Fred let out a deep breath. "The first time it really clears!"

Monet rested his hand upon Fred's shoulder. "If we go east we'll have to cross the river."

"We'll follow the railroad track north for a mile or two. There's a crossing near Pritchard's. I saw it on the day we went after the tree."

The train pulled into the station and was whistling on its way again.

The hospital automobile swung toward the grounds. Suddenly the sun was snuffed out again; it grew dark and lowering.

"We had better be on our way," Fred said, warningly. "It's going to pour in less than no time."

For a moment a silence fell between them, succeeded by an outburst from Monet.

"Let's keep on!" he cried, harshly. "Let's keep right on going! I don't want to go back. I won't, I tell you! I won't!"

Fred took him by the shoulders ... he was trembling violently. "Come ... come! We can't do that, you know!... We haven't provisions or proper clothing. And the rain, my boy! We'd die of exposure ... or ...

worse!"

"I don't care!" Monet flung out, pa.s.sionately. "I'm not afraid to die ... not in the open."

"And you haven't your violin," Fred put in, gently.

"I never want to play again--after last night. ... It was horrible ...

horrible... '_G.o.d rest you, merry gentlemen_!' What could have possessed them?"

"Come, now!... You'll feel better to-morrow... And I promise you on the first clear day we'll make it... The first morning we wake up and find a cloudless sky."

Fred moved forward, urging Monet to follow. The youth gave a little shiver and suffered Fred's guidance.

"If I go back now," he said, sadly, "it will be forever. I shall never leave."

Fred turned about and gave him a slight shake. "Nonsense! Last night made you morbid. Harrison ought to have known better. This is no place for Christmas! One day should be always like another."

Monet shook his head. "While they were sing ... something pa.s.sed ... I can't describe it. But I grew cold all over ... I knew at once that...

Oh, well! what's the use? You do not understand!"

He flung his hands up in a gesture of despair.

Fred looked up at the sky. It had grown ominously black. "We'd better speed up," he said, significantly.

Monet squared himself doggedly. "You run if you want to... It doesn't matter to me one way or another ... I feel tired."

The rain began to fall in great garrulous drops. Fred took Monet's sleeve between his fingers; slowly they retraced their steps. For a few yards the youth surrendered pa.s.sively, but as Fred neared the thicket again he felt the sharp release of Monet's coat sleeve. He continued on his way... Suddenly he heard a noise of swift feet stirring up the rain-soaked leaves. He turned abruptly. Monet was running in the other direction--toward the precipice. A dreadful chill swept him. He tried to call, to run, but a great weakness transfixed him. The startled air made a foolish whistling sound. Monet's figure flew on in silence, gave a quick leaping movement, and was lost!

Fred Starratt crawled back toward the precipice. The rain descended in torrents and a wind rose to meet its violence. He looked down. The pool below was churning to whitecapped fury, releasing a flood of greedy and ferocious gurglings. Gradually a bitter silence fell and a gloom gathered. Everything went black as midnight...

He felt a cold blast playing through his hair. Instinctively he put his hand to his head. His hat was gone.

Suddenly it came to him that he would have to go back to Fairview ...

_alone_.

He rose to his feet. "North ... a mile or two!" he muttered. "If I can once cross the bridge!"

CHAPTER XVI

On a certain evening in February Fred Starratt, from the upper deck of a ferryboat, again saw the dusky outlines of San Francisco stretch themselves in faint allurement p.r.i.c.ked with glittering splendor. It was a mild night--the skies clear, the air tinged with pleasant chill, the bay stilled to nocturnal quiet.

He had come out upon the upper deck to be alone. He wanted to approach the city of his birth in decent solitude, to feel the thrill of home-coming in all its poignant melancholy. He had expected the event to a.s.sume a special significance, to be fraught with hidden meaning, to set his pulses leaping. But he had to confess that neither the beauty of the night nor the uncommon quality of the event moved him.

Had he been wrung dry of all emotional reaction? It was not until a woman came from the stuffy cabin and took a seat in a sheltered corner outside that he had the slightest realization of the nearness of his old environment. As she pa.s.sed close to his pacing form a sickly sweet odor enveloped him. He looked after her retreating figure. She was carrying a yellow armful of blossoming acacia. The perfume evoked a sad memory of virginal springs innumerable ... springs that seemed to go back wistfully beyond his own existence ... springs long dead and never to be revived. Dead? No, perhaps not quite that, but springs never to be again his portion. This perfume of the blossoming acacia ... how in the old days it had always brought home a sense of awakening, a sense of renewal to a land burned and seared and ravished in the hot and tearless pa.s.sion of summer! Following the first rains would come the faint flush of green upon the hillsides, growing a little deeper as the healing floods released themselves, and then, one day, suddenly, almost overnight, the acacia would bend beneath a yellow burden, sending a swooning fragrance out to match the yellow sunlight of February. From that moment on the pageant was continuous, bud and blossom and virginal leaf succeeding one another in showering abundance. But nothing that followed quite matched the heavy beauty of these first golden boughs, nothing that could evoke quite the same infinite yearning for hidden and heroic destinies. He defined the spell of the perfume again, but he did not feel it. It shook his memory to its foundations, but it left his senses cold. And the city before him was as sharply revealed and as cruelly unmoving.

Suddenly he was done with a desire for solitude and he went below. A half score of men were idling upon the lower deck. He began his restless pacings again, stroking his faded beard with a strangely white hand. Finally he stopped, gazing wistfully at the dark beauty of the ferry tower, sending its winsome shaft up into the quivering night. A man at his elbow began to speak in the characteristically Californian fashion about the weather.

"Yes," Fred a.s.sented, briefly, "it _is_ a fine night."

"Too fine," the stranger returned. "We need rain."

"Haven't you had much down this way, either?" Fred found himself inquiring, glad of a chance to escape for the moment into the commonplace.

"At the beginning of the season it came on a bit, but since Christmas there has been scarcely a drop. How does the country look?"

Fred leaned against a water barrel and continued to stroke his beard.

"Pretty well burned up. But the fruit trees will soon be blossoming in spite of everything... The worst of it is there isn't any snow in the mountains."

"Ah, then you've been up into the Sierras."

"Yes, since December... I had to make my way through the northern pa.s.ses just after Christmas. Folks told me it couldn't be done... I guess it would have been almost impossible in a wet season. But things were the same way up north. No end of rain in the fall and none to speak of since the holidays. But at that I've been through some tough times... How are things in town?"

The stranger unb.u.t.toned his shabby overcoat and took out a bag of tobacco. His indifferent suit and thick blue-flannel shirt, which ordinarily would have stamped him as an artisan, was belied by the quality of his speech.

"Things are rotten. Everybody is striking. You can't get work anywhere except you want to scab... You'd better have stayed where you came from."

There was a tentative quality in this observation that roused in Fred a vague speculation. He had a feeling that the stranger was leading up cautiously to some subject. He looked again, this time sharply, at his companion of the moment. There was nothing extraordinary in the face except the eyes burning fitfully under the gloom of incredibly thick, coa.r.s.e, reddish eyebrows. His mouth was a curious mixture of softness and cruelty, and his hands were broad, but not ungraceful.

"Well, if a man is starving he'll do almost anything, I guess," Fred returned, significantly.

"Do you mean that _you_ would--if you were starving?"

"I'm starving now!" escaped Fred Starratt, almost involuntarily.

"I thought so," said the other, quietly.

"Why?"

"I've seen plenty of starving men in my day. I know the look. And you're suffering in the bargain. Not physically. But you've been through a h.e.l.l of some kind. Am I right?"