The Portal of Dreams Part 25

"Then the only part of my story," I said, a little crest-fallen, "which is new to you is the information that you were a G.o.ddess and I a high priest, out there in the South Seas?"

"Oh, that wasn't new at all," she ruthlessly enlightened, "I knew that, too."

"Is there anything you don't know?" I inquired. "What gift of prophetic vision--"

"There wasn't any vision about it," she interrupted. "I got a letter from Mrs. Keller the day before you reached Kentucky. I guess when you get back to New York you'll find one from the captain. His wife wrote to tell me you were coming. That was why I got a headache and stayed at home that night."

She laid her hand on my forearm. My sleeves were uprolled to the elbows.

"Dearest," she exclaimed in sudden anxiety, "you're cold!" I suppose I was, but I had not known it.

It has been some time now since I have written in the diary which had its birth under such strange circ.u.mstances. The narrative went into a pigeon-hole because I have been too busy living to think of reflecting upon life. It was a device for moments of emptiness and in later times also for moments of extraordinary jubilation, but since the last pages were scribbled there has been enough of celebration in merely living out the days. Yet now I must add a postscript, so that some time He may have the full record before him. He is my little son.

He is teaching me a great many things and finding in me a willing pupil.

When I first walked out into the public ways after his entrance to the stage whereon I hope he will be cast in a worthy part, I walked differently. I walked with the pride of an emperor. Not the pride of arrogance. I needed no car of ivory and bronze with captives marching fettered at its wheel. I needed no slave to whisper in my ear, "Remember, Caesar, thou art but a man." I was filled with a new graciousness and wished to be generously courteous to all men, yet that desire was born of a sense of vast superiority. I had found the meaning of life; the secret of which the gulls shrieked in mating-time around the rocks of the island--though then my ears were deaf to its significance.

She has minted from the precious metal of her soul a life which, with the other lives of his day, will form the mosaic of his times. I have the prospect before me of new miracles as that new life unfolds. I feel the exaltation of being undeservedly linked with something vastly greater than myself. I made an awkward effort once to put some part of this idea into words, but Frances only laughed. To her it is all quite natural. Her only comment was that he is as much mine as hers, which was a flattery that even my egotism could scarcely a.s.similate.

We have not named him yet, but an idea struck me a day or two ago while I was sitting at my down-town desk, and I straightway called her up.

"I have just thought of a name," I said. "I want to call him Francis Ra-Tuiki. Of course," I hastened to add, realizing that the silence at the other end of the wire threatened protest, "of course we can dignify it with highly unphonetic spelling, if you like."

"I don't know," she judiciously reflected. Then with a sudden afterthought she added, "That might possibly do for a middle name. I have already decided upon the first."

I wonder what name she has in mind--and she had just finished telling me that I had a full half-interest in that kid!

A railroad now runs into Adamson County and the new order is replacing the old. My wife and I and our brother went down on the first train run over the new line. The people had gathered to see the spectacle, and incredible as it may seem, there were among them some who looked for the first time on a locomotive. Old Mrs. Marcus, a little more withered and monkey-like, was there, and as she contemplated the marvel she could only murmur in wonderment, "Well, Provi-_dence_!"

Calloway Marcus no longer rides in a hollow square, but goes openly to court to defend the railway's damage suits. Yet now that the law is becoming adequate, he will never have the opportunity to turn it, as his weapon of reprisal, against Jim Garvin. Retribution came to the head of the murder syndicate with grimmer and more appropriate drama than Marcus had planned. The judge fell behind his own counter, riddled with bullets bought from his own shelf, and fired by the hand of his own chief henchman and jackal.

Though one of the last of the terrorized juries sat in the box, to the end that the slayer "came cl'ar," it is now Curt Dawson who goes sunken-eyed and body-guarded, searching the shadows. Shots from the laurel are few--but occasional even now--and Garvin's boy is nearing manhood. At all events, Garvin's executioner seems convinced that reprisal will come to him. Perhaps it is a premonition.