and improvidence, and easy derelictions of the flesh.

That is to say, he is such fifty-one weeks out of the fifty-two. All through the frigid winter season, despite the lure of California limiteds or Havana liners, he holds hard in that den of his, with its floor and walls of sanitary tiling and its ceiling of white enamel, and hews--or grinds rather, for Sandford is a dental surgeon--close to the line.

All through the heat of summer, doggedly superior to the call of Colorado or the Adirondacks or the Thousand Islands, he comes and departs by the tick of the clock. Base-ball fans find him adamant; turf devotees, marble; golf enthusiasts, cold as the tiles beneath his feet.

Even in early June, when Dalton, whose suburban home is next door, returns, tanned and clear-eyed from a week-end at _the_ lake--there is but one lake to Dalton--and calls him mysteriously back to the rear of the house, where, with a flourish, the cover is removed from a box the expressman has just delivered, to disclose a shining five-pound ba.s.s reposing upon its bed of packed ice--even then, hands in pockets, Sandford merely surveys and expresses polite congratulation. Certainly it is a fine fish, a n.o.ble fish, even; but for the sake of one like it--or, yes, granted a dozen such--to leave the office, the sanitary-tiled office, deserted for four whole days (especially when Dr. Corliss on the floor below is watching like a hawk)--such a crazy proceeding is not to be thought of.

Certainly he will not go along the next week end--or the next, either.

The suggestion simply is unthinkable. Such digressions may be all right for the leisure cla.s.s or for invalids; but for adults, live ones, strong and playing the game? A shrug and a tolerant smile end the discussion, as, hands still in his pockets, an after-dinner cigar firm between his teeth, Sandford saunters back across the dozen feet of sod separating his own domicile from that of his fallen and misguided neighbor.

"Dalton's got the fever again, bad," he comments to the little woman upon his own domain, whom he calls "Polly," or "Mrs. Sandford," as occasion dictates. She has been watching the preceding incident with inscrutable eyes.

"Yes?" Polly acknowledges, with the air of harkening to a familiar harangue while casting ahead, in antic.i.p.ation of what was to come next.

"Curious about Dalton; peculiar twist to his mental machinery somewhere." Sandford blows a cloud of smoke and eyes it meditatively.

"Leaving business that way, chopping it all to pieces in fact; and just for a fish! Curious!"

"Harry's got something back there that'll probably interest you," he calls out to me as I chug by in my last year's motor; "better stop and see."

"Yes," I acknowledge simply; and though Polly's eyes and mine meet we never smile, or twitch an eyelid, or turn a hair; for Sandford is observing--and this is only June.

So much for Dr. Jekyll Sandford, the Sandford of fifty-one weeks in the year.

Then, as inevitably as time rolls by, comes that final week; period of mania, of abandon; and in the mere sorcerous pa.s.sage of a pair of whirring wings, Dr. Jekyll, the exemplary, is no more. In his place, wearing his shoes, audaciously signing his name even to checks, is that other being, Hyde: one absolutely the reverse of the reputable Jekyll; repudiating with scorn that gentleman's engagements; with brazen effrontery denying him utterly, and all the sane conventionality for which the name has become a synonyme.

Worst of all, rank blasphemy, he not only refuses to set foot in that modern sanitary office of enamel and tiling, at the corner of Thirteenth and Main, below which, by day and by night, the "L" trains go thundering, but deliberately holds it up to ridicule and derision and insult.

CHAPTER II--THE PRESAGE OF THE WINGS

And I, the observer--worse, the accessory--know, in advance, when the metamorphosis will transpire.

When, on my desk-pad calendar the month recorded is October, and the day begins with a twenty, there comes the first premonition of winter; not the reality, but a premonition; when, at noon the sun is burning hot, and, in the morning, frost glistens on the pavements; when the leaves are falling steadily in the parks, and not a bird save the ubiquitous sparrow is seen, I begin to suspect.

But when at last, of an afternoon, the wind switches with a great flurry from south to dead north, and on the flag-pole atop of the government building there goes up this signal: [Transcriber's Note: signal flag image here]; and when later, just before retiring, I surrept.i.tiously slip out of doors, and, listening breathlessly, hear after a moment despite the clatter of the wind, high up in the darkness overhead that m.u.f.fled _honk!_ _honk!_ _honk!_ of the Canada-goose winging on its southern journey in advance of the coming storm--then I _know_.

So well do I know, that I do not retire--not just yet. Instead, on a pretext, any pretext, I knock out the ashes from my old pipe, fill it afresh, and wait. I wait patiently, because, inevitable as Fate, inevitable as that call from out the dark void of the sky, I know there will come a trill of the telephone on the desk at my elbow; my own Polly--whose name happens to be Mary--is watching as I take down the receiver to reply.

CHAPTER III--THE OTHER MAN

It is useless to dissimulate longer, then. I am discovered, and I know I am discovered. "h.e.l.lo, Sandford," I greet without preface.

"Sandford!" (I am repeating in whispers what he says for my Polly's benefit.) "Sandford! How the deuce did you know?"

"Know?" With the Hyde-like change comes another, and I feel positively facetious. "Why I know your ring of course, the same as I know your handwriting on a telegram. What is it? I'm busy."

"I'm busy, too. Don't swell up." (Imagine "swell up" from Sandford, the repressed and decorous!) "I just wanted to tell you that the honkers are coming."

"No! You're imagining, or you dreamed it!... Anyway, what of it? I tell you I'm busy."

"Cut it out!" I'm almost scared myself, the voice is positively ferocious. "I heard them not five minutes ago, and besides, the storm signal is up. I'm getting my traps together now. Our train goes at three-ten in the morning, you know."

"Our-train-goes-at-three-ten--in-the-morning!"

"I said so."

"_Our_ train?"

"Our train: the one which is to take us out to Rush Lake. Am I clear?

I'll wire Johnson to meet us with the buckboard."

"Clear, yes; but go in the morning--Why, man, you're crazy! I have engagements for all day to-morrow."

"So have I."