Part 21

I did not say anything. I turned and went below. McCord was there already, standing on the farther side of the table. After a moment or so the cat followed and sat on her haunches at the foot of the ladder and stared at us without winking.

"I think she wants something to eat," I said to McCord.

He lit a lantern and went into the galley. Returning with a chunk of salt beef, he threw it into the farther corner. The cat went over and began to tear at it, her muscles playing with convulsive shadow-lines under the sagging yellow hide.

And now it was she who listened, to something beyond the reach of even McCord's faculties, her neck stiff and her ears flattened. I looked at McCord and found him brooding at the animal with a sort of listless malevolence. "_Quick_! She has kittens somewhere about." I shook his elbow sharply. "When she starts, now--"

"You don't seem to understand," he mumbled. "It wouldn't be any use."

She had turned now and was making for the ladder with the soundless agility of her race. I grasped McCord's wrist and dragged him after me, the lantern banging against his knees. When we came up the cat was already amidships, a scarcely discernible shadow at the margin of our lantern's ring. She stopped and looked back at us with her luminous eyes, appeared to hesitate, uneasy at our pursuit of her, shifted here and there with quick, soft bounds, and stopped to fawn with her back arched at the foot of the mast. Then she was off with an amazing suddenness into the shadows forward.

"Lively now!" I yelled at McCord. He came pounding along behind me, still protesting that it was of no use. Abreast of the foremast I took the lantern from him to hold above my head.

"You see," he complained, peering here and there over the illuminated deck. "I tell you, Ridgeway, this thing--" But my eyes were in another quarter, and I slapped him on the shoulder.

"An engineer--an engineer to the core," I cried at him. "Look aloft, man."

Our quarry was almost to the cross-trees, clambering the shrouds with a smartness no sailor has ever come to, her yellow body, cut by the moving shadows of the ratlines, a queer sight against the mat of the night. McCord closed his mouth and opened it again for two words: "By gracious!" The following instant he had the lantern and was after her. I watched him go up above my head--a ponderous, swaying climber into the sky--come to the cross-trees, and squat there with his knees clamped around the mast. The clear star of the lantern shot this way and that for a moment, then it disappeared and in its place there sprang out a bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at anchor in the heavens. I could see the shadows of his head and hands moving monstrously over the inner surface of the sail, and muffled exclamations without meaning came down to me. After a moment he drew out his head and called: "All right--they're here. Heads! there below!"

I ducked at his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked up a slipper--a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began to stagger down the shrouds. Under his left arm he hugged a curious assortment of litter, a sheaf of papers, a brace of revolvers, a gray kimono, and a soiled apron.

"Well," he said when he had come to deck, "I feel like a man who has gone to hell and come back again. You know I'd come to the place where I really believed that about the cat. When you think of it--By gracious! we haven't come so far from the jungle, after all."

We went aft and below and sat down at the table as we had been. McCord broke a prolonged silence.

"I'm sort of glad he got away--poor cuss! He's probably climbing up a wharf this minute, shivering and scared to death. Over toward the gas-tanks, by the way he was swimming. By gracious! now that the world's turned over straight again, I feel I could sleep a solid week. Poor cuss! can you imagine him, Ridgeway--"

"Yes," I broke in. "I think I can. He must have lost his nerve when he made out your smoke and shinnied up there to stow away, taking the ship's papers with him He would have attached some profound importance to them--remember, the 'barbarian,' eight thousand miles from home. Probably couldn't read a word. I suppose the cat followed him--the traditional source of food He must have wanted water badly."

"I should say! He wouldn't have taken the chances he did."

"Well," I announced, "at any rate, I can say it now--there's another 'mystery of the sea' gone to pot."

McCord lifted his heavy lids.

"No," he mumbled. "The mystery is that a man who has been to sea all his life could sail around for three days with a man bundled up in his top and not know it. When I think of him peeking down at me--and playing off that damn cat--probably without realizing it--scared to death--by gracious! Ridgeway, there was a pair of funks aboard this craft, eh? Wow--yow--I could sleep--"

"I should think you could."

McCord did not answer.

"By the way," I speculated. "I guess you were right about Björnsen, McCord--that is, his fooling with the foretop. He must have been caught all of a bunch, eh?"

Again McCord failed to answer. I looked up, mildly surprised, and found his head hanging back over his chair and his mouth opened wide. He was asleep.

THE BOUNTY-JUMPER[20]

By MARY SYNON

From _Scribner's Magazine_

[20] Copyright, 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1916, by Mary Synon.

"... While faith, that in the mire was fain to wallow, Returns at last to find The cold fanes desolate, the niches hollow, The windows dim and blind,

"And strown with ruins around, the shattered relic Of unregardful youth, Where shapes of beauty once, with tongues angelic, Whispered the runes of Truth."

--_From "The Burden of Lost Souls_."

On the day before Isador Framberg's body was brought back to Chicago from Vera Cruz, James Thorold's appointment as ambassador to Forsland was confirmed by the Senate of the United States. Living, Isador Framberg might never have wedged into the affairs of nations and the destinies of James Thorold. Marines in the navy do not intrigue with chances of knee-breeches at the Court of St. Jerome. More than miles lie between Forquier Street and the Lake Shore Drive. Dead, Isador Framberg became, as dead men sometimes become, the archangel of a nation, standing with flaming sword at the gateway to James Thorold's paradise.

For ten years the Forsland embassy had been the goal of James Thorold's ambition. A man past seventy, head of a great importing establishment, he had shown interest in public affairs only within the decade, although his very build, tall, erect, commanding, and his manner suavely courteous and untouched by futile haste, seemed to have equipped him with a natural bent for public life. Marrying late in life, he seemed to have found his bent more tardily than did other men. But he had invested wealth, influence, and wisdom in the future of men who, come to power, were paying him with this grant of his desire. The news, coming to him unofficially but authoritatively from Washington, set him to cabling his wife and daughter in Paris and telegraphing his son whose steamer was just docking in New York. The boy's answer, delayed in transit and announcing that he was already on his way to Chicago, came with the morning newspapers and hurried his father through their contents in order that he might be on time to meet Peter at the station.

The newspapers, chronicling Thorold's appointment briefly, were heavy with harbingering of the funeral procession of the boy who had fallen a fortnight before in the American navy's attack upon Vera Cruz. The relative values that editors placed upon the marine's death and his own honoring nettled Thorold. Ambassadors to the Court of St. Jerome were not chosen from Chicago every day, he reasoned, finding Isador Framberg already the fly in the amber of his contentment. To change the current of his thought he read over Peter's telegram, smiling at the exuberant message of joy in which the boy had vaunted the family glory. The yellow slip drove home to James Thorold the realization of how largely Peter's young enthusiasm was responsible for the whetting of his father's desire to take part in public affairs. For Peter's praise James Thorold would have moved mountains; and Peter's praise had a way of following the man on horseback. Thorold's eager anticipation of the boy's pride in him sped his course through rosy mists of hope as his motor-car threaded the bright drive and through the crowded Parkway toward the Rush Street bridge.

A cloud drifted across the sky of his serenity, however, as a blockade of traffic delayed his car in front of the old Adams homestead, rising among lilacs that flooded half city square with fragrance. The old house, famous beyond its own day for Judge Adams's friendship with Abraham Lincoln and the history-making sessions that the little group of Illinois idealists had held within its walls, loomed gray above the flowering shrubs, a saddening reminder of days that James Thorold must have known; but Thorold, glimpsing the place, turned away from it in a movement so swift as to betoken some resentment and gave heed instead to the long line of motors rolling smoothly toward the city's heart.

Over the bridge and through the packed streets of the down-town district Thorold, shaken from his revery of power and Peter, watched the film that Chicago unrolled for the boulevard pilgrims. The boats in the river, the long switch-tracks of the railroads, the tall grain-elevators, the low warehouses from which drifted alluring odors of spices linked for James Thorold the older city of his youth with the newer one of his age as the street linked one division of the city's geography with another. They were the means by which Chicago had risen from the sand-flats of the fifties to the Michigan Avenue of the present, that wide street of the high skyline that fronted the world as it faced the Great Lakes, squarely, solidly, openly. They were the means, too, by which James Thorold had augmented his fortune until it had acquired the power to send him to Forsland. To him, however, they represented not ladders to prosperity but a social condition of a passing generation, the Chicago of the seventies, a city distinctively American in population and in ideals, a youthful city of a single standard of endeavor, a pleasant place that had been swallowed by the Chicago of the present, that many-tentacled monster of heterogeneous races, that affected him as it did so many of the older residents, with an overwhelming sensation of revolt against its sprawling lack of cohesion. Even the material advantages that had accrued to him from the growth of the city could not reconcile James Thorold to the fact that the elements of the city's growth came from the races of men whom he held in contempt. What mattered it, he reasoned, that Chicago waxed huge when her grossness came from the unassimilated, indigestible mass of Latins and Greeks, Poles and Russians, Czechs, Bulgars, Jews, who filled the streets, the factories, and the schools?

The prejudice, always strong within him, rose higher as he found his machine blocked again, this time by the crowd that stood across Jackson Boulevard at La Salle Street. Even after the peremptory order of a mounted police officer had cleared the way for him James Thorold frowned on the lines of men and women pressed back against the curbstones. The thought that they were waiting the coming of the body of that boy who had died in Mexico added to his annoyance the realization that he would have to fight his way through another crowd at the station if he wished to reach the train-shed where Peter's train would come. The struggle was spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the funeral cortège of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine passage that brought him past the gates and under the glass dome of the train-shed.

Left alone, Thorold paced the platform a little apart from the group of men who had evidently been delegated to represent the city. Some of them he knew. Others of them, men of Isador Framberg's people and of the ten tribes of Israel, he did not care to know. He turned away from them to watch the people beyond the gates. Thousands of faces, typical of every nation of Europe and some of the lands of Asia, fair Norsemen and Teutons, olive-skinned Italians and men and women of the swarthier peoples of Palestine, Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Russians, Bulgars, Bohemians, units of that mass which had welded in the city of the Great Lakes of America, looked out from behind the iron fence. The tensity written on their faces, eager yet awed, brought back to James Thorold another time when men and women had stood within a Chicago railway terminal waiting for a funeral cortège, the time when Illinois waited in sorrow to take Abraham Lincoln, dead, to her heart. The memory of that other day of dirges linked itself suddenly in the mind of James Thorold with the picture of the lilacs blooming in the yard of the Adams homestead on the parkway, that old house where Abraham Lincoln had been wont to come; and the fusing recollections spun the ambassador to Forsland upon his heel and sent him far down the platform, where he stood, gloomily apart, until the limited, rolling in from the end of the yards, brought him hastening to its side.

Peter Thorold was the first to alight.

A boy of sixteen, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, springing from the platform of the Pullman into his father's arms, he brought with him the atmosphere of high adventure. In height, in poise of shoulders, in bearing, in a certain trick of lifting his chin, he was a replica of the dignified man who welcomed him with deep emotion; but a difference--of dream rather than of dogma--in the quality of their temperaments accoladed the boy. It was not only that his voice thrilled with the higher enthusiasms of youth. It held besides an inflexibility of tone that James Thorold's lacked. Its timbre told that Peter Thorold's spirit had been tempered in a furnace fierier than the one which had given forth the older man's. The voice rang out now in excited pleasure as the boy gripped his father's shoulders. "Oh, but it's good to see you again, dad," he cried. "You're a great old boy, and I'm proud of you, sir. Think of it!" he almost shouted. "Ambassador to Forsland! Say, but that's bully!" He slipped his arm around his father's shoulder, while James Thorold watched him with eyes that shone with joy. "What do you call an ambassador?" he demanded laughingly.

"Fortunately," the older man said, "there is no title accompanying the office."

"Well, I should think not," the boy exclaimed. "Oh, dad, isn't it the greatest thing in the world that you're to represent the United States of America?"

James Thorold smiled. "No doubt," he said dryly. His gaze passed his son to glimpse the crowd at the gate, frantic now with excitement, all looking forward toward some point on the platform just beyond where the man and boy were standing. "These United States of America have grown past my thought of them," he added. The boy caught up the idea eagerly. "Haven't they, though?" he demanded. "And isn't it wonderful to think that it's all the same old America, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave?' Gee, but it's good to be back in it again. I came up into New York alongside the battleship that brought our boys home from Mexico," he went on, "and, oh, say, dad, you should have seen that harbor! I've seen a lot of things for a fellow," he pursued with a touch of boyish boastfulness, "but I never saw anything in all my life like that port yesterday. People, and people, and people, waiting, and flags at half-mast, and a band off somewhere playing a funeral march, and that battleship with the dead sailors--the fellows who died for our country at Vera Cruz, you know--creeping up to the dock. Oh, it was--well, I cried!" He made confession proudly, then hastened into less personal narrative.

"One of them came from Chicago here," he said. "He was only nineteen years old, and he was one of the first on the beach after the order to cross to the customhouse. He lived over on Forquier Street, one of the men was telling me--there are six of them, the guard of honor for him, on the train--and his name was Isador Framberg. He was born in Russia, too, in Kiev, the place of the massacres, you remember. See, dad, here comes the guard!"

Peter Thorold swung his father around until he faced six uniformed men who fell into step as they went forward toward the baggage-car. "It's too bad, isn't it," the boy continued, "that any of the boys had to die down in that greaser town? But, if they did, I'm proud that we proved up that Chicago had a hero to send. Aren't you, dad?" James Thorold did not answer. Peter's hands closed over his arm. "It reminds me," he said, lowering his voice as they came closer to the place where the marines stood beside the iron carrier that awaited the casket of Isador Framberg's body, "of something the tutor at Westbury taught us in Greek last year, something in a funeral oration that a fellow in Athens made on the men who died in the Peloponnesian War. 'Such was the end of these men,'" he quoted slowly, pausing now and then for a word while his father looked wonderingly upon his rapt fervor, "'and they were worthy of Athens. The living need not desire to have a more heroic spirit. I would have you fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and, when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and who had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them.'" With the solemnity of the chant the young voice went on while the flag-covered casket was lifted from car to bier. "'For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not in stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war.'"

He pulled off his cap, tucking it under his arm and dragging his father with him to follow the men who had fallen in behind the marines as they moved forward toward the gates and the silent crowd beyond. Almost unwillingly James Thorold doffed his hat. The words of Peter's unexpected declamation of Pericles's oration resounded in his ears. "Once before," he said to the boy, "I heard that speech. Judge Adams said it one night to Abraham Lincoln."

"Father!" Peter's eyes flashed back from the cortège to meet James Thorold's. "I never knew that you knew Abraham Lincoln." His tone betokened an impression of having been cheated of some joy the older man had been hoarding. But James Thorold's voice held no joy. "Yes," he said. "I knew him."

The gates, sliding back, opened the way for the officers who led the procession with which Isador Framberg came back to the city of his adoption. The crowd yawned to give space to the guard of honor, walking erectly beside the flag-draped coffin, to the mourners, men and women alien as if they had come from Kiev but yesterday, to the little group of men, public officials and rabbis, who trailed in their wake, and to James Thorold and Peter, reverently following. Then it closed in upon the cortège, urging it silently down the broad stairways and out into the street where other crowds fell in with the strange procession. Surging away after the shabby hearse, drawn by its listless horses and attended by the marines, the crowd left the Thorolds, father and son, on the pavement beside the station. "Don't you want to go?" There was a wistfulness in Peter's voice that told his father that the boy had sensed some lack of responsiveness in him. "He's going to lie in state to-day at the city hall. Don't you think we should go, dad?" Not Peter's query but Peter's eyes won his father's answer. "After a while," he promised. "Then let's find a breakfast," the boy laughed. "I spent my last dollar sending you that telegram."

All the way over to his father's club on Michigan Avenue, and all through the breakfast that he ordered with lusty young appetite, Peter kept up a running fire of reminiscence of his European adventures. That the fire held grapeshot for his father when he talked of the latter's worthiness for the ambassadorship to Forsland he could not guess; but he found that he was pouring salt in a wound when he went back to comment upon Isador Framberg's death. "Why make so much of a boy who happened to be at Vera Cruz?" the older man said at last, nettled that even his son found greater occasion for commendation in the circumstance of the Forquier Street hero than in his father's selection to the most important diplomatic post in the gift of the government. Peter's brows rose swiftly at his father's annoyance. He opened his lips for argument, then swiftly changed his intention. "Tell me about Judge Adams, dad," he said, bungling over his desire to change the topic, "the fellow who knew his Pericles."

"It's too long a story," James Thorold said. He watched Peter closely in the fashion of an advocate studying the characteristics of a judge. The boy's idealism, his vivid young patriotism, his eager championship of those elements of the new America that his father contemned, had fired his personality with a glaze that left James Thorold's smoothly diplomatic fingers wandering over its surface, unable to hold it within his grasp. He had a story to tell Peter--some time--a story of Judge Adams, of the house among the lilacs, of days of war, of Abraham Lincoln; but the time for its telling must wait upon circumstance that would make Peter Thorold more ready to understand weakness and failure than he now seemed. Consciously James Thorold took a change of venue from Peter Thorold of the visions to Peter Thorold of the inevitable disillusions. But to the former he made concession. "Shall we go to the city hall now?" he asked as they rose from the table.