Will N. Harben

“ I looked across and saw Carrie—poor Carrie!—with that blank stare of death in her eyes. She seemed to say, 'You've whipped me clean to the earth, Dix; I'm done; I'm all in; but have mercy, don't you see how awful it is?' She may have thought I was crowing over her, but I wasn't—God knows I wasn't. During the first prayer I knelt down and prayed for her and begged forgiveness for my silly caper. The poor thing has lost even her boy-lover. She's yearning for something she may never lay her hands on. ”

“ Folks say men and women fixed like we are can't love one another without doing wrong; but they can. The strong ones can, and we are strong, Alfred. Our love is sweet enough as it is. It is of heaven; let's keep it right. You might think you'd respect me if I let you hold me in your arms—here at your own house, with your wife away, but you wouldn't—down in your secret soul you'd feel that I was—was tainted."
"Forgive me, Dixie, darling," he cried. ”

“ In this life folks don't love in the highest and best way but once—not but once in a lifetime. Dick Wrinkle was your first and only abiding fancy. The feeling that made you turn me down and take him when you was a girl and I was a big blockhead of a boy was born of God in heaven. I was the one that was making a mistake when I come and begged you to marry me while that pure thing was still alive in your heart. A love like that never dies; it is too sweet and glorious to die. ”

“ I don't believe a word of it," the boy cried, his face aflame with fury. "She told me she never had a sweetheart in her life—that she hated men."
"She's had good cause," answered Henley. "A woman that don't get a speck of attention will hate anything. I reckon she's passed the line, and nobody will marry her."
"She's going to marry me," the boy blurted out, leaning over and striking the desk with his fist, as if to emphasize his words, "and when she's my wife I'll call and make you settle for what you've said. ”

“ Her work finished, the girl turned and saw him. She flushed a shade deeper than was due to her exercise, and with the axe in hand she came to him. Her large hazel eyes held a mystic charm behind the long lashes which seemed actually to melt into the soft pinkness of her skin.
"Good-morning, Alfred," she greeted him, her lips curling in a smile. "I know this ain't where you sell goods, but I thought it might save me a trip to town to ask you if you keep axes at your store. This old plug of a thing is about as sharp as a sledgehammer." ”

“ The time was ripe for work in the highways and byways—the sowing of seed in out-of-the-way places, and the preacher was to "take the road" with one or two good singers, a cornet-player, and a cottage-organ, and give people in isolated mountain-nooks a chance to hear the Word and profit thereby for their eternal weal.
He had just seated himself and was mopping his perspiring brow when Henley rose and stood hemming and hawing and clearing his throat. ”

“ Money is power, Alfred; it will have its way in this world. A man might sorter fancy he couldn't get along with a woman on his own level, but let her rise high above him, and he won't be exactly in the same boat. He'll naturally think more about her, and, in thinking more about her, and trying harder to please her, his old love will be revived—that is, if it ever died. Who could tell? I couldn't."
"Look here, Dixie, listen to me!" Henley's voice shook with subdued passion. ”

“ I'm talking plain, Dixie, but me and you are good, true friends, and I want you, anyway, to understand my fix. I used to watch her taking walks all by herself in the woods, always in her thick, black veil, and bowed over like, as if she was under a heavy load. I reckon no woman the Lord ever constructed is quite as attractive to the eye uncovered as she is partly hid, for we are always hunting for perfection, and so nothing under the sun seemed to me to be so good and pure and desirable as Hettie did. I even gloried in the attention she paid his mammy and daddy. ”

“ I want you to be like the rest of the girls. What do we care about owning this farm. Her daddy can't buy a knitting-needle on time, and yet they live as well as anybody else, and she thinks she is a grade higher than the rest of us."
"Don't you let it bother you, Muttie," Dixie said, tenderly; indeed, she was always moved by a demonstration of her mother's love, and her eyes were moist as she put a caressing hand on the gray locks of the little woman. "We are going to see it through. When the farm is plumb paid for we'll make Carrie so sick with our fine doings she'll wish she was dead." ”

“ Alfred, it was you asking to come over on the—the first—the very first night after your wife left. A girl will do a lot of headstrong things when her pity and admiration are worked up for a man she loves, but now and then, if she's sensible, some powerful small thing will make her think. Alfred, I saw the brink we was standing on, as plain as if we was on a high cliff and there was nothing between us and the bottom, and all sorts of forces was blinding us and pulling and shoving us over. ”

“ Alfred Henley, I've told you a lie—a cold, deliberate lie. Can you respect anybody that will tell a lie?"
"Well, I wouldn't have much respect for myself then," he said, his eyes large in wonder over what she was driving at. "I've lied as many times as an average clock can tick in a lifetime. I've told a dozen lies to sell a pair of shoes, and forty to sell a hoss." ”

“ Every night, as I say my prayers and call on God to help you, I wonder what He meant by the bonds with which He's tied me to you hand and foot, heart and soul. When you was trying to find me a husband, and fighting for my legal rights, you thought it was just friendship, and so did I. The world we live in counts it one of the blackest of sins for a married man and an unmarried girl to love each other, but you know we didn't do wrong intentionally. ”

“ The long rows of succulent plants, as high as the girl's knees, seemed breathing, conscious things to which she was giving relief as she smoothly cut away the tenaciously encroaching weeds and deep-rooted grass, the heaviest bunches of which she took up and threshed against the hoe-handle and left in the sun to die lest they be revived by some shower which would beat their roots into the mellow soil again. ”

“ I'm agent for the Adamantyne Tombstone Company, of Tennessee. We own the only quarry of snow-white, non-grit, pristyne Parian rock on this side of the blue ocean, and we have in our employ the best and most world-renowned chisel-artists that ever breathed the spark of life into inanimate matter. Now, just set where you are, gentlemen—don't move—and I'll show you a beauty—a tombstone that will make a man want to die—if he's able to pay the price."
He held his book of illustrations open before Henley, whose eyes were twinkling mischievously as they rested on his clerk. ”

“ What I want to know is why you'd rather hoe cotton in weather like this than go with me to a jolly picnic. Why, Dixie, you don't begin to know your power; you could do as you like in this world, if you only would. You are the best-looking girl in the county, and you grow prettier every day. The blood of life is in your veins; you haven't got the sickly, palish look that the girls have who stay indoors half the time. You've got a clear eye, a good figure, and a complexion that society women would give big money for. ”

“ Love like I have for Joe shows what the other love ought to be like, and until I yearn to help a man out of his troubles and cling to him and want him by me every minute—until then I'll not sell myself. You can't marry for pay and be honest, for you know you can't give value for value. You'd have to act a part, and that would be a living lie that would pall on you, and sicken your very soul."
"So you're not going to see Long any more?" Henley said, carried out of himself by her winsome logic. ”

“ Lord, Lord, I set here sometimes when there ain't anybody about except a drunk Injun or cowboy and git so blue and lonely that it leaks out of me like sweat and drops on the floor. I reckon it is kinder natural for a feller to want what he's been brought up on, especially if he has, by his own act, cut it out and signed his death-warrant. Oh, that was a fool thing, Hank—a blasted fool thing! It seems to me that I dream o' them damn mountains and blue skies every night hand-running—and the good, old-fashioned grub we used to have! ”

“ As he slowly spat the blood from his gashed lips, he solemnly vowed that he would have the man's life who had dared to interfere with him. To the end of his existence he would see himself sprawling at the feet of the woman whom he had so long and persistently sought—as long as he lived he would see the righteous glare in his antagonist's eyes, the look of grateful relief which lighted the face of the rescued. ”

“ Welborne is getting to be like that old man in the fairy-book that stuck to the feller's neck and never could be shook off till he was made drunk. Welborne never touches a drop, you know, and so he'll stick till death claims him. I'm in an awful mess. I work like a slave from break of day till away after dark, and never seem to move a peg toward any sort of landing-place."
"You really ought to marry," Henley said. "That's exactly what you ought to do. There's many a good man in the world that is actually suffering for the need of the right sort of a helpmeet." ”

“ Love—the right sort, Alfred—is the sweetest, holiest thing in all the world. It is the first breath of real heaven that men and women feel here on earth. When two people love each other—like we—like they ought to love one another, they both know it as plain as we know that sky full of stars is over us right now. ”

“ Then the coarser voice drowned the finer and fainter, and Henley recognized it as belonging to Bradley.
"I've been put off and fooled and deviled by you as long as I'm going to be!" the brute cried out. "You are a beautiful young devil, that's what you are. I've offered you every inducement a man could offer. If I'm drunk, you are the cause of it. I can't think of nothing but you—you, with your maddening eyes of fire and cheeks full of hot blood. ”

“ Henley remarked, insincerely. "If you can't hold in and take things as they come you'd better call the deal off. I started you; I can't lay down everything and keep—keep telling you what to do and say. Life's too short and makes too many claims on a fellow."
"I want you to say a good word for me, Alf." Long wiped his anxious mouth with his bare hand and tugged at his mustache. "She believes the sun rises and sets in you. Looks to me like it's Alfred did this, an' Alfred said that, an' Alfred thinks so and so and does so and so, with every breath she draws. ”

“ The fool, the fool—the silly fool! You mustn't mind, Alfred. You really mustn't."
"Mind?" he muttered. "My God!"
"Oh, I know!" she went on, still soothingly. "It is awful looked at from your standpoint, but that ain't the thing. We must consider the intentions of folks before we take offence. Why, Alfred, that old busybody hasn't yet got it through his head that any living man could object to a joke like that. Nothing under high heaven was ever sacred to him; you must have noticed that in the time you have known him. He'd make a jest out of the death of his closest kin. ”

“ There was something that bespoke prodigious vanity and lack of principle in the low brow, over which the coarse, black hair was plastered down so smoothly; in the heavy, carefully waxed, curled, and perhaps dyed mustache; in the small, conscious eyes, set close together; in the grossly sensuous mouth, from which a weak chin receded.
"He ain't as purty as he thinks he is by a long shot," Dixie remarked, rather lamely, for she was slightly chilled by Henley's failure to comment favorably on the picture, "but he has a good heart. ”

“ Henley answered in pained retaliation, "and to show you that I had no ill-will in any shape or form. You loved Dick in the right sort of way, and I'm just man enough to lay no obstacle whatever in your track. In the next life you and Dick will be reunited, and all things will be made straight. I don't want to fuss with you over it, Hettie. This life is too beautiful, if it is looked at right, to waste time in jowering. ”

“ For a moment Henley's eyes rested on the group, and he sighed deeply. "Yes, she's my wife," he said. "I owe her every duty, and, before God, I'll stick to my vows and do what's right by her, come what may! She was the only woman I thought I wanted, or ever could want. They say every cloud has a silvery lining, but my cloud was made out of lead—and not rubbed bright at that. I reckon, if the truth must be told, that the whole mistake was of my own making. Whatever the Creator does for good or ill, He don't seem to bother about hitching folks together ”

“ Pa was on the lookout for a hoss to do field-work, and he let everybody know he had the money, and a good many came his way. He wasn't any judge of hoss-flesh, and a gypsy, passing along, stuck him—burned the old chap clean to the bone. It was a flea-bitten hoss that was as round and slick as a ball of butter, and as active under the gypsy's lash and spur as a frisky young colt. The gypsy said he had paid two hundred for him, but, as he was anxious to get to his sick wife in Atlanta, he would make it a hundred and fifty and be thankful that he'd made one man happy. The old man was his meat. ”

“ The whole thing has gone out o' folks' minds by this time, I reckon; but Carrie never laid it aside. It rankled and still rankles. She gloats over my hardships and makes a point of flaunting her good luck in my face, and is eternally telling me of her chances to get married. She's half crazy on the subject, and thinks every one else is like her. I know one thing, Alfred Henley, when I do slip off the coil of single blessedness she'll be madder than a wet hen without shelter on a cold December day. And she won't have long to wait neither—there! ”