The Wishing Moon Part 38

Mr. Brady nodded again.

"Neil," he got out presently, "I can make it up to you. I haven't been square with you, but I can. I will. You don't know----"

"You've done talking enough. Will you go now?"

"Yes."

"You'll quiet down and go to mother's and stay there till I come?"

"Yes."

Neil let him go.

"Maybe I'll finish up your friend for you myself, Charlie, after you leave here," he offered. "I've thought of it often enough. Now I come here and fight for him instead of fighting against him. I fight with you. Poor old Charlie. Murder and sudden death! I tell you, things like that don't happen in Green River."

Neil stopped talking suddenly. The telephone at his elbow had rung again, this time with a sharp, sudden peal, peremptory as an impatient voice speaking. Neil caught it up, jerked off the simpering lady by her audacious hat, and answered.

At once, strangely intimate and near in that room where the three had been shut in for the last half hour alone and away from the rest of the world while it went on as usual or faster, a man's voice spoke to him.

It was almost unrecognizable, so excited and hoa.r.s.e, but it was Luther Ward's.

"h.e.l.lo," Neil said. "h.e.l.lo. Yes, this is Everards'. No, he can't come to the 'phone. He--what? What's that?"

Neil stopped and listened breathlessly. Mr. Brady, slinking head down from the room, turned curiously to stare at him, and Judith, slipping across the room like a little white ghost, drew close to him and felt for his hand. Neil took her hand, this time with no response of heart or nerves. He had put down the telephone, replacing the receiver mechanically, but Luther Ward's voice still echoed in his ears.

It had spoken to an uncanny accompaniment of half-heard voices, rattling unintelligibly in the room where Ward was, the prosaic, tobacco-scented room that Neil knew so well.

"Tell Everard to come," Ward's voice had said. "He's to come down here, to Saxon's office. I'm there now. Theodore Burr has shot himself. Yes, shot himself. He won't live through the night. Who's this talking to me?

Neil Donovan, it's you. What are you doing at Everard's? Never mind.

Come down here yourself. Come straight down. Theodore's conscious, and talking, and he's been asking for you."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Green River was getting ready for the rally in Odd Fellows' Hall. It was six o'clock on the evening of the seventeenth of September, and "Grand rally, Odd Fellows' Hall, September Seventeenth at eight-thirty," had been featured for weeks in the Green River _Record_, on the list that with a somewhat arrogant suggestion of prophetic powers possessed by the _Record_ was headed "Coming Events." It was always a scanty list, especially in the fall, when ten, twenty, thirty companies began to play larger centres, and church lawn parties and circuses could no longer appear on it. Sometimes not more than six events were to come in a gray and workaday world. But six were enough to announce. Even a true prophet is not expected to see all the future, only to see clearly all that he sees, and the _Record_ did that.

This rally was important enough to be listed all by itself, and it did not need the adjective grand. It was The Rally.

It was Green River's own--a local, almost a family, affair. No out-of-town celebrities were to be imported this time, to be listened to with awe and then wined and dined by the Colonel safe from the curious eyes of the town. This time old Joe Grant was to preside, as he had done as a matter of course on all such occasions when he was the acknowledged head of the town in political and financial matters, in the old days of high-sounding oratory and simpler politics that were gone forever, but were not very long ago. Judge Saxon, an old timer, too, and better loved than the Honourable Joe, had declined the honour of presiding, but had the authentic offer of it, his first distinction of the kind for years.

It was a local but very important occasion. It was Colonel Everard's first official appearance as candidate for mayor. It was to be a very modest appearance. No more time was allotted for his speech than for Luther Ward's. He was putting himself on a level with Luther and the Judge and the Honourable Joe and identifying himself at last with local politics. The evening emphasized the great man's condescension in accepting this humble office and honouring Green River. Even with the scandal of Theodore Burr's suicide unexplained still and only two weeks old, interest centred on the rally. It was a triumph for the town.

Green River was almost ready. Dugan's orchestra was engaged for the evening, instead of a rival organization from Wells, which the Colonel often imported upon private and public occasions. Jerry Dugan was getting old, too, like the Judge and the Honourable Joe. He had not lost the peculiar wail and lilt from his fiddling, but he had made few recent additions to his repertoire. Just now the band concert in front of Odd Fellows' Hall was winding up with his old favourite: "A Day on the Battlefield."

It had the old swing still, contagious as ever. Loafers in front of the hall shuffled their feet in time to it. Moon-struck young persons hanging two by two over the railings of the bridge to gaze at the water straightened themselves and listened. An ambitious soloist lounging against the court-house fence across the square began to whistle it with elaborate variations, at the inspiring moment when "morning in the forest" had bird-called and syncopated itself into silence, and actual fighting, and the martial music of the charge began.

High and lilting and shrill, it hung in the still night air, alive for the hour, challenging the echoes of dead tunes that lingered about the square, only to die away and be one with them at last; band music, old-fashioned band music, blatant and empty and splendid, clear through the still night air, attuned to the night and the town.

"Good old tune. Gets into your feet," Judge Saxon said, while his wife adjusted his tie before the black walnut mirror in their bedroom, but his unusual tribute to the tune was perfunctory to-night, and his wife ignored it, wisely taking this moment of helpfulness to plunge him suddenly and briskly into a series of questions which she had been trying in vain for some time to get the correct answers to.

"Hugh," she said, "why wouldn't you take the chair to-night?"

"You were the only thing I ever tried to take away from Joe Grant and got away with it, Millie," the Judge explained gallantly.

"Don't you think this rally is like old times? Don't you want to see the town stand on its own feet again, instead of being run from outside?"

"I do, Millie."

Mrs. Saxon made her next point triumphantly, connecting it with the point before by some obscure logic known only to ladies.

"Hugh, a father could not do more for Lillian Burr than the Colonel has since poor Theodore went. The house full of flowers, calling there himself every day and twice a day, though she won't see him; but Lillian won't see any one. The Colonel's been ailing himself, too, but he wouldn't put off the rally and disappoint the town. And the new library will open this fall, and there's talk that he's giving an organ to the church. Hugh, don't you think Theodore's death may have sobered him?

Don't you think this may be the beginning of better things? Don't you think----"

"I think you're making a b.u.t.terfly bow. I don't like them," said the Judge, with the ingenuous smile that somehow closed a subject. She sighed, but changed her attack.

"Turn round now. I want to brush you. Hugh, what has happened to Neil Donovan?"

"What do you mean, happened to him?" snapped the Judge, and then added soberly, "I don't know, Millie. I wish I did."

"An Irish boy can get just so far and no farther."

"How far, Millie?"

"Don't be flippant, Hugh. There's something strange about Neil lately.

He didn't speak three times at the table last time he came to supper here. He looks at me as if he didn't know who I was when I speak to him on the street sometimes. There's no life in him. He's like Charlie and all the rest of them--giving out just when things are going his way; that's an Irish boy every time."

"When things are going his way? When his best friend has just shot himself?"

"I didn't refer to that, Hugh," said Mrs. Saxon with dignity.

"No?"

"I referred to Neil's family affairs, and the fact that Colonel Everard has taken him up."

"Maggie home and behaving herself and no questions asked, Charlie shipped to Wells, and Neil going shooting twice with the Colonel?"

"Three times, Hugh."

"And that's what you call things going his way."

"Hugh, why should those two spend any time together at all? They hate each other, or I always thought so--that is, if a man like the Colonel could hate a boy like Neil. What does he want of Neil now? What does Neil want of him?"

"They don't tell me, Millie."

"But it's queer. It frightens me, Hugh. It's as queer as----"