"BT 
 
 FREDERICK ORIN 
 
 BARTLETT 
 
THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 THE COLLECTION OF 
 NORTH CAROLINIANA 
 
 ENDOWED BY 
 
 JOHN SPRUNT HILL 
 CLASS OF 1889 
 
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BIG LAUREL 
 
n^ 
 
 BIG LAUREL 
 
 FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT 
 
 Author e/" One Year of Pierrot ,'' ''Joan & Cor 
 *• The TriferSf'' etc. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BV FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS 
 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 
 
TO 
 
 JOHN WALLACE 
 
 A SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN AND AN 
 
 AMERICAN SOLDIER 
 
 UPON WHOSE MANUSCRIPT 
 
 THIS STORY IS BASED 
 
 s 
 
 (0 
 
BIG LAUREL 
 
BIG LAUREL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Where the narrow, rocky road from Big Laurel 
 Cove taps the main highway down the valley, 
 a limpid trout stream refuses to give up its right 
 of way and forces a ford. Here, one afternoon 
 in June, Bud Childers coming down from 
 his shack on Green Mountain stopped to water 
 his horse in the middle of the brook. Lank and 
 lean, he sat easily astride the mare, gazing about 
 indifferently in spite of his twenty- two years. 
 In his inscrutable eyes there lurked something 
 of that unchanging limpid blue which coats these 
 North Carolina mountains. It was not easy to 
 read in them anything except perhaps cruelty; 
 an expression to which the long line of his thin 
 jaw closing on bloodless lips, the high protruding 
 cheek-bones clearly traced by his tautly drawn 
 bronzed skin, doubtless contributed. The hot 
 sun beating down upon his head caused him to 
 raise his black dust-stained hat. A white cres- 
 
4 BIG LAUREL 
 
 cent-shaped scar was then revealed slightly above 
 his left ear clearly visible in his blue-black hair 
 — souvenir of the day that the Enfield boys, 
 stimulated by liquor, attempted, in an argument, 
 to knife him. The Enfields have their souvenir 
 in a marble slab in Mount Bethel churchyard. 
 The memory of this episode was never so com- 
 pletely out of Bud's mind but that the unex- 
 pected crackle of a twig sent his hand flashing 
 back to the gun always within reach. It did at 
 this moment as his quick ear caught the sound 
 of movement in the cover of hemlocks and rhodo- 
 dendrons skirting the road at the bend beyond 
 him. His face remained immobile. His eyes 
 were leveled like a rifle barrel. His bony hand 
 was alert. And all for a slight, flaxen-haired girl 
 carrying under her arm a small sack of flour ! 
 
 She stepped out upon the road, and for a 
 moment the sun claimed her for its own, drench- 
 ing her through and through with its luminous 
 rays like a spot-light from a distant gallery on 
 the figure of a woodland nymph. It touched 
 with gold the girl's white-clad figure, her silken 
 hair, her wonderfully fair skin, and lighted her 
 eager, young face — a primitive face, but with 
 
BIG LAUREL 5 
 
 the beauty of a wild rose half opened. She might 
 have been eighteen or a little less. Much of the 
 child was still left, but the mouth had already 
 begun to harden and the eyes to question. At 
 this moment, however, both eyes and mouth were 
 gently smiling, moved into unconscious harmony 
 with the picture before her — the slope pied with 
 mountain daisies half asleep under the soft radi- 
 ance of the setting sun; the sanded road bur- 
 nished to a golden sheen, and finally the stream 
 in front where the scattered shafts of light spent 
 themselves in flashing from stone to stone. It 
 was a setting worthy of the princes of the fairy 
 books she had lately been reading — reading as 
 children read. 
 
 Bud, still motionless, saw her — but not 
 wholly as a prince might have seen her. His 
 eyes noted scarcely more than her pretty figure 
 suggested by the curve of her neck, the litheness 
 of her movements and the trim ankles. Her ap- 
 peal to him was the primitive appeal of a woman 
 to man. And yet she was not just any woman, 
 even though she was not the first upon whom he 
 had looked greedily. He was conscious of that 
 at once. She was prettier than most for one 
 
6 BIG LAUREL 
 
 thing. And something more besides, although 
 he did not attempt to analyze his emotions. He 
 was more interested in speaking to her. In re- 
 sponse to a tugging at his bridle, the horse moved 
 lingeringly out of the stream into the road. Then 
 the girl, startled, wide-eyed, looked up. For a 
 second she seemed about to turn and run. Then, 
 as though thinking better of that, she faced the 
 man. The latter grinned ; partly to assure her of 
 his good nature and partly because the sight of 
 any one suddenly surprised was amusing. 
 
 "Afeard?"he asked. 
 
 She raised her head still higher. She recog- 
 nized the man now. From all she had heard 
 about him she was entitled to be afraid. But the 
 woods were near and she could run in them like 
 a deer. 
 
 " No," she answered quietly. 
 
 " I 'lowed mebbe you 'd heard tales about me." 
 
 She remained uncompromisingly silent. 
 
 " My name 's Bud Childers," he announced. 
 
 She made no reply, but shifted the sack for- 
 ward on her arm as though about to go on. 
 
 "What's yourn.^ " he demanded. 
 
 " Roxie Kester." 
 
BIG LAUREL 7 
 
 He sidled his horse nearer. 
 
 " Let me have that air sack. I 'm goin' your 
 way, I reckon." 
 
 " It ain't heavy," she replied, shrinking out of 
 reach. 
 
 " Might as well," he insisted with his wrinkled, 
 calloused hands outstretched; "me on a horse 
 and you on your feet." 
 
 " It ain't heavy." 
 
 " Might as well — me a man and you a 
 
 woman." 
 
 " I kin carry it all right." 
 
 He dropped his hands to his side again, still 
 smiling, but with the grin of a collie dog ready 
 to change in a flash to a snarl. 
 
 "It ain't — isn't fur to where I live," she 
 added in a sincere dislike at hurting him — or 
 any man. 
 
 " You been goin' to this air school, aincher? " 
 he asked, quick to detect her avoidance of the 
 " ain't." 
 
 " I been goin','' she nodded. 
 
 "Like it?" 
 
 " More 'n anything I ever done," she answered. 
 
 " How long yer been goin' ? '* 
 
8 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "Six years. Ma was sick last year, but she's 
 better now an' I 'm goin' back next fall." 
 
 " Six year o' schoolin' sounds like enough ter 
 me. I ain't been but two, an' that 's all I need. 
 Got me a house over in Big Laurel Cove, got me 
 a cow, and I 'm makin' money too." 
 
 The sack in her arms was becoming heavy. 
 She was listening because she saw no alternative, 
 but her face remained blank. Bud noted it with 
 a frown. 
 
 " Got me a house," he repeated with slightly 
 more emphasis, " and a cow that give a gallon 
 and a half at a milkin', a good sure-footed hoss 
 and — besides, I 'm makin' money." 
 
 " Looks like you oughta be married with all 
 what you say you got," she answered mockingly. 
 
 " Mebbe I will some o' these days," he an- 
 swered, seeking her eyes. But he found them at 
 that moment turned towards a bird in the hem- 
 locks. 
 
 Bud shifted his position in the saddle slightly 
 and adjusted one side of his lavender suspenders. 
 
 " Ain't no girl in that thar Cove purty like 
 you," he declared. 
 
 " My pa 'lowed I was pretty," she answered 
 without embarrassment. 
 
6C 
 
 BIG LAUREL 9 
 
 Yo' pa dead?" 
 
 Three year come this September." 
 
 "Who makes yo' livin' fer yer if yo' pa's dead?" 
 
 " My mother hires out for washing and I work 
 out. Guess I '11 take the path fer a piece." 
 
 The path mounted several feet to an embank- 
 ment left by the road-builders in grading the 
 course of the road. The roadbed itself, hidden 
 from the sunlight by the dense foliage of the 
 great chestnut-oaks cloaking the mountain-side, 
 was rarely free of mud so that those on foot 
 deserted it here for the path. She started at once 
 and he followed below, losing sight of her at 
 times as she was hidden by the laurel, but falling 
 in with her again where the path rejoined the 
 road. All this while he continued his conversa- 
 tion as he was able. 
 
 " A gal like you can't do no good workin' out," 
 he suggested. 
 
 " Ma thinks I do tol'able well." 
 
 " Workin' out ain't like havin' a home fer yo' 
 
 own." 
 
 " I like workin' down to Mr. Howe's. He 's 
 good to me and so 's Miss Wilmer." 
 
 " It ain't like havin' a home fer yo' own.' 
 
 » 
 
lo BIG LAUREL 
 
 " They have books to read down there." 
 
 " Where do the Howes live, anyhow ? " 
 
 " The bark-covered house with the porch run- 
 nin' round it — this side of Valley Elk," she 
 informed him. 
 
 " I pass thet way sometimes. Mebbe I '11 be 
 seein' you off an' on." 
 
 " Mebbe," she answered with a little pucker 
 of her mouth. 
 
 "Where's yo' house?" 
 
 " Up there." 
 
 She pointed to a primitive, clapboarded struc- 
 ture they were approaching on the mountain- 
 side. 
 
 He turned his eyes back to her. 
 
 " Oughta make a trip over in the Cove and see 
 ►mine," he ventured. 
 
 " Seein' yours would n't do me no good," she 
 returned, a bit more tartly now that she was in 
 sight of home. " Good-evenin'." 
 
 With that she began to mount the path. It 
 followed a circuitous course through the giant 
 rhododendrons growing on the hillside beneath 
 the house. In June when they were in flower she 
 looked down on an undulating sea of pink. 
 
BIG LAUREL ii 
 
 She entered the house and closed the door 
 sharply behind her. 
 
 Bud Childers remained in the road until he 
 heard that decisive slam and then turned and 
 resumed his interrupted journey. It was not 
 often that he went out of his way for valley folk ; 
 the round-faced folk with laughter in their eyes. 
 It was more often they who changed their course 
 for him. When he met them, it was he who kept 
 the middle of the road. The life that made him 
 lean had also given him muscles with the resili- 
 ency of highly tempered steel. The valley boys 
 with whom he attended the Mission school for 
 two terms had discovered this. 
 
 At eleven, having learned to write his name 
 Bud had gone back to the Cove; back to the 
 house his grandfather had built as soon after the 
 Civil War as the Confederate deserter hunters 
 ceased to hunt him through the mountains. And 
 here, joining his father. Bud had his own patch 
 of corn, a newly cleared strip of mountain-side 
 punctuated with half-burnt stumps and decay- 
 ing chestnut-oaks, showing still the cut, a ring 
 chopped around their bases, that had wounded 
 them mortally and left them there to die. At fif- 
 
12 BIG LAUREL 
 
 teen he was logging, following the logs down 
 into the valley to the sawmill and then making 
 his way back to the Cove. A living was all he 
 claimed of life, and this he could make without 
 wandering far afield. 
 
 His father's death left him alone with his 
 grandmother — his mother had given her life to 
 bring him into the world — and this arrange- 
 ment proved satisfactory enough. The old lady 
 was not good for much except to cook, but she did 
 that until two days before her death. When not 
 at the stove she rocked back and forth mechan- 
 ically in the doorway, a birch brush stained with 
 snuff protruding from her withered lips. When 
 she walked, her legs followed her uncertainly, 
 barely moving the folds of the dirty gray calico 
 which clothed her. Then one day she flickered 
 out, leaving Bud alone. 
 
 At first he did not mind being alone, for his 
 farm and his cooking kept him busy enough dur- 
 ing the day. But the evenings were long. Even 
 the old grandmother crouching by the fireplace 
 had made them shorter than they were now. She 
 scolded and fussed a good deal, but she was 
 always some one. 
 
BIG LAUREL 13 
 
 Bud, once or twice, had considered marrying. 
 To get him a wife was the normal and natural 
 thing to do. No house, without one, could be 
 said to be complete. He was quite unemotional 
 over the idea, and in the few tentative proposals 
 he had made among the daughters of his moun- 
 tain neighbors he was met by an equally unemo- 
 tional refusal. Unemotionally they had already 
 made other plans, and though Bud was well 
 enough they saw no reason for shifting their 
 affections. Besides, to do this would in all prob- 
 ability involve considerable shooting on the part 
 of certain young men who would be more or less 
 directly concerned in any such alteration of 
 arrangements. 
 
 Bud accepted these decisions philosophically. 
 There was no harm in asking even if in the end 
 he did not receive. If the evenings seemed a 
 little lonelier than before after these half-hearted 
 ventures, it was not because any of these young 
 ladies had left their mark, but merely because 
 he had now been longer alone. 
 
 Bud moved slowly back over the road he had 
 just followed with Roxie Kester and at the ford 
 where he had met her, stopped where he had 
 
14 BIG LAUREL 
 
 stopped before. The setting had not changed 
 except that the slowly sinking sun was now cast- 
 ing a mellow glow over tree and stream and road 
 instead of the more brilliant sheen of the direct 
 rays. 
 
 There at the bend stood the same thick cluster 
 of rhododendrons through which she had pushed. 
 For a moment he waited as though he expected 
 them to open again and reveal once more that 
 slight figure. He found his blood running faster 
 because of this. Then, half ashamed of his mood, 
 he started on with a muttered curse at his foolish- 
 ness. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 When Captain Edward Allston, A.E.F., re- 
 ceived his discharge from the army, he returned 
 to his home in Baltimore to put up, as graciously 
 as possible, with the fuss about his safe return 
 which he knew he must inevitably face sooner or 
 later. He played his part like a gentleman. For a 
 week he allowed his family to do with him what 
 they wished and accepted with a smile every at- 
 tention they and his many friends, including even 
 the sub-debs, showered upon him. Within decent 
 limits he even permitted them to make a hero of 
 him, although this, by all odds, was the most dis- 
 agreeable demand made upon him. He felt that 
 those who had been deprived of the chance of 
 serving directly were entitled to some compensa- 
 tion, and if they enjoyed this sort of thing, this 
 was the sort of thing he should allow them to 
 enjoy. 
 
 All this while he was looking forward. He 
 was not consciously tired, but he was confused. 
 His mind was in a jumble; filled with detached 
 pictures of training camps, and troop trains, and 
 
1 6 BIG LAUREL 
 
 foul-smelling transports, of strange faces and 
 sights and smells and sensations, with the tyr- 
 anny of military discipline binding together the 
 titanic whole like the steel bands shrunk around 
 artillery shells. If he talked reluctantly to the 
 eager young women who asked so many ques- 
 tions, it was because he was not yet quite clear 
 in his own mind. That was it ; he was not quite 
 clear. And he wished to get clear. 
 
 The place to accomplish this was not within the 
 four walls of a house, pleasant as the house might 
 be. He needed more room, more silence, more 
 time. He needed the open road, the open sky, and 
 above all an open mind if ever he hoped to get 
 back to straight, normal thinking — the kind of 
 thinking which had characterized the Allstons 
 since Phillip Allston built that fine old Georgian 
 mansion on the banks of the James in 1720 and 
 established the family in America. Ned Allston 
 had always resented the circumstances which 
 forced his grandfather to leave Virginia and 
 those spacious grounds for town life in Baltimore. 
 
 Allston remained at home a week. Then he 
 packed his suitcase, tossed it into his low gray 
 roadster, waved au revoir to the somewhat 
 
BIG LAUREL 17 
 
 anxious group who did not quite understand, and 
 started south. He had no fixed plan. He intended 
 to follow the better roads into Virginia and pos- 
 sibly through Virginia into North Carolina, stop- 
 ping where it was pleasant to stop, fishing here 
 and there, sleeping and eating a great deal, trying 
 all the time to get his thoughts to run straight so 
 that the world might again appear orderly to him. 
 The scheme worked out even better than he 
 expected. He found it a little hotter than was 
 comfortable, to be sure, but he remedied that by 
 turning west by north and making for the Blue 
 Ridge country. It was all one to him which way 
 he traveled as long as he retained the privilege 
 of traveling in any direction he wished. That 
 seemed to be the one big clarifying idea he 
 worked out on the first lap of his journey. He 
 was now free to free himself and he must guard 
 that freedom. For two years he had been nothing 
 but a pawn moved about by a hand over which 
 he had no control. He had been ordered to go 
 to this place and, snapping his hand to his fore- 
 head, level with his eyes, he had gone; he had 
 been ordered to go to that place and, saluting 
 again, he had gone. He had been commanded to 
 
1 8 BIG LAUREL 
 
 do this and he had obeyed; he had been com- 
 manded to do that and he had obeyed. And each 
 time he put into the task assigned to him every- 
 thing that was in him. He stinted of himself 
 nothing. Furthermore, he did this gladly. The 
 cause was worthy of his best. 
 
 But this did not mean that he accepted his lot 
 without a struggle. The only discipline the pres- 
 ent generation of Allstons knew was self-imposed. 
 It is doubtful if one of them had ever received a 
 direct order until Private Allston enlisted at 
 Plattsburg. In the following few months the lat- 
 ter received enough to make up for a couple of 
 generations — blunt, bullying orders that roused 
 the fighting blood in him, until his intelligence 
 came to his rescue. That was but the begin- 
 ning. Doubtless this was good for him; certainh' 
 it was necessary. But now — well, it was good to 
 be free. And if he had ceased to plot murder 
 against certain superior officers, he was glad they 
 were no longer about. 
 
 It was good to be free. It was good to be able 
 to take the right-hand road or the left as one 
 chose. Or it was good to take neither and stop 
 when one willed. It was good not to get up in the 
 
BIG LAUREL 19 
 
 morning any sooner than one wished and to go 
 to bed at night when one did wish. It was good 
 to meet people without any uniform to tag them. 
 It was good to hear them all speak English once 
 again — even though they did it brutally. It was 
 good to find some, too, who did it rather nicely. 
 Like the young woman at Valley Elk. 
 
 It was rather an odd and dramatic circum- 
 stance — his meeting with the young woman at 
 Valley Elk. He had no intention of meeting her 
 nor she of meeting him. Until it happened, both 
 would have said that it was about the most re- 
 mote probability of their respective lives. Wilmer 
 Howe had come up here from New Orleans with 
 her father to enjoy a quiet, cool, and serene sum- 
 mer in this bungalow Mr. Howe had built sev- 
 eral years ago for just that purpose. Allston had 
 not come up here for any purpose whatsoever ex- 
 cept to try in passing a bass stream he had heard 
 of in the preceding village — a whim scarcely de- 
 serving to be dignified as a purpose. 
 
 It was mid-afternoon and he had been driving 
 all day. Settled back in his seat, he was not as 
 alert as he should have been so that, when round- 
 ing a turn he saw the frail figure of a girl in the 
 
20 BIG LAUREL 
 
 middle of the road, he had no ahernativd to avoid 
 hitting her but to swerve sharply to the right. The 
 sudden jerk at the wheel snapped the steering- 
 gear and drove him into the bushes against a 
 chestnut-oak. He had not been going fast, but 
 the impact knocked the breath out of him and the 
 broken glass of the windshield cut his face. He 
 pulled himself free, rather a sorry spectacle, but 
 able to stand, and started towards the young 
 woman in the road with the rather hazy intention 
 of stopping her screams. 
 
 " Look here," he protested feebly and brokenly 
 because it was not easy to talk. " Don't make that 
 noise. I 'm the one to holler." 
 
 Roxie covered her eyes with her hands to shut 
 out the sight of his blood-stained face. 
 
 "Oh," she moaned, "yer're killed." 
 
 " I 'm not," he insisted. " But if 3^ou keep 
 making that noise I '11 wish I had been." 
 
 Miss Wilmer came running down the serpen- 
 tine drive preceded by a barking collie dog to add 
 to the confusion. At sight of Allston she too was 
 inclined to cover her eyes — brown eyes, large 
 and limpid, and, at the moment, big-pupiled — 
 but she conquered her timidity. The collie dog 
 bared his teeth. 
 
BIG LAUREL (i.i 
 
 "Tarn," she called to him. "Tarn! Down!" 
 
 Allston straightened to attention and removed 
 Ids cap. His eyes were no longer on Roxie. 
 
 " I 'm sorry I stirred up all this fuss," he apolo- 
 gized. "I — I think something must have hap- 
 pened to the steering-gear." 
 
 She may have been interested in the fate of the 
 steering-gear, but she did not show it. Her con- 
 cern seemed to be wholly about him. 
 
 " You 're hurt ! " she exclaimed. 
 
 Roxie, still moaning, had sidled close to Miss 
 Howe. 
 
 "Oh, it's all my fault, Miss Wilmer," she 
 choked. " An' if you '11 let me, I '11 run for the 
 doctor — fast." 
 
 The prospect of action seemed to inspire Roxie. 
 She stood poised for flight — her frail body 
 quivering. 
 
 "It's good of you both," broke in Allston. 
 " But, honest, I seem whole. If you could direct 
 me to the village — " 
 
 " I hope you don't think me as inhospitable as 
 that," Miss Wilmer said hurriedly. " Our house 
 is just up the hill. Shall I call father to help 
 you 
 
 ?" 
 
22 BIG LAUREL 
 
 He tried his legs again and they seemed to be 
 working. 
 
 " You 're very kind," he answered, meeting her 
 brown eyes. " I can make it easily. My name is 
 Allston." 
 
 She inclined her head ever so slightly in recog- 
 nition of his introduction and bade Roxie hurry 
 on. The latter on the instant flew up the road, 
 running free as a wild thing. 
 
 Allston found himself making his way by the 
 side of Wilmer Howe towards a grassy terrace 
 before a low-roofed bungalow set upon the sum- 
 mit of the incline. Obviously this was a summer 
 home, designed without much originality, but 
 with good taste and ample means; a house, he 
 thought at once, expressing the father rather than 
 the daughter. He would expect something more 
 distinctive of her. Perhaps it was she who was 
 responsible for the grounds — generous and well- 
 cared-for, bounded by a hedge of balsams giving 
 a trace of formality to the enclosure. And yet, 
 when halfway up he paused for breath — his ribs 
 had received a bad bruising — and looked below 
 over the luxuriant meadows in the valley and the 
 symmetrical fields beneath the radiant sun, he 
 thought she must be responsible for all that too. 
 
BIG LAUREL 23 
 
 A lean, erect man with white hair stepped 
 through the door of the house to the porch, 
 looking very much disturbed. At sight of Allston 
 he hurried forward, walking briskly and firmly. 
 
 "What's this Roxie tells me.^* An accident.^" 
 
 His brown eyes swept Alls ton's face and figure 
 and instantly grew sympathetic. 
 
 " I hope it 's not serious ? " 
 
 "Not at all, sir," answered Allston. "My 
 face — " 
 
 "His car swerved and struck a tree," explained 
 the daughter. 
 
 "That's bad. The road there is dangerous. 
 Come right into the house." 
 
 He placed a broad hand beneath Allston's 
 arm. 
 
 " The first thing to do is to clean those cuts," 
 he advised. 
 
 " I imagine it 's the only thing to do," laughed 
 Allston. "The car came off worse than I." 
 
 "Fortunately. Cars are more easily replaced 
 than heads," answered Howe. " Wilmer will tele- 
 phone for the doctor if you think it necessary." 
 
 " I 'm sure it is n't. All I need is a chance to 
 wash up." 
 
24 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Howe escorted him to the guest-room, pretty 
 in yellow and old rose chintz, and pointed out the 
 very modern and immaculate bath opening from 
 it. 
 
 " You need my help ? " he asked. 
 " Thanks, but I can manage nicely." 
 "Then I will wait for you on the porch." 
 The cuts, while not ornamental, were not se- 
 rious. Cold water both cleaned them and stopped 
 their bleeding. His ribs were still sore, but that 
 injury did not show. He rejoined his host within 
 twenty minutes very much improved in appear- 
 ance if by no means restored to his original con- 
 dition of a half-hour before. 
 
 Allston's intention was to express his thanks 
 and make his way afoot to the village at once. 
 He had already intruded long enough on the 
 generous hospitality of these good people. But 
 his polite plan was more easily conceived than 
 executed. It seems that neither Mr. Howe nor 
 his daughter was yet ready to believe — having 
 brought up his bag in the interim and inspected 
 the machine — that Allston was in any condition 
 to proceed. When he came down he found 
 they had arranged for him a large, comfortable 
 
BIG LAUREL 25 
 
 wicker chair before a dainty tea-table laden with 
 cool drinks and cakes and preserves. 
 
 "My dear sir!" exclaimed Mr. Howe solicit- 
 ously. " I could not think of allowing you to go, 
 and besides — where would you go.^ " 
 
 " I was hoping to find, if not a hotel, then some 
 kind of boarding-place." 
 
 "There is no hotel, and the boarding-houses 
 are already full." 
 
 "That is a complication," frowned Allston. 
 Then, brightening, " But there is still the car. I 
 can sleep on the seat if you don't mind my using 
 a portion of your blue sky for a roof." 
 
 "With a spare room in my house, sir?" 
 
 Allston laughed. He laughed pleasantly, re- 
 vealing fine white teeth. It was a better voucher 
 than most formal introductions. 
 
 " I am indebted to you, sir," he answered, un- 
 consciously imitating the touch of formality 
 which characterized the speech of Mr. Howe. " I 
 am indebted to you — and the chestnut-oak." 
 
 But his indebtedness did not end there. Prop- 
 erly he should have included Roxie who entered 
 at that moment bearing a tray. It was she who 
 had first swerved him from the main road. He 
 
26 BIG LAUREL 
 
 found her blue eyes upon him — eyes filled with 
 shy anxiety. He smiled into them good-naturedly. 
 
 "All through crying?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes, sir," she answered, confused. 
 
 " That 's good because it was n't your fault at 
 all." 
 
 "It was," she insisted with a directness and 
 positiveness that startled him. 
 
 " Roxie," warned Wilmer. " It is n't polite to 
 contradict." 
 
 "It ain't perlite to lie, is it?" retorted Roxie 
 with no trace of insolence, but with frank 
 conviction. 
 
 "You may go now." 
 
 As the girl went out, Wilmer evidently felt 
 called upon to explain her. 
 
 " She 's a treasure and I don't know what we 'd 
 do without her. We can't bring colored servants 
 with us from home. There is n't society enough 
 here for them. But I 'm afraid the Mission school 
 has n't been able to change her temperament, al- 
 though it has improved her English. Somehow 
 you don't mind her frankness much when you 
 get used to her." 
 
 "I don't mind even now," returned Allston. 
 " She 's honest, at any rate." 
 
BIG LAUREL 27 
 
 "She's honest and she's good," nodded Wil- 
 mer, serving him with cold tea. " And a firm 
 believer in fairies." 
 
 " Is that to her advantage or not ? " questioned 
 Allston. 
 
 She hesitated. Allston was on the whole sur- 
 prised at that. He himself might have hesitated 
 if asked to consider the question seriously, but 
 he did not expect it of her. And he was more or 
 less puzzled and interested by her answer. 
 
 " If she 'd only believe in bad fairies too," she 
 said. 
 
 "Nonsense," broke in the father. "That's a 
 paradox. All fairies are good. As soon as they 
 aren't, they are something else." 
 
 "Father is as gallant to the fairies as to the 
 ladies," she smiled with evident fond apprecia- 
 tion of that quality. 
 
 "Wilmer is worried about a young mountain- 
 eer who has lately been paying his attentions to 
 Roxie," broke in Howe, throwing some light on 
 the argument. "He hasn't a very good reputa- 
 tion, it's true. But I tell her that a man can't 
 throw a woman over his saddle like in the old 
 days and make off with the lady against her will." 
 
28 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " Which might be true," put in Wilmer. " Ex- 
 cept that some of these mountain folk are still 
 living in the old days. Bud Chiiders is hardly 
 more than a cave man." 
 
 "And he's your bad fairy?" asked Allston. 
 
 " Or the something else," she smiled. " Fairy, 
 good or bad, is rather a light name for a six-foot 
 
 man." 
 
 Perhaps she felt the conversation had swung 
 into too personal a channel, for deftly she turned 
 it aside to the more general discussion of the 
 effect of Mission schools upon these people. She 
 had rather positive views. 
 
 Allston listened politely, but not so much to 
 what she said as to the melody of her voice and 
 to the quick play of expression on her fine face, 
 particularly about the mouth. She had a mouth 
 such as is generations in the making — two sen- 
 sitive lips, full without being too full, thin with- 
 out being too thin, balanced nicely, almost 
 exquisitely, above a firm, if rounded chin. Her 
 straight nose matched the chin rather than the 
 mouth. It came from her father rather than her 
 mother, he thought. The eyes were a girl's eyes 
 grown, by much reading, a bit mature before her 
 
BIG LAUREL 29 
 
 time. She controlled them a little too well for 
 youth, perhaps, and yet at moments Allston 
 caught in them flashes as wayward as sunbeams. 
 
 Then, somehow, Allston found the conversa- 
 tion back in the personal channel — this time 
 sweeping his own life into the current. He felt a 
 certain obligation here. So as briefly as pos- 
 sible he filled in enough of his past to give them 
 some slight understanding of who he was and 
 why he was here. He found them both eager lis- 
 teners and when he had done, the dusk was well 
 upon them. Howe rose and extended his hand as 
 though to welcome a new guest. 
 
 "I feel honored more than ever," he said a 
 little pompously but sincerely, "to entertain a 
 man who fought for democracy." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Bud Childers sat before the open fire In his log 
 shack on Big Laurel Cove. He sat alone. It is 
 not good for a man to be alone unless he is either 
 poet or philosopher. Bud was neither. And yet, on 
 the board table which, with a few rough chairs, 
 was the only article in the way of furniture , the 
 room contained, stood a bottle and in the bottle 
 a withered branch from a laurel bush, plucked 
 just beyond the ford where he had first seen 
 Roxic Kester. It would have been foolhardy of 
 any one to accuse Bud of expressing here a poetic 
 idea. The chances are that he would have ac- 
 cepted this as a challenge. He knew nothing 
 about poets or poetry or poetic ideas, he was not 
 that kind. Maybe a squirrel brought in the 
 branch, and if any one cared to dispute that 
 statement Bud was ready. 
 
 But no one did dispute it. He was alone. Being 
 alone will play strange tricks with a man — with 
 any man. It will bring to light, like digging in 
 the ground, many curious things, both good and 
 bad. 
 
BIG LAUREL 31 
 
 Two weeks had passed since Bud first met 
 Roxie — a disappointing two weeks. Four times 
 within that period he had waylaid her on the road 
 before the Howe house and walked by her side 
 as far as her home. He had spoken her fair and 
 spoken her foul — losing his temper once and 
 making a threat. Maddened by her stubbornness 
 he had rested a heavy hand upon her arm. 
 
 "Y'are comin','' he had said. "Y'are comin' 
 if I hev to carry yuh." 
 
 And she, pulling herself free, had clenched her 
 two little fists. 
 
 " If we had us men-folks home, you 'd be slow 
 sayin' that, Bud Childers." 
 
 Which was not altogether true. Men-folk or 
 no men-folk, he meant to have her. He meant to 
 have her because he wanted her more than he 
 had ever wanted anything in his life. There was 
 something peculiar about this. He had desired 
 things before, but never like this. If what he 
 wished came easily, he took it; if not, he forgot. 
 As long as he had a roof over his head, a plot of 
 land of his own, enough to eat, and a little money, 
 he could always worry along. Mostly he lived 
 each day as it came, content enough in his moun- 
 
32 BIG LAUREL 
 
 tain kingdom. Even when he first began to feel 
 the loneliness of the nights and to look about for 
 a wife, it was with indifferent interest in the 
 woman herself. His interest in Roxie was, per- 
 haps, even at the start, quicker than that he had 
 ever felt for others of her sex, but he had not an- 
 ticipated any such desire as that which had now 
 taken possession of him. 
 
 He had wanted her first because she was a 
 woman and he a man. Then he had wanted her 
 because she was good to look upon; dainty and 
 clean-limbed and shy as a fawn. Finally he 
 wanted her because she Vv'as Roxie Kester; be- 
 cause she was herself. Just what this meant he 
 did not know, except that now, to-day, he felt 
 she was the one woman who could ever break 
 his loneliness ; this new loneliness which she her- 
 self had created. 
 
 It is one thing to be lonely; another to be 
 alone. W^ithout her, he was alone. This did not 
 mean merely that he was by himself. That is a 
 negative condition. It meant an acute conscious- 
 ness of the absence of another. That is positive. 
 It left him not content to wait, and impelled him 
 to action. 
 
BIG LAUREL ^3 
 
 Bud was like a child in his impatience over 
 delay. Patience is not an inborn virtue ; it is the 
 product of high development. It involves self- 
 control which is the ultimate goal of civilization. 
 Like a child, too, Bud felt a desire to be equiva- 
 lent to a proprietary right. Wanting Roxie, he 
 was entitled to her. 
 
 And so, sitting alone before his fire rolling and 
 smoking innumerable cigarettes. Bud planned 
 how he might get her. To him it seemed only a 
 matter of gaining possession. The future would 
 look after the rest. He was sure of himself there. 
 She was stubborn and as full of fight as a moun- 
 tain wildcat, but she would tame. He even smiled 
 a little in anticipation of that struggle. She would 
 tame. He had broken horses and he had broken 
 men. His thin lips hardened. He could also break 
 a woman. 
 
 Break her, yes, but after that, he could break 
 any one else who tried to harm her. Once she 
 was his own, then valley folk or mountain folk 
 had better have a care how they trespassed. He 
 would relish the opportunity to prove himself. 
 He would relish it at this moment. God, if only 
 he could get out and shoot for her! If only it 
 were as simple as that ! 
 
34 BIG LAUREL 
 
 But it was not some one else he must fight 
 now ; it was the girl herself. She had heard stories 
 about him. That was the trouble. Well, some of 
 them were true enough, but they had nothing to 
 do with the present. What was past was past. He 
 had done nothing but defend his rights. Once she 
 was his, he would defend her rights too. 
 
 The thing to do first was to get her. There was 
 just one way to accomplish this if she wouldn't 
 come ; that was to bring her. He could not carry 
 her before a minister against her will, but he 
 could fetch her up here. He could keep her here 
 one night and then — she would go to the minis- 
 ter quickly enough after that. 
 
 Bud's breath came faster as he planned. His 
 face hardened around the mouth, but it grew 
 mellow about the eyes. To have her here — to 
 have her here ! It was something to grow breath- 
 less about just to picture her — say in that chair 
 over yonder. She might tear at him with her 
 little fingers; she might cry, but even so she 
 would be here. She would be part of this room; 
 part of his life. He would no longer be alone. 
 
 Then, lifting his hectic eyes. Bud caught sight 
 of the sprig of laurel in the bottle on the table. 
 
BIG LAUREL 35 
 
 It was like a bit of her — like her in a tender 
 mood, a pleading mood. He rose and paced the 
 room, his gaunt shadow following him silently. 
 He did n't want to hurt her. He did n't mean for 
 to hurt her. He was going to marry her all right 
 and proper, and she 'd be glad as soon as she 
 got used to him. He 'd give her everything she 
 wanted; plenty of new dresses and money and 
 candy. He 'd go down to the village with her and 
 let her buy all the new furniture she wanted. 
 He 'd let her keep the house clean and he would 
 wipe the mud off'n his feet when he came in. 
 He'd aim to please her every way she wanted. 
 In a little while she 'd get used to him. 
 
 So Bud planned, and the sooner his plans were 
 carried out the better. There was n't any sense in 
 keeping her riled up or in keeping himself riled 
 up. To-morrow night was as good as any. No 
 sense in keeping riled up. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 It was little Tom Culley, weasel-faced and dirty, 
 who, for a pint of moonshine whiskey offered by 
 Bud, took to Roxie at the Howe bungalow one 
 night the lying message that her mother was sick 
 and the summons to come home at once. For 
 the previous three days Bud had waited from 
 dusk until dark only to be forced back over the 
 trail to Big Laurel Cove disappointed and alone. 
 The girl had not come out. 
 
 Roxie herself might have found difficulty in ex- 
 plaining why she kept so tight within doors, for 
 it was not wholly on account of Bud Childers. 
 True enough the man had been pestering her; 
 had followed her home against her will and made 
 his threats. And yet when quite honest with her- 
 self she knew she was not afraid of him. He might 
 pinch her arm with his big hand, and he might 
 scowl, and he might say he was going to do this 
 and do that, but in the end what could he do.^* 
 Once she had cowed him with a smile, and once 
 again she had said to him in a voice hardly above 
 a whisper: 
 
BIG LAUREL 37 
 
 " Bud Childers — stop." 
 
 And he had stopped. 
 
 It had given her a new sense of power. 
 
 Pie was more a nuisance than anything else — 
 a nuisance at a time when she wanted to be left 
 alone with her thoughts. If Bud had been able to 
 read these, he would have waited even more rest- 
 lessly than he did, down there by the ford. There 
 were others, too, who might have grown restless. 
 
 But the thoughts of a young woman, until she 
 chooses to voice them, are her own. They are her 
 sacred city. Bold adventurers or the merely cu- 
 rious may try to enter through the eyes and guess 
 what lies behind, but it is more than probable 
 they will guess wrong. At any rate, they can 
 never know with certainty if only the lady keeps 
 her lips sealed. 
 
 And that, Roxie — cross her throat and hope 
 to die — meant to do. It was her one excuse for 
 not at the very beginning running from her 
 dreams like a startled fawn. She could not be 
 blamed for getting them — they came from 
 around a corner as suddenly as Allston's machine 
 had that day ; but she could be blamed for keep- 
 ing them. Way down deep in her romantic little 
 
38 BIG LAUREL 
 
 heart — where half of what she knew came from 
 — she understood her danger. It was one thing 
 to have a fairy prince safe within the covers of 
 a story-book, where he could be shut in again at 
 the end of the day, and quite another to have him 
 walking around the house in flesh and blood, 
 sometimes within arm's length, where closing a 
 door upon him did no good whatever. Because 
 often enough she could still hear his voice as he 
 talked to Miss Wilmer or at least hear his foot- 
 steps as he strode about his room. 
 
 Allston had risked his life to save her life. That 
 was the beginning of her dream. He had done a 
 fine thing, as a prince might do it — head up, a 
 smile on his lips, and quietly. He had staked his 
 life for hers — even when she was at fault. And 
 this gave a new value to her life. It gave a new 
 dignity. One moment she was nothing much to 
 any one; the next, more than a king's ransom — 
 a king's son — had been offered for her. 
 
 If, after this, he had vanished, it would still 
 have been safe for Roxie to dream on. Princes 
 are harmless enough until they begin to stalk 
 around in the daytime. Then they become dan- 
 gerous — however well meaning. 
 
BIG LAUREL 39 
 
 Allston stayed on. This was at the suggestion 
 of Howe. Certain parts of the wrecked car had 
 to be sent away for and this took time. Besides, 
 there was no especial reason why he should not 
 remain, anyway — as far as he or any one else 
 could see at the time. Both father and daughter 
 proved congenial to him and he, apparently, 
 proved congenial to them. He had driven far 
 enough to get a certain amount of restlessness 
 out of his system and the idea of basking for a 
 while beneath this golden sun rather appealed. 
 
 So Roxie cooked his breakfast and served it to 
 him ; so, too, she did his lunch ; so, too, his din- 
 ner. She cared for his room — humbly, grate- 
 fully, almost religiously. She made his bed and 
 smoothed out his pillows with her eyes aglow. 
 She picked up all his things — he was none too 
 tidy — and placed them where they belonged. 
 She even polished his shoes. He caught her at it 
 once. She was using his kit when by chance he 
 came back into his room after some forgotten 
 thing. She did not know he was there until she 
 felt his hand on her shoulder. 
 
 " Roxie," he said quietly, " I 'II do that myself." 
 
 Startled, she faced him. 
 
40 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "It's a man's job," he explained. 
 
 "But I don't mind — honest I don't." 
 
 " But I mind," he returned. 
 
 She dropped the brushes obediently and he 
 went out. Allston had never been able to accus- 
 tom himself in France to the sight of women bur- 
 dened with the tasks of men. 
 
 Roxie gathered brown-eyed Susans and placed 
 them in his room — secretly. And happily. And 
 when he came downstairs with one of the posies 
 in his buttonhole, she felt like singing. He did 
 not know she had picked them, but that made no 
 difference to her. She was asking no reward for 
 her service other than he had already given ; other 
 than he was giving her every day he remained. 
 
 Allston, for his part, spoke her fair always ; 
 without either condescension or boldness. She 
 was white ; she was young ; she was native. She 
 was, he felt, in every way entitled to his respect. 
 Even to the Howes she was more like one of the 
 family than a servant. To Allston she possessed 
 the added interest of a whimsical personality new 
 to him so that he never missed an opportunity of 
 speaking to her. 
 
 "I suppose these folk are more nearly native 
 
BIG LAUREL 41 
 
 American than most," he once suggested to 
 Wilmer. 
 
 "The American of eighteen-fifty," she an- 
 swered. 
 
 Hesitatingly one day Allston took from his 
 wallet a dollar bill, prompted solely by the desire 
 to recompense her for the extra work he felt he 
 had occasioned. 
 
 "This is for you," he explained. 
 
 "What fer?" she demanded. 
 
 " For ribbons or anything you need. I 've 
 been a lot of bother." 
 
 "You ain't bothered me none." 
 
 "But — " 
 
 " You ain't bothered me none." 
 
 " I 've made you more work," 
 
 Her face colored as it always did in spite of 
 herself when she tried to talk to him. 
 
 " I don't call that bother," she replied. 
 
 "Well," he laughed. "Then all I can do is to 
 thank you again." 
 
 "That's — enough," she said. 
 
 As it turned out, however, Allston did find an 
 opportunity to do a little more. When Roxie 
 came to Wilmer with that message from Tom 
 
42 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Culley reporting her mother's sickness, it was al- 
 ready dark. Even so, had it not been for the re- 
 cent advances of Bud Childers to Roxie, Wilmer 
 would have considered the walk safe enough for 
 the girl. As it was she was a bit worried. Voicing 
 her fears to her father, Allston overheard. 
 
 " I '11 go along with her," he suggested on the 
 instant. 
 
 Howe demurred a moment. 
 
 " I don't suppose there 's any danger, but those 
 mountain folk are a queer lot." 
 
 " What do you mean .'* " 
 
 "If Childers should be along the way — " 
 
 He paused a moment, and then added: 
 
 " He 's pretty free with a gun." 
 
 " That 's simple," answered Allston. " I '11 
 carry one myself." 
 
 " I don't imagine you '11 need it, but it might 
 be as well to have it." 
 
 So Allston thrust his automatic in his pocket 
 and immediately forgot it. He joined Roxie and 
 she led the way from the open valley to the wind- 
 ing, rocky road which ran along the thickly 
 wooded mountain-side. The hush of the early 
 night was here. The great symphony of the for- 
 
BIG LAUREL 43 
 
 est's nocturnal players had not yet begun their 
 overture, awaiting the last bar of the catbird's 
 vesper song. High above the trees a full moon 
 furnished a silver light where it could get through. 
 
 Roxie was as surefooted as he, but instinctively 
 he steadied her with his hand. She was, if any- 
 thing, less steady after that than before. It was 
 as though she became a little dizzy. 
 
 "Am I going too fast for you ? " he asked. 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 Yet twice she stumbled and would have fallen 
 had he not caught her. 
 
 " Careful there," he warned. " It 's a rough old 
 road." 
 
 So they came to the bend. Rounding it, the girl 
 was the first to see the dim figure of a man on 
 horseback a few paces before them. Against the 
 impenetrable background of foliage, the sharply 
 drawn contour of the rider's face stood out like 
 the countenance of a monk from a black cowl. 
 
 It was Bud. She could see him only dimly, but 
 she knew his eyes had left her to question the 
 man by her side. And she caught the slow, 
 stealthy movement of his hand creeping back to 
 his hip. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Allston, at first, was not inclined to take the 
 situation seriously. The scene, like an act of 
 melodrama, was not sufficiently motivated to 
 convince him. Here was a dark, scowling figure 
 of a man on horseback planted squarely in the 
 middle of the moonlit road — a villain made to 
 order. Clinging to his arm, Allston felt the tight 
 grip of Roxie's warm fingers — the heroine if one 
 wished so to consider her. And he — well, it 
 looked as though he were cast for the part of hero. 
 But he did not know his lines. 
 
 Had this been France and a year ago, he would 
 have been quick enough to react to the danger. 
 The world was at war then and he was tuned up 
 to it. Often enough on night patrol he had 
 walked straight into the heart of even grimmer 
 drama than this and played his role like a veteran, 
 with life the penalty of a miscue. 
 
 But he had left all that behind him. The world 
 was now at peace. It was surprising how quickly 
 he had been able to forget that trees meant pos- 
 sible ambush and that moonlight in open spaces 
 
BIG LAUREL 45 
 
 was a source of deadly danger. Men no longer 
 were enemies and beautiful young women no 
 longer needed rescuers. Civilization had reas- 
 serted her rights and bade men walk once again 
 relaxed and at their ease. 
 
 Even at this moment, Allston viewed the scene 
 more as an effective picture than anything else. 
 Bud, lank and lean, made rather a striking figure 
 of the solitary horseman type. He had jerked up 
 the mare's head, and she, a bit frightened by the 
 figures in the shadows, pricked forward her ears 
 and snorted impatiently. In the silver light the 
 two were rather spooky. As they stood there, 
 silent and immobile now, it would not have 
 greatly surprised Allston if it developed that the 
 rider had no head. 
 
 But Roxie Kester knew better. The man be- 
 fore her was no apparition. He was a grim real- 
 ity. And his silence did not imply passiveness. 
 She understood the meaning of that slight for- 
 ward bend of his head and the significance of that 
 quietly moving arm creeping towards the gun 
 at his hip. And she knew better than anything 
 else the interpretation Bud would place upon the 
 presence of this stranger by her side. Her wildly 
 
46 BIG LAUREL 
 
 beating heart — beating like a frightened bird at 
 the approach of a hostile hand — told her that. 
 
 Yet for a moment she also stood transfixed. 
 She like the two men resembled a figure cut out 
 of black paper. It was as though the night birds 
 had also come to this conclusion, for softly, here 
 and there in the trees and bushes roundabout, 
 they ventured forth once more into cooing calls. 
 
 Roxie was the first to speak. She moved for- 
 ward a step, and thereby, without any realiza- 
 tion on Allston's part of what she was doing, 
 placed herself between the two men. 
 
 "Hullo, Bud," she said. 
 
 "Hullo, Roxie," he answered. 
 
 " I 'm goin' hum 'cause ma 's sick," she ex- 
 plained. 
 
 "Yo'ma's sick?" 
 
 "Little Tom Culley — he sent word." 
 
 "Needed a stranger ter show the way, I 
 reckon?" 
 
 " He 's a f rien' o' Miss Wilmer," she answered 
 almost eagerly. 
 
 "Then," said Bud, deliberately — "then he 
 oughter stay with Miss Wilmer. It ain't healthy 
 in these hills — fer strangers." 
 
BIG LAUREL 47 
 
 Bud had reached his gun. He brought it for- 
 ward, at this point, rather ostentatiously, and 
 rested it on the pummel of his saddle. 
 
 " Bud ! " cried Roxie. 
 
 But Allston, in the meanwhile, had reached his 
 own gun. He had no desire to force any issue 
 here unless it proved necessary. His instinct, 
 however, warned him that he could no longer 
 keep himself in the background. His temper, 
 moreover, had been pricked by the studied inso- 
 lence of Bud's reference to strangers. When he 
 acted, he acted quickly. With his raised auto- 
 matic he jumped forward. 
 
 '* Throw down that gun," he ordered. 
 
 Bud made a motion and Allston fired. He was 
 a sure shot and he had learned well his lesson that 
 when any firing is to be done, it is well to 
 fire first. He aimed at the weapon in Bud's hand 
 and the gun spun out of the lean fingers into the 
 bushes. The mare jumped and Roxie screamed. 
 The birds in the woods became instantly hushed. 
 With an oath Bud checked his horse and turned 
 as though to ride the two down. But the auto- 
 matic was still leveled and the brown eyt& be- 
 hind it quite untroubled. 
 
48 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "Steady there," warned Allston. 
 
 " You ugly, pink-cheeked hornyhead," choked 
 Bud, " I '11 cut yer heart out fer that." 
 
 " Steady," repeated Allston. 
 
 " It ain't healthy here fer strangers, particular 
 when they messes in somethin' that don't con- 
 
 cern 'um." 
 
 " But when it does concern them? " questioned 
 Allston. 
 
 Bud turned from Allston to Roxie. She shrank 
 closer to her protector which exasperated Bud 
 still more. 
 
 "Like 'um pink-cheeked and white-fingered, 
 don' cha," he growled. 
 
 Allston lost the last remnant of his patience 
 at that. He pulled the girl to the side of the road. 
 
 "Now," he commanded, "you move on." 
 
 Helpless Bud turned his horse in the direction 
 of the Kester house. 
 
 "Not that way — this," ordered Allston point- 
 ing to his rear. 
 
 His voice was metallic. His words were as 
 decisive as a military order. Men from Gibral- 
 tar to Timbuktu recognize that quality. 
 
 Bud swung his horse and with an oath can- 
 
BIG LAUREL 49 
 
 tered past the two. Allston stood facing in the 
 same direction until assured by the receding clat- 
 ter of the hoofs merging into the forest silence 
 that the man did not pull up when out of sight. 
 Then he thrust his automatic back in his pocket. 
 
 Almost impatiently, he turned to the girl. He 
 found her bright eyes upraised to his. Her pretty 
 face was flushed with excitement — and some- 
 thing more. In the tender, softening light of the 
 moon — lovers' light — he caught an expression 
 which brought the color to his own cheeks. 
 He breathed a little faster as he allowed his eyes 
 to meet her eyes. Her lips were tight as though 
 she were deliberately making them tight to im- 
 prison her tongue. Her head was a little back — 
 a quite unconscious pose of silent supplication. 
 Her body w^as lax. Her arms hung loosely by 
 her side — the long, slender arms of a girl. 
 
 To Allston at the moment she seemed almost 
 a product of the forest, like some delicate fern 
 bred in the wild, but possessing an exquisiteness 
 beyond the reach of the most skilled florists ; pos- 
 sessing, too, the sturdiness that Nature gives, but 
 which the hothouse sacrifices. Again she re- 
 minded him of some of those young women of 
 
so BIG LAUREL 
 
 France at once so intensely human and so Instinc- 
 tively spiritual. There were such faces, passed 
 In the day's grim work, which still haunted him. 
 So, he felt, this face before him always would 
 haunt him. 
 
 The moonlight — the moonlight! The silence 
 — the silence! The hush of a stilled world with 
 all harsh things made beautiful by night! The 
 girl with eager, motionless lips, one with the 
 growing things that bid a man take as he finds ! 
 
 Allston shook himself free from the spell, 
 breathing deeply. 
 
 " Come," he said, " it — It is time we went on." 
 
 Slowly, like a drooping flower, Roxie's head 
 lowered. Her limp arms stiffened. Her lips 
 tightened even more. She fell into step by his 
 side as he led the way at a faster pace than before 
 along the mountain road leading to her home. 
 
 Where the circuitous path ended in a clearing 
 before her house, Allston left her. 
 
 "I guess you're safe enough now, Roxle." 
 
 "Yes, sir," she answered. 
 
 " And I hope you won't find your mother very 
 sick. If you think there 's anything more I can 
 do—" 
 
BIG LAUREL 51 
 
 " No, sir," she broke in hurriedly, " I reckon 
 there ain't — isn't." 
 
 " Then we '11 see you in the morning? " 
 
 " I 've gotter git yo' breakfast." 
 
 "Not if your mother needs you." 
 
 " I Ve gotter git yo' breakfast." 
 
 " We can manage somehow." 
 
 " I 've gotter cook you hot mufhns. Miss Wil- 
 mer she cain't do that." 
 
 "Can't she?" he smiled. "Then we must 
 manage without them." 
 
 " No, sir. I gotter do that." 
 
 "Well, we'll see. If you don't come I'll call 
 here in the morning." 
 
 She looked frightened. 
 
 " I reckon yer better not," she decided. 
 
 "Eh?" 
 
 " Yer better not." 
 
 " But I will," he replied. 
 
 " Please, Mister Allston — that Bud — " 
 
 Allston shrugged his shoulders impatiently. 
 
 " I '11 let him do the worrying." 
 
 " Only yer don't know Bud. He don't ferget." 
 
 " That ought to be in my favor — if he does n't 
 forget," he suggested. " But you don't think for 
 a moment he 's going to keep me off the road ? " 
 
52 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " No," she answered instantly. " That 's why 
 I 'm afeard fer you." 
 
 There was almost a mother light in her eyes. 
 Impulsively Allston took one of her warm hands 
 in his. 
 
 "You're a good little girl," he said tenderly. 
 " But you Ve got worries enough of your own 
 without including me. Good-night." 
 
 " Good-night," she answered. 
 
 Her voice was as cooing low and sweet as that 
 of a night bird. He dropped her hand and 
 started to retrace his steps. Once he turned. He 
 found her looking after him. 
 
 " Good-night," he called back. " Don't worry." 
 
 But Roxie stood there, never moving until she 
 could no longer hear even the lightest trace of his 
 footsteps. Then she lifted her eyes to the stars. 
 They smiled back at her. She thought they were 
 like his eyes. Only they were so high — so diz- 
 zily far away. They were above the house, above 
 the trees, above even the heights of Cater- 
 pillar Ridge, above Green Mountain, which was 
 the highest place she knew about. They were 
 almost as high as God. He lived there among 
 them. And yet the preacher said that He was 
 
BIG LAUREL 53 
 
 always near — right around us everywhere. So 
 the stars must be nearer than they looked. So 
 perhaps the eyes of the Prince might be nearer 
 than they seemed. Things could be far away and 
 yet very near. That was confusing. Also it was 
 comforting. The puzzled frown left her face as 
 she pushed open the door and went in. 
 
 She found her mother busy about her normal 
 tasks and showing no evidence of illness. But the 
 sight, instead of bringing her relief, roused a new 
 fear. 
 
 " Tom Culley said yuh was tuk sick," explained 
 Roxie, as her mother observed her entrance with 
 as much surprise as she ever showed about any- 
 thing. Her emotions had ceased to be more 
 than the ghostly relics of emotions long since 
 dead. She had exhausted them years before. 
 Resignation had taken their place. 
 
 " I ain't sick," she answered with a slow shake 
 of her head. "How cum Tom Culley to say 
 thet.?" 
 
 Her pale eyes squinting from a meager, desic- 
 cated face, white as wax, listlessly met the quick 
 young eyes of her daughter. 
 
 The answer was clear enough to Roxie. It ex- 
 
54 BIG LAUREL 
 
 plained the presence of Bud Childers in the mid- 
 dle of the road. The girl turned towards the door. 
 
 " I 'm a-goin' back," she said. 
 
 "Coin' back?" 
 
 But Roxie sprang for the latch. If Bud 
 Childers had laid for her such a plot as this, the 
 incident would not end there. He would be wait- 
 ing for Allston to return. She threw open the 
 door and ran out into the night; straight down 
 the rocky mountain road. And as she ran, she 
 called his name. 
 
 " Mister Allston ! Mister Allston ! " 
 
 There was no answer. Allston. far ahead, was 
 walking fast. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 As ten o'clock came and then eleven, Wilmer 
 found it more and more difficult not to respond 
 to her father's fears. 
 
 "We shouldn't have allowed him to go," de- 
 clared Howe. 
 
 "And yet," answered the girl, "he's the sort 
 of man you feel to be capable of going anywhere." 
 
 " I don't doubt his courage," responded Howe. 
 "But against a man of the type of Childers he 
 needs something more." 
 
 " What do you mean, dad } " 
 
 "He needs to know his man. Childers has no 
 code. If he couldn't shoot a man in front, he'd 
 shoot him in the back. Such a chap has one idea 
 and only one — to get his man ; by fair means, if 
 convenient, by foul, if necessary." 
 
 "You don't think Childers means to-^to get 
 him?" 
 
 " I don't know anything about it. Apparently 
 the fellow is infatuated with Roxie. If that is so, 
 he'll resent any interference — particularly on 
 
56 BIG LAUREL 
 
 the part of a stranger. I ought to have known 
 better than to let him start." 
 
 " I doubt if you could have prevented it, dad," 
 answered the girl. 
 
 " It was my duty — as host." 
 
 Wilmer turned back to her book — a Gals- 
 
 f 
 
 worthy novel. That seemed to be about as far as 
 she could get in it to-night — just to turn back 
 to it again and again. The pages in which ordi- 
 narily she was able to lose herself were just so 
 many white pieces of paper covered with print. 
 They were very white and symmetrical and the 
 print very black and even, making so many par- 
 allel lines from side to side. But there was a cer- 
 tain monotony to literature in this form. It 
 seemed scarcely worth while to turn the leaves. 
 
 In the two weeks Wilmer had been living in 
 daily contact with Allston — a more sustained 
 contact than she had ever experienced with any 
 man of her own age — she had developed a very 
 real interest in him. Her life for the last five 
 years, since the death of her mother, had been 
 largely devoted to her father. By nature quiet 
 and reflective, she had found this sphere adequate 
 enough on the whole to satisfy her, and where it 
 
BIG LAUREL 57 
 
 did not she was able to piece it out with her books. 
 She read a great deal and intelligently without, 
 however, any especial objective. She preferred, 
 generally speaking, books with an analytical turn 
 and modern rather than classic — James and 
 Meredith, and the younger school of British 
 novelists with their intense if somewhat vague 
 passion for the super-critical and radical ap- 
 proach to present-day problems. And yet the net 
 result of their influence was to leave her rather 
 more conservative than before. She was willing 
 enough to believe these young observers, but the 
 effect of this was to cultivate in her a rather 
 cynical distaste for actual contact with the life 
 they described — particularly on its emotional 
 side. And so, though her home in New Orleans 
 still remained, through her social connections, a 
 gathering-place for a group of young men and 
 women, they came and went marking only so 
 many pleasant inconsequential incidents of a 
 season. There were several young fellows who, it 
 is true, pressed their attentions upon her a little 
 more eagerly than others, but her retreat at the 
 beginning of each summer to this mountain fast- 
 ness always discouraged them. They preferred 
 
58 BIG LAUREL 
 
 to follow the pretty faces which led to the gayer 
 resorts. 
 
 And yet Wilmer Howe was not without her 
 attractions. As far as physical beauty goes she 
 possessed a piquant charm of her own. She had 
 as pretty a face as any of those who had pretty 
 faces and not much else. Her brown eyes were 
 like placid pools reflecting autumn foliage — the 
 deep pools one finds in shaded places. Her mouth 
 and nose and chin were modeled as a careful and 
 sensitive artist might model them. If they were 
 not as quickly responsive as the features of some 
 of her friends, they perhaps inspired more confi- 
 dence when they did respond. It meant some- 
 thing to rouse Wilmer Howe either to laughter 
 or tears. Few had accomplished either, though 
 many had made her smile and a few claimed to 
 have seen her eyes dimmed. A handsome good- 
 for-nothing from Georgia — later killed at Cha- 
 teau-Thierry — had done more than that, but he 
 never spoke of it. He kept it, to the end, a grave 
 secret. 
 
 Allston was the first man ever presented to her 
 without a well-filled-in background. He had 
 done his best, since, to supply the deficiency by 
 
BIG LAUREL 59 
 
 casual mention of his mother and father and sis- 
 ter, even a few aunts and cousins for good meas- 
 ure, and an incidental reference to the ancestor 
 who settled on the James. She never questioned 
 any of his statements — except her father she 
 had never met a more straightforward man or 
 one whose ordinary speech she was so ready to 
 accept at its full face value — but these people 
 to whom he referred remained nothing more than 
 shadows. They lacked all the sidelights that mu- 
 tual friends throw upon such a group. 
 
 Not that she minded particularly. In a way 
 it w^as rather refreshing. It left her free — ut- 
 terly free — to discover the man for herself. 
 Here he was, undeniably prepossessing, straight 
 and tall, clear of eye, thin of face, bearing a faint 
 resemblance physically and superficially to the 
 lean mountain folk hereabouts. But he and they 
 had chosen different roads a hundred years ago 
 — perhaps a thousand years ago. A passing 
 glance told her all she needed to know of a man 
 like Bud Childers. A decade might never fully 
 reveal a man like Allston. 
 
 And yet, at times, she felt as though she had 
 made wonderful progress in even this brief period 
 
6o BIG LAUREL 
 
 of two weeks. She had come to like him. She 
 had come to trust him. She had come to wait for 
 him. And now to-night she had come to worry- 
 about him. 
 
 That, on the whole, was a bit absurd. She 
 recognized as much herself. It rather vexed her. 
 Of course her anxiety could be justified on gen- 
 eral humanitarian grounds. She was not so cold- 
 blooded but that any man in danger roused her 
 sympathies. And this man was her guest. More- 
 over, she was indirectly responsible for having 
 placed him in his present hazardous position. 
 Clearly, then, there was nothing unnatural in the 
 fact of her being more or less disturbed when he 
 was two hours late. 
 
 More or less — upon the nice balance of those 
 two words hung the fine distinction of whether 
 her present agitation was normal or abnormal. 
 A little more in one scale, a little less in the other, 
 makes all the difference in the world. The 
 trouble was that with her it was one moment a 
 little more and the next a little less. The scales 
 refused to remain stationary. 
 
 And her friend Galsworthy did not help her in 
 the slightest. Rightfully he should have bade her 
 
BIG LAUREL 6i 
 
 shrug her shoulders and go on with him. He 
 should have said, in effect: 
 
 " Be sensible. This man is not anything in 
 particular to you, and even if he is your guest 
 there is nothing you can do to relieve his plight. 
 He is only a figure in real life and you know you 
 are not greatly concerned about such. They are 
 merely shadows. Come with me and I will show 
 you the substance — men who are men. I will 
 reveal to you the raw, crude inwardness of men. 
 You will be wiser — and safer." 
 
 But he failed her. To be sure, she refused to 
 listen, but the fault still remained his. The 
 function of the artist is to command attention. 
 
 At quarter past eleven she put down her book 
 and moved restlessly about the room. Covertly 
 her father watched her. There was an expression 
 on her face he had never seen since she was a 
 little girl — frank, unrestrained fear. 
 
 "There's a full moon and the chances are he 
 Is enjoying it," the father suggested. 
 
 She brushed aside the curtains and looked out. 
 The grass was a stagy green; the trees like the 
 trees of Maeterlinck. The driveway leading to 
 the road was as clear as by daylight. 
 
62 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " The moon is full," she nodded. " That makes 
 it easy to see." 
 
 But if it made it easy for Allston to see, it made 
 it easy for Childers. One had the choice of get- 
 ting comfort or added fear from that. 
 
 "Of course he may have strayed from the 
 road," said Howe. 
 
 " It is possible, but not probable," decided Wil- 
 mer. 
 
 "Why do you say that? " 
 
 "He has told me about his night patrols in 
 France." 
 
 " He had his maps and his instructions to help 
 him there." 
 
 "Yes," she admitted. "That's true." 
 
 « Then — " 
 
 But at that moment Wilmer caught sight of a 
 figure in the roadway. Only the slightest quick- 
 ening of the movement of her nostrils revealed 
 the jump her heart gave. She drew back a little 
 so as not to be seen. Then she waited perhaps 
 two breaths before saying: 
 
 "Here he comes now." 
 
 She recrossed the room to the table, resumed 
 her seat, and picked up her book. It was here 
 
BIG LAUREL 63 
 
 Allston saw her when he came in. Howe had 
 hurried to the door. 
 
 "Welcome back," the latter greeted the 
 younger man heartily. "You gave us all a 
 
 scare." 
 
 " I 'm sorry. The night was so wonderful I 
 took my time." 
 
 Wilmer looked up from her book with a smile. 
 His presence w^as enough to throw her back into 
 her usual calm. Her fears of a moment ago hon- 
 estly now appeared ludicrous. 
 
 "You didn't meet with any adventures, 
 then.?" 
 
 "But I did," Allston smiled back. " I was the 
 hero of a real bit of melodrama." 
 
 He sat down crossing his long legs comfort- 
 ably. 
 
 Howe appeared concerned. 
 
 "You didn't meet Childers? " 
 
 " In full force," admitted Allston. 
 
 Then lightly and entertainingly he told the 
 whole story. And yet not the whole stor>\ As 
 he talked, somehow Roxie did not stand out as 
 prominently in his narrative as actually she did 
 in the picture the episode had left in his own 
 
64 BIG LAUREL 
 
 mind. Rather deliberately he was slightly reti- 
 cent about some details — insignificant enough 
 in themselves — which had registered with un- 
 usual vividness in his own mind. He did this 
 partly as a matter of personal taste and partly 
 out of respectful deference to Roxie herself. He 
 considered certain moments in the nature of pri- 
 vate and confidential communications : for ex- 
 ample, those few seconds after Bud's departure 
 when Roxie, in gratitude, had stood there so si- 
 lently in the moonlight, her face uplifted to his. 
 He was sure she had been moved by nothing but 
 girlish gratitude and had no conception of the 
 astonishingly dramatic picture she made. Yet 
 he never mentioned the incident. His conclu- 
 sion from this point on was matter-of-fact 
 enough. 
 
 " So I took her to the house and then came 
 home — striking into the woods instead of keep- 
 ing to the road." 
 
 "You were wise in that," said Howe. 
 
 "The trouble was I discovered my gun was 
 empty," laughed Allston. " The last time I used 
 it I popped away at some squirrels on the road. 
 I 'd already wasted the one shell I had on Bud 
 and I was afraid a second bluff might not work." 
 
BIG LAUREL 6s 
 
 " Good Lord ! " gasped Howe. " Bluff is a dan- 
 gerous game to play against that kind of man. 
 You don't realize how recklessly they kill. They 
 never reckon consequences." 
 
 "Well," said Allston, willing enough to forget 
 the whole affair, " here I am back again, at any 
 rate. I'm sorry if I've kept you up." 
 
 Wilmer rose. 
 
 "You must be tired after your long tramp. 
 You '11 let me make you a cup of coffee? " 
 
 " Please don't trouble," he pleaded. 
 
 No one had noticed the slight, tired-looking 
 figure who had suddenly appeared at the door 
 leading from the kitchen. Her cheeks were 
 flushed after the stumbling journey she had 
 taken at a run as long as her breath held out. Her 
 hair was awry and her face stained where she had 
 wiped away the perspiration with an earth-soiled 
 hand. Below her eyes were other streaks — chan- 
 nels made by tears forced from her, not by 
 maudlin grief, but sheer elemental anger because 
 her feet would not carry her faster; the helpless 
 rage of one baffled in an overwhelming effort. 
 
 " Roxie ! " exclaimed Wilmer as she caught 
 sight of the girl. 
 
 " Please^ I '11 git him his coffee," she panted. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 In a cane-bottomed chair beside the threshold 
 of the post-office — a flimsy board building owing 
 all its distinction, like a dirty uniform, to the 
 magic influence of those two letters U.S. — sat 
 Daddie Ingram during that social hour preceding 
 the arrival of the mail. He himself owed much 
 of his prestige to his association, as postmaster, 
 with the Federal Government — that vast power 
 which makes its influence felt even to the most 
 remote hamlets. He had acquired a certain dig- 
 nity because of his affiliation with the Eagle It- 
 self. 
 
 The hot sun had made the roads which cen- 
 tered here dusty. Even the droning insects be- 
 came half-hearted. Flies moved listlessly and 
 became lazily indifferent to the danger of hostile 
 hands moving against them with no spirit. Men 
 slouched up to the weather-worn porch and sank 
 down with a grunt, drawing their knees up and 
 tilting their hats down. Some of them whittled, 
 but none of them were sufficiently inspired to 
 attempt any creative effort, unless perhaps a long 
 
BIG LAUREL 67 
 
 spindling toothpick sharpened with extreme care 
 to a needle point. 
 
 Over his befogged spectacles, Daddie Ingram's 
 faded blue eyes brightened a trifle as they ob- 
 served the approach of Mr. Howe down the road. 
 He spat and shifted his quid in order to be in 
 readiness for a conversation which he had antici- 
 pated for several hours. He introduced his sub- 
 ject without preliminaries as soon as Howe was 
 safely within range. 
 
 " Hear that young man up at yo' house had a 
 sort of run-in with Bud Childers last night." 
 
 How^e was surprised — unpleasantly surprised. 
 He had rather hoped the affair might not become 
 current gossip. The moment this became public 
 property it complicated matters a good deal. 
 
 " What did you hear ? " questioned Howe with- 
 out committing himself. 
 
 "Wull, I heard on two or three sides. Yes, 
 suh, on two or three sides." 
 
 Pausing a moment he added, as though after 
 mature reflection: 
 
 " I heard it on tw^o or three sides." 
 
 "Childers been talking.?" 
 
 "Ain't no one heard him doin' it," replied 
 
68 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Daddie cautiously. "Fust pusson I seen who 
 knowed anything 'bout it was Httle Tom Culley. 
 Said old Widder Kester giv' him the devil this 
 mornin' for carryin' a lie 'bout her bein' sick. 
 Tom said he told her who give him the message. 
 Tom he went to Bud an' Bud was fightin' mad — 
 all riled up about it. Then Tom 'lowed he was 
 gonter cut up thet young man up to yo' house." 
 
 " Well .? " 
 
 "Bud's bad," drawled Daddie Ingram. "Yes- 
 suh, he 's bad. Yessuh, he 's bad medicine. That 
 young man up to yo' house might erve needed a 
 gun and a good un." 
 
 Howe spoke deliberately now. 
 
 "Mr. Allston is just out of the army. He has 
 a gun and he knows how to use it." 
 
 " Wull, he might erve needed a good un. Yes- 
 suh, he might erve." 
 
 "He will use it — if it's necessary. But he 
 IS n't looking for any trouble which is n't forced 
 on him." 
 
 "Looks like an awful nice feller," admitted 
 Daddie. " That clever an' friendly. I 'm power- 
 ful glad he's got a gun. Better carry it, too." 
 
 Turge Calhoun, a dwarfed, fleshless little man 
 
BIG LAUREL 69 
 
 who looked as though he had been long hung 
 upon a nail to dry, looked up with interest. Then 
 he broke out into uncanny laughter — ' a piercing 
 falsetto. 
 
 "Turge — he knows Bud," nodded Ingram 
 phlegmatically. 
 
 Howe attended to his business inside and went 
 back home frankly disturbed. It was clear 
 enough that this group, while not actually hos- 
 tile to Allston, looked forward with considerable 
 pleasant anticipation to a second run-in between 
 him and Bud. They intended to go even further 
 — as far as it was possible by innuendo and goad- 
 ing they would spur Bud on. There was both 
 amusement and excitement in the situation — 
 just as in a cock or a dog fight. They were no 
 more apt to consider consequences than Bud 
 was — less, in view of the fact that they them- 
 selves were not in danger. 
 
 Anxious as Howe was, he felt quite helpless. 
 He knew there was no authority of the law he 
 could invoke. Officers are powerless until after 
 a crime is committed. Moreover, it is doubtful 
 if he would find local officials sympathetic, any- 
 way. It was even more doubtful if he himself 
 
70 BIG LAUREL 
 
 was in sympathy with any such method of pro- 
 cedure. Difficulties of this nature could not be 
 settled by law. Allston would be the last man in 
 the world to listen to such a proposal. 
 
 Obviously the simplest way out, if it could be 
 managed, would be to place the tv/o men beyond 
 reach of one another. But it was as much out of 
 the question to think of shifting Bud Childers 
 as it was Green Mountain or Big Laurel Cove or 
 Caterpillar Ridge. As for moving Allston out 
 of danger, it seemed equally impossible except 
 by resorting to some ruse. This course was as 
 distinctly against Howe's own nature as he knew 
 it would be against that of his guest. 
 
 Howe did not repeat his conversation with 
 Daddie Ingram either to his daughter or to 
 Allston. To do so would be only to frighten the 
 former and rouse, possibly to aggressive action, 
 the latter. But he did persuade Allston to keep 
 his automatic always in his pocket and to make 
 sure it was loaded. 
 
 "Don't pop away at any more squirrels," he 
 warned. " If you do, reload. You '11 need a full 
 hand the next time you call that man." 
 
 Allston heeded the advice, although even now 
 
BIG LAUREL 71 
 
 he was by no means convinced that any such pre- 
 caution was necessary. However, he had toted 
 a gun so much during the past two years that he 
 found it no great burden and this was an easy 
 way to please his host. And Allston was anxious, 
 in every way, to please him. He felt, each day, 
 under a greater obligation. He had prolonged 
 his visit with these amiable people far beyond the 
 limits the happy chance of his accidental intro- 
 duction to them warranted. And yet he stayed on, 
 for every time he suggested that he was straining 
 his welcome he was met by such a genuine pro- 
 test from both father and daughter that he found 
 it easy to drift back into inaction. 
 
 This countryside was to his taste. He liked the 
 contrast of rugged hills with fertile valley ; of the 
 primeval mountain growth of huge chestnut-oaks 
 and laurel, with the luxuriant rhododendrons, 
 tropical in their leafy richness; of the cold 
 streams and rough roads with the formal order- 
 liness of this well-kept summer place. He sensed 
 something of this dramatic contrast in these peo- 
 ple who had come so unexpectedly into his life. 
 Bud and Roxie set against Howe and Wilmer 
 heightened his interest in both. They stood for 
 
72 BIG LAUREL 
 
 two different periods. And yet for all he knew 
 the difference between them might not be as great 
 as it seemed. 
 
 That was the striking fact against which he 
 was continually bumping during the war; the 
 amazing likeness of peoples he had always con- 
 sidered so essentially different, and the amazing 
 differences between those he thought identical. 
 This held true even of different civilizations. It 
 held true of different historical epochs. The past 
 and the present were all jumbled together over 
 there just as the dead and the living were. It was 
 sometimes difficult to distinguish one from the 
 other. And they were easily interchangeable. 
 He remembered with particular vividness an old 
 French town in which he had been billeted — a 
 town dating back, not years like towns at home, 
 but centuries. If anything might be thought to 
 be deep-rooted and fixed in its associations with 
 the past, it was this stone village, gray and heavy 
 with age. And yet in a night Allston had seen a 
 rude interruption of its traditions. The inhabi- 
 tants had been hurried away to escape heavy gun- 
 fire when he and a few other officers entered the 
 silent streets. Only the empty shell of this an- 
 
BIG LAUREL 73 
 
 cient town remained. Yet doors were open, 
 tables set, beds in order. Even the old town clock 
 was going. It made him jump when it struck out 
 with leisurely resonance and indifferent concern 
 each passing hour. But the population, boast- 
 ing kinship back to Caesar, had vanished in a 
 day to give place to a few sprightly young officers 
 bred in a country which three hundred years be- 
 fore had been savage. These soldier cubs ate at 
 the time-stained tables, slept in the hallow^ed 
 beds, while the night stars looked down undis- 
 turbed. 
 
 It was not easy after this for Allston to believe 
 that centuries counted for much towards stabil- 
 ity. It was still more difficult when a little later 
 he saw varying breeds of men tearing at each 
 other's throats like jungle beasts. He was one 
 of them and tore as hard as any. And then — 
 presto — this was over and the breeds became 
 polite and civilized again, and the ancient towns- 
 folk returned to their abodes and remade their 
 beds and reset their tables and sent Allston and 
 the others — such of them as were not buried with 
 the dead centurions — back to their own young 
 land. 
 
74 BIG LAUREL 
 
 An experience like this made a man cautious 
 about fixing boundaries either of time or space. 
 It drove a man back of history to a primitive 
 brotherhood which discovered men and women, 
 of whatever cHme and of whatever period, to be 
 much alike. 
 
 And yet he was inclined even now to make an 
 exception of Wilmer. It was difficult for him to 
 conceive any set of circumstances which could 
 affect the cultivated poise of her calm nature or 
 disturb to any extent her steady control based 
 upon a fine intelligence. It amused him to im- 
 agine how she would have acted under the condi- 
 tions existing in that little French town so sud- 
 denly shaken from its venerable security. He 
 could not picture her then as any other than she 
 was now. She would have remained had that 
 been possible. If not she would have walked 
 out calmly, looking upon the interruption as an 
 ugly interlude, but quite unchanged by it. But 
 she would be beautiful, with a sort of saintly 
 beauty, both In going and returning. 
 
 In many ways this steadiness, this assurance, 
 this complete confidence In herself, the product 
 of a ripe development a little beyond her years, 
 
BIG LAUREL 75 
 
 appealed strongly to him. She stood out in his 
 lately troubled world like the North star over a 
 stormy sea. He welcomed her because she 
 seemed to guide him back to that snug harbor in 
 which he had ridden so safely at anchor beneath 
 a golden sun and an azure sky until the war bade 
 him set sail. In her presence he was able to 
 dream pleasantly and lazily again as he had in 
 college. And rather sentimentally too. This was 
 an agreeable surprise. He thought all that had 
 been burned out of him. During those few days 
 at home he had been astonished at how unrespon- 
 sive he had been to the pretty young faces about 
 him. But they had chattered about the war and 
 his nerves had been more jumpy than they now 
 were. 
 
 He had steadied down a lot since then. He 
 could thank Wilmer's deep brown eyes for that — 
 and her soft, musical voice, never raised, but clear 
 and distinct as a silver bell. He liked to listen 
 to it in the evening as she read aloud to her father, 
 though often he found himself hearing nothing 
 but the voice. He was quite sure that if inter- 
 ested in the text he would do much better to read 
 to himself. But he seldom was interested. He 
 
76 BIG LAUREL 
 
 much preferred talking with her when she had no 
 book in her hand. 
 
 He much preferred talking to her about — al- 
 most nothing at all. She was a good walker, and 
 they used to start on long tramps through the 
 woods for the neighboring hills. Always it was 
 to some definite point like Caterpillar Ridge. 
 Never on these hikes did they succeed in reaching 
 their objective. Allston, at times, felt rather 
 mean about that because it seemed to disturb her. 
 And it obliged him to adopt the rather under- 
 handed expedient of allowing her to believe that 
 the bit of gas he had once inhaled was respon- 
 sible for his weakness, when, as a matter of fact, 
 it was nothing but the joy of sprawling out lazily 
 at her feet. He had never felt better in his life 
 and he knew it. 
 
 He used to pick out the sunny places — tiny 
 coves lying like pockets or mountain nests at the 
 foot of bold rocks. If he could find one near a 
 brook, so much the better, for this gave him the 
 excuse of fishing while the rippling tinkle of the 
 falling water sang with her a duet. It is not on 
 record that he brought home any fish, but this 
 was of minor importance. Your true sportsman 
 never fishes for the sake of fish. 
 
BIG LAUREL 77 
 
 But always he brought home something — if 
 only the memory of a dimpling smile caught un- 
 expectedly in response to some bit of fooling. He 
 liked to make her smile unexpectedly. It was 
 like angling in an untried brook. Her eyes were 
 the pools — so deep that one could not see bot- 
 tom. And like mountain pools continually fill- 
 ing with fresh water, her thoughts ran through 
 them. One could never tell when a smile, like a 
 quick trout, might flash into them from some- 
 where, and jump at his bait. That was worth 
 waiting for. 
 
 So they sat one afternoon just off the road 
 leading to Big Laurel Cove — not knowing except 
 in a general way where they were. It would not 
 have mattered greatly to Allston had he realized 
 he was within a short distance of Bud Childers's 
 shack. As far as he was concerned at this time 
 Bud Childers did not exist. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Bud Childers, however, did exist. He existed 
 more intensely than ever. From the moment he 
 met Allston and Roxie together he had burned 
 Hke a man with a fever. 
 
 It was a dangerous fever — a fever bred of baf- 
 fled desire, of jealousy, of hate. Since he had 
 been old enough to stand on his two feet and fight 
 back, he had never been bullied as Allston had 
 bullied him. Always he had been able to leave his 
 mark even if meeting defeat in the end. But in 
 the last ten years he had never until now met 
 defeat. 
 
 To this humiliating reversal Allston had added 
 the insult of humbling him before Roxie. How 
 Bud ever found his way back to Big Laurel Cove 
 that night he never knew, for if ever a man was 
 blind with rage it was he; literally blind. He 
 saw nothing of the rocky road over which he 
 traveled, but he took it at a gallop, cursing the 
 mare and digging his heels into her sides when- 
 ever she paused. He turned her into the barn all 
 dripping with lather as she was and never re- 
 
BIG LAUREL 79 
 
 moved her saddle. Then he stumbled to his house 
 and locked himself in. 
 
 He had not waited for Allston that evening nor 
 attempted to trail him home. He knew better 
 than that. He must see straight and have a 
 steady hand when he met the man again. In the 
 condition he was then in he could not have been 
 sure of his aim at ten feet. And he meant to be 
 sure — next time. 
 
 But the process of calming down was no simple 
 one. Hour after hour he paced his cabin floor 
 until finally, exhausted, he tumbled into a heap 
 on his bed and slept. When he awoke it was the 
 same thing all over again. And yet slowly, out 
 of this jumble of emotions, two finally detached 
 themselves or perhaps absorbed the others ; hate 
 — black hate — of this man Allston, and love — 
 fire-like love — of Roxie Kester. 
 
 Or perhaps his passion resolved itself, in the 
 final analysis, into the single passion of love. 
 For Love is the mother of every passion, and 
 mother-like shelters all her brood, even those 
 which turn against her and eat away at her heart. 
 A man may hate beyond the possibility of loving, 
 but a man may love and yet hate at one and the 
 same time. 
 
8o BIG LAUREL 
 
 If Bud had desired Roxie before, he desired her 
 with a fervor a hundred times as strong now. 
 There were moments when she drove every other 
 desire out of his head and heart — even all 
 thought of Allston. Whenever he was able to let 
 himself go utterly, she washed away even those 
 crimson spots that danced before his eyes. It was 
 then as though just he and she were alone in the 
 world. Yet they knew not loneliness. Two only 
 they might be out of hundreds of millions, but it 
 was the hundreds of millions who were alone, not 
 they. Because they would be up here on this 
 mountain-side where the trees were many and 
 friendly, where the birds and squirrels would be 
 their playmates by day; where, by night, the stars 
 and planets would be their fellows. Bud was 
 never as definite as that, but something of the 
 sort he sensed whenever he thought of her. She 
 was more one with such things than she was with 
 folk — even as he was. He had always been able 
 to get along up here. The trees and the denizens 
 among them had never interfered with him. For- 
 est creatures let a man alone. And he, in his way, 
 had always been kind to them. He had a feel for 
 them. Animals were not afraid of him, though 
 
BIG LAUREL 8i 
 
 often enough he lost his temper and abused them, 
 and, when necessary, killed them without emo- 
 tion. But he spent weeks nursing an injured 
 chicken back to health and kept an old gray horse 
 for years after she was quite useless. No dog had 
 ever come to his shack for food and gone away 
 hungry, though many a man had done so. 
 
 Bud had a notion that it was not man who was 
 basic, but Nature. This new love of his — for it 
 was new, a development of his initial desire — 
 was one with Nature. It had to do with elemental 
 things. Had he been religious he might have said 
 it had to do with God. But after that, to have 
 been consistent, he would have had to say this 
 black hate had to do with the Devil. 
 
 He might not have been far wrong at that. 
 Whenever it pounced upon him he was like one 
 possessed. It bred murder in his heart — the lust 
 to kill. A dozen times his eyes had burned with 
 evil satisfaction at the picture of Allston in his 
 death agonies. He had heard the bark of his own 
 pistol and seen the man crumple up, falling to 
 this side and that, his eyes rolling, his face writh- 
 ing with pain. Leeringly he had looked on, watch- 
 ing to the last gasp. 
 
82 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Only one thing had stayed his hand as long as 
 this. He wanted Allston to die, but he himself 
 wanted to live. Never before had he considered 
 himself when in such a mood. He had always 
 moved recklessly. This new element made him 
 move cautiously. To die would be to lose Roxie 
 in another way. To have her, he must live. He 
 needed years to satisfy himself with her. He 
 might need years to satisfy her with him. 
 
 Life — the ability to see, hear, and feel her — 
 he must retain. He must not jeopardize a second 
 of it. When he shot, it must be from ambush 
 with no traces left. He must await his opportu- 
 nity — perhaps contrive it. 
 
 The opportunity came sooner than he ex- 
 pected and with no contriving. It came one after- 
 noon when in descending the mountain road, his 
 keen nostrils caught a new scent in the still air. 
 It was tobacco smoke, but not of his kind. It was 
 neither plug nor Bull Durham, but something 
 more pungent. He had caught the same spicy 
 aroma once or twice when the summerers were 
 loafing around the post-office waiting for the 
 mail — the men in white flannels and immaculate 
 shirts. It was the kind that only pink-cheeked 
 strangers smoked. 
 
BIG LAUREL 83 
 
 Bud stiffened like a pointing bird dog. He 
 stood so, listening, for almost a full minute. He 
 regulated even his breathing. Then slowly he 
 moved his hand back to his big-calibred revolver 
 until his fingers gripped the handle. The feel of 
 it calmed his twitching muscles. 
 
 A light breeze coming out of the woods on his 
 left, where a branch of the stream which ran by 
 his shack had its source, gave him his direction. 
 He knew every foot of those woods as he did for 
 miles around his place. He knew even the little 
 cove where a man would be likely to stop to rest. 
 
 Carefully Bud moved one foot, looking to see 
 where to rest it, lest a crackling twig give warn- 
 ing. So step by step he made his way among the 
 trees — taking a half-hour to go a few hundred 
 yards. But when, through the branches, he made 
 out clearly the form of Allston sitting on the 
 ground, he felt the time well spent — even though, 
 to his surprise, he discovered that the man was 
 not alone. He saw red for a second as he caught 
 sight of a woman's skirt. Then, as he discerned 
 who the other was, he steadied. There was only 
 one woman in the world who had the power to 
 stay his fingers on the trigger. And that one was 
 not Wilmer Howe. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 For a few moments Bud Childers, safely hidden 
 in the undergrowth, studied Allston as he sat 
 within a few feet of Wilmer Howe in that sunHt 
 cove on the side of Green Mountain. His long, 
 bony fingers grasped firmly the gun with which 
 he meant to kill this man. He had awaited his 
 opportunity and here it was. He would have 
 gambled a hundred to one that no power on earth 
 could swerve him from his purpose, for it was 
 backed by deadly hatred and jealousy and the 
 burning hunger for revenge for the deep humilia- 
 tion he had been made to suffer before the woman 
 he loved. It was possible, from his present strate- 
 gic point, to shoot and vanish. His guilt might be 
 suspected aftersvards, but no one could definitely 
 establish it. There were other men in these 
 mountains besides himself ready enough to shoot 
 at strangers when they wandered loosely among 
 the coves. Too many hidden stills existed here- 
 abouts to make outsiders welcome. 
 
 Bud's face flushed as he watched Allston take 
 leisurely puffs of the Turkish cigarette he held in 
 
BIG LAUREL 85 
 
 his white fingers. And his Hp curled in scorn as 
 he noted the behed Norfolk jacket, the golf trou- 
 sers and long stockings, the shiny, low shoes — 
 all marks to him of effeminacy. But the smooth- 
 shaven face, with its clear pink skin showing 
 through the slight tan, seemed to irritate him 
 more than anything else. His own was dark and 
 tough as leather. So should every man's be who 
 was a man. 
 
 It was to this fellow Bud had seen Roxie cling 
 in the moonlit road. How much she meant by it 
 he did not know, but she had meant enough so 
 that she had turned away from him on the very 
 night he intended to claim her. She had turned 
 away from her own kind to a stranger because of 
 his store clothes and his lily-white fingers and his 
 pink cheeks and his school-taught way of speak- 
 ing. She liked 'um that way. He had taunted 
 her with that and she made no reply. 
 
 Bud raised his gun with care not to disturb as 
 much as a twig. He did not dare wait longer, for 
 the sight of the man and the ugly memories he 
 brought fresh to mind revived the old fever that 
 blinded his eyes and unsteadied his hand. Blood- 
 red anger does not make for sure shooting. And 
 
86 BIG LAUREL 
 
 yet he must not hurry. He could not afford to 
 risk more than one shot and he must not merely 
 wound. To leave Allston crippled would be worse 
 than nothing. That would excite only sympathy 
 without definitely ending the affair. So he took 
 his time. 
 
 Bud's finger muscles had actually begun to 
 press against the heavy trigger, his bead drawn 
 fair on Allston's heart, when he saw something 
 that made him pause. It was a simple act; All- 
 ston suddenly tossed aside his cigarette and seized 
 the girl's hand. Bud could not catch the man's 
 words, but he saw Wilmer Howe spring to her 
 feet. He saw Allston rise beside her. 
 
 Bud still had a good target — an even better 
 target than before. And yet his gun began to 
 lower. This situation interested him. He could 
 catch Allston's w^ords now. 
 
 " Oh, I 'm sorry, Wilmer," he exclaimed. " But 
 your hand was so near." 
 
 Her face was scarlet. 
 
 " I did n't expect that sort of thing from you," 
 she answered, avoiding his eyes. 
 
 "I didn't expect it of myself," he said. "Hon- 
 est, I didn't. I — I lost my head for a moment." 
 
BIG LAUREL 87 
 
 *^That is just what I didn't expect." 
 
 " I can't explain it any further," he confessed. 
 
 " It 's the sort of thing that can't be explained," 
 she replied. 
 
 There was no quaver in her voice — only a note 
 of deep regret. 
 
 "And yet," went on Allston, passing his hand 
 over his eyes — "and yet there was something. 
 It was almost — almost as though I were in dan- 
 ger. Your lingers were near and I seized them. 
 That sounds absurd, does n't it.^ " 
 
 "Yes," she answered steadily, "it does." 
 
 " Perhaps I 'm more used to absurd things than 
 you," he went on with a worried smile. "They 
 were always happening — over there." 
 That sort.^ " she questioned. 
 All sorts. You never knew. You just acted 
 without knowing why." 
 
 " It 's a rather dangerous way, is n't it? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " And it does n't make it easy for a woman to 
 trust a man who — who acts in that way, does 
 it.?" 
 
 " No." 
 
 "Then — perhaps we had best be going.' 
 
 
 » 
 
88 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "I've hurt you as deeply as that?" he ex- 
 claimed. 
 
 She started forward a step. Again Bud raised 
 his gun and covered his man. And yet, even as 
 he did so, he felt that here was a new develop- 
 ment which he ought to consider. If he had time, 
 he would consider it. If this man was sweet on 
 Wilmer Howe, it eliminated him more effectively 
 from Roxie's life than his death would do. And 
 this without the margin of danger that was bound 
 to follow any shooting. 
 
 Allston hurried to her side with a cry that 
 made the girl pause. 
 
 "Wilmer," he said huskily, "Wilmer, if— if 
 you go like this I can never forgive myself. I 've 
 acted like a cad, but you must show that you 
 trust me again." 
 
 "How can I do that.^" 
 
 " Come back and sit down where you were. 
 That's all I ask. Sit here a little while longer 
 with me and then — and then we '11 go back home 
 and I '11 pack my bag." 
 
 She met his eyes at that. 
 
 "You'mean — ?" 
 
 "I 've overstayed in the Garden of Eden — by 
 one day," he answered. 
 
BIG LAUREL 89 
 
 "But dad— what will dad think?" 
 
 " You 're going to make it hard for me to face 
 your father if you leave me with the feeling I Ve 
 abused his generous hospitality." 
 
 " I don't want you to feel like that," she pro- 
 tested. 
 
 "Then — " 
 
 Her face grew even more scarlet as she slowly 
 moved back to the flat rock upon which she had 
 been seated. Allston again took his place at her 
 feet. Again Bud released the grip on his gun. 
 
 There was much here he did not understand; 
 there was something here he did — even better 
 than Allston. It was clear to him that the pink- 
 cheeked fool had some one now in whom he was 
 more interested than in Roxie. If he went to 
 Roxie and told her this — reported how he had 
 seen Allston hold Wilmer Howe's hand and 
 heard him speaking his school-taught talk to her 
 up here alone in the cove — she might change her 
 mind about this stranger. If he knew Roxie she 
 would turn against the man as quickly as she had 
 turned to him. She would hate him with as black 
 a hate as he did. She would see him as he was. 
 
 Bud was not much given to diplomacy nor to 
 
90 BIG LAUREL 
 
 much fine reasoning, but here was a suggestion 
 that appealed to him. It was based first of all 
 upon the idea of self-protection which in turn 
 went back to his newfound zest in life. He wanted 
 to live and he did not mean to take any unneces- 
 sary chances. With everything in his favor, a 
 man who has killed is not in as secure a position 
 as a man who has not killed. There is always the 
 danger that something unforeseen may happen. 
 The officers had rounded up Roge Enfield after 
 he knifed Pete Calhoun in spite of every effort 
 made to protect him. 
 
 Allston might get out of this country at once 
 as he had hinted to Wilmer Howe, or he might 
 stay long enough to marry this woman. He'd be 
 going, anyhow, before winter. And either way 
 he 'd be leaving Roxie forever. He 'd be leaving 
 Roxie just as soon as Bud could get word to her 
 of what he had seen. 
 
 Bud lowered his gun. It was too bad to miss 
 a dead-sure thing like this, but the new plan was 
 worth trying. If it was not as satisfactory in 
 many ways as shooting, it was safer. 
 
 When Bud took his first careful step back 
 through the bushes, it marked a significant stage 
 
BIG LAUREL 91 
 
 in his development. For the first time in his life 
 he had allowed Reason to dictate to passion. His 
 im_pulse still was to kill. In not obeying it he was 
 making a real personal sacrifice. And though 
 fundamentally he was governed by selfish mo- 
 tives — perhaps reason makes for selfishness — he 
 was also allowing the interests of another to play 
 a part in his decision. However indirectly, he 
 was considering Roxie to a degree. If his chief 
 concern was with the happiness she would bring 
 him, he w^as also honestly convinced that it was 
 within his power to bring happiness to her. He 
 was going to allow her to go to the village and buy 
 whatever she wished — calico for dresses, ribbons 
 for her hair, candy and everything. Within a 
 week he had got his eye on another horse that 
 would be good for her to ride. And he was going 
 to wipe his feet whenever he came into the house. 
 And wash his hands if she insisted upon it. All 
 those hopes contributed towards his desire to live 
 — made him willing to give up his desire to kill 
 when this conflicted with those other interests. 
 
 Step by step Bud felt his way back to the road. 
 And then, walking free and easy, undisturbed 
 now by the noise of his firm feet crunching twig 
 
92 BIG LAUREL 
 
 and rock, he returned to his shack on Big Laurel. 
 He went about his farm work whistling. It was 
 something of a relief not to care who heard him. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 For centuries philosophers have attempted to 
 disentangle dreams from reality and to fix definite 
 boundaries between the two. They have not 
 found it easy. It is doubtful whether, even if pos- 
 sible, this would prove worth while except for 
 the satisfaction it would bring the philosophers. 
 Probably when the latter are all done with their 
 grave conclusions people will continue to mix the 
 two agreeably to their own lives. 
 
 If deep-browed academicians have found the 
 task of separation difficult, certainly Roxie Kes- 
 ter cannot be blamed if she did not succeed and 
 so kept right on with her dreaming. Particularly 
 after that wonderful evening when Allston stood 
 by her side like a veritable knight of old. For he 
 had seemed to her then nothing short of magnifi- 
 cent. And yet, unlike most magnificent things in 
 her life — such as story-book heroes and angels 
 and gallant men of whom she read in the papers 
 during the war — not remote. He had been near 
 enough to touch. He had touched her ; had held 
 her hands for a moment. How the stars had swam 
 
94 BIG LAUREL 
 
 before her then ! How close, at that moment, her 
 dreams had seemed to reality. She had been 
 ready to give herself up to them utterly. She had 
 been ready to give herself up to him had he but 
 asked or, not even asking, had taken. A little 
 later, recalling her emotion, she had grown big- 
 eyed, but she did not deny the fact. She had been 
 quite helpless. And she was not ashamed of it. 
 He had fought for her, twice risked his life for 
 her, and she w^as his if he wished. Not that she 
 had any very definite idea of what that meant. 
 Few of her ideas were definite. They were 
 scarcely more than instincts, warning her here 
 and urging her on there, but always proving 
 themselves sound and sweet and true. 
 
 Roxie thought of love as she thought of Heaven 
 — a condition of complete happiness necessarily 
 obscure until actually experienced. It was quite 
 detached from marriage, or marriage, at any rate, 
 as she saw it exemplified in the lives about her. 
 Here it meant housekeeping and scarcely any- 
 thing more than housekeeping. Marriage marked 
 the end of youth ; the beginning of old age. It 
 was a serious, more or less matter-of-fact estate 
 into which women entered, not because they 
 
BIG LAUREL 95 
 
 wished, but because it was inevitable. It was 
 what Bud Childers had proposed for her. It was 
 what, for the time being at any rate, Allston had 
 saved her from. 
 
 Love was something entirely different ; as dif- 
 ferent as poetry from prose; as different as 
 dreams from reality. It even turned prose into 
 poetry and reality into dreams. It glorified every- 
 thing like spring. It made flowers grow beneath 
 her feet; made the birds break forth into song 
 when she walked abroad; it deepened the blue 
 of the sky and burnished the gold of the sun ; it 
 put her in touch ever}^vhere with the beautiful. 
 It even brought out the beauty in her own face 
 and figure. 
 
 Roxie was not vain, although she knew well 
 enough she compared favorably with other girls 
 in the village. But lately, when standing before 
 the mirror while doing her hair for the night, she 
 had looked at herself a little more critically. And 
 with a thrill of pride she had not discovered much 
 with which to find fault. Her light hair was long 
 and silken and responded with an added sheen 
 to the careful combing she now gave it. Her blue 
 eyes stared back at her with a new light which 
 
96 BIG LAUREL 
 
 quickened them. Her skin was clear and though 
 slightly more tanned than Miss Wilmer's had a 
 creamy bloom the latter lacked. Her nose and 
 mouth and chin were not much and yet not badly 
 modeled. Her teeth were large and not as pearly 
 white as Miss Wilmer's, but they were strong 
 and, ever since the teacher at school had taught 
 her to use a toothbrush, had improved. Her body 
 was lithe and firm, but she did not think much 
 about that. Except, she could not help but no- 
 tice, she looked her best when in her long white 
 night-robe which gave her full freedom and re- 
 vealed the fine curves of her neck and her slight, 
 rounded arms. She blushed even as she noted 
 this and was glad enough to blow out her lamp 
 and shelter herself in the dark. 
 
 She awoke every morning as fresh and clear- 
 visioned as the dawn. She awoke with the physi- 
 cal vigor of a young animal ready to frolic and 
 with her eyes wide open. She dressed as quickly 
 as a boy and went down to her tasks with a song 
 in her heart. For she was kindling the morning 
 fire, not for Miss Wilmer, but for Allston. She 
 threw open windows to let in the cool, fragrant 
 new air, not for her mistress, but for him. For 
 
BIG LAUREL 97 
 
 him she started the kettle to boiling and for him 
 mixed her batter for hot bread. This was his 
 house. He was the host and the others guests. 
 
 At odd times he stepped into the kitchen to say 
 Hello. That was something to look forward to 
 and later to remember. She made it a point al- 
 ways to be wearing a clean gingham apron. 
 
 " Do you know," he said to her, dropping in 
 just before supper, " you look as though you 
 grew in the field like the daisies and some one 
 plucked you fresh every day. You sure that is n't 
 true.^ " 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " Flowers are pretty, but they don't last long," 
 she said. 
 
 "And 3^et they are everywhere. They were 
 even in France — on the battle-fields." 
 
 Roxie often carried Allston's thoughts back to 
 those days by suggestions of one kind and an- 
 other. And he never resented this. She never 
 made him feel that he was recalling past events 
 for the entertainment of an outsider. It was 
 more as though she helped him live over again 
 the pleasanter details. She accepted them as he 
 had done at the time, simply and naively. 
 
98 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "But I don't know if it's any stranger to find 
 them in France than in my room every day," he 
 went on with a smile. " How do they get on my 
 table?" 
 
 "I put them there," she answered directly. 
 "Don't you like them? " 
 
 " Very much. It 's mighty kind of you, Roxie. 
 About this time, three years back, there was a 
 lady in France who used to do that for me." 
 
 She looked up quickly. 
 
 "A girl?" she asked. 
 
 "A lady — a very old lady." 
 
 " Oh." 
 
 " But the flowers were young. Flowers are al- 
 ways young, aren't they?*' 
 
 "Until they die." 
 
 " Who knows ? They may be young after that." 
 Maybe," she nodded seriously. 
 How old are you?" 
 
 "Eighteen. How old are you?" 
 
 " Twenty-four." 
 
 " Seems like you was younger." 
 
 " Is that very old, Roxie? " 
 
 " No, sir, that ain't very old," she hastened to 
 assure him, fearing she had offended. "No, sir. 
 
 6( 
 
BIG LAUREL 99 
 
 only seems like I 'd be old when I was twenty- 
 four." 
 
 " I doubt it — if you keep growing in the field. 
 You '11 come up every spring." 
 
 "Seems sometimes like it was spring always." 
 
 "What.?" he questioned. "That sounds as 
 though you were in love." 
 
 Her cheeks flamed scarlet at that. He noticed 
 it before she could turn. He studied her pretty 
 back as she bent her head over her work and the 
 curv^e of her neck where the soft hair grows. 
 
 "Roxie," he said without moving, in a lowered 
 voice, " is love like that? " 
 
 " I dunno," she answered weakly. 
 
 He scarcely heard her reply. His thoughts this 
 time had gone back, not to France, but to a tiny 
 sunlit cove on the mountain-side; to the impul- 
 sive clasp of a warm hand which had left him 
 worried ever since. 
 
 " It might be like that," he said. " That 's what 
 the poets are always singing, isn't it?" 
 
 " I dunno," she repeated. 
 
 He roused himself. 
 
 " I don't know either," he said. " But perhaps 
 some day we may find out — both of us. It sounds 
 reasonable, anyhow." 
 
loo BIG LAUREL 
 
 He went out leaving Roxie alone with her 
 burning thoughts while he reviewed his own. 
 
 It would seem that with all that has been 
 written about love by both philosophers and ro- 
 manticists ; with all the lovers there have been in 
 the world since the world began Vvho have re- 
 corded their experiences in song and story and 
 memoirs ; with all that a man sees and hears of 
 love with his own ears and his own eyes before 
 he has reached twenty, there should be little 
 chance left for speculation on the part of any one. 
 And yet here was Allston, who had read a good 
 bit and had seen a good bit, unable to recognize 
 it either in himself or in others. It was as though 
 he found himself in some newly discovered land 
 about which he must feel his way cautiously lest 
 he lose his direction. It was as though he were 
 upon some untried venture. 
 
 He had, of course, a sentimental notion of 
 what love meant, but this did not seem to the 
 point. It was not that which had made him reach 
 for Wilmer's hand. He had said at the time he 
 could not explain his act, and that was true. His 
 impulse had come from deep within. But stranger 
 than this was the effect this brief contact pro- 
 
BIG LAUREL loi 
 
 duced in him. The effrontery of it, which had at 
 first startled them both, she seemed ready to for- 
 give, and this, in turn, allowed him to forget that 
 crass feature. But this by no means settled the 
 matter. Their relations were not what they had 
 been before. He saw this in her eyes suddenly 
 grown timid; he felt it in his own changed atti- 
 tude when with her. 
 
 She had become, he would have said, more hu- 
 man. Until now she had been no more than an 
 intellectual pastime, like a pleasant and not too 
 baffling problem in chess. He had enjoyed mov- 
 ing this way and that in order to see how she 
 would respond. When he made her smile, he felt 
 that he had scored Check, although more often 
 than not she moved easily out of danger. This 
 seemed like an amusing and safe diversion for 
 them both. With nothing at stake it mattered 
 little who won. 
 
 But the touch of her warm fingers — brief as it 
 was — had proved her of flesh and blood. It 
 seemed strange after this that he had ever 
 doubted it. On the walk home from the cove that 
 late afternoon he was conscious of it every min- 
 ute. He saw her try to resume the old game at 
 the point where it had been so rudely interrupted 
 
I02 BIG LAUREL 
 
 and saw her fail, though he did his best to help 
 her. He himself tried and failed. For long inter- 
 vals they walked in silence — a dangerous silence. 
 
 That evening she came down to supper light- 
 heartedly enough and in a pretty new gown. 
 For the first time since his stay here Allston 
 could have told with some detail just what she 
 wore. It was a light, gauzy thing of a bluish tint 
 with rosebuds peeping out from the skirt be- 
 neath. Her hair was done high and fastened with 
 a large tortoise-shell comb. The walk had so 
 crimsoned her cheeks that her father noticed it. 
 
 "You're looking very fine to-night," he said. 
 
 "Thank you, dad," she answered. 
 
 Allston wished to add his testimony, but when 
 he met her brown eyes he decided not to venture. 
 But at that he honestly did think she looked very 
 fine. 
 
 Howe appeared troubled with Allston's lack of 
 success in the neighboring streams. He had rec- 
 ommended them — on hearsay evidence, to be 
 sure — and held himself more or less responsible. 
 
 " It 's odd you don't have better luck," he said 
 at supper. " I 've always understood the fishing 
 around here was excellent — particularly for 
 bass." 
 
BIG LAUREL 103 
 
 " It is," answered Allston. " But I Ve been 
 
 fishing for trout." 
 
 " Well, it seems as though you ought to get a 
 trout occasionally." 
 
 " I 'm afraid it 's been my fault," broke in 
 Wilmer. " I think Mr. Allston will have to try 
 his luck alone for a while." 
 
 " I might get more fish," admitted Allston. 
 " But I would n't have as much pleasure." 
 
 "Trout are wary," said Howe. 
 
 "As wary as smiles," admitted Allston. 
 . " I did more or less fishing when a boy," ran on 
 Howe. "The streams were better stocked then." 
 
 " But the woods were not any sweeter nor the 
 sun any brighter," suggested Allston. "And that 
 after all is what counts. I haven't a complaint 
 to make — unless it is of to-day." 
 
 "Why of to-day .f*" questioned Howe. 
 
 " I did n't give enough attention to my 
 fishing." 
 
 "And lost a big one? They always bite best 
 when vour head is turned." 
 
 "My head was turned," replied Allston, look- 
 ing across the table at Wilmer. She was very 
 busy at that moment pouring tea. 
 
I04 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "You will have sugar to-night?" 
 
 " All you '11 give me." 
 
 " That 's too bad," Howe consoled him. " I 
 hope you '11 have better luck next time." 
 
 " I shall certainly try to keep my head another 
 time," declared Allston. 
 
 It was not easy, however, even for the remain- 
 der of that evening. He had never before minded 
 the presence of her father, but from this point on 
 he found himself contriving all sorts of little sub- 
 terfuges for isolating her. She managed to foil 
 them all without permitting him to know whether 
 it was deliberate or not. To-night she consumed 
 at least two hours in reading the New Orleans 
 papers until he heartily wished that New Orleans 
 could be blotted from the map. And yet, had it 
 not been for the papers and those droning market 
 quotations on sugar, the chances are that Howe 
 would not have impolitely closed his dear old 
 eyes and gone off peacefully to sleep. The girl 
 herself did not notice until Allston rose and 
 touched her shoulder, pointing at the dozing 
 figure. 
 
 "Let's go out on the porch," he whispered. 
 " We must n't disturb him." 
 
BIG LAUREL 105 
 
 She hesitated — evidently uneasy. 
 
 "You don't want to wake him, do you? You 
 know he hasn't been sleeping very well lately." 
 
 Which was true enough. 
 
 Reluctantly she rose and yet with a curious 
 sort of reluctance too; a reluctance that ex- 
 pressed iftself in a choking kind of eagerness. 
 Out there he faced her in the light of a waning 
 moon. 
 
 "You didn't mean what you said about letting 
 me fish alone?" he demanded. 
 
 "It — it might be best," she answered. 
 
 " It would be like sending me into exile, and 
 you don't want to do that, do you ? " 
 
 " I don't know," she answered with almost the 
 bewilderment of a child. "Oh, I don't know 
 anything." 
 
 It was strange that her phrase should have re- 
 called to him the half-heard phrase Roxie had 
 used. The latter had said, " I dunno " in answer 
 to the question he had asked, carelessly enough, 
 of her. 
 
 "Everything seems to be getting down to 
 that," he muttered. " I don't know very much 
 myself." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 It was not often that Wilmer remained long 
 awake after retiring to her room. Her days came 
 to a calm and untroubled close with the first 
 approach of drowsiness. The problems which 
 claimed her attention were either of that minor 
 daylight character familiar to all housekeepers 
 or else of so purely an academic nature — being 
 largely those offered by the younger British nov- 
 elists — that they were as easily laid aside at 
 night as her walking boots. 
 
 But this evening, instead of hurr}ang into bed 
 after blowing out her light, she slipped on a 
 dainty negligee and sat by the open window. She 
 enjoyed the feel of the fresh night breeze on her 
 white forehead and w^arm face. The moon had 
 already lost one section of its brilliant circumfer- 
 ence, but enough was left to bathe in a translu- 
 cent glow the encircling hills which shut in the 
 sleeping valley covered now with a silver veil. A 
 cluster of chestnut-oaks stood below her window 
 slightly to the left of the porch. Fleeting bits of 
 light sifted through the luxuriant foliage like 
 
BIG LAUREL 107 
 
 drops of silver rain. The scene before her eyes 
 was both clear and vague ; many bits easily recog- 
 nizable, but the rest complicated with full-bodied 
 shadows. She knew every inch of it, and yet it 
 was veiled in mystery. Knowing there was noth- 
 ing to fear, still she would have been afraid to 
 walk abroad alone. She would not trust her in- 
 telligence to keep in leash her imagination. And 
 yet if her intellect could not do that for her, it 
 was serving her ill. 
 
 It was — in other ways. Reason should have 
 told her she was making too much of the incident 
 of the afternoon. To treat that seriously was to 
 make too much of Allston himself. And this was 
 dangerous. It destroyed perspective and cloaked 
 the man in mystery — as the night light did the 
 familiar acres and trees before her. This left her 
 the prey to all sorts of illusions — to all sorts of 
 unwarranted timidities. It took her back to 
 childhood and virginal ignorance. This, after her 
 reading had turned the searchlight upon one 
 shadow after another revealing the stark truth. 
 
 The stark truth was sometimes unpleasant; 
 sometimes tediously innocuous. Never was it ro- 
 mantic. Most men, it seems, were the slaves of 
 
io8 BIG LAUREL 
 
 fleeting passions; most women, their victims. 
 This ended sometimes in tragedy; sometimes in 
 comedy; sometimes in nothing at all. The great- 
 est tragedy to her was when it ended in nothing 
 at all. She had an orderly mind and liked to 
 reach definite conclusions. She found vagueness 
 depressing. 
 
 Yet that appeared to be the spirit of the day. 
 No one knew an>i:hing with certainty whether 
 of politics or religion or human nature. She her- 
 self had clung persistently to most of the doc- 
 trines of her father In politics and religion, and 
 found them adequate. But she could not accept 
 his trusting confidence In the inherent honesty of 
 men, except those of his generation. The world 
 was simpler In his day. 
 
 She had liked Allston from the start and been 
 willing to accept him, up to a certain point, at his 
 face value. She never expected to go beyond that 
 point. As long as she viewed him merely objec- 
 tively, she found him distinctly entertaining and 
 a decided addition to her list of friends. Consid- 
 ering the circumstances of his introduction to the 
 household, she was warranted in believing that 
 here their relations would end. It was on this 
 
BIG LAUREL 109 
 
 theory she had allowed herself so much freedom 
 with him. 
 
 Now this was all changed. He had thrust him- 
 self upon her attention in another fashion. When 
 he seized her hand, the act, in itself, was 
 trivial enough, as he had argued. But what it 
 connoted was not trivial. And the effect it pro- 
 duced on her was not trivial. The blood which 
 rushed to her face was not in protest at his bold- 
 ness, even though for self-protection she had been 
 obliged to make him think so. In reality it was a 
 startling confession of weakness in herself. Had 
 she been coldly indifferent or even righteously in- 
 dignant, she could have forgotten the incident. 
 But she could not forget the surge of a far differ- 
 ent emotion that had swept through her. 
 
 She had handled herself well considering the 
 strength and unexpectedness of this attack. The 
 carefully erected barriers of years had been swept 
 away. She had found herself standing, self- 
 dependent, facing this man in the grip of a pas- 
 sion so primitive it shocked her. She had been 
 thrilled by the clasp of his strong fingers. For a 
 few dizzy seconds she was merely some captured 
 thing glad of her capture. Had she obeyed her 
 
no BIG LAUREL 
 
 desires, she would not have struggled at all — 
 would neither have withdrawn her hand nor 
 chided him. 
 
 Wilmer faced the truth mercilessly. She made 
 no attempt to equivocate or to excuse herself, 
 though even here in the privacy of her room her 
 cheeks flamed scarlet once again. She had been 
 governed by instincts as primitive as anything 
 she might expect of Roxie and she knew it. To 
 be sure, she had conquered them. In the space of 
 half a dozen frantic heartbeats she had mastered 
 herself. But this did not blot out those other few 
 seconds. 
 
 And now to explain it — and she must explain 
 it to maintain her self-respect — she was driven 
 to the use of the word love ; the word she prided 
 herself on being able to regard with almost cyni- 
 cal scorn. It was not like this that she had ex- 
 pected love to come, if ever it did come into her 
 life. If she was not yet twenty-live, she was no 
 longer seventeen. She was supposed to be suffi- 
 ciently well disciplined to analyze even this pas- 
 sion intelligently. If not, all her reading and 
 thought were to little purpose. The first appeal 
 of a lover to her should be through intellect and 
 character, not through the emotions. 
 
BIG LAUREL iii 
 
 It was some consolation to be able to admit 
 that she could offer no criticism of Allston's char- 
 acter as far as it had been revealed to her. As for 
 his intellect, if it was not as acutely active as her 
 ideal called for, it was by no means negative. 
 She might have been satisfied with it — if only it 
 mattered. But it did not. 
 
 She had not this afternoon, and she did not 
 now, care a picayune about his intellect. It was 
 the beat of his pulse against her hand which had 
 swayed her. It was the feel of being in his posses- 
 sion that had taken away her breath. It was the 
 magic of his eyes seeking her eyes with an in- 
 sistence almost brutal which had swept her off 
 her feet. 
 
 It was all those things which at this moment 
 brought into her eyes something of the mystery 
 which the moon brought to the familiar picture 
 at which in awe she now gazed from her window. 
 Her lips parted and she pronounced his name — 
 using quite unconsciously, because it expressed a 
 tenderness her mood demanded, a nickname she 
 associated with a brother who had died very 
 young. 
 
 " Ned," she repeated to herself. 
 
1 1 a BIG LAUREL 
 
 The sound of the whispered name brought the 
 man into such vivid being that it was as though 
 he stood beside her. She shrank away from the 
 window. She stared about the room in fear lest 
 her boldness had actually materialized him. 
 Hurriedly she threw off her negligee and running 
 to the bed hid herself beneath the sheets. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 A RAIN lasting three days delayed Bud Childers. 
 But with the cards he now held he could afford 
 to wait. Moreover, he found himself interested 
 in a new occupation. He could use this time to 
 advantage in preparing the shack for his prospec- 
 tive bride. 
 
 It is doubtful if any woman in the world save 
 Roxie could have roused in him such an ambi- 
 tion. This log house, substantially as it stood 
 to-day, had been adequate for him, for his father, 
 for his father's father, and all the women who in- 
 cidentally had lived here. He was ready to main- 
 tain that it was good enough for any one — except 
 Roxie. It was essentially good enough for her. 
 But living with the Howes had made her fussy. 
 And she was a little different, anyway. She liked 
 purty things and clean things. 
 
 The building was a one-story affair made of 
 hewn trees with the bark on. In the course 
 of time much of this had fallen off leaving the 
 bare wood now weatherbeaten, showing a dull 
 grayish brown. A flimsy porch stood before it, 
 
114 BIG LAUREL 
 
 the roof supported by posts of young chestnut- 
 oaks. A board door opened into the main living- 
 room. This was finished roughly with planed 
 boards, but made rather attractive by a stone fire- 
 place blackened by the smoke from countless fires. 
 Here Bud did most of his cooking, though a room 
 in the rear was intended to be a kitchen. Near the 
 dog-irons stood a black tin coffee-pot, and on the 
 mantel above were various earthen crocks which 
 had served as cooking-utensils for three genera- 
 tions. A few cane-bottomed straight-back chairs, 
 a table covered with cracked oilcloth, a small 
 stove in the corner, the pipe braced with rusted 
 wires, a rifle and a long-barreled shotgun fas- 
 tened to the walls, a lithograph torn from an old 
 patent-medicine calendar representing dimly an 
 elderly couple peacefully paring fruit, were the 
 only furnishings. On the wall to the right of the 
 fireplace two doors indicated a cupboard. To the 
 rear, back of this room, was the bedroom contain- 
 ing a four-poster rope bed covered with some- 
 what frayed and none too clean crazy-quilts 
 above gray blankets. Outside, to the left, and 
 sheltered by the eaves stood the spring-house 
 supplied with the clearest of mountain water. 
 
BIG LAUREL 115 
 
 Bud's original idea was merely to sweep, but 
 having done that much he went a little farther 
 and applied hot water and soap to the floors, the 
 furniture, and finally to the odds and ends of 
 dishes. This not only filled in the spare time left 
 from his farm duties, but it satisfied a newly de- 
 veloped craving. He was not doing this for him- 
 self. He was doing it for Roxie. In a way he was 
 being of service to her. He was relieving her 
 pretty hands from drudgery. But in so doing he 
 was submitting to a standard which seemed to 
 him like damned foolishness — as far as he 
 alone was concerned — and swallowing a goodly 
 amount of stubborn pride. This involved self- 
 sacrifice. He was doing it, moreover, for another. 
 This involved a conception of unselfishness. Bud 
 had never been noted for either quality. 
 
 And yet he took a tremendous satisfaction in 
 his efforts. The task proved so congenial that he 
 carried it far beyond his first intention. On the 
 second day he mounted his mare in the rain and 
 posted to the village store. His idea was to buy 
 new oilcloth for the table and a fresh coffee-pot. 
 Before he was done he had included towels, 
 blankets, a cake of scented soap, and a supply of 
 tinned goods. 
 
ii6 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "Looks like you meant to git married," sug- 
 gested Ed Bingham, the storekeeper. 
 
 "None o' yo' damned business if I am, is it? " 
 frowned Bud. 
 
 " No-o," drawled Bingham with an instant de- 
 sire to conciliate. " No-o, it ain't." 
 
 " Then fergit it," snapped Bud. 
 
 If Ed Bingham found this difficult under the 
 circumstances, he managed to give his face the 
 proper expression for registering forgetfulness 
 as long as Bud remained in the store and that 
 sufficed. He had his opportunity to express as 
 freely as he wished his real opinions after Bud 
 cantered off. He made the most of that. As far as 
 Bud was concerned, he might, and be hanged. 
 What was spoken to his face was one thing ; what 
 was spoken behind his back another and rela- 
 tively unimportant matter. 
 
 Bud returned to his shack through the pouring 
 rain, carefully protecting his purchases beneath 
 a rubber poncho. Never had he minded less a 
 wet ride, for the little mare's hoofs sang him a 
 song all the way — a simple song with not much 
 variety, but, to his ears, good to hear. It was 
 merely this : 
 
BIG LAUREL 117 
 
 "Roxie, Roxie, Roxie." 
 
 It ran through his head all the remainder of 
 that day and mixed itself with his restless dreams. 
 It roused him at dawn and was echoed in the 
 twitter of the morning birds greeting so joy- 
 ously the clear sky. He rose at once with the real- 
 ization that this morning had a significance of its 
 own; it was the last he would have to face by 
 himself. To-night he was to find Roxie and fetch 
 her up here. That made it seem almost as though 
 she were here now. He washed with considerable 
 attention to details and slicked down his black 
 hair until it lay plastered to his head. 
 
 Bud was confident. That was characteristic 
 of his attitude towards any personal venture he 
 undertook alone. It was doubly true of this one 
 in which he was prepared to risk all in order to 
 gain all. He saw no obstacles in his path; could 
 conceive of none which might stop him. His plan 
 was well outlined and simple; he would ride to 
 the Howe shack after dark and leave his horse in 
 the road just below. Then he would circle the 
 house and post himself near the kitchen door in 
 the rear. There he would wait his chance to see 
 Roxie alone. He would not need over five min- 
 
ii8 BIG LAUREL 
 
 utes with her because this time he held all the 
 cards. When he was done, she would follow him. 
 No fear about that. She might come like a colt 
 for the first time in halter, but she would come. 
 It mattered little what her temper was at the 
 start. She would tame. 
 
 Towards dusk Bud went through the shack 
 once again and put everything in order. Then he 
 took out his gun and examined it to make sure 
 each chamber was loaded. Finally he piled up 
 fresh wood and kindling beside the fireplace in 
 order to have everything ready for a quick blaze. 
 On the table he placed a kerosene lamp and 
 matches. At half-past seven he closed and locked 
 his door and went to the barn for his mare. 
 
 It was dark when Bud reached the valley, but 
 he took the rest of the road on a gallop. There 
 were those who later said they remembered 
 hearing him pass. 
 
 "Thought it must be some one after the 
 doctor," said one. 
 
 Another thought it was some one loaded with 
 moonshine whiskey. All were glad enough that 
 the mysterious night rider in such a hurry went 
 by without stopping. 
 
 Bud picketed the mare in the woods just off 
 
BIG LAUREL 119 
 
 the road, not a hundred yards from the spot 
 where Allston a few weeks before had been 
 brought to such an abrupt and unexpected halt. 
 Had Bud been interested he might have seen the 
 tree still showing the scars made by Allston's ma- 
 chine. But that would have been to stir him up 
 unnecessarily. 
 
 Bud trusted to the dark to keep him concealed 
 halfway up the serpentine drive leading to the 
 lighted bungalow, but when within reach of the 
 light cutting a path over the grass, he swerved to 
 the left and made a wide half-circle. From this 
 point he worked his way more cautiously towards 
 the kitchen. The door was open and through it 
 he caught occasional glimpses of a figure flitting 
 back and forth. It was Roxie. His heart, had he 
 been blind, would have told him that. The sight 
 spurred him on — made him resent caution. In 
 another dozen paces he was at the door. 
 
 Roxie felt his presence before she saw him. She 
 was hanging near the stove her wet dishcloths. 
 Her back was towards him when suddenly she 
 swung. At sight of him she stood transfixed. In 
 that interval he crossed the room and seized an 
 arm. 
 
 "I gut suthin' to tell yuh," he said. 
 
I20 BIG LAUREL 
 
 As she shrank away he added in a lower, tenser 
 tone : 
 
 " I 'm goneter tell yuh suthin'. " 
 
 She saw then that in his other hand he held his 
 gun. It made her afraid — but not for herself. 
 
 "What's the matter, Bud?" she asked aim- 
 lessly. 
 
 " Come out hyar an' I '11 tell yuh." 
 
 She grew suddenly cold. She shook as with the 
 ague. Yet she followed where he led — away from 
 the house across the fields until their voices could 
 not be heard. 
 
 " That pink-cheeked fren' o' yourn — I seen 
 him t'other day." 
 
 "Mr. Allston.?" she trembled. 
 
 " Ef thet 's his name. I seen him in the woods 
 a-makin' up to Miss Wilmer." 
 
 Whatever Roxie had expected, it was no such 
 line of attack as this. She stiffened. 
 
 "Yer He," she choked. 
 
 " I seen him in the cove a-holdin' her hand, 
 he went on, quite undisturbed. 
 
 "Yer lie. Bud Childers. Yer lie in your throat, 
 she panted. 
 
 "I swear to Gawd I seen him — a-holdin' her 
 hand." 
 
 » 
 
 ?> 
 
BIG LAUREL 121 
 
 " What was you doin' there ? " she demanded, 
 struggling hard against a new emotion that 
 gripped her throat like a strangler's hold. 
 
 " What was I doin' thar ? " he repeated slowly. 
 "What was I doin' thar.? I was passin' by." 
 
 That was all he said, but from his voice she 
 knew. With a spasmodic shudder she drew back 
 a step. He followed instantly, bending closer to 
 her ear. 
 
 " I was passin' by like I 'm passin' by here," 
 he said. " But I ain't used to passin' by." 
 
 She made no reply. What he said was true. She 
 turned towards the house. He seized her arm 
 again. 
 
 " I left him for Miss Wilmer," he said hoarsely. 
 "She can have the damned honey-lapper an' 
 welcome. But you — I want you myself." 
 
 "Bud," she pleaded, her breath coming in 
 gasps. 
 
 "I want you to-night — now. The mare Is 
 waitin'. I 'm waitin'. But we cain't wait long." 
 
 "What you sayin'?" 
 
 " I love yer, Roxie. I 've fixed the house all up 
 purty fer yer." 
 
 "Forme?" 
 
122 BIG LAUREL 
 
 His cheeks were burning with eagerness now. 
 Roughly he pressed closer. 
 
 " You talk like we was married ! " she ex- 
 claimed. 
 
 " To-morrer 's time 'nuflF for that. But I wanter 
 make sure of you to-night." 
 
 All the fighting instinct in her flared up — the 
 fighting instinct based upon her pride of woman- 
 hood. Like a fury she turned on the man. 
 
 "I'd die afore I went with you, Bud Child- 
 ers ! " she exploded. 
 
 " But yo '11 come," he said. " Yo '11 come." 
 
 " Go 'way ! Go 'way ! " 
 
 "I won't go away — without'n you. 'Cause if 
 I do — s'help me Gawd I '11 get yo' pink-cheeked 
 fren' fust." 
 
 If the girl had been struck between the eyes, 
 she could have been no more dazed. A blow 
 would have left her less dazed because then she 
 might not have been able to think. She could 
 think now. Her thoughts ran like flames through 
 dry grass. And like wild flames first in this direc- 
 tion and then that. There was so much in her 
 poor little head that was inflammable! 
 
 Miss Wilmer and the Prince — a-holdin' hands ! 
 
BIG LAUREL 123 
 
 It was a lie! Wouldn't she have known, living 
 right here with them, if Miss Wilmer or Mr. 
 Allston — but another burning thought cut in 
 and enveloped this one. They did not know about 
 her — neither of them — then why should she 
 know about them ? Love might be a hidden thing, 
 like gold in the ground. 
 
 It was a lie — and yet something must have 
 held Bud back when he had this man so at his 
 mercy. It was a lie, and yet not the sort of lie 
 Bud would make up. Bud could lie on occasion 
 — he had lied that night he said her mother was 
 sick — but he was not lying now. 
 
 Silently the tall, lean figure stood beside her 
 in the dark awaiting her decision. She turned as 
 though in hope of detecting in him some slight 
 evidence of weakness. She could not see his face, 
 but that was not essential. She felt the set of his 
 thin mouth. He was grimly in earnest. He meant 
 every word he said both about Allston and about 
 herself. He had spoken of love — of love for her. 
 Here was something to catch at. If he was 
 honest about that, he could not be all bad. 
 
 But before she could reason very far along this 
 line, she heard some one calling from the house. 
 
124 BIG LAUREL 
 
 It was Allston who had come into the kitchen. 
 
 Bud turned in a flash with half-raised gun. 
 Allston stood framed in the doorway — an easy 
 mark. With a desperate cry Roxie threw herself 
 in front of Childers. 
 
 " I '11 go, Bud," she whimpered. " I '11 go,' 
 
 99 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 RoxiE made one request of Bud Childers. 
 
 "You'll let me go back ter the house and git 
 some things, Bud? " 
 
 If any one else, under these circumstances, had 
 suggested this, he would have grown instantly 
 suspicious. Even now he hesitated. 
 
 "I — I '11 tell 'um I 'm goin' ter bed an' then 
 they won't hunt fer me," she added quickly. 
 
 "I reckon you'll come back," he decided, 
 " 'cause ef yo' don' — " 
 
 " I promise," she whispered. 
 
 "I'll take yer promise," he said. "Ef you'll 
 cross yer throat." 
 
 She crossed her throat. 
 
 " Then I '11 wait hyar half an hour. Thet long 
 nuff?" 
 
 There was a trace of consideration in the 
 question. 
 
 "Yes, Bud," she answered. 
 
 She flew across the grass as Allston called 
 again. She came to the house quite out of breath. 
 
 " Where in the world have you been ? " de- 
 manded Allston. 
 
126 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "Jest out in the field," she answered. 
 
 " Queer," he muttered. " I was sitting there by 
 the fire and all of a sudden I got worried about 
 you. Star-gazing.^" 
 
 She moved away from the open door and closed 
 it. But there were two windows through which 
 they could be seen. 
 
 " I 'm all done hyar," she said. " Guess I '11 
 blow out the light." 
 
 She waited for him to go back to the sitting- 
 room. He did not move. 
 
 " I 'm all done hyar," she repeated. 
 
 " Well .? " 
 
 " I 'm goin' ter blow out the light now." 
 
 "Then blow it out." 
 
 She crossed to the table and blew down the 
 chimney. It was necessary to blow twice. Then 
 she made for the stairs that opened from the 
 kitchen to the rear room she occupied. 
 
 " Roxie," he called in the dark. 
 
 " I 'm all done hyar. I 'm goin' ter bed now," 
 she answered. 
 
 " Just a minute." 
 
 She heard his feet moving towards her and 
 would have run had she dared. But to do so 
 
BIG LAUREL 127 
 
 would only excite suspicion and that was the one 
 thing she must avoid. His life, on as small an 
 issue as this, was at stake. She heard him shuffle 
 nearer and nearer and flattened herself against 
 the wall. 
 
 " Roxie," he said. ** You sure you 're all right? " 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "I don't believe much in hunches, but — over 
 there I used to have them and pretty nearly al- 
 ways they were worth following." 
 
 He was at her side now. He put out his hand. 
 It touched her shoulder. 
 
 " I had a hunch about you to-night." 
 
 "Ye-es, sir." 
 
 " I did n't know but what Bud Childers was 
 snooping 'round." 
 
 She did not answer. 
 
 " Keep away from him, Roxie. If he bothers 
 you, let me know." 
 
 " I 'm goin' ter bed now," she repeated. 
 
 " All right, little girl. Good-night." 
 
 He dropped his warm hand from her shoulder. 
 She felt as though it must have left a red mark 
 there. 
 
 "Good-night," she stammered. 
 
128 BIG LAUREL 
 
 He left her side and made his way across the 
 dark room to the door into the sitting-room. 
 He opened it and in the full light she saw him 
 framed. 
 
 It was a lie about Miss Wilmer. Her mouth 
 half opened to call him back. If she told him 
 everything, of how Bud had come to carry her 
 off and was waiting out there, he could get his 
 own gun and fight him off. There was still time. 
 Even now he turned back as though expecting 
 to hear her voice. Clenching her two iists she 
 closed her lips tight. She had given her word and 
 crossed her throat and even in a fair fight there 
 would always be danger. 
 
 The door closed behind him. The room was in 
 utter darkness again. Roxie, her hot eyes filling, 
 fumbled her way up the stairs and into her attic 
 chamber. She lighted her lamp and began to roll 
 up a few things into a bundle; stockings, shoes, 
 a nightgown — anything she happened to see. 
 This gave a definiteness to Bud's proposal that 
 terrified her anew. He was going to take her up 
 there before she was married. To-morrow, he 
 had said, they would go to the minister's — but 
 what of to-night? She grew hot and cold. She 
 
BIG LAUREL 129 
 
 rose from the bureau drawer in which she was 
 fumbling and stood upright — an animal about 
 to spring. At sight of herself in the mirror, she 
 grew flaming red with shame. She blew out the 
 lamp and, crumbling, knelt by her bed as she 
 did every night. She said her prayer — the only 
 one she knew: 
 
 "Now I lay me down to sleep, 
 I pray the Lord my soul to keep; 
 If I should die before I wake, 
 I pray the Lord my soul to take.'* 
 
 She had known this from childhood and it had 
 always brought her comfort. But it was not ade- 
 quate for now. In superstitious awe of what she 
 was doing — half fearing it was blasphemy — she 
 added a line of her own: 
 
 "Lord! Lord, please to let me die afore I 
 wake." 
 
 If at that moment she had felt herself suddenly 
 swooning off into death, she would not have been 
 greatly surprised. She waited a minute expect- 
 antly, but nothing happened. It was life she must 
 face, not death. 
 
 Suddenly — as though in answer to her prayer 
 — she thought of a long, steel-bladed knife she 
 used in the kitchen. She could take that with her. 
 
I30 BIG LAUREL 
 
 It would give her something to fight through this 
 night with. It would save her until to-morrow, 
 and that was all she asked. 
 
 It would save her to herself, but not to the 
 world. She realized that. No one would believe, 
 with the opportunity for escape she now had, 
 she went with Bud other than voluntarily. Her 
 mother would not believe ; the Mission would not 
 believe; Miss Wilmer would not believe — be- 
 cause never, never, never could she tell why she 
 did this thing. 
 
 Mr. Allston himself might not believe. He had 
 warned her; had offered his protection. If, in the 
 face of that, she went, he must think it was 
 because she chose to go. 
 
 "Lord," she repeated, "dear, good, kind Lord 
 — please to take my soul right away. I wanter 
 be good, Lord. Please to take it." 
 
 If poignant earnestness can wing a prayer 
 straight to God, that prayer sped like an arrow. 
 And yet if He heard, He gave no evidence of it. 
 Roxie breathed on, her white, girlish bosom heav- 
 ing. The knife would save her to herself, but not 
 to the others. 
 
 Weak-kneed and dazed, she rose to her feet 
 
BIG LAUREL 131 
 
 again. Time was passing and Bud was waiting. 
 She had promised to be back in half an hour and 
 the period of grace might have passed already. 
 In the grip of a new fear akin to panic, she re- 
 lighted her lamp. God was going to make her go. 
 
 It was curious how easily she swung in her 
 thoughts from God to Allston. From this point 
 it was upon him that she concentrated. In this 
 mood she conceived a new idea. It might be that 
 he would have another of those queer notions he 
 called "hunches" and come up here to see if she 
 was asleep. She must protect him against that 
 possibility. To throw him off his guard she must 
 write a note and leave it on her pillow. 
 
 She found the stub of a pencil and a bit of 
 paper. She wrote impulsively and with little 
 thought of what she was writing except the ob- 
 ject to be obtained. Her letters were big and 
 scrawly and many of her words mis-spelled. 
 
 Deer sir [she wrote]. I *m goln off tonlte and not comin 
 back. You will no why sum day. I am allrlte. Plese 
 dont hunt for me. You have been orful good to me an with 
 meny thanks I am your frend 
 
 RoxiE Kester 
 
 If he did not find this to-night some one would 
 find it in the morning. It would explain to 
 
132 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Allston why his hot muffins were not ready. 
 When Roxie rose from the table she looked all 
 about the room to make sure no one saw her. 
 As an extra precaution she blew out the light. 
 Then she pressed the note to her lips over the 
 words " Deer sir," and kissed them again and 
 again — wildly, passionately, sobbingly. 
 
 A moment later she pawed around in the dark 
 for her half-made-up bundle, placed it under her 
 arm, and stole down the kitchen stairs. Every 
 time they creaked she paused and held her 
 breath, though she knew the half-hour must be 
 almost spent. Reaching the bottom she tiptoed 
 to the kitchen table and felt around in the drawer 
 until she found her knife. She concealed this in 
 the bundle. 
 
 From the next room came the sound of voices ; 
 first Miss Wilmer's voice; then Allston's voice; 
 then Miss Wilmer's voice, and finally a hearty 
 laugh from Allston. She closed her eyes as 
 though to shut out the picture this called up. 
 
 "It's a lie," she said to herself. 
 
 She went on out the door and across the grass. 
 Bud was waiting. Detaching himself from the 
 dark he hurried forward to meet her. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 Allston talked rather more than usual that 
 evening and he laughed often. But he was 
 strangely restless. At least a half-dozen times he 
 rose abruptly from his chair and walked about 
 the room, picking up a book only to drop it, mov- 
 ing to the window only to turn away, lighting a 
 cigarette only to toss it into the fire after a few 
 puffs. 
 
 For an hour or more Wilmer noted his uneasi- 
 ness without comment, but finally laughingly 
 referred to it. 
 
 " If you were a woman I 'd say you had the 
 fidgets," she declared. 
 
 "No — it isn't that," he answered. "My nerves 
 are steady enough." 
 
 " Then why don't you sit still ? " 
 
 "I give it up," he smiled. 
 
 "It's that Bud Childers," broke in Howe. 
 " He 's getting on my nerves too." 
 
 Wilmer glanced up and shot a quick question 
 at her father. 
 
134 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "You've heard something, then, that you 
 haven't told me? " 
 
 " No," returned Howe. 
 
 "You've seen him?" 
 
 " No. I 've neither seen nor heard of him for 
 two or three days. I 'd feel better if I had." 
 
 Wilmer turned to Allston with an uneasy feel- 
 ing that something was being concealed by one of 
 the men. 
 
 "Nor I," Allston assured her. "And I don't 
 expect either to see or hear of him again. I have 
 a notion his bark is worse than his bite." 
 
 Howe shook his head. 
 
 " I 'm not so sure of that. Those men nourish 
 a grudge for years. That's how feuds are bred." 
 
 " It is n't Childers who is bothering me," 
 asserted Allston. " If I were obliged to describe 
 my restlessness I 'd have to turn to the spook 
 world and I 'm not very keen about that sort of 
 thing." 
 
 He sat down again in his chair before the fire, 
 between Howe and his daughter. The latter 
 studied him a moment with amused interest. 
 
 " Somehow you 're not the kind of man I 'd 
 suspect of being susceptible to spirits," she said. 
 
BIG LAUREL 135 
 
 He had rather avoided her eyes this evening. 
 He had found them increasingly dangerous. He 
 would have said that in the last few days they 
 had mellowed and deepened. They were still like 
 pools reflecting the brown of autumn foliage and 
 he was still tempted to fish in them for smiles. 
 But he could not forget what he had caught there 
 once. 
 
 "Why do you single out me? " he asked. 
 
 "Because your feet are so solidly on the 
 ground." 
 
 " I 'm of the earth earthy? " 
 
 She frowned. 
 
 " Please don't misinterpret." 
 
 " I don't mean to, but is n't that what you 
 said?" 
 
 She shrugged her pretty shoulders. 
 
 "I intended rather a compliment, but if you 
 won't have it — " 
 
 " I '11 accept all the crumbs of that kind you 
 toss me," he interrupted. 
 
 " If you two are beginning another quarrel, 
 I 'm going upstairs," protested Howe good- 
 naturedly. 
 
 He may have dozed a good deal in their com- 
 
136 BIG LAUREL 
 
 pany off and on, but it is surprising what a man 
 of his age can pick up even when half asleep. He 
 was sure of nothing yet, but his suspicions were 
 aroused and he was not at all displeased with 
 them. He had never met a young man who with 
 so little effort had so thoroughly worked his way 
 into his good graces. He had never met a young 
 man whom he so thoroughly trusted. He proved 
 that in his willingness to leave Allston so much 
 alone with his daughter. He had not lived sixty- 
 five years for nothing, and would have been quick 
 enough to foil any development of this sort of 
 which he did not approve. 
 
 As a matter of fact Howe for the last year or 
 two had been more or less worried about Wil- 
 mer's future. Not financially, for he had means 
 enough to assure her of independence in that 
 direction. But he did not believe in that kind of 
 independence for a woman. Marriage to him was 
 the wholesome and natural estate of woman- 
 hood. He had been conscious of a growing fear 
 that Wilmer was deliberately sacrificing herself 
 to him in this matter. He had never discussed it 
 with her. It was a difficult and delicate question 
 to bring up. But he had thought a good deal 
 
BIG LAUREL 137 
 
 about it and could account for her apparent aver- 
 sion to men in no other way. In spite of good 
 health he was growing old and in his old age felt 
 in his life the lack of those tiny baby fingers 
 which so assist down the incline however gentle 
 the slope. This craving for grandchildren is a 
 sort of second birth. It is the logical continua- 
 tion of growth. It makes for completion. 
 
 He could trust Wilmer to be sound in' her 
 choice — true to her heart — if only she would 
 choose. He did not propos-e either to assist her or 
 to advise. That would be an impertinence. With 
 this newer generation it was possible for a father 
 to be impertinent towards his daughter. He used 
 to resent that where now he only smiled at it. 
 He would not assist her directly, but whenever 
 it was possible to retire gracefully from the field 
 where these two were trying each other out, he 
 welcomed the opportunity — even when he knew 
 it annoyed Wilmer. As now, for example. 
 
 It was only nine o'clock when he rose upon 
 the slightest of pretexts, to go to his room. 
 
 "No one is quarreling," protested Wilmer. 
 
 "Call it a disagreement, then," answered 
 Howe, 
 
138 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " If you '11 stay I '11 read to you." 
 
 Wilmer looked to Allston for support. She re- 
 ceived little. 
 
 "No," declared Howe, "I'm really ready for 
 bed." 
 
 With that he made his sturdy way across the 
 room and went upstairs, Wilmer following him 
 with a candle. When she returned, Allston was 
 over by the window again staring out into the 
 night. He came back to the fire as soon as he 
 heard her steps. 
 
 " I feel," he said, " exactly as though I heard 
 some one calling — but so far off that I can't 
 identify either the voice or the words. Queer, 
 is n't it .? " 
 
 "The imagination plays strange tricks some- 
 times." 
 
 "You think that's all it amounts to.?" 
 
 "Certainly. What else?" 
 
 " I don't know. I 'm always getting back to 
 that fool phrase ; I don't know." 
 
 "We ought to know — always," she said. 
 
 " I suppose so, but do we? " 
 
 CC T » 
 
 The phrase was on her own lips but she checked 
 herself. 
 
BIG LAUREL 139 
 
 "Go ahead; finish it," he insisted with a note 
 of triumph. 
 
 " I refuse to be so stupid," she answered, evi- 
 dently nettled. 
 
 " We may as well be honest with ourselves." 
 
 " As long as we remain sensible," she finished 
 for him. 
 
 " Sensible? I wonder what we mean when we 
 say that?" 
 
 " I mean governed by intelligence," she replied 
 instantly. 
 
 "Yes," he admitted. "That's a good defini- 
 tion. Only — it does leave out a whole lot." 
 
 " Nothing worth while," she insisted dogmati- 
 cally. 
 
 " It leaves out war." 
 
 " Perhaps war is n't worth while." 
 
 " But there it is. The idea governed a good 
 many million men for five years. And there 
 was n't much intelligence back of it when you 
 think it over in cold blood." 
 
 " Many were governed by the idea of self- 
 protection and that's intelligent." 
 
 "It's more instinctive. And the instincts — 
 are they intelligent? " 
 
I40 BIG LAUREL 
 
 He spoke rather more earnestly. She answered 
 rather more cautiously: 
 
 "When properly trained." 
 
 " But when properly trained we should n't have 
 instincts," he laughed. "We should have only 
 
 reason." 
 
 " Well .? " 
 
 "Having chased our tails we are back where 
 we started." 
 
 " I don't see it." 
 
 "Then let's try again. Being sensible leaves 
 out — love." 
 
 She moved her chair a trifle — to turn her face 
 away from him and towards the flames. 
 
 "Doesn't it?" he asked. 
 
 There was one good feature about that objec- 
 tionable phrase of " I don't know " which she 
 was willing enough to admit; it furnished, at 
 least, a convenient refuge. If ever she had wished 
 to use it, that was now. Without some such re- 
 treat one was forced always to direct answers. 
 
 "Perhaps you're a better authority on love 
 than I," she parried. 
 
 "You're wrong," he returned quickly. "I 
 don't know a thing about it except that, as far 
 as one can observe, it isn't always sensible." 
 
BIG LAUREL 141 
 
 "Your observations have been — extensive?" 
 she queried. 
 
 There was a touch of coquetry about her now 
 that enhvened her mouth. Her profile, he thought, 
 was several years younger than her full face. The 
 gentle curves that outlined her lips and rounded 
 chin were at this moment — she had uncon- 
 sciously relaxed her usual control over them — 
 those of a girl of eighteen. 
 
 Allston leaned towards her, his long arms on 
 his knees. 
 
 "My observations cover a period of not more 
 than a week or two," he said. 
 
 "No?" 
 
 " And I can't make head nor tail out of them." 
 
 "Your deductions may not be at all accurate," 
 she suggested. 
 
 "They are scarcely scientific," he admitted. 
 "They are based upon a series of impulses." 
 
 " Impulses are dangerous," she reminded him. 
 
 "And yet they get hold of one," he said 
 tensely, " like instincts." 
 
 She rose upon the pretext of poking the fire. 
 She rose instinctively — as one draws back at 
 the approach of a flame. What was tempting her 
 
142 BIG LAUREL 
 
 to reach out her hand and smooth the hair back 
 from his troubled forehead? It was a Httle act of 
 tenderness she sometimes indulged in with her 
 father, but this man was not her father. Nor her 
 brother. Nor bore any blood relationship with 
 her whatsoever. The tenderness that sought ex- 
 pression in some definite act like this rather than 
 in words, that demanded contact, was akin to 
 mother love. Yet there was a difference; a dis- 
 tinct difference. Mother love is a result, born 
 of the past. This emotion of hers was a desire 
 urging her towards the future. It was more com- 
 plex than mother love and more poignant. It 
 was even less intelligent. 
 
 Yet — she felt like offering a little prayer of 
 thanks — it was her intellect that enabled her 
 to keep herself in control in this emergency. And 
 with everything against her. Both her cheeks 
 and her eyes tried to play her false. Only the heat 
 from the burning logs before which she stooped 
 saved her from an involuntary confession. They 
 accounted, after a fashion, for her flushed skin 
 and her excited eyes — brown still, but shot 
 through and through with dazzling golden arrows 
 as though some one had suddenly swept aside 
 
BIG LAUREL 143 
 
 the autumn branches which kept them cool and 
 let in the glare of the living sun. Reason, how- 
 ever, was still on her throne. She could still dic- 
 tate as she chose the thoughts to which she would 
 allow audible expression. 
 
 The only trouble was that, in contrast with 
 those she concealed, the spoken thoughts sounded 
 so utterly inane that she would much have pre- 
 ferred to keep silent. That privilege, however, 
 she could not permit herself. Silence was far more 
 expressive than speech. 
 
 So for another half-hour she rambled on in an 
 effort to keep their conversation in the placid 
 waters of banality until in desperation she was 
 forced to seek safety in flight. This at a time 
 when she knew that as far as her own thoughts 
 went, flight offered no protection; this also at a 
 time when she felt — uncannily enough — as 
 though some unseen hand were on her arm 
 urging her not to leave him. She could not ac- 
 count for that. It served further to confuse her. 
 Doubtless it was merely a normal reaction to his 
 strange mood. Yet it should not be in the face 
 of her derision of that mood. 
 
 At half-past nine Wilmer excused herself. 
 
144 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "Perhaps a good night's rest will help your 
 fidgets," she said to Allston, as she lighted her 
 candle. 
 
 He rose. 
 
 "Perhaps," he admitted. "Though I refuse 
 to call them fidgets." 
 
 Her mind was aggressively acute to-night. She 
 seemed driven to pick up every phrase and ana- 
 lyze it. 
 
 " I wonder if it makes so much difference what 
 we call things," she reflected. "People argue 
 over definitions as though it changed the thing 
 itself." 
 
 "I suppose it's just another attempt to be 
 honest." 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 "Or to avoid the truth — dishonestly." 
 
 "And yet if we spoke the stark truth as it 
 comes to us, would n't we make mistakes ? " 
 
 Again the warning flame across her cheeks. 
 
 " Oh, it 's possible to keep on forever getting 
 nowhere," she exclaimed. 
 
 " And you 're tired," he said anxiously. 
 
 "Good-night," she answered simply. 
 
 She was about to turn away when he extended 
 his hand. 
 
BIG LAUREL 145 
 
 "Good-night," he said with a wistful plea in 
 his voice. 
 
 She hesitated a moment and then placed her 
 own w^arm fingers within his broad palm. But 
 only for a second. He had no time to close over 
 them. 
 
 "Good-night," she v/hispered, and hurried up 
 the stairs leading from the open room to the floor 
 above. 
 
 He watched her until she disappeared — the 
 flash of her pretty ankle the last glimpse he had 
 of her. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 Allston blew out the big lamp on the table and 
 sank down in a chair before the open fire. He 
 was tired neither physically nor mentally. And 
 yet in some ways he was glad to be alone. For 
 the last few hours he had been under a nervous 
 strain in Wilmer's presence. He was like a man 
 in a closed room with many doors trying to feel 
 his way out through one opening and then 
 another, discovering that some of the doors gave 
 a little way and others not at all, in the end to be 
 left exactly where he started. Further, to com- 
 plicate matters, that thin voice in the dark out- 
 side still called to him. He heard it even now 
 above the rustling and creaking and eerie moan 
 of a rising wind beating against the house, pre- 
 sage of a storm. 
 
 It was extraordinary to him that such a situa- 
 tion could have developed out of such innocu- 
 ous material. The whole adventure had begun 
 so lazily and drowsily ! Half asleep at the wheel 
 of his wheezy gray runabout he had been keep- 
 ing to twenty miles an hour over a country road 
 
BIG LAUREL 147 
 
 that seemed as though It might end at any time 
 in primeval forest. It was just the setting he had 
 sought for that complete relaxation which was to 
 allow his mind, muddied by two years of war, 
 to settle into the placid pool it always had been. 
 So it had seemed about to do when Roxie Kester 
 appeared in the road and forced his head-on col- 
 lision with a chestnut-oak. But that seemed 
 merely like a temporary interruption. The kind- 
 ness of the Howes offered him just as good an 
 opportunity to bask in the sun as did the open 
 road. This was a golden land dripping with milk 
 and honey where a man need not keep his eyes 
 more than half open. It was a country of blue 
 sky and birds and shocked wheat and flowers and 
 people at their ease. 
 
 It still was. If he could only get hold of that 
 idea and keep it, he might find that the present 
 crisis which appeared so acute was merely a mor- 
 bid mental condition unwarranted by fact. He 
 was only a guest in passing. He had distorted 
 his values. This was only a bypath incident not 
 to be taken too seriously. The main road of his 
 life lay in another direction, though where only 
 the Lord knew. Somehow it must be related to 
 
148 BIG LAUREL 
 
 the past he had already lived, and must develope 
 out of those surroundings with which he was 
 already familiar. 
 
 Yet it was not easy to think of any future 
 which should eliminate this girl who had just 
 left him. He had known women twenty years, 
 neighbors at home, whom he could banish with 
 less difficulty. He had seen them with his eyes 
 alone. He had never made them part of his 
 thoughts — of his deeper thoughts. And they had 
 never made him question himself. Nor had they 
 ever made him feel. 
 
 It was at this point that he found himself 
 most baffled in his relations with Wilmer. She 
 made him think, but she parried every thought. 
 She made him feel, but she checked every expres- 
 sion of that emotion. There were moments when 
 he felt he could break through that reserve, but 
 he never quite dared to tr>^ after his one attempt. 
 Then, too, he was held in check by the conditions 
 under which he was a guest here. Unvouched 
 for, he was under even deeper obligations to his 
 host than one accepted under the conventions. He 
 was in honor bound not to violate the trust im- 
 posed upon him. He could advance no farther 
 
BIG LAUREL 149 
 
 than he was asked. And Wilmer was not always 
 easy to interpret. 
 
 To-night he was more bewildered by her than 
 ever. The net result of this evening had been to 
 increase the tension between them while leaving 
 everything at loose ends. He could not fairly 
 blame her alone for that, however, while he was 
 ragged in his own thinking. It began to look as 
 though this clarifying process which had ap- 
 peared so simple during the first few days of his 
 flight from home was becoming decidedly com- 
 plicated. If he had succeeded in clearing his mind 
 of one kind of jumble, that of troop trains and 
 transports, and the braggart tyranny of superior 
 officers, it was only to fill it with another kind 
 dominated by quite as autocratic a type of tyr- 
 anny. It seemed that a woman's eyes could, in 
 their way, bully as effectively as any uniformed 
 overlord with his jingling spurs. 
 
 Allston began to pace the floor again. The 
 wind was increasing in volume and driving scat- 
 tered raindrops against the windows with the ve- 
 locity of bullets. An occasional flash of lightning 
 cut a blazing path through the dark like star 
 shells, though the light was not held. And from a 
 
ISO BIG LAUREL 
 
 distance, beyond the mountains, he heard the low 
 rumble of thunder so like the heavy guns that used 
 to growl through the night over Flanders that at 
 moments it was difficult for him not to believe 
 he was back there again. This might have been 
 one of those deserted houses in that old French 
 town in which he had been billeted except that it 
 lacked the marks of age. But it is the mood that 
 counts in a picture; not the details. The Huns 
 were attacking over Green Mountain and he was 
 here to do his little part to drive them back. Bar- 
 barism was in a new clash with civilization. He 
 felt this so keenly that his hand as another star 
 shell burst went back to his automatic. And then 
 came the voice again. 
 
 This time it was more individualized. It 
 sounded like the voice of Roxie Kester. That was 
 absurd, of course, but the notion gave him a 
 start. The girl had acted strangely when she 
 came back to the kitchen from across the fields. 
 It was queer that she had been out there at all 
 except that young women were subject to odd 
 spells of that sort. He had not been satisfied when 
 he left her and might have been considerably 
 worried had not other matters come in to occupy 
 his attention. 
 
BIG LAUREL 151 
 
 Allston tiptoed through the kitchen and out- 
 doors to see if her Hght was burning. Her win- 
 dow was dark. The wind whipped his face and 
 drove him in. Still he was not satisfied. Action 
 whetted his fears. It became necessary now, if 
 he hoped to get any rest, to allay his anxiety once 
 for all. Striking a match he made his way up the 
 stairs to the door of Roxie's room. It was closed, 
 but he listened there for sound of her breathing. 
 He heard nothing, but that proved nothing. Re- 
 luctantly and not at all sure of the explanation of 
 his action he could give if she did answer, he 
 knocked. He received no reply and knocked again 
 — louder this time. But even so he was held 
 back by his dread of rousing the rest of the house- 
 hold. It would be easier, should his alarm prove 
 groundless, to explain his conduct to Roxie than 
 to either Howe or Wilmer. 
 
 The continued silence became ominous and 
 oppressive. He was finding it difficult to breathe 
 as though the hall were being exhausted of air. 
 Cautiously he turned the handle and pushed. 
 The door opened, but the room was in utter dark- 
 ness. 
 
 He whispered her name: 
 
152 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " Roxie." 
 
 Then: 
 
 " Are you there, Roxle ? " 
 
 Silence now gave him a direct answer. He 
 struck a match and held it above his head. The 
 bureau drawers were open and one shoe stood in 
 the middle of the room. The white bed was empty 
 and undisturbed. On the table he saw a lamp and 
 lighted this. Then he caught sight of the note on 
 the pillow. The fact it was addressed to him was 
 significant. Under ordinary circumstances she 
 would have written to Wilmer. As he read, every 
 word justified his suspicions. But at the sentence, 
 "Please don't hunt for me," he saw as clear as 
 daylight the hand of Bud Childers in the affair. 
 
 The note dropped from Allston's nervous fin- 
 gers to the floor. He did not pick it up. He knew 
 every word by heart. For two hours she had been 
 calling to him and he had not answered. 
 
 But why, if in danger, had she not called upon 
 him when he sought her after dinner and offered 
 his aid? The note answered that. She was trying 
 to protect him. In some way, by some ruse, Bud 
 had bullied her into following him and she had 
 deliberately sacrificed her one chance of escape. 
 
BIG LAUREL 153 
 
 The inevitable deduction swept Allston back to 
 that night at the bend in the road when she 
 stood before him with her head tilted back and 
 her eyes closed. In her white dress silvered with 
 moonlight she had made a romantic figure. She 
 was like some gentle creature sung of in idyls. A 
 man might well pray to be saved from such a 
 temptation as she offered him then. He had not 
 been insensible, though, thank God, he had held 
 steady. It had for him been but a passing mo- 
 ment, but for her it had meant more. He saw it 
 now — fool that he had been. He saw it now when 
 it was possibly too late. 
 
 There was one chance in a hundred that Roxie 
 had gone home. After that the chances were a 
 hundred to one that she had gone with Bud Chil- 
 ders. It was now ten o'clock. Within two hours 
 he would know. 
 
 Allston had not been so coolly sure of himself 
 since he stepped out of uniform. His face hard- 
 ened and something of that merciless tint of blue 
 steel took the place in his eyes of their natural 
 color. His thoughts clicked into place like car- 
 tridges in a machine gun. All the qualities that 
 military discipline had trained into him reas- 
 
154 BIG LAUREL 
 
 serted themselves with automatic precision. He 
 moved quickly and without hesitancy. 
 
 Crossing the room he extinguished the lamp 
 and came out, closing the door behind him. There 
 was no need of rousing the others. They had 
 much better sleep on. He meant to have the girl 
 back here before morning, and in that case there 
 was no reason why they should ever be disturbed 
 by knowledge of the episode. 
 
 He came downstairs and went to his room for 
 a coat and hat. Here he stopped to examine his 
 revolver and to slip into his pocket the remainder 
 of his cartridges. He found about a dozen. He 
 closed his own door, returned to the sitting-room 
 to make sure the fire was safe there, and hurried 
 out. 
 
 It was pitch dark — inky dark. The wind was 
 still blowing and the rain increasing in volume. 
 He bent against it as he took the road to Roxie's 
 house he had followed before. It was pitiful that 
 he should be obliged to waste the time necessary 
 to eliminate that faint possibility, but it was es- 
 sential. Before he ventured to force himself into 
 Childers's shack he must be certain of his facts. 
 That was too grim a business to undertake except 
 upon firm ground. 
 
BIG LAUREL 155 
 
 His progress was slow and labored. The road 
 was rough, and he frequently found himself out 
 of it and floundering among the bushes. Always 
 there was the temptation to quicken his pace and 
 always he resisted that. He must take no chances 
 of spraining an ankle. And he must keep plenty 
 of strength in reserve. He had seen too much of 
 the reckless folly of advancing to a point farther 
 than support warranted. He had v/atched whole 
 regiments wiped out as they occupied their for- 
 ward positions with spent strength, the helpless 
 victims of fresh attacking troops. He must not be 
 exhausted when he finally reached the home of 
 Bud Childers. 
 
 Not that he anticipated any such weakness. 
 He had learned that, given the occasion, one's 
 resources are well-nigh inexhaustible. Again and 
 again in France he had found himself just be- 
 ginning to draw on his strength at the point 
 where in civil life he would have been ready to 
 quit. And never had he been dominated by so 
 inflexible a will as now. Duty and patriotism will 
 carry a man far, but such a call as this which 
 now urged him on will carry a man even farther. 
 Here was Duty linked, not with an abstract idea, 
 
156 BIG LAUREL 
 
 but with the most concrete appeal a man can 
 know — that of a woman in need of his strength. 
 
 As Allston fought his way on, as he pitted his 
 might against the obstacles in his path, Roxie be- 
 came still more clearly outlined. He thought of 
 her less as a child. This startled him at first. It 
 left him uneasy. It was better, in some ways, to 
 think of her as a child. 
 
 But this thing she had done for him — if his 
 deductions were correct — was the act of a 
 woman. And such a woman ! Unreasonable and 
 unwarranted it was! Unjustified and uncalled- 
 for it w^as ! But also it was magnificent! 
 
 This much Allston appreciated and responded 
 to with a thrill. And yet even so he had not be- 
 gun to plumb the depths of her intense little be- 
 ing. He interpreted her act as one of heroic self- 
 sacrifice based upon an exaggerated sense of grati- 
 tude for the protection he had given her. That 
 was enough, God knows, to spur him on, but it 
 left out, too, so much — so much. 
 
 The windows of the Kester house were dark 
 when he reached there. That told him nothing. 
 He pounded at the door without response and 
 that told him more. Roxie would not have been 
 
BIG LAUREL 157 
 
 as difficult as this to rouse. With his worst fears 
 revived, he kicked at the wooden panels as the 
 rain beat down upon him. The passing minutes 
 were becoming of more and more value. He tried 
 the latch and shook it impatiently when he heard 
 shuffling footsteps within. A voice called to him 
 — the voice of an old and timid woman. 
 
 "Who's thet.f'" she demanded. 
 
 He answered with a question. 
 
 "Is Roxie there .^" 
 
 " Roxie hyar ^ No, Roxie ain't hyar. She 's up 
 to Miss Wilmer's. Who be you-all.?" 
 
 Allston had already taken a step back. The 
 wind tore his reply to shreds. He must make the 
 mountain road now as fast as the night would let 
 him — remembering always to keep plenty of 
 strength in reserve. 
 
 One thing helped him; the afternoon he had 
 returned from that little cove on the mountain- 
 side Howe had questioned him as to where he had 
 been. As he told, Howe clapped a hand upon his 
 shoulder. 
 
 " Big Laurel is up there. Keep away," he 
 warned. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
158 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "You must have been within a few hundred 
 yards of Childers's shack." 
 
 It was not that fact which left so vivid an 
 impression in Allston's mind, but what he had 
 thought while walking by the side of Wilmer. He 
 was glad enough now, however, that it served to 
 place him. He could have returned to that cove 
 with his eyes shut. 
 
 Against a background of storm-rent clouds and 
 the formidable bulk of mountains and a sea of 
 tossing trees, a man is but a tiny object. With the 
 night and the winds and the beating rain against 
 him, it would seem that he would count for no 
 more than a dead leaf. And yet ever since man 
 was man and not merely some grubbing insect, 
 the elements have spent their fury against him in 
 vain. Again and again on the ocean and on the 
 desert, in the frozen North and the tropic South, 
 on mountain-top and plain, man has faced their 
 worst and often enough survived. If at times he 
 is pitifully easy to kill, at other times he is un- 
 conquerable. 
 
 Yard by yard Allston fought his way along the 
 mountain road that follows the slope of the hills 
 and past the Lutheran church which gave him his 
 
BIG LAUREL 159 
 
 bearings. With the creek on his right he stumbled 
 through a heavy growth of hemlocks, passing sev- 
 eral shacks in darkness. Each time he mastered 
 the temptation to rouse the occupants and in- 
 quire his way. To do this would be possibly to 
 reveal his business — would inevitably reveal his 
 presence in the neighborhood — and that seemed 
 unwise. These people were certain to be more 
 friendly to Bud than to himself. In the end he 
 might be obliged to take that risk, but he knew 
 that Bud's shack opened somewhere from this 
 road into a clearing, and he felt sure that how- 
 ever late the hour he would find it lighted. If he 
 knew Roxie there would be little sleep for Bud 
 that night. Whatever club the bully held over 
 her head to make her follow would not be effec- 
 tive enough to cow her utterly. If left alone Bud 
 might win in the end, but he would have a fight 
 on his hands that could not be settled in a few 
 hours. 
 
 That was a fair argument, and yet with every 
 passing minute Allston felt the strain of the de- 
 lay. She might not be conquered, but she must 
 be suffering. And for every second of pain he was 
 responsible. Unwittingly she had placed him in a 
 position where this could not be otherwise. 
 
i6o BIG LAUREL 
 
 So for another ten minutes he floundered on, 
 and then, to the right and ahead, he caught 
 through the trees — flashing on and off as the 
 waving branches passed before it — a yellow 
 gleam. He pressed on faster and nearer. A sharp 
 turn brought him to the log which crossed the 
 creek to the clearing before the shack. Cautiously 
 he moved over this. The light from the uncur- 
 tained window did not carry far and the rain 
 dripping down the panes obscured his sight of the 
 room within. He paused now, a little out of 
 breath. It was not easy to wait when so near, 
 but this was no easy task he had before him. A 
 single careless move might end for all time his 
 usefulness. 
 
 He had once read somewhere that there is no 
 such thing as an accident; that every mishap can 
 be traced directlv to some one's mistake. He had 
 
 
 
 always remembered that. It had served him in 
 good stead in the war. It helped him to a cool 
 judgment that cut down his own mistakes. 
 
 When he moved a few steps nearer the window, 
 he was in complete command of himself. The 
 driving rain was to his advantage. It made it 
 easier to look in than to look out. With his auto- 
 
BIG LAUREL i6i 
 
 matic in his hand he crept to within a few feet 
 of the shack, and standing a little to one side of 
 the window peered in. What he saw made it very 
 difficult for him to breathe normally. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 Allston, from where he stood outside the shack, 
 had Childers within range, and as he saw the big 
 fellow standing before the shrinking figure of 
 Roxie, he was tempted to shoot. He was re- 
 strained by his unwillingness at this point to kill 
 and by fear of the consequences, if he attempted 
 merely to cripple the man, that might follow to 
 the girl before he could reach her side. He must 
 be patient a few moments longer and if possible 
 get inside the house. Only then could he secure 
 the drop on Bud. 
 
 Allston knew nothing of the floor plan of the 
 shack, but he saw a door leading from the main 
 room to the left of the fireplace and so supposed 
 there must be another entrance in the rear. If 
 not he might find an unfastened window. In this 
 reconnoitering, the tempest which had until now 
 opposed him changed its colors and assisted. He 
 could move freely without danger of being over- 
 heard. Circling to the left he went around the 
 spring-house. But now he no longer had the help 
 of the lamp within. He had to feel his way, fol- 
 
BIG LAUREL 163 
 
 lowing the house as a blind man does. He came 
 to a darkened window — the kitchen window — 
 passed it and so reached the frame of a door. His 
 fingers feh their w^ay across this to a latch which 
 rattled as he touched it. He could thank the wind 
 once more for disarming suspicion at such un- 
 usual noises. All the evening long it, too, had 
 been fumbling at this latch. 
 
 But Allston knew that once he opened this 
 door the wind would follow him in and rushing 
 ahead announce a visitor. This would give Bud 
 the time he needed to seize his gun. And that in 
 turn meant shooting to the death without either 
 explanation or argument. This Allston wished 
 to avoid, if possible. Bully and brute the man 
 might be, but he was entitled to a hearing ; bully 
 and brute the man might be, but Allston pre- 
 ferred that some one other than himself should 
 administer that kind of grim justice. He himself 
 had no desire to kill. His concern was with Roxie 
 rather than Bud. He was perfectly willing to give 
 the man a mauling if opportunity offered, but his 
 chief business was to rescue the girl. 
 
 Allston had noted that to the right of this out- 
 side door and just inside there was another room. 
 
i64 BIG LAUREL 
 
 With that in mind a plan of action suggested it- 
 self which would make that eager wind at his 
 back serve instead of foil him. If he swung the 
 outer door wide and stepped in quickly, he could 
 shove open this inner door and hide himself in 
 that room. The wind hurrying ahead would sum- 
 mon Bud, who, the chances were, would think the 
 storm had beaten open the door. Allston then 
 might have his chance at the man as he passed. 
 If not, he would still have the advantage of being 
 inside the house. He would retain that advantage 
 even if Bud started a search. For Bud to find him 
 must hold a light. 
 
 Allston acted promptly — the one gamble he 
 was taking being that the door was locked. 
 Gently he pressed the latch and shoved. The door 
 opened and the storm swept down the narrow 
 hall to the lighted living-room beyond. Allston 
 stepped noiselessly into the right-hand room, 
 keeping as near the sill as was safe. He heard an 
 oath from Bud and then silence. 
 
 Childers was waiting to see what, if anything, 
 followed the opening of that door. Nothing fol- 
 lowed but wind-laden rain that made the lamp 
 ' flicker. The hall was only feebly lighted, but when 
 
BIG LAUREL 165 
 
 Bud cautiously ventured to look the length of it 
 he saw enough to be assured that it was empty. 
 And so, quite off his guard, he strode down to 
 close the door. This time he shoved the bolt that 
 locked it. 
 
 It was while he was at this task, both hands oc- 
 cupied, that Allston sprang. He brought the butt 
 of his automatic down hard just over the man's 
 temple. Bud staggered and Allston threw his full 
 weight upon him bearing him to the floor. At the 
 same time he found the fellow's throat. For a 
 moment Allston held on, but Bud was quite still. 
 In falling he had struck his head hard enough to 
 knock him out. 
 
 From the next room Allston heard the moan- 
 ing cries of the girl. He called her. 
 
 " Roxie ! " 
 
 The cr>'ing ceased instantly, but he received no 
 reply. 
 
 " Roxie, come here." 
 
 She came on a run then. She saw Allston still 
 full length upon the man. 
 
 "Find me a rope," he ordered. 
 
 "Mister Allston!" 
 
 " Quick ! " 
 
1 66 BIG LAUREL 
 
 She vanished to reappear a few seconds later 
 with a piece of stout cord. Allston turned the 
 fellow over and bound together his two wrists 
 with the army hitch designed for just this pur- 
 pose. Roxie watched, dazed and breathless with 
 both fear and blind joy. 
 
 " Now bring the lamp," he commanded. 
 
 As long as Allston issued orders to her she 
 could act. If only he would continue — indefi- 
 nitely. That was all she asked for, just the privi- 
 lege of obeying. 
 
 When she returned, Allston stooped and ex- 
 amined the man's wounds. There were two ugly 
 gashes, one over the temple and one in the blue- 
 black hair. Allston sent for water and when she 
 brought it sopped his handkerchief in it and 
 washed away the blood which had trickled over 
 Childers's face. Both wounds he discovered to be 
 superficial. He cleaned them as best he could and 
 felt Bud's pulse. It was steady. In fact, before he 
 was through with his examination and first-aid 
 treatment the man had begun to revive. His eyes 
 flickered open and he tried to make his feet. That 
 was not easy with tied hands and became further 
 complicated as Allston promptly sat on his legs. 
 
BIG LAUREL 167 
 
 "Steady there," he warned. "You're going to 
 stay put for a while." 
 
 Bud experienced difficulty at first in under- 
 standing the situation. This was like some evil 
 dream. He twisted and writhed for a moment 
 and then settled back to the inevitable. His lips 
 twitched, but he did not speak. 
 
 "Now, Roxie," said Allston, "we must find 
 more rope. Look around, will you ^ " 
 
 "You — you gotter watch him," she panted. 
 
 "I'll watch him, but I can't spend the rest of 
 the evening on his legs. It's late and — we've a 
 long way to go." 
 
 She brought an old leather halter-strap. This 
 served well enough, though Allston could not 
 fasten it as tight as he wished. However, it made 
 it safe to leave the man and he was beginning to 
 feel the cold. First, however, he took the precau- 
 tion to remove Bud's gun — a villainous-looking 
 Colt big enough to bore a hole the size of a 
 walnut. 
 
 "Better stay quiet," warned Allston. "If I 
 hear you moving I '11 find more rope. Get that? " 
 
 Bud's level eyes, hard as dagger blades, met 
 those of steel blue before him. He deigned no re- 
 
1 68 BIG LAUREL 
 
 ply. His face was as immobile as though cut from 
 granite. 
 
 Allston picked up the lamp and led the way 
 into the next room. He tossed a log on the open 
 fire and removed his wet coat, Roxie watching 
 him in silence and awe. He warmed his numb 
 hands over the blaze, surveying the room in de- 
 tail as he did so. It was cleaner than he had ex- 
 pected and more attractive. With the cold wind 
 rattling the windows, hopelessly, and the rougher 
 features of the surroundings subdued by shad- 
 ows, with the warmth of the wood flames tingling 
 pleasantly on his skin, he reacted quickly from 
 the ugly incidents of the last few minutes. What, 
 a short time ago, had seemed so grave a problem 
 was now no problem at all. The moment he felt 
 Roxie to be safe and sound, as obviously she was 
 with Bud eliminated, he was rather inclined to 
 accept the whole situation with easy good humor. 
 He turned to Roxie with a smile. She was stand- 
 ing back against the wall — as far back as she 
 could get. She was wearing no hat and her hair 
 had become loosened, a detached strand hanging 
 over one temple and another over her forehead. 
 With a quick movement and in some embarrass- 
 
BIG LAUREL 169 
 
 ment as she saw him looking at her, she swept 
 these back into place. 
 
 To Allston she was just a child again. He sank 
 into a chair with his wet, muddy boots thrust 
 towards the flames. 
 
 " Roxie," he said, " you certainly arranged a 
 real hike for me to-night." 
 
 She w^as silent a moment and then she broke 
 out: 
 
 "What fer — did you come.? " 
 
 " To take you home," he answered easily. 
 
 "Who asked ye? " she demanded. 
 
 " You did." 
 
 '' You lie ! " 
 
 She spoke without thinking. The phrase 
 sounded harsher than she intended. She meant 
 only to deny. 
 
 Allston turned in his chair to face her. 
 
 " Come over here by the fire." 
 
 " I don' w^anter." 
 
 He rose. 
 
 " Then I '11 have to come to you, but I wanted 
 to dry my feet." 
 
 At that she ran to his side. 
 
 "Please," she begged, "yer boots is all muddy 
 an' wet." 
 
170 BIG LAUREL 
 
 As he sat down again willingly enough, for his 
 legs really were heavy and his feet bruised, she 
 knelt by his chair, and before he realized what 
 she was doing began to unlace his shoes. As she 
 did so her voice fell into a low crooning. 
 
 " Po' feet," she murmured. " They 's all wet an' 
 hurt — they's all wet an' hurt. Oh, I didn' know 
 you'd come. I didn' know. It's all my fault." 
 
 Her fingers were fumbling at the strings — her 
 bent head by his knee. He placed his hand upon 
 her silky flaxen hair. 
 
 " Roxie," he protested, "don't do that." 
 
 " Yer '11 ketch yo' death o' cold. An' it '11 be all 
 my fault." 
 
 "Get up, child." 
 
 "They're mos' done now." 
 
 It was true enough. She had them off before he 
 could object further and had placed them on the 
 hearth. 
 
 " You 'd spoil any man, Roxie," he smiled. 
 
 " I never done thet fer no man afore," she an- 
 swered. 
 
 "And you shouldn't again." 
 
 " I 'd do it fer you ag'in." 
 
 " I shan't ever let you." 
 
BIG LAUREL 171 
 
 " Then what f er did ye come ? " she cried. 
 
 "To fetch you home." 
 
 "Back to Miss Wilmer's?" 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 He was a bit puzzled by her questioning. He 
 did not know where it was leading, but he had an 
 uncomfortable feeling that it was leading some- 
 where it should not. 
 
 "I ain't a-goin' back to Miss Wilmer's," she 
 answ^ered with tightened lips. 
 
 " Of course you are," he insisted with a trace of 
 irritation. 
 
 " Who 's a-goin' to make me ? " she challenged. 
 
 "Make you.^ No one. You're going because 
 it's the place for you to go; because you want to 
 
 go. 
 
 " I don't." 
 
 " Look here, Roxie — " 
 
 " I don't," she repeated, with a sharp stamp of 
 her foot. "An' ef you wanter go an' hold her 
 hand some more you kin go." 
 
 The last part of her speech was a wild, uncon- 
 strained outburst. A moment ago she would have 
 choked herself before she would have allowed it 
 to escape her lips. Even now she stood back 
 aghast, though still aggressive. 
 
172 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " Good Lord ! " exclaimed AUston, his eyes held 
 to her by the intensity of her passion. 
 
 As he started to rise she sank down in a heap, 
 her legs weak beneath her. Leaning forward she 
 buried her face in her hands. Allston retained his 
 seat. He did not dare move; did not dare touch 
 her. He was confused and uncertain. 
 
 " Who 's been talking to you, Roxie ^ " he 
 frowned. 
 
 "Bud — he seen," she choked. 
 
 " Saw what ? " 
 
 "Seen you a-holdin' of Miss Wilmer's hand 
 down to the cove." 
 
 Suddenly she lifted her wet face to his. 
 
 "Unless he lied," she trembled. "Mebbe he 
 lied. I tol' him he lied." 
 
 Allston caught his breath. Bud must have been 
 in the bushes. With a chance like that, why 
 hadn't the fellow shot.^ 
 
 " Mebbe he lied," she said again, her face eager 
 with new hope. 
 
 "But if he didn't?" 
 
 " I won't never go down ter Miss Wilmer's 
 ag'in," she choked. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 In the dark hall, bound hand and foot, Bud 
 Childers lay flat on his back staring into Hell. 
 In the old days of the Spanish Inquisition devil- 
 ish minds spent days of thought in devising new 
 tortures by which to bring with a nice apprecia- 
 tion of every fine point fresh torments to indi- 
 vidual cases. The infliction of pain was a profes- 
 sion. But even these fanatical experts could have 
 contrived nothing better adapted to the especial 
 requirements of Childers than this which Allston 
 — wholly without that object in mind — had hit 
 upon. 
 
 Bud's very soul was seared by the realization 
 of how he had been foiled, outwitted, and man- 
 handled by this pink-cheeked stranger — this 
 honey-lapping interloper — this lily-fingered ri- 
 val. The fellow had thrown and tethered him as 
 though he were a yearling steer. And he had 
 done this in Bud's own home — in his own in\a- 
 olable cove. Allston had kicked him one side like 
 a yellow dog within the sacred precincts of his 
 own shack and left him like a crippled pup in 
 
174 BIG LAUREL 
 
 the dark. And Roxle had been a witness of this 
 ignominy. 
 
 But that was not all. That was enough to 
 make a man writhe like a salted worm, but it was 
 not all. Allston was still here. He was occupy- 
 ing Bud's own living-room. He was sitting in 
 one of Bud's chairs. He was warming himself 
 before Bud's iire. And this with Bud's own 
 woman aiding and abetting. 
 
 Gawd A' mighty! Gawd A' mighty! 
 
 As the full meaning of it all burned into his 
 brain, Bud found it as difficult to breathe as 
 though he were being strangled. He could hear 
 their voices from the next room, though he could 
 not make out their words. That was worse. It 
 left him free to imagine. They were talking about 
 him and laughing. 
 
 Gawd A' mighty! 
 
 Bud strained at the ropes binding his hands — 
 strained until the cords bit into his flesh. He 
 tested his strong legs against the ankle straps 
 until his muscles cramped into knots. He turned 
 his head this way and that, his mouth open like 
 a snapping dog, until the sweat stood out upon 
 his thin forehead in great beads. It ran down 
 
BIG LAUREL 175 
 
 into his narrowed eyes, burning them with salt. 
 
 Here in his own shack! Here where for three 
 generations no man had dared tread without be- 
 ing asked! Here in these rooms he had made 
 ready for Roxie — she who on the morrow was 
 to have been his bride ! The egg-eyed hornyhead ! 
 
 He was breathing Hke a man who has run a 
 mile. His big hairy chest — made deep by so 
 many trips up and down the mountain — heaved 
 spasmodically. It was well his heart was strong — 
 else something might have snapped. It was carry- 
 ing a heavy load. As it was there were moments 
 when those thin lips covering that iron jaw grew 
 first purple and then white. 
 
 He could hear their voices and hear their feet 
 when they moved. If Allston had only come out 
 here occasionally and kicked him, he could have 
 stood it better. But the man ignored him as 
 though he were not there. They talked on and 
 for all he knew held hands — in the room where 
 the sprig of laurel stood in a bottle on the table: 
 on the table covered with new oilcloth which he 
 had ridden to the village to buy for her. This man 
 was treading with his dirty feet the floor Bud had 
 got down on his knees to clean for Roxie. And 
 she was in there beside him. 
 
176 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Bud lay passive for a few minutes. The cold 
 wind slithered in beneath the door and marked 
 him as with a knife-blade where it touched his 
 skin. It played with his disheveled black hair. It 
 worried, like a playful pup, the bottom edges of 
 his trousers and his ankles. It maddened him 
 like something alive bent upon teasing. He 
 kicked out at it with both tied feet. 
 
 And the man who had done all this was the 
 man he had allowed to go when he had drawn 
 a sure bead on his heart that day in the cove. 
 What a cussed fool he had been not to put an 
 end to him then and there! God give him one 
 more such chance — just one more! God give 
 him half a chance — just a fighting chance! 
 With a gun or a knife or with his naked fists. He 
 had not fought with his hands since he was a 
 bov, but now he felt the instincts of a mountain 
 cat. He craved to claw and to tear. He ached to 
 bite with his yellow teeth as animals bite. 
 
 Again he tested his strength until the muscles 
 in his throat stood out like whipcords. He could 
 not understand why the rope did not break. With 
 the strength now latent in him he felt that he 
 could snap iron chains. It was maddening. When 
 
BIG LAUREL 177 
 
 finally he sank back once again limp after his 
 effort, he felt a choking sensation in his throat 
 like that which comes to small boys helpless in 
 their rage. Something akin to tears moistened 
 his hard blue eyes. To offset this, he voiced an 
 ugly oath below his breath. 
 
 He flopped over on his side to relieve the 
 w^eight of his body on his hands. There was hu- 
 miliation in that act itself. It gave him the effect 
 of groveling. He had seen dogs, belly to the 
 ground, crawl along like that, and it always filled 
 him with contempt. He felt the same contempt 
 for himself. But quickly following every such 
 emotion came his black rage against Allston — 
 the man who forced upon him each additional 
 torment. 
 
 Gawd A' mighty ! 
 
 But all this while Bud spoke never a word out 
 loud. There were moments when he could have 
 shrieked in rage ; there were other moments when 
 wild oaths sought expression. But every time 
 so tempted he brought his thin lips tight over his 
 teeth. Had Allston himself come out here, he 
 would have been met with stolid silence. Speech 
 to Bud, when highly moved, expressed nothing. 
 
178 BIG LAUREL 
 
 It was too utterly inadequate. His, emotions 
 drove him to stolidness — to the stoicism of the 
 Indian. 
 
 At the end of ten minutes Bud had spent in 
 unavailing struggle the first mad onrush of his 
 blind rage. By brute force he had failed to ac- 
 complish anything except to lacerate his flesh. 
 He accepted this fact as a fresh humiliation. He 
 had pride in his physical strength. The deepest 
 satisfaction he could have had at the moment 
 would have been to burst these bonds Allston 
 had fastened upon him. 
 
 Exhausted mentally and physically, he lay 
 quiet for a moment. Passive, he found himself 
 able to think more clearly. It was barely possible 
 that what could not be accomplished in one way 
 might be in another. A rat was a small animal, 
 and yet by industry and patience he generally 
 managed to secure his ends. Bud had seen them 
 by constant gnawing eat their way through oak 
 beams that would have foiled the strength of a 
 bear. A rope was made up of many fine strands. 
 If a man could break them one by one, it was 
 only a question of time when he would have them 
 all severed. 
 
BIG LAUREL 179 
 
 Bud squirmed his long fingers tipped with hard 
 nails until they reached the hempen cords. Then 
 he began to scratch against them — slowly, labo- 
 riously, painfully. It was a tedious process. But 
 the rope was old. He could feel the outer strands 
 fuzz up as he continued. He could also feel the 
 calloused tips of his fingers quicken as the skin 
 wore away. It was a question which would last 
 the longer. It was a question how much time he 
 had, anyway. But with those voices coming to 
 him from the next room he must be doing some- 
 thing. x4nd one can never tell. 
 
 Gawd A' mighty, if he should get free — ! 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 RoxiE Kester had ridden up here this evening 
 sitting behind Bud and holding to the man's big 
 shoulders to keep from falling. Bud had kept the 
 mare to a walk and they had journeyed in silence. 
 She had not been afraid. This was not altogether 
 because of her reliance on the long-bladed 
 kitchen knife which she had slipped from her bun- 
 dle and hidden in her bosom, although this had 
 helped to steady her. But the deeper reason was 
 that even on that long wild ride she had thought 
 less of herself than of some one else. She had 
 eliminated herself — as far as her future was con- 
 cerned — the moment she left the house and 
 joined this other. She had made her decision. 
 She had made her sacrifice. Twice her Prince 
 had risked his life for her and now she was risk- 
 ing her own for him. She was doing even more. 
 There was a certainty here. A man may clash 
 with another man — may clash even with a chest- 
 nut-oak — and escape. He is risking only his 
 life. But a woman may not place herself in such 
 a position as she was now in and avoid the con- 
 
BIG LAUREL i8i 
 
 sequences. However she protected herself until 
 morning, it made the next step inevitable. Not 
 to marry Bud the next day would be to stand 
 disgraced. The only explanation she could give 
 that would justify her conduct, she must not give. 
 The toothless old gossips would roll the story 
 around their tongues like snuff. A girl does not 
 spend the night in a mountain shack unless she 
 chooses. 
 
 Yet Roxie was neither afraid nor depressed. 
 She w^as in a state of exaltation paralleled only 
 by religious ecstasy. Love — such romantic love 
 as hers — is heroic. Heroism is nothing but com- 
 plete and utter unselfishness. Her joy came in 
 giving, not in asking. If she could not give her- 
 self to him she would give herself for him. 
 
 The wonder is not that the young are inspired 
 to such idealistic heights ; the wonder comes to 
 the old and sophisticated. Men and women are 
 born poets — women more often than men. And 
 poets are a simple people living outside them- 
 selves, in touch with the singing stars. Only as 
 they turn wise and think of themselves do they 
 grow blunt and blind and are forced to grope 
 their way on the surface of the earth. 
 
1 82 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Roxie could allow her thoughts to wander at 
 will on that ride up the mountain-side. She could 
 permit them to take flight where they would. She 
 had given all that she had to give and so was en- 
 titled to take all that remained for her to take. 
 There was no need of repressions. She had won 
 the complete freedom that only love can give. 
 
 So she thought of Allston as she chose — call- 
 ing him Ned as in her very secret heart she had 
 long called him. Aye, she could kiss his hair now 
 and his white forehead and his lips. Throwing 
 back her head, the rain beat down upon her face 
 and each drop was like a kiss back from him. 
 There were thousands of them, but not too many. 
 How her heart leaped at the thought! How it 
 sang ! A thousand, ten thousand were not enough 
 to satisfy her hungry heart. 
 
 A man may carry a lady off on horseback with- 
 out carrying her heart at all. A man may take a 
 lady into the black forest and have none of the 
 best of her. A man may shut a lady up in the 
 fastness of his shack and wonder what has be- 
 come of her. 
 
 Bud dimlv realized that much an hour later. It 
 did not discourage him, but it puzzled him. He 
 
BIG LAUREL 183 
 
 had looked for protest and outcry and he was met 
 by an uncanny silence. Once, when he tried to 
 take her hand, he was warned off, but even then so 
 quietly that he was dazed. At the end of another 
 hour he was staring at her with a new eagerness 
 and growing passion that might have made him 
 dangerous — when the back door had swung 
 open admitting the tempest. 
 
 The presence of Ned Allston was in reality 
 fraught with more tragic consequences to Roxie 
 than to Childers. The latter had been thrown 
 and tied, and that was the end of him. But Roxie 
 had been set free — and that was not the end of 
 her. She had been released from the end. She 
 was forced to face a new fight — a fight made 
 more intense by the leeway she had so recently 
 given herself. It is one thing to stay within 
 bounds and another to move out of bounds and 
 
 return agam. 
 
 Allston in the last few hours had become 
 more distinctly personal to her than before. He 
 had stepped into reality: so much so that when he 
 stood before her in the flesh she was half ashamed 
 to face him. She remembered the rain and her 
 upturned mouth. It was because of that she had 
 allowed herself to speak of Wilmer. 
 
1 84 BIG LAUREL 
 
 He had not denied the story Bud had told of 
 what he saw in the cove. Then it was true. She 
 was sitting on the floor, Turk fashion, and 
 Allston was still in his chair studying her with 
 his puzzled blue eyes. To herself she repeated 
 over and over again the question she had asked 
 of him, " What f er had he come ? " 
 
 Ail he was doing now was to take away her 
 dreams — the one thing that had saved her. He 
 was not changing other conditions in the slight- 
 est. He was making them even worse. Did he 
 think she wanted to go back to Miss Wilmer's 
 and watch him hold her hand.'* 
 
 She felt the venomous sting of a new emotion 
 — of jealousy. The poison works swiftly in such 
 natures as hers. 
 
 In the meanwhile Allston had come to some 
 realization of the problem he faced. Another 
 man might have been quicker, but another man 
 would not have been Allston. That the girl had 
 her romantic moments he was aware — every one, 
 man or woman, has those ; but that she had car- 
 ried them as far as this he had never suspected. 
 His mind had been far too occupied in another 
 direction. Even on his way up here when, under 
 
BIG LAUREL 185 
 
 the stress of the struggle, he had sensed some- 
 thing of the significance of her act and that in a 
 way it involved him, he had not associated it with 
 love. Rather had it seemed like a magnificently 
 impersonal poetic idea. For two years, in France, 
 he had been in touch often with just this sort of 
 thing. Again and again he had seen it govern 
 the fine acts of men and women — of young men 
 and women. Under the spell of it he had seen 
 them make sacrifices that staggered the imagina- 
 tion. Sometimes it was in the name of country ; 
 sometimes in the name of duty; sometimes in the 
 name of honor; sometimes in the name of grati- 
 tude — but always it was utterly impersonal. 
 
 To him Roxie from the beginning had seemed 
 of this type. She reminded him in many ways of 
 those extraordinary young peasant women with 
 whom he had come into such fleeting contact — 
 the women with the liquid black eyes s® quick to 
 respond to elemental emotions, but so steady/ 
 withal as one saw them in their mothers and 
 grandmothers. Somehow Allston had always 
 understood them enough to respect them, which 
 could not be said of some of his fellow officers. 
 He had glimpsed the finer stuff that lay below 
 
1 86 BIG LAUREL 
 
 the tempting smiles, and understood, too, some- 
 thing of the abnormal conditions under which 
 they were living. 
 
 Roxie had been just such another, though un- 
 der no such tension. She was as good to look 
 upon as a mountain flower. She possessed much 
 of the same natural beauty and many of the same 
 natural imperfections. And she fitted well into 
 her own surroundings, appearing best in the 
 woods, under sun or moon. She was at her best 
 here to-night in this mountain shack where the 
 wind and the rain were more companions than 
 enemies. In the glow of the firelight her hair 
 shone like spun gold, and her skin, tanned and 
 even freckled in places, was as beautiful as the 
 spotted ochre of a tiger lily. One did not ask 
 here for peaches and cream. And her eyes of 
 light blue were as shallow and as deep as the sky 
 at noontime. Her nose and mouth, a trifle 
 pinched, but wonderfully alert — like the nose 
 and mouth of little forest things dependent for 
 their lives on smell and taste — held him where 
 more perfect features had often left him indiffer- 
 ent. Her perfect little body, both strong and light, 
 had its own beauty. Rightly she should have been 
 
BIG LAUREL 187 
 
 barefooted. He had a notion she had as shapely 
 a foot as Trilby's. 
 
 Back of these physical attributes there was an 
 undoubted personality, and here again he was 
 forced for comparison to the forest creatures — 
 the gentler ones like the doe and squirrel. Naively 
 wondering and trustful he saw her, ready to 
 respond to affection, quick to start at danger. 
 It is flattering to any man to have such a person- 
 ality come to him without fear. As a result of it 
 a man may feel better than he is. 
 
 It is always dangerous to compare a woman 
 with anything but a woman. It is dangerous to 
 compare them, an}^way. Each one must be taken 
 by herself no matter how much like all others she 
 turns out to be in the end. 
 
 Allston, in reviewing swiftly his few points of 
 contact with Roxie, could find nothing on his 
 part that suggested indiscretion. He might justly 
 take a certain amount of satisfaction in that, but 
 it did not alter facts — if what he was beginning 
 to suspect was a fact. He was by no means sure 
 of that even now. He meant to avoid being sure 
 if that were possible. The best way to accomplish 
 this was to get Roxie out of here at once and back 
 to normal conditions. 
 
1 88 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Allston reached for his boots. They were still 
 wet, but he forced them on and laced them. Then 
 he took his automatic and stepped out into the 
 hall to make sure Bud was safely tied. He found 
 the man silent and motionless, and without 
 speaking to him returned to the sitting-room. His 
 plan v/as to notify one of the neighbors on his 
 way down the mountain road and have him come 
 up and free the fellow. 
 
 Roxie had watched from the corners of her 
 eyes every move Allston made. And she realized 
 that every step he took forced her that much 
 nearer a final decision. It was evident that he 
 meant to^go back and intended to take her with 
 him. But it was impossible for her to go back — 
 impossible for many reasons. And yet of them 
 all she could not tell him one. 
 
 It was impossible because she could no longer 
 remain in the same house with him and Miss 
 Wilmer — and yet to tell him why would be to 
 tell him all and she had told him too much 
 already. 
 
 It was impossible because even if Miss Wilmer 
 accepted her, the valley folk would not. Yet, if 
 she told him that, his next question would be to 
 
BIG LAUREL 189 
 
 ask why, then, had she come? To answer that 
 would be to tell him all. 
 
 It was impossible finally because it was ut- 
 terly impossible. If ever she left this house with 
 him, Bud remaining behind alive, it would mean 
 his death more surely than as though she had not 
 come at all. She knew how Bud felt out there. 
 She knew it with a keen realization of the an- 
 guish he was suffering, which amounted at mo- 
 ments almost to pity. Bud — he deserved it. He 
 had brought it on himself. And yet it was cruel 
 hard. She did not enjoy seeing any one suffer. 
 When she saw a man kick a vicious dog, she was 
 sorry for the dog. And Bud — he had his bad 
 points, but he was not a dog. Had Allston killed 
 the man outright, fighting for his own life as he 
 had a right to do, she would have felt no regret. 
 Obliged to choose between the two men, she 
 would not have hesitated to choose for Allston. 
 And she realized that all Allston had done to 
 Bud, after coming here, was necessary. Only he 
 should not have come. 
 
 That was the pity of it. His coming left her 
 with no alternative — and without her dreams. 
 Bud could not be allowed to starve to death out 
 
I90 BIG LAUREL 
 
 there. Some one would free him. Once free, he 
 would kill. There would be no hand left to stop 
 him. It was doubtful if now even she could stop 
 him. But she must try. 
 
 To do that she must remain behind with him. 
 She must give her life — anything Bud asked for 
 
 — to buy him off from his revenge. He would ask 
 all. There was no doubt about that. Perhaps in 
 the end she might not have enough. And yet if 
 he wanted much she would have much to give. 
 The more he wanted, the more she would be able 
 to give. So in the end she must make him want 
 
 — must whet his appetite. Here was a grim test 
 for a woman. 
 
 But that was all to come later. For the present 
 she was concerned alone with Allston. He must 
 go and she must stay. The sooner this happened, 
 the better it would be for both. And this drove 
 her quickly and definitely to her final sacrifice. 
 There was just one way in which she could bring 
 this about; one clear, logical way that would 
 answer for all time his every question and send 
 him home safe and happy to Wilmer. It came to 
 her, as he reentered the room with his jaws set so 
 firmly, that she was half afraid of him. As she 
 

 BIG LAUREL 191 
 
 thought of her plan, she sprang to her feet and 
 faced him with a nervous tremor. Most of the 
 color had gone from her cheeks on the instant. 
 
 " Roxie." 
 
 He spoke sharply — incisively. She had never 
 heard his voice like that. 
 Yes, sir," she answered. 
 Put on your hat and coat." 
 
 "Whatfer?" 
 
 "We're going now." 
 
 "Goin' now? No, sir, I ain't goin' now." 
 
 "Don't delay," he ordered. "And don't be 
 foolish." 
 
 She braced herself — holding her feet a little 
 apart as though steadying for a blow. 
 
 " I ain't goin' now. I ain't goin' no time." 
 
 Unconsciously she had fallen back into the 
 vernacular both in words and voice. There was a 
 drawling softness to it that Allston noticed. It 
 made for tenderness. It was difficult for him to 
 maintain his rigid sternness in the face of it. 
 Yet that was the only safe thing to do. 
 
 He seized her arm. 
 
 " Quick ! " he commanded. 
 
 She shook herself free with a semblance of in- 
 
192 BIG LAUREL 
 
 dignation. Most women are born actresses, given 
 the occasion. And Roxie had the occasion. Her 
 heart and soul were in the stand she was taking. 
 Certainly the stake was big enough — his life and 
 nothing less. She was playing for a larger salary 
 than most real actresses receive. 
 
 " Don' tech me ! " she cried. 
 
 His brows came together. 
 
 "Good Lord — do you want me to throw you 
 over my back? " 
 
 " Do I want ye ter throw me over your back ? " 
 
 Her blue eyes flamed. Had it not been for the 
 cost to him, that is just what she would have 
 liked. But the cost to him was what made it 
 impossible. 
 
 " Damn it, I '11 do it if you don't come now^'* 
 he threatened. 
 
 (Out in the hall alone, Bud was clawing, claw- 
 ing, clawing. He had been clawing all this time. 
 The tips of his fingers were bleeding, but the rope 
 was fuzzing deeper and deeper. Every now and 
 then he stopped to strain at it. Gawd A' mighty, 
 if he should get free — !) 
 
 " Put on your hat and coat or I '11 do it for 
 you," insisted Allston. 
 
BIG LAUREL 193 
 
 The words she was trying to utter stuck in her 
 throat. This acting business was not so easy 
 after all. Yet she found her voice when AUston 
 almost roughly seized her arm again. The touch 
 of him gave the inspiration she needed. 
 
 " I 'm goin' ter stay hyar. I 'm goin' ter stay 
 with Bud," she trembled. 
 
 "You what.?" 
 
 " I come hyar with Bud. Ain't I got a right .'^ " 
 
 "But zvhy did you come.? " 
 
 " I come because I wanted. He asked me ter 
 marry him an' I said I would. Ain't I got a 
 right?" 
 
 "You mean you love him.? " 
 
 Here was a direct question. It demanded a 
 direct answer. She turned her eyes around the 
 shack like a frightened animal. The man before 
 her followed her gaze. She could not get away 
 from him. So finally — 
 
 "Yes," she answered. 
 
 " You came here of your own free will .? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " And the note you wrote was simply to throw 
 Miss Wilmer off the track.? " 
 
 "I — I hed ter tell her somethin'," she pleaded. 
 
194 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " Lord ! " he broke out. " What a farce ! What 
 a farce!" 
 
 She did not know the meaning of his words, 
 but she saw something Hke a smile below his 
 frown and she did not like that. 
 
 " If folks would only leave other folks alone ! " 
 she cried. 
 
 Allston started. 
 
 "There's real philosophy in that," he nodded. 
 "If folks would only leave other folks alone! " 
 
 (Bud was still clawing, clawing, clawing. It 
 hurt. It hurt like the devil now. He writhed un- 
 der a new torture. He paused for breath as he 
 heard their voices in long-continued conversa- 
 tion. They gave him a new incentive. He 
 gathered himself together and throwing into the 
 effort every ounce of his strength he strained once 
 again at the weakened strands.) 
 
 Allston turned from the girl and paced the 
 room once across and back. The story she had 
 just told came like a shock. It hurt, in a way, 
 his pride. It was a blow at his ideals. If at first 
 it did not sound plausible, it sounded upon 
 second thought more plausible than the original 
 interpretation he had given. Natives, after all, 
 
BIG LAUREL 195 
 
 were natives in whatever part of the country they 
 lived and however good to look upon they were. 
 It was perfectly normal for her to fall in love 
 with one of her own. And this man Bud, if 
 no better than most of his fellows hereabouts, was 
 not much worse as far as his observation of the 
 last few weeks went. He was a little more auto- 
 cratic and domineering than some, but he liked 
 him for that. Howe had spoken of him as " bad," 
 but without much concrete evidence except for 
 the story that he had once killed a man. To 
 Allston that did not sound as significant as it 
 might have done a few years back. He himself 
 had killed his man. In battle, to be sure, but so 
 was Bud probably in a battle of his own. 
 
 Allston came back to his original position be- 
 fore Roxie. It was as though she had grown oldei 
 in the last few minutes. She did not stand as 
 straight. And so he suddenly saw her as fitting 
 almost perfectly into these surroundings. 
 
 "So that is it, Roxie,'* he said more gently. 
 "You came because you wanted to come. And 
 you 're here because you want to be here. But — 
 you are n't married yet ^ " 
 
 The girl trembled at that. 
 
196 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "No, sir. I ain't married yet. But Bud — he 
 said to-morrer he'd marry me." 
 
 "And you believe him?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, I beheve him. Oh — I gotter believe 
 him." 
 
 " Then you ought to have waited until to-mor- 
 row." 
 
 " But I did n'." 
 
 "You were afraid Miss Wilmer might object? " 
 
 "Yes, I was 'fraid o' Miss Wilmer." 
 
 "I think most likely she would have objected. 
 And yet if you love the man — " 
 
 Why did she cringe at that? 
 
 "And yet if you love him — why, there isn't 
 any answer. Love is seldom — intelligent." 
 
 " I dunno," she answered vaguely. 
 
 She wished that he would not talk any more. 
 She wished that he would go. Every second he 
 remained was making it more difficult for her. 
 
 "You know the man and what they say of 
 him? " he asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And of course you believe he loves you or 
 you wouldn't have come. And that is the impor- 
 tant thing ; if he loves you, little girl. You '11 have 
 
BIG LAUREL 197 
 
 him at your mercy — if he loves you as he ought 
 to love you." 
 
 In her bewildered brain that suggestion of his 
 seemed to fasten. It was being loved, he said, not 
 loving that was important. " You w^ill have him 
 at your mercy," ran his phrase. If only that 
 proved true, then Allston w^as safe. 
 
 "Why don't ye go now\f* " she questioned. 
 
 Suddenly the lamp flickered. The flame flared 
 up, then down, then up again, smoking the chim- 
 ney as a gust of wind swept dow^n the hall and 
 into the room. Allston's hand flew back to his 
 automatic. Clutching it he ran out into the 
 empty hall. At the same moment Roxie ran to 
 the table and extinguished the light. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 Bud had escaped. That was the meaning of the 
 flickering lamp. And Roxie understood well the 
 danger to Allston of standing exposed, after this, 
 in a lighted room. Bud's gun was here, to be sure, 
 but he might have another hidden about the 
 place — in the barn or the spring-house. 
 
 Allston had run into the hall and, finding his 
 man gone, had promptly closed and locked the 
 door through which he had escaped. The prob- 
 lem no longer was to keep Bud in, but to keep 
 him out. Cursing his stupidity in not having 
 maintained a closer watch, he struck a match in 
 order to search both side rooms. Roxie, running 
 to his side, warned him of the danger. 
 
 "He'll shoot through the winder!" she cried. 
 
 This was a chance he had to take. Remember- 
 ing his own ruse which had gained him admis- 
 sion in the first place, he did not care to see it 
 repeated by another. He found both rooms 
 empty. Bud had sought the open where he would 
 be able to secure another gun and ammunition. 
 
 It was uncanny how in the space of less than a 
 
BIG LAUREL 199 
 
 minute the whole situation had changed for all 
 three of them. Roxie was quicker to realize this 
 fact than Allston. She was quicker because for 
 her the change meant more. Bud was now com- 
 pletely out of her power. As long as he had lain 
 there in the hall, she was still in control of 
 him. She had within herself the tribute price for 
 Allston's ransom. But with Bud gone this op- 
 portunity had been snatched away from her. She 
 was left quite helpless — pitifully helpless. 
 
 And yet for a moment she felt as though sud- 
 denly soaring into the clouds like a released bird. 
 If she had lost her power over Bud, he in turn had 
 lost his power over her. For her this meant, for 
 the time being, freedom — a wild, unnatural sort 
 of freedom. She was a prisoner here with the man 
 she loved. Their interests now, instead of being 
 opposed, were mutual. Bud was against them 
 both. And there was nothing she could do to 
 prevent this ; nothing Allston could do — until 
 morning, anyway. They were as isolated as on a 
 desert island. 
 
 Allston himself did not see this, at first, quite 
 as clearly. He was for immediate action. 
 
 " We must get out of here quick ! " he snapped. 
 
200 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " But we can't," she broke in eagerly. "He — 
 he '11 kill us both. Bud '11 kill us both." 
 
 " You forget I 've got his gun." 
 
 "You've gut one gun." 
 
 " It 's the only one he had." 
 
 " In his pocket. But outside he mought have 
 others, an' long's ye don' know, it's jest as bad." 
 
 " But when you don't know you always have a 
 chance." 
 
 "If he ain't gut a gun, he's gut sticks and 
 stones. He 'd kill with somethin' afore yuh could 
 git through the door." 
 
 "There are two doors. He can't watch them 
 both." 
 
 " Only yuh can't tell which. An' after what 
 yuh done ter him — Oh, you don' know Bud like 
 I do." 
 
 "I know he's killing mad," admitted Allston. 
 
 And yet, had it not been for Roxie, he would 
 have taken his chance and made a dash for it. 
 Once through the door it would be a fair fight. 
 It maddened him — even as it had maddened 
 Bud — to be held in check like this. He began 
 to pace the room — keeping out of range of the 
 glow from the dying fire. 
 
BIG LAUREL cioi 
 
 Then a new thought flashed into his mind. If 
 what this girl had told him was true — if she 
 were really in love with Bud — then there would 
 be no harm in leaving her here. 
 
 She w^as standing in the shadows over by the 
 table. He strode to her side and she crowded 
 close to him. She acted afraid, and that under 
 the circumstances was not natural. She ought 
 to be glad that her lover had escaped. And it 
 made his own course obvious and simple. If he 
 went out, Bud would come in and this would end 
 the whole affair. A moment ago Roxie had re- 
 fused absolutely to return with him. If that was 
 her position before Bud escaped, it was still her 
 position. Had he gone away and left her to free 
 Bud — and he had seen no alternative — she 
 would have been exactly where she would be if 
 he went now. Bud had only forced by a few 
 minutes the inevitable. 
 
 With only himself to consider, then, Allston 
 did not propose to spend the rest of the night up 
 here. It was both humiliating and unnecessary. 
 It might easily turn out to be something worse. 
 If he were not back at the Howe bungalow by 
 morning, the house would be in a turmoil. With 
 
202 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Roxie gone, too, his absence might be misinter- 
 preted. 
 
 Here was a fair argument, and yet he was not 
 altogether convinced that it would hold. It did 
 not explain fully Roxie's present attitude. Well, 
 then his suggestion might force that explanation. 
 
 " Roxie," he said quietly, " a moment ago you 
 told me you came here because you wished to 
 
 come." 
 
 « 
 
 Yes, sir," she admitted with a start. 
 
 "You said you were going to stay." 
 
 " Yes, sir, I 'lowed I was goin' ter stay with 
 Bud." 
 
 " Did you mean that.? " 
 
 Her senses were acute. She felt he was leading 
 her into some sort of trap. She did not answer. 
 Frantically she tried to guess the meaning of it. 
 
 "Were you telling the truth.? " he demanded. 
 
 "Yes, sir," she answered because she was 
 forced to answer. 
 
 "It's hard to believe — somehow," he said. 
 " And yet I don't know why it should be. In time 
 you were bound to marry, if not with Bud — then 
 with some other Bud. Perhaps I 've been think- 
 ing of you as younger than you are.' 
 
 » 
 
a >1 
 
 BIG LAUREL 203 
 
 " I 'm eighteen," she replied as a statement of 
 fact. 
 
 " And that 's young or old according as you 've 
 lived. I saw men of eighteen in France who were 
 fifty." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "There are moments when you seem older 
 than that and moments when you seem younger. 
 That 's the trouble. What are you now ? " 
 I 'm eighteen." 
 
 And you 're sure you know your own mind ? " 
 'Bout how I come to come up hyar with 
 Bud?" she asked suspiciously. 
 "Yes." 
 Yes, sir, I know my own mind 'bout thet." 
 And about staying ^ " 
 
 Yes, sir, I know my own mind 'bout stayin'. 
 We — we gotter stay till mornin' now." 
 " We .? " he frowned. 
 "Bud, he — he'll kill us certain." 
 He spoke more sharply. He was only going 
 around in a circle and he was tired of circles. 
 
 "Listen, Roxie," he said. "What you've told 
 me about Bud changes ever5^hing. It's evident 
 enough now that I butted in where I don't be- 
 
 et 
 
ao4 BIG LAUREL 
 
 long. If Bud loves you, and you love him, you 're 
 safe enough here, and the quicker I get out the 
 Setter. What I want you to do is to make what in 
 the army we called a diversion. You stand out of 
 danger and swing open the back door and I'll 
 cut out the front. Bud ought to be glad enough 
 to see you to forgive your part in it." 
 
 The girl cowered away. She did not speak. 
 The silence became tense. 
 
 "That's all there is to it," he went on. 
 " You 're game ? " 
 
 Slowly the full irony of her fate made itself 
 manifest to her. She did not know it as irony. 
 It seemed to her more like some cruelly right- 
 eous form of retributive justice. The lie she had 
 told to save the man she loved had been turned 
 against her to threaten his life. She had lied to 
 drive him out of this house away from Bud 
 Childers and this same lie was still working to 
 drive him out — but this time into the clutch of 
 Bud. She did not believe for a moment that he 
 had a chance to escape as he proposed. He did 
 not know Bud. Even if he got through the door, 
 he would not be allowed a hundred yards down 
 the road. If he took to the woods, he would be 
 
BIG LAUREL 205 
 
 a stranger there against Bud who knew every 
 foot even by night. Bud would make sure and she 
 could not stop him. The one and only chance she 
 had of protecting Allston now was to keep him 
 here until he was missed at home — until Miss 
 Wilmer and Mr. Howe roused the village and sent 
 out help to him. 
 
 She had lost her power over Bud by staying 
 without a struggle with Allston. Her one op- 
 portunity for regaining her influence had been 
 to send Allston away and release Bud with her 
 own hands. That would have meant something 
 to the man ; it would have been a tangible proof 
 of her friendliness that he could have understood. 
 To bring about this opportunity she had deliber- 
 ately sacrificed whatever good opinion of her All- 
 ston may have had. And now Bud, by escaping, 
 had spoiled all those plans just as Allston, by 
 coming, had spoiled all her other plans. 
 
 It was pitiful. She was stripped of her last 
 vestige of influence over either man. And this at 
 a time when she needed it most; when she had 
 made each an even greater menace to the other. 
 
 That was because she had lied. It was wrong 
 to lie. God hated a liar. His punishment was ter- 
 
206 BIG LAUREL 
 
 rible and swift. She saw that now as vividly as 
 though it were expressed in some flaming sign in 
 the sky. 
 
 Trembling the girl clasped her two hands. She 
 wanted to get down on her weak knees and pray 
 for forgiveness. 
 
 " Why don't you answer, Roxie ^ " Allston 
 questioned sharply. 
 
 She did not answer because she felt as help- 
 less as a mere onlooker; because she could no 
 more think of what to say or do than a baby in 
 arms before some awful catastrophe about to en- 
 velop her. She found herself repeating silently 
 that little prayer which had been once before her 
 last refuge this fearful night. The second line 
 she said over and over again : 
 
 " I pray the Lord my soul to take. I pray the 
 Lord my soul to take." 
 
 That other time the steel-bladed knife which 
 she had brought to the shack as protection 
 against Bud was the answer to her prayer. And 
 now the prayer — or a certain temporary poise 
 resulting from reliance on it — furnished her 
 with another solution. In reality this answer 
 sounded more like the voice of God than had the 
 
BIG LAUREL 207 
 
 other. If the suggestion was daring, It was the 
 sort of daring of which the Lord might be sup- 
 posed to approve. And it was both simple and 
 logical like most of the acts of God. 
 
 Swiftly Roxle looked up and met Allston's 
 blue eyes. She could not in the shadows see much 
 of them, but she felt them. They were steady and 
 honest — of that she was sure. They were the 
 sort of eyes that made it easier to tell the truth 
 than to He. And that was what the still, small 
 voice advised. If she were being punished now for 
 not having been honest, the only way she could 
 redeem herself was from this moment on to tell 
 the truth. God might not forgive altogether her 
 first offense, but if the truth did not expiate it 
 nothing would. No matter at what cost to her 
 pride, to her instincts as a maiden, she must tell 
 the truth. 
 
 " Speak," he commanded. 
 
 So she spoke — her lips quivering. 
 
 "It — It ain't Bud I love, it's — it's you," she 
 stammered. 
 
 "What.?" he cried. 
 
 "It's you," she stumbled on. "Oh, It's allers 
 been you. I could n' help It. I'm sorry." 
 
2o8 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Queer, feeble, jerky little sentences these 
 through which to express as deep an emotion as 
 that now shaking her — racking her. But they 
 were the best she could do. 
 
 And feeble though they were, they struck home 
 to Allston like knife-thrusts. He felt weak after 
 them. For he believed — at least that she be- 
 lieved. This explained a do^en facts that had 
 been vague ; a dozen facts that he had allowed to 
 remain vague even when they aroused his sus- 
 picions, because he in his turn had refused to 
 face the truth. It was clear to him now why she 
 had come here; it was because of this love, to 
 save him. No other explanation was big enough 
 to make plausible her willingness to risk her 
 honor on this night alone with Bud. And all the 
 incidents that followed fitted in accurately and 
 convincingly. 
 
 Not for a second did Allston doubt her sin- 
 cerity. And his big heart flamed up in response 
 to the nobleness and heroism and idealism of the 
 act — foolish as it was and as unworthy of it as 
 he knew himself to be. 
 
 "God!" he breathed. "What a wonderful 
 woman you are ! " 
 
BIG LAUREL 209 
 
 "I could n' help it," she moaned. "Bud — 
 he said he 'd kill yuh an' he 'd 'a' done it too. An' 
 I thought—" 
 
 She looked so abject, so pitiful, so alone in her 
 misery that Allston could no more refrain from 
 what he did next than he could have refrained 
 from picking up an outcast kitten mewing in the 
 cold. He stepped nearer and gathered her into his 
 arms. She came unresisting — weak from the 
 continued tension of these last hours. She buried 
 her' face on his shoulder, trying hard at first to 
 stifle her sobs, but finally letting herself go com- 
 pletely. 
 
 Allston held her tenderly and in silence. That 
 seemed to be the only thing to do. Words were 
 quite useless; reason, unavailing. Whether she 
 was right or wrong or he right or wrong was not, 
 in such a crisis, important. This was some iso- 
 lated moment to be handled by itself. 
 
 If he could not respond with the deep emotion 
 that stirred her, he felt his cheeks burning in an- 
 swer to the clinging appeal of her warm arms, to 
 the clean incense of her hair, to the feverish eager- 
 ness of her rapid breathing. He would have been 
 either less or more than man had he remained 
 
aio BIG LAUREL 
 
 insensible. Lightly he brushed her flaxen hair 
 with his Hps. 
 
 He felt as though he had been swept back a 
 hundred years — a thousand, for all he knew; 
 back to some time when the world was made up 
 of nothing but stars and trees and men and 
 women. This mountain shack of hewn logs might 
 have been his own. And all he saw and all he 
 knew was what it contained and what the forest 
 roundabout contained. The rest of the world 
 counted for no more than it did before the days 
 of maps. Life must be lived and its problems, as 
 far as they concerned him, settled right here. 
 
 Unconsciously his arms tightened about her 
 lithe young body. In response she raised her 
 flushed face a little — shyly, but with new con- 
 fidence. 
 
 "You won't go — now? " she whispered. 
 
 Her words startled him back to the present. 
 His arms fell to his side. 
 
 " Now I ought to go ! " he cried. 
 
 A shattered pane of glass followed the report of 
 a gun. Some one outside was beginning to probe 
 the shadows. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 Bud, after making his escape, ran down the 
 mountain road to the home of Roge Carver, 
 where he borrowed a rifle and ammunition. Roge 
 loaned both without either question or comment, 
 although later he admitted to his neighbors that 
 it did occur to him that the incident was more or 
 less unusual. It was not easy to understand how 
 Bud happened to be without a gun of his own 
 when within so short a distance of his shack, or 
 why he needed one, anyway, on a stormy night 
 at one o'clock in the morning. 
 
 "He was all riled up," explained Roge. "So I 
 did n' hold no talk with 'um." 
 
 No one disputed that as an unwise decision. 
 When a man like Bud goes gunning in the dead 
 of night, he is best left alone. The explanation 
 Roge offered his wife when he returned to bed 
 seemed fairly reasonable. 
 
 "Mebbe one o' them Enfield boys is prowlin' 
 round." 
 
 On the whole, however, it made little difference 
 to his neighbors what Bud was about as long as 
 
212 BIG LAUREL 
 
 they were not immediately involved. That a man 
 out there alone on the mountain-side, in Stygian 
 darkness, was battling with all the devils of Hell 
 did not interest them. Bruised and sore from 
 head to foot, with the tips of his raw fingers quiv- 
 ering. Bud could fight it out and welcome as long 
 as he kept to himself. It even made little differ- 
 ence whether he lost or won. 
 
 As he staggered up the rocky road, he would 
 have been the first to admit the truth of this. 
 This was his fight now — his alone. He could 
 depend upon neither God, man, nor the Devil 
 for assistance. He was against the universe and 
 the universe against him. Even the mountain 
 wind bred in his own mountain trees had played 
 him false. It had lured him into danger at the 
 door. It was trying to press him back even now 
 and whipping his black hair into his eyes. In 
 desperate rage he cursed it as he stumbled on. 
 
 No matter how small the man, there is some- 
 thing Homeric about his struggles when he comes 
 to grips with elemental forces. Whether king or 
 common slave, a man who swayed by big pas- 
 sions does his best against odds acquires a cer- 
 tain majesty. Men respect even rats who fight 
 hard for life. 
 
BIG LAUREL 213 
 
 If Bud had been dominated at the moment of 
 his escape by nothing but black revenge, this, 
 before he returned to the shack, had changed 
 into something else, no less intense, but on the 
 whole worthier. His objective remained still the 
 same — the death of Allston. But while he lay 
 bound upon the floor suffering acute physical 
 pain, he had looked forward to this as a matter 
 solely of personal satisfaction. It was man to 
 man then, with Roxie stimulating the enmity, 
 but she herself almost wholly eliminated from 
 the final issue. Once Bud was free and, rifle in 
 hand, within sight of his own door again, the girl 
 assumed to him her old importance. Because, as 
 he realized now, with Allston dead, she would be 
 left more than ever his. The first time he had 
 secured no more than temporary possession ; this 
 time possession would be permanent. 
 
 So after all he did not stand altogether alone 
 against the universe. With Roxie still alive that 
 was not possible. God, man, and the Devil — 
 they could all be against him, but as long as he 
 kept within striking distance of this girl he could 
 still hope. In a way she was nearer him at this 
 moment than she had ever been before. He had 
 
214 BIG LAUREL 
 
 until now been under certain restraints. She had 
 forced upon him a compromise. For her sake he 
 had twice spared Allston. She could not expect 
 that again of him. The issue now was clean-cut 
 and that suited him better. 
 
 Within a hundred yards of his shack, Bud 
 paused. The windows were dark — a fact that 
 made him smile grimly. It indicated that the 
 two were still within or they would not have 
 taken this precaution. And that they were still 
 inside was all he asked. It meant that they must 
 come out — in one hour, two hours, ten hours, 
 twenty hours. It did not much matter when. 
 They must come out of one of two doors. 
 
 Bud took up a position by the spring-house to 
 the left. From that angle he commanded either 
 door. With rifle cocked he sat down to wait. 
 
 But waiting was a more difficult business than 
 he anticipated. That was because his thoughts 
 refused to stand still. And yet often enough he 
 had sat on a rock for hours at a time waiting for 
 a buck to pass down a mountain trail — waited 
 stolidly and indifferently for his quarry. He had 
 not then been worried by thought. He had been 
 patient enough. This was all that was necessary 
 now. 
 
BIG LAUREL 215 
 
 If Allston had only been in there alone, Bud 
 could have sat where he was a week, indifferent 
 to sleep, indifferent to hunger, indifferent to the 
 weather. Each passing hour then would only 
 have heightened his expectancy. But Roxie was 
 there too. 
 
 He wondered what the two were doing. There 
 were moments when he thought he caught the 
 sound of their muffled voices — as he had caught 
 them when he lay prone and bound on the floor. 
 Then the moisture started to his forehead and 
 his arm muscles twitched and the tips of his raw 
 fingers began to quiver. He was tempted then to 
 beat down one of those silent, blank doors and 
 force his way in. 
 
 Only he knew better. He would be shot in his 
 tracks — through the panels most likely. He did 
 not underestimate his man — pink-cheeked, lily- 
 fingered though he might be. Lily fingers could 
 pull a gun trigger quite as easily as any other 
 kind. Furthermore, he had had evidence that 
 Allston could shoot straight. He did not like to 
 remember the night of their first meeting when 
 this stranger had shot the gun out of his hands. 
 Yet it was one of the things he could not forget. 
 
2i6 BIG LAUREL 
 
 He must wait — but what were they doing in 
 there? Holding hands, perhaps. Gawd A' mighty! 
 And he sitting out here in the dark — sitting out- 
 side his own home! 
 
 It was curious, but from the first Bud had 
 never considered as a possibility the fact that 
 Roxie might really care for this stranger. His 
 mind could no more conceive this than that she 
 should not in the end care for himself. Allston 
 was fooling her, that was all, and she was being 
 fooled. One of the traditional old wives' tales 
 hereabouts was of a country girl ruined by a city 
 chap. Bud had heard it since a boy. He knew 
 of other cases, too, where the villain had not been 
 a city chap ; but those stories, though based on 
 sounder evidence, were not as dramatic. They 
 were, perhaps because of this evidence, dis- 
 tinctly commonplace. 
 
 Whatever Roxie's relations with Allston were, 
 then, they were only temporary. And she was not 
 at fault. She did not know men. It was the old 
 story of the summerer and his fine clothes, except 
 that Roxie would never be fooled too far. Bud 
 knew that. He had known it before, but the early 
 part of this evening the girl had proven it. The 
 
BIG LAUREL 217 
 
 little wildcat had taken a kmfe out of her bosom 
 and started for him. And he — well, he was 
 almost tempted to risk one cut for a kiss. Her 
 eyes had stopped him. They had warned that the 
 cut would be deep. 
 
 Now she was in there with Allston. That was 
 what made it hard to wait. It was this which 
 moved him from his position once and urged 
 him to one of those front windows. Cautiously 
 he peered in. He could see only the dying fire 
 lighting dimly the hearthstones. But this sight 
 maddened him. It was cold outside, and here he 
 was barred from his ow^n fire. To the right was a 
 black shadow. Upon the impulse of the moment 
 he raised his rifle and fired into it. Then he 
 moved back swiftly to his point of vantage by the 
 spring-house. 
 
 Nothing followed. The shadow evidently was 
 only a shadow. It was expecting too much to 
 hope it was anything else. Roxie was no fool. 
 She would see to it that Allston kept out of range. 
 For that matter Allston himself was no fool. 
 
 Bud made up his mind that he could look for- 
 ward to little action until morning, and the only 
 consolation he could get out of that was that 
 
21 8 BIG LAUREL 
 
 daylight would increase his chances. Daylight 
 would make the result certain. In the dark a 
 man, no matter how good a shot, might shoot 
 wild. Once the sun was up Bud knew that not 
 even a rat could move ten inches from either 
 doorsill. 
 
 With his rifle across his arm he sat down, his 
 thin lips drawn taut, his blue eyes as hard and 
 cold as steel. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 Allston did not minimize the danger of his sit- 
 uation. He knew that the odds were against him 
 and that those odds increased with every passing 
 hour. After dawn his chances of getting out alive 
 would be ten to one against him. But his only 
 alternative was to make a dash for it with Roxie, 
 and that would be to risk her life as well as his 
 own. Bud would shoot at anything that moved 
 from either door. He must wait until Bud could 
 distinguish clearly between them. 
 
 Allston accepted his lot like a gentleman. He 
 even appreciated the grim irony of his plight — 
 the sardonic humor of it. He had come up here 
 to save Roxie and had succeeded in doing noth- 
 ing but endanger her; she in her turn had come 
 here to save him and had only placed his life in 
 jeopardy. Both had been actuated by the highest 
 motives, but these had worked only for their 
 doom. 
 
 There was something wrong about that. 
 Though helpless, Allston was by no means re- 
 signed to any such outcome; neither for Roxie 
 
220 BIG LAUREL 
 
 nor for himself. There was too much good in 
 this girl to have any misfortune come to her. As 
 for himself, life had never seemed sweeter. He 
 did not mean to let go of it without a struggle. 
 
 Yet, too, life had never been more confused. 
 Roxie clung to him now like a child in alarm. 
 After her confession, she abandoned herself ut- 
 terly to her emotions — quite trustfully, without 
 a trace either of fear or reserve. Yet she did not 
 seem bold. Her sincerity saved her from that. 
 
 They had retreated into the far corner to the 
 left of the fireplace, out of range of any window, 
 and here they sat down upon the floor. This 
 child-woman snuggled up to him kitten-wise, 
 her head upon his shoulder. And he placed his 
 arm about her, knowing her as half child and 
 half woman; more child than most children, 
 more woman than most women. 
 
 So, a thousand years ago, he might have sat in 
 some cave guarding his woman against the en- 
 trance of wild beasts. Inhaling the incense of her 
 hair, feeling the quick beating of her heart, 
 conscious of the love which had already sacri- 
 ficed so much for him, which was ready to sacri- 
 fice so much more, it was difficult to drag him- 
 
BIG LAUREL 221 
 
 self back to the present; difficult to see straight. 
 
 Yet that is what he must do — whether he 
 lived on or not. To see straight while he did live 
 was more important than living on. And in this 
 crisis the calm, steady brown eyes of Wilmer 
 Howe came to help him. 
 
 He had not forgotten her. Something of her 
 presence had been with him all the evening. He 
 had felt it again and again, though in the turmoil 
 of vivid details which follow^ed so swiftly one 
 after another he had not always visualized her. 
 And it had not been easy either to tell just what 
 part she w^as playing in this isolated drama up 
 in these black hills. Their relations had been so 
 purely intellectual that it was difficult to fit her 
 into action so largely physical — the clash of 
 body against body rather than mind against 
 mind. 
 
 But now, it seemed almost as though she were 
 standing before him, a silent onlooker. The sug- 
 gestion was startling enough at first. It sent the 
 blood to his cheeks. And then he found himself 
 meeting her imagined gaze quite coolly. There 
 was nothing here of which he need feel ashamed 
 even before her. 
 
222 BIG LAUREL 
 
 It was very quiet inside the shack. Outside the 
 wind was still reeling in and out among the trees 
 boisterously as a drunken sailor, but distinctly it 
 was outside. The doors were safely barred. The 
 gale scarcely stirred the dark within save when oc- 
 casionally it puffed down the chimney and revived 
 into a glow the dying embers. And the girl in 
 his arms lay very still like one not daring to move 
 for fear of breaking a spell. 
 
 It was only a few hours ago that Allston had 
 left Wilmer, but he felt as though days must have 
 passed. Yet less than five hours before, she had 
 lighted her candle and excusing herself had gone 
 upstairs to her room. He had watched her pretty 
 feet as they twinkled out of sight. A half-hour 
 later, he had no doubt, she was sound asleep. 
 
 Perhaps, in her dreams, she had followed him 
 up here; perhaps, in her dreams, she was now 
 looking to see what he was about. The continued 
 silence began to rouse his imagination. It did 
 so even in the face of the startling reality he was 
 still confronting. With Roxie's heart beating 
 against his arm, it was not of her he thought, but 
 of this other. 
 
 If Allston had been timid in his mental ap- 
 
BIG LAUREL 223 
 
 proach to Wilmer before, he was bold enough 
 now. With a possible margin of only five hours 
 of life ahead, a man must needs be bold if ever. 
 True values assert themselves willy-nilly in such 
 a crisis. 
 
 He had realized from the moment of Bud's es- 
 cape that never had the desire to live been so keen 
 in him, and in the next few hours he learned 
 why. In France he had faced death even more 
 intimately than he was doing to-night and had 
 done it with a certain indifference. Not that he 
 was either dulled or depressed; not that he was 
 insensitive to what life meant or that he sought 
 escape from its responsibilities. He was then in 
 an utterly negative state with the issue com- 
 pletely out of his hands. And he had seen so 
 much of death that it had lost its horror. About 
 the only distinction he made between live men 
 and dead men was that the former were still able 
 to move. The latter lay quietly where they 
 crumpled up — sometimes for days. He had 
 passed groups of such immobile forms as unemo- 
 tionally as he passed broken tree branches. 
 
 On his mission up here to-night, he had not 
 considered death either one way or the other, 
 
224 BIG LAUREL 
 
 although he had sensed his danger. Roxie herself 
 was the one who finally brought him face to face 
 with a full realization of the issue. It was she 
 who had finally forced the fatal situation. And 
 she had done this, unwittingly and unconsciously, 
 in the name of love. Humbly and out of a full 
 heart he drew his arm tighter, and she opened 
 her eyes and looked up into his face and smiled. 
 
 Lord, what was this thing called love? It was 
 symbolized as a winged cherub and expressed in 
 terms of June roses, and yet it drove men relent- 
 lessly to the very brink, and over, of death. And 
 women, too; young women scarcely out of girl- 
 hood. 
 
 And it drove men on to life when death would 
 be simpler. Allston did not want to die. He 
 wanted to get back to Wilmer. Give him one 
 more hour alone with her and he would beat 
 down her reserve — would sweep her into his 
 arms and hold her there. He had been playing 
 with love. He had not realized the bigness of 
 his passion. It had seemed to him some dainty, 
 fragile emotion to be handled as cautiously as a 
 delicate vase. And love was one of the tw^o vital 
 things of a man's being. There were only two; 
 
BIG LAUREL 225 
 
 love and death. Everything else was trivial. And 
 love was neither of the intellect nor of the heart. 
 It was of the soul. 
 
 That day in the cove when he had seized Wil- 
 mer's hand, his soul had spoken. It had bid him 
 take, then and there. She had drawn back from 
 him — yes. But that was because he was half- 
 hearted. He had not pressed on. 
 
 Roxie moved a little. 
 
 "You're cold.'^" she asked anxiously. 
 
 "No. Are you?" 
 
 "Cold — here.?" 
 
 " The fire is going out," he answered. " I '11 
 poke around and see if I can't find a blanket." 
 
 " Please don't," she pleaded. 
 
 But he rose abruptly. He needed to be on his 
 feet. Instantly she rose, too. 
 
 " He '11 git yuh through the winder." 
 
 " You stay here," he ordered. 
 
 " Mister Allston ! " 
 
 He moved down the hallway towards one of 
 the side rooms. She followed. 
 
 " Stay where you are," he commanded. 
 
 She obeyed, but her lips began to tremble. She 
 did not want to let him out of her sight. She was 
 
226 BIG LAUREL 
 
 afraid lest the dark might swallow him up for- 
 ever. She was none too sure of him now. The 
 fairy book might close at any moment and the 
 story end. 
 
 But he came back with his arms full of 
 blankets torn from the bed — clean new blankets 
 which Bud had bought within a week. He spread 
 one down upon the floor for her to lie on. 
 
 " Perhaps you can get a little sleep in the next 
 few hours," he suggested. 
 
 " Only I don' wanter sleep," she answered. 
 
 "Lie down, an}^^ay." 
 
 "What you goneter do?" 
 
 " I 'm going to cover you up." 
 
 "And then.?" 
 
 " I 'm going to think, Roxie. I 'm going to 
 think hard." 
 
 "Here?" 
 
 " Here beside you." 
 
 "All right." 
 
 She lay down prone upon her back and he 
 covered her as he might have covered a child. 
 
 "You'll save one blanket for yuhself ? " she 
 asked. 
 
 "I don't need any.' 
 
 » 
 
BIG LAUREL 227 
 
 "Please. It'll be cold afore mornin'." 
 
 To quiet her he threw one over his shoulders 
 and resumed his place near her. She reached 
 for his hand, found it, and grasped one linger* 
 So she thought she held him safe. 
 
 It was well enough for her to think so during 
 those next few hours. It brought her comfort 
 and did no harm to any one. Yet, tight as she 
 gripped that finger, he — though she did not 
 know it — instantly slipped away. She had no 
 more of him than a few hours before Bud had 
 had of her. 
 
 But it was the feel of her warm hand that made 
 Allston realize that the difference between life 
 and death is not so crudely simple as the differ- 
 ence between mobility and immobility. That dis- 
 tinction satisfied the God of War. He was content 
 with incapacity. Ineffectiveness was death. He 
 even preferred total disability because it turned 
 a man from an asset into a liability, though still 
 able to feel and to think. 
 
 But the God of Peace, when He marked a man, 
 did not stop here. He demanded annihilation. 
 With the body must go all the emotions and all 
 the thoughts. A man to be dead must be dead all 
 
228 BIG LAUREL 
 
 over — must be resolved into his elements. Noth- 
 ing must be left of him on this planet except a 
 memory. And that faded as rapidly as an un- 
 finished print. 
 
 Allston did not propose to submit to any such 
 programme without a struggle. Before such a 
 contingency every sense became doubly acute. 
 He was as alert to sounds as a squirrel. He 
 jumped at every creak, not in fear, but in readi- 
 ness. The automatic in his hand responded sub- 
 consciously, finding direction with sureness. His 
 eyes pierced the dark so that he saw even into the 
 far corners of the room where before he could not 
 see. Once a rat crept out of the hallway and be- 
 fore he knew what he was about Allston had 
 fired — and killed. Roxie sprang up quivering 
 from head to foot, and it took him ten minutes to 
 quiet her. 
 
 But if Allston was alert to the present, he was 
 even more alert to the future. His thoughts ran 
 ahead like galloping horses in response to the call 
 of new needs. He had, all these years, merely 
 scratched the surface while he thought he had 
 been digging deep into the very bowels of the 
 earth. Before he was out of college he had in an 
 
BIG LAUREL 229 
 
 academic way been ready to grapple with life. 
 On top of that he had, through war, been brought 
 into deadly contact with life itself — with what 
 he had considered the big basic elements of ex- 
 istence. He had been plunged from poetry into 
 prose. So he had completed the cycle. There was 
 little left for him to know. His own problem 
 was to classify and card-index his wide expe- 
 riences — to put them in order for use. 
 
 Only one element had been left out of the past 
 few years — a relatively unimportant element. 
 That was the element of love — a distinctly 
 peace-time element. He had even touched upon 
 that superficially. And he had more or less ex- 
 pected to go into it more fully at his leisure. But 
 not until the noise of the big guns was out of his 
 ears; not until the ghastly realities had faded 
 away; not until the little mounds had flattened 
 down and the trenches been filled in; not, in 
 brief, until — if ever — he was able to get away 
 from actuality into that pleasant poet's paradise 
 of dreams. There would be time enough then 
 for the pretty drama of love. 
 
 So he had thought of it. So he had stepped 
 forward lightly to meet the little winged cherub. 
 
230 BIG LAUREL 
 
 So he had challenged him to shoot his swiftest 
 and straightest. Even after he had felt the first 
 sting of the dart, he had smiled on. The wound 
 smarted, but it was by no means serious. 
 
 Then this night had come — the second act 
 of a whimsical Barrie comedy. There was height- 
 ened action at the rise of the curtain, but that 
 might be significant or not. He had held him- 
 self ready to laugh at any moment. As the scene 
 progressed, it had not been as easy, but still he 
 would have followed any cue Wilmer had given 
 him up to the moment she lighted her candle and 
 disappeared for the night. 
 
 The succeeding scenes followed quickly, and 
 they had ranged from melodrama to genuine 
 tragedy, all based on this one theme of love. Not, 
 however, love as he had conceived it. This had 
 been no affair for winged cherubs to indulge in. 
 And it had ceased to be a play. It was too se- 
 rious — too grimly real for that. This had been 
 a man's game. And a woman's game, too. But 
 the stakes were terribly high. 
 
 Sitting there in the corner of this darkened 
 shack waiting for the dawn (which for all he 
 knew might turn out to be night), with this other 
 
BIG LAUREL 231 
 
 palpitating human being so curiously involved 
 with him, Allston began to sense something of 
 what love really is. As he vibrated to the dy- 
 namic power of this mighty force, he began to 
 sense something of what life really is. And the 
 iwo were one. 
 
 The two were one; that was the full signifi- 
 cance of both love and life. A man floundered 
 on trying to separate the inseparable until he 
 discovered this. Neither prose nor poetry; reality 
 nor dreams ; man nor woman, had any real ex- 
 istence apart from the other. When they did 
 unite, their potentiality was akin to that of God. 
 Out of that union came all the big things that 
 are; came life itself. 
 
 Concretely this meant for Allston that woman 
 w^ith whom he had been in such light contact dur- 
 ing these last few weeks. It meant Wilmer Howe. 
 And yet it did not mean the Wilmer who in 
 her pretty setting had been acting her dainty 
 comedy — the idyl of the winged cherub — but 
 the real woman back of her; the woman of flesh 
 arid blood whom for a few brief seconds he had 
 felt when he grasped her hand; the woman who 
 was, if she was at all, in the secrecy of her room. 
 
232 BIG LAUREL 
 
 And how he hungered for her now in this crisis ! 
 How, had she been near, he would have dragged 
 her out of herself — brutally if necessary! How, 
 had she been as close to him as this other was, 
 he would have covered her hair and forehead 
 with kisses, kisses both sacred and burning. His 
 lips grew hot and dry at thought of it. 
 
 Roxie opened her drowsy eyes. 
 
 " Yer warm enough? " she asked with the ten- 
 derness of a cooing dove. 
 
 Allston started. 
 
 "Yes," he answered. 
 
 " I feel 's though I was goin' asleep." 
 
 " That 's the best thing you could do," he re- 
 plied. 
 
 " I Ve dreamed a dream like this," she smiled 
 gently. 
 
 " You might as well keep on dreaming — till 
 morning." 
 
 That was the best thing she could do. And he 
 was entitled to his dreams, too, until morning. 
 So he gave himself up to them riotously, but with 
 his eyes wide open and his brain clear — as 
 though they were not dreams at all. It was as 
 though Wilmer had come to him here and made 
 
BIG LAUREL 23;^ 
 
 herself an integral part of him — blending into 
 him until she became one with him. 
 
 It was Roxie who was dreaming. Her eyes 
 were closed and her breathing regular. Yet from 
 time to time she stirred uneasily in her sleep. 
 Then Allston, fearing lest she take cold, slipped 
 the blanket from his shoulders and threw it over 
 her — very gently so that she would not awake. 
 Her face in repose appeared even younger. It 
 was quite untroubled. He thanked God for that. 
 If only she were sleeping safe in her own bed as 
 she should be! 
 
 Allston became aware of the approaching dawn 
 even before there was light. The wind died 
 down so that it was quite still all about the shack. 
 But within, the air became fresher with the clear- 
 ness of atomized spring water. When the light 
 did begin to come, it came subtly. It was more as 
 though the dark were being diluted. Without 
 moving, Allston watched the process w4th weird 
 fascination. He wished the girl to sleep as long 
 as that was safe, but he knew this could not be for 
 long. The sun was coming up behind those dark 
 ridges, and it was only a question of a very brief 
 time when it would enter here and leave them 
 
-234 BIG LAUREL 
 
 as exposed as though the wall of the shack were 
 torn down. Every window would be a menace. 
 There would not be a corner left in which they 
 could hide. 
 
 He did not wish to hide. Light was what he 
 was waiting for — light that would allow Bud to 
 distinguish between him and Roxie. Only he 
 must time himself nicely ; it must be clear enough 
 not to permit of any mistake on Bud's part, but 
 not clear enough to allow the man to shoot 
 through the windows. 
 
 On the shelf over the fireplace there was a row 
 of crocks. As soon as he was able to count these, 
 Allston would rouse the girl. That time came 
 within five minutes. He made out four of them — 
 one, two, three, four. He placed his hand on 
 Roxie's head and whispered her name. She 
 started to her feet, staring about wildly. 
 
 "Steady," whispered Allston. "It's morning." 
 
 The girl was confused. It was difficult for her 
 to grasp the situation. 
 
 " Listen," he commanded. " I 'm going out be- 
 fore he can see us here. It 's the only way. You 're 
 to stay behind until I get across the clearing. 
 Then you follow. You '11 be safe." 
 
BIG LAUREL 235 
 
 " I '11 be safe ! " she cried. " But you? " 
 
 " I must take my chances." 
 
 " Then I wanter take mine — with yuh." 
 
 " You '11 only spoil mine," he frowned. " I can 
 get across there alone, and once in the woods 
 I 'II wait for you. Straight from the house and 
 across the road. You understand?" 
 
 " N0-0-," she whimpered. 
 
 " If he tries to stop you, I '11 have him covered. 
 Straight across and into the woods." 
 
 Already the crocks on the shelf were becoming 
 too visible. 
 
 "You've been game till now; be game to the 
 end," he whispered. 
 
 Beseechingly she stood before him with up- 
 lifted face. He stooped and brushed her forehead. 
 
 "God bless you — whatever happens," he 
 choked. 
 
 Then, before she could catch her breath, he 
 swung open the door and, crouching a little, 
 dashed out. He had not gone ten feet before a 
 rifle cracked from the spring-house. 
 
 Allston crumpled up like an empty sack. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 It was half-past nine when Wilmer left Allston 
 alone in front of the open fire and went upstairs. 
 And though it was after midnight before she fell 
 asleep, she had not then heard his footsteps along 
 the hall. She had listened, too, rather closely. 
 The man had been in her thoughts every minute 
 since she bade him good-night and retreated to 
 her room. Her abrupt and somewhat inhos- 
 pitable departure was a retreat — nothing less. 
 She had been neither weary, sleepy, nor bored. 
 In fact, she had retired at a moment when she 
 had felt herself more than usually alert and alive 
 both mentally and physically — more alive than 
 she felt it either discreet or safe to be. When a 
 carefully nurtured and intelligent young woman 
 finds herself prompted to such intimate acts of 
 tenderness as smoothing back the hair from the 
 forehead of a man she has lately chided for being 
 too boldly impulsive, it would seem to be high 
 time for her to remove herself out of danger even 
 though that involves a humiliating confession. It 
 was no argument either that because his hair was 
 
BIG LAUREL 237 
 
 light and all awry, it appeared like the hair of a 
 boy; or that because his face was troubled, her 
 tenderness was justified on purely humanitarian 
 grounds. Besides, she had considered nothing of 
 the sort. She had wished to do it because some 
 newly roused instinct craved satisfaction in just 
 that way. 
 
 There was no use in lying. That was both 
 cowardly and useless. If there were mortal sin 
 here this was no way of ridding one's self of it. 
 One should probe for causes. That is what the 
 intellect is for. The ability to do this or not is 
 what distinguishes between the intelligent and 
 the unintelligent. 
 
 Well, then, the reason she had wished to 
 smooth back the hair from Allston's forehead 
 was because — she had wished to do it. He was 
 worried and she held herself partly responsible. 
 She could not help this. She had tried to be honest 
 both with him and herself — to speak the truth 
 as she saw it. But having done this she was sorry 
 because it had not helped to dissipate his per- 
 plexity. It had only more deeply involved them 
 both. Words had been unavailing. It was then 
 that this strangely primitive impulse had asserted 
 
238 BIG LAUREL 
 
 itself. Her warm hand urged her to express what 
 her tongue could not. 
 
 She had conquered the temptation. That is a 
 woman's lot; to conquer and conquer and con- 
 quer. Given emotions more acute than those of 
 men, she is asked to control them more com- 
 pletely. If she does not, she is never forgiven. 
 She has betrayed her trust. 
 
 She had conquered the physical impulse, but 
 that was all. Alone here in her room she knew 
 that. The old tenderness returned — the tender- 
 ness that sought expression in action. And after 
 all perhaps it was not so strange. Men have 
 always sought and women always given this 
 tangible proof of their feelings. Down through 
 the years a woman has spoken her heart through 
 the touch of her hand and lips. Speech has been 
 left for men. 
 
 In her room with the dark all around her, 
 Wilmer allowed herself to relax somewhat. But 
 vigilance is the eternal price of liberty in more 
 senses than one. The moment she permitted her 
 thoughts to wander where they would, they went 
 where she would not. Only once before had she 
 felt herself the victim of this unseen power, and 
 
BIG LAUREL 139 
 
 the man who was responsible now lay dead at 
 Chateau-Thierry. 
 
 She had been younger then. Over twenty, every 
 year counts double in a woman's life until she 
 reaches full maturity. Her youth had been an 
 excuse where now it no longer was. And yet she 
 doubted if at twenty she would have had to fight 
 so hard for control. Her emotions were feebler 
 then. 
 
 To add to her confusion she was not at all sure 
 what it was she was trying to repulse. There is so 
 much vagueness in a young woman's life; so 
 much hinted at, but never made clear; so much 
 guessed, but not known. It is probably true that 
 they are more of a mystery to themselves than 
 to the young men who look upon them with such 
 awe. It was certainly true of Wilmer in spite of 
 all her reading. 
 
 No two authorities seemed to her able to agree 
 on this thing called love; whether it was some- 
 thing to welcome or something to be guarded 
 against. Before Allston came along she had been 
 inclining to the latter view, for it appeared to lead 
 more often to unhappiness than to happiness. 
 Most tragedies were born of love ; the great trage- 
 
240 BIG LAUREL 
 
 dies as well as the sordid little ones. In most cases 
 woman was the victim, and when not, most cer- 
 tainly deserved to be. The good women suffered 
 to themselves; the bad women caused others to 
 suffer. 
 
 If this were true, then love was something 
 to be fought off like an evil spirit. But the trouble 
 was that instead of gaining strength as she strug- 
 gled, as in other contests of her life, she felt her 
 resistance to be constantly weakening. The more 
 she argued, the feebler became her arguments ; 
 the more bitterly she condemned herself, the 
 more ardently she desired. Hour by hour her in- 
 tellect had been giving way to her emotions. She 
 was becoming, looking at it in one way, less and 
 less intelligent in her attitude to this burning 
 problem. 
 
 And yet if her slow retreat did not bring her 
 back into safer territory, it left her on more famil- 
 iar ground. Forced to her base, she found that 
 base to be her heart. And her heart was more 
 peculiarly herself than her mind. 
 
 There are, in every woman, two women; the 
 one coolly, calmly, deliberately, intelligently 
 formed, and within her another, often enough im- 
 
BIG LAUREL 241 
 
 prisoned for life, the creation of God. Shyly the 
 latter sits in silence peeping as she finds her op- 
 portunity through the eyes — safe hidden in the 
 eyes — or makes her presence felt through a 
 touch of the hand or, in full power, through the 
 lips. And this woman grows and grows if given 
 half a chance. If not she sickens and dies — 
 pathetically, tragically. And what is left after 
 that may be admirable, but does not win 
 admiration. 
 
 It was face to face with this other self that 
 Wilmer now found herself — an elfish, wholly 
 irresponsible self, although governed by some- 
 thing bigger even than thought. And when 
 the word love reached this Other, it was as 
 though she sprang into radiantly full being. 
 Flushed and palpitating, eyes brimming with dar- 
 ing and eagerness, she asserted herself. She was 
 Youth with all the hardy qualities of youth; she 
 was Life with all the adventurous enthusiasm of 
 life; she was Womanhood with all the steady 
 courage of womanhood. She asked no questions, 
 but she whispered secrets. 
 
 She whispered secrets to Wilmer lying there in 
 the dark — big secrets, holy secrets, quickening 
 
242 BIG LAUREL 
 
 secrets. She spoke of love quite fearlessly — at 
 times almost fiercely. With eyes that were like 
 the blazing sun, with nostrils that quivered, with 
 a mouth opened for frank laughter, she chal- 
 lenged the world to deny her. 
 
 And Wilmer, her pretty white arm thrown 
 over her forehead, stared and marveled until 
 finally her eyes grew heavy and she slipped away 
 into a dream world. 
 
 She awoke at dawn. She started to her elbow 
 to listen once again for the footsteps of Allston. 
 The house was silent — the utter silence of early 
 morning. She realized then that she must have 
 slept and that he had passed her door during that 
 interval. She fell back to her pillow, but her eyes 
 remained wide open. She had a feeling that 
 something had happened in the last few hours — 
 something big. It is so one awakes after joyous 
 news, unable for a second to recall it. The emo- 
 tion remains, but unrelated. Then suddenly she 
 remembered, and her face became as radiant as 
 the face of that other woman. She was that other 
 woman — that heart woman. In her dreams, love 
 had taken possession. 
 
 She sprang from bed, and crossing to the open 
 
BIG LAUREL 243 
 
 window looked out at the dawn. The quickening 
 sky greeted her like a sister. The east was still 
 a silver gray, but it looked so fresh and clean and 
 cool that impulsively she threw out her arms to- 
 wards it. So she did towards all the trees and 
 grasses, though they were still half hidden in the 
 dark. There were shadows there, too, but they 
 were friendly shadows. She did not fear them in 
 the least. They called to her to come out under 
 the sky and be refreshed like them. 
 
 She felt cramped here in her room. She wished 
 to be part of the dawn. And so dressing quickly 
 she stole downstairs to the sitting-room. The 
 fire was out, but the chair in which Allston had 
 sat was still in its place before the cold hearth. 
 Her hand fell upon it caressingly. It had become 
 individualized to her. There were other chairs in 
 the room of similar design, but these were merely 
 so many indifferent pieces of wicker furniture. 
 This was his chair. This would always be his 
 chair. 
 
 She moved across the room to find a wrap, and 
 when opposite the door leading into the kitchen 
 was stopped by a draft as from an open window. 
 That was unusual because her father was rather 
 
244 BIG LAUREL 
 
 finicky about having the house tight-locked at 
 night, and Roxie knew this. For a moment she 
 hesitated. It was not yet full day, but she could 
 see well enough to distinguish objects within. 
 Perhaps Roxie was up. She often rose early. 
 
 Wilmer ventured to the threshold and called 
 the girl's name. She received no response, but 
 she saw then it was not a window but the outside 
 door that was open. It affected her as something 
 dramatic. Nothing can be more significant than 
 a door open when it should be closed or closed 
 when it should be open. It involves a human ele- 
 ment that may mean much. 
 
 On the whole, Wilmer was now sorry she had 
 come down here. She was no more than ordi- 
 narily timid, but there is something unnatural 
 about a house before it has awakened. The si- 
 lence, for one thing, is intensive. One feels like 
 an intruder, and like an intruder is never sure of 
 what one may stumble upon. The night things 
 do not vanish except before direct rays of either 
 sun or lamp. 
 
 Finally, with considerable effort, she crossed 
 the kitchen and hurriedly closed the door — with 
 an odd feeling, before it latched, that something 
 
BIG LAUREL 245 
 
 from without might resist her efforts. She was 
 left a little out of breath. Which was absurd, of 
 course. She realized this as soon as she had 
 turned the lock. 
 
 But now the dead stove and the dumb kettle 
 and the silent pots and pans hanging all around 
 oppressed her. A kitchen is a living thing ex- 
 pressed in terms of noise and movement. When 
 it is quiet and still, it is out of character. More- 
 over, it emphasized the absence of Roxie. She 
 was always here, or at least some evidence of her. 
 
 Wilmer listened for her footsteps overhead. 
 She ought by now to be dressing. The first feeble 
 chirps of the early birds could be heard outside 
 and she always rose with them. It was not neces- 
 sary for her to get up at this hour, but she always 
 did. 
 
 A peculiar sense of loneliness sw^ept over Wil- 
 mer. She felt suddenly conscious of being the 
 only live thing about in the house. She wished 
 to see Roxie — to hear another human voice. It 
 was this which impelled her up the stairs to the 
 girl's door. It was closed and she heard no move- 
 ment within. She rapped gently and received no 
 response. Then she turned the knob and gently 
 
246 BIG LAUREL 
 
 pressed the door open. Her eyes sought the bed. 
 It was empty. 
 
 And in the center of the room there stood one 
 shoe and beside it a bit of paper. She picked up 
 the note and hurrying to the window read it. 
 Her heart stopped beating for a moment. Roxie 
 had gone. Reading between the Hnes as clearly 
 as Allston had done, she knew with whom. But 
 there were some other things between the lines, 
 clear enough to Allston, which she did not under- 
 stand. 
 
 Clutching the crumpled bit of paper, Wilmer 
 came back to the sitting-room. When the note 
 had been written, she had no way of knowing, 
 but the undisturbed bed indicated that it was 
 the evening before. Roxie was generally asleep by 
 ten. She had been gone, then, some seven hours. 
 But why had she left at such an hour if with Bud.^^ 
 She had heard the girl in the kitchen until after 
 nine, and that was too late for the completion of 
 even a runaway match. There was an element 
 of the inexplicable here which urged her to seek 
 Allston at once. And, besides, she wanted him 
 for herself. 
 
 Here was an emergency demanding action. 
 
BIG LAUREL 247 
 
 and she turned to this man as naturally as, a day 
 ago, she would have turned to her father. As soon 
 as this, he had slipped into place by her side. 
 He was there to help whenever she needed help. 
 And he was there in a more vital sense than ever 
 her father had been. If the latter was a wise 
 counselor, he also stood in need of counsel ; if 
 a protector, he also was often in need of protec- 
 tion. If he was her right hand, she was his left 
 hand. 
 
 But Allston stood out full-bodied, by himself. 
 He needed no assistance. He could relieve her 
 wholly of such a responsibility as this. 
 
 And yet, as she made her way up the stairs and 
 down the hallway to his room, she began to ques- 
 tion. To give him this note was to rouse him. To 
 place this situation before him was to lead him 
 into danger. For he would follow Roxie. There 
 was no doubt about that. He would follow until 
 he learned whether the girl had entered upon this 
 mad venture of her own volition or not. That 
 involved a terrible risk. 
 
 Wilmer, a few feet from his door, paused, lean- 
 ing against the wall for support. If she waited a 
 few hours, then he might seek help on his mission. 
 
248 BIG LAUREL 
 
 A dozen men from the village would be willing to 
 accompany him on such an errand. With the 
 house surrounded, Bud would be forced to ex- 
 plain or to surrender. 
 
 But if Roxie were in actual danger, then a few 
 hours might mark the difference between life and 
 death, between honor and dishonor. 
 
 It was a cruel dilemma in which to place a 
 woman in so brief a time after she had awakened 
 to the full realization of love. It made little dif- 
 ference that her love had not yet been confessed 
 — even that she had no assurance that it would 
 be reciprocated. Once she had made the admis- 
 sion to herself, it existed — even if she lived the 
 rest of her years with lips tight sealed. To her it 
 was a reality at this moment — a stupendous 
 reality. She loved as only a woman can love who 
 has fought against love. It burned within her now 
 like a white-hot flame. 
 
 In the end her decision was based, not upon 
 Roxie, but upon herself and the man she loved. 
 To be true to that love, she must send him; to 
 be true to that love, he must go. If this new-found 
 passion meant anything, it meant being true to 
 the highest; it meant willingness to sacrifice to 
 
BIG LAUREL 249 
 
 the highest. If she quailed before such a clean- 
 cut issue as this, she could never again respect 
 that love; if she saved him at such a cost, she 
 could never respect that which she had saved. 
 
 With head up, if with knees weak, she knocked 
 at his door. And as she did so it was as though 
 not her hand but her naked heart were beating 
 against the wooden panels. The ache of it made 
 her tremble. To add to the agony she was forced 
 to do it again — and yet again. The silence 
 following hurt, too. It raised new fears. These 
 accumulated so rapidly that she was soon in a 
 panic. Scarcely conscious of what she was about, 
 she turned the knob and pushed open his door — 
 standing back as she did so. Light is indifferent. 
 It cares not what it reveals. It showed now with 
 grim starkness Allston's empty, untouched bed. 
 
 And a vacant room. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 The fact that Allston had gone last night and 
 had not yet returned was as convincing proof to 
 Wilmer of some mishap to him as a direct 
 message would have been. Had he accomplished 
 his purpose, he would have been back within 
 three hours — four at the most. Such under- 
 takings are decided quickly. When two strong 
 men meet in mountain country over such an 
 issue, the argument is not long-drawn-out. And 
 the end is apt to be definite. 
 
 So for a moment the girl stared at the empty 
 bed as one stares helplessly at the jerky telegrams 
 on yellow paper that are brutally thrust into one's 
 life. Direct blows between the eyes these, which 
 stun. And however grimly concrete the news, it 
 is difficult to understand because it comes 
 through such a thin medium. All is well — then 
 a bit of yellow paper — and all is over. 
 
 Wilmer did not have even as much as a written 
 report; just an opened door and silence. But if 
 the message had been written in burning letters 
 of fire or shouted at her through a megaphone, it 
 
BIG LAUREL 251 
 
 could have told her no more. He had gone to 
 meet Bud Childers and he had not come back. 
 
 Dazed as the girl was, she held herself well. 
 Facing the little things about his room, she stood 
 straight as though facing something of him. His 
 courage called for her courage. Whatever had 
 happened to him, she knew he had accepted like 
 a man, so that whatever had happened, she must 
 accept like a woman. If some of the color 
 vanished from her cheeks that was not her fault. 
 She could not control this. But she could control 
 her trembling lips and did. Turning from the 
 room, she found her way back downstairs and to 
 the sitting-room. There she saw again his chair 
 — the chair in which he had sat last evening. 
 For a second she tottered. All the little things of 
 him seemed so doubly important now. Every 
 suggestion of him was so vital. It might be — it 
 might be that this was all she had left ; traces at 
 a moment when she hungered for a hundred 
 times more than she had ever had when within 
 arm's length of him. 
 
 She pronounced his name below her breath. 
 Just this — 
 
 " Ned." 
 
252 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Then louder as though the name itself could 
 bring him nearer. 
 
 " Ned," she called. " Ned/* 
 
 She received no answer. The man who had 
 been here yesterday — who would have responded 
 to her lightest whisper — did not count. And if 
 he could have answered as of yesterday, that 
 would not have counted. It was to-day — now — 
 that she wanted him. It was this minute — this 
 second. She wanted him to come to her and place 
 his arms about her and hold her tight ; she wanted 
 the feel of his lips and the sound of his voice. 
 She wanted him in the flesh with all his tousled 
 light hair. She was empty without him — as 
 empty as a mother with an unweighted arm. 
 
 Tears started to her hot eyes, and, burying her 
 face in her hands, she knelt before the wicker 
 chair as before a sacred shrine. 
 
 "God, give him back to me," she pleaded. "I 
 want him. I want him so." 
 
 If all the prayers of women were answered, 
 perhaps there would be no need of other prayers. 
 How many go trembling up through the day and 
 through the night ! 
 
 Wilmer rose again to her feet — steadied and 
 
BIG LAUREL 2S3 
 
 strengthened. It may be that this is the most 
 direct and best answer God can give — strength 
 to endure, strength to act. She moved towards 
 the kitchen — towards the door she had found 
 opened. It was as though this were the beginning 
 of the trail leading to his side. She had no pre- 
 conceived plan, but her feet took her here. This 
 was the path Hoxie had taken; the path Ned 
 Allston had taken. It was the path she must 
 take. 
 
 Her heart leaped in response to the suggestion. 
 She must follow him. If he could not come to her, 
 she must go to him. In essence the idea was 
 foreign to her nature. She was neither bold nor 
 venturesome. Ordinarily she would have turned 
 to her father, but now this never occurred to her. 
 He played no part in this early morning drama. 
 He slept and he must sleep on. This did not con- 
 cern him. It concerned her alone — that inner 
 woman who in a sense had never had a father. 
 
 The drawer of the kitchen table was open — 
 pulled far out. Her eyes caught the gray sheen of 
 steel. She had never seen these articles except as 
 so many cooking-utensils. But they were more 
 than that ; they were weapons. They were knives. 
 
254 BIG LAUREL 
 
 And knives were for both defense and offense. 
 She crossed the room and picked out one — a 
 thin-bladed, pointed knife worn down by much 
 use. She thrust this into her bosom and returned 
 to the door. She unlocked it, swung it open, and 
 went out into the dew-wet grass. 
 
 The cool of the unwarmed dawn air which met 
 her hot skin and bathed her eyes and refreshed 
 her dry throat as she drank it deep into her lungs, 
 braced her like wine. Down the serpentine drive 
 she went walking with long, steady strides, un- 
 hurried in spite of her excited heart and with chin 
 well up. She wore no hat; no coat. She needed 
 none. Her brown hair, which had not been as 
 carefully arranged as usual this morning, soon 
 fell loose until it hung all about her flushed 
 cheeks gypsy-wise. Had any one glimpsed her, he 
 would surely have thought it Roxie who was 
 abroad at such an hour. For though taller she 
 was walking with that rhythmic swing, all from 
 the hips down, which only those acquire who have 
 lived long in mountain country and walked 
 much. And her feet were sure on the rocky 
 ground. 
 
 The sky grew pink in the east, but she saw it 
 
BIG LAUREL 255 
 
 not. Birds began to stir and sing among the wet 
 leaves, but she heard them not. Squirrels began 
 to chatter — squirrels she loved to stop and tease 
 — but she gave no heed to them. As far as she 
 was concerned this colorful, vibrant world about 
 her was as desolate as the moon surface. Her 
 thoughts were all of the man towards whom she 
 was speeding. 
 
 She knew this road well. It was the same she 
 had taken with him after that adventure in the 
 sunlit cove which lay so near the mountain path 
 leading to Bud's shack. She had laughed at her 
 father's fears when the latter warned them to 
 avoid that neighborhood. How trivial that whole 
 incident now seemed to her, and yet it had played 
 its part. It was playing its part now. It was lead- 
 ing her with sure feet to his side. 
 
 But what was she going to find after she 
 reached his side.^* It was a question she fought off. 
 And yet, batlike, the question returned to circle 
 again and again around her thoughts. 
 
 Leaving the sandy road that skirted the lower 
 end of the valley, her course took her upwards on 
 a trail rough as a stream-bed. It ran like a tunnel 
 through the dark of crowding trees. Laurel and 
 
2^6 BIG LAUREL 
 
 rhododendron and sourwood in a snarling tangle 
 beneath beech and oak pressed close, as though 
 bent upon obliterating this rough gash hacked 
 through their fastness. Overhead the dark 
 branches came together and shut out the sun. It 
 was damp and shaded here and the pungent smell 
 of the earth met her as though she were burrow- 
 ing. She hurried a little up the steep path with an 
 uncanny feeling that if she delayed too long she 
 might be enveloped. The growing things might 
 seize her, might twine their snaky limbs about her 
 and force her down into this same earth from 
 which they sprang. And the earth was cold and 
 damp. She wanted none of it. She began to feel 
 stifled, and broke into a panic-stricken run that 
 took the breath out of her. Halfway up she had 
 to stop. But she refused to sit down. She did 
 not dare sit down. She stood in the center of the 
 road, her head upturned, her eyes trying to pierce 
 the green canopy above. With her hands hanging 
 limply by her side, she breathed through her 
 mouth because her nostrils did not furnish enough 
 air. Had any one come upon her so, he would 
 have thought her some wild thing fleeing from 
 the hunters. 
 
BIG LAUREL 257 
 
 Up she climbed and up where the dawn did not 
 reach before high noon ; up and up and up. Until 
 she saw the end of the tunnel. Then, breaking 
 into a ru;i again, she never stopped until she 
 plunged out upon the top where man had fought 
 the trees to the death and left a summit of upland 
 pasture open to the sky, and made rich farmland 
 covered with blue grass dotted with grazing 
 cattle. She felt like a diver coming up from deep, 
 brackish water. She threw herself prone on her 
 back for a moment, her eyes fixed on the wide 
 expanse of clean blue sky, shot with gold up here. 
 Below her lay the crescent-shaped valley — a 
 picture so serenely peaceful in contrast to what 
 she had just come through that only the psalmist 
 could adequately express it. The lines though 
 unspoken came to her lips : 
 
 " He maketh me to lie down in green pastures ; 
 He leadeth me beside the still waters. Though I 
 walk through the valley of the shadow of death, 
 I will fear no evil : for Thou art with me." 
 
 All her life she had uttered these words with- 
 out any appreciation save of their rhythmic 
 beauty. Now they were like a voice from the sky 
 itself. They quenched, like cold water, the fever 
 
258 BIG LAUREL 
 
 in her veins. They lent a significance to that 
 beautiful valley below which she was never to 
 forget. They made of it, for all time, a resting- 
 place. 
 
 But she could not pause here. She kept the 
 road along the ridge-top until she passed the 
 Lutheran church, and then turned down the 
 mountain-side again — into the dark forest again. 
 The valley was behind her now ; but it was there. 
 When she faltered she closed her eyes and re- 
 called it — the golden warmth of it and the serene 
 promise of it. It helped her mightily over that 
 last mile ; helped her as she dipped down towards 
 Big Laurel Cove — towards the dragon country. 
 It was so she felt — like the lost maidens of the 
 fairy books in the creepy land of devouring 
 monsters. She was terrified, but under some spell 
 she staggered on. The strain of the four miles 
 was beginning to tell on her legs. And the ten- 
 sion was beginning to tell on her thoughts. She 
 became more and more a prey to the vagaries of 
 her excited imagination. A squirrel leaping from 
 one bending oak branch to another made her 
 start and clutch at her knife — the knife which all 
 the way had lain like a bony hand against her 
 white bosom. 
 
BIG LAUREL 259 
 
 Then the clearing before Bud's shack and the 
 log crossing the stream, and beyond it — the 
 crumpled form of Allston. She saw it from the 
 roadway and took the last hundred yards in a 
 series of bounding leaps like some frantic wild 
 animal. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 At the sharp, staccato crack of Bud's rifle Roxie 
 had sprung from the cabin. She was out before 
 Allston fell. But as he fell, she fell too. Her legs 
 gave way and a dark cloud settled down upon her 
 and she knew no more. 
 
 From the rear of the spring-house Bud uttered 
 an oath. For a second he thought he had made 
 some dreadful mistake; that his bullet had gone 
 home to her. Yet there in a heap and quite mo- 
 tionless lay Allston. His automatic had dropped 
 from his lifeless fingers and fallen several feet 
 away — quite out of reach. There was no sham- 
 ming in that pose. 
 
 But also, prone, lay Roxie. There was no 
 shamming in her pose either. She had fallen face 
 downward. Bud reloaded and ventured forth, his 
 eyes first on Allston and then on Roxie. But 
 strange to say he was more afraid to approach 
 the latter than the former. Halfwav to her side 
 he stood motionless with the deepest, blackest 
 fear he had ever known upon him. Fear had him 
 by the throat — was strangling him with fiercer 
 
BIG LAUREL 261 
 
 passion than Allston had done. His arms grew 
 limp and his rifle dropped. 
 
 He tottered forward, stopped, and went on 
 again. Then the last ten feet he took at a run 
 and knelt by her side. He turned her over. She 
 did not resist. She was as passive as a child's rag 
 doll. And her face was white — chalky white. 
 His eyes sought her bodice near the heart. There 
 was no crimson stain there. That was what he 
 had feared. He felt her hands. They were cold, 
 but he caught a slow pulse-beat. It was as though 
 he had been released from chains. She was not 
 dead, and that was enough. 
 
 Rising, Bud glanced at Allston. He looked at 
 him as he might a dead branch — with no more 
 pity, with no more regret. The damned furriner's 
 cheeks were not as pink as they had once been. 
 He had shot true this time. 
 
 A squirrel chattered. Bud came to alert. This 
 was the end in one sense, but it was only the 
 beginning in another. This man was motionless, 
 but his very immobility brought a new danger. 
 He would lie there one hour, two hours, perhaps 
 three hours. He would make no sound. He 
 would not move a finger. And yet all the while he 
 
aSo. BIG LAUREL 
 
 would be calling — calling with a voice that might 
 be heard throughout the county. The dead are 
 not as helpless as they seem. Allston would be 
 missed, in time, down at the bungalow. Some one 
 would wonder where he was and go to a neighbor 
 and make him wonder too. They would go to- 
 gether to a third neighbor until the hue and cry 
 was raised. Then they would all swarm up here 
 together. 
 
 Bud's wild eyes turned to the shack. He could 
 not stay in there. However tight he might bar 
 the doors, the searchers would beat them down. 
 His home was no longer his home. He had killed 
 more things than one when he shot from behind 
 the spring-house. 
 
 But at that he had not killed everything. He 
 himself was still alive and Roxie was still alive. 
 And back of him lay the hills still alive — the 
 tangled hills that he knew as a squirrel knows 
 them. Once in their shelter he would still have 
 some sort of chance. With Roxie by his side he 
 might have hours — even days — days that would 
 count for years. 
 
 Bud went back and picked up his rifle. He 
 would need that now more than ever. Moving 
 
BIG LAUREL 263 
 
 swiftly and definitely, he entered the shack and 
 spreading a blanket on the floor hastily tossed 
 into it the tinned goods he had lately bought, a 
 small bag of flour, a can of coffee, some sugar, 
 salt, a frying-pan, and coffee pot. Drawing the 
 four corners together he tied them in a knot and 
 throwing the bundle over his shoulder came out. 
 
 Allston still lay on the ground quite motion- 
 less. So too did Roxie. But there was a difference 
 — a significant difference. As far as Bud was 
 concerned, Allston now stood only for the past, 
 while Roxie still stood for the future. Until death 
 the future persists in full strength, whatever 
 limitations are put around it. 
 
 Bud stooped and placed his hands upon the 
 girl. Her body was warm and the touch of it 
 magnetized him. Lifting her easily he swung her 
 upon his back, her head and arms over his right 
 shoulder. So for hours he had carried burdens 
 heavier than she. His provisions and rifle he 
 seized in his left hand. With long, noiseless 
 strides, he crossed the log to the road, turned to 
 the right, and began to climb the rocky trail. 
 
 Straying tendrils of the girl's light hair brushed 
 his cheeks as bending forward he bore her up- 
 
264 BIG LAUREL 
 
 wards and away — away from the silent form in 
 his yard, away from the valley and all its folks be- 
 low, away from the invisible hand of the law which 
 would soon be reaching for him. And with that 
 loose hair against his rough cheeks, the strength 
 of ten men was in him. With it came a new de- 
 fiance. They might turn out the whole county 
 after him, but before they caught him he would 
 be in the next county. They might turn out the 
 whole State to hound him, but he would cross the 
 mountains — mountain after mountain if neces- 
 sary — until he reached the next State. There 
 were no limits to his horizon now. He was 
 anchored by neither shack nor farm. They could 
 take them both and be damned, but they would 
 travel far before they took him or his woman. 
 For all he knew, these hills and this forest con- 
 tinued indefinitely. A man could live in them 
 indefinitely. And when they could not furnish 
 him with what he needed, why, there were always 
 settlements where a man with a rifle could secure 
 what he wished. 
 
 The higher Bud climbed, the less he had any 
 consciousness of being a fugitive. It was more as 
 though all his life he had been a prisoner and had 
 
BIG LAUREL 265 
 
 just found freedom. His contact with civiliza- 
 tion had done nothing but force upon him a series 
 of inhibitions. Some one was always interfering 
 with his rights. He was pulling away from all 
 that. 
 
 Where a small stream crossed the road, he 
 turned sharp left into the woods. He was becom- 
 ing impatient even with man-made paths. He 
 followed the edge of the cut made by the running 
 water, forcing his way through the bushes, sweep- 
 ing aside the growth ahead of him with his long 
 arm. Not a twig touched her face. Not a branch 
 whipped her body. 
 
 He was well out of the beaten track before any 
 sign of consciousness began to return to the girl. 
 The first indication she gave was something like 
 a sigh and a feeble attempt to raise her head. Her 
 eyes even then remained closed. And she made 
 no struggle. But at once Bud lowered her to the 
 leaf-strewn ground and went to the brook for 
 water. Scooping up as much as his cupped hands 
 would hold he returned and moistened her lips 
 and bathed her forehead. The effect came quicker 
 than he anticipated. Her eyes opened wide and 
 she struggled to her elbow. 
 
266 BIG LAUREL 
 
 " Hit 's only me, Roxie," he said gently. 
 
 It was only he. And as he spoke the words 
 they were tempered with love. Through his steel- 
 gray eyes there shone something of the gentle blue 
 of the sky peering through the upper branches 
 of the trees. It was only he. Big and brutal and 
 coarse-featured and merciless as he was, there 
 was the tenderness of a woman in his touch. Be- 
 fore her it was only he — only Bud. And had 
 there been need he would have held out his right 
 arm and drained into her veins every drop of his 
 blood. 
 
 " I don't aim ter bother yuh," he went on as she 
 remained dumb. "Hit's only me." 
 
 Big-eyed, half fearing what she would find, 
 Roxie was fumbling around among her confused 
 thoughts trying to account for her presence here. 
 Bud Childers — he had come to the bungalow for 
 her. She had gone with him. Then Allston — the 
 night — the dawn — the crack of a rifle! Weakly 
 she sank back, throwing her arm over her eyes 
 as though to shut out some terrible sight. For a 
 moment she almost fell back into a pit of dark- 
 ness. Allston had fallen. She had seen him fall. 
 She had started to his side, and then — and 
 then — 
 
BIG LAUREL 267 
 
 She scrambled to her knees staring in terror at 
 the man before her. 
 
 "Whar's Mister Allston?" she panted. 
 
 Bud's face grew dark. 
 
 " Over thar," he answered grimly with a nod 
 back of his head down the mountain. 
 
 "You — you shot him! You — you killed 
 him! " she cried. 
 
 " Well f " he drawled vaguely. 
 
 Still on her knees she began to crawl away 
 from the man. 
 
 You — you devil!" she choked. 
 He come up thar and no one axed him," he 
 said. 
 
 "And you killed him — a-hidin' behin' the 
 spring-house like a yaller dawg, you killed a 
 man!" 
 
 There was the cut of a knife in every word she 
 spoke. He winced, but his lips grew thin and 
 hard. And all the blue vanished from the gray 
 eyes. 
 
 "Tears like yo're takin' et kinder hard — him 
 a furriner." 
 
 As he spoke his eyes narrowed until his bushy 
 brows almost met. 
 
 u 
 
 a 
 
268 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "Him a furrlner," he repeated in a voice that 
 was Hke the low growl of a mountain cat. 
 
 "Him a man!^'' burst out Roxie. 
 
 "It was him er me," said Bud. "An' I didn' 
 go atter him. He come up hyar." 
 
 "He come up hyar," nodded Roxie with a 
 quick, gasping intake of breath. " He come up 
 hyar. You wanter know how he come to come 
 up hyar, Bud Childers t It was 'cause he keered 
 more 'bout me than he keered 'bout hisself. 
 Thet 's the truth, Bud Childers, ef yuh want the 
 truth. Thet 's the kind o' man he was." 
 
 "An' you — you keered 'bout him?" 
 
 She lifted her face at that — lifted it and met 
 Bud eye to eye: 
 
 "Keered?" she choked. "Keered? Oh, my 
 Gawd ! " 
 
 With that her head began to sink, her lips to 
 quiver, and though she fought hard she could no 
 longer control the tears. Her hands before her 
 face she bowed low, racked by sobs that shook her 
 to the depths. 
 
 With his rifle across his knees Bud sat down 
 and watched her. He removed his old black hat 
 and ran his hand across his perspiring forehead 
 — slowly as though in bewilderment. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 A MAN may look dead, and yet by no means be 
 dead ; a man may be very close to the borderland 
 of death, and yet, if he has not actually crossed, 
 may be dragged back by the strong hands of love. 
 Bud Childers's bullet had not found Allston's 
 heart. The shot had gone high and a little wild. 
 Striking to the right of his head, it had cut a gash 
 across his temple — a gash which had been 
 covered as he fell. But the impact of the bullet 
 against his skull had stunned him and dropped 
 him in his tracks. That was his good fortune, for 
 otherw^ise a second shot, better directed, would 
 most certainly have followed. 
 
 Allston had fallen. The curtain had been rung 
 down. For all he knew it was final. And yet in 
 the course of time the curtain began to rise again. 
 Light — the emblem of life — filtered through his 
 eyes and made itself a conscious fact in his half- 
 paralyzed brain. That was all he was aware of at 
 first — just light; a pale, cold light like that of 
 dawn. It was quite meaningless and without 
 
!27o BIG LAUREL 
 
 warmth. It roused no emotions in him; little 
 interest. It just was; nothing more. 
 
 Yet because it was, it indicated life. It stood 
 for continuation instead of the end. It meant 
 another day. It meant being. It meant — 
 
 Something more was trying to get through to 
 that numbed brain of his. Another sense was 
 fluttering to life — sound. He heard a far-off 
 noise. Then, it seemed close to his ear. It was 
 whispering a familiar name. It was his name. 
 
 " Ned," he heard. And then once more, " Ned." 
 
 It roused him to eflfort. He tried to move his 
 arm. Quickly following this, he began to feel ; 
 something warm was resting on his forehead 
 smoothing back his hair. Something still warmer 
 brushed his cold lips. Then, like a film unfold- 
 ing its secrets in a dark room, his mind began to 
 clear. Objects became more concrete. They stood 
 for something. This was a woman bending over 
 him. Still somewhat hazy he tried to raise his 
 head. As he did so he heard a sharp cry. The 
 ugly wound stood revealed. 
 
 "Ned," came the trembling voice. "Lie still. 
 I — I must get water." 
 
 Then he knew. That was Wilmer Howe. That 
 
BIG LAUREL 271 
 
 was Wilmer Howe. They were in the cove where 
 he had stopped to iish for trout. No, there was 
 something wrong about that. This was a clear- 
 ing. He rose to one elbow. His hair and cheek 
 felt sticky, and he put up his hand. He brought 
 it back crimsoned. He saw the shack beyond and 
 the whole story flashed before him. 
 
 His head sank to the ground. He seemed to be 
 weak. Bud had got him when he started to run 
 from the door. But how happened it that Wilmer 
 had taken the place of Roxie.^ This was strange 
 — very strange. It was not easy to think about 
 anything very long at a time. 
 
 He heard footsteps running towards him. 
 Again he tried to sit up, but before he could do 
 that Wilmer was by his side. She was holding a 
 tin dipper to his lips. He drank thirstily. It was 
 very refreshing — this clear, ice-cold spring water. 
 She poured a little into the palm of her hand and 
 bathed his forehead and face. He struggled again 
 to sit up and, with her help, succeeded. He was 
 facing the log shack. His hand went back to his 
 pocket. 
 
 "Where — where 's my gun? " he demanded. 
 
 Wilmer had thought of themselves as alone. 
 
272 BIG LAUREL 
 
 Both Bud and Roxie had been eUminated from 
 her thoughts. Now she raised her eyes and 
 glanced about. 
 
 Allston caught sight of his automatic on the 
 ground a few feet away. He tried to reach it and 
 'failed. Following his outstretched arm, she saw it 
 too, and, picking it up gingerly, handed it to him. 
 The feel of it in his fingers roused him to action 
 in spite of his weakness. He squinted towards 
 the shack. 
 
 "Lord!" he said. "You shouldn't be here, 
 Wilmer. Childers may — may be in there. He 
 may be in the woods." 
 
 He wanted to make his feet now. He tried and 
 failed. 
 
 " What 's the matter with my darned legs ? " 
 he stammered petulantly. 
 
 " You Ve been hurt," she explained gently. 
 "Please — please to sit still." 
 
 "But that devil — it isn't safe for you here, I 
 tell you." 
 
 "You think he may be inside?'* 
 
 "He might be. Where's Roxie?" 
 
 "I — I have n't seen any one but — but you." 
 
 "Then — can't you help me stand up? " 
 
BIG LAUREL 273 
 
 " It 's better for you not to move." 
 
 " I 've got to get in there and — find out." 
 
 The girl's face was very white and tense. She 
 was kneeling by his side, but she suddenly rose. 
 Then she took the gun from his weak fingers. 
 
 " I '11 see ! " she exclaimed. 
 
 Before he could catch her skirts she was mov- 
 ing across the few yards of clear space to the 
 door. He called after her. With every ounce of 
 strength left in him he tried to follow, but 
 apparently he had lost a good deal of blood. His 
 legs were like limp straws. Helpless he saw her 
 disappear through the door. She was not gone 
 long, but it seemed an eternity before she came 
 out again. 
 
 *^The house is empty," she said. 
 
 "Thank God. If it hadn't been — " 
 
 "But it is. And if — can you get across there, 
 leaning on me.^ " 
 
 The color was returning to his cheeks ; the light 
 to his eyes. 
 
 "Leaning on you," he repeated slowly, "I — 
 I think I could get anywhere." 
 
 "Then — " 
 
 She bent down and placed an arm beneath his 
 
274 BIG LAUREL 
 
 shoulder. As he moved she lifted and so got him, 
 tottering, to his feet. He stood so for a moment 
 with his arm over her frail shoulder. He did not 
 seem to wish to move farther. 
 
 " I can build a fire," she ran on. " It 's cold out 
 here. You can walk a little ? " 
 
 Then he said, as though to himself: 
 
 "You oughtn't to be here." 
 
 He tried to keep his weight from her as much 
 as possible, but actually he did lean heavily. 
 Even so her shoulders did not sag. Frail they 
 looked — fit only for the burden of lace shawls 
 — but they did not sag. His left arm was over 
 them and her right arm around his waist sup- 
 porting him. He felt the tight, steady grip of it. 
 Even w^hen he paused, this did not relax. 
 
 So he came back over that threshold which so 
 brief a time ago he had crossed in the other di- 
 rection; so he came back into that room where 
 he had waited through the night. There was the 
 corner where he had sat with Roxie. The 
 tumbled blankets still lay on the floor. They 
 cried out to him. They brought her name to his 
 lips. 
 
 "Where's Roxie.?" 
 
BIG LAUREL 275 
 
 "Steady," Wilmer answered. "Steady until 
 we get to the chair." 
 
 She led him to a chair before the dead hearth. 
 He slumped down wearily. 
 
 " She 's gone," he said. " Bud must have got 
 her." 
 
 " She was here, then ? " 
 
 "Here with Bud Childers." 
 
 "But why—" 
 
 "Because the brute bullied her into coming. 
 He threatened to get me — if she didn't come." 
 
 " Oh !" she cried. "And then?" 
 
 "I got him. I had him fair — tied hand and 
 foot. But the beggar squirmed loose." 
 
 "And then?" 
 
 "Roxie wouldn't leave for fear of him." 
 
 " Then ? " 
 
 "I took a chance — this morning. He was 
 waiting behind the spring-house." 
 
 She shuddered at that. 
 
 "But she — she may have escaped." 
 
 "Yes. Only — women are queer," he answered 
 in a voice scarcely audible. 
 
 Wilmer turned her head and smiled a little — 
 to herself. Roxie was gone and Bud was gone. 
 
276 BIG LAUREL 
 
 But she was here and Ned Allston was here. And 
 he was helpless — helpless enough to be depend- 
 ent on her. Much of her fear had vanished. It 
 was evident now that his wound, however pain- 
 ful, was not serious. The thing to do was to make 
 him warm and comfortable until help arrived. 
 That gave her an hour — perhaps two hours. 
 
 She started towards the door. His eyes were 
 upon her. 
 
 " Where you going .? " he demanded. 
 
 "I must kindle a iire." 
 
 He staggered to his feet. 
 
 "That's my job," he said. 
 
 She hurried to his chair. 
 
 "You'd help most if you'd sit still," she an- 
 swered. " You only interrupt." 
 
 She waited until he reseated himself. 
 
 " I don't seem to have much strength," he mut- 
 tered. 
 
 "And I have more than I ever had," she an- 
 swered. " So you see it ought to be my job." 
 
 Women are queer, Allston had said. That is a 
 very loose and very general statement, but there 
 may be something in it. At any rate, it served 
 as an explanation, as good as any, perhaps, of 
 
BIG LAUREL 277 
 
 why Wilmer found the unfamiliar tasks she now 
 went about not only congenial, but distinctly ex- 
 hilarating — even mentally stimulating. If she 
 had ever kindled a fire, it was so long ago she had 
 forgotten about it. And she would have been in- 
 clined to argue that it was so humbly simple an 
 act that it was not worth remembering, anyway. 
 It made no heavy call upon the intellect. In and 
 of itself it was a trivial duty. 
 
 And yet, as she went to look for wood, she 
 felt a pride in her mission out of all proportion 
 to the effort. She was to build a fire — for him. 
 She must make him warm. She must heat water 
 and bathe his wound. If she could find provi- 
 sions in the shack, she must prepare something 
 for him to eat — if only a cup of tea or coffee. She 
 must build up his strength. 
 
 His strength — the strength of the man she 
 loved. She must give him some of her own 
 strength and in this indirect way alone was that 
 at the moment possible. It was too indirect to 
 satisfy her — too simple. Could she have opened 
 her veins into his veins, that would have seemed 
 too simple. Perhaps this new need could never 
 be satisfied by any one act — only by a succes- 
 
278 BIG LAUREL 
 
 sion of acts extending without limit through his 
 life. It was as big as that. 
 
 But at any rate here was something — some- 
 thing definite and tangible calling for effort if 
 only the picking up of chips. The very simplic- 
 ity of the task hallowed it. The disciples grasped 
 eagerly at the opportunity to express their great 
 love through the anointing of His feet. 
 
 In the rear of the shack Wilmer found a wood- 
 pile and a dulled and rusty axe. Picking up this, 
 she battered away at some of the driest pine until 
 she had broken it into splinters. She was sur- 
 prised at the power in her arms and back. She 
 had never handled anything as heavy as this axe 
 in her life, and yet she raised it easily and 
 brought it down upon the stubborn dried limbs 
 with sufficient force to accomplish her object. 
 They broke in spite of their resistance. There is 
 always satisfaction in victory even in so primi- 
 tive a conflict as this. But back of this there was 
 more; she was doing this for her man, even as 
 Roxie might have done. She was using her 
 muscles and hands for him. She was catering 
 to his well-being and comfort. 
 
 With cheeks grown crimson by the effort, she 
 
BIG LAUREL 279 
 
 stopped and gathered an armful of the splinters, 
 hugging them close to her bosom, careless of what 
 they did to her gown. Clothes had become unim- 
 portant — as unimportant as the appearance of 
 her hands and hair. She was not concerned with 
 how she looked, but wholly with what she had to 
 do. If her long, tense walk up here had tired her, 
 she did not feel it. She came back through the 
 door proudly, smiling over her load. 
 
 "Lordy!" exclaimed Allston. "But you 
 shouldn't be doing that. You make me feel like 
 a limp cad." 
 
 She lowered her burden to the side of the 
 hearth. Then dropping to her knees she picked 
 out the smaller pieces and piled them criss-cross 
 in the ashes, adding larger pieces on top. 
 
 Allston watched her, fascinated, in spite of his 
 discomfort. She may have looked at odd times 
 more beautiful than now, but never since he had 
 known her. For all her beauty was of herself. 
 Her hair, brown and silken, was unaided by deft 
 fingers. It was so loosely fastened that it seemed 
 as though at any moment it might fall over her 
 shoulders. He hoped and prayed that it might. 
 He wished to see it so — all of it in its full glory. 
 
28o BIG LAUREL 
 
 Had he been a little nearer he would have been 
 tempted to touch it with his fingers. 
 
 Her fine features were quite unrestrained. 
 They were subject to no conscious control. And 
 so tney appeared softened to the point of ten- 
 derness. Her face was half turned from him, but 
 he saw an expression about her mouth of glad- 
 ness, of eager, childlike interest. Innocent as it 
 was, it bred wild thoughts in him. He wanted 
 those lips nearer. He wanted them within reach 
 of his own lips. And yet, before he would have 
 leaned forward one inch towards them, he would 
 have stopped himself with his own automatic. 
 The wonder of her; but the sacredness of her! 
 
 She turned with outstretched hand. 
 
 "You have a match .f^" she asked. 
 
 That was the most he could give her — a 
 match. He fumbled in his pocket, found one, and 
 extended his own hand towards her. It was not 
 as steady as it should have been. It was still less 
 steady as in taking it the tips of her fingers 
 touched him. There were kisses in them. He held 
 his breath. If only that match went out so that 
 he could hand her another. 
 
 But she was very careful. She nursed the tiny 
 
BIG LAUREL 281 
 
 flame until it burned steadily and then applied 
 it to the smaller twigs. They caught fire and 
 licked up to the larger twigs ; sprang from those 
 to the dry splinters until no shadow of hope was 
 left him. The hearth came to life like a roused 
 sleeper. He felt the heat at once. It was welcome. 
 
 And she held out her hands towards the danc- 
 ing golden flames. She had taken the first step 
 towards making this room habitable; the first 
 step towards making it a home. She had brought 
 into it heat and light. 
 
 With glowing face she turned towards Allston. 
 
 "A fire is such a friendly thing," she exclaimed. 
 
 "That fire represents more than friendship," 
 he answered. 
 
 She did not take up the argument. She was not 
 interested in words. She had still a great many 
 things to do. 
 
 She went out into Bud's kitchen to forage. She 
 did not discover much, but she did find a little 
 coffee in the bottom of a can, and sugar and half 
 a loaf of dry bread. That was enough. It was 
 food and hot drink. 
 
 There was no coffee-pot, for Bud had carried 
 that off with him, but she found a couple of tins 
 
282 BIG LAUREL 
 
 that were whole and clean. She brought her 
 treasures back and laid them at his feet. 
 
 "Here's a bit of luek," she said. 
 
 Every time she spoke, her words seemed curi- 
 ously inadequate to Allston. This was not a bit 
 of luck, but stupendous good fortune. To drink 
 coffee of her brewing and eat bread of her finding 
 promised a meal to be remembered. It was an 
 event worth all it had cost. It was going to keep 
 her busy near him for the next half-hour. 
 
 She made another journey to the spring-house 
 and filled her pails. She brought them back and 
 placed them close to the flames near the dog- 
 irons. She piled on more wood and bade him 
 see that the water did not boll over. 
 
 " I must find some clean linen if there is any. 
 That cut—" 
 
 He had almost forgotten about the cut. It had 
 ceased bleeding, but it was a matted ugly blotch 
 on his head. 
 
 "It can wait, can't it, until I get to the doc- 
 tor.?" 
 
 " No," she replied. 
 
 Where she secured the clean white strips of 
 cotton with which she returned, Allston never 
 
BIG LAUREL 283 
 
 knew. The torn hem of a ruffled petticoat left 
 behind in the bedroom might have told him had 
 he ever seen it. But he never did. He began to 
 question her, but some instinct warned him that 
 this evidently was none of his business. 
 
 He did not seem to have much business of any 
 sort here now. He found himself a good deal un- 
 der orders — gentle orders, to be sure, but none 
 the less to be regarded seriously. And, as he re- 
 membered, this was one of the things he had 
 looked forward to escaping just as soon as he left 
 the army. He had chafed under them; — not 
 openh% because he respected the necessity of 
 them, but inwardly, because they went against 
 the grain. As a free-born American citizen of 
 Southern ancestry and independent means he 
 had, until the war, come pretty near to doing 
 just about as he liked without dictation of any 
 sort. Once he was out of kilts no one had inter- 
 fered to any extent with the management of his 
 everyda}^ life. 
 
 Now this young woman, approaching him with 
 a pail of lukewarm water, tucked a towel around 
 his neck and commanded him to lean his head 
 back. He did so when he would much have pre- 
 
2 84 BIG LAUREL 
 
 ferred not. Then she proceeded to sop a wet rag 
 against the wound left by Bud Childers's bullet. 
 It was distinctly an unpleasant process. It hurt 
 more or less, and the water trickled down his 
 neck. Besides, he felt that this was a distasteful 
 duty which did not come within her province, but 
 that of a surgeon. He offered that argument, but 
 she kept on. 
 
 " I 'm afraid I 'm not much of a nurse, but 
 I 'm sure this ought to be done," she said. 
 
 "You're a wonderful nurse," he assured her. 
 
 " I 'm trying not to hurt." 
 
 " It hurts you more than it does me. It 's such 
 a messy thing to bother with." 
 
 " If he had come an eighth of an inch nearer," 
 she trembled. 
 
 " I 'm surprised he did n't. I thought he was a 
 better shot." 
 
 " Oh, it was wicked of him ! " 
 
 " It was more or less human. You see, he 
 didn't understand." 
 
 "He's more like a savage than a man." 
 
 "And yet it's so easy for any of us to mis- 
 understand," he said. 
 
 She was still sopping, rinsing frequently the 
 
BIG LAUREL 285 
 
 carmine from the rag. It was coloring the water 
 in the pail like red pigment. 
 
 " He wanted Roxie as a beast wants his prey. 
 But Roxie—" 
 
 " Was worth fighting for," he broke in. 
 
 "Why did she go with him? She could have 
 roused the house." 
 
 " Yes," he answered slowly. " She could have 
 done that — and she didn't. Women are queer." 
 
 He had thought for a moment that he could 
 tell this woman beside him the whole story, but 
 he found his lips sealed. After all this was not 
 his story; it was Roxie's. It was of too sacred a 
 nature for him to reveal. He felt as though he 
 had overheard something not intended for his 
 ears ; the holy revelations a woman makes only 
 to herself. The part of a gentleman was to forget 
 them; to treat them as though they had never 
 been. In these last few minutes he had forgotten 
 even the girl herself. He realized it with a start. 
 
 " Where is she t " he demanded. " If Childers 
 took her off — " 
 
 "Even he couldn't do that against her will," 
 said Wilmer. " Please to be quiet." 
 
 "You think that.?" 
 
286 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "You don't know those girls." 
 
 "I — I guess you 're right," he admitted. 
 
 "It's probable she escaped into the woods. If 
 she didn't—" 
 
 " The woods," he nodded. " She had the other 
 door. She had a fair chance if she kept her head." 
 
 "And she knew the man through and 
 through." 
 
 "The devil! He gnawed through those ropes 
 like a rat." 
 
 The woman by his side grew pale. 
 
 "It's a miracle you're alive," she said. 
 
 " I don't know. I don't know." 
 
 The old familiar phrase steadied her in one 
 way and unsteadied her in another. It sent her 
 thoughts back for a moment to the evening be- 
 fore. He did not know — any more than he knew 
 then. But she — how much she had come to 
 know in these last few hours ! And yet not by the 
 slightest token must she let him know that she 
 knew. She must maintain a stricter guard over 
 herself than ever before. She must be careful of 
 her eyes, her speech, her hands — especially her 
 hands. Li^htlv thev caressed the cut over his 
 temple, but only in the course of her duty. And 
 his tousled hair was so near her now. 
 
BIG LAUREL 287 
 
 A moment later, in the course of duty, she 
 found a better opportunity. She wound strips of 
 white bandage around and around his head, her 
 fingers brushing his head — ever so gently, ever 
 so lovingly, in the course of duty. 
 
 And he, sitting very quiet, his eyes closed, felt 
 them like kisses — ashamed at the thought. He 
 did not know. Lord ! he did not know even then 
 — and might never know. 
 
 The coffee began to boil. She left his side 
 and poured some of the hot brew into a tin dip- 
 per and ordered him to drink it. After the first 
 sip it is doubtful if he would have drunk it ex- 
 cept under orders. She had sweetened it liberally 
 but it was a muddy concoction. 
 
 She gave him bits of the stale bread and or- 
 dered him to eat them. He obeyed — as smartly 
 as though it were an order of the day. 
 
 Quite without resentment, too. 
 
 "Aren't you going to join me? " he asked. 
 
 She tried a little of the coffee and made up a 
 wry face. 
 
 " It is n't very nice," she admitted. 
 
 He was about to agree with that when she 
 added quickly: 
 
288 BIG LAUREL 
 
 "But it's good for you." 
 
 So he took his medicine — to the last drop. 
 
 Up to this time she had been very busy. Now, 
 after going out and getting another armful of 
 wood, there seemed to be nothing to do but wait. 
 He w^as too weak to walk and she did not dare 
 to leave him even long enough to go back for help 
 to one of those neighboring houses she had 
 passed below. 
 
 She had to wait — facing him. That is a diffi- 
 cult task — when one has a secret trembling in 
 the eyes, on the lips, and on the tips of the fingers. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 Bud had never heard a woman cry as Roxie cried. 
 He had heard them whine and heard them lament 
 and seen their faces grow stolid with grief, but 
 that was all in the day's w^ork. He was always 
 able to pass on and forget. It was no affair of 
 his, and women were doomed to a certain amount 
 of that sort of thing. 
 
 But this time the sobs got under his thick, 
 leathery skin. They pierced still deeper — into the 
 core of him, into the heart of him. His eyes 
 upon her sagging form; upon the hair which so 
 lately had been blown across his cheek as he bore 
 her away, insensible, over his shoulder; upon 
 the small hands crowded against her face ; he felt 
 an ache that was like the ague. And yet there was 
 a significant difference. The pains of the fever 
 were personal. They concerned him and his own 
 body. But now he w^as hurt not because of him- 
 self, but because she was hurt — this other. 
 
 That was difficult to understand. The more 
 so because, in reality, he had his own grievous 
 wound. She was crying because he had killed 
 
290 BIG LAUREL 
 
 that pink-cheeked furriner — crying because she 
 had cared for the man. For a moment that mem- 
 ory did serve to harden him, but — she kept on 
 crying. She was hurt. There was no pretense 
 about it. She was suffering like a wounded pet. 
 The cause of her grief did not matter. 
 
 Bud's heart went out to her as it never had to 
 any other living thing. Dropping his rifle to the 
 ground he rose. 
 
 " Roxie," he faltered, " don' take on like thet." 
 
 She did not move. She gave no indication that 
 she heard. He took a step nearer, his long arms 
 hanging loosely by his side ; his face troubled. 
 
 " I 'm a-talkin' to yuh, Roxie," he said. 
 
 There was, in his voice, the deep tenderness of 
 a lover and of a father, too. Huddled in a heap 
 as she was, she looked such a tiny body. He could 
 have picked her up without effort. And he ached 
 to do just that — to pick her up and hold her 
 close. He felt that so he could shield her from 
 harm. 
 
 Because she did not protest, he ventured still 
 nearer. He was at her side now, still standing 
 erect. 
 
 " Gawd ! " he said, " Gawd, how I love yuh ! " 
 
BIG LAUREL 291 
 
 At that Roxie sprang — upright and sideways 
 towards Bud's rifle. But Bud was there before 
 her. He moved instinctively. That gun was as 
 much a part of him as his right hand. He 
 snatched it from the ground, and as he did so the 
 girl recoiled. 
 
 The two faced each other again ; Roxie shrink- 
 ing away in fear at the revenge he might take 
 for this attempt, Bud feeling more helpless with 
 the rifle in his hands than without it. 
 
 She had tried to get the gun. If she had suc- 
 ceeded, she would have killed him. She hated 
 him as fiercely as that. A woman is not often 
 tempted to kill, but when she is so tempted she 
 is dangerous. And yet the realization of this 
 hatred, instead of rousing him to aggressive ac- 
 tion, instead of urging him to retaliation as or- 
 dinarily it would, had quite the opposite eff"ect. 
 It took all the spirit out of him — all his courage 
 and high hopes. His arms grew limp. The hills 
 about him, instead of offering protection, 
 hemmed him in like prison walls. No use now in 
 climbing them or crossing with her to the val- 
 leys beyond. With her ready to spring upon him, 
 whether he was there or here made little differ- 
 
292 BIG LAUREL 
 
 ence. Whether he was here or anywhere made 
 no difference now. 
 
 An overpowering sense of helplessness pressed 
 down upon him. Never before had he faced a 
 situation, however desperate, where he could not 
 find relief in physical action. Always there was 
 something to break through or down; always 
 there was a shooting chance. But here there was 
 nothing to strike ; nothing over which a rifle bul- 
 let had any control. He could still carry her off^, 
 to be sure, but what would he be carrying? Just 
 the shell of her, and this love of his was genuine 
 enough to turn away from that. He wanted more, 
 but the more that he wanted could not be taken. 
 He could have it only as it was given. And no 
 man can force a gift. 
 
 Here was an idea new to Bud Childers ; all 
 that a woman has of love worth while must come 
 to a man as a gift. Love is not anything to be 
 seized with the hands. It is not the flower; it is 
 the perfume of the flower. It is not the hair, the 
 lips, the hands, but the soul. Else one woman 
 would be like another woman and not worth the 
 struggle. 
 
 It was quite useless for Bud to carry the girl 
 
BIG LAUREL 293 
 
 any farther back Into the hills. He must allow 
 her to return to her own. But after that — what 
 of himself.? 
 
 Bud's eyes wandered a moment — from the 
 frightened girl to the heavy forest growth sur- 
 rounding her. The trees had always been his 
 friends. He had played among them as a child, 
 hunted among them as a boy, and lived among 
 them as a man. They had furnished him a home, 
 food, protection, and companionship. But they 
 failed him now. They offered no encouragement. 
 They remained as blank and as dumb as so many 
 trees. They turned to Roxie rather than to him. 
 Perhaps this was in revenge for the axe he had 
 driven deep into the heart of so many of their 
 fellows. 
 
 He raised his eyes to a squirrel frolicking 
 among the branches — a red boomer who chat- 
 tered saucily in his face. He raised his eyes to 
 the sky and the sky gave him no answer. 
 
 He was conscious of a deep and awful sense 
 of desolation — as though he had suddenly been 
 abandoned by all creation. He was n't much on 
 religion, but there was something of religion in 
 his feeling. Gawd A'mighty was getting his 
 
294 BIG LAUREL 
 
 revenge. He was alone as he had never been alone 
 
 — alone even here in his own mountain country. 
 And his long face grew haggard at the thought. 
 
 Bud Childers brought his eyes back to Roxie. 
 He found her still watching him — suspiciously, 
 alertly. Her eyes stabbed like knives. He could 
 bear it no longer. With a suppressed cry, he 
 tossed the gun to her feet. 
 
 " Shoot ef yuh want ! " he cried. " Shoot an' 
 hev done with hit." 
 
 The girl picked up the rifle. She held the butt 
 firmly against her shoulder and covered him. 
 And, instead of quailing, she saw him stand a 
 little more erect, his eyes full upon her. With 
 her finger upon the trigger she sighted along the 
 barrel to the left of his broad, exposed chest. She 
 had only to bend that finger ever so little and 
 Allston stood revenged. This was no more than 
 simple justice. She repeated that word to herself 
 
 — justice — as she raised her eyes to the gray of 
 Bud's eves. The man did not flinch. He was 
 holding himself taut, ready to receive the blow, 
 but he did not flinch. 
 
 His eyes were gray, but there was blue in them. 
 They were gray, but there was light in them. 
 
BIG LAUREL 295 
 
 They were gray, but back of them there was the 
 magic of the dawn. It was as though something 
 was a-borning there. Something a-borning to 
 which her mother heart, willy-nilly, responded. 
 She tried to fight off the emotion, but her trigger 
 linger weakened. She tried still to fight it off, but 
 her extended arms began to wobble. She lowered 
 the rifle. 
 
 "Bud Childers," she said, "you knowed I 
 could n' do thet. You knowed I could n' kill." 
 
 " I reckoned you 'd kill me ef yuh hed the 
 chanst," he replied seriously. 
 
 " You 're speakin' honest ? " 
 
 " I reckoned yuh would." 
 
 Her mind was working quickly. She did not 
 fully believe yet that any such change of heart 
 had come over him. She was half ashamed to 
 believe it. It was not like Bud to give up in this 
 wise. He was depending upon her weakness. But 
 there was one way to test him — one way that 
 would prove conclusively if the man meant what 
 he said or not. 
 
 " Bud Childers," she called, " hit ain't fer me 
 to hand out justice, but thar's them thet will. 
 An' ef yo're hones' ye '11 walk back to th' valley 
 an' pay like a man fer what yuh done." 
 
296 BIG LAUREL 
 
 A rifle bullet would have been merciful in com- 
 parison with those words. Bud staggered back 
 a little — just a very little. He recovered quickly. 
 Everything in his nature — everything there up 
 to a few minutes ago — rebelled at the suggestion. 
 The world swam about him. And yet here was a 
 direct challenge — a challenge flung in his face. 
 The eyes before him were even now, at this hesi- 
 tancy, filling with mocking laughter. The lips 
 were curling in scorn. 
 
 " You — you ax me to do thet ? " he faltered. 
 
 " I dare yuh to do thet," she answered. 
 
 He turned on his heels and led the way back 
 to the mountain road. 
 
 Roxie followed the tall, stooping figure as 
 though in a dream. She was not convinced even 
 now that he intended to fulfill any such purpose. 
 Yet without faltering he led the way through the 
 bushes and out into the road, pausing to wait for 
 her when his long stride took him too far ahead. 
 And more than once she found her own steps 
 lagging. She was urging this man to his death 
 and he was going willingly. Never once did he 
 give any sign of weakening. She watched his big 
 muscular body as it swung along the road in 
 
BIG LAUREL 297 
 
 front of her — watched it with a feeling of awe. 
 It was so expressive of life — so vibrant with 
 energy. It did not seem right to kill anything 
 like that — even in the name of justice. Yet 
 Allston, too, had been vibrant with life, and 
 then — 
 
 The memory hardened her young face. She 
 grasped the rifle firmly and followed more 
 rapidly. 
 
 They were nearing the shack. It was a ques- 
 tion of only a few more minutes and this issue 
 would be taken out of her hands forever. How 
 long it was she had been gone she did not know, 
 but it seemed like hours. The chances were that 
 by now the searchers were up here. At every 
 turn of the winding road she half expected to see 
 a challenging figure. She peered ahead shrink- 
 ingly. But Bud never even glanced up. He 
 plodded on like one in a dream. 
 
 She paused once — deliberately. Perhaps, if he 
 found himself out of sight of her, he might make 
 a dash for liberty. But his ears apparently were 
 alert, because within three steps he stopped in his 
 turn and swung to see what had become of her. 
 So once again their eyes met. 
 
298 BIG LAUREL 
 
 The fool! Why didn't he take his chance? 
 Once around that httle bend he could have 
 swerved into the undergrowth and disappeared. 
 Instead of that he just stood there waiting. His 
 eyes asked nothing of her — nothing of any one. 
 
 Resting the butt of the rifle on the ground, she 
 leaned upon the barrel as upon a staff. 
 
 " 'T ain't fer now," he said encouragingly. 
 
 It was not far for her, but for him — it might 
 be a journey without end. That thing called law 
 was helpless as long as a man kept in the hills, 
 but once he came dovv-n into the valley it had the 
 strength of a giant. She remembered stories — 
 stories told to illustrate the might and majesty 
 of the law; of how certain men had struggled and 
 run and twisted and turned in vain in their at- 
 tempt to escape the sheriff. And her sympathies 
 always had been with the man — as they were 
 with the fox against the hounds. The law was 
 necessary and should be respected. She had 
 learned that at the Mission school. But the law, 
 too, was a vague outside force — a foreign force. 
 More often than not it was associated with men 
 from the county seat or from that far-off place 
 called Washington. 
 
BIG LAUREL 299 
 
 Bud waited patiently while she stood there in 
 a tremble. She did not want this Thing to catch 
 him. She did not want him dragged off and put 
 in prison or possibly killed. She was a valley girl, 
 but these mountains were part of her. It was as 
 though she were surrendering Caterpillar Ridge. 
 As long as she could remember she had associ- 
 ated these woods with Bud Childers. The fool ! 
 Why didn't he run instead of waiting for her? 
 
 "Reckon we'd better be rackin' erlong," he 
 said. 
 
 So she started once more, and then, unex- 
 pectedly, they were around a turn and in full 
 view of the clearing before the shack. Her eyes 
 were drawn as by a magnet to the spot where she 
 had last seen the crumpled form of Allston. It 
 was not there. Moreover, smoke was coming 
 from the cabin chimney. Some one was here — 
 but not the crowd she had expected. Not a soul 
 was in sight. 
 
 "Wanter turn in thar.?" asked Bud. 
 
 Roxie caught her breath. 
 
 " Whar is he? " she trembled. 
 
 " They mought ha' kerried him inside," he said 
 in a voice grown dead. 
 
300 BIG LAUREL 
 
 With that he went on again, across the log 
 towards the shack. She followed close at his heels, 
 afraid of what she might see. Twice her hand 
 v/as almost upon Bud's arm, but she was not 
 sure, even at this moment, of what she ought to 
 do. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 Allston was facing the door when the two 
 figures came out of the road. He sprang to his 
 feet reaching for his automatic. Wilmer was 
 bending over the fire. 
 
 "What is it, Ned?" she asked, without turn- 
 ing. 
 
 " I 'm going outside a moment. Wait here," 
 he ordered. 
 
 Before she grasped the full meaning of his 
 words, he was across the threshold and in the 
 open, his gun half raised, his eyes full upon the 
 eyes of Bud Childers. 
 
 Roxie stared as at one risen from the dead. 
 She stood transfixed. Had it not been for the ban- 
 daged head which gave Allston his one touch of 
 reality, she would not have been able to breathe 
 As it was she breathed deeply and slowly and 
 softly as before an apparition which might van- 
 ish at a sound. And her hand, like a child's, 
 sought Bud's hand. She gripped it with all her 
 might. 
 
 Then another figure appeared at the door — 
 
302 BIG LAUREL 
 
 the figure of a woman. There was reality enough 
 about Wilmer Howe. After one glance she rushed 
 out and threw herself in front of Allston, reaching 
 up her white arms to his shoulders, shielding him 
 with her body. Very gently Allston tried to turn 
 her one side, but with a moaning cry she clung. 
 
 " No ! No ! No ! " she choked. 
 
 Roxie saw Allston's half-raised arm lower and 
 saw it sweep around this woman. 
 
 It was then she had to hold herself steady; 
 then that she had to face the truth however much 
 it hurt. She, after all, was not the Princess of the 
 fairy story, but this other. The book over which 
 she had dreamed was roughly snatched out of 
 her hands, and the covers closed before her eyes 
 — the story unfinished. And yet — and yet per- 
 haps that was the way with fairy stories. Perhaps 
 it was just so they were able to live on forever. 
 Thev stood for dreams — unfinished dreams. 
 The Prince himself was smiling. She winced at 
 that. 
 
 Bud felt the soft fingers on his hand relaxing. 
 It was not till then that he removed his eyes from 
 Allston. Suddenly this other man did not mat- 
 ter. Once again he was alone with Roxie — alone 
 
BIG LAUREL 303 
 
 with Roxie in the hills. And the mountains round 
 about him, instead of closing in, stood back to 
 give him room — room for his big full heart. He 
 was breathing the air of a free man once more. 
 The trees were his brothers. The birds were sing- 
 ing — golden notes in an air filled with sifted 
 fine gold. And a saucy little red squirrel chattered 
 excitedly in a tree overhead. 
 
 Bud stooped and swept the girl into his long 
 arms. Against her feeble protests, he held her 
 tight. 
 
 And lo ! Roxie found another stor}^-book open 
 before her eyes. 
 
 Whatever took place up there in that shack by 
 Big Laurel Cove was never satisfactorily ex- 
 plained either to the local gossips or the local 
 authorities. 
 
 As Daddie Ingram expressed it to the group 
 which gathered at the post-office : 
 
 "Thar's suthin' purty durned quar 'bout the 
 hull bisness." 
 
 Perhaps there was. Both Wilmer Howe and 
 Roxie might have agreed with him on that, and 
 there were certain details that neither Bud nor 
 
304 BIG LAUREL 
 
 I. 
 
 Allston ever fully understood. It was queer busi- 
 ness, but as far as those most immediately in- 
 volved were concerned an eminently satisfactory 
 business. The wedding of Bud and Roxie which 
 took place a week later at the Howe bungalow 
 seemed to be proof of this. That was a memorable 
 event in the neighborhood. Every one was invited 
 and every one came and every one appeared to 
 be happy. 
 
 "But," as Daddie Ingram said later, "'co'se 
 Bud Childers is Bud Childers an' thar ain' no 
 gittin' round thet. Roxie '11 hev to watch her step 
 livin' 'long o' him." 
 
 Daddie was a wise old owl and his opinion 
 carried weight. It was rather too bad, then, that 
 he could not have been present eight months 
 later when Allston and his wife climbed the 
 mountain road to visit Bud and Roxie. Together 
 they took the same trail that separately each had 
 taken once before — along the sandy road skirt- 
 ing the valley and up through the dark forest. 
 If here where the woods smell damp Wilmer 
 clung to Allston's arm, it is nobody's business. 
 Once through the leafy tunnel and on the open 
 ridge looking down upon the sunlit valley, Wil- 
 mer paused and, placing her hands upon her hus- 
 
BIG LAUREL 305 
 
 band's shoulder, looked straight into his blue 
 eyes and whispered: 
 
 " Even though I walk through the valley of the 
 shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For Thou 
 art with me." 
 
 Reverently he kissed her white forehead. 
 
 So they went on into the dragon country, fear- 
 ing nothing, their hearts singing. As they ap- 
 proached the clearing they heard the sound of a 
 hammer and found Bud busy upon a substantial 
 addition to the cabin — a generous front porch 
 made of planed boards. He stepped forward cor- 
 dially to greet them. 
 
 "Roxie's in thar," he said with a jerk of his 
 thumb towards the interior. "An' she '11 shore be 
 mighty proud ter see yuh." 
 
 As the two approached the door he stood aside 
 to allow them to pass. He himself stopped a mo- 
 ment before a rather conspicuous doormat bear- 
 ing the word "Welcome." Rather sheepishly he 
 lagged behind to wipe his heavy boots clean of 
 all dirt. 
 
 "Roxie's kinder fussy 'bout mud," he 
 explained. 
 
 THE END 
 
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