The Wishing Moon Part 35

"No," Neil said. "Not with the big race called off."

"Called off? How's that?"

"Because you weren't there, Luther."

Mr. Ward gave a gratified laugh at this graceful compliment, and descended to facts.

"I'm too old for horse racing. It's my boy's turn. He went over with Willard Nash's crowd to-day. Why didn't you?" Mr. Ward demanded severely.

"Oh, Willard asked me all right. He's quite strong for me now." Mr. Ward had doubted this, being on the watch for slights to Neil and resenting them, though he never made an effort to prevent them. This was the usual att.i.tude of Neil's more influential friends.

"Willard's a shrimp," said Mr. Ward gruffly. "And I like you," he added in a burst of frankness. "I always did like you, Neil. You've pulled yourself up by your boot-straps, and I hope you hang on to them tight.

There's n.o.body better pleased than I am. Oh, I got a rig and sent all the help from the store over to the fair to-day," he added, turning quickly to impersonal subjects.

"You always do treat them right."

"Well, this wasn't my idea. I got it from the Colonel." A look of harmless but plainly evident pride came into Mr. Ward's open and ruddy countenance as he mentioned the great man's name. It was only the week before that he had received his first dinner invitation from the Everards. It came at the eleventh hour and did not include his wife, but he was dazzled by it still. "You know what he's doing? Closing his house, practically, for all three days of the fair, and sending all the help on the place over there--two touring cars full. It's a fine thing for them. They're high-cla.s.s help and don't have it any too interesting down here. Anybody that says he's not democratic don't know the Colonel.

This town don't half know him yet."

"You're right," Neil put in softly.

"Democratic," declaimed Mr. Ward, "and public spirited. Look at the fountain he's going to put up in the square. Look at the old Grant house going to be fitted up for a library. Look at him running for mayor, when he's been turning down chances at bigger offices for years--willing to stay here and serve for the good of the town. There's talk against him more than ever this year. I know that. It amounts to an indignation meeting when the boys get together at Halloran's. Well, failures hate a successful man, and their talk don't count. It will die down. But I hate to hear of it. For the Colonel's put this town on the map. He's not perfect, but who is? And suppose he does have a good time his own way?

We've got a right to--all of us. It's a free country."

Mr. Ward delivered this last sentiment with touching faith in its force and freshness, and waved a plump hand of invitation toward the little private office back of the main section of his store, where he had developed his unfailing eloquence of speech upon subjects of public interest, and liked best to practise it. But Neil, himself listened to with growing deference by the groups that forgathered there, was not to be lured to that sanctum to-day. Speaking hastily and vaguely of work to be done, he escaped from his good friend and across the street to Judge Saxon's office.

He climbed the stairs heavily, and did not linger before the door to picture the sign changed to "Saxon, Burr, and Donovan," as he had done more times than he cared to admit. The office was not a thing to be proud of as a step up in life for him to-day; it was a place to be alone in, as men feel alone and safe in the place that is their own because they have worked there.

Showing this in every move, Neil locked the door, threw off his cap, and dropped into the broken-springed chair at the desk that was nominally Theodore Burr's, but really his. He groped mechanically for the handle of the drawer where he usually rested his feet, found it hard to open, gave up the attempt and, leaning back without its support, stared at Mr.

Burr's ornate, bra.s.s-mounted blotter with unseeing eyes.

Sitting there, he was no longer the boy who had the privilege of intimate talk with prominent citizens like Mr. Ward and valued it; or the boy who had laughed at his mother's anxiety so bravely. He was not even the boy that he used to be, sullen, but rebellious, too. To-day for the first time he was something worse, a defeated boy. The long minutes dragged like hours, and he sat through them as he would have sat through hours, silent and motionless, losing run of time and acknowledging defeat.

For there was something that this boy wanted, and had always wanted, as he could never want other things, even success or love, as a boy or a man can want one thing only in one lifetime. It was a remote and preposterous dream that he had, a dream that n.o.body else in Green River was foolhardy enough to cherish long, but this boy belonged to the race of poets and dreamers, the race that must sometimes dream true, because it always dreams. His dream had taken different forms: sometimes he saw himself doing desperate things, setting fire to a house that he knew and hated, striking a blow in the dark for which n.o.body thanked him, but the issue was always the same, and the dream never left him. He was to find Green River a new master. He was to save the town. That was his dream.

It had never left him till now.

He was only a lean, tense boy, crouched over a battered desk and staring out of the window at a country street with absent, beautiful eyes, but he was living through a tragic hour; the terrible hour that poets and dreamers know when they lose hold upon their dreams. Measured by minutes, this hour was not long. Neil pa.s.sed a hand across his forehead and sat up, reaching for his cap in a dazed way, for he was not to be permitted to hide longer from his trouble here. The plump and personable figure of Mr. Theodore Burr was crossing the square and disappearing into the door below. His unhurried step climbed the stairs. Neil opened the door to him.

"h.e.l.lo, stranger. Why aren't you at Madison?" Neil said.

"I didn't go," said Mr. Burr lucidly. "Where are you going? I don't want to drive you away from here."

"Oh, just out. I was going anyway."

"You don't invite me. I don't blame you. I'm poor company, and I've got business to attend to here."

"No!"

"Why shouldn't I have business here?" snapped Mr. Burr.

"You should, you should, Theodore. Say"--the question had been troubling Neil subconsciously all the time he sat at the desk--"what's wrong with that lower drawer? I can't open it."

"It's locked."

"What for?"

"That," said Mr. Burr with dignity, "is my private drawer--for private papers."

"Papers!" Mr. Burr's private papers were known to consist chiefly of a file of receipted bills and a larger file of unreceipted bills, both kept with his usual fastidious neatness. "What papers?"

"That's my business. I've got some rights here, if I am a figurehead.

I've got some privileges."

"Sure. Don't you feel right to-day, Theodore?"

"That," said Mr. Burr, "is my business, too."

Neil stared at his friend. Mr. Burr was faultlessly groomed, as always, his tie was of the vivid and unique blue that he affected so often, and a very recent close shave had acted upon him as usual, giving him a pink and new-born appearance, but his eyes looked old and tired, as if he had not slept for weeks and had no immediate prospect of sleeping, and there were lines of strain about his weak mouth. He was not himself. Even a boy preoccupied with his own troubles could not ignore it.

"Don't you feel right?" Neil said. "Don't you want me to do something, Theodore?"

"Yes. Get out of here. Leave me alone," Mr. Burr snapped angrily.

"Sure," said Neil soothingly.

Suddenly Mr. Burr gripped Neil's reluctant, shy, boy's hand, kept it in his for a minute in silence, and then abruptly let it go, pushing Neil toward the door.

"Don't begrudge me one locked drawer when you'll own the whole place some day," he said, with all the dignity that his fretful burst of irritation had lacked. "I'd like to see that day. You're a good boy, Donovan."

"You're not right. You've got a grouch. Come with me and walk it off,"

Neil said uneasily, but he did not press the invitation, and his friend had little more to say. His silence was perhaps the most unusual thing about his behaviour, which was all out of key to-day. Neil remembered afterward that just as he closed the door upon Mr. Burr and his vagaries, shutting them at the same time out of his mind, Mr. Burr, sitting rather heavily down in the broken-springed desk chair, was bending and stretching out a faultlessly manicured, slightly unsteady hand toward the locked drawer of the desk.

Neil stepped out into the street with a cautious eye upon the Emporium across the way, but no portly form was in sight there now, and no hearty voice hailed him. He crossed the square and turned north, walking quickly, soon leaving the larger houses behind, and then the smaller houses above the railroad track, always climbing gradually as he walked.

Finally, at the entrance to an overgrown road that led off to his left, and at the highest point of his long and slow ascent, he turned and looked back at the town.

The town that Colonel Everard had put on the map hardly deserved the honour, seen so in a glitter of afternoon light, with the long, sloping hill leading down to it, and the white tower of the church pointing high above it, a cozy huddle of houses at the foot of the hill. It looked una.s.suming and sheltered and safe, only a group of homes to make a simple and sheltered home in. The boy looked long at it, then turned abruptly and plunged into the road before him.

It led straight across a shallow belt of fields and deep into the woods.

Only a cart-track at first, it soon lost itself here in a path, and the path in turn grew fainter and became a brown, alluring ghost of a path.

It was hard to trace, but this was ground that Neil knew, a favourite haunt of his, though few other boys ventured to trespa.s.s here. The woods were part of the Everard estate.

Neil had found his first May flowers here on the first spring that he was privileged to give them to Judith. Last year she had helped him look for them here. His errand here was not so pleasant to-day. The brown path did not really lead to the heart of the woods as it seemed to. It was not so long as it looked. It was a fairly direct short cut to the Everard house.

The boy followed it quickly, with no eyes for the dim lure of the woods to-day.

"You've beat me," he muttered once to himself; "I'll have a look at you."

Soon the woods were not so thick. They fell away around him, carelessly thinned at first, littered with fallen trees and stumps, but nearer the house combed out accurately by the relentless processes of landscape gardening, and looking orderly and empty. The little path vanished entirely here. Ahead of Neil, through a thin fringe of trees, was the Colonel's rose garden; beyond it, the broad stretch of lawn and the house, bulky and towered and tall.