you?"
Once more he nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Again the sight of his
emotion braced her to make her tone more matter-of-fact than ever.

"Now, then," she went on, "if you consult the map you'll see that an old
wood-road runs through the forest, and comes out at the station of Saint
Jean du Clou Noir. There you can get a train to Quebec.... The road begins
nearly opposite the two little islands I spoke of.... I don't think
you'll have any difficulty in finding it.... It's about seven miles to the
station.... You could walk that easily enough through the night.... I've
marked a very good train on the time-table--a train that stops at Saint
Jean du Clou Noir at seven thirty-five ..."

A choking sensation warned her to stop, but she retained the power to
smile. The sun had set, and the slow northern night was beginning to close
in. Across the lake the mountains of Vermont were receding into deep
purple uniformity, while over the crimson of the west a veil of filmy
black was falling, as though dropped in mid-flight by the angel of the
dark. Here and there through the dead-turquoise green of the sky one could
detect the pale glimmer of a star.

"You must go now," she whispered. He began to move the canoe into the
water.

"I haven't thanked you," he began, unsteadily, holding the canoe by the
bow, "because you wouldn't let me. As a matter of fact, I don't know how
to do it--adequately. But if I live at all, my life will belong to you.
That's all I can say. My life will be a thing for you to dispose of. If
you ever have need of it--"

"I shan't have," she said, hastily, "but I'll remember what you say."

"Thanks; that's all I ask. For the present I can only hope for the chance
of making my promise good."

She said nothing in reply, and after a minute's silence he entered the
canoe. She steadied it herself to allow him to step in. It was not till he
had done so and had knelt down with the paddle in his hand that, moved by
a sudden impulse she leaned to him and kissed him. Then, releasing the
light craft, she allowed it to glide out like a swan on the tiny bay. In
three strokes of the paddle it had passed between the low, enclosing
headlands and was out of sight. When she summoned up strength to creep to
an eminence commanding the lake, it was already little more than a speck,
moving rapidly northward, over the opal-tinted waters.




VI



On finding himself alone, and relatively free, Ford's first sensation was
one of insecurity. Having lived for more than a year under orders and
observation, he had lost for the moment some of his natural confidence in
his own initiative. Though he struck resolutely up the lake he was aware
of an inner bewilderment, bordering on physical discomfort, at being his
own master. For the first half-hour he paddled mechanically, his
consciousness benumbed by the overwhelming strangeness. As far as he was
able to formulate his thought at all he felt himself to be in process of a
new birth, into a new phase of existence. In the darkening of the sky
above him and of the lake around there came upon him something of the
mental obscurity that might mark the passage of a transmigrating soul.
After the subdued excitement of the past weeks, and especially of the past
hour, the very regularity of his movements now lulled him into a passivity
only quickened by vague fears. The noiseless leaping forward of the canoe
beneath him heightened his sense of breaking with the past and hastening
onward into another life. In that life he would be a new creature, free to
be a law unto himself.

A new creature! A law unto himself! The ideas were subconscious, and yet
he found the words framing themselves on his lips. He repeated them
mentally with some satisfaction as a cluster of lights on his left told
him he was passing Greenport. Other lights, on a hill, above the town and
away from it, were probably those of Judge Wayne's villa. He looked at
them curiously, with an odd sense of detachment, of remoteness, as from
things belonging to a time with which he had nothing more to do. That was
over and done with.

It was not until a steamer crossed his bows, not more than a hundred yards
in front of him, that he began to appreciate his safety. Under the
protection of the dark, and in the wide loneliness of the waters, he was
as lost to human sight as a bird in the upper air. The steamer--zigzagging
down the lake, touching at little ports now on the west bank and now on
the east--had shot out unexpectedly from behind a point, her double row of
lights casting a halo in which his canoe must have been visible on the
waves; and yet she had passed by and taken no note of him. For a second
such good-fortune had seemed to his nervous imagination beyond the range
of hope. He stopped paddling he almost stopped breathing, allowing the
canoe to rock gently on the tide. The steamer puffed and pulsated, beating
her way directly athwart his course. The throbbing of her engines seemed
scarcely louder than that of his own heart. He could see people moving on
the deck, who in their turn must have been able to see him. And yet the
boat went on, ignoring him, in tacit acknowledgment of his right to the
lake, of his right to the world.

His sigh of relief became almost a laugh as he began again to paddle
forward. The incident was like a first victory, an assurance of victories
to come. The sense of insecurity with whith he had started out gave place,
minute by minute, to the confidence in himself which was part of his
normal state of mind. Other small happenings confirmed his self-reliance.
Once a pleasure party in a rowboat passed so near him that he could hear
the splash of their oars and the sound of their voices. There was
something almost miraculous to him in being so close to the commonplace of
human fellowship. He had the feeling of pleasant inward recognition that
comes from hearing one's mother-tongue in a foreign land. He stopped
paddling again, just to catch meaningless fragments of their talk, until
they floated away into silence and darkness. He would have been sorry to
have them pass out of ear-shot, were it not for his satisfaction in being
able to go his way unheeded.

On another occasion he found himself within speaking distance of one of
the numerous small lakeside hotels. Lights flared from open doors and
windows, while from the veranda, the garden, and the little pier came
peals of laughter, or screams and shouts of young people at rough play.
Now and then he could catch the tones of some youth's teasing, and the
shrill, pretended irritation of a girl's retort. The noisy cheerfulness of
it all reached his ears with the reminiscent tenderness of music heard in
childhood. It represented the kind of life he himself had loved. Before
the waking nightmare of his troubles began he had been of the unexacting
type of American lad who counts it a "good time" to sit in summer evenings
on "porches" or "stoops" or "piazzas," joking with "the boys," flirting
with "the girls," and chattering on all subjects from the silly to the
serious, from the local to the sublime. He was of the friendly,
neighborly, noisy, demonstrative spirit characteristic of his age and
class. He could have entered into this circle of strangers--strangers for
the most part, in all probability, to one another--and in ten minutes'
time been one of them. Their screams, their twang, their slang, their
gossip, their jolly banter, and their gay ineptitude would have been to
him like a welcome home. But he was Norrie Ford, known by name and
misfortune to every one of them. The boys and girls on the pier, the
elderly women in the rocking-chairs, even the waitresses who, in
high-heeled shoes and elaborate coiffures, ministered disdainfully to the
guests in the bare-floored dining-room, had discussed his life, his trial,
his sentence, his escape, and formed their opinions upon him. Were it
possible for them to know now that he was lurking out there in the dark,
watching their silhouettes and listening to their voices, there would be
such a hue and cry as the lake had not heard since the Indians sighted
Champlain on its banks.

It was this reflection that first of all stirred the current of his deep,
slow resentment. During the fifteen months since his arrest he had been
either too busy, or too anxious, or too sorely puzzled at finding himself
in so odd a position, to have leisure for positive anger. At the worst of
times he had never lost the belief that the world, or that portion of the
world which concerned itself with him, would come to recognize the fact
that it was making a mistake. He had taken his imprisonment and his trial
more or less as exciting adventures. Even the words of his sentence lost
most of their awfulness in his inner conviction that they were empty
sounds. Of the confused happenings on the night of his escape his clearest
memory was that he had been hungry, while he thought of the weeks spent in
the cabin as a "picnic." Just as good spirits had seldom failed him, so
patience had rarely deserted him. Such ups and downs of emotion as he had
experienced resulted in the long run in an increase of optimism. In the
back of his slow mind he kept the expectation, almost the intention, of
giving his anger play--some time; but only when his rights should have
been restored to him.

But he felt it coming on him now, before he was prepared for it. It was
taking him unawares, and without due cause, roused by the chance
perception that he was cut off from rightful, natural companionship.
Nothing as yet had brought home to him the meaning of his situation like
the talk and laughter of these lads and girls, who suddenly became to him
what Lazarus in Abraham's bosom was to Dives in his torment.

A few dips of the paddle took him out of sight and sound of the hotel; but
the dull, indignant passion remained in his heart, finding outward vent in
the violence with which he sent the canoe bounding northward beneath the
starlight. For the moment it was a blind, objectless passion, directed
against nothing and no one in particular. He was not skilled in the
analysis of feeling, or in tracing effect to cause. For an hour or two his
wrath was the rage of the infuriated animal roaring out its pain,
regardless of the hand that has inflicted it. Other rowing-parties came
within hearing distance, but he paid them no attention; lake steamers hove
in sight, but he had learned how to avoid them; little towns, dotted at
intervals of a few miles apart, lit up the banks with the lights of homes,
but their shining domesticity seemed to mock him. The birth of a new
creature was a painful process; and yet, through all his confused
sensations and obscure elemental suffering, he kept the conviction that a
new creature was somehow claiming its right to live.

Peace of mind came to him gradually, as the little towns put out their
lights, and the lake steamers laid up in tiny ports, and the
rowing-parties went home to bed. In the smooth, dark level of the lake and
in the stars there was a soothing quality to which he responded before he
was aware of doing so. The spacious solitude of the summer night brought
with it a large calmness of outlook, in which his spirit took a measure of
comfort. There was a certain bodily pleasure, too, in the regular monotony
of paddling, while his mental faculties were kept alert by the necessity
of finding points by which to steer, and fixing his attention upon them.
So, by degrees, his limited reasoning powers found themselves at work,
fumbling, with the helplessness of a man whose strong points are physical
activity and concentration of purpose, for some light on the wild course
on which he was embarked.

Perhaps his first reflection that had the nature of a conclusion or a
deduction was on the subject of "old Wayne." Up to the present he had
regarded him with special ill will, owing to the fact that Wayne, while
inclining to a belief of his innocence, had nevertheless lent himself to
the full working of the law. It came to Ford now in the light of a
discovery that, after all, it was not Wayne's fault. Wayne was in the grip
of forces that deprived him to a large extent of the power of voluntary
action. He could scarcely be blamed if he fulfilled the duties he was
appointed to perform The real responsibility was elsewhere. With whom did
it lie? For a primitive mind like Ford's the question was not an easy one
to answer.

For a time he was inclined to call to account the lawyers who had pleaded
for the State. Had it not been for their arguments he would have been
acquitted. With an ingenuity he had never supposed to exist they had
analyzed his career--especially the two years of it spent with Uncle
Chris--and showed how it led up to the crime as to an inevitable
consequence. They seemed familiar with everything he had ever done, while
they were able to prove beyond cavil that certain of his acts were
inspired by sinister motives which he himself knew to have sprung from
dissipation at the worst. It was astonishing how plausible their story
was; and he admitted that if anybody else had been accused, he himself
would probably have been convinced by it. Certainly, then, the lawyers
must have been to blame--that is, unless they were only carrying out what
others had hired them to do.

That qualifying phrase started a new train of thought. Mechanically, dip
by dip, swaying gently with each stroke as to a kind of rhythm, he drove
the canoe onward, while he pondered it. It was easy to meditate out here,
on the wide, empty lake, for no sound broke the midnight stillness but the
soft swish of the paddle and the skimming of the broad keel along the
water. It was not by any orderly system of analysis, or synthesis, or
syllogism, that Ford, as the hours went by, came at last to his final
conclusion; and yet he reached it with conviction. By a process of
elimination he absolved judge, jury, legal profession, and local public
from the greater condemnation. Each had contributed to the error that made
him an outlaw, but no one contributor was the whole of the great force
responsible. That force, which had set its component parts to work, and
plied them till the worst they could do was done, was the body which they
called Organized Society. To Ford, Organized Society was a new expression.
He could not remember ever to have heard it till it was used in court.
There it had been on everybody's lips. Far more than old Chris Ford
himself it was made to figure as the injured party. Though there was
little sympathy for the victim in his own person, Organized Society seemed
to have received in his death a blow that called for the utmost avenging.
Organized Society was plaintiff in the case, as well as police, jury,
judge, and public. The single human creature who could not apparently gain
footing within its fold was Norrie Ford himself. Organized Society had
cast him out.

He had been told that before, and yet the actual fact had never come home
to him till now. In prison, in court, in the cabin in the woods, there had
always been some human hand within reach of his own, some human tie, even
though it was a chain. However ignoble, there had been a place for him.
But out here on the great vacant lake there was an isolation that gave
reality to his expulsion. The last man left on earth would not feel more
utterly alone.

For the first time since the night of his escape there came back to him
that vague feeling of deserting something he might have defended, that
almost physical sensation of regret at not having stood his ground and
fought till he fell. He began to understand now what it meant. Dip,
splash, dip, splash, his paddle stirred the dimly shining water, breaking
into tiny whirlpools the tremulous reflection of the stars. Not for an
instant did he relax his stroke, though the regret took more definitive
shape behind him. Convicted and sentenced, he was still part of the life
of men, just as a man whom others are trying to hurl from a tower is _on_
the tower till he has fallen. He himself had not fallen; he had jumped
off, while there was still a chance of keeping his foothold.

It required an hour or two of outward rhythmic movement and confused
inward feeling to get him ready for his next mental step. He had jumped
off the tower; true; but he was alive and well, with no bones broken. What
should he do now? Should he try to tear the tower down? The attempt would
not be so very ludicrous, seeing he should only have to join
those--socialists, anarchists, faddists--already at the work. But he
admired the tower, and preferred to see is stand. If he did anything at
all, it would be to try to creep back into it.

The reflection gave still another turn to his thoughts. He was passing
Burlington by this time--the electric lamps throwing broad bands of light
along the deserted, up-hill streets, between the sleeping houses. It was
the first city he had seen since leaving New York to begin his useless
career in the mountains. The sight moved him with an odd curiosity, not
free from a homesick longing for normal, simple ways of life. He kept the
canoe at a standstill, looking hungrily up the empty thoroughfares, as a
poor ghost may gaze at familiar scenes while those it has loved are
dreaming. By-and-by the city seemed to stir in its sleep. Along the
waterside he could hear the clatter of some belated or too early wayfarer;
a weird, intermittent creaking told him that the milk-cart of provincial
towns was on its beat; from a distant freight-train came the long,
melancholy wail that locomotives give at night; and then drowsily, but
with the promptness of one conscientious in his duty, a cock crew. Ford
knew that somewhere, unseen as yet by him, the dawn was coming, and--again
like a wandering ghost--sped on.

But he had been looking on the tower which the children of men had
builded, and had recognized his desire to clamber up into it again. He was
not without the perception that a more fiery temperament than his
own--perhaps a nobler one--would have cursed the race that had done him
wrong, and sought to injure it or shun it. Misty recollections of
proud-hearted men who had taken this stand came back to him.

"I suppose I ought to do the same," he muttered to himself humbly; "but
what would be the use when I couldn't keep it up?"

Understanding himself thus well, his purpose became clearer. Like the ant
or the beaver that has seen its fabric destroyed, he must set patiently to
work to reconstruct it. He suspected a poor-spirited element in this sort
of courage; but his instinct forced him within his limitations. By dint of
keeping there and toiling there he felt sure of his ability to get back to
the top of the tower in such a way that no one would think he lacked the
right to be on it.

But he himself would know it. He shrank from that fact with the repugnance
of an honest nature for what is not straightforward; but the matter was
past helping. He should be obliged to play the impostor everywhere and
with every one. He would mingle with men, shake their hands, share their
friendships, eat their bread, and accept their favors--and deceive them
under their very noses. Life would become one long trick, one daily feat
of skill. Any possible success he could win would lack stability, would
lack reality, because there would be neither truth nor fact behind it.

From the argument that he was innocent he got little comfort. He had
forfeited his right to make use of that fact any longer. Had he stayed
where he was he could have shouted it out till they gagged him in the
death-chair. Now he must be dumb on the subject forevermore. In his
disappearance there was an acceptation of guilt which he must remain
powerless to explain away.

Many minutes of dull pain passed in dwelling on that point. He could work
neither back from it nor forward. His mind could only dwell on it with an
aching admission of its justice, while he searched the sky for the dawn.

In spite of the crowing of the cock he saw no sign of it--unless it was
that the mountains on the New York shore detached themselves more
distinctly from the sky of which they had seemed to form a part. On the
Vermont side there was nothing but a heaped-up darkness, night piled on
night, till the eye reached the upper heavens and the stars.

He paddled on, steadily, rhythmically, having no sense of hunger or
fatigue, while he groped for the clew that was to guide him when he
stepped on land. He felt the need of a moral programme, of some pillar of
cloud and fire that would show him a way he should be justified in taking.
He expressed it to himself by a kind of aspiration which he kept
repeating, sometimes half aloud:

"O Lord, O Holy One! I want to be a man!"

Suddenly he struck the water with so violent a dash that the canoe swerved
and headed landward.

"By God!" he muttered, under his breath, "I've got it.... It isn't my
fault.... It's theirs.... They've put me in this fix.... They've brought
this dodging, and shifting, and squirming upon me.... The subterfuge isn't
mine; it's theirs.... They've taken the responsibility from me.... When
they strip me of rights they strip me of duties.... They've forced me
where right and wrong don't exist for me any more.... They've pitched me
out of their Organized Society, and I've had to go.... Now I'm free ...
and I shall profit by my freedom."

In the excitement of these discoveries he smote the waters again. He
remembered having said something of the sort on the night of his interview
with Wayne; but he had not till now grasped its significance. It was the
emancipation of his conscience. Whatever difficulties he might encounter
from outside, he should be hampered by no scruples from within. He had
been relieved of them; they had been taken from him. Since none had a duty
toward him, he had no duty toward any. If it suited his purposes to juggle
with men, the blame must rest upon themselves. He could but do his best
with the maimed existence they had left to him. Self-respect would entail
observance of the common laws of truth and honesty, but beyond this he
need never allow consideration for another to come before consideration
for himself. He was absolved from the necessity in advance. In the region
in which he should pass his inner life there would be no occupant but
himself. From the world where men and women had ties of love and pity and
mutual regard they had cast him out, forcing him into a spiritual limbo
where none of these things obtained. It was only lawful that he should
make use of such advantages as his lot allowed him.

There was exaltation in the way in which he grasped this creed as his rule
of life; and looking up suddenly, he saw the dawn. It had taken him
unawares, stealing like a gray mist of light over the tops of the Vermont
hills, lifting their ridges faintly out of night, like the ghosts of so
many Titans. Among the Adirondacks one high peak caught the first glimmer
of advancing day, while all the lower range remained a gigantic silhouette
beneath the perceptibly paling stars. Over Canada the veil was still down,
but he fancied he could detect a thinner texture to the darkness.

Then, as he passed a wooded headland, came a sleepy twitter, from some
little pink and yellow bill barely withdrawn from its enfolding wing--to
be followed by another, and another, and another, till both shores were
aquiver with that plaintive chirrup, half threnody for the flying
darkness, half welcome to the sun, like the praise of a choir of children
roused to sing midnight matins, but still dreaming. Ford's dip was softer
now, as though he feared to disturb that vibrant drowsiness; but when,
later, capes and coves began to define themselves through the gray
gloaming, and, later still, a shimmer of saffron appeared above the
eastern summits, he knew it was time to think of a refuge from the
daylight.

The saffron became fire; the fire lit up a heaven of chrysoprase and rose.
Where the lake had been as a metal mirror for the stars, it rippled and
dimpled and gleamed with the tints of mother-of-pearl. He knew the sun
must be on the farther slope of the Green Mountains, because the face they
turned toward him was dense in shadow, like the unilluminated portion of
the moon. On the western shore the Adirondacks were rising out of the bath
of night as dewy fresh as if they had been just created.

But the sun was actually in the sky when he perceived that he no longer
had the lake to himself. From a village nestling in some hidden cove a
rowboat pulled out into the open--a fisherman after the morning's catch.
It was easy enough for Ford to keep at a prudent distance; but the
companionship caused him an uneasiness that was not dispelled before the
first morning steamer came pounding from the northward. He fixed his
attention then on a tiny islet some two or three miles ahead. There were
trees on it, and probably ferns and grass. Reaching it, he found himself
in a portion of the lake forest-banked and little frequented. Pastures and
fields of ripening grain on the most distant slopes of Vermont gave the
nearest token of life. All about him there was solitude and
stillness--with the glorious, bracing beauty of the newly risen day.

Landing with stiffened limbs, he drew up the canoe on a bit of sandy
beach, over which sturdy old bushes, elder and birch, battered by the
north winds, leaned in friendly, concealing protection. He himself would
be able to lie down here, among the tall ferns and the stunted
blueberry-scrub, as secluded and secure as ever he had been in prison.

Being hungry and thirsty, he ate and drank, consulting his map the while
and fixing approximately his whereabouts. He looked at his little watch
and wound it up, and fingered the pages of the railway guide he found
beside it.

The acts brought up the image of the girl who had furnished him with these
useful accessories to flight. For lack of another name he called her the
Wild Olive--remembering her yearning, not wholly unlike his own, to be
grafted back into the good olive-tree of Organized Society. With some
shame he perceived that he had scarcely thought of her through the night.
It was astounding to recollect that not twelve hours ago she had kissed
him and sent him on his journey. To him the gulf between then and now was
so wide and blank that it might have been twelve weeks, or twelve months,
or twelve years. It had been the night of the birth of a new creature, of
the transmigration of a soul; it had no measurement in time, and threw all
that preceded it into the mists of prenatal ages.

These thoughts passed through his mind as he made a pillow for himself
with his white flannel jacket, and twisted the ferns above it into a
shelter from the flies. Having done this, he stood still and pondered.

"Have I really become a new creature?" he asked himself.

There was much in the outward conditions to encourage the fancy, while his
inner consciousness found it easy to be credulous. Nothing was left of
Norrie Ford but the mere flesh and bones--the least stable part of
personality. Norrie Ford was gone--not dead, but gone--blasted,
annihilated stamped out of existence, by the act of Organized Society. In
its place the night of transition had called up some one else.

"But who? ... Who am I? ... What am I?"

Above all, a name seemed required to give him entity. It was a repetition
of his feeling about the Wild Olive--the girl in the cabin in the woods.
Suddenly he remembered that, if he had found a name for her, she had also
found one for him--and that it was written on the steamer ticket in his
pocket. He drew it out, and read:

"Herbert Strange."

He repeated it at first in dull surprise, and then with disapproval. It
was not the kind of name he would have chosen. It was odd, noticeable--a
name people would remember He would have preferred something commonplace
such as might be found for a column or two in any city directory. She had
probably got it from a novel--or made it up. Girls did such things. It was
a pity, but there was no help for it now. As Herbert Strange he must go on
board the steamer, and so he should be called until--

But he was too tired to fix a date for the resumption of his own name or
the taking of another. Flinging himself on his couch of moss and trailing
ground-spruce, with the ferns closing over him, and the pines over them,
he was soon asleep.





Part II

Strange




VII



Dressed in overalls that had once been white, he was superintending the
stacking of wool in a long, brick-walled, iron-roofed shed in Buenos Aires
when the thought came to him how easy it had all been. He paused for a
minute in his work of inspection--standing by an open window, where a
whiff of fresh air from off the mud-brown Rio de la Plata relieved the
heavy, greasy smell of the piles of unwashed wool--just to review again
the past eighteen months. Below him stretched the noisy docks, with their
row of electric cranes, as regular as a line of street lamps, loading or
unloading a mile of steamers lying broadside on, and flying all flags but
the Stars and Stripes. Wines, silk, machinery, textiles were coming out;
wheat, cattle, hides, and beef were pouring in. In the confusion of
tongues that reached him he could, on occasions, catch the tones of
Spaniard, Frenchman, Swede, and Italian, together with all the varieties
of English speech from Highland Scotch to Cockney; but none of the
intonations of his native land. The comparative rarity of anything
American in his city of refuge, while it added to his sense of exile,
heightened his feeling of security. It was still another of the happy
circumstances that had helped him.

The strain under which he had lived during this year and a half had
undoubtedly been great; but he could see now that it had been inward
strain--the mental strain of unceasing apprehension, the spiritual strain
of the new creature in casting off the old husk, and adapting itself not
merely to new surroundings, but to a new life. This had been severe. He
was not a rover, and still less an adventurer, in any of the senses
attached to that word. His instincts were for the settled, the
well-ordered, and the practical. He would have been content with any
humdrum existence that permitted his peaceable, commercially gifted soul
to develop in its natural environment. The process, therefore, by which
Norrie Ford became Herbert Strange, even in his own thoughts, had been one
of inner travail, though the outward conditions could not have been more
favorable. Now that he had reached a point where his more obvious
anxieties were passing away, and the hope of safety was becoming a
reality, he could look back and see how relatively easy everything had
been.

He had leisure for reflection because it was the hour for the men's midday
meal and siesta. He could see them grouped together--some thirty-odd--at
the far end of the shed--sturdy little Italians, black-eyed, smiling,
thrifty, dirty, and contented to a degree that made them incomprehensible
to the ambitious, upward-toiling American set over them. They sat, or
lounged, on piles of wood, or on the floor, some chattering, most of them
asleep. He had begun like them. He had stacked wool under orders till he
had made himself capable of being in command. He had been beneath the
ladder; and though his foot was only on the lowest rung of it even now, he
was satisfied to have made this first step upward.

He could not be said to have taken it to his own surprise, since he had
prepared himself for it, and for other such steps to follow it, knowing
that they must become feasible in time. He had been given to understand
that what the Argentine, in common with some other countries, needed most
was neither men nor capital, but intelligence. Men were pouring in from
every corner of the globe; capital was keen in looking for its
opportunity; but for intelligence the demand was always greater than the
supply.

The first intimation of such a need had come to him on the _Empress of
Erin_, in mid-Atlantic, by a chance opportunity of the voyage. It was on
one of the first days of liberty when he had ventured to mix freely with
his fellow-passengers. Up to the present he had followed the rule of
conduct adopted at the little Canadian station of Saint Jean du Clou Noir.
He went into public when necessary, but no oftener. He did then what other
people did, in the way to attract the least attention. The season favored
him, for amid the throngs of early autumn travellers, moving from country
back to town, or from seaside resorts to the mountains he passed
unnoticed. At Quebec he was one of the crowd of tourists come to see the
picturesque old town. At Rimouski he was lost among the trainful of people
from the Canadian maritime provinces taking the Atlantic steamer at a
convenient port. He lived through each minute in expectation of the law's
tap on his shoulder; but he acquired the habit of nonchalance. On
shipboard it was a relief to be able to shut himself up in his cabin--his
suite!--feigning sickness, but really allowing his taut nerves to relax,
as he watched first the outlines of the Laurentides, and then the shores
of Anticosti, and lastly the iron-black coast of Labrador, follow each
other below the horizon. Two or three appearances at table gave him
confidence that he had nothing to fear. By degrees he allowed himself to
walk up and down the deck, where it was a queer sensation to feel that the
long row of eyes must of necessity be fixed upon him. The mere fact that
he was wearing another man's clothes--clothes he had found in the cabin
trunk that had come on board for him--produced a shyness scarcely
mitigated by the knowledge that he was far from looking grotesque.

Little by little he plucked up courage to enter the smoking-room where the
tacit, matter-of-course welcome of his own sex seemed to him like
extraordinary affability. An occasional word from a neighbor, or an
invitation to "take a hand at poker," or to "have a cocktail," was like an
assurance to a man who fancies himself dead that he really is alive. He
joined in no conversations and met no advances, but from the possibilities
of doing so he would go back to his cabin smiling.

The nearest approach to pleasure he allowed himself was to sit in a corner
and listen to the talk of his fellow-men. It was sometimes amusing, but
oftener stupid; it turned largely on food, with irrelevant interludes on
business. It never went beyond the range of topics possible to the
American or Canadian merchants, professional men, politicians, and
saloon-keepers, who form the rank and file of smoking-room society on any
Atlantic liner; but the Delphic worshipper never listened to Apollo's
oracle with a more rapt devotion than Ford to this intercommunion of
souls.

It was in this way that he chanced one day to hear a man speaking of the
Argentine. The remarks were casual, choppy, and without importance, but
the speaker evidently knew the ground. Ford had already noticed him,
because they occupied adjoining steamer-chairs--a tall, sallow Englishman
of the ineffectual type, with sagging shoulders, a drooping mustache, and
furtive eyes. Ford had scarcely thought of the Argentine since the girl in
the cabin had mentioned it--- now ten or twelve days ago; but the
necessity of having an objective point, and one sufficiently distant
turned his mind again in that direction.

"Did I hear you speaking yesterday of Buenos Aires?" he ventured to ask,
on the next occasion when he found himself seated beside his neighbor on
deck.

The Englishman drew his brier-root pipe from his mouth, glanced sidewise
from the magazine he was reading, and jerked his head in assent.

"What kind of place did it seem to you?"

"Jolly rotten."

Pondering this reply, Ford might have lost courage to speak again had he
not caught the eye of the Englishman's wife as she leaned forward and
peeped at him across her husband's brier-root. There was something in her
starry glance--an invitation, or an incitement--that impelled him to
continue.

"I've been told it's the land of new opportunities."

The Englishman grunted without looking up. "I didn't see many."

"May I ask if you saw any?"

"None fit for a white man."

"My husband means none fit for a--gentleman. I liked the place."

From the woman's steely smile and bitter-sweet tones Ford got hints of
masculine inefficiency and feminine contempt which he had no wish to
follow up. He knew from fragments of talk overheard in the smoking-room
that they had tried Mexico, California, and Saskatchewan in addition to
South America. From the impatience with which she shook the foot just
visible beneath the steamer-rug, while all the rest of her bearing feigned
repose, he guessed her humiliation at returning empty to the land she had
left with an Anglo-Saxon's pioneering hope, beside a husband who could do
nothing but curse luck. To get over the awkward minute he spoke hurriedly.

"I've heard of a very good house out there--Stephens and Jarrott. Do you
happen to know anything about them?"

"Wool," the Englishman grunted again. "Wool and wheat. Beastly brutes."

"They were horribly impertinent to my husband," the woman spoke up, with a
kind of feverish eagerness to have her say. "They actually asked him if
there was anything he could do. Fancy!"

"Oh, I know people of that sort put a lot of superfluous questions to
you," Ford said. But the lady hurried on.

"As to questions, there are probably fewer asked you in Argentine than
anywhere else in the world. It's one of the standing jokes of the place,
both in Buenos Aires and out in the Camp. Of course, the old Spanish
families are all right; but when it comes to foreigners a social catechism
wouldn't do. That's one of the reasons the place didn't agree with us. We
wanted people to know who we'd been before we got there; but that branch
of knowledge isn't cultivated."

"More beastly Johnnies in the Argentine passin' under names not their
own," said the man, moved to speak, at last, "than in all the rest of the
world put together. Heard a story at the Jockey Club--lot of beastly
native bounders in the Jockey Club--heard a story at the Jockey Club of a
little Irish Johnny who'd been cheatin' at cards. Three other asses
kicked him out. Beggar turned at the door and got in his lick of revenge.
'Say boys, d'yez know why they call me Mickey Flanagan out here? Because
it's me na-ame.' Beggar 'd got 'em all there."

Ford nerved himself to laugh, but made an excuse for rising.

"Oh, there's lots of cleverness among them," the lady observed, before he
had time to get away. "In fact, it's one of the troubles with the
country--for people like us. There's too much competition in brains. My
husband hit the right nail on the head when he said there was no chance
for any beastly Johnny out there, unless he could use his bloomin'
mind--and for us that was out of the question."

Ford never spoke to them again, but he meditated on their words, finding
himself at the end of twenty-four hours in possession of a new light.
"I've got to use my bloomin' mind." The words seemed to offer him the clew
to life. It was the answer to the question, "What should I do _there_?"
which positively asked itself, whenever he thought of seeking a refuge in
this country or in that. It came as a discovery that within himself was
the power that would enable him to make the best of any country, and the
country to make the best of him.

He could hardly have explained how his decision to try Argentina had
become fixed. Until he saw whether or not he should get successfully
ashore at Liverpool there was a paralysis of all mental effort; but once
on the train for London his plans appeared before him already formed. The
country where few questions were asked and the past had no importance was
clearly the place for him. Within a fortnight he was a second-class
passenger on board the Royal Mail Steam Packet _Parana_, bound for Buenos
Aires--thus fulfilling, almost unexpectedly to himself, the suggestion
made by the girl in the Adirondack cabin, whose star, as he began to
believe, must rule his fate.

He thought of her now and then, but always with the same curious sense of
remoteness--or unreality, as of a figure seen in a dream. Were it not for
the substantial tokens of her actuality he possessed she would have seemed
to him like the heroine of a play. He would have reproached himself for
disloyalty if the intensity of each minute as he had to meet it had not
been an excuse for him. The time would come when the pressure of the
instant would be less great, and he should be able to get back the emotion