Part 4
The company was falling in after the halt when he came to the road. The curly head lay close to his bearded face, and a great clumsy hand protected the little body.
"Where did you get that, Wojak?" growled the lieutenant, staring blankly at the sorrowful little bundle. "Leave the kid and fall in," he commanded. "There's no time for nonsense on this march."
Wojak started to protest, but the habit of obedience was too strong. Sullenly he stood the baby in the snow and took his place in the ranks. The child's sobs turned to a heartbroken wail.
"Forward, march!" commanded the officer, and the company moved away down the road. Wojak looked back and saw the tiny arms stretched out after him while snowflakes settled on the yellow head. Long after the hilltop was hidden in swirling snow he seemed to see them and to hear the wail of the orphaned baby.
* * * * *
The sun was setting when the army bivouacked four miles from Wojak's farm. The orders were that no leaves of absence should be granted; but he knew the sentinel on guard, and home was too near to be left unseen for another four months.
The stars were glittering from an all but clear sky when he slipped silently through the lines and started down the familiar roads toward Sophy and Stephan. Four months was a terrible length of time. The passage of armies had marked the country. The great tree by the cottage of Ivanovicz had been shattered by a shell and had crashed through the roof. Jablonowski's barns had been burned. The windows of the church at the corners were shattered and a great hole had been shot in the steeple. Wojak walked faster, and a twinge of anxiety came over him as he entered the lane that led up to his barnyard. His heart stopped: the thatch of the stable had been burned and only the walls were standing. His eyes strained for a glimpse of the house. It was not there. A few charred beams marked the place where his home had stood.
He ran nearer. Snow had covered everything. Beside the place where the door had been was a white mound with a stick standing in the earth at its head. To the stick was nailed a little shoe. Wojak seized it with shaking hands.
"Stephan!" he choked. "My little Stephan!"
After a while he looked up. Looming above him was a man on horseback who had ridden up unheard through the muffling snow.
"You are under arrest," said the voice of the lieutenant.
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APPROXIMATING THE ULTIMATE WITH AUNT SARAH
By Charles Earl Gaymon
Aunt Sarah was sixty-three years old. Uncle John was sixty-four years old.
If you spoke to Aunt Sarah about any new fringe on the tapestry of the intellectual loom she would say:
"Oh, yes, we 'proximated that line of thought in 1893. It is near, but not quite the ultimate."
If you spoke to Uncle John about Schopenhauer he would reply:
"I don't take much stock in them new-fangled cultivators."
Uncle John and Aunt Sarah had lived together in the old homestead for thirty-eight years.
Aunt Sarah always had intellectual curiosity: she had left the old Baptist church in her girlhood to join a joy cult; she had followed with her mental telescope the scintillating trajectory of William James's flight through the philosophic heavens of America; she had known about eugenics long before the newspapers had made the subject popular knowledge, and she had played in the musty, rickety garret of occultism at a time when the most daring minds in science were sitting tight in the seats of the scornful. But there was a shadow in the sunlight of Aunt Sarah's mental advancement, an opaque spot in the crystal of her mysticism, an unresolved seventh in the harmony of her simple life in the Wisconsin backwoods--
She was married.
She was married to Uncle John!
At six o'clock in the evening of June 1, 1915, Aunt Sarah glanced up from reading Bennett's "Folk Ways and Mores" as Uncle John entered the kitchen door. Uncle John had just come from performing the vespertime chores.
"Pa, we shall have to get a divorce!" said Aunt Sarah, shutting Bennett with determination. "Marriage is a worn-out convention; it is only one of the thousand foolish folk ways that hinder the advancement of science among the masses."
"Very well, ma."
"We _will_ get a divorce."
"I quite agree, ma."
"Don't attempt logic with me, John. I said that we would get a divorce."
Uncle John shook his head. "When will it be?" he asked.
"To-morrow."
Uncle John smiled, dropped his armful of kindling into the wood box behind the kitchen range, and began to lay the Brobdingnagian bandana handkerchief that served them for a tablecloth.
Aunt Sarah finished the preparation of the bacon and onions and set the coffee pot back when it began to boil.
After supper Uncle John read the seed catalogue and Aunt Sarah resumed her Bennett.
The following afternoon Judge Thompson, who lived in the biggest and best house in the little county seat, was surprised to see from his chair in the big bay window an antiquated carriage drawn by a retired farm horse draw up before his cast-iron negro hitching post. In the carriage were Aunt Sarah and Uncle John.
Judge Thompson was on the porch in time to receive his guests.
"We've come to get a divorce," said Aunt Sarah, with a direct gaze; then she added, with the _sang froid_ of one who is wise, "What'll it cost?"
The judge motioned them to seats in the wicker chairs on the porch, and then replied:
"But you must have grounds----"
"Everybody knows it. Incompatibility of temperament."
And the judge, smiling, humoured Aunt Sarah, for he knew her and the community in which she lived. "It will cost you just ten dollars," he said.
"Make out the paper," Aunt Sarah replied.
One hour later Uncle John and Aunt Sarah left the judge's house together, separated for life.
Moses, their horse, looked at them out of the corner of his good eye as they approached the carriage.
Uncle John paused, but Aunt Sarah stepped firmly into the vehicle.
Uncle John followed her and took up the reins.
Moses knew the way home by a clairvoyant sense, and he took that way at his own pace of prophet-like dignity.
At the door of the old homestead Uncle John handed Aunt Sarah down from her seat in silence. Then he put Moses into his stall. And when he returned to the house he found Aunt Sarah beaming upon him through her gold-rimmed spectacles from her place at the table, which was loaded with a supper such as she alone could cook.
Aunt Sarah was jubilant. She was living at last with a man to whom she was not married; no longer was there a blot on the scutcheon of her intellectual progress; no longer did a black beetle mar the pellucid amber of her simple life of Advanced Ideas; no longer could the acolytes, in off moments when they were not engaged in trundling the spheres through the macrocosm, gaze sternly down upon her through interstellar space and say:
"Aunt Sarah is nearly, but not quite, an intellectual."
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THE HORSE HEAVER
By Lyman Bryson
"For why should you be tired?" demanded his wife, splashing her arms viciously in the suds as she finished the day's rinsing. "You've nothing to do but shovel dirt all day and rest when your boss ain't looking."
"Gwan, I'm a hard-working man," said Kallaher. "And, what's more, I can kick about it whenever I want to without any remarks from yourself. I'm tired. When's supper?"
"Supper is any time when I can get my arms dry and get a good breath." Mrs. Kallaher began belligerently to get his supper.
Kallaher stretched his short legs out in front of him and leaned back in his chair. "It was a hard day," he said gently. "As if it wasn't enough to have me breaking my back with the shovel and all, a fool drove his horse too close to the ditch, and the dumb beast fell in on top of me."
"That's likely--now, ain't it?--and you being here to tell about it!"
"Believe it or not, it happened." Kallaher folded his hands across the place where he didn't wear a belt and sighed. "But I put him out again and went on with my work without taking a rest or nothing."
Mrs. Kallaher might have tried again to express her incredulity, but just then old Mother Coogan, next-door neighbour, thrust a red excited face through the kitchen door.
"Mary Kallaher, is your man home?"
"Why shouldn't he be?"
Mrs. Coogan entered and stood, one hand clutching a newspaper, the other pointing dramatically at Kallaher. "It may be so, but he don't look it," she said.
Before they could question her she began reading from the paper: "Mike Kallaher, a ditch digger on the new Twelfth Street sewer, is a small man but a mighty. A horse, driven too near the ditch to-day, fell in. 'Begorra,' said Mike, 'can't a man work in peace?' He laid down his shovel, spat on his hands, and heaved the horse back into the street. The foreman thought he had been hurt when the horse fell in, but he wasn't, and he was not in the least bothered by having to throw him back out again. He went back to his digging."
"Let me see that paper." Kallaher rose and took it from her hand. Slowly he went over the story--which the reporter who wrote it had thought exceeding clever. "Yeh," he said finally, "that's me, all right."
Mrs. Coogan looked upon him with respect. "I never thought much of you before, Mike Kallaher, but you're the only man I know that could pick up a horse." She turned to his wife. "It's no wonder you're a meek woman, Mary, but you ought to be proud of a man like that, sure."
"Are you coming on with supper now?" asked Kallaher in a mighty voice of the speechless Mrs. Kallaher. "Be quick now, or I'll give you what's needing."
Never before had he dared make a threat as if he meant it. His wife was struck with sudden awe. She gasped and hurried silently with the setting on of supper. She trembled and dropped a dish.
"You poor clumsy dub!" roared her husband, towering to the height of five-feet-two. "Are you so weak you can't hold a pot, now?"
"Excuse me, Michael," she murmured. "Excuse me, man. I was excited."
Mrs. Coogan saw with approval that Kallaher was bullying his wife, and went down the street to tell the neighbourhood.
In Mike Kallaher's kitchen--for it had suddenly become his own, after belonging for fifteen years to his wife--a poor, meek, unhappy-looking Irishwoman was obeying orders. She jumped when he yelled at her, which he did every two minutes to see her jump, begged his pardon, brought his pipe, and looked on in silence when he deliberately knocked out the ashes on the newly scrubbed floor. A man who could throw a horse out of a ditch would stop at nothing.
As the new monarch sat in his chair looking contemptuously away from his slave, who was tentatively watching him, there was a knock at the door. Mike's chest had begun to get tired from being swelled out so far, and he let out his breath with a sigh.
A suave young man was admitted. After ascertaining that Mike Kallaher really lived in this place he asked Mike how he was feeling.
"Good," was the truculent answer.
"No injuries from your little adventure this afternoon?"
"Injured, is it? Not a bit--not a bit."
"I'm glad to hear that. I'm assistant manager of the Burke Construction Company. We heard one of our horses fell on you to-day, so I came down to help out if you were hurt. We thought we could afford to pay a few hundred dollars on doctor bills." The young man smiled pleasantly. "But since you're not hurt and are so willing to admit it, we won't have that pleasure. Good-bye." He got up and went.
Kallaher had forgotten to swell out his chest again. He sat drooping in his chair. His wife was no longer tentative.
"Horse heaver, is it?" She advanced, menacing. "Horse heaver? You poor mick! There goes your chance to be a cripple for life and die rich."
She pulled his face up by the front hair and slapped him like a mother.
"Horse heaver, is it? Take that, now!"
And Kallaher took it.
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THE EGO OF THE METROPOLIS
By Thomas T. Hoyne
"You couldn't get her picture?" sneered the city editor contemptuously. "Come, Johnson, get into the game. You're not in Chicago or St. Louis now. This is New York."
Johnson was eating his bread in the sweat of his brow, but he wanted to continue eating. Therefore he said nothing, but lounged off into the local room, empty during the dead afternoon hours.
He was lucky to be working at all. During the couple of weeks he had been wearing out shoe leather chasing pictures for the greatest of all metropolitan morning newspapers he had been told his good fortune a hundred times. He, a perfect stranger in New York, had walked right into a job.
The job should have been tempting only to the rawest cub, but Johnson, a crackerjack reporter, snapped at it. He knew that some of the best newspaper men in New York, crackerjack reporters, were carrying the banner along Park Row.
The afternoon newspapers were boiling over with editions, black type and red crying out that one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars had disappeared from a vault of the soundest bank in Wall Street and that the cashier was missing. To be assigned to this bank story, to get the chance to show what he really could do, Johnson would have given a finger from his right hand.
He sat on a corner of a typewriter desk, swinging one leg, while he raged inwardly at the insolent city editor. Bread or no bread, he could not work himself into spasms of enthusiasm over a near society woman's photograph for a cheap story. He was too old in the game for such child's play.
The noisy opening of the door between the managing editor's room and the office of the city editor roused him. He heard the managing editor's voice.
"Got any line on that bank cashier?"
"Not yet, sir," replied the city editor, "but every live man on the staff is out on the story."
Johnson flushed as if he had been insulted publicly. How would the old guard in Chicago or Cincinnati retort to such an insinuation against a man who had campaigned up and down the country and had learned the newspaper game as a soldier learns war--in action? He recalled winning out in California, notwithstanding "Native Sons." But to win against the esoteric self-sufficiency of New Yorkers demanded higher fortitude.
"Where can I find the owner of this newspaper?"
Johnson came out of his dream abruptly to answer the insignificant little man who had rambled into the local room.
"He isn't in the building just now," said he patiently.
Owners of newspapers do not receive callers casually. When cranks get through the outer doors now and again it is the duty of some employee to act as buffer.
The visitor lifted a trembling hand to his forehead, shook his head uncertainly, and began to mumble a meandering, inconsequent tale. Amid the aimless words one sentence unexpectedly shaped itself that set the reporter's nerves atingle.
Johnson glanced fearfully toward the city editor's office.
"You want to see the owner of the paper?" he asked softly, the sudden thumping of his heart sounding in his voice. "Come with me."
He grasped the visitor's arm and hurried him out of the local room into the hall, and thence into an elevator.
"This way," he coaxed, when they reached the street level. He led the man out into the crowded thoroughfare, cleverly sheering away from points of danger, as a battleship might convoy a treasure bark.
In the empty local room time dragged. The city editor busied himself in his little office, glaring at his assignment book, studying clippings from afternoon newspapers, and answering calls on his telephone. Once he was interrupted by a woman who laid two tickets for a church fair on his desk and asked to have a paragraph about the entertainment published.
"Johnson!" shouted the city editor arrogantly. His voice merely lost itself in the hollow local room. He rose from his chair irritably and peered through the door of his office, but there was no Johnson on whom to break his wrath.
As evening came on reporters and copy readers straggled in. No one brought startling news in the bank story. The cashier was still missing and there was no trace of him.
The local room burst into nervous life, emphasized by erratic volleys from pounding typewriters and hoarse yells for copy-boys. More than once as the night wore away the city editor stepped from his office to look toward the corner where Johnson usually sat. Each time a vacant chair aggravated his anger.
It was nearly eleven o'clock when the ringing telephone bell called his attention from the proof before him. He jerked the receiver from its hook.
"Johnson, eh? I wanted you half a dozen times this afternoon and evening, but now you needn't come in at all. You're through."
He jammed the receiver back with a glow of satisfaction in having good reason to discharge an incompetent.
The telephone bell rang again. This time the city editor listened.
"You've got the cashier locked up in your room!" he fairly yelled. "All right! All right!"
Shaking with excitement he wheeled from the telephone.
"Brail! Jack! Fredericks!"
He roared the names into the local room in sharp succession.
Like soldiers at a bugle call men sprang from desks where they were working or idling.
"You, Jack, get on the 'phone and take a story from Johnson! He's got the biggest beat that ever was pulled off in the city of New York."
The rewrite man settled himself at the wire.
At the other end of it Johnson, in his room at the cheap hotel where he lived, struggled to be calm in this moment of triumph. He began to dictate.
Near him, well within range of vision, sat his willing prisoner. Not once since they left the newspaper office together had the cashier been out of Johnson's sight. Helpless, hopeless, but with a conscience no longer heavily burdened, the unfortunate man listened now just as he had listened while the reporter, without betraying his source of information, craftily verified by telephone the wandering confession.
Clear and without interruption the stream of dictation poured over the wire. The story was written as a newspaper story should be written, and when it was told it ended.
"That's all," sighed Johnson proudly. "I'll hold him here till two o'clock to make the beat an absolute cinch. Then I'll 'phone the police."
In the newspaper office the rewrite man had hardly drummed out the last line of copy before the sheet of paper was snatched from his typewriter and rushed in the wake of former scudding sheets to the composing room, just in time for the first edition.
"There never was a beat like it," cried the exultant city editor. "I don't see how he landed it."
"It's a great piece of newspaper work," agreed the managing editor. "No man in the country could have done better. Who is Johnson?"
"A new man, but I've taught him the game already. He didn't wait for any assignment--just went right out and dug that cashier up." The city editor's voice cracked with enthusiasm. "That's the kind of newspaper men we turn out in little old New York."
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THE GAY DECEIVER
By Howard P. Stephenson
The only other passenger thumbed his tobacco into a melancholy pipe-bowl.
"What's your line?" he asked.
"Soap and Christmas candles," I said, and held out my cigar for his light.
"Married?"
"Yes, you?"
"Um-m-m-m." And he stretched his legs, drew up his elbows and looked worried.
"When I was making this territory about this time last year," he began, "I met a pretty, wifely little girl, and we were married before I left town. Tarascon wasn't on my regular trip then, but now I have to strike home once a month.
"You see, I was raised in a family of sisters--all older than I, all unmarried. I could never bring myself to tell them about Edyth. They don't know it yet. Live in Cranford, on the Vandalia. My wife thinks I haven't any folks."
"Well?"
He blushed. "There--it--we--I'm going to be a father." Then he did blush.
I laughed, sympathetic. "You can't bear not to let your sisters know?" I ventured.
He nodded and gulped.
"Tarascon," called the brakeman. "Tarascon."
* * * * *
I was on the hot veranda of the Croxton House, at Croxton, some two weeks later, when I felt a modest hand on my shoulder.
"Boy or girl?" were my first words, with a grin.
"Girl," announced the father with pride. "Sophronia Judith Rose. Named for my sisters."
He seated himself, fished in his pocket for his pipe, and smiled nervously.
"They knew it when I got home," he said. "I'd left Edyth's letter in my room. I believe they had been suspecting all along. Well, they never said a thing at supper, but when I went upstairs I saw a string of baby ribbon sticking out of my sample case. The girls had packed it full of things from their hope boxes. Baby things, they were.
"I tried to bluff it out, but I--I couldn't do it, and I'd told them all about it five minutes after I came downstairs.
"We all took the train for Tarascon the next day. Edyth was tickled--said she'd suspected I had sisters. She hadn't, though, of course.
"So I had to name the baby for them. Weighed eleven pounds, too.
"My, I've got to catch that 9:32 for Tarascon!"
He pulled out his watch, then turned the dial to me sheepishly. Under the crystal was a tiny slip of narrow ribbon, baby blue.
"So long," he said. "Mayn't see you again. This is my last trip. The firm's giving me a city job, where I can be with the family."
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IN COLD BLOOD
By Joseph Hall
With the door of her room locked Viola Perrin opened the letter which she had taken from her husband's office table. It was not very securely glued, and she succeeded in loosening the flap without marring the envelope.
When she had read it she dropped the thing upon her dressing table and stared with dry, unseeing eyes into the mirror. Her world had crumbled. She did not burst into tears. She was one of those women who cannot weep. The thing that had happened to her left her racked, writhing, tearless.
Suddenly the horror of the thing struck her with full force. St. John was untrue. He was intriguing with another woman even while he was being the same courteous, attentive husband to her that he had always been. She rose and clenched her hands fiercely. She caught her lower lip cruelly between her teeth. For the first time in her life she wanted to scream.
In an instant she was hot with anger and hurt pride. She rose quickly and dressed for the street. She hurried. She must get away. She had no right in this room, in this house, in the house of a man who did not love her.