The World For Sale: Chapter 13

Chapter 13

THE CHAIN OF THE PAST

For once in its career, Lebanon was absolutely united. The blow that had
brought down the Master Man had also struck the town between the eyes,
and there was no one--friend or foe of Ingolby--who did not regard it as
an insult and a challenge. It was now known that the roughs of Manitou,
led by the big river-driver, were about to start on a raid upon Lebanon
and upon Ingolby at the very moment the horseshoe did its work. All night
there were groups of men waiting outside Ingolby's house. They were of
all classes-carters, railway workers, bartenders, lawyers, engineers,
bankers, accountants, merchants, ranchmen, carpenters, insurance agents,
manufacturers, millers, horse-dealers, and so on.

Some prayed for Ingolby's life, others swore viciously; and those who
swore had no contempt for those who prayed, while those who prayed were
tolerant of those who swore. It was a union of incongruous elements. Men
who had nothing in common were one in the spirit of faction; and all were
determined that the Orangeman, whose funeral was fixed for this memorable
Saturday, should be carried safely to his grave. Civic pride had almost
become civic fanaticism in Lebanon. One of the men beaten by Ingolby in
the recent struggle for control of the railways said to the others
shivering in the grey dawn: "They were bound to get him in the back.
They're dagos, the lot of 'em. Skunks are skunks, even when you skin
'em."

When, just before dawn, old Gabriel Druse issued from the house into
which he had carried Ingolby the night before, they questioned him
eagerly. He had been a figure apart from both Lebanon and Manitou, and
they did not regard him as a dago, particularly as it was more than
whispered that Ingolby "had a lien" on his daughter. In the grey light,
with his long grizzled beard and iron-grey, shaggy hair, Druse looked
like a mystic figure of the days when the gods moved among men like
mortals. His great height, vast proportions, and silent ways gave him a
place apart, and added to the superstitious feeling by which he was
surrounded.

"How is he?" they asked whisperingly, as they crowded round him.

"The danger is over," was the slow, heavy reply. "He will live, but he has
bad days to face."

"What was the danger?" they asked. "Fever--maybe brain fever," he
replied. "We'll see him through," someone said.

"Well, he cannot see himself through," rejoined the old man solemnly. The
enigmatical words made them feel there was something behind.

"Why can't he see himself through?" asked Osterhaut the universal, who
had just arrived from the City Hall.

"He can't see himself through because he is blind," was the heavy answer.

There was a moment of shock, of hushed surprise, and then a voice burst
forth: "Blind--they've blinded him, boys! The dagos have killed his
sight. He's blind, boys!"

A profane and angry muttering ran through the crowd, who were thirsty,
hungry, and weary with watching.

Osterhaut held up the horseshoe which had brought Ingolby down. "Here it
is, the thing that done it. It's tied with a blue ribbon-for luck," he
added ironically. "It's got his blood on it. I'm keeping it till
Manitou's paid the price of it. Then I'll give it to Lebanon for keeps."

"That's the thing that did it, but where's the man behind the thing?"
snarled a voice.

Again there was a moment's silence, and then Billy Kyle, the veteran
stage-driver, said: "He's in the jug, but a gaol has doors, and doors'll
open with or without keys. I'm for opening the door, boys."

"What for?" asked a man who knew the answer, but who wanted the thing
said.

"I spent four years in Arizona, same as Jowett," Billy Kyle answered,
"and I got in the way of thinking as they do there, and acting just as
quick as you think. I drove stage down in the Verde Valley. Sometimes
there wasn't time to bring a prisoner all the way to a judge and jury,
and people was busy, and hadn't time to wait for the wagon; so they done
what was right, and there was always a tree that would carry that kind o'
fruit for the sake of humanity. It's the best way, boys."

"This isn't Arizona or any other lyncher's country," said Halliday, the
lawyer, making his way to the front. "It isn't the law, and in this
country it's the law that counts. It's the Gover'ment's right to attend
to that drunken dago that threw the horseshoe, and we've got to let the
Gover'ment do it. No lynching on my plate, thank you. If Ingolby could
speak to us, you can bet your boots it's what he'd say."

"What's your opinion, boss?" asked Billy Kyle of Gabriel Druse, who had
stood listening, his chin on his breast, his sombre eyes fixed on them
abstractedly.

At Kyle's question his eyes lighted up with a fire that was struck from a
flint in other spheres, and he answered: "It is for the ruler to take
life, not the subject. If it is a man that rules, it is for him; if it is
the law that rules, it is for the law. Here, it is the law. Then it is
not for the subject, and it is not for you."

"If he was your son?" asked Billy Kyle.

"If he was my son, I should be the ruler, not the law," was the grim,
enigmatic reply, and the old man stalked away from them towards the
bridge.

"I'd bet he'd settle the dago's hash that done to his son what the
Manitou dagos done to Ingolby--and settle it quick," remarked Lick
Farrelly, the tinsmith.

"I bet he's been a ruler or something somewhere," remarked Billy Kyle.

"I bet I'm going home to breakfast," interposed Halliday, the lawyer.
"There's a straight day's work before us, gentlemen," he added, "and we
can't do anything here. Orangemen, let's hoof it."

Twenty Orangemen stepped out from the crowd. Halliday was a past master
of their lodge, and they all meant what he meant. They marched away in
procession--to breakfast and to a meeting of the lodge. Others straggled
after, but a few waited for the appearance of the doctor. When the sun
came up and Rockwell, pale and downcast, issued forth, they gathered
round him, and walked with him through the town, questioning, listening
and threatening.

A few still remained behind at Ingolby's house. They were of the devoted
slaves of Ingolby who would follow him to the gates of Hades and back
again, or not back if need be.

The nigger barber, Berry, was one; another was the Jack-of-all-trades,
Osterhaut, a kind of municipal odd-man, with the well-known red hair, the
face that constantly needed shaving, the blue serge shirt with a scarf
for a collar, the suit of canvas in the summer and of Irish frieze in the
winter; the pair of hands which were always in his own pocket, never in
any one else's; the grey eye, doglike in its mildness, and the long nose
which gave him the name of Snorty. Of the same devoted class also was
Jowett who, on a higher plane, was as wise and discerning a scout as any
leader ever had.

While old Berry and Osterhaut and all the others were waiting at
Ingolby's house, Jowett was scouting among the Manitou roughs for the
Chief Constable of Lebanon, to find out what was forward. What he had
found was not reassuring, because Manitou, conscious of being in the
wrong, realized that Lebanon would try to make her understand her
wrong-doing; and that was intolerable. It was clear to Jowett that, in
spite of all, there would be trouble at the Orange funeral, and that the
threatened strike would take place at the same time in spite of Ingolby's
catastrophe. Already in the early morning revengeful spirits from Lebanon
had invaded the outer portions of Manitou and had taken satisfaction out
of an equal number of "Dogans," as they called the Roman Catholic
labourers, one of whom was carried to the hospital with an elbow out of
joint and a badly injured back.

With as much information as he needed, Jowett made his way back to
Lebanon, when, at the approach to the bridge, he met Fleda hurrying with
bent head and pale, distressed face in his own direction. Of all Western
men none had a better appreciation of the sex that takes its toll of
every traveller after his kind than Aaron Jowett. He had been a real buck
in his day among those of his own class, and though the storm of his
romances had become but a faint stirring of leaves which had tinges of
days that are sear, he still had an eye unmatched for female beauty. The
sun which makes that northern land a paradise in summer caught the
gold-brown hair of Gabriel Druse's daughter, and made it glint and shine.
It coquetted with the umber of her eyes and they grew luminous as a
jewel; it struck lightly across the pale russet of her cheek and made it
like an apple that one's lips touch lovingly, when one calls it "too good
to eat." It made an atmosphere of half-silver and half-gold with a touch
of sunrise crimson for her to walk in, translating her form into melting
lines of grace.

Jowett knew that Druse's daughter was on her way to the man who had
looked once, looked twice, looked thrice into her eyes and had seen there
his own image; and that she had done the same; and that the man, it might
be, would never look into their dark depths again. He might speak once,
he might speak twice, he might speak thrice, but would it ever be the
same as the look that needed no words?

When he crossed Fleda Druse's pathway she stopped short. She knew that
Jowett was Ingolby's true friend. She had seen him often, and he was
intimately associated with that day when she had run the Carillon Rapids
and had lain (for how long she never dared to think) in Ingolby's arms in
the sight of all the world. First among those who crowded round her at
Carillon that day were Jowett and Osterhaut, who had tried to warn her.

"You are going to him?" she said now with confidence in her eyes, and by
the intimacy of the phrase (as though she could speak of Ingolby only as
him) their own understanding was complete.

"To see how he is and then to do other things," Jowett answered.

There was silence for a moment in which they moved slowly forward, and
then she said: "You were at Barbazon's last night?"

"When that Gipsy son of a dog gave him away!" he assented. "I never heard
anything like the speech Ingolby made. He had them in the throat. The
Gipsy would have had nothing out of it, if it hadn't been for the
horseshoe. But in spite of the giveaway, Ingolby was getting them where
they were soft-fairly drugging them with good news. You never heard such
dope. My, he was smooth! The golden, velvet truth it was, too. That's the
only kind he has in stock; and they were sort of stupefied and locoed as
they chewed his word-plant. Cicero must have been a saucy singer of the
dictionary, and Paul the Apostle had a dope of his own you couldn't buy,
but the gay gamut that Ingolby run gives them all the cold good-bye."

She held herself very still as he spoke. There was, however, a strange,
lonely look in her eyes. The man lying asleep in the darkness of body and
mind yonder was not really her lover, for he had said no word direct of
love to her, and she knew him so little, how could she love him? Yet
there was something between them which had its authority over their
lives, overcoming even that maiden modesty which was in contrast to the
bold, physical thing she had done in running the Carillon Rapids those
centuries ago when she was young and glad-wistfully glad. So much had
come since that day, she had travelled so far on the highway of Fate,
that she looked back from peak to peak of happening to an almost
invisible horizon. So much had occurred and she felt so old this morning;
and yet there was in her heart the undefined feeling that she must keep
her radiant Spring of life for the blind Gorgio if he needed it-if he
needed it. Would he need it, robbed of sight and with his life-work
murdered?

She shuddered as she thought of what it meant to him. If a man is to
work, he must have eyes to see. Yet what had she to do with it, after
all? She had no right to go to him even as she was going. Yet had she not
the right of common humanity? This Gorgio was her friend. Did not the
world know that he had saved her life?

As they came to the Lebanon end of the bridge, Fleda turned to Jowett
and, commenting on his description of the scene at Barbazon, said: "He is
a great man, but he trusts too much and risks too much. That was no place
for him."

"Big men like him think they can do anything," Jowett replied, a little
ironically, subtly trying to force a confession of her preference for
Ingolby.

He succeeded. Her eye lighted with indignation. She herself might
challenge him, but she would not allow another to do so.

"It is not the truth," she rejoined sharply. "He does not measure himself
against the world so. He is like--like a child," she added.

"It seems to me all big men are like that," Jowett rejoined; "and he's
the biggest man the West has seen. He knows about every man's business as
though it was his own. I can get a margin off most any man in the West on
a horse-trade, but I'd look shy about doing a trade with him. You can't
dope a horse so he won't know. He's on to it, sees it-sees it like as if
it was in glass. Sees anything and everything, and--" He stopped short.
The Master Gorgio could no longer see, and his henchman flushed like a
girl at his "break"; though, as a horse-dealer, he had in his time
listened without shame to wilder, angrier reproaches than most men
living.

She glanced at him, saw his confusion, forgave and understood him.

"It was not the horseshoe, it was not the Gipsy," she returned. "They did
not set it going. It would not have happened but for one man."

"Yes, it's Marchand, right enough," answered Jowett, "but we'll get him
yet. We'll get him with the branding-iron hot."

"That will not put things right if--" she paused, then with a great
effort she added: "Does the doctor think he will get it back and that--"

She stopped suddenly in an agitation he did not care to see and he turned
away his head.

"Doctor doesn't know," he answered. "There's got to be an expert. It'll
take time before he gets here, but--" he could not help but say it,
seeing how great her distress was--"but it's going to come back. I've
seen cases--I saw one down on the Border"--how easily he lied!--"just
like his. It was blasting that done it--the shock. But the sight come
back all right, and quick too--like as I've seen a paralizite get up all
at once and walk as though he'd never been locoed. Why, God Almighty
don't let men like Ingolby be done like that by reptiles same's
Marchand."

"You believe in God Almighty?" she said half-wonderingly, yet with
gratitude in her tone. "You understand about God?"

"I've seen too many things not to try and deal fair with Him and not try
to cheat Him," he answered. "I see things lots of times that wasn't ever
born on the prairie or in any house. I've seen--I've seen enough," he
said abruptly, and stopped.

"What have you seen?" she asked eagerly. "Was it good or bad?"

"Both," he answered quickly. "I was stalked once--stalked I was by night
and often in the open day, by some sickly, loathsome thing, that even
made me fight it with my hands--a thing I couldn't see. I used to fire
buckshot at it, enough to kill an army, till I near went mad. I was
really and truly getting loony. Then I took to prayin' to the best woman
I ever knowed. I never had a mother, but she looked after me--my sister,
Sara, it was. She brought me up, and then died and left me without
anything to hang on to. I didn't know all I'd lost till she was gone. But
I guess she knew what I thought of her; for she come back--after I'd
prayed till I couldn't see. She come back into my room one night when the
cursed 'haunt' was prowling round me, and as plain as I see you, I saw
her. 'Be at peace,' she said, and I spoke to her, and said, 'Sara-why,
Sara' and she smiled, and went away into nothing--like a bit o' cloud in
the sun."

He stopped, and was looking straight before him as though he saw a
vision.

"It went?" she asked breathlessly.

"It went like that--" He made a swift, outward gesture. "It went and it
never came back; and she didn't either--not ever. My idee is," he added,
"that there's evil things that mebbe are the ghost-shapes of living men
that want to do us harm; though, mebbe, too, they're the ghost-shapes of
men that's dead, but that can't get on Over There. So they try to get
back to us here; and they can make life Hell while they're stalking us."

"I am sure you are right," she said.

She was thinking of the loathsome thing which haunted her room last
night. Was it the embodied second self of Jethro Fawe, doing the evil
that Jethro Fawe, the visible corporeal man, wished to do? She shuddered,
then bent her head and fixed her mind on Ingolby, whose house was not far
away. She felt strangely, miserably alone this morning. She was in that
fluttering state which follows a girl's discovery that she is a woman,
and the feeling dawns that she must complete herself by joining her own
life with the life of another.

She showed no agitation, but her repression gave an almost statuesque
character to her face and figure. The adventurous nature of her early
life had given her a power to meet shock and danger with coolness, and
though the news of Ingolby's tragedy had seemed to freeze the vital
forces in her, and all the world became blank for a moment, she had
controlled herself and had set forth to go to him, come what might.

As she entered the street where Ingolby lived, she suddenly realized the
difficulty before her. She might go to him, but by only one right could
she stay and nurse him, and that right she did not possess. He would, she
knew, understand her, no matter how the world babbled. Why should the
world babble? What woman could have designs upon a blind man? Was not
humanity alone sufficient warrant for staying by his side? Yet would he
wish it? Suddenly her heart sank; but again she remembered their last
parting, and once more she was sure he would be glad to have her with
him.

It flashed upon her how different it would have been, if he and she had
been Romanys, and this thing had happened over there in the far lands she
knew so well. Who would have hinted at shame, if she had taken him to her
father's tan or gone to his tan and tended him as a man might tend a man?
Humanity would have been the only convention; there would have been no
sex, no false modesty, no babble, no reproach. If it had been a man as
old as the oldest or as young as Jethro Fawe it would have made no
difference.

As young as Jethro Fawe! Why was it that now she could never think of the
lost and abandoned Romany life without thinking also of Jethro Fawe? Why
should she hate him, despise him, revolt against him, and yet feel that,
as it were by invisible cords, he drew her back to that which she had
forsworn, to the Past which dragged at her feet? The Romany was not dead
in her; her real struggle was yet to come; and in a vague but prophetic
way she realized it. She was not yet one with the settled western world.

As they came close to Ingolby's house she heard marching footsteps, and
in the near distance she saw fourscore or more men tramping in military
order. "Who are they?" she asked of Jowett.

"Men that are going to see law and order kept in Lebanon," he answered.

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