Part 2

Mastered by despair, he clung to the iron railing. What could he hope of science when he had failed in his duty to faith? Somehow he managed to struggle to his feet and gain the room.

The sheeted figure on the bed was very still, the face paler than the pillow on which it lay. He crumpled down beside her and hid his face, too sick with shame to weep. He _knew_ with a horrid certainty that she was dead and that he had killed her.

And then:

"Paul!"

It was the merest wisp of sound, almost too impalpable to be human utterance. He lifted his head and looked into the face of the great surgeon.... He was smiling.

"Paul!"

He looked now into the pale face of his wife ... and _she_ was smiling.

"There, there," said the great surgeon. "I told you she would come back. Her constitution----"

"Constitution!" scoffed the nurse. "It was you."

"Or," smiled the surgeon, magnanimously, "your prayers, sir."

But the sick woman made a gesture of dissent.

"No," she said, "it was none of those things. I came back when I remembered----"

"Paul," she whispered, "lean down."

He obeyed. Her palms fluttered against his cheeks, and, as lightly as a butterfly on a flower, her lips brushed his one closed eye and then the other. And then the girl who had been Ellen McCartney laughed a low, thrilling laugh, which spoke of youth in love in the springtime.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

By Selwyn Grattan

The empty vial--the odour of bitter almonds--and in the chair what had been a man.

On the desk this note:

"Farewell. From the day of our marriage I have known. I love you. I love my friend. Better that I should go and leave you two to find happiness than that I should stay and the three of us wear out wretched lives. Again farewell--and bless you.

"Robert."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

THE GRETCHEN PLAN

By William Johnston

"And Solomon had seven hundred wives," read Pastor Brandt.

Gretchen Edeler sat up to listen. A new idea had come to her. A distressing state of affairs existed in the village of Eisen. There had gone to the war from the village over three hundred men. From the war there had returned fifty-one--only fifty-one--and there in Eisen were two hundred and eighty-one girls wanting husbands.

Of the fifty-one returned soldiers twenty had wives and families already. Two had married during the war, married the nurses they had had in the hospital. Hilda Sachs, the rich widow, had captured one. That left just twenty-eight men available for husbands--twenty-eight to two hundred and eighty-one girls.

Yet no marriages occurred. The men wished to marry as much as the girls, but how could a man decide with so many to pick from? Thus stood matters that Sunday morning.

After the service Gretchen waited to speak to Pastor Brandt.

"Everything in the Bible," she asked anxiously, "is it always right?"

"Ja," the herr pastor affirmed, "the Bible always gives right."

"About everything?"

"Ja, about everything."

"The Bible says that Jacob had two wives and that Solomon had seven hundred wives. Is it right for men to have many wives?"

"It was right in Bible days," affirmed the pastor guardedly. "In those times many wives were needed to populate the land."

"Many wives are needed now to populate the land," asserted Gretchen. "Why should not each man in Eisen take now ten wives?"

"It is against the law," declared the pastor.

"It is not against Bible law."

The pastor pondered ten minutes.

"Nein," he answered, "it is not against Bible law."

"It would be for the good of the Fatherland."

The pastor pondered twenty minutes.

"Ja," he decided, "it would be for the good of the Fatherland."

"We will do it," announced Gretchen. "Ten of us will take one husband. Better a tenth of a husband than never any husband. Will you marry us?"

The pastor pondered thirty minutes.

"Ja," he said at length, "for the good of the Fatherland."

Quickly Gretchen spread her news. Quickly the girls accepted the Gretchen plan. Quickly they formed themselves into groups of ten and selected a husband. Quickly the twenty-eight men accepted. What man wouldn't?

Only Selma Kronk, the homeliest of homely old maids, was left unmated. In indignant dismay she hastened to Frau Werner's kaffee-klatch and unfolded to the married women assembled there the schreckliche Gretchen plan.

"Impossible!" asserted Frau Stern.

"Unspeakable!" declared Frau Heitner.

"It must not be!" announced Frau Werner.

In outraged wrath they appealed to their husbands to interfere.

"It is for the good of the Fatherland," the husbands one and all declared. "What man would not have ten wives if he could?"

They appealed to the Mayor, to the Governor, even to the Kaiser himself, but in vain. To a man they welcomed the idea.

So the Gretchen plan was carried out. Each war hero took ten wives, not only in Eisen, but throughout the land.

Nevertheless, Frau Werner and the other aggrieved respectable advocates of monogamy had their revenge.

As invariably happens after a war, all the babies born were boy babies.

"Aha!" cried Frau Werner exultantly, as each new birth was announced. "Twenty years from now there will not be women enough to go around. Each wife then will have to have ten husbands. I wonder how the men will like that?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------

THE GLORY OF WAR

By M. B. Levick

He was an orderly in the hospital and had got the job through a friend in his Grand Army Post. The work was not for a fastidious man, but John was not fastidious. In his duties he affected the bluff manner of a veteran, and, peering at the internes with a wise squint, would say, "Oh, this ain't nothin'; an old soldier is used to such things. If y' want t' see the real thing, jus' go to war." And he would laugh at them and they would laugh at him.

He wore his G. A. R. emblem conspicuously on all occasions. At the slightest chance he became a bore with long tales of fighting, of how he had chased Johnny Reb and how _those_ were the days. The students, still near enough to the classroom to hold a lingering repugnance for the text-books' overemphasis on the Civil War, would guy him, but John never suspected.

On Decoration Day he marched and attended as many exercises as he could squeeze into the too short hours. He wore a committee ribbon like a decoration for valour. Once he carried a flag in a parade, and for weeks talked about Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, and regimental colours that had changed hands in distant frays.

And he had fought only to save his country, he would assert. He didn't have no eye on Uncle Sam's purse, not he; he could take care of himself, and if not, why, there was them as would. When the youths accused him of sinking his pension, he turned hotly to remind them of their lack of beard.

He was ever so ready to defend himself with an ancient vigour that the students and the nurses were sorry when he fell ill. Perhaps his campaigning had taken from his vitality, they surmised. The house surgeon told them he would never get up. After that--and the afterward was not long--John told his tales to more sober auditors.

He had been in bed a week and had begun to suspect the state of affairs when he called to him one evening the youth who of all had shown him the most deference.

"Sit down," he said, without looking the youngster in the eye; and for a time there were heard only the noises of the day-weary ward. Presently John spoke, in an apprehensive tone of confidences.

"I've been a soldier now for forty-five years," he said, "an' for once I want to be just myself.... I kind o' like you, an' there ain't nobody else I can talk to, for I ain't got any one....

"In '61 I was on my father's farm in Pennsylvani'. I was on'y a kid then--fifteen--but when the war come I wanted the worst way to go. But my mother, she cried an' begged me not to, an' my daddy said he'd lick me, so I tried t' forget it.

"But I couldn't. Lots o' other boys was goin' away t' enlist an' they was all treated like heroes. Ye'd 'a' thought they'd won the war already by themselves the way folks carried on when they left--the girls cryin' about 'em an' the teacher an' the minister an' the circuit judge speakin' to 'em an' all the stay-at-homes mad because they wasn't goin', too.

"It kept gettin' harder an' harder to work on the farm, an' finally I said, 'Well, I'll go anyway.' I knew pa an' ma wouldn't change their mind, so I didn't say nothin' to them. But I went to all the other boys an' told _them_. 'I'm goin' away t' enlist,' I'd say, an' when they'd laugh an' say, 'Why, y'r ma won't let ye,' I'd look wise an' tell 'em to watch me, an' I'd strut aroun' an' wink sly-like.

"They got to talkin' about it so much I was scairt my dad would find out, but he didn't, an' I held back as long as I could, because all the other boys was lookin' up to me. I was a man, all right, then. None o' 'em that went away was the mogul I was. The girls got wind of it, too, an' I could see 'em out o' the tail o' my eye watchin' me an' whisperin' an' sayin', girl-like, all the things the boys was tryin' not to say. That on'y made the boys talk more, too.

"So after a few days I ran away. The first night I hung roun' near the town an' after dark sneaked back to hear 'em talkin'. 'He'll be back soon,' one feller said. Another, just to show he knew more, spoke up, 'No, he won' come back 'less in blue or in a coffin.' An' the others laughed.

"I thought that was fine--in blue or a coffin. 'You bet I won't; I'm the man f'r that,' says I to myself.

"It took me three days to walk to the city. When I told the recruitin' sergeant I wanted to be high corporal he laughed an' pounded me an' put me through my paces. Then he said I couldn't be a soldier. My eyes wasn't good enough.

"I cried at that; on'y a kid, y' know--the' was lots of 'em younger than me fightin'. But I remembered the feller what said, 'He won't come back 'cept in blue or a coffin,' so I went where the soldiers was an' bummed an' hobnobbed with 'em till they let me help at peelin' vegetables and pot-wrastlin' an' such things. Then I got to be a sort o' water boy. My, I was proud!... But that on'y lasted a month, an' I had to get out.

"I jus' couldn't go home without the blue, an' it seemed too soon to get a coffin yet, so I went to New York an' stayed all through the war. Nearly starved, too.

"After it was over I went back home. They didn't suspicion, o' course, an' the first thing I knew I'd told 'em I'd been in the army. Hadn't planned to, but some way it just popped out.

"Right away it was hail-fellow-well-met with them that had been at the front, an' we were goin' roun' givin' oursel's airs an' the girls seemed to think we was better than all the rest.... Well, sometimes I....

"I was jus' a young fellow, y' know, an' kep' gettin' in deeper an' deeper an' never thought it'd mean anything. When a man says, 'John, you remember that clump o' trees the Fifty-eighth lay under at Antietam?' why, you say, 'Yes.' An' the next time y'r tellin' about Antietam you jus' throw in them trees without thinkin'. That's the way it was with me. An' I read books to get my facks straight an' no one never caught me nappin'. I used t' correct _them_.... At last I got to believe it all myself....

"Then the G. A. R. Post was organized in our town.... An' so it went.

"Well, it's been a long time. If I'd 'a' known in the first place maybe it'd 'a' been different.... But it was my right, anyway, wasn't it, now? Say, don't you think it was comin' to me? It wasn't my fault. By God, I wanted to fight! Jus' one chance an' so help me----

"They cheated me out o' it an' I got even. That's all it was. I never took no pension. I've had the glory, like 'em.... I've paid for it.... I on'y took my own.

"And the Post will bury me."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

THE AVIATOR

By Hornell Hart

"The French Government declines to accept your services." The words said themselves over and over in his ears in the drone of the motor, as the monoplane climbed into the velvet night sky. Was that diplomatic blunder of two years ago so utterly unforgivable? Was exile not enough? Would the Republic deny him even the right to fight under her colours? "The French Government declines to accept your services." The recruiting officer had said it, and General Joffre had reiterated the unrelenting statement in reply to his direct appeal for enlistment. And now the drone of the propeller, the hum of the motor, and the rush of the air through the braces whispered the words ceaselessly into his ears as the great wings carried him up into the darkness.

Below, the ghostly searchlight fingers of the fortress reached up, groping toward him. The central searchlight of the fortress was playing on a French cruiser which had crept up recklessly close to the fort and was pouring shells in rapid salvos up into the battlements on the hill. The sparks of fire from the ship's side seemed but tiny points of light far down below. Momentarily balls of flame appeared above and around the dim outlines of the fortifications, and the smoke of bursting shells drifted wanly across the white, searching pencils of light. Down there France, undaunted, grappled the Turk in the darkness. From the farther shore distant lights of Asia twinkled in the night.

Behind that central searchlight, Henri had said, lay the entrance to the powder magazine. That passageway was the vital spot of the fortress. An explosion there would ignite the ammunition and shatter the entire centre of the fortifications.

A searchlight came wheeling across the sky and shot past just behind the monoplane. The flash of the guns on the hill were now just beneath him, and their roar formed a surging background of sound to the whirr of the machine. He swept in a huge curve toward a position back of the fortress. The searchlight was circling the sky again. For a fraction of a second the aeroplane was silhouetted in its full glare. The beam wavered and returned zigzagging to pick him up again. This time it caught and followed him. A shell burst below him. If one fragment of shrapnel should strike the nitroglycerine which he carried France would profit little from this last ride of his.

The fortress was not far behind him. He swept about and pointed the nose of the monoplane downward straight toward the base of the central searchlight. Its beam had ceased to play on the battleship and was lifting swiftly toward him. Suddenly its glare caught him straight in the eyes. He gripped the controls and steered tensely for that dazzling target.

"The French Government declines to accept your services." He smiled grimly. They could not well decline them now. The air rushed past him so swiftly that it seemed stiff like a stream of water under high pressure. Below him at that point of light death stood smiling. The crash of a shell bursting behind him was lost in the gale of wind in his ears. The light grew swiftly larger and the outlines of the battlements became distinct. "The French Government----" the world ended in a crash of blistering whiteness.

"He was pointed directly at the magazine," said Abdul, the gunner. "If the shell from the French cruiser had not struck him we should all by now have been with Allah."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

LOYALTY

By Clarence Herbert New

They had been playing "cut-in" Bridge until the Charltons went home, at midnight. Instead of following them Norris returned to the library with Steuler and his wife. In the old days Barclay Norris had asked Barbara to marry him; but Steuler's impetuous love-making appealed to her imagination, and Norris had remained their loyal friend. In the library, Steuler yawned--without apology. Extracting a suit-case from the coat-closet, he started for the stairs.

"You and Barbara may sit up all night, my friend; but me--I haf been travelling, I cannot keep my eyes open! Good-night!"

Norris stopped him with a slight motion of the head, nodded to a chair by the table, lighted a cigar rather deliberately, and sat down.

"There's a matter I want to discuss with you, Max--_now_.... Don't go away, Bab. It concerns you--rather deeply." He inspected his cigar critically during a few moments of silence. "Max, you may have heard that my law practice brought me occasionally in touch with the Government, but you didn't know I was officially connected with the Secret Service. When we were drawn into this war your probable sympathies were considered. But you enlisted for the Spanish War, though you never got farther than Chattanooga. You took the oath of allegiance. We considered your loyalty had been demonstrated, so we trusted you. We've had a constant fight against treachery, however, in the most undreamed-of places. You were again suspected. Is it necessary for me to say more? Lieutenant Schmidt was arrested ten minutes after you left him this morning. I saw you receive from him specifications for the Wright Multiplane, the Maxim Chlorine Shell, and the perfected 'Lake' Submarine. I also know you have a copy of the State Department's code-book."

Barbara Steuler had remained standing at the end of the table, her eyes dilating with an expression of incredulous, outraged amazement.

"Barclay! Are you _insane_? Are you accusing _Max_ of these horrible things? My _husband_?"

Norris spoke gently but firmly.

"I'm stating facts, Bab--not accusing. Because I've been your friend, and his, I'm giving him this chance to return the papers and code before it's too late. At this moment I'm the only one who really knows. He meant to sail on Grunwald's yacht for Christiania at sunrise. There's still time for him to get aboard and escape. I'm personally answerable for the unknown man I've been following to-day!"

She whirled upon her husband, saw, with horror, that he was making no denial, that he was looking at their old friend with a gleam of hatred in his eyes. Presently he pulled open a drawer in the table, thrusting one hand into the back part of it.

"So! You efen suspect where I put the codebook? Yess? Well, it iss the fortune of war, I suppose. You think I will not arrested be, if I reach the yacht before morning? Nein? You are the only one who knows--yet? Und suppose I nefer come back? My wife I mus' leave with the man who always haf lofed----" There was a flash, a stunning report. Norris staggered up from his chair and pitched headlong upon the floor.

"Max! _Max!_ A traitor! A murderer! My God!"

He took a canvas-bound book from the drawer, thrusting it hastily into the suit-case, then fetched overcoat and hat from the closet. In his hurry he overlooked the automatic pistol which lay upon the table. So intent was he upon escaping with what he had that he seemed to have forgotten her entirely. But a low, gasping voice made him whirl about at the door.

"Another step--and I'll--_kill_ you!" The pistol steadily covered his heart. (He'd seen her shoot.)

"Put that book on the table." He hesitated, meditating a spring through the doorway. "When I count three! One!..." With a muttered curse he took the code from the suit-case.

"Empty your pockets!"

There was no mistaking the expression in her eyes. He emptied his pockets.

"Now--_go_! Without the suit-case!"

"Barbara! You would haf me leave you! Like this!" Her face was colourless, in her eyes a brooding horror, a dazed consciousness of that motionless body on the floor behind the table.

"My people fought at Lexington and Concord--for principles dearer than life to them. You swore allegiance to those principles, to their flag. And you are--_this_! You've murdered our loyal friend--when he was giving a traitor a chance, at great personal risk! Go! _Quickly!_"

As the front door slammed she ran to the window, watched him down the block. A man who did such things might return later, catch her unarmed, secure the papers. Her brain worked automatically. There was no safe place to conceal them. They must be destroyed at once! Tearing the book to pieces, she piled the leaves upon the andirons in the fireplace with the other papers, then lighted the heap. When they were entirely destroyed a patter of footsteps echoed from the stairs; a little figure in pajamas came peeking around the portière. (A thrill of passionate thankfulness ran through her that he resembled _her_ people, with no trace of the alien blood.)

"Mo-ther! What was that big noise?"

"Possibly some one's automobile, dear--a blowout or a back-fire, you know." She forced herself to speak quietly, standing so that he couldn't look behind the table.

"Mo-ther, who was down here wiv you?"

"Uncle Barclay, sweetheart. But--oh, God!--he's gone now." (Norris's love had been the truer, deeper affection; she'd known it for some time.) "Run along back to beddy, darling. Mother will come up presently."

She had a feeling of suffocation as the boy hugged her impetuously and padded softly upstairs. As she listened to his careful progress another sound, a faint rustling from behind the table made her heart stop beating for a second. With trembling limbs she leaned across the table and looked. The dead man lay in a slightly different position; there was a barely perceptible movement of the chest. She reached breathlessly for the telephone.

"Give me Bryant 9702, please!... Yes! Doctor Marvin's house! _Quickly!_"

--------------------------------------------------------------------

MOSES COMES TO BURNING BUSH

By W. T. Larned

Melting snow in the spring and cloud-bursting rains in the fall poured their floods from the foothills, through the arroyo, and were licked up and lost in the arid lands below. The Mormons came, dammed the outlet in the ridge--and, lo! there was a lake. Thus Burning Bush, Cortez County, New Mexico, was created, on the edge of green alfalfa fields. And because there was coal the railroad ran a spur to collect it; and because there was a railroad cowmen came in with their beeves and sheepmen with their mutton and wool.

In the terms of a now-discarded census classification, the "souls" composing Cortez County's population were officially designated as "white men, Mormons, and Mexicans." Also, there were Indians, who could not vote and did not count. Finally, there was Ah Sin.

Ah Sin was no common coolie. He had been, indeed, the prize pupil at the Chinese mission on the Coast. He could speak and read English, do sums with his head in American arithmetic, and recite whole passages from the Bible. With a cash capital accumulated in ten years of dogged domestic service, he had come to Burning Bush and opened a general store. It was the only one in town, and it paid.