Francis Lynde

“ She smiled gravely. "You are such a boy, Tom. Don't you know that all through life you'll have two kinds of friends: those who will stand by you because they won't believe anything bad about you, and those who will take you for just what you are and still stand by you?"
He scowled thoughtfully at her. "Say, Ardea; I'd just like to know how old you are, anyhow! You say things every once in a while that make me feel as if I were a little kid in knee-breeches." ”

“ It was the one fortuitous touch needed to open that inner chamber of her heart, closed, hitherto, even to her own consciousness. And when the door was opened she looked within and saw what no woman sees but once in her life, and having once seen, will die unwed in very truth if any man but one call her wife.
Once more the drumming wheels began the overture; the lighted bay-window of the station slipped backward into the night, and the bloodshot eye of another switch-lamp peered in at the window and was gone; but Gertrude neither saw nor heard. ”

“ The electric search-light eye on the hurricane-deck was just over her head, and its great white cone seemed to hiss as it poured its dazzling flood of fictitious noonday upon the shelving river bank and the sleeping hamlet beyond. The furnace doors were open, and the red glare of the fires quickened the darkness under the beam of the electric into lurid life. Out of the dusky underglow came the freight-carriers, giving birth to a file of grotesque shadow monsters as they swung up the plank into the field of the search-light. ”

“ And with the terrifying flood, as if borne on its crest, came a dank wind that sucked up into the small side gulch as it passed, chilling the three who were bracing themselves to hold the burros—and their own footing—like the breath from an ice cavern.
Like a good many of nature’s cataclysms, a cloud-burst flood does not last forever. While they were still shivering from the effect of the passing blast, the deafening roar withdrew into the down-canyon distances, and in a few minutes the waters began to subside. ”

“ Morning in the highest highlands of the Rockies, a morning clear, cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot. For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue depths of the canyon shadow. ”

“ Instinctively Ballard put his arm about Elsa and drew her back from the cliff's edge. There could be no chance of danger for the group looking on from the top of the high mesa; yet the commanding roar of the menace was irresistible.
When the wave entered the wedge-shaped upper end of the Elbow it was a foam-crested wall ten feet high, advancing with the black-arched front of a tidal billow, mighty, terrifying, the cold breath of it blowing like a chill wind from the underworld upon the group of watchers. ”

“ Reaching the approach to Brady’s Cut, a huge gash torn through the side of one of the rounded basin hills, David turned to his left and climbed steadily until he attained the sparse growth of trees crowning the hill at the edge of the great cutting. Below him the ordered pandemonium of industry was in full stride. Under the light of masthead arcs, two mammoth steam-shovels rattled and clanked, the sharp staccato of their exhaust pipes echoing from the surrounding heights like the cachinnations of some invisible and mocking giant of the immensities. ”

“ The Andromeda was at anchor a short distance from one of the many cays with which the southern Caribbean is dotted; a long, low-lying island plumed with palms and densely jungled with tropical undergrowth. The yacht lay within a stone's throw of an outer reef, and the reef enclosed a broad lagoon reflecting the shadows of the palms like a silver mirror under the shimmering moonlight; and the shadowy background of foliage was made blacker by contrast with a ribbon of white sand beach. ”

“ Being very much in love with Isabel, Antrim was quite willing to turn his back upon the scenery for the sake of looking at her. And as between a winsome young woman swinging in a hammock—a young woman with laughing brown eyes and a profusion of glory-tinted hair framing a face to which piquancy and youthful beauty lent equal charms—who but a scenery-mad pilgrim of the excursion trains would think of making a comparison? ”

“ Kent's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted, passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same heart-beat. ”

“ It seemed a hair-graying age to the watchers at the Nadia's windows before the men behind the commissary barricade got their infernal machine placed to their liking. They stared at it, all three of them, fascinated, deaf and blind to all else. A minimized shudder as of drumming wheels or escaping steam was in the air when they saw the flare of the match that betokened the firing of the fuse, but no one of the three heard it. ”

“ It was suddenly brought home to the enthusiast with sharp emphasis that to all civilized mankind, save and excepting those few chosen ones who shared his peculiar convictions, he was a common thief, a bandit, an outlaw. Public opinion, potential or expressed, is at best but an intangible thing. But for a few tumultuous seconds Griswold writhed under the ban of it as if it had been a whip of scorpions. Then he smiled to think how strong the bonds of custom had grown; and at the smile conscience flung away its empty quiver. ”

“ With the shades of night creeping ghost-like through the solemn forest they hit the invisible trail again; heading westward and ever westward, rolling down steep hillsides into deep gulches, and crawling painfully up the corresponding steep on the other side, stumbling blindly over fallen trees and rocks; going on and on after their feet and legs were so numb and stiff that they could hardly be sure they had any, and with their eyes, for which they had small use in the darkness, leaden heavy with sleep. ”

“ The trail was blind and the snow was fetlock deep for the animals. The led horse was stubborn and hung back; and wherever a widening of the trail permitted, the jacks strayed and scattered. Philip’s temper grew short, and by the time he had reached the high, wind-blown, boulder-strewn notch which served as the pass over the spur range, he was cursing the scattering burros fluently and fingering the butt of the big revolver in an itching desire to bullet all three of them. ”

“ Nearer at hand were the wooded slopes of the Dabney lands—lordly forests culled and cared for through three generations of land-lovers until now their groves of oaks and hickories, tulip-trees and sweet-and black-gums were like those the pioneers looked on when the land was young.
Thomas Jefferson had the appreciative eye and heart of one born with a deep and abiding love of the beautiful in nature, and for a time the sunset ravishment possessed him utterly. ”

“ In the harkening instant there was a faint twang like the thrumming of a distant harp string, and then the grave-like silence was rent smartly by the whistling hiss of an arrow, the shaft passing evenly between us and scattering the handful of fire where it struck.
Jennifer came alive with a start, leaping up with a malediction between his teeth upon our dallying.
"Too late, by God!" he cried. "They've trapped us like a pair of blind moles!" ”

“ Gridley was a large man, virile of face and figure, and he marched in the ranks of the full-fed and the self-indulgent. Hallock was big-boned and cadaverous of face, but otherwise a fair physical match for the master-mechanic; a dark man with gloomy eyes and a permanent frown. Jovial good-nature went with the master-mechanic's gray eyes twinkling easily to a genial smile, but it stopped rather abruptly at the straight-lined, sensual mouth, and found a second negation in the brutal jaw which was only thinly masked by the neatly trimmed beard. ”

“ Was it a softening memory of the loving-kindnesses of one James Garvin to a man soul-sick and body-wasted, snatched as a charred brand out of a fire of his own kindling? Or was it the stirring of a ruthless devil of self; a devil never more than dormant in any heart insurgent; a fell demon of the pit whose arousing waits only upon opportunity, whose power is to transform pity into remorseless ingratitude and ruth into relentless greed? ”

“ But from the plateau where they were standing, the vista expands as if by magic. The mighty mountain at whose foot the train pauses becomes but a foothill, and just beyond it, in indescribable grandeur and majesty, rises the huge, snow-clad bulk of Gray's Peak, stupendous, awe-inspiring, dazzling the eye with its unspotted mantle of shimmering white, and slaying the sense of proportion with its immeasurable vastness.
Gertrude caught her breath, and Brockway stood uncovered beside her, silent and watchful. ”

“ Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to go and come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the most public place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hat pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step of the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at the slightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in the cool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathing too bitter to be set in words. ”

“ Having gone so far astray on the Sunday, it was inevitable that Brant should awake repentant and remorseful on the Monday. He slept late, and when he had breakfasted like a monk and had gone downtown to face another day of enforced idleness in his office, conscience rose up and began to ply its many-thonged whip.
What a thrice-accursed fool he had made of himself, and how completely he had justified Mrs. Langford’s opinion of him! How infinitely unworthy the love of any good woman he was, and how painstakingly he had put his future beyond the hope of redemption! ”

“ There may have been more beautiful things in a world of beauty than she was, standing there in the softened light of the shaded awning electrics, white-clad in yachting flannels and with a round little white hat devoid of trimmings of any sort crushed down over her masses of red-gold hair—there might have been, I say, but I doubted it. ”

“ A stroke of Champe’s sword severed the painter, and with the fresh sea air to wash the vile fumes of the cellar from our lungs, we set our shoulders to the bows, running with the light boat to give it momentum, and flinging ourselves in on either side at the water-taking plunge. ”

“ Griswold had been hardening himself deliberately to look unmoved upon what the shaded electric night-light in the farther room should reveal: it was nothing more terrible than the sight of a drawn face, half-hidden in the pillows; a face in which life and death still fought for the mastery as they had fought on that other day when life, unhelped, would have been the loser. ”

“ The cool gray eyes of the father were Gertrude's inheritance, also; but in the eyes of the daughter the calculating stare became the steady gaze of clean-hearted guilelessness; and in her even-tinted complexion there was only a suggestion of the sallow olive of the father's clean-shaven face. For face and figure, Gertrude owed much to birth and breeding, and it was small wonder that Frederick Brockway had lost his heart to her in time-honored and romantic fashion. ”

“ A confused clamor of shots, yells, curses and bludgeon blows rose upon the midnight air, and, hasten as I might and did, the battle was as good as fought and won before I could clamber over the long-boat and dart up the ladder and hurl myself into it.
Upon reaching the deck I saw that I might have spared myself a large share of the anxieties if I had had a little more confidence in Van Dyck's gift of leadership. Like a good general he had been merely waiting for the propitious moment. ”

“ But the inner Ardea was a being apart—high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by passion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived. ”

“ The little French office clock—Bromley's testimonial from his enthusiastic and admiring classmates of the École Polytechnique—had chimed the hour of ten; the August moon rose high in a firmament of infinite depths above the deserted bunk shanties and the silent machinery on the camp mesa; the big touring car, long since cooled from its racing climb over the hills of the roundabout road, cast a grotesque and fore-shortened shadow like that of a dwarfed band-wagon on the stone-chip whiteness of the cutting yard; and still the members of the auto party lingered on the porch of the adobe bungalow. ”

“ I here confess to you, my dears, that, had I loved my sweet lady less, no earthly power could have driven me into that dismal stifling place. All my life long I have had a most unspeakable horror of low-roofed caverns and squeezing passages that cramp a man for breath and for the room to draw it in; and when the suffocating madness came upon me, as it did when we were well jammed in this cursed horror-hole, I was right glad to have my love for Margery to make an outward-seeming man of me; glad, too, that my dear lad was close behind to shame me into going on. ”

“ It was raining dismally the evening of the following day when Ford saw from his Pullman window the dull sky-glow of the metropolis of the Middle West. It had been a dispiriting day throughout. When a man has flung himself at his best into a long battle which ends finally in unqualified loss, the heavens are as brass, and the future is apt to reflect only the pale light of the past failure. ”

“ In his westward sweep over the Titanic playground of farther Colorado, the sun looks down into a narrow valley through which tumbles a brawling stream whose waters, snow-born within rifle-shot, go to swell the canyoned flood of the Gunnison River. Fir-clad mountains, sombre green to timber-line and fallow dun or dazzling white above it, according to the season, stand like a cordon of mighty sentinels around and about; and the foot of civilized man treading the sward of the park-like valley must first have measured many weary miles of the mountain wilderness. ”

“ Like a stone from a catapult Brant was upon them, smashing the globe of the bracket light in passing, and while one might draw a quick breath three pairs of hands clutched fiercely in the darkness for the weapon on the table. In the midst of the struggle—if that which has no duration in time can be said to have a middle part—came the crash of a pistol shot. ”

“ The August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley hemmed in by the broken ranges. ”

“ Silas Plegg POWDER GAP, a hill-studded basin where the Powder River, leaping down from the high watershed of the upper range, gathers itself for the swift rush to its emptying into the Timanyoni forty miles away, lies like a half-closed hand in a gorge of the Hophras, with the upturned fingers and thumb postulating the surrounding majesties of mountain peaks, and the forested hills and ridges figuring as the callouses in the palm. ”

“ With a savage upper-cut that caught the watchman on the point of the jaw and sent him crashing among the picks and shovels of the mine-mouth tool-room, Judson darted out into the moonlight. But as yet the fierce race was only fairly begun. Without stopping to look for a path, the ex-engineer flung himself at the steep hill-side, running, falling, clambering on hands and knees, bursting by main strength through the tangled thickets of young pines, and hurling himself blindly over loose-lying bowlders and the trunks of fallen trees. ”

“ The spring evening was raw and chilly, and the open doors of the saloon volleyed light and warmth and a beckoning invitation. Griswold's gift, prostituted to the service of the changed point of view, bade him read in the red face, the loose lip, and the bibulous eyes the temptation that was gripping the plain-clothes man. "Wait," whispered the colorless inner voice; "wait, and be ready when he goes in to get the drink he has promised himself he will never again be weak enough to take while he is on duty. ”

“ Could Margery be brought to view it calmly, this was a sword to cut the knot of all entanglements.
As matters stood, the world would call her widow at my death; and since a woman is first of all the keeper of her own good name, she would never dare aver the truth. So in common justice she should own the name the world would call her by. Again, as matters stood, no wrong could come of it to her, or Richard Jennifer, or any. Dick would love her none the less because a dying man had given her his name for some few hours. ”

“ Twice a day, in the time whereof these things are written, the platform of the Denver Union Depot gave the incoming migrant his first true glimpse of the untrammelled West. A broad sea of planking, open to the heavens—and likewise to the world at large—was the morning and evening arena of a moving spectacle the like of which is not to be witnessed in any well-ordered railway station of the self-contained East. ”

“ Tom stood up, beating the air softly with the hunting-crop.
"The man has spoiled your life, Nan; and, incidentally, he has muddied the spring for me—robbed me of the love and respect of the one woman in the world," he said, quite without heat. "If I find him, I think I shall blot him out—like that." A bumblebee was bobbing and swaying on a head of red clover, and the sudden swish of the hunting-crop left it a little disorganized mass of black and yellow down and broken wing-filaments. ”

“ In the heart of the valley the heights are heavily wooded, and the sombre greens wall out the world to the sky-line; but farther on bald slopes and ridges stretch away above the pines and firs, and the blue arch of the firmament springs clear from snow-capped abutments of fallow dun and weathered gray.
In the upper levels of the valley the disused trail leaves the stream and begins to climb by loops and zigzags to the pass. ”

“ He did his best, flying down the long tunnel reaches with little regard for the precarious footing, tripping over the cross-ties of the miniature tramway and colliding with the walls, now and then, between the widely separated electric bulbs. Far below, in the deeper levels, he could hear the drumming chatter of the power-drills and the purring of the compressed air, but the upper gangway was deserted, and it was not until he was stumbling through the timbered portal that a watchman rose up out of the shadows to confront and halt him. ”

“ But I laid fast hold of him and would not hear to any such a foolhardy marring of Ephraim Yeates's plan.
"Heavens, boy! are you gone clean mad?" I would say. "'Twill be risky enough with midnight in our favor; with the camp well asleep, and that great fire burned down to give us something less than broad daylight to work in!"
He turned upon me like a pettish child. "Oh, to the devil with your stumbling-blocks, John Ireton! You are always for holding back. By heaven! I'll swear you have no drop of lover's blood in your veins!" ”

“ And as for the apparent determination to die open-eyed and militant behind the barricade, the unromantic truth again steps in to give the coup de grace to the disappointed unities. There is a limit to human endurance, and the hardiest soldier may find it on a field as yet no more than half won. Fastings and fierce hurryings, wounds, physical and spiritual, and ruthless determination may ride roughshod over Nature's turnpike; but Nature will demand her toll. For this cause Jeffard saw no more than the first flight of moon-arrows glancing from the face of the western cliff. ”