Sarah Pratt Carr

“ Behind them stood Bess Carter bursting with indignation. “You boys haven’t the spunk of a flea!” she taunted, and before they could reply she was standing on the bench gazing fearlessly but silently around on the mob. Her advent, so sudden and unheralded, touched the most quieting element of a crowd, its curiosity.
Tall, erect, her dark eyes flashing in the light of the torches, her beauty enhanced by her air of refinement and womanliness,—her power was felt by every little hoodlum there as keenly as by the older people.
“Gee! The Queen of Sheba’ll do the trick!” Billy ejaculated softly. ”

“ He writhed inwardly at the conclusions forced upon him.
“Remember, Billy, every girl is like an apple slowly ripening toward womanhood.”
The room was very still, and they stood together, Billy’s arm close about her waist, looking out upon the distant shimmering lake. At length she lifted her head suddenly and spoke with a singular passion.
“My boy, the love relation between a man and a woman is the holiest one on earth. It may begin in passion, but if true, it ends in a constant devotion that opens the door of heaven. ”

“ The yellow rose of sunrise touched Cascades and Olympics alike with a splendor he had not before recognized, and lighted the vast reaches between ranges with a clear thin radiance not seen in southern lands.
Billy’s heart ached with this new fulness of life. Visions undreamed before opened his eyes to his own manhood; and the impulse came to put this experience into rhythm,—the impulse that touches every normal young creature. Some may not have the wit to fix it on paper, but all sing the song. ”

“ He was beginning to note social differences; to realize that daughters of very rich men are reared to a luxurious scale of life; that they cannot understand poverty, or even simple comfort. He was seeing that no matter how willing they may think themselves to endure poverty with the loved man, they are totally unfit; and their failure is not their blame.
Something of this made him awkward and silent, while the four girls together with Reginald Steele, Redtop, and Sis Jones, chattered and laughed and joked, till Billy began to wish he had not come. ”

“ The dullest one there knew that this was a crisis, knew that the smouldering rebellion against Jim Barney’s tyranny had at last broken into open war.
None understood the situation better than Billy. “Fellows, think before you follow Jim Barney. His game is as cultus as his name; and this hour starts the open fight between rowdyism and decency. All that want to line up for things we shall not be ashamed of, stay!” ”

“ Just imagination.”
“Just imagination makes the whole world, Billy.”
“That’s what we think when we’re children, but I guess when we get out with the cold facts we’ll find imagination doesn’t fill the dinner pail.”
“Billy, imagination makes everything! It builds the world. Why, when God himself looked into the void didn’t He have to imagine a world before He could speak the fiery word that created it?” ”

“ He took her hand again in the closer clasp, and she saw a new look in his face, the look his mother saw when they discussed together the deep things of life. “Erminie, I have been trying to see your life as you see it. You know my mother is—she talks things over with me—the things a chap needs to know before he starts out for himself; and I have come to see pretty deep into—into the sort of thing that’s between us, engagements and that; what it means to one’s whole life, what it means to the race.”
“Why, Billy! Billy! Does your mother talk to you of such things?” ”

“ Billy was utterly perplexed. What could she mean?
Slowly, his feet weighing tons, he plodded home, and entered to find the telephone ringing.
He hurried to take down the receiver that the household might not be disturbed. “Who is it?”
“Erminie,” came back over the wire. “Oh, Billy, I’m so glad to get you!”
“Yes?” Billy could not keep the coldness out of his voice. He was hearing again the tender eagerness in her tone as the Kid bent over her twenty minutes before.
“Oh, I don’t wonder you speak in that Alaska voice, Billy; but you don’t know everything. ”

“ But when the man slow to fight does become enraged, especially if it is in the just cause of others, he is twice an adversary; the blood of the beast joins with the spirit of man. Right then makes might.
Billy was younger, slenderer, less skilled; for the Kid valued his “good right arm” as his chief glory in life. But right arm and skill, any force that mere physical exercise had developed, met its Waterloo in such a tide of outraged spirit as enables a little woman with a carving fork, to put to flight desperadoes, or such as now nerved Billy’s arms. ”

“ A motherless boy wholly orphaned by the great fire in San Francisco, he had lived, tramp-like, as a newsboy, till adventuring into the newer opportunities of the City of Green Hills. He had been Billy’s fellow-traveller on the steamer that brought them both from California; and his efforts to make good at each turn of his fortune’s wheel enlisted every one in his favor. ”

“ I’ll have to die when I don’t believe in it.”
“Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true, Billy Boy!” She had not called him so since the days in Vina when she was a waif and the Bennett home her refuge. The affectionate child-name touched him, bridged the distance between them.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he hesitated, “imagination may be a divine privilege; but for mere man,—too much dreaming makes him discontented. I think when one must earn one’s bread and butter the straight fact is better.” ”

“ Billy, men of the twenty-first century will run nearly everything in the world that calls for power by the force of the tide. They’ll turn it into acres of light, and heat, and force their garden truck with it. They’ll cook with it, grind with it, carry it up mountains and down into mines; drive with it, fly with it, and laugh at us for troglodytes.”
Both laughed softly, and Mr. Smith presently rose. “I guess I’ll go down to the grade and kill time there. May Nell might come again; she doesn’t have as much respect for business as you do, Billy.” ”

“ Opportunity will pass your way many times. Catch her every time—hold her. By Heaven! With your face and body, your clean mind and good brain, you can do anything,—be a young god. Billy, a fellow at the open door of life doesn’t suspect his power, doesn’t use a fraction of it. ”

“ He went to the foreman for his tools, and set to work.
The hard work, the long hours, and Billy’s youth unaccustomed to labor left him at night little more than a log to roll into bed, sleep heavily, and go dully off in the morning to another day of digging. It was no wonder that the strange situation of being engaged to marry a young woman and already entered upon his life obligation of providing her home, and yet not knowing where she was, did not weigh upon him as much as he had thought it would. ”

“ Billy went on. “At least we don’t pay for them, nor hire the teachers. But they are responsible to those who do hire them for the good name of the schools. If students are lazy or lawless the teachers are called to account.”
“Well, what’s the matter with us? Aren’t we all right?” Jim loomed formidably in front of Billy.
“No! We’re not all right, Jim Barney. If you and your crowd, and the sort of manners toward women and girls you stand for,—if that’s to be the standard for this school, I’m ashamed of it, and ashamed of any principal that will stand for it,—when he knows it.” ”

“ Billy started off in fine spirits with a basket his mother had prepared, and a proud feeling that he would not be ashamed to open it in the presence of any girl. He had begged Erminie to let him bring the luncheon for the two of them; and when he met her as agreed at the trolley line transfer point, care-free, erect and strong, his eyes shining with anticipation, it was little wonder that he saw an answering look of pleasure and pride in her eyes. He was a young man any girl might feel it a privilege to know ”

“ He looked angrily around and was about to speak, when Billy, with a power new to his mates and startling to the bully, launched a threat that electrified them all. “Kid Barney, your man for president is a rowdy, and you know it. We are going to expose him and defeat him.”
“Not on your life, you won’t!” Barney hurled back with a wicked gesture; and his followers broke out noisily.
But Billy’s voice rose above the din, the more impressive for dominating it. “We’re going to have a man in this new office that represents the whole school,—a man that’s honest and capable, and a gentleman besides.” ”

“ Billy gasped. “Gee!” For a minute he could say no more, and they stood looking at each other till a passer jostled them into moving on.
“But you don’t have to! Girls aren’t like—they aren’t property any more.”
“No; but some fathers think they are.”
“Does your father?”
“Dad wouldn’t put it that way; but you see, Billy, this man who—who wants to marry me—is awfully strong with the city ring, and in some way he has dad cinched. Dad thinks he could make it square by getting him into the family.” ”

“ Billy winced. “I should think that—that—well, when boys and girls are old enough to care for each other that would mean they were old enough to marry.”
“In the dawn of the race when men were no wiser than the plants, when they lived naturally, it did mean that. But as the race unfolds and we make artificial conditions, man sees more fully perhaps the meaning of God’s command to him to have dominion over every thing on the earth. Man’s growing wisdom is in charge over Nature to mould her material forms to higher, ever higher perfection.” ”

“ Billy thought hard. Wild notions of succoring this girl, of taking her to his own home, of leaving school and going to work that he might support her, of doing something, anything worthy of a man on whom womanhood calls for help. A dozen equally impossible plans surged through his excited brain; but he could not think of anything definite, practical enough.
“Don’t look so hurt—so angry, Billy. Something will turn up. You’ve told me what I wanted to be sure about, the sort of man Alvin Short is, and—”
“Perhaps some of it isn’t true. I’ll find out exactly.” ”

“ What you need now is school, and the university; a year or two of running about the country to see what sort of a nation you belong to; and then you’ll be fit to settle in some business where you’ll have men digging for you. That’s what I want you to do, Billy.”
The boy could not speak. This was what he had looked forward to, had planned to do, even if he had to earn his way and take years in doing it. But Erminie’s coming into his life had changed everything. Such dreams must be abandoned for a different and harder future. ”

“ He dropped the receiver. It was true. He was the cause of their trouble; he had gotten Erminie left at the picnic; he had angered Jim Barney, whose threats, Billy believed, had frightened Erminie into running away. And Billy could not say a word in her defence. She had to bear the cruel slur alone. How shameful that an innocent accident should be the scourge of a girl, perhaps for the whole of her life! ”

“ Smith’s fifteen-million dollar dream as is heaven from a very dirty earth.
Something of this Billy ventured to express.
“The only heaven we have is right here. If it isn’t clean, it’s up to us to make it so. And one thing sure: it will never be any bigger or any cleaner than we imagine it to be.”
The boy thought of May Nell. This was off the same pattern of life as hers. As if in answer to his thought, Mr. Smith went on.
“Business is merely realized dreams; preferred stock in imagination. But it takes sweat to realize on them. ”

“ Billy had never seen him in this mood before.
“They think I want to get the land round here for nothing. Boy, when a real man wants to make money, he takes something out of Nature that’s worthless, or worth little—or perhaps it’s man’s waste—and makes that thing, after a dose of brains and a civilized dress, worth good money. But a lazy man jumps a lot of land and sits down to listen to his neighbors holler for it. In your time, my son, the people will have their eyes open, and there’ll be no land going that way. ”