"As far as I can make out," went on Brian, puffing at his pipe, "you're wildly unhappy and discontented at the farm and that worries your sister. Of course your absence worries her too but the two letters we wrote that night you tumbled into my camp fire must have made her feel a lot better, particularly since we both expressed our intention of making the best of ourselves. You say she won't leave your uncle because he's an invalid. That leaves you without any string to your bow but your own inclination. In a sense you've followed that too long. I mean, Don, shirking the course of study the old minister mapped out for you when your sister kept on plugging. You need it."

"Nothing mattered," said the boy bitterly. "I knew I wouldn't stay. I didn't dare. Once," he added in a low voice, "when Uncle cursed my sister and threw a bottle of brandy at her, I made up my mind to kill him."

"Good Lord!" said Brian, shocked.

"That's one of the reasons I don't dare go back. I'm afraid. You can't guess what it is," he choked. "He taunts and jeers and curses in a breath and he gets drunk every night. I wish to G.o.d he would die!"

The wish was horrible in its sincerity. Brian ignored it.

"If you were older," said Brian, "and your chief need wasn't school, I'd take you abroad with me, free lancing. But in the circ.u.mstances, with your welfare somewhere else, that's impossible."

Donald hung his head.

"I--I wish it wasn't," he blurted. "I want to go wherever you go."

"That first night when I asked you to tramp along with me," said Brian gently, "I said, in my letter to your sister, that I'd see you through.

That I'm going to do. But you've got to help me. I want you, after I'm gone, to stay up here at the quarry, study nights, and next year work your way through college."

The boy stared, blank terror in his eyes.

"A year's work will put you on your feet--your kind of work when the mood is on you--and you can enter in the fall. I know a chap who's working his way through Yale. He'd show you the ropes."

"Here!" said Donald. "Alone!"

"Here," said Brian quietly, "alone. I know you can do it."

Don brushed his hair back heavily from his forehead. It was but little browner than his face. The gesture reminded Brian irresistibly of Kenny, Kenny in rebellion.

"It isn't the college part," Don said hopelessly. "There I think I'd get through. And I'd like to be an engineer. It's the year here. An entrance examination would be stiff, wouldn't it, Brian?"

"Yes."

"I know chunks of a lot of things I don't need, almost nothing of things I ought to know a lot about. When I liked a thing, I studied.

And when I didn't I let it slide. It worried my sister. And I work by fits and starts when there's n.o.body around to keep me at it. Up here alone, working all day and studying half the night, I'd never swing it.

It would mean the hardest kind of work."

"Once," said Brian, "I saw you chop wood for thirteen hours."

"You were there."

"And down there in the quarry Grogan says you can load more stone to the hour than two wops."

"You're there feeding the crusher. And you work as hard as I do."

Brian rose. His pipe was out. He knew as he knocked the ashes into a saucer and filled again from a bowl of tobacco upon the mantel, that Donald's eyes were upon him, abject with misery and remorse. But neither spoke.

Irritable and upset, Brian went out upon the porch.

The straggling cl.u.s.ter of shacks around the rude store were dark.

Grogan's weary men found bed early. The moonlight was calm and cold and weirdly bright. A wind mournful with the rustle of dead leaves came sharply from the trees behind the shack where by day the autumn sun touched russet into gold and scarlet. A bleak spot up here! The solitude of stone and struggle. Could he expect Don to linger here and fight his battle? Brian, with the weight of his years heavy on his shoulders, said honestly no. And the problem still was with him.

He went down the steps and walked aimlessly along the ridge above the quarry. The bright emptiness below was grotesque with shadow, shadows of ghost-like derricks, screens and drills. On the spur track lay a car half full of stone. Standing there with the trainload of Donald's labor at his feet, it came sharply to Brian that the boy stood again at the parting of the ways. And the year would tell.

To the right from the dank water of a quarry pool abandoned long since to catfish and willows, a milk-white mist was rising eerily into the moonlight. Brian saw it but he saw it indistinctly. He was thinking of the boy's sister, her sweet face tragic with imploring. It lay in the mist and yet not in the mist, and it was binding him to obligation.

He had written a promise. That promise he must keep. The face his memory etched upon the mist made its appeal to every finer instinct of his courage.

Brian did not face his problem with excitement. He faced it with ruthless concentration. All summer he had been groping through fog and disillusion to the meaning of service, service to his fellowmen, and he had groped through to something vague and lofty. Service lay across the water where men raved in the red fever of destruction, service and inclination. Could not one be mercifully the religion of the other?

Must service spring from the bitter dregs of self-denial? Brian stared wretchedly into the dank white mist curling in the moonlight like a fallen cloud. And again with his conscience up in arms he remembered the face of Donald's sister. In a sense he could thank the boy for the peace of his summer. And he had written his promise. He was like Kenny, that boy, inflammable of purpose, erratic in his vigor, and likable. And he needed a friend, inflexible and kindly.

"Always," said Brian, "I am slated to be somebody's keeper."

Could he shirk? Had he shirked when he left the studio in anger? Had he a right to live his life his own way? Had anybody? His common sense endorsed his earlier rebellion. This was different.

"Whenever you tell me I can do a thing and hang around to see me do it, I can seem to make myself do it somehow!"

The words echoed harshly in his ears; and at first Brian refused to hear them. Then inexorably he faced his fact. He and he alone was the spur to the boy's amazing energy. A year? Well, after all what was a year?

He went back through the autumn moonlight with a sigh.

"Don," he said, "you're right. You couldn't swing it up here alone.

I'll stick and see you through it."

Don looked up, his face scarlet with emotion. Brian's hand was on his shoulder. And Brian's eyes were half humorous, half quizzical and wholly tender.

"No, no, Brian, no!" he choked. "I--I didn't mean that--"

"Of course you didn't," said Brian. "I thought that much of it out for myself."

Don's head went down upon his hands with a sob.

That night Brian wrote to Whitaker.

CHAPTER XIX

SAMHAIN

To Kenny in poetic mood the seasons were druidic. There was May Eve with its Bel fires when summer peeped over the hilltops at the cattle driven through the sacred flames to protect them from disease. There was Midsummer's Eve with more fires, and if St. Patrick in unpagan zeal had chosen to kindle his fires in honor of St. John, he could. To Kenny the festival was still druidic. There was Samhain or summer ending, when the November wind speeded the waning season with a flurry of dead leaves; and to Kenny, Samhain came and drove him forth in the chill dusk to face another problem.

He had come to the farm in blossom time and he had stared ahead to sanity--in September at the latest. Now with branches dark and bare against the glorious sunsets that burned at night in the west long after the valley was in shadow, even with talk in Hannah's kitchen of early snow, his madness was if anything a trifle more acute. Even the dreaded hours with Adam ceased to trouble him in the joy of his days.

There was peace here and, thanks to Mr. Adams, who had simplified his relations with the bank, freedom from work and worry.

The November twilight, scintillant with stars, lay darkly ahead. He forged through it in excitement. He who could forecast with the wisdom of experience the duration of his own enslavement had gone over his time. And, powers of wild-fire, he still kept going! Something emotionally was wrong.

It pleased him in a moody moment to busy himself with mathematics, much as he hated them, and deduce a singular fact. He had spent delicious hours of many a day with many a maid. But days and days and days with one? Not ever!