The Blind Man's Eyes Part 3

"I don't exactly understand."

"Why, it must affect every man most as it touches his own interests.

An artist would think of it as a background for contrasts--a thing to sketch or paint; a writer as something to be written down in words."

Eaton understood. She could not more plainly have asked him what he was.

"And an engineer, I suppose," he said, easily, "would think of it only as an element to be included in his formulas--an _x_, or an _a_, or a _b_, to be put in somewhere and square-rooted or squared so that the roof-truss he was figuring should not buckle under its weight."

"Oh--so that is the way you were thinking of it?"

"You mean," Eaton challenged her directly, "am I an engineer?"

"Are you?"

"Oh, no; I was only talking in pure generalities, just as you were."

"Let us go on, then," she said gayly. "I see I can't conceal from you that I am doing you the honor to wonder what you are. A lawyer would think of it in the light of damage it might create and the subsequent possibilities of litigation." She made a little pause. "A business man would take it into account, as he has to take into account all things in nature or human; it would delay transportation, or harm or aid the winter wheat."

"Or stop compet.i.tion somewhere," he observed, more interested.

The flash of satisfaction which came to her face and as quickly was checked and faded showed him she thought she was on the right track.

"Business," she said, still lightly, "will--how is it the newspapers put it?--will marshal its cohorts; it will send out its generals in command of brigades of snowplows, its colonels in command of regiments of snow-shovelers and its spies to discover and to bring back word of the effect upon the crops."

"You talk," he said, "as if business were a war."

"Isn't it?--like war, but war in higher terms."

"In higher terms?" he questioned, attempting to make his tone like hers, but a sudden bitterness now was betrayed by it. "Or in lower?"

"Why, in higher," she declared, "demanding greater courage, greater devotion, greater determination, greater self-sacrifice."

"What makes you say that?"

"Soldiers themselves say it, Mr. Eaton, and all the observers in this horrible war say it when they say that they find almost no cowards and very few weaklings among all the millions of every sort of men at the front. They could not say the same of those identical millions under the normal conditions of everyday business life."

He remained silent, though she waited for him to reply.

"You know that is so, Mr. Eaton," she said. "One has only to look on the streets of any great city to find thousands of men who have not had the courage and determination to carry on their share of the ordinary duties of life. Recruiting officers can pick any man off the streets and make a good soldier of him, but no one could be so sure of finding a satisfactory employee in that way. Doesn't that show that daily life, the everyday business of earning a living and bearing one's share in the workaday world, demands greater qualities than war?"

Her face had flushed eagerly as she spoke; a darker, livid flush answered her words on his.

"But the opportunities for evil are greater, too," he a.s.serted almost fiercely.

"What do you mean?"

"For deceit, for lies, for treachery, Miss Dorne! Violence is the evil of war, and violence is the evil most easily punished, even if it does not bring its own punishment upon itself. But how many of those men you speak of on the streets have been deliberately, mercilessly, even savagely sacrificed to some business expediency, their future destroyed, their hope killed!" Some storm of pa.s.sion, whose meaning she could not divine, was sweeping him.

"You mean," she asked after an instant's silence, "that you, Mr. Eaton, have been sacrificed in such a way?"

"I am still talking in generalities," he denied ineffectively.

He saw that she sensed the untruthfulness of these last words. Her smooth young forehead and her eyes were shadowy with thought. Eaton was uneasily silent. The train roared across some trestle, giving a sharp glimpse of gray, snow-swept water far below. Finally Harriet Dorne seemed to have made her decision.

"I think you should meet my father, Mr. Eaton," she said. "Would you like to?"

He did not reply at once. He knew that his delay was causing her to study him now with greater surprise.

"I would like to meet him, yes," he said, "but,"--he hesitated, tried to avoid answer without offending her, but already he had affronted her,--"but not now, Miss Dorne."

She stared at him, rebuffed and chilled.

"You mean--" The sentence, obviously, was one she felt it better not to finish. As though he recognized that now she must wish the conversation to end, he got up. She rose stiffly.

"I'll see you into your car, if you're returning there," he offered.

Neither spoke, as he went with her into the next car; and at the section where her father sat, Eaton bowed silently, nodded to Avery, who coldly returned his nod, and left her. Eaton went on into his own car and sat down, his thoughts in mad confusion.

How near he had come to talking to this girl about himself, even though, he had felt from the first that that was what she was trying to make him do! Was he losing his common sense? Was the self-command on which he had so counted that he had dared to take this train deserting him? He felt that he must not see Harriet Dorne again alone. At first this was all he felt; but as he sat, pale and quiet, staring vacantly at the snow-flakes which struck and melted on the window beside him, his thoughts grew more clear. In Avery he had recognized, by that instinct which so strangely divines the personalities one meets, an enemy from the start; Dorne's att.i.tude toward him, of course, was not yet defined; as for Harriet Dorne--he could not tell whether she was prepared to be his enemy or friend.

CHAPTER IV

TRUCE

The Eastern Express, mantled in a seething whirl of snow, but still maintaining very nearly its scheduled time and even regaining a few lost minutes from hour to hour as, now well past the middle of the State, it sped on across the flatter country in its approach to the mountains, proceeded monotonously through the afternoon. Eaton watched the chill of the snow battle against the warmth of the double windows on the windward side of the car, until finally it conquered and the windows became--as he knew the rest of the outside of the cars must have been long before--merely a wall of white. This coating, thickening steadily with the increasing severity of the storm as they approached the Rockies, dimmed the afternoon daylight within the car to dusk.

Presently all became black outside the windows, and the pa.s.sengers from the rear cars filed forward to the dining car and then back to their places again. Eaton took care to avoid the Dorne party in the diner.

Soon the porter began making up the berths to be occupied that night; but as yet no one was retiring. The train was to reach Spokane late in the evening; there would be a stop there for half an hour; and after the long day on the train, every one seemed to be waiting up for a walk about the station before going to bed. But as the train slowed, and with a sudden diminishing of the clatter of the fishplates under its wheels and of the puffings of exhausted steam, slipped into the lighted trainsheds at the city, Eaton sat for some minutes in thought. Then he dragged his overcoat down from its hook, b.u.t.toned it tightly about his throat, pulled his traveling cap down on his head and left the car.

All along the train, vestibule doors of the Pullmans had been opened, and the pa.s.sengers were getting out, while a few others, snow-covered and with hand-luggage, came to board the train. Eaton, turning to survey the sleet-shrouded car he had left, found himself face to face with Miss Dorne, standing alone upon the station platform.

Her piquant, beautiful face was half hidden in the collar of the great fur coat she had worn on boarding the train, and her cheeks were ruddy with the bite of the crisp air.

"You see before you a castaway," she volunteered, smiling.

He felt it necessary to take the same tone. "A castaway?" he questioned. "Cast away by whom?"

"By Mr. Avery, if you must know, though your implication that anybody should have cast me away--anybody at all, Mr. Eaton--is unpleasant."

"There was no implication; it was simply inquiry."

"You should have put it, then, in some other form; you should have asked how I came to be in so surprising a position."

"'How,' in this part of the country, Miss Dorne, is not regarded as a question, but merely as a form of salutation," he bantered. "It was formerly employed by the Indian aborigines inhabiting these parts, who exchanged 'How's' when pa.s.sing each other on the road. If I had said 'How,' you might simply have replied 'How,' and I should have been under the necessity of considering the incident closed."

She laughed. "You do not wish it to be closed."