If you'd been men you'd had one long ago, but you're just--just stock. I'd rather be an outlaw on the mountain than any of you; I'd ruther be what you think I am; by G.o.d!" he cried out of his bitterness of spirit, "but I'd ruther be Valentine Simmons!"

"Have you got the options?" Entriken demanded--"all them that Pompey had and you bought?"

Gordon vanished into the house, and reappeared with the original contracts in his grasp.

"Here they are," he exclaimed; "I paid eighty-nine thousand dollars to get them, and they're worth--that," he flung them with a quick gesture into the air, and the rising wind scattered them fluttering over the sere gra.s.s. "Scrabble for them in the dirt."

"You c'n throw them away now the railroad's left you."

"And before," Gordon Makimmon demanded, "do you think I couldn't have gutted you if I'd had a mind to? do you think anybody couldn't gut you?

Why, you've been the mutton of every little storekeeper that let you off with a pound of coffee, of any note shaver that could write. The _Bugle_ says I let out money to cover up the railway deal, but that'd be no better than giving it to stop the sight of the blind. G.o.d A'mighty! this transportation business you're only whining about now was laid out five years ago, the company's agents have driven in and out twenty times...."

"Let him have it!"

"Spite yourselves!" Gordon Makimmon cried; "it's all that's left for you."

General Jackson moved forward over the porch. He growled in response to the menace of the throng on the sod, and jumped down to their level. A sudden, dangerous murmur rose:

"The two hundred dollar dog! The joke on Greenstream!"

He walked alertly forward, his ears p.r.i.c.ked up on his long skull.

"C'm here, General," Gordon called, suddenly urgent; "c'm back here."

The dog hesitated, turned toward his master, when a heavy stick, whirling out of the press of men, struck the animal across the upper forelegs. He fell forward, with a sharp whine, and attempted vainly to rise. Both legs were broken. He looked back again at Gordon, and then, growling, strove to reach their a.s.sailants.

Gordon Makimmon started forward with a rasping oath, but, before he could reach the ground, General Jackson had propelled himself to the fringe of humanity. He made a last, convulsive effort to rise, his jaws snapped....

A short, iron bar descended upon his head.

Gordon's face became instantly, irrevocably, the shrunken face of an old man.

The cl.u.s.tered men with the dead, mangled body of the dog before them; the serene, sliding stream beyond; the towering east range bathed in keen sunlight, blurred, mingled, in his vision. He put out a hand against one of the porch supports--a faded shape of final and irremediable sorrow.

He exhibited neither the courage of resistance nor the superiority of contempt; he offered, apparently, nothing material whatsoever to satisfy the vengeance of a populace cunningly defrauded of their just opportunities and profits; he seemed to be no more colored with life, no more instinct with sap, than the crackling leaves blown by the increasing wind about the uneasy feet on the gra.s.s.

He lipped a short, unintelligible period, gazing intent and troubled at the throng. He shivered perceptibly: under the hard blue sky the wind swept with the sting of an icy knout. Then, turning his obscure, infinitely dejected back upon the silent menace of the bitter, sallow countenances, the harsh angular forms, of Greenstream, he walked slowly to the door. He paused, his hand upon the k.n.o.b, as if arrested by a memory, a realization. The door opened; the house absorbed him, presented unbroken its weather-worn face.

A deep, concerted sigh escaped from the men without, as though, with the vanishing of that bowed and shabby frame, they had seen vanish their last chance for reprisal, for hope.

XIX

The cold sharpened; the sky, toward evening, glittered like an emerald; the earth was black, it resembled a ball of iron spinning in the diffused green radiance of a dayless and glacial void. The stream before the Makimmon dwelling moved without a sound under banked ledges of ice.

A thread of light appeared against the facade of the house, it widened to an opening door, a brief glimpse of a bald interior, and then revealed the figure of a man with a lantern upon the porch. The light descended to the ground, wavered toward a spot where it disclosed the rigid, dead shape of a dog. An uncertain hand followed the swell of the ribs to the sunken side, attempted to free the clotted hair on a crushed skull. The body was carefully raised and enveloped in a sack, laboriously borne to the edge of the silent stream.

There it was lost in the dark as the light moved to where it cast a limited, swinging illumination over the wall of a shed. It returned to the stiffly distended sack, and there followed the ring of metal on the iron-like earth. In the pale circle of the lantern a figure stooped and rose, a figure with an intent, furrowed countenance.

The digging took a long while, the frozen clods of earth fell with a scattering thud, the shadow of the hole deepened by imperceptible degrees.

Once the labor stopped, the sack was lowered into the ragged grave; but the opening was too shallow, and the rise and fall of the solitary figure recommenced.

The sack was finally covered from sight, from the appalling frigidity and s.p.a.ce of the sky, from the frozen surface of the earth wrapped in stillness, in night. The clods were sc.r.a.ped back into the hole, stamped into an integral ma.s.s; the spade obliterated all trace of what lay hidden beneath, returned to the clay from which it had been momentarily animated by the enigmatic, flitting spark of life.

The lantern retraced its path to the shed, to the porch; where, in a brief thread of light, in the shutting of a door, it disappeared.

XX

Gordon met Valentine Simmons squarely for the first time since the collapse of his laborious planning outside the post-office. The latter, with a senile and pleased chuckle, tapped him on the chest.

"Teach you to be provident, Gordon," he said in his high, rasping voice; "teach you to see further than another through a transaction; as far ain't near enough; most don't see at all."

The anger had evaporated from Gordon Makimmon's parched being: the storekeeper, he recognized, was sharper than all the rest of the County combined; even now the raddled old man was more acute than the young and active intelligences. He nodded, and would have pa.s.sed on, but the storekeeper, with a ponderous furred glove, halted him.

"We haven't had any satisfaction lately with the Stenton stage," he shrilled; "and I made out to ask--you can take it or leave it--if you'd drive again? It might be a kind of--he! he!--relax from your securities and investments."

Gordon, without an immediate reply, regarded him. He thought, in sudden approbation of a part, at least, of the past, that he could drive a stage better than any other man in a hundred, in a thousand; there, at least, no humiliating failure had overtaken his prowess with whip and reins. The old occupation, the monotonous, restful miles of road sweeping back under the wheels, the pleasant, casual detachment of the pa.s.sengers, the pride of accomplishment, irresistibly appealed to him.

Valentine Simmons' rheumy eyes interrogated him doubtfully above the fixed, dry color of his fallen cheeks.

"By G.o.d, Valentine!" Gordon exclaimed, "I'll do it, I'll drive her, and right, too. It takes experience to carry a stage fifty miles over these mountains, day and day; it takes a man that knows his horses, when to slack up on 'em and when to swing the leather ... I'm ready any time you say."

"The stage goes out from Greenstream to-morrow; you can take it the trip after. Money same as before. And, Gordon,--he! he!--don't you go and lend it out at four per cent; fifty's talking but seventy's good. Pompey knew the trick, he'd have dressed you down to an undershirt, Pompey would."

Gordon returned slowly, absorbed in new considerations, to his dwelling.

It was obvious that he could not live there alone and drive the Stenton stage; formerly Clare had attended to the house for him, but now there was no one to keep the stoves lit, to attend to the countless daily necessities. This was Tuesday--he would take the stage out on Thursday: he might as well get together a few necessities and close the place at once.

"I'll shut her right in," he said aloud in the empty, echoing kitchen.

He decided to touch nothing within. In the sitting room the swift obscurity of the closing shutters obliterated its familiar features--the table with the lamp and pink celluloid thimble, the phonograph, the faded photograph of what had been Mrs. Hollidew. The darkness spread to the bedroom that had been Lettice's and his: the curtained wardrobe was drawn, the bed lay smoothly sheeted with the quilt folded brightly at the foot, one of the many small gla.s.s lamps of the house stood filled upon the bureau. The iron safe was eclipsed, the pens upright in the gla.s.s of shot, the kitchen and s.p.a.ces beyond.

Finally, depositing an ancient bag of crumbling leather on the porch, he locked himself out. He moved the bag to the back of the buggy, and, hitching the horse into the worn gear, drove up the incline to the public road, to the village, without once turning his head.

XXI

He rose at five on Thursday and consumed a hasty breakfast by a blur of artificial light in the deserted hotel dining room. It was pitch black without, the air heavy with moisture, and penetrating. He led the horses from the shed under which he had hitched them to the stage, and climbed with his lantern into the long-familiar place by the whip. A light streamed from the filmy window of the post-office, falling upon tarnished nutcrackers and picks in a faded plush-lined box ranged behind the gla.s.s.

Gordon could see the dark, moving bulk of the postmaster within. The leather mail bags, slippery in the wet atmosphere, were strapped in the rear, and Gordon was tightening the reins when he was hailed by a man running over the road. It was Simmons' clerk.

"The old man says," he shot between labored breaths, "to keep a watch on Buck. Buckley's coming back with you to-morrow. He's been down to the hospital for a spell. There ain't liable to be anybody else on the stage this time of year."