"Maybe Brian Boru might have been proud of her for a daughter," he muttered, as he trudged back up the steps, "but I'll be dammed if I know whether I am or not!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE MANTLE OF THELISMER THORNTON

The fire on the Jo Quacca hills was checked at nightfall. Two hundred beaters and trenchers managed to fight it back and hold it in leash to feed on the slash of the timber operation. But, like a tiger confined in its cage, it had reached out through its bars and claimed victims. Three stands of farm buildings were in ruins.

Harlan Thornton, sooty and weary, left the fire-line as soon as he knew that the monster had been subdued. He rode about to rea.s.sure the owners that their losses would be made up by himself and his grandfather.

"Keep away from the lawyers," he counselled the losers. "They'll get half the money out of you if you hire them. We'll settle after appraisal."

The men that he talked to seemed sullen in spite of his a.s.surances. They seemed to be repressing taunts or reproaches merely in consideration of the fact that he was holding the purse-strings. He noted this demeanor, and feared to ask questions.

Clare Kavanagh rode with him; she had not left his side, even when he led his crews into perilous places and entreated her to keep back.

And they rode away together down the long stretch of highway from the hills to the village. Behind them, against the dusk, glowed the red, last signals of the dying fires: tree-trunks upraised like smouldering torches, the timbers of the falling buildings tumbling from their props and sending up showers of sparks. A pale sliver of new moon made the red of the fires even more baleful, and the two who rode together looked back and felt the obsession of something they had never experienced before.

"I am unhappy, Big Boy," sighed the girl. "We have never come back from our rides like this."

"It has been a wicked day for both of us, child."

"And you cannot call me child after to-day--so my father says." Her voice was still plaintive, but there was a hint of the old mischief there. "I'll be sixteen to-morrow--and I didn't know until to-day that I'd be so sorry that it is so. Ever since I was ten I've been wishing I could be eighteen without waiting for the years. But I don't know, now, Harlan. It seemed as though I'd be getting more out of living. I thought so." Tears were in her voice now. "It seems as though I'd grown up all of a sudden; and things aren't beautiful and happy and--and as they used to be--not any more! I've lost something, Harlan. And if growing up is losing so much, I don't want to grow up."

He listened indulgently and understood this protest of the child. Their horses walked slowly side by side, and the tired hounds trailed after them.

"The grown-ups do lose a lot of things out of life, little girl--things that mean a great deal in childhood. But keep your heart open, and other things will come."

"Perhaps when I get to be twenty-four years old and as big as you are I can talk that way, and believe it, too. But just now I'm only a girl that doesn't believe she's grown up, even if they do tell her so, and tell her she mustn't be a playmate any longer. And you are not to ride with me any more, and you are not to come to my house nor may I come to yours. That's what they say. What are we to do, then?"

She cried her question pa.s.sionately. He had no answer ready. Plat.i.tudes would not do for this child, he reflected, and to lecture her then even on the A B C's of the social code would be wounding her ingenuous faith.

"If this is the way it all turns out, and I can't have your friendship any longer, what is it that you're going to do or I'm going to do?" she insisted. "That's losing too much, just because one is grown up."

Tenderness surged in his heart toward this motherless girl--tenderness in which there was a new quality. But he had no answer for her just then. He did not understand his own emotions. He was as unsophisticated as she in the affairs of the heart. His man's life of the woods had kept him free from women. His friendship with this child, their rides, their companionship, had been almost on the plane of boy with boy; her character invited that kind of intimacy.

And so he wondered what to say; for her demand had been explicit, and she demanded candor in return.

At that moment he welcomed the appearance of even Ivus Niles. That sooty prophet of ill appeared around a bend in the road ahead. The twilight shrouded him, but there was no mistaking his stove-pipe hat and his frock-coat. He was leading his buck sheep, and the hounds rushed forward clamorously. Niles stopped in the middle of the road, and let them frolic about him and his emblematic captive.

"The dogs won't hurt you, Niles," Harlan a.s.sured him, spurring forward.

"I ain't afraid of dogs, I ain't afraid of wolves, not after what I've been through with the political Bengal tigers I've been up against to-day," Niles a.s.sured him, sourly. "And your grandfather is the old he one of the pack. You tell him--"

"You can take your own messages to my grandfather, Niles." He swung his horse to pa.s.s, the girl at his side, but the War Eagle threw up his hand commandingly.

"I've got a message for you, yourself, then, and you stay here and take it. He stole our caucus for you to-day, your grandfather did--"

"You don't mean to say I was nominated!"

"That's too polite a word, Mr. Harlan Thornton. I gave you the right one the first time. He stampeded our caucus by having that fire set on the Jo Quacca hills. Three sets of farm buildings offered up to the G.o.ds of rotten politics! That's a nice kind of sacrifice, Thornton's grandson!

It goes well with the crowd you're in with. It will smell well in the nostrils of the people of this State. You ought to be proud of being made a lawmaker in that way."

It was not reproach--it was insult, sneered in the agitator's bitterest tone.

"The property of three poor toilers of the soil laid flat in ashes, a town terrified by danger rushing down through the heavens like the flight of the war eagle," shouted Niles, declaiming after his accustomed manner, "and all to put you into a seat in the State House, where you can keep stealing the few things that your grandfather ain't had time or strength to steal! You've had your bonfire and your celebration--now go down and hoist the Star-Spangled Banner over 'The Barracks'--but you'd better hoist it Union down!"

Harlan dropped off his horse and strode to Niles. He seized him by the shoulder and shook him roughly, for the man had begun his oratory once more.

"Enough of that, Niles! Was I chosen in the caucus to-day? I want yes or no."

"Yes--and after three-quarters of the voters had been stampeded to fight that fire that was sweeping down on their property! And you--"

Harlan pushed him to one side, leaped upon his horse, and rode away.

The girl jumped her roan to his side.

"It's wicked, Harlan," she gasped, "wicked! I heard him! What are you going to do?"

That was another of her questions that he found it hard to answer. "I'm going to find my grandfather, Clare, and I'm going in a great hurry.

Come, I can't talk now, little girl!"

They galloped down the long hill to the bridge, their horses neck and neck.

"The last ride as playmates!" she cried, as they started. Her voice broke, pathetically. He did not reply. He was too furiously angry to trust himself in conversation at that moment, and he rode like a madman, knowing that she could keep pace with him.

They drew rein at the end of the bridge.

"It's only a bit of a run for you now, little girl. I'll keep on home."

She put her hand out to him and held him for a moment.

"I'm afraid you'll go away to be a big man, after all, Harlan," she said, dolefully.

"Go in this way? What are you talking about, child?" he demanded, choking, his fury getting possession of him. "I've been disgraced--abused. I'll--but I mustn't talk to you now--the wicked words might slip out."

But she would not loose his hand just then.

"I sent for you to come home because I heard father say that politics is wicked business. But I didn't know it was as wicked as this. It's no wonder they can't get the good men like you to go into it. If they could it would be better, wouldn't it?"

Even in his distress it occurred to him that out of the mouth of this child was proceeding quaint and unconscious wisdom.

"I wish it wasn't wicked," she went on, wistfully. "I've been thinking as I rode along that I've been selfish. I'd like to see you a big man like some of those I've read about. It was selfish of me to say I didn't want you to get out of the woods and be a big man."

"I couldn't be one," he protested.