The Difficult Minute

FROM the depot at Penangton, Morning County, Missouri, to the one line of street cars it is ten miles. Henderson figured that out for himself, as he stumbled irritably over the rough road, across the bridge, up the plank walk, to the car. It was an October evening, and the day was trailing off in a gray, shining halation that was neither mist nor fog, but dancing haze. Henderson saw far-away houses brooded over by gray wings; he saw rickety wheels of gray spiked by the small gleam of the street lamps; and he saw occasional people work up out of, and twist back into, the farther distance in gray spirals. The whole town and the hills beyond it were one wavering, lightening, deepening scheme of gray, except where, far to the west, a stubborn stretch of red lay along the sky.

As he came on toward the car, Henderson had a half-dashed, half-defiant look in his eyes. “ You’re a pretty cuss! ” he mumbled once or twice. “ Better have stayed in Chicago in the first place. Better have stayed in Dixburn in the last place. Penangton ! ” He looked about him disgustedly. To the west he could distinguish the outline of a tall building, shadowy and uncertain in the gloom ; he picked out the white letters across its sides: “ P-e-n-r-y-n M-i-l-l-s.” He looked to the east, and saw a straggling line of sheds. He read the letters on their sides easily enough, because his eyes had become accustomed to the first part of the combination : “ Penryn C-o-a-l — Penryn Coal P-o-c— Penryn Coal Pockets.” He stopped halfway up the plank walk, dropped his heavy traveling case, and worked the fingers of his aching hand. His eyes, sweeping southward, were caught by a trim brick building beyond the depot. It had white letters across its front. “ The first word is Penryn,” said Henderson, at a guess. “No, the first word is T-h-o-r-l-e-y. Thorley-P-e-n-r— Uhunh ! I knew Penryn would be along. Now what’s the rest ? Thorley-Penryn S-e-r-o-t-h— Oh, go to the dickens ! ” he finished impotently. “ I don’t care what you are.” Still farther south he descried the headstones of a cemetery. “ Good ! One can at least die in Penangton. I ’ll bet the tallest shaft is named Penryn.” The night’s blacker shadow leaped up out of the earth then, and the haze became thick gloom. The last red flare was gone from the west. Two men came up the plank walk toward Henderson.

“ Coolish night,” he heard one saying, as they clacked off northward.

“ Brrrt! It is a coolish night,” said Henderson to himself. He turned to pick up his valise, but for some reason his hands went together first, and he held them so convulsively. “ A coolish night,” he heard himself repeating, with a witless, wandering intonation. Then he shook himself threateningly. “ Oh, I ’ll try again. Of course I ’ll try,” he said, but he said it like a man who is trying to anæsthetize his soul; and when he got into the car, the look in his eyes was more distinctively dashed than defiant.

“Is there a driver ? ” he by and by asked wistfully of the one other occupant of the car.

“ Yes, there’s a driver,” — the other occupant looked out of the window at a frame house which stood just where the plank walk ended, and the brick pavement and the car track began, — “ but there’s also a saloon.”

Henderson bit his lower lip in a confidential enjoyment of the quality of that voice. There was a note in it of standing things good-naturedly when they could n’t be helped.

“I wonder if there’s no way of breaking the connection?” he said, getting back to the driver and the saloon with a jerk. He went to the car door and hallooed at the frame house. A man came to the door.

“ Dave ain’t quite ready yet,” called the man, thickly but genially. “Jes’ wait a minute till he wets his whis’le, will you ? ”

It seemed the thing to do under the circumstances. The air had the crispness of early autumn, and Henderson saw that the woman in the car felt it; so he shut the door, and came patiently back to his seat.

“It ’s just one of Penangton’s ways,” she explained, with a funny little lift of her brows.

Henderson took his lower lip into confidence again, and deliberately poised himself in midair, as it were, on the sound of that voice. It had so many kinds of suggestion in it. She had said only two sentences to him, but the first had made him aware that whatever was worth laughing at in the world she was ready to laugh at, and the next had made him aware that she had run the gamut of Penangton from end to end. After the atony of the past few weeks he was almost feverishly glad of his rising interest in that voice, in anything. His soul, he knew, was somewhere near in the same tense, wrung attitude his body had assumed out on the plank walk, but he had a curious, hurried desire to tell his soul to shut up, to come along, to make the best of it.

“ It’s quite a town, Penangton ? ” “The lamp is sputtering,” said the woman, in reply. “ Could n’t you turn the wick higher ? Oh, goodness, it’s going out! Why, there’s no oil in it.”

They both got up hurriedly, but the lamp was too far gone for rescue. It began to smoke dismally.

“ I ’ll go get the driver,” said Henderson. “Just wait here a minute.” He jumped off the car and ran up the steps to the saloon. Presently he came back, shaking his head. “ The driver’s drunk for fair,” he said. “ Everybody in there’s drunk. What ’ll we do ? ”

“ Could n’t you drive ? ” she asked merrily.

He looked down the silent street, and his eyes lit up a little. “ I ’ll drive you home, if you ’ll let me,” he said, with decision. “ I can just do it.” He ran through to the front of the car, and unwound the reins from the brake. The mules stirred slowly and sorrowfully. “ Shall I ? ” asked Henderson. The woman began to laugh. “ Do you live on the car line ? ” went on Henderson gleefully. He laughed, too. It seemed good to be pulling his soul along out of its tragics into something humorous and commonplace. “ Come up ! ” He shook the reins out over the mules. “ It’s my idea to drive until I stop to let you out, then drive on a little farther, and leave the car standing on the track, while I cut for a hotel. Do you think it will work ? — The mules seem to like to stand.” His voice broke up into little chuckles, like a schoolboy’s.

The woman came out on the front platform to him. She could hardly talk for laughing. “ It will work,” she said, “ unless somebody else gets on the car.”

Henderson’s face wrinkled a little, but he shot the leather quirt out over the mules briskly. “Nobody will get on,” he said. “ I ’ll never be able to stop this team.” He felt so exhilarated that it was like pain. The car began to make a great banging noise that just suited him. The way the sparks flew from the hoofs of the mules just suited him. The way that woman leaned back against the car door and laughed just suited him. It was all so exactly on the outside. There was nothing introspective about it. He looked back at her gayly. “ I hope you live at the other end of the line ? ” he queried.

“ About halfway.”

“ I hope it’s a long line.”

“ About two miles, not counting the roughness.”

“ Don’t count the roughness. Nothing counts.”

“ That’s it, — nothing counts. Is n’t this a lark ? ”

Henderson nodded brightly. “ Will it be dark like this all the way ? ” he asked; and when she said yes, he began to sing the first bars of a gay little air under his breath ; the woman sang too, both of them holding their voices down cautiously.

“ Don’t you ever finish things ? ” she complained finally, after trying in vain to adapt her voice to Henderson’s manytuned melody.

“ No,” said Henderson. “ No ; I don’t like the finish— of anything.” He moved back to where she was, and leaned against the car frame, with the reins dangling carelessly. “ The beginning is always so much more interesting.”

She rocked her head on the door jamb at her back. “ Mmh ! I don’t know.”

“ Oh yes ! ” cried Henderson. “In the beginning you have the beginning and all you can imagine about the end.”

“ But in the end you have the end and all you can remember about the beginning.”

“ Remember ” ! It was a bad word for Henderson. Something like a shiver passed over him. " I ’ll back imagination, anticipation, against memory, seven days in the week, won’t you ? ”

“ Hold in your mule steeds here,” said the woman. “ Steady for the corner.”

They swung around the corner, and started on a gentle down grade between two rows of splendid trees. “ Say,” said Henderson, following her lead like a happy child, and shunting the conversation off on a side track again, “ say, are n’t you cold ? ”

“No, indeed. Isn’t this air fine? That’s one good thing we have in Penangton.”

“ What other good things do you have in Penangton ? ”

“Oh, mills and coal mines and an academy. Then there’s the county,” — she gave a wide sweep of her arm which seemed to skip over the town and to encircle something outside it, — “ wheat! ”

“ Many doctors here ? ”

She looked back into the car at the small case which sat beside his large one. “ Oh! I see. Yes, there are a great many doctors.”

“ What school ? ”

“ Two who get their bills paid eventually, three who never get paid, two who forget to send out bills, and one rascal.”

Henderson propped one foot on the splashboard of the car. “ The last class seems to invite as being least crowded,” he commented gravely.

“Well, I don’t know; if it comes to that, they are all more or less rascals, — at least they don’t believe in themselves. That’s a pretty bad sort of rascality, you know. Are you coming here to live ? ” she asked suddenly, turning her face toward him.

“ Like as not.”

“ Well, if you do, there’s one thing in Penangton you want to look out for. There’s one thing that isn’t a good thing. It’s Penrynism.”

“ What’s Penrynism ? ”

“ It’s the money disease. Some doctors get it. The rascal here has it.”

Henderson dropped his head, and whacked at his shoes with the butt of his quirt. “ I expect I ’ll get it, then. I feel particularly susceptible to infection of that kind just at this writing.” Immediately he was as sombre as he had been out there on the plank walk ; his merriment had been a thin cloak, after all, and it had worn through.

“ Slow up now,” said the woman next.

“ I’m almost home. Just around this last corner.”

He drew his breath in sharply, and made the mules take the corner very slowly. He made them go slower yet when he found that he was on a street where the trees were so big and so close together, and the street lamps were so little and so far apart, that it was as black as Egypt, and as mysteriously pleasant.

“ Stop. I’m home.”

“ Now you see,” said Henderson ruefully, “ why I hate the end of things.” He stepped down to help her from the car.

“ Remember the beginning. — Oh, you are going to have to learn to stand remembering,” she insisted, laughing lightly. “ Here, this is my gate.”

He ran ahead and opened it for her, and as she passed through he lifted his hat high and made her a sweeping bow. “I’d rather hope it isn’t the end,” he said.

She only laughed again, and stood looking at him for a short moment. “ I think it is. But it was a nice ride. I shan’t forget it. Good-night.” She called back another cheerful good-night, as she went up the walk to the house.

Henderson, at the gate, watched her, with a lonely look on his face. Ahead of her he traced out a big frowning house front, across the lower part of which ran a light veranda, like a misplaced smile. When the door had opened to her, she paused for a moment in the light from the hall, with her face turned his way; then the door shut quietly. Henderson rubbed his hand softly over the brass head of the low gatepost, until presently his eyes traveled to it. “ P-e-n-r-y-n,” he spelled unseeingly. When he did begin to see it, he said flat-footedly, “ Well, I’m damned! ” and turned back to his mules.

They were gone. As far down the street as he could see there was no sign of them. “Now, how the mischief am I to find a hotel ? ” mused Henderson, without concern. “ Follow the track. Light her up, Fate, my lady; I follow,” and with that he looked at the Penryn house purposefully.

He was sure the car track would pass a hotel somewhere, and he had turned but another corner when he came upon one, with the car and the sad mules standing before it. A crowd of mild-looking men were around the car.

“ But how you going to account for the satchels ? ” one man was asking, with the hope of excitement vibrating blithely in his voice.

Henderson got into the crowd at this juncture. “ I ’ll account for the satchels,” he volunteered. “ You ’ll find my name on them, — Henderson. I left them in the car while I went into the saloon for the driver. — The mules ambled off while I was out of the car.” It was a long hiatus, but Henderson saw that there was no need of bridging it over ; that the men around him were used to the driver, the saloon, and the mules.

Once in the hotel, he went directly to his room, took off his top-coat, and sat down in front of a comfortably glowing grate. “ Very beautiful,” he said, straight at the red coals. For a few minutes longer a half-blunted interest remained in his face ; then his hands spread out weakly on the arms of the chair, and he dropped his chin as though he were going down in his clothes with the shamefaced resolution never to come up again. Slowly and reluctantly his mind went back over his most recent past, the Illinois days.

First of all came the medical college in Chicago ; and clearest of all was the vision of Alden, the dean, on the rostrum before the class, bis burning eyes throwing off some kind of white illumination, his thin hands knotted with enthusiasm, conviction radiating from every inch of his long, swaying body. And loudest of all rang the recollection of Alden’s voice, high and quivering in its advocacy of the Hahnemannian creed, the beauty of the “ law,” the totality of the symptoms, the central modality ; or fiercely earnest in its denunciation of routinism, specifics, prescribing in the lump. Ah, Alden had believed. That had been the intrinsic beauty of sitting under him. Headerson’s perception had always been of the keenest, and Henderson, of all the men and women who had listened to Alden, and learned of him, in the first four years of the college’s struggle for existence, had been the one to carry away with him the deepest impress of Alden’s spirit. He, of them all, had gone out from the college doors with the feeling most strong upon him that he had had a glorious bath in some deep, clean current of ethics. He had never been able to account to himself for Alden’s influence upon him. Before he went up to college he had been commonplace enough, a quick, shrewd fellow, with a good business head, acute sympathies, and one strong inclination in the world, — the inclination to study medicine ; but when he left Alden he was like a finely charged wire, across which hummed and sang concepts of his profession as the “ noble profession,” the scientific possibilities of the “ noble profession,” life as an opportunity for the “ noble profession,” — all that went to make Alden’s life like a benediction.

And what happened ? What always happens to the young physician who has n’t money enough to wait three years for patients, and abide by the Code while waiting ? He had first “ located ” in Chicago, in a South Side boarding house ; a little later he had located in a town in central Illinois ; and after that he had variously located all over the state, until he found himself at Dixburn, in southern Illinois. Henderson’s memory could linger in any one of the half dozen towns that had preceded Dixburn, and could find in each some pleasant friendship begun, some little addendum to the series of drug provings he had taken up, something halfway pleasant or halfway worth while ; but Dixburn had been hell from start to finish. He had to admit that his acute sufferings in Dixburn had had no better or bigger excuse than that his clothes had begun there to show signs of irreparable wear, and he had had no money for new ones. Something psychical worked itself out in him during the second month that he loafed and suffered around that sun-baked Illinois town. It might have been change, or it might have been development, or it might have been reversion. “ I have got down to my clothes,” was the way he passed judgment upon himself; and, as he had the time, he began to outline, with some contemptuous amusement, the sort of man he would have been if it had happened that he had never been influenced by Alden. When he had put himself to himself as " ordinary,” he went under a wet blanket of conviction that he must get at life on a different plane ; that he had been keyed up too high in the beginning. A little later on in that last month, there had come a day when one of his shoes cracked straight across the top; and in the black, helpless cursing that Henderson stuffed into the crack he checked off self-potentialities never before suspected. As he sat and glared at the crack, he told himself unqualifiedly that he was done with trying to meet the conditions of life in the Alden way; that he was ready to do anything now for money, money! and that fate would better not tempt him. His face assumed too sharp an expression ; it became the face of a man in danger of overreaching himself, in his greediness for gain. He felt sure that, if opportunity had come his way, he would have done things that much worse men than he never do. The whiteness and the fineness of Alden’s influence lifted from him entirely, and circled off above him with a cool backward fanning.

Then a medical magazine offered a prize of one hundred and fifty dollars for the best essay on The Spirit of Hahnemann’s Teachings, and Henderson, with rebellion and blasphemy and battered-down belief in his heart, wrote ethically, and got the one hundred and fifty dollars. Inevitably, the next thing he did was to buy some shoes. That the ethical should have stretched out a hand to him with a purse in it just at this moment half frightened him. He walked about Dixburn in his new shoes for another month in crushed incompetency, and when he crossed over to Penangton he was still effectually flattened out. The truth was, he told himself in final review, as he sat there with his face tucked away from the comfort in the grate, — the truth was that he had primed himself for wickedness in Dixburn, had hung around and waited for temptation, and temptation had not come. Instead of temptation had come a chance of the right sort. “ But if the wrong sort of chance had come,” Henderson pointed out to his soul, with that pitilessly keen insight that was his,

— “ if the wrong sort had come, and I had profited by it more than by the one hundred and fifty, I wonder, O my Soul, if you would be whining around now like an abused house cat? ”

He tumbled into bed a few minutes later, glad to find that he was sleepy. Before he was done felicitating himself upon that fact he sat up, staringly awake. “ If I don’t win out here,” he said, as though he had dragged up a large conclusion from the edge of the land of dreams,

— “if I don’t win out here, I ’ll never win out. It’s now or never, and I don’t think I ’ll ever forget how she looked there in that doorway.” The dying gleam in the grate shot up and broke into small gaseous hubbies as he lay back on his pillow.

When he had dressed and breakfasted, the next morning, and had made his way to the street, he felt immeasurably better. He sat down in one of the loafing chairs outside the hotel door, and smoked, with two clearly defined notions in his head : one was to finish his cigar, and the other was to beat back along that car track to the house whose door had opened and shut in front of him the night before. Every time he thought of the woman who had stood framed in that door, he found his determination to stay in Penangton strengthening. He was very near the end of his cigar, and very near the beginning of a dream, when a man stopped in front of him.

“ Scrape my shins if ’t ain’t! ” said the man, holding out his hand. The big, assertive voice pushed through Henderson’s dream like a steam roller, and bowled him back, willy - nilly, to the medical college, Alden, and the Chicago days.

“ Oh, you, Thorley ? How d’ you do?” Henderson’s greeting was slow, but it had the amiability that curls off the end of a good cigar, and he got up and shook hands with the man, whom he could place as one of the fellows of the ’90 class. He had not seen Thorley since the finish in April, two years and more before, and he hardly recognized him because of the bushy side whiskers on his face. Still, when he came to think of it, it was inevitable that Thorley should have sprung those whiskers. One never saw a man with his kind of face who did n’t sooner or later come to side whiskers, and stop there permanently. All that Henderson immediately recalled about him was, that he was the one chap at college who did n’t have to get “ used ” to the dissecting room. Thorley had n’t sickened or blinked from the first. And that odor of fresh blood, still warm enough to run, which sorely tried every freshman’s stomach in the operating rooms, had n’t bothered Thorley in the least. He had n’t even noticed it, until a boy in front of him reeled, and had to be swung out by his shoulders and heels.

“ Live here ? ” asked Henderson.

“ Yes. How are you making it ? ” Thorley laughed a good-natured, rollicking laugh as soon as Henderson opened his mouth to reply. “ Need n’t tell me. About eighteen of the twenty in the ’90 class have told me already. I ’m making it,” he rounded off, with a dogged down jerk of his head.

“ How ? ”

“ Whiskey cure.”

“ Oh, Lord ! ”

“ And morphine,” went on Thorley, untouched.

“ What’s your — your cure ? ” Henderson smiled down at Thorley from the heights of the Code, as he nicked the ash from his cigar.

“ Something new. It’s a serotherapy wrinkle.”

Henderson’s smile became a deeplunged laugh, and Thorley’s round eyes twinkled. “ Hair of the dog for the bite,” Thorley insisted. “ Only mine’s cows. It’s simple.” His eyes fairly danced. “ Inoculate a cow with alcohol; then draw off the serum from the cow’s blood, and use as an antidote for inebriety. You’d be surprised at the way it works, Henderson.”

For a moment Henderson made no reply ; a direct line of comparison had projected itself from the face of Thorley, standing there with his fat neck spilling over his collar, to the face of Alden, all aglow with splendid dignity. " You’ve got a long way from Alden,” he demurred at last.

“ Oh, Alden hell! ” said Thorley, with a short laugh which stayed good-natured. “ Alden’s wife has enough money for him to live on. Mine has n’t. That’s the difference between me and Alden.” He rocked back on his heels easily. “ Going to be here long ? ” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“ I tell you what you do,” suggested Thorley quickly, and with some emphasis. “ Come up and see my sanitarium. And say, one of these days I ’ll take you out to the depot and show you the Thorley-Penryn Serotherapy Stables, where we draw off anti-alcoholic serum for alcoholism.”

“ Quack, quack, quack! ” laughed Henderson ; and Thorley went off with his own mouth puckered.

After Thorley had left him, Henderson started up the street toward the Penryn house. He had no trouble in finding it; but when he got within a block of it he had trouble in accounting for its being there, — in Penangton. It was so much of a castle that while it had ten times more ground than the Chicago castles, it still did n’t have half ground enough. The effect was not good, “ though it would be if there were two miles of park,” thought Henderson. “ Now, how did she ever make a mistake of that kind ? Must have been built before she grew up and took hold of things.” He walked on a little farther, and examined the house more carefully “ It was built before she grew up and took hold of things,” he said finally, his eyes, agile as squirrels, running up and down the weather marks of the house. He felt immediately relieved. It somehow seemed to him very important, just then, that that woman should not fail him anywhere, should come quite up to what he expected of her. Suddenly he decided not to go any nearer the house. It occurred to him that if she should see him loitering about, their “ beginning ” might be cheapened. He made a detour around the house, and came back to the main street a block above it, and continued his walk. He took that walk and made that detour every day for a week ; and although he never got a glimpse of her, he refrained from making any inquiries about her at the hotel, from the same fear of cheapening their beginning. During that week, however, he learned incidentally that the various signs which had glared him out of countenance, the night of his arrival, did not begin to cover all of the Penryn consequence to Penangton. Every enterprise in the town or around it was a Penryn enterprise, and the town itself was thickly coated with an adulation of Penryn which was yet not thick enough to hide its deep dislike for him.

It was on Tuesday of Henderson’s second week of the old business of waiting for business that Thorley came into the hotel and asked for him. Thorley had that concentrated look that most people wear when they are acting under a rigid determination to bring up something casually before they have done with you.

“ Suppose you come up and take a look at my sanitarium to-day,” said he, early in the conversation. “ Suppose you come along now. Would n’t you care to ? I’d like to show you over.”

They went down the street together, and Henderson knew that Thorley was telling some hard-luck story of his own about early struggles; but as that same kind of story was already marked across Henderson’s memory with a great puckered cicatrix that pinched every nerve in him, he made a point of not listening, until Thorley said, “There she is,” and turned his fat hand on his wrist by way of indicating the sanitarium. It was a two-story main building of brick, with frame annexes that cluttered it up like an oversupply of white wings. The main building was well out toward the street, and had on its front windows, “ Serotherapy Cure for Alcoholism. If I Don’t Cure You, You Don’t Pay Me.” The subtle, half-sweet, half-cutting odor of some never before smelled drug combination assailed Henderson as soon as he was inside. He sniffed at it curiously, as Thorley led the way into a front room, which seemed to be an office because of the desk and safe in it, and a laboratory because of the long vial cabinet against one wall. The other walls were hung with what looked like framed certificates, at first glance, but what proved, on closer inspection, to be engrossed letters, all beginning, “ My dear Dr. Thorley,” and all ending, “Very gratefully yours.”

“ What’s that I smell, Thorley ? ” asked Henderson, still sniffing.

“ That ? Oh, that’s my secret.”

“ You ought to keep your secret better bottled, then,” retorted Henderson. “ It smells to heaven.”

“ Well, now,” said Thorley, sitting down at the desk, “ I was just thinking of unbottling it, in a way. Look here, Henderson, what’s lacking about you that you useter have ? Tussle been too devilish hard for you ? Sit down over there, — sit down. You want to try your hand at something ’t ain’t so hard ? Something that ’ll pay ? ”

“ Depends on the something,” smiled Henderson, as he took the chair pointed out to him.

“ Oh no, it don’t,” Thorley answered emphatically. “No, it don’t. You can just bet your life on that, — as long as you have n’t a wife with the money. Let’s make a long story short, Henderson. What I want to tell you is this : I’m making a go of this show. I guess you ain’t been here long enough to know all it means to be hitched to the name of Penryn with a hyphen. It’s meaning so much that I can hardly keep track of it. I gotter have a partner, — a parlor partner, Henderson. Trouble with me is, I’m getting a lot of people in here that I can’t han’le. I ’m plain to say they are up the scale from me a ways. I haveter keep my mouth shut just for fear of not saying the right thing. They come from St. Louis and Kansas City and round about, and I don’t go with ’em. ’Specially I don’t go with the women. When you add morphine jim-jams to women’s natural fits you’ve got too much for me, Henderson. They want you to be sympathetic, and they ’re afraid you ’ll be fresh. They keep me twirling. The fact is, I gotter have some help.”

“ Count me out, Thorley.”

“Well, now, I don’t see why. You need n’t think I ain’t straight. It ’s all legitimate. There are hundreds of places, or similar, in this state and in every state in the Union.” Thorley glanced up at Henderson, and then continued, a little sheepishly : “ They do some good. My medicine is a sort of antidote, don’t care what you say.”

“ I guess your medicine is n’t the serum, then. I guess you fall back on the muriate or the bichloride a little.”

“Keep on guessing,” laughed Thorley“ Whatever it is, it helps my patients to atop, if they wanter stop; it helps ’em get ’emselves back. Say, Henderson, if you want the truth, I got just one qualm of conscience about this business. The patients are such a damn bad lot in general, I feel some guilty about helping ’em to get ’emselves back. There’s nothing in ’em worth saving. When you fish ’em up, and dry ’em out, and put ’em on their feet, you feel like you’d played a joke on ’em.”

“ Thorley, what the dickens did you ever pick out a missionary business for ? ” Henderson got up, frowning. “ You don’t care a continental about giving people a chance, yet ” —

“ Blue blazes, man,” cried Thorley, “ it s my own chance I’m concerned about, — not theirs ! See here, Henderson. I suppose if I were a damn fool, who went about this thing with his face shining and his lips twitching, like Alden, you’d think the thing was all right, and that I was all right. I know the enthusiasm dodge; but I got two eyes, let me tell you, and I ’m none the worse man for seeing on both sides and straight to the bottom.”

“ You are the worse man, though, Thorley, for never seeing straight to the top. Wall your eyes up a little once in a way, and you ’ll get still another view.”

When Henderson parted from Thorley, that day, he went home directly past the Penryn house. He felt justified in it; and though he did not see Miss Penryn about the place, a fine and unsullied glow lasted him all the way to the hotel. After that he walked directly past the house every day. It seemed to him that he would have to find out more about her soon, whether the “ beginning ” were to be cheapened by his inquiries or not. The amount of pleasure he got out of just remembering that woman was a wonder to him, and the hope of knowing her better some day was a joy and a support to him. From the sort of ivory frame, rich and creamy, in which memory had placed her, Miss Penryn dominated him, waking or sleeping.

During the next week he was at Thorley’s a number of times. There was no other place to go, and Mrs. Thorley’s room, with its glowing fire and cushioned chairs, was inviting. It was up there, one blustering evening, that Thorley said to him suddenly, “ Henderson, I wish to goodness you’d quit your hesitating, and come on in here with us.”

“ Why, I did n’t know that I was hesitating.”

Thorley gave a peculiar grunt, and then went on, as though some things were too patent to be talked about: “ You seem to think it’s wrong for me to do a little good to these howling hyenas I cage up here, just because I do myself a lot more. That’s about the size of your argument. Why, my principle is the principle every syndicate and every trust fattens on. Do somebody else a little good, and do yourself a lot more. It’s the Penryn principle, — and look at Penryn.”

“ And look at this bilious town,” replied Henderson. “ It’s jaundiced with Penrynism.”

“Oh, come off! If it wasn’t for Penryn, this town would be a sand bar in the Missouri River. It’s Penryn that worked the railroad in, and Penryn that got the elevators away from the river, where the grain boats could n’t come no more, up to the depot, where trains can come. It’s Penryn that got the mines going, and Penryn that’s getting us electricity for the cars. You need n’t tell me that kind of a man don’t deserve credit. It’s good religion to call him a cheat and a rascal, and I guess he’s all of it; but he does things that other people get the benefit of, no matter how you look at him.”

“ Has Mr. Penryn any children ? ” Irresistibly quick, the question clipped through the barrier of the careful days with bullet-like radicalism.

“ Lord, yes. Them three boys at the Bank ’s his.”

“Any daughters?” Henderson sat up straight, to let the questions volley as they would.

“ He ’s got a daughter.”

“ Is she here ? ” This close to that woman again, this close to her name even, she seemed to step down from her frame and to come toward him, richly alive, with all the promising significance she had had for him that first evening. There had been nothing in his life more foolish than that woman’s effect upon him, and nothing more vital. He was trembling as he waited for Thorley’s answer.

“ Is she here now, Zu ? ” called Thorley to his wife, who was bending over some knitting, close to the lamp. “ She ’s not here much any more.” Thorley raised his voice and called again : “ Zu, is Mrs. Shore here now ? ”

“ Purl one, two — wait a minute — purl two — that’s it. Why, I don’t think so. She stopped on her way up from St. Louis, a week ago, but she did n’t stay over but one night.”

“ Where ’d you ever meet her?” asked Thorley. It was strangely as it should be that Thorley’s emphasis unconsciously put that woman on a pedestal, high and white.

“ Why,” said Henderson, like a man in a fog, “somewhere — a long way from here — if she is the woman I think she is. What does she look like ? ”

“ Queen. And she rules, let me tell you. She’s the one person living who’s been too much for Lowry Penryn. They say this town owes a good deal to her.” Thorley chuckled as he continued: “ They say she’s headed Lowry off a time or two.” He put his clumsy thumbs together and leaned toward Henderson a little. “ Say, Henderson, I don’t mind telling you that Penryn ’s agreed to back me a long way further on the serum. We are going to buy Al Hickam’s farm, down Weaver Road, for the cows, and we are going to work the cure for all there is in it. And there’s plenty in it.”

“ So.” The word clumped at Henderson’s ears heavily, without interrogation and full of finish. “ That’s good.” He recognized that what Thorley had just been telling him had set him fairly back in the old-clothes Dixburn period, without any of the bitter vigor and combativeness of that period. In two seconds he had become as pallid and antemic, as unable to fight for his ideal, and as little desirous of fighting, as though Alden had never existed, as though that woman in the frame had never existed. She had n’t ever existed. That was the worst of it. He knew what Thorley was going to say next, and as he picked up his hat and coat his answer stood out in his mind with great clearness. It was about the only clear thing in his mind. He was going to accept Thorley’s offer. That was all there was to it. Nothing could be simpler. His upper lip strained back from the simplicity of it, and his nostrils widened fastidiously to let the simplicity of it down his dry throat. The next thing was Thorley’s voice : —

“ Tell you what I ’ll do, Henderson : I ’ll guarantee you three thousand for the first year. After that there will be five, and after that ten, if there ’s a cent. And there’s always a cent in a Penryn deal. Will you take it ? ”

“ No,” said Henderson. That was simple, too ; but his mind, crouched low to receive the expected blow, lumbered through a good half minute as though the blow had really fallen. Then he put on his hat and went down the steps, all his nerves alive again, and flashing jubilant notice to his brain that he had n’t been able to get down to that lower plane even when he had wanted to ; that he had underrated the protective value of his ideals, had underrated himself there in Dixburn. He might have trusted himself then, as he could trust himself now, to hold out for the right sort of finish, as right went with him. He was bound to do it. He could n’t do anything else. “ That’s the good thing about it,” he told himself. “ Could n’t strike that gait even when I wanted to. Lord, Alden, it was a precious leaven you gave me.” He deliberately stopped on the street and hugged himself. “ It’s bound to keep you quick, you old lump,” he said. Then, as he was opposite the Penryn house, he looked over that way. “ And I guess I can learn to stand remembering,” he decided fearlessly.

“ I’m afraid you’ve lost him,” lamented Mrs. Thoi’ley, when Thorley came back from the sanitarium door, after letting Henderson out.

“ Yes, he’s got that damn Alden look back on his face. I’ve lost him.”

R. E. Young.