To-night Richard Travis was lonely. His supper tray had not been removed. He lit a cigar and picked up a book--it was Herbert Spencer, and he was soon interested.

Ten minutes later an octoroon house-girl, with dark Creole eyes, and bright ribbons in her hair, came in to remove the supper dishes. She wore a bright-colored green gown, cut low. As she reached over the table near him he winced at the strong smell of musk, which beauties of her race imagine adds so greatly to their aesthetic _status-quo_.

She came nearer to him than was necessary, and there was an attempted familiarity in the movement that caused him to curve slightly the corner of his thin, nervous lip, showing beneath his mustache. She kept a half glance on him always. He smoked and read on, until the rank smell of her perfume smote him again through the odor of his cigar, and as he looked up she had busied around so close to him that her exposed neck was within two feet of him bent in seeming innocence over the tray. With a mischievous laugh he reached over and flipped the hot ashes from his cigar upon her neck. She screamed affectedly and danced about shaking off the ashes. Then with feigned maidenly piquancy and many reproachful glances, she went out laughing good humoredly.

He was good natured, and when she was gone he laughed boyishly.

Good nature is one of the virtues of impurity.

Still giggling she set the tray down in the kitchen and told Cook-mother Charity about it. That worthy woman gave her a warning look and said:

"The frisk'ness of this new gen'ration of n.i.g.g.e.rs makes me tired.

Better let Ma.r.s.e d.i.c.k alone--he's a dan'g'us man with women."

In the dining-room Travis sat quiet and thoughtful. He was a handsome man, turning forty. His face was strong, clean shaved, except a light mustache, with full sensual lips and an unusually fine brow. It was the brow of intellect--all in front. Behind and above there was no loftiness of ideality or of veneration. His smile was constant, and though slightly cold, was always approachable. His manner was decisive, but clever always, and kind-hearted at times.

Contrary to his habit, he grew reminiscent. He despised this kind of a mood, because, as he said, "It is the weakness of a fool to think about himself." He walked to the window and looked out on the broad fields of The Gaffs in the valley before him. He looked at the handsomely furnished room and thought of the splendid old home. Then he deliberately surveyed himself in the mirror. He smiled:

"'Survival of the fittest'--yes, Spencer is right--a great--great mind. He is living now, and the world, of course, will not admit his greatness until he is dead. Life, like the bull that would rule the herd, is never ready to admit that other life is great. A poet is always a dead rhymester,--a philosopher, a dead dreamer.

"Let Spencer but die!

"Tush! Why indulge in weak modesty and fool self-depreciation? Even instinct tells me--that very lowest of animal intellectual forces--that I survive because I am stronger than the dead.

Providence--G.o.d--whatever it is, has nothing to do with it except to start you and let you survive by overcoming. Winds you up and then--devil take the hindmost!

"It is brains--brains--brains that count--brains first and always.

This moral stuff is fit only for those who are too weak to conquer. I have accomplished everything in life I have ever undertaken--everything--and--by brains! Not once have I failed--I have done it by intellect, courage--intuition--the thing in one that speaks.

"Now as to things of the heart,"--he stopped suddenly--he even scowled half humorously. It came over him--his failure there, as one who, sweeping with his knights the p.a.w.ns of an opponent, suddenly finds himself confronting a queen--and checkmated.

He walked to the window again and looked toward the northern end of the valley. There the gables of an old and somewhat weather-beaten home sat in a group of beech on a rise among the foothills.

"Westmoreland"--he said--"how dilapidated it is getting to be!

Something must be done there, and Alice--Alice,"--he repeated the name softly--reverently--"I feel--I know it--she--even she shall be mine--after all these years--she shall come to me yet."

He smiled again: "Then I shall have won all around. Fate? Destiny?

Tush! It's living and surviving weaker things, such for instance as my cousin Tom."

He smiled satisfactorily. He flecked some cotton lint from his coat sleeve.

"I have had a hard time in the mill to-day. It's a beastly business robbing the poor little half-made-up devils."

He rang for Aunt Charity. She knew what he wished, and soon came in bringing him his c.o.c.ktail--his night-cap as she always called it,--only of late he had required several in an evening,--a thing that set the old woman to quarreling with him, for she knew the limit of a gentleman. And, in truth, she was proud of her c.o.c.ktails. They were made from a recipe given by Andrew Jackson. For fifty years Cook-mother Charity had made one every night and brought it to "old marster" before he retired. Now she proudly brought it to his grandson.

"Oh, say Mammy," he said as the old woman started out--"Carpenter will be here directly with his report. Bring another pair of these in--we will want them."

The old woman bristled up. "To be sure, I'll fix 'em, honey. He'll not know the difference. But the licker he gits in his'n will come outen the bottle we keep for the hosses when they have the colic. The bran' we keep for gem'men would stick in his th'oat."

Travis laughed: "Well--be sure you don't get that horse brand in mine."

CHAPTER III

JUD CARPENTER

An hour afterwards, Travis heard a well-known walk in the hall and opened the door.

He stepped back astonished. He released the k.n.o.b and gazed half angry, half smiling.

A large dog, brindled and lean, walked complacently and condescendingly in, followed by his master. At a glance, the least imaginative could see that Jud Carpenter, the Whipper-in of the Acme Cotton Mills, and Bonaparte, his dog, were well mated.

The man was large, raw-boned and brindled, and he, also, walked in, complacently and condescendingly.

The dog's ears had been cropped to match his tail, which in his infancy had been reduced to a very few inches. His under jaw protruded slightly--showing the trace of bull in his make-up.

That was the man all over. Besides he had a small, mean, roguish ear.

The dog was cross-eyed--"the only cross-eyed purp in the worl'"--as his master had often proudly proclaimed, and the expression of his face was uncanny.

Jud Carpenter's eastern-eye looked west, and his western-eye looked east, and the rest of the paragraph above fitted him also.

The dog's pedigree, as his master had drawlingly proclaimed, was "p'yart houn', p'yart bull, p'yart cur, p'yart terrier, an' the rest of him--wal, jes' dog."

Reverse this and it will be Carpenter's: Just dog, with a sprinkling of bull, cur, terrier, and hound.

Before Richard Travis could protest, the dog walked deliberately to the fireplace and sprang savagely on the helpless old setter dreaming on the rug. The older dog expostulated with terrific howls, while Travis turned quickly and kicked off the intruder.

He stood the kicking as quietly as if it were part of the programme in the last act of a melodrama in which he was the villain. He was kicked entirely across the room and his head was driven violently into the half-open door of the side-board. Here it came in contact with one of Cook-mother's freshly baked hams, set aside for the morrow's lunch. Without even a change of countenance--for, in truth, it could not change--without the lifting even of a hair in surprise, the brute seized the ham and settled right where he was, to lunch.

And he did it as complacently as he had walked in, and with a satisfied growl which seemed to say that, so far as the villain was concerned, the last act of the melodrama was ending to his entire satisfaction.

Opening a side door, Travis seized him by the stump of a tail and one hind leg--knowing his mouth was too full of ham to bite anything--and threw him, still clutching the ham, bodily into the back yard.

Without changing the att.i.tude he found himself in when he hit the ground, the brindled dog went on with his luncheon.

The very cheek of it set Travis to laughing. He closed the door and said to the man who had followed the dog in: "Carpenter, if I had the nerve of that raw-boned fiend that follows you around, I'd soon own the world."

The man had already taken his seat by the fire as unaffectedly as had the dog. He had entered as boldly and as indifferently and his two deep-set, cat-gray cross-eyes looked around as savagely.

He was a tall, lank fellow, past middle age, with a crop of stiff, red-brown hair, beginning midway of his forehead, so near to an equally s.h.a.ggy and heavy splotch of eyebrows as to leave scarce a finger's breadth between them.

He was wiry and shrewd-looking, and his two deep-set eyes seemed always like a leopard's,--walking the cage of his face, hunting for some crack to slip through. Furtive, sly, darting, rolling hither and thither, never still, comprehensive, all-seeing, malicious and deadly shrewd. These were the eyes of Jud Carpenter, and they told it all.

To this, add again that they looked in contrary directions.

As a man's eye, so is the tenor of his life.

Yet in them, now and then, the twinkle of humor shone. He had a conciliatory way with those beneath him, and he considered all the mill hands in that cla.s.s. To his superiors he was a frowning, yet daring and even presumptuous underling.