Almost was Mary Louise tempted to accept and stay, he looked so helpless, in such terrific danger, standing there blinking at them, his eyes vaguely trying to focus, and so mildly blue. His head with the graying hair so closely cropped gave him an odd appearance of boyishness, to which the smart little bow tie added not a little. He was trim, dapper, in spite of the fact that his standing collar was a size or two too large; in spite, too, of the tiny, well-trimmed goatee. He looked like a faun in trouble. With a shadow of distress crossing his face, he gave ground and backed away, the lamp tipping perilously in his grasp. Joe sprang forward and rescued it, setting it on the porch railing.

"We'd better be going, I reckon, Aunt Lorry. Miss Susie's all alone,"

he explained.

Mary Louise recovered herself with a start. What could she be thinking of, letting Joe make her excuses for her? Somehow she felt a sharp little wave of irritation against him for it. She hastened to add, however, "Oh, no, Mrs. Mosby. Thank you so much. I really must be getting home. Aunt Susie _will_ be worried. It's quite dark."

The little woman murmured something, and then, "And how is your Aunt Susie? I must call. Give her my love, be sure," all in one breath.

"I will. You must," agreed Mary Louise, and turned to go. And as she did so she caught a most lugubrious expression on the face of Uncle Buzz, a gradual lengthening of all the muscles on one side of the face, resolving itself finally into a prodigious wink, deliberate and malign. Fortunately, it pa.s.sed in the darkness the regard of the partner of his joys and sorrows and roused no answering spark.

They made their adieus and pa.s.sed on down the shaded avenue on foot.

Mary Louise gave an odd little shiver as they walked out into the shadow, past the circle of the lamp on the railing. Uncle Buzz--Mr.

Mosby--had seemed always just a piece of background, a harmless bit of scenery, a catalogue of amenities, a husk, a sh.e.l.l--she wondered how many other things. And now he was cropping out with a personality, had desires, problems, secret plottings, all behind the mask--a Machiavelli.

She was aroused by a chuckle from Joe. The chuckle jarred. She turned and frowned at him in the darkness. Their shoes crunched in the small gravel of the roadway and then directly they came to the gate and turned along a wooden walk.

"Uncle Buzz's sure ripe," Joe's voice came out of nowhere. "Been ripe for over two days. Time he was being picked," he continued.

"Joe!"

"Oh, don't get shocked. You aren't, you know. It's nothin' new!" He paused a moment as if to consider. "Reckon Aunt Lorry's busy with the pickin' now. She'll hate you," he added as an afterthought.

"What for?" asked Mary Louise.

"For seein' him." Joe chuckled again and relapsed into silence.

They walked the rest of the way without speaking, around one corner past the old meeting house, beneath the low-branched maples, up to the McCallum gate. Mary Louise opened it and held it open, her arm barring the way.

"Well! To-morrow's another day," said Joe, apparently disregarding it.

"It's just as well," replied Mary Louise. "I'm not quite sure the army's helped you much, Joe."

"The army? Helped me?--I don't get you," he tried to see her eyes, puzzled.

"You're flippant--about things that are not trivial."

"Oh!" he laughed. "It doesn't always rain when it clouds. Wait till we get into some real heavy weather. What's the harm, anyway? We should bother."

"That's not the only thing. You were making fun of Zenie's baby--just like it was a little animal. They might find out some day _how_ you quoted from the Bible. Of course, there's no real harm done--but I don't like it."

Joe slid his hand softly along the top bar of the wooden gate till it touched hers. She drew quietly away. "Perhaps!" he said. "The old world runs along pretty well whether we bother or whether we don't. It doesn't make much difference what we do or what we don't. The old fellow's heart's all right, I reckon, and as for the n.i.g.g.e.rs!--just as good a name as Loraine. My Lord!"

She stood silent, in thought. A faint reddish glow came to them from the curtained gla.s.s door of the ell sitting room. "Just a little sermon to start us out right--back to work. It _is_ a serious business, you know, Joe--reconstruction! It's a big task. Let's not fall down on it or be trivial--shirk any of the responsibilities.

Good-night," she added suddenly, giving her hand. "It's been a glorious day. I'll see you--in the city."

They parted, and he could hear her sc.r.a.pe her feet at the edge of the porch. The stars were winking through the branches of the maples and somewhere in the darkness a gutter was keeping up a monotonous dripping. He pa.s.sed the corner and turned back to the road with the overlapping elms, walking with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his eyes watching the road. "Humph!" he said after a while, out loud, and then began to whistle softly to himself, shuffling with his feet on the gravel in time to his whistling as he walked.

CHAPTER III

Joe Hooper was not a handsome man. He was of that type so often seen in the South, tall, gangly, and very dark, with a sallow complexion and a general air of inertness that always misleads the stranger to the type. Insignificant looking, perhaps, but they will be found, on later acquaintance, to be worming themselves into general regard without effort. The law claims many of them and occasionally the raising of stock and the tilling of soil, though usually as proprietors only, it is true. Sometimes they are swept into strange waters where, if they float about long enough, they manage by some inherent mordant capacity to colour the entire complexion to their own. There are exceptions, of course.

Joe's father had lost his farm through foreclosure. It killed him.

This fact and the presence of some alien strain sent Joe to Louisville which had some of the elements of the melting pot and some traditional elements of opportunity. He was twenty-four when he made this change.

For two years he had resisted fusion and escaped opportunity. He had fallen into a job with the Bromley Plow Company and risen to the exalted status of stock clerk when the war came. The war, or rather the idea of the war, had proved a great relief to his imagination and he had enlisted at once, as a matter of fact, on the second day. This notion of service had been the one thing stronger than the influence of Mary Louise, which had been, it must be confessed, the main reason for his sticking as long as two years. The Plow Works had seemed a rather tedious road to a _Restoration_ and the _Barebones Parliament_ that sat in the inner office had seemed inexorably determined to make that road as devious and difficult as possible. He had escaped gladly.

But the war had come to an end with him still in service on this side and he had at length returned with many things unsatisfied. One of these had been his idea about Mary Louise. She, too, had been swept into the vortex, into a mild eddy of it. The Red Cross had found her useful in the maintenance of a tea room for the enjoyment of the men at Camp Taylor. It had sounded innocent enough, but upon Joe's return he had found that she had in some way been galvanized. She was one of the war's changes; he, unfortunately, not so.

He did not know clearly just what he had expected upon his return, but then he had not expected the kind of return that he had experienced.

There had been nothing epochal in it. Even his job was waiting for him; it seemed to him even the same routine details. One file of correspondence that he had found upon his desk that first morning had had a singularly familiar look. It would always stick in his memory.

First there had been a moment of high antic.i.p.ation at the station with the taxi-men calling out the names of the hotels, and stretched across Main Street he remembered seeing a large banner flanked with bunting and with "Welcome Home" inscribed thereon. Then he had watched the familiar landmarks as he rolled southward in the street car with an odd little feeling of "h.e.l.lo, there you are again"; and the Works, looming up in the distance at the end of the line, with its tall brick stack, was a sort of culmination. Not exactly a culmination, either, for he was conscious of a jarring note. Then the oak-panelled lobby, with the time clock, a sombre monitor, took just another grain of carefree satisfaction from the sum total of his feelings; and finally--his desk, and the worn, thumb-edged file! The first letter therein! "Recent shipments castings EE23, G143, F47, and J29 have come to us unannealed. J29 shows fins and sprues; the hole in EE23 is in most cases completely closed; and G143 and F47 are so rough that they will not fit into their respective sockets without machining. Will return same via local freight to-day." That was all. An Homeric welcome into very deep water! Such had been Joe Hooper's homecoming.

As for Mary Louise:--well, there had been nothing quite so definite.

He had met her at the tea room--there had been one final week of closing after his arrival--and he had not quite made up his mind about her before she had left for Bloomfield, beyond a certain stiffening of fibre, an aloofness that was new, and a business-like air that seemed to say "Come across," that he did not exactly like. But then a week is not a very long time to get down to bed-rock with a person, especially when that person is busy ten hours out of the day and thinking the other fourteen about the ten that have just pa.s.sed.

Four weeks had rolled around. It was the first of May. Joe sat at his desk absently fingering a stack of paper slips. They were reports from the various a.s.sembling shops advising him of the number of bolts of certain styles and sizes used in those respective shops that day. He was supposed to post these amounts in a stock ledger against the various sizes and styles and note the approaching shortages wherever they came. There were between fifty and a hundred slips. The window was open opposite his desk and a delightful breeze was curling up the edges of some papers which had been thoughtfully weighted down. Joe gazed, heavy lidded, through the window. An automobile, a long, slouchy black one, went whirling by with the tonneau full of girls.

Their veils were streaming and fluttering out behind, many-hued and flimsy. They were all gazing at the office windows as they pa.s.sed.

"One might think it was a reformatory or the county workhouse or something," he thought. He turned dully to the stack of reports and began to count them. He felt stale--flat.

He heard his name called, and turning, saw Mr. b.o.n.e.r standing at the corner of the part.i.tion looking at him over his spectacles. Mr. b.o.n.e.r was a tall, heavy man with nervous twitchings and anxious eyes that were eternally shifting about beneath their brows for something disturbing. He was responsible for keeping the warehouse filled, the warehouse whose books Joe kept, and it was his further duty to keep it filled as cheaply as possible. The threat of failure in either was what caused that eternal shifting. It was a sort of high-tension vigilance.

Joe rose to his feet, obeying the monosyllabic summons, and followed Mr. b.o.n.e.r around the part.i.tion. Mr. b.o.n.e.r rated a private office, where he could worm information, trade secrets, and occasional concessions from travelling salesmen. There was nothing social about the place. As Joe turned the part.i.tion corner and stood in the doorway, the old man had already seated himself at the desk. His fat hips completely filled the chair. He was apparently staring at something on the desk before him, but Joe could catch the occasional shifting glimmer of his eyes at the corners and knew he was looking at him. Suddenly Mr. b.o.n.e.r turned to the inner corner of the desk, started to speak, strangled, and with difficulty recovered himself.

His voice, when finally he did recover it, was so loud that it startled even himself, and just as suddenly he lowered it to confidential pitch. Joe had been a witness to this procedure many times before but it never failed to interest him. In fact, Mr. b.o.n.e.r was himself a study. There was an old-fashioned golf cap perched on the top of his graying head and his close-clipped moustache was silvery white, in marked contrast to the pink-and-white mottle of his cheeks, which hung down over his collar in folds, like some dependable old foxhound's. One hand lay fat and puffy on the desk, clutching a pencil in a nervous grip. And the middle of him--he seemed to bulk and fill out the entire chair--so incongruous with his little feet and mincing gait! It was as though as much as possible of his body were seeking to escape that all-devouring tension in relapse. How familiar it all was! Even during those months at camp the picture would recur and Joe would laugh softly to himself. Poor old duffer! He was a product of the plant just as much as ploughs and tillage implements were. How soon would _he_ begin to show the indelible imprint?

The voice rose sharply. Joe realized that Mr. b.o.n.e.r was speaking to him--was speaking with great feeling. He came back to realities with a jerk.

"Out of carriage bolts two one half one quarter," he was saying. It was probably the second time he had said it. He choked with emotion and had to seek refuge again in the receptacle on the floor at the left-hand corner of his desk.

Joe seemed unmoved.

"Book shows been out since April nineteenth." The old man turned to observe the effect of his d.a.m.nation.

Joe quivered but showed no sign.

"Make out memorandum cut down one thousand five one half by one quarter." He spoke it explosively, keeping a furtive eye on that left-hand corner. "Have a surplus eleven thousand of them."

Joe guiltily felt that the old man knew the stock books better than he himself. A little spot of red appeared in each cheek.

Mr. b.o.n.e.r shoved two sheets of yellow paper across the desk toward him. "I've reordered replacement one thousand five one half, cancellation one thousand two one half." This with an air of satisfaction. There was nothing more to be done, patently. "Waste stock," Mr. b.o.n.e.r muttered.

Joe turned to go.

Mr. b.o.n.e.r exploded again. This was not all, apparently. "Blue annealed sheets," he called, sputtered, gripped the arms of his chair convulsively, recovered, and sat glaring helplessly.

Joe availed himself of the opportunity. "Have a memo for you on the desk." In spite of himself his voice sounded nervous. "Just out of two sizes to-day." He waited.

The old man turned and bent his head over his work. _That_ was over.