"I don't know if I can make it," Gordon repeated; "it'll strip me if I do."

Valentine Simmons swung back to his desk. "At least," he observed, "keep this quiet till something's settled."

Gordon agreed.

XIII

Even if he proved able to buy out Simmons, he thought walking home, it would be a delicate operation to return the timber rights to where he thought they belonged. He considered the possibility of making a gift of the options to the men from whom they had been wrongfully obtained. But something of Simmons' shrewd knowledge of the world, something of the priest's contemptuous arraignment of material values, lingering in Gordon's mind, convinced him of the potential folly of that course. It would be more practical to sell back the options to those from which they had been purchased at the nominal prices paid. He had only a vague idea of his balances at the Stenton banks, the possibilities of the investments from which he received profit. He was certain, however, that the sum asked by Valentine Simmons would obliterate his present resources. Yet he was forced to admit that it did not seem exorbitant.

He continued his altruistic deliberations throughout the evening at his dwelling. It might be well, before investing such a paramount sum, to communicate with the Tennessee and Northern Company, receive a fresh ratification of their intention. Yet he could not do that without incurring the danger of premature questioning, investigation. It was patent that he would have to be prepared to make an immediate distribution of the options when his intention became known in Greenstream. He was aware that when the coming of a railroad to the County became common knowledge the excitement of the valley would grow intense.

Again, it might be better first to organize the timber of Greenstream, so that a harmonious local condition would facilitate all negotiations, and avert the danger, which Valentine Simmons had pointed out, of individual blindness and compet.i.tion. But, in order to accomplish that, he would have to bring into concord fifty or more wary, suspicious, and largely ignorant adults. He would have to deal with swift and secret avarice, with vain golden dreams born of years of bitter poverty, privation, ceaseless and incredible toil. The magnitude of the latter task appalled him; fact and figure whirled in his confused mind. He was standing, and he suddenly felt dizzy, and sat down. The giddiness vanished, but left him with twitching fingers, a clouded vision. He might get them all together, explain, persuade.... G.o.ddy! it was for their good. They needn't be cross-grained.

There it would be, the offer, for them to take or leave. But, if they delayed, watch out! Railroad people couldn't be fooled with. They might get left; that was all.

This, he felt, was more than he could undertake, more than any reasonable person would ask. If he paid Valentine Simmons all that money, and then let them have back their own again, without a cent to himself, they must be content. They should be able to bargain as well as he--who was getting on and had difficulty in adding figures to the same amount twice--with the Tennessee and Northern.

The following morning he departed for Stenton.

XIV

Gordon paid Valentine Simmons eighty-nine thousand dollars for the latter's share of the timber options they had held in common. They were seated in the room in which Gordon conducted his peculiar transactions. He turned and placed Simmons' acknowledgment, the various papers of the dissolved partnership, in the safe.

"That finishes all I had in Stenton," he observed.

Valentine Simmons made no immediate reply. He was intent, with tightly-folded lips, on the cheque in his hand. His shirt, as ever, was immaculately starched, the blue b.u.t.ton was childlike, bland; but it was cold without, and hot in the room where they sat, and the color on his cheeks resembled dabs of vermilion on buffers of old white leather; the tufts of hair above his ears had dwindled to mere cottony sc.r.a.ps.

"Prompt and satisfactory," he said at last. "I tell you, Gordon, you can see as far as another into a transaction. Promises are of no account but value received ..." he held up the cheque, a strip of pale orange paper, pinched between withered fingers.

Suddenly he was in a hurry to get away; he drew his overcoat of close-haired, brown hide about his narrow shoulders, and trotted to the door, to his buggy awaiting him at the corner of the porch.

XV

Gordon placed on the table before him the statements and accounts of his newly-augmented options. The papers, to his clerical inefficiency, presented a bewildering ma.s.s of inexplicable details and accounts. He brought them, with vast difficulty, into a rough order. In the lists of the acreages of timber controlled there were appended none of the names of those from whom his privilege of option had been obtained, no note of the slightly-varying sums paid--the sole, paramount facts to Gordon now. For the establishment of these he was obliged to refer to the original, individual contracts, to compare and add and check off.

Old Pompey had conducted his transactions largely from his buggy, lending them a speciously casual aspect. The options made to him were written on slips of paper hastily torn from a cheap note book, engrossed on yellowing sheets of foolscap in tremulous Spencerian. Their wording was informal, often strictly local. One granted privilege of purchase of, "The piney trees on Pap's and mine but not Henny's for nineteen years." Another bore, above the date, "In this year of Jesus Christ's holy redemption."

The sales made to Valentine Simmons were, invariably, formal in record, the signatures were all witnessed.

It was a slow, fatiguing process. A number of the original vendors, Gordon knew, had died, their families were scattered; others had removed from the County; logical subst.i.tutes had to be evolved. The mere comparison of the various entries, the tracing of the tracts to the amounts involved, was scarcely within Gordon's ability.

He labored through the swiftly-falling dusk into the night, and took up the task early the following morning. A large part of the work had to be done a second, third, time--his brain, unaccustomed to concentrated mental processes, soon grew weary; he repeated aloud a fact of figures without the least comprehension of the sounds formed by his lips, and he would say them again and again, until he had forced into his blurring mind some significance, some connection.

He would fall asleep over his table, his scattered papers, in the grey daylight, or in the radiance of a large gla.s.s lamp, and stay immobile for hours, while his dog lay at his feet, or, uneasy, nosed his sharp, relaxed knees.

No one would seek him, enter his house, break his exhausted slumbers.

Lying on an outflung arm his head with its sunken, closed eyes, loose lips, seemed hardly more alive than the photographed clay of Mrs.

Hollidew in the sitting room. He would wake slowly, confused; the dog would lick his inert hand, and they would go together in search of food to the kitchen.

On the occasions when he was forced to go to the post-office, the store, he went hurriedly, secretively, in a coat as green, as aged, as Pompey's own.

He was anxious to finish his labor, to be released from its responsibility, its weight. It appeared tremendously difficult to consummate; it had developed far beyond his expectation, his original conception. The thought pursued him that some needy individual would be overlooked, his claim neglected. No one must be defrauded; all, all, must have their own, must have their chance. He, Gordon Makimmon, was seeing that they had, with Lettice's money ... because ... because....

The leaves had been swept from the trees; the mountains were gaunt, rocky, against swift, low clouds. There was no sunlight except for a brief, sullen red fire in the west at the end of day. At night the winds blew bleakly down Greenstream valley. Shutters were locked, shades drawn, in the village; night obliterated it absolutely. No one pa.s.sed, after dark, on the road above.

He seemed to be toiling alone at a hopeless, interminable task isolated in the midst of a vast, uninhabited desolation, in a black chasm filled with the sound of whirling leaves and threshing branches.

The morning, breaking late and grey and cold, appeared equally difficult, barren, in vain. The kitchen stove, continually neglected, went continually out, the grate became clogged with ashes, the chimney refused to draw. He relit it, on his knees, the dog patiently at his side; he fanned the kindling into flames, poured on the coal, the shining black dust coruscating in instant, gold tracery. He bedded the horse more warmly, fed him in a species of mechanical, inattentive regularity.

Finally the list of timber options he possessed was completed with the names of their original owners and the amounts for which they had been bought. A deep sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment, took the place of his late anxiety. Even the weather changed, became complacent--the valley was filled with the blue mirage of Indian summer, the apparent return of a warm, beneficent season. The decline of the year seemed to halt, relent, in still, sunny hours. It was as though nature, death, decay, had been arrested, set at naught; that man might dwell forever amid peaceful memories, slumberous vistas, lost in that valley hidden by shimmering veils from all the implacable forces that bring the alternation of cause and effect upon subservient worlds and men.

XVI

As customary on Sat.u.r.day noon Gordon found his copy of the weekly _Bugle_ projecting from his numbered compartment at the post-office. There were no letters. He thrust the paper into his pocket, and returned to the village street. The day was warm, but the mists that had enveloped the peaks were dissolving, the sky was sparkling, clear. By evening, Gordon decided, it would be cold again, and then the long, rigorous winter would close upon the valley and mountains.

He looked forward to it with relief, as a period of somnolence and prolonged rest--the mental stress and labor of the past days had wearied him of the active contact with men and events. He was glad that they were, practically, solved, at an end--the towering columns of figures, the perplexing problems of equity, the far-reaching decisions.

In rehearsing his course it seemed impossible to have hit upon a better, a more comprehensive, plan. There was hardly a family he knew of in the valley of which some member might not now have his chance. That, an opportunity for all, was what Gordon was providing.

A number of horses were already hitched along the rail outside Valentine Simmons' store; soon the rail would hardly afford room for another animal.

He pa.s.sed the Presbyterian Church, Dr. Pelliter's drugstore and dwelling, and approached his home. Seen from the road the long roof was variously colored from various additions; there were regions of rusty tar-paper, of tin with blistered remnants of dull red paint, of dark, irregular shingling.

It was a dwelling weather-beaten and worn, the latest addition already discolored by the elements, blended with the nondescript whole. It was like himself, Gordon Makimmon recognized; in him, as in the house below, things tedious or terrible had happened, the echoes of which lingered within the old walls, within his brain.... Now it was good that winter was coming, when they would lie through the long nights folded in snow, in beneficent quietude.

There were some final details to complete in his papers. He took off his overcoat, laid it upon the safe, and flung the _Bugle_ on the table, where it fell half open and neglected. The names traced by his scratching pen brought clearly before him the individuals designated: Elias Wellbogast had a long, tangled grey beard and a gaze that peered anxiously through a settling blindness. Thirty acres--eight dollars an acre. P. Ville was a swarthy foreigner, called, in Greenstream, the Portugee; every crop he planted grew as if by magic. Old Matthew Zane would endeavor to borrow from Gordon the money with which to repurchase the option he had granted.

He worked steadily, while the rectangles of sunlight cast through the windows on the floor shortened and shifted their place. He worked until the figures swam before his eyes, when he laid aside the pen, and picked up the _Bugle_, glancing carelessly over the first page.

His attention immediately concentrated on the headlines of the left-hand column, his gaze had caught the words, "Tennessee and Northern."

"G.o.ddy!" he exclaimed aloud; "they've got it in the _Bugle_, the railroad coming and all."

He was glad that the information had been printed, it would materially a.s.sist in the announcement and carrying out of his plan. He folded the paper more compactly, leaned back in his chair to read ... Why!... Why, d.a.m.n it! they had it all wrong; they were entirely mistaken; they had printed a deliberate--a deliberate--