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Intruders in Eden

Judd waited until the bus started up again. He watched it as it rolled away, spitting good-by at him with its gas fumes. He continued to watch it as it rounded the road curve and disappeared from sight, rupturing his last tie with the world.

Then he carried his bags and parcels in through the old gate pillars of stone. He placed them side by side on the grass where the boughs of a crab-apple tree dappled his blanket roll with shadows. A bluebottle fly, humming about his side of bacon that smelled slightly of creosote, made him think of a plane heard through mountain clouds.

He stood for a moment, listening to the trill of a song sparrow from the top of a stone cedar. He translated that run of notes into “Sweet—sweet—Canada—Canada—Canada!” Then he crossed to the “For Sale” sign on a near-by post. He had trouble in wrenching it free. But he laughed as he dropped it face down on the grass.

His face became more meditative as he stood on the ridge slope, staring down over his new home. This was his land now, the whole alluringly unkempt forty acres of it, to do what he liked with. It was his own, with no one to question his coming and going—his own to work and reclaim. Here, at last, he would find peace. It would be his island of refuge, hidden away from a world of men gone mad and women who no longer remembered the meaning of loyalty.

Here, he repeated, would be peace, with no one to question his coming and going, cut off from that outer crazy world of blood and tears and tumult. Here he could hide away and lick his wounds and wait for the healing forces of time to make him whole again. It was a stroke of luck, he felt, that he should have stumbled on this old farm with its twenty acres cleared and its twenty in fruit, and its tumble-down lake-front cottage hidden away behind its grove of whispering pines.

Yet it was something more than luck that had brought him back to the alluvial plains of Kent and the scenes of his lost youth. It was, he assumed, the homing instinct that always brings an old dog back to his bed. For even in the blasted olive groves of Crete he had thought of those sloping orchard lands along the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. Even after his fish-boat escape from the tortured island, and during his nights of fever in a Cairo hospital ward, he had thought of those Kentish farm lands as a place of quietude, a place where the fall of petals could make one forget the fall of bombs.

The moroseness went out of his face as he stared down over the sun-bathed orchard slope. It came home to him how he had hungered for the familiar smell of fresh-turned loam, the sharp aroma of sun-bleached pine needles, the consoling quietness of green fields and leafy coverts where birds nested and sang and life once more flowed slowly and sanely about one.

“Pine Brae,” Judd said aloud. That, old Scullard had said in the Chamboro law office where the papers had been so precipitately signed, was what the place had been called by its earlier owners. “Pine Brae,” Judd repeated as his eye rested on the dark arc of pines that stood out against the egg-shell blue of Lake Erie. He liked the sound of it. But he liked even more the smell of spring in the air. For spring was the time of hope. And until he had stumbled on those secluded forty-odd acres crying out for reclamation, there had been very little hope in his scheme of things.

Judd stiffened his shoulders and breathed deeper as he continued to gaze down the hill slope that fell away toward the misty blue water of the lake, where a fish hawk planed lazily through the azure. A mile out he could see, through a Corot-like haze, the vague L of a pile-driver, at the end of a row of pound-stakes. It floated there, ghostly and shadowlike on the pallid blue water, the slow rise and fall of its weight-chug making only a muffled throb in the quiet air. To the east he could see the opal green of Rond-Eau, framed in the curving darker green of rushes and wild rice. Beyond that confusion of intermingling greens with their occasional quicksilver flash of open water, he could see the prolonging line of Pointe Aux Pins, so low and miragelike in the pearl-misted air that he could not tell where the land finally melted into the skyline. Even the coal boat, nosing slowly in toward the harbor there, looked ghostlike in the nebulous light. Its phantasmal plume of smoke, blending into the pale blue, looked like a battalion of tired clouds losing themselves in sleep.

It was all gratifyingly peaceful. It was the sort of peace, he told himself as he studied the nearer mottled terraces of the treetops edged with the yellow-green of willow buds along the lake front, that he had been hungering for. The sloping peach orchard about him seemed to be drinking in the pale and brooding sunlight. Already, on the old trees he could see a showing of buds, swelling buds with a promise of pink in them. He found the same promise in the darker-wooded apple orchard still farther down the slope, where the crowded red of the still unopened blossoms gave a tinge of warmth to the greening treetops, as though they stood bathed in the afterglow of ghostly sunsets.

In three weeks, he knew, all that orchard slope would be a sea of bloom, a bee-haunted riot of white and red and pink, overhung with a perfume that he could remember from his boyhood days on a Raleigh farm. It was, he told himself as he gathered up an armful of his parcels and started down the orchard lane, like coming back to his lost youth.

There would, of course, be work for him there. Three years of neglect showed in everything about him. The orchard trees were unpruned and the fields were weed-grown. A board had fallen away from the barn end and the mow door hung, like a broken wing, on one twisted hinge. The berry patches were a tangle of canes and the cedar hedge that sheltered the house garden from the north winds was untrimmed and high pointed. Even the house itself, he observed as he rounded the pine grove through which he could see the red splash of a brick chimney, was in a pretty ruinous condition. The roof would have to be re-shingled and the sagging front veranda that faced the lake would have to be straightened up. That cool and ample veranda, he decided, was what he liked best about the old house. He’d cut away some of the shrubbery and take out the rotting cedar posts that supported the floor and put in cement piers. He’d——

But Judd stopped short, arrested by a discovery that held him silent on the grass-grown driveway. For on the edge of the undulating veranda floor, where a Navajo blanket had been spread out along the broken boards, he saw a woman asleep in the sun.

She lay there motionless and utterly relaxed. Her body, which looked boneless in the softened contours of sleep, seemed to be drinking in the sunlight that fell over her. It was the loose-legged slacks she wore, Judd assumed, that made him think of a sailor washed ashore. Yet there was no mistaking her sex.

She was a young woman, he saw, neither thin nor full-bodied. But the paleness of her skin gave her a fragile look, which was accentuated by the faint bluish shadows under her closed eyes, where the dark tangle of lashes lent a further duskiness to her face. It was a sensitive and yet a self-assured face, with a touch of imperiousness in the curve of the fluted and slightly parted lips.

But Judd resented her presence there, lying so possessively across the threshold of his new home. It seemed a threat to his proprietorship. She had been washing her hair, apparently, for clustered about her on the floor boards he could see a crumpled towel and a cake of toilet soap, a comb and brush, a pigskin cigarette case and a metal lighter. The last, for some reason, deepened his hostility toward the intruder. Yet his face softened again as he stood looking down at her tousled head. Her hair, he observed, was quite dark, and so short that it gave a suggestion of boyishness, for all the disorder in which it fell about her passive face. The skin of her bare shoulders was very smooth. They looked almost quince-colored in the sunlight, though the swell of the breast that lost itself under the edge of her brassiere was a gardenia-white faintly threaded with blue. And more than ever Judd resented her there in any such over-revealing undress.

Yet he hesitated about waking her, she lay so defenseless and helpless-looking in the slanting sunlight. It would, he remembered as his eyes rested on those sun-drenched shoulders, be embarrassing for them both. He decided to go back to the road gate for the rest of his duffel.

But even as he backed away, she opened her eyes and sat up.

“I’m sorry,” she said with unexpected matter-of-factness. Men, apparently, meant little to her. Her movements were almost abstracted as she reached for a blue woolen jumper and pulled it down over her head. “Who are you?” she asked when the bobbed head had emerged from the swathing wool.

Judd’s laugh was brief and brittle.

“I’m the new owner of this farm,” he announced.

It seemed to take a little time for her to absorb the full meaning of that.

“Then I’ve no business here,” she said as she straightened her jumper and smoothed down her hair. She looked over her shoulder at the house front. “It’s been empty so long. And I like being alone.”

“Why?” he asked, trying in vain to fit her into a background where she didn’t belong. There was something urban and assured about the unruffled face with its faint aura of abstraction.

She laughed a little, and her laugh was as brittle as Judd’s had been.

“I’m a war wreck,” she said, quite without emotion.

“What does that mean?” questioned Judd, conscious of a new dignity about her as she rose to her feet.

Her assessing gaze, before she answered, rested on his lean and solemn face. What she found there, apparently, made it worth while to explain herself.

“I was a nurse in England, and then an ambulance driver along the east coast. They bombed us, near Dover. And then they machine-gunned what was left of us. And then they bombed the hospital where we were stowed away. It did something to my nerves. So they sent me home.”

“Shell-shocked?” Judd suggested.

“Perhaps,” she agreed. “A little. But I got this, too.”

Her face remained abstracted as she pulled aside her jumper neck and showed a wound scar where the pallid gold of the shoulder flesh faded into the creamy white threaded with blue. He could see how the cicatricial tissue had built up about the wound and left it like a small volcano, circular and purplish in color, except where it was threaded with small ridges of white. The thought that the body of a woman, and a woman busy on errands of mercy, could be confronted with violence like that sent a small tingle of protest through his own body. But war, he remembered, was anything but chivalrous.

He resisted a wayward temptation to touch the wound where the surrounding flesh was so smooth and soft. He stood, startled, in fact, that any such impulse had come to him.

“It—it doesn’t bother you any more?” he asked with a casualness that was largely defensive.

“Oh, no; not a bit,” was the other’s equally casual answer as she stooped to pick up her comb and brush. “But I can’t stand the sound of guns or sudden noises. That’s why I like to come here. It’s always been so quiet and peaceful.”

That statement held Judd arrested for a moment.

“We seem to be in the same boat,” was his retarded yet curt comment.

“In the same boat?” she echoed, her eyes narrowing with perplexity.

Judd nodded.

“I’m back from the front myself.”

“What front?” she asked. The quickened gaze with which she swept him seemed seeking for some physical disability which she failed to find.

Judd, conscious of that inspection, laughed a little.

“No, it wasn’t lead I was slinging. It was merely ink. My job was to cover the Near East fighting for the Interstate Press. That took me through the fall of Greece and then over to the Crete debacle. But I got too far behind our line, in the mix-up, and the Germans picked me up.”

“That meant a prison camp,” observed the other, with a small movement of understanding.

“Not exactly,” Judd explained. “But it wasn’t altogether a picnic. You see, they got me just after I’d given my coat to a wounded English flier. And I’d been foolish enough, ten minutes later, to take the tunic off a dead soldier who didn’t have any legs left. That coat wasn’t doing him any good, of course. And I needed it. But a half-drunk Hun officer wouldn’t swallow my story. He simplified the situation by ordering me shot as a spy.”

Judd was unable to read any horror in the other’s eyes. All he saw was the momentary winged flutter of her lips. And it struck him as odd, as he studied the molded corners of those lips, that he should be thinking that she had a very beautiful mouth.

“You mean you had to face a firing squad?”

“I did,” Judd acknowledged. “And there wasn’t much fun in it. That’s why I don’t like guns myself.”

“Naturally,” said the other. “But you weren’t a belligerent?”

“I tried to tell them I was only a correspondent. But they wouldn’t listen to me. And things move pretty fast at a time like that. They had me against a wall, with the firing squad lined up, when a couple of Blenheims dropped down and blitzed their camp.”

“Our blessed Blenheims,” said the woman from the front.

“Yes, your blessed Blenheims,” agreed the other. “For they gave me a chance to slip aside and hide away in the hills for a couple of weeks. Then I crawled down to the coast and got away in a fishing boat. But bad water and rotten food and body lice gave me typhus and six weeks in a Cairo hospital.”

“It’s not pleasant,” the young woman beside him quietly affirmed.

“It’s not pleasant,” he as quietly agreed.

The smile that twisted his lips was a small but comprehending one. He knew the secret of understatement like that. It was the protective effort, as instinctive as an eye squint at the open sun, to see small in retrospect what had been overtorturing in actuality.

The woman at his side sat for a moment immured in her own thoughts.

“Is that why you came here?” she finally asked.

That, he felt, was none of her business.

“Are you the only person in the world who’s looking for a little peace?” he was prompted to challenge.

“I suppose not,” she said with a ghost of a smile. “But it seems strange you should be turning your back on the world.”

“It’s such a crazy world,” Judd retorted. “It strikes me, at the moment, as just about hopeless.”

Her slow head shake was a sign of denial.

“It’ll straighten out, in time,” she protested. “It seems to have pulled through a good many calamities since it began.”

“What makes you think it’ll straighten out?” demanded the refugee from the front.

“It’s got to,” she protested, “or there’s nothing left to live for.”

Judd’s morose gaze rested on the level blue line of the lake.

“Well, our finger in the dike isn’t going to do much good. You can’t stop that bloody flood any more than I can.” His gaze slewed about to the slender body of his companion bathed in the appeasing warmth of the spring sunlight. “And in the meantime we’ve got our own worthless carcasses to consider.”

His companion’s gaze became remote.

“Yes, one has oneself to think of,” she echoed as she rose to her feet.

Judd saw, for the first time, the bicycle leaning against the rain barrel at the veranda end. A vague feeling of deprivation went through him as he watched her bundle up her possessions and strap them to the wire carrier on the handle bars. He made his interest in the bicycle an excuse for drawing nearer the stooping and slender figure.

“We don’t see many of these in this neck of the woods,” he observed with a head nod toward the wheel.

“I got used to them in England,” she explained. “They made army life a little more endurable. Most of the nursing sisters had their own bikes. Cycling was about the only off-duty fun we had. But one had to be careful, of course, about shell holes.”

Her eyes, for a moment, once more became ruminative. Then she drew a deeper breath and gazed about at her newer world of sun-clad peace.

“By the way, you mustn’t use that well water,” she said with a glance toward the rusted pump at the house end. “There are rabbits in it—dead rabbits. You’ll get good water from the spring, halfway down the cliff there.”

Judd looked to where she was pointing. Then his glance went back to the gaping well platform. There was, plainly, work a-plenty awaiting him.

“That stove in your kitchen doesn’t draw well,” she added as she straightened her wheel. “I think it’s swallows’ nests in the chimney. But I couldn’t get up there, of course.”

Judd wondered why her hooded brow, in the sunlight, should remind him of his print of Sargent’s “Hosea.”

“You seem to know the old place pretty well,” he ventured.

She nodded assent to that, without smiling.

“There’s a cat I’ve been trying to tame. It must have been left by the last tenants. It’s grown quite wild and keeps alive by killing birds and rabbits. You’ll find their bones under the veranda there.”

“Couldn’t you tame her?” Judd asked.

“I might have, in time. But she doesn’t seem to look for kindness any more.”

He wondered if any second meaning could lurk in that speech.

“Isn’t it worth another try?” he found himself saying.

“I’ll have to leave that to you. Good luck!”

He stopped her as she started away.

“This looks too much like an eviction. And I don’t even know your name.”

Her musing eyes studied him. They were, he realized, singularly honest eyes. But they were, clouded by an indefinable look of tragedy.

“What difference would it make?” she demanded. “I’ll not be bothering you.”

But she was already bothering him, he realized. She seemed, of a sudden, the only point of life in that empty and silent place.

“You’ll want to know if I tame your wild-cat,” he suggested. Her smile, at that, wiped away the sadness from her face, a sadness touched with uncertainty. Life, plainly enough, had not been easy on her.

“Are you going to be alone here?” she asked with a glance down at his hand luggage. It was his initials and the “N.Y.C.” on his suitcase which seemed to hold her attention.

“Quite alone, thank God,” Judd said. Her quick look up, at the fervency in that reply, prompted him to go on. “I got bombed myself, when I landed in New York.”

It was plain that she failed to get his meaning. And he stood grateful that she asked for no explanation of a confession which should never have been made.

“And you’re actually going to farm this land?” she inquired. The note of incredulity in her voice annoyed him.

“I didn’t come here to pick peach blossoms,” he said with punitive brusqueness.

If that hurt her a little, she refused to show it. Her gaze merely wandered about the sagging house front, the weed-grown gardens and the tangled shrubbery of the hill slope.

“That should keep you good and busy,” she quietly acknowledged.

“Will you be a neighbor of mine?” he questioned as she stood silent beside her wheel. He liked the Flying-Victory poise of her shoulders and the tender hollow that the afternoon sun accentuated just under her cheekbone. And he no longer resented her as an intruder on his seclusion.

“Me?” she said with a note of surprise, as though her thoughts had been elsewhere. “No; I’m billeted on a country minister at Buckhorn. But he has asthma and seven children, and his wife doesn’t seem to approve of women who smoke and wear slacks.”

“It doesn’t sound so hot,” said Judd.

“It isn’t,” she agreed. “But beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Then why do you stick it?” he questioned.

“That’s what I ask myself, now I’m feeling stronger.” Her gaze went out to the great sweep of pale blue water that melted into the southern skyline. “I think it must have been the lake kept me anchored here. I once had the happiest summer of my life on that lake.”

The note of regret in her voice was echoed by Judd when he spoke.

“And we’re always fools enough to think the old setting can bring back the old felicity!”

That brought her glance back to his face.

“No, it doesn’t always work,” she slowly admitted.

“Then why don’t you try a setting with less asthma and animosity?”

Her shoulder movement seemed both casual and listless.

“I’ve been thinking of that. But I rather wanted to see spring break over this beautiful country.” A faraway look came into her eyes. “And it’s not always easy to pull up stakes when you don’t quite know what you’re heading for.”

“Why don’t you?” asked Judd. He watched her as she took a cigarette from the pigskin case and lighted it. The thing that surprised him was that she seemed so very much alive.

“I’m the only one left,” she explained with a curt laugh. “The one brother I had came over to bring me home and we were torpedoed in mid-Atlantic. He died before we could get into the boats. But on the fifth day the Swedish freighter Stureholm picked us up and brought us to Halifax. It’s not nice sitting in water up to your knees.”

“No, it’s not nice,” Judd agreed. Five days in a wave-lashed open boat, he told himself, could make the day-by-day trials of life seem rather trivial. “And I suppose you lost everything.”

“Almost everything,” she agreed with a flicker of a smile that impressed him as stemming more from valor than from diffidence. “All I had were the things that had been shipped back to Canada after I’d been reported dead.”

“Reported dead?” he echoed.

“That was earlier,” she quietly explained, “when I was helping with the wounded after Dunkirk. We’d a Thames excursion-boat pretty well crowded with broken bodies. When they blew our stern off somebody gave me a life belt and I was picked up by a trawler, a trawler that carried me on to Scotland. And before I got back they had me classed as a casualty.”

“You’ve sure had your share of wallops,” Judd admitted.

She made no immediate reply to that.

“It’s rather odd,” she finally observed, “what being reported dead does to you. It seems to shut and lock the door on everything you’ve done in the past.”

“Which can be a mighty good thing now and then,” commented her companion.

“Except that sometimes it gives you the feeling of being very much alone.”

His smile was more fraternal than pitying.

“I suppose it does,” he acknowledged. “And as far as I can see we’re both at the end of the same rope.”

“But you’ve something to live for,” she retorted, though her expression, a moment later, suggested that she regretted that emergence from the impersonal. He could see her shrug repeated as she turned away and tightened the strap of her carrier.

Her face had cleared by the time she looked up at him.

“You have work to do,” she announced with a smile of understanding, “and I’ve taken up too much of your time.”

The occasion, he felt, called for a prompt denial of that. Yet he stood silent as she moved away along the curving driveway. The one thing he wanted, he reminded himself, was to be alone there.

“Good luck,” she called back over her shoulder as she swung into the saddle and pedaled briskly up the drive that circled the pine grove.

Judd stood watching her until she passed out of sight between the orchard trees. He demanded his final gift of solitude, yet her going, for some reason, seemed to leave an empty place in the sunlight. Equally empty seemed the house when he stepped in through the broken door and inspected the rooms with their dust and mouse dirt, the lint-covered floors and the paltry remnants of furniture. Rodents, he saw, had eaten holes in the mattress on the bed with one leg missing. Some of the plaster had fallen from a water-stained ceiling. Two bricks held up one corner of the pitted kitchen stove, and a scattering of pots and pans were covered with rust.

The lady had been right, he acknowledged as he went from room to room forcing open the windows and letting the fresh air of spring flow through that tomb of mustiness; there’d be things to keep him good and busy. But he’d manage it, in some way.

He’d manage it, he repeated as he stepped outside and soothed himself with the vista of Lake Erie stretching in a wide blue sweep from east to west. Then a rabbit hopping across the lawn made him think of other things.

He stooped and peered in under the broken veranda floor. As the lady had said, there were bones enough there. It looked like a battlefield, with its scattered rabbit skulls. As he stared deeper into that cave of gloom he was startled by two eyes gleaming in the dark. Behind those eyes, in time, he could discern the gaunt figure of a cat, gnawing on a rabbit’s head. When he reached for a stone and flung it at the twin glow, he was answered by a sound of hate touched with defiance, a sound that was neither a hiss nor a growl. Judd sent a second stone toward the source of that sound.

The gaunt and bristling body disappeared in the darkness. But Judd didn’t like that note of malignity under the floor boards of his new home. He had come there for peace, for peace and quietness. And he’d have it, he told himself, even though he had to fight for it.

Judd found the lengthening spring days too short for all he had to do. His first task was to make the old house on the lake cliff habitable. This meant mending broken doors and patching roof leaks and clearing out the nest-obstructed kitchen chimney. It meant cleaning musty rooms and burning debris and repairing a meager assortment of abandoned furniture. And it meant, as well, carrying water and chopping wood and cooking meals on the red-rusted stove that could sing cheerfully enough with its restored draught. So crowded were his days that he resented the long tramp to the near-by village of Buckhorn to buy his supplies.

But his earlier spirit of adventure stayed with him during those hours of toil. No sense of loneliness weighed on him as, tired and hungry, he cooked his evening meal and felt the companionable warmth of the kitchen. After putting things to rights he would rest his feet on the stove hearth, fill his pipe and plot his work program for the next day. Then, drugged with weariness, he would knock out his pipe, go to bed, and wake from a dreamless sleep to blink at the sun shining in through the window that faced the lake.

Yet it was the land, he knew, that needed him most. For that, eventually, he might even have to hire help, though help would not be easy to find in that man-drained countryside. And he had to be careful about what money he spent. Once settled, he would have to acquire a horse and a cow, and there should be chickens, of course, and a couple of pigs. Later on he would have to figure on a secondhand car or a truck of some kind. But that would have to wait. It disturbed him a little to see how much he had to spend on household needs, from a new kettle to a kerosene lamp; and on hardware and tools, from a handsaw to a whetstone. When he found a rusty axhead, in the workshed, he sharpened and polished it and with his own hands shaped for it a handle of hickory.

His most unsavory task was the cleaning out of his well. He tore away the rotting platform, drew up the old pump and replaced its worn valve with a new one cut out of belt leather. Then he pumped the well as dry as he could. Then to the bottom of the well he lowered a pail, which by devious jerks he finally inverted, and so brought to the surface a putrescent mass of fur and flesh and rabbit bones. Its stench sickened him a little. But, realizing it was a job that had to be done right, he threw together an eighteen-foot ladder, withdrew the pump, and lowered his ladder to the well-bottom. Beside this he dropped his pail, after tying his rope end to the recumbent pump handle. Then he went down the ladder with a chipped granite saucepan in his hand.

It seemed hard to breathe there, in the fetor and the dripping darkness. But he scooped up mud and sand and offal until his pail was filled. Then he mounted the ladder, emerged into the sanity of yellow sunlight and drew up his pail. This he emptied at the garden end, meditating on the cruelty of life that could send so many furred bodies to so loathsome a death.

He was at the well bottom, repeating this maneuvre, when he saw a shadow across the circle of light above him.

“Are you all right down there?” a woman’s voice asked. That voice, he knew, belonged to the war refugee he had found on his doorstep.

“Of course,” he called back, resenting her intrusion at a time so unseemly. He filled his pail, climbed the ladder, and slowly and stoically pulled his load of putrescence to the surface.

“You’re not going about this right,” admonished his visitor. “This is a two-man job, with fresh water coming in all the time. You stay down and bail, and I’ll pull up the bucket when it’s full.”

Judd shook his head.

“It’s too heavy for a woman.”

Her smile, at that, was clipped and casual.

“I’m a trifle stronger than you think.”

“But it’s too filthy a mess,” Judd protested. He was, at the moment, for the second time thinking that she had a beautiful mouth.

“It’s nothing to what nurses have to face now and then,” she contended. Her smile became a condoning one. “I don’t suppose you ever swabbed out an ambulance floor after a dozen bleeding Tommies had made it look like a slaughterhouse?”

“But we’re not at the front now,” he said as he reached for his pail.

“Perhaps not,” she answered with a glance down into the black hole at her feet. “But we may as well be sensible about this. It’s going to save you half a day’s work.”

He agreed, in the end, filling the pail only half full before giving her the signal to haul it up. She was so unexpectedly expeditious about it that he was soon down to white quicksand through which clear water bubbled up. Then he scrubbed the bricks and once more bailed the well-bottom dry, staring down with a surge of satisfaction as the clear water slowly rose in its circle of gloom.

He climbed to the surface, bedraggled and wet, and grateful for the warm sunlight that would soon take the chill from his bones. The war nurse was busy washing her hands at the rain barrel.

“You must pump it out a few times,” she told him. “And if I were you I’d sweeten it with quicklime.”

“Thanks,” said Judd, slightly resentful of the mandatory note. He had thought of using charcoal. But quicklime, he conceded, would be better.

His visitor, he saw, was looking with disapproval at his splattered overalls and his water-soaked shoes.

“You should change those,” she quietly suggested.

He hesitated for a moment. But the chilling discomfort of wet socks told him she was right.

She was waiting for him when he emerged from the house. But she busied herself watching a robin tugging an earthworm from the lawn as he took out his pipe and sat down on the house steps.

“It would be more comfortable,” he suggested, “if I happened to know your name.”

“My name,” she said as she seated herself on the far end of the steps, “is Landis—Joyce Landis.” She was still watching the robin. “What’s yours?”

He told her that he answered to the name of Peter Judd and that he hoped the pail hauling hadn’t been too heavy for her.

“Of course not,” she retorted. Then she turned to him with a less abstracted eye. “You shouldn’t take chances when you’re alone here, though.”

“With what?” he asked.

“With wells and things. It would be your bones we’d be taking out of that hole in the ground, if you’d happened to slip on your crazy ladder.”

“I can take care of myself,” he said with a smile at the concern in her eyes. “And my neighbors aren’t much interested in me.”

There was a touch of pity in her smile.

“Don’t be too sure of that. The lonelier the country, I’ve noticed, the more the natives are interested in a newcomer. You’ll never know it, of course, but you’ll be watched and labeled and argued over before you’re here a week.”

The new note of seriousness in her voice held Judd arrested.

“I suppose you speak from experience?”

“I do,” she acknowledged. “But they haven’t got me labeled yet.”

Labeling her, he told himself, might not be easy.

“Then I’m going to keep them guessing,” he announced. His laugh was casual. “When an old-timer named Pretlow came down from over the hill last night, just to pry around and size up the city half-wit who’d bought this broken-down farm, I tried to make it plain to him this particular slice of land wasn’t open to snoopers.”

The other’s grave eyes considered him for a moment of silence. Then she moved her head from side to side.

“You shouldn’t do that,” she protested. “People can’t live alone, nowadays, no matter how much they want to be a second Robinson Crusoe. You’re a part of this countryside. And you lose out by not knowing your neighbors. And letting them know you.”

“What do I lose?” challenged the exile from the city.

“What every hermit loses,” she contended. “I don’t mean by what it does to your disposition. But it leaves you like a tree without roots. People just can’t get along without those outside contacts. They need to know what’s going on about them.”

“I don’t,” he maintained. He was thinking again how much she reminded him of his lost print of Sargent’s “Hosea.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” she said as her gaze wandered off to the dilapidated house front. “I’m what you’d call a snooper around here. I’ve been one, for weeks and weeks. Haven’t you learned something from me?”

“I’ve learned that the county holds a very interesting and charming lady,” he acknowledged with listless gallantry.

But that gallantry she altogether disregarded.

“You might learn more,” she continued, still grave-eyed. “For instance, there must be a lot of things you’re going to need in this place.”

“There are,” he admitted. But advice from outsiders, he was tempted to add, was not on the list.

“Then do you happen to know there’s a foreclosure sale at the Farlow farm next Saturday, a sale where you might pick up quite a few of the things you’ll be needing?”

Even while he laughed with grudging admiration for her practical-minded candor, he sat vaguely apprehensive of new intrusions on his privacy.

“Thanks for the tip,” he said, without enthusiasm.

Her gaze went about the neglected garden.

“It’s like starting from scratch,” she said with a note of sympathy he was quick to resent.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said with unexpected sharpness. His tone brought her about for a less impersonal inspection of his face.

“You look thin,” she affirmed. “Are you eating right?”

That brought his averted glance back to her, his laugh a defensive one.

“I eat like a horse. But you don’t get fat on a fourteen-hour day.”

“I suppose not,” she agreed. “Your hours would be saner, I imagine, if you had someone to run your house for you.”

“I like being alone,” he proclaimed.

“Something tells me,” she said with a cool disregard of his own studied coolness, “that you don’t like women.”

His face became more barricaded than ever.

“They don’t like me,” he answered with a short and shielding laugh.

She returned to a silent study of his face.

“You mean one particular one didn’t?” she finally ventured.

Her astuteness held him speechless for a moment.

“You can put it that way if you like. But I’d rather an unhappy experience back in the city. I put all my eggs in one basket. And the bottom fell out.”

She gave a nod of understanding, her gaze on the blue-misted line of Pointe Aux Pins.

“I thought it was something like that,” she acknowledged. “But there are, of course, different kinds of women.”

“So I’ve been told,” Judd said with a quarantining note of remoteness. And instinct told her it was best not to pursue the subject further.

“What I came for,” she said as she rose to her feet, “was to see the apple blossoms. But the nights have been too cold. They’re not out yet.”

“The peach trees are braver,” Judd told her. “They’re in full bloom now on the lower hill slope.”

He was losing time, he realized, in talking with this intruder on his solitude. But after days of silence he found something almost appealing in the slightly husky contralto voice of the woman with the honest hazel eyes.

“I’ll look at them on my way out,” she was saying as she crossed to where her bicycle leaned against the syringa bush. She called back a noncommittal “Cheerio” as she pushed the wheel about the curve of the weed-grown drive. She intended, apparently, to walk up through the orchard.

Her going again touched him with a vague sense of deprivation. He found himself striding after her.

“It’s about time I had a look at those trees myself,” he explained as he joined her.

“But you didn’t come here to pick peach blossoms,” she reminded him.

He was able to laugh at that reference to his earlier brusqueness.

“I remember enough about farming,” he said, “to know that work must come first. But that doesn’t mean you’ve got to be a brother to the ox.”

He had the satisfaction of finding that she had caught the allusion, for as her gaze went up to the budding apple trees that towered above them she quietly intoned: “ ‘What to him are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?’ ”

He found himself moving a little closer to her. But her eyes remained on the black tangle of branches above her.

“In another week,” she observed, “they’ll be beautiful.”

Judd, for all his closeness to her, knew a sense of remoteness that touched him with disappointment.

“They’ll look better after a pruning saw gets busy on ’em,” he said with deliberated hardness. It would take considerable surgery, he told her, to make up for three years of neglect.

“And shouldn’t they have been sprayed?” she asked.

Judd nodded and laughed.

“They may have to shift for themselves this spring. I’m going to be late in getting out on my land.”

She made a movement of disapproval at that. Then she smiled, obviously at the pride of possession that lurked in the way he said “my land.” But her eyes were grave again as she stooped and picked up a handful of dark soil from an earth cut left by a spring runnel. She compressed it and sniffed at it and stirred it loose again, with a touch that was almost caressing. Then she let it run slowly out through her fingers.

“What is it about land that makes you want to feel it?” she inquired.

That dreamily uttered question brought a sense of kinship between them that Judd had neither asked for nor expected. Her stooping figure, in the spring sunlight, became symbolic of the expectant and receptive soil under her feet. She, like that soil, seemed waiting for something.

“Why are we happier,” she was asking as she took up another handful of earth, “when we’re able to get close to it?”

It had been that way, he supposed, since Adam delved and Eve spun. For he too had often enough known an impulse to take up a handful of earth, to find something moving and mysterious in contact with the mother of all growth. There was, he felt, something magical about soil. It was good to feel it under your feet. It was good to see it lying under the sun that stirred it into productiveness, lying passive, like a woman waiting for conception.

That thought sent a wayward wave of hunger through his body, an unexpected hunger of the flesh for companioning flesh. It was, he suspected, his manhood groping for a completion which had been denied it. It was the old hound of sex baying deep in its kennel. And it threw an abrupt glamour about the abstractedly smiling woman who stood within three paces of him.

But Judd took a deeper breath and turned away from her. He refused to let his gaze remain on the sweetness of the smiling lips and the swell of the breast whispering of things that no longer had room in his plan of life. He had learned his lesson there. All his thought, after this, was to go to the land that would bring balance and sanity back to his days. Mother Earth never betrayed you. There was no peril in the love of land. And this friable earth crust all about him, this patient dark soil waiting for him to awaken it, was now his own. It was his land, to work and reclaim, to reward him for his daily toil and give him some final anchorage.

It was, he told himself, one of man’s primal impulses, this craving to own and control some part of the earth he walked. It was a hunger with which he was born, something fundamental in his nature. Yet when Joyce Landis, conscious of some mood of remoteness that had crept over him, walked farther up the orchard slope and leaned her wheel against a peach tree, he found himself questioning if love of the land could be all-sufficient. For there was another hunger equally fundamental, he remembered as his eyes rested on the sun-bathed figure with its mysterious lines of allurement. It was a hunger that brought him once more to her side as she reached up for a branch heavy with bloom and drew the laden bough down closer to her upturned face, the better to smell the blossoms. It made him wonder why she, too, like those blossoms, should seem so shaped and colored for nature’s final end of impregnation. For there was something almost rhapsodic in her posture as she stood inhaling the fragrance of the clustered pink petals. There was a challenging in the coloring of her lips, now slightly parted, a coloring that was richer and warmer than that of the bee-haunted petals about her. She seemed to give meaning and depth to a landscape that would have been empty without her.

That discovery disturbed Judd a little. For it brought home to him how this complicating second hunger could sometimes show itself even stronger than man’s love of land. It was man’s love for woman, the subliminal call of the heart for companionship.

But at the end of that road, he told himself, lay captivity. And the one thing he asked of life now was freedom. There must be no more entanglements and mistakes. And there would be none, he realized as he stared at the poised and ardent figure with the upturned face and the upthrust arms, silhouetted against the afternoon sun.

That figure, in some way, continued to give a sense of completion to the picture. Her quietly murmured “They’re lovely” seemed to say what needed to be said. And her own loveliness gave a new dimension to the beauty of the sloping hillside with its serried aisles of bloom. For it came home to him, as he stood watching her, that there was a beauty all its own in that upturned face, a beauty which must have hitherto escaped his attention. But that beauty was not for him.

“They’re good enough to look at,” Judd said, determined to remain matter-of-fact, “but they’ve seen their best day. I’m thinking of rooting them out and putting this land into crop.”

Her gaze wavered about the hill slope, rich with color.

“Not this year,” she pleaded. “Give them one more chance.”

He laughed at her solemnity.

“Life isn’t that kind,” he said as he glanced down over his neglected acres.

“No, life isn’t that kind,” she repeated after a moment of silence. Then she turned to him and held out her hand. “Good-by.”

“Won’t I be seeing you again?” he questioned, resenting a small pang that was as abrupt as it was unexpected.

“I’m afraid not,” she said with a remoteness that seemed new to her.

He resisted the impulse to say more as she reached for her wheel and started up the slope that led to the stone-pillared gate. She passed through the gate and he could see her no more. It was the lowering sun, he concluded, that made the bloom waves lose a little of their color and the afternoon air lose a little of its warmth. But there was work waiting for him on the lower slopes, work that would give him scant time to think about women. He had learned his lesson there. And that was a door which would have to remain closed and locked in his life.

Judd, with a sandwich in his pocket, covered the four long miles to the Farlow farm on foot. The air was cool and clear, the hedges and orchard slopes were noisy with bird notes, and the peaceful-looking farm lands that stretched away on either side of the Ridge were checkerboards of umber and green.

Those prosperous-looking fields left him wondering why the Farlows had failed. Farm life, he knew, was not idyllic. It had its hardships and disappointments, its crop failures and untimely frosts. But this alluvial soil of Kent County was good soil. It stood ready to pay back what was put into it by honest toil. And failure, he contended, implied either indolence or bad judgment. Any section might have its off-season. But it was only the incompetents who failed to build up a reserve to carry them through a lean year.

That thought made him wish he had a wider reserve of his own. It left him regretting his city-life improvidence, when money that came easy was too easily spent again. But now he had something to build up for, every dollar would have to be weighed. He would always fight against being one of the Farlow breed.

Judd repeated that determination as he invaded the site of the auction sale. He had expected the scene to be a dolorous one. But he found, to his surprise, that the event was almost a gala affair. Cars and farm wagons were parked along the untidy lane; noisy groups clustered about the weathered implements arrayed in the barnyard; still more garrulous groups drifted and prodded about the household furniture that had been brought out on the sagging veranda for display; children romped about the out-buildings; a nursing mother fed her baby under a blighted apple tree; and an amorous couple made unabashed love behind a silo that leaned slightly to the south.

Judd avoided the house, where farm women in foolish-looking hats seemed to predominate, and the melancholy figures of Mr. and Mrs. Farlow, surrounded by their lost possessions, cast a restricted shadow over the casually appraising groups. For Judd’s primary interest was in the livestock. What he most needed was a milch cow and a work horse.

Yet as he approached the groups that clustered about the farm animals so sadly assembled in a fenced-off corner of the orchard, he noticed that a silence fell over the joking and gesticulating sons of toil confronting him. The manner in which they quietly made way for him plainly implied he was not one of them. He was merely an outlander, a city slicker in the midst of honest workers. An accruing consciousness of standing very much alone in the world firmed his determination to make his appraisal of the patient-eyed livestock a convincing one. He knew as he examined a restive three-year-old mare that half a hundred derisive eyes were examining him.

It was as he moved on to an old work horse and was diligently investigating its hocks and shoulders, and even attempting an unrewarding examination of its teeth, that a heavy-set man with a broad and stubbled face detached himself from the onlookers and almost timidly moved out to the city slicker’s side.

“Guess we’re kind o’ neighbors,” ventured the stranger. “I’ve the farm next to yours up on the Ridge.” He shifted his chewing-cud and spat on the orchard grass. “My name’s Spike Slocum.”

If Judd knew a moment of hesitation, he at least remembered the recent admonitions of Joyce Landis. The sternness went out of his face. He even managed to make his smile a friendly one.

“My name’s Judd,” he announced, “Peter Judd. And first crack out of the box I’ve got to get me a horse and cow.”

Spike Slocum spat again.

“Know anything about farmin’?”

Judd ignored the implication in that frank query.

“I was brought up on a Raleigh farm.”

“You don’t look it.”

Judd laughed.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Folks’ve been sayin’ you’re city bred.”

“That’s a charge I’ll have to live down. I still know which side to milk a cow on.”

The ensuing laugh seemed to beat down a barrier or two.

“Then if you’re lookin’ for a single-plow horse, you can’t beat this old fellow. He’s a little sway-back and underfed. But he’s sound and steady. I’ve known him for ten years and more.”

“What’ll he go for?”

“Can’t say. But if you pay over forty for him in these tractor times, you’re payin’ too much.”

Judd felt that he was learning things.

“And what should a cow cost me?”

“About the same, I’d say, at a forced sale like this. See that brindled old mooley over there? She’s seen her best days, natcherly, but she’s good for another five years. She’s got good tits and a bag that shows she’s a free and easy milker. In your shoes, I’d say nab her when she comes up for sale.”

Judd inspected the brindled cow, wondering if her meekness was the meekness of senility. His companion noticed the passing frown of doubt.

“You don’t want something young and breachy, that’ll keep you on the jump half your time, something that’ll start you sweatin’ every time you pull her tit. No, son, you want something quiet and steady. And that holds good with more’n a cow.”

“Thanks for the tip,” said Judd. His glance went toward the faded house, the brutally disemboweled house whose exposed entrails made him think of the zodiac figure in rural almanacs. “Why couldn’t these people make a farm like this pay?”

Spike Slocum chewed for a silent moment or two. “Because old Clem Farlow never got the backin’ he needed. First off, he had an ailin’ wife, thinkin’ more about her Peruna and patent medicine than about her butter-and-egg money. Then his girl went off to Detroit and turned into a soda-jerker. Then his boy went into the flyin’ corps and got killed at Dunkirk. That kind o’ broke Clem’s spirit, even before the loan sharks started eatin’ his leg off.”

“Eating his leg off?” questioned the puzzled Judd.

“That’s about what it amounts to, once you slap a mortgage on your land and back it up with a sprinklin’ of notes. Clem was a good worker. But it takes more’n a single worker to swing a farm these days.”

Judd considered that pronouncement. He even wondered if it was in any way directed at him.

“It’s been done by single workers,” he contended.

But that claim was lost on his companion, who looked up to observe that the barnyard groups were moving in straggling lines toward the house.

“Guess we’d better get into the show,” he suggested. “Looks like they’re goin’ to sell off the house stuff first. That’s Sid Rawlins, the auctioneer, on the washtub there. He’s more fun than a barrel o’ monkeys, once he gets goin’.”

The auctioneer, poised high on his overturned wooden tub, got under way even as they approached him. His voice was raucous and his humor was coarse, but he did his best to whip up a factitious excitement in the laughing and chattering crowd that surrounded him. When a baby cried just under his flailing arm, he abruptly stopped and viewed the mother with feigned indignation.

“Can’t you silence that infant, ma’am?” he demanded. “Or does your dress button up the back?”

This brought a rewarding shout from the males and a flutter of titters from the females. Judd, as his eye wandered through the ranks of the latter, half expected and half hoped he might see the face of Joyce Landis there. But he failed to find her. She did not, he remembered, belong in that motley array. He noticed the melancholy and dead-eyed face of Clem Farlow, sitting detached and silent on the veranda end. He noticed, too, the growing excitement of the crowd, through which a bottle of applejack was being secretly circulated. They were, he felt, an aggregation of solitary and sad-hearted units, reveling in a rough comradeship that was both brief and shallow, trying to lose their loneliness in the thin-packed companionship of the passing moment. They even forgot the dissolution of a household in the whipped-up joy of competing for the relics of another’s failure. For once the bidding had started, Judd observed, that shrewd and toil-hardened group, for all its hilarity, kept a quick eye open for bargains. If they roared with laughter at the auctioneer’s off-color witticisms, they rocked with glee when his oratorical gestures proved too much for the tub on which he stood and the collapse of its bottom sent him tumbling to the earth. And over it all stretched a tranquil blue sky, and behind it stood the budding and bewildered old orchard trees with their promise of spring.

Judd saw it through, wondering at the vague heaviness about his heart. He bought in his horse for forty-two dollars. When it came to the brindled cow his only competitor was the village butcher, whose final bid of twenty-eight dollars was accompanied by the declaration that any such sum was three dollars more than she’d ever bring for beef. Judd bought her for thirty. His saving on these two animals, in fact, tempted him into other purchases. He found himself in possession of a secondhand wagon and a set of harness, a young porker and a dozen hens, a plow and a cultivator, to say nothing of an odd assortment of garden tools and dishes and even a pot-bellied Klondike stove that had been knocked down for a dollar.

He had, he saw, bought more than he intended. But as he assembled his purchases in the battered old wagon box, with his horse between the shafts and his meek-eyed mooley cow tied to the tailboard, he told himself that he had bought only what was badly needed. He tried to forget that it was salvage from a wreck. Life, he acknowledged, was like that. The race went to the strong.

His impatience to be back on his own land prompted him to start for home while the auctioneer, now hoarse of voice but still blithe of spirit, was disposing of the last household remnants along the sagging veranda. Judd, seated on his wagon box, saw a scrawny youth emerge from the house with an ancient-looking musket in his hands.

The youth handed the musket up to the auctioneer, who looked it over and held it high above his head.

“What am I offered,” he shouted, “for this fine old weapon that fought its way through the Fenian Raids and bagged many a bear along this Ridge? Do I hear one dollar?”

“Fifty cents,” said a voice from the crowd.

“Fifty cents my eye! Four bits for a gun like this? Not on your life! Wake up, folks, and give me a starter!”

“Seventy-five cents,” said a weaker voice. But the auctioneer pretended not to hear him. He busied himself leveling the weapon at an imaginary hawk in the sky. Then he opened the breech, and with a parade of astonishment, blinked down at the shell he saw there.

“Why, she’s loaded and ready for use, right now. She’s loaded for bear. She’s ready to pot any German or Jap that comes over the hill. She may be worn around the edges but she can still shoot straight. Who says a dollar for an A-one weapon that’ll leave you sleeping easier o’ nights.”

“A dollar,” said a man in blue jeans at the back of the crowd.

“A dollar I’m offered. One dollar for a fifty-dollar firearm that’s still good for half a dozen shotgun weddings. Do I hear a dollar and a half? Don’t disgrace me, gents, on the last lap of the race. Who said one-fifty down there? Am I offered one-fifty?”

That challenge brought no response from the crowd. Some of them were already drifting toward their waiting cars.

“I’m waiting for that one-fifty,” croaked the tired auctioneer. “It’s your last chance for the last item in this big sale. It’s the last drop of the hat, the end, the grand finale. Good. One-fifty I’m bid. Do I hear a two-bit raise on that? Then one-fifty it is. Going, going——”

That was as far as he got. For Clem Farlow’s gaunt body interposed itself between him and his audience.

“You ain’t a-goin’ to sell that musket,” the old farmer announced. His voice was thin and tremulous, but his movement was decisive as he caught at the weapon and wrenched it free of the auctioneer’s clasp.

“She’s sold already, friend Farlow, sold to the gentleman with the black whiskers there.”

“She ain’t,” was the low but stubborn rejoinder.

The auctioneer’s laugh was caustic.

“You figuring on potting partridge and black squirrel for the rest of your life?”

Clem Farlow, with a dazed look on his face, backed slowly away.

“I’ve got use for this gun,” he quaveringly proclaimed.

Sid Rawlins threw up his hands, in an exaggerated gesture of resignation, as the resolute old figure turned and stalked in through the open door of his lost home.

A silence born of perplexity fell over the crowd. Judd, watching from his wagon box, could hear that silence broken by the fluting of a robin from a near-by apple tree. But a moment later the bird notes were lost in a louder sound, a hollow roar of sound that came from inside the empty house.

It held the stunned groups motionless for a moment or two. Then the black-whiskered man went in through the open door. When he failed to reappear, after a few moments of waiting, a woman in a gray shawl pushed her way through the crowd and entered the house. She was followed by two gangly youths in denim.

The waiting Judd caught the sound of a woman’s scream. A moment later the black-whiskered man stepped out through the door and leaned against a porch post.

“Clem Farlow’s killed hisself,” he called out in a voice that shook with excitement. . . .

On the slow ride home, through the opaline spring air that seemed so touched with peace and so full of the promise of things to come, Judd found a weight of lead hanging about his heart. He wondered, as he turned in through his own gate pillars and surveyed the sloping acres that were to bring him tranquillity, if the road to worldly success always had to be strewn with the wreckage of other lives.

A break in the weather, two days later, kept Judd off his land. But it failed to tempt him into idleness. It merely diverted his industry to other channels. He was glad to be too busy to think. In dripping slicker, he repaired the coop for his chickens and built a pen for his hungry young porker. He shaped a new handle for the broken plow and patched the newly acquired harness hitherto precariously held together with fence wire. He currycombed the brindle cow, brushing the caked manure from her flanks, rewarding her for her passiveness with a handful of salt. She was woefully thin, but she would come up, he felt, with proper feeding. She was, in fact, already giving him more milk than he knew what to do with. And her presence there, in her freshly bedded stall, gave him a mysterious sense of permanency touched with peace.

He also busied himself clipping and currying his horse, abruptly stopping in that process to test the steed’s sight when he remembered how Spike Slocum had announced the old sway-back’s name was Homer. For the Homer of history, Judd recalled, had been blind. That name, he suspected, might have an appropriateness all its own.

But this Homer was not blind. He was quick enough to spot a succulent clump of grass as Judd put him through his paces in an experimental turning of furrows along the rain-soaked edge of the lower field. Homer, at that trial, proved himself both steady and tractable. A small tingle of triumph went through his owner as the knack of turning those furrows straight and true came back to him across the misty gulf of the years. It touched something ancestral in him. From his boyhood, too, he remembered the peace of a stable at nightfall, with its ammoniacal smell and its animals stalled and bedded down, quietly munching their hay and making life once more seem elemental and simple. An orderly stable at dusk had always appealed to him.

His house also demanded Judd’s attention. He found much patching and mending and cleaning up to do there. But any weariness it brought him he accepted without complaint. It blotted out the past and brought forward-looking thoughts.

The storm, as he sat in front of the stove with his feet on the hearth, even brought him a consoling sense of isolation. After a second day of driving rain, with a southeast wind shaking his walls and the lake waves pounding on the shore, he found his warm kitchen a little haven of peace. He leaned back, in the arc of yellow lamplight from the table end, with the double consolation of a singing kettle and a cooling pipe leaving him scarcely conscious of the lashing gusts that kept beating against his window. He had, he told himself, found his escape from the hounds of remorse.

It was only when he reached for his pencil and pad and began jotting down a lengthening column of figures that the look of contentment went from his face. His frown deepened as he proceeded to add up what he had expended at the Farlow sale. Things had gone cheap enough at that auction, and his own needs had been numerous. But that debauch of buying had most unmistakably slimmed his roll. It took money, plainly, to get even a small farm into working shape. He remembered what he had spent in one night in the Rainbow Room, in the old days. And it had failed to bring him the peace of mind which he was at the moment finding in the singing of a kettle on a rusty kitchen stove. He was on his own now, to do what he liked, to prove that he could carve success out of failure. He might have narrowed his margin of reserves, but he had now put Pine Brae on a working basis. He had the tools and the animals to make a start. The animals were not perhaps anything to boast of. But the possession of stock gave a sense of completion to his farm. There was a brooding hen or two in his coop, he remembered, that would have to be placed on a setting of eggs. And he once more had clotted cream for his coffee.

Judd relighted his pipe and leaned back in his chair, listening to the muffled roar of the lake and the pound of the rain gusts on the roof that was no longer a leaky one. He roused himself and put more wood on the fire. He sat watching the opened draught give a cherry glow to the stove front, turning the oblongs of mica into symbols of warmth and comfort.

Then his relaxed body stiffened into attention. For above the pound of the rain gusts he heard a sharper sound, a sound that brought a frown to his face. It meant, without a doubt, that someone was knocking on his door.

He waited until the knock was repeated, wondering what could bring him a visitor on such a night and at such an hour. Then he went to the door and opened it.

The driving rain blurred his vision a little. It took a moment or two to make out the vague outline of the figure confronting him there. Then he saw it was a woman, a woman wet to the skin.

“Can I come in?” he heard that woman ask.

He knew even before she stepped into the lighted room misted with steam and pipe smoke that it was Joyce Landis. She stood arrested, just inside the door, with her questioning gaze on Judd’s face. She continued to look at him as the water dripped from her sodden felt hat that had scant jauntiness left in its tilted brim.

“What’s happened?” he asked in a hardened voice that brought a flutter to the eyes so quietly looking into his. He declined to be startled. And he refused to show any embarrassment at that midnight invasion of his privacy. He was no raw and clumsy rustic to be set tingling at the appearance of a petticoat, either wet or dry. And his intention, obviously, was to let the intruder harvest that fact from his casually maintained matter-of-factness.

“What’s happened?” he curtly repeated.

The other’s voice was unexpectedly controlled.

“I had a row with that woman. I knew it was coming. But I didn’t count on its coming on a night like this.”

“You’re soaked,” said Judd.

“That’s not important. The important thing is whether I can stay here for the night.”

“Of course,” said Judd, still studiously matter-of-fact. “But you’ve got to get out of those wet clothes.”

Her laugh was brief and a trifle bitter.

“They’re all I have. It’s what you pay for losing your temper.”

The shiver that went through her body did not escape him.

“I’ll have to fix you up with what I’ve got here,” he told her as she sank into a chair. The weariness in the wet face that refused to turn in his direction disturbed him. “That’s the tea cannister on the shelf there. While I’m digging out something for you to put on, you’d better make yourself a cup of tea. And take it hot.”

“I’m all right,” she said, her face still listlessly averted.

When he returned to the kitchen with a flannel shirt and slacks and a dressing gown over his arm he saw that she had taken off her hat and coat. Her thin waist, wet and translucent, clung to her body as she bent over the stove top, trying to wring her hair dry with her hands. Her skin looked unexpectedly smooth and white in the modified lamplight.

“You can change here,” he said with a new note of constraint. “I’ve got to go out to the stable and fix up my stock for the night.”

She smiled at that, at his use of the word “stock,” he suspected, for so meager an assortment of farm animals.

“And get some hot tea under your belt,” he commanded as he reached for his lantern and struck a match. She looked at him, absentmindedly, and nodded. He realized, as she sat down and took off her shoes and stockings, that she had no dry footwear. That sent him back to his bedroom for slippers and socks. He noticed the whiteness of her ankle and the line of her heel, as clean-cut as the back of a razor blade, as she sat warming her feet in the stove glow. She did it as studiously detached as a child. It was her life at the front, he assumed, that had endowed her with that welcome gift of sexlessness.

Judd made his visit to the stable a prolonged one. As he beat his way back, through the driving rain, it gave him a small and not unpleasant shock to see a square of light in his usually dark house and a figure moving about in the friendly yellow lamp glow.

His visitor was toasting bread over the stove coals when he stepped into the kitchen and closed the door on wind and rain. He noticed two cups on the table end. She caught his eye as he stared at them without relish.

“I didn’t have any supper tonight,” she explained. “It seems more civilized, not eating alone.”

She looked so reassuringly boylike in her oversized slacks that his earlier resentment at a lost solitude vanished in a wave of contrition. He seated himself at the table end and helped her butter the toast. The color, he noticed, had come back to her face, which remained preoccupied as she drank her tea and made away with her third slice of toast. Life, plainly, had not been dealing kindly with her.

“More tea?” she asked, after refilling her own cup.

He shook his head, disturbed by a vague unrest that kept him guardedly silent.

“I shouldn’t have come here, of course,” she ventured out of the silence. “But I hadn’t much choice.”

“It’s all right,” he said, without enthusiasm. “I’m not—well, not very well fixed for visitors. But you can have my bed for the night and I’ll bunk here in the kitchen.”

“Oh, no,” was her firm rejoinder. “I’ll not let you do that. I’ve slept in some queer places in my time. Give me a couple of blankets and I’ll be all right in a corner here.”

“That wouldn’t be very civilized,” he contended as it came home to him, with the rain beating against the windows, that there was something disturbingly consoling, after all, in having a fellow being under the same roof in such weather.

“But I insist,” she told him. And he knew by her face that it would be futile to argue about it.

“What are your plans?” he asked out of yet another silence that fell between them.

“I haven’t any,” she answered, her eyes on the stove front. “Not yet, at least. But I’m a graduate nurse. I’ve been hoping there might be a chance for me in the Chamboro hospital.”

That statement seemed to take a little of the tension out of the situation.

“How about your things at that parson’s house?” he asked.

“I’ll have to get them in the morning, of course, much as I hate going back there.”

He studied the desolate figure in the ill-fitting clothes.

“You won’t need to,” he found himself saying. “I’ll get them for you.”

That brought her questioning gaze about to his face. What she read there, apparently, swept aside her hesitation.

“That’s frightfully kind of you,” she said with a small tremor about the shadowed ends of her lips. It lasted only a moment. But it was, he realized, her first sign of any surrender to the emotional.

“You’ve been through enough,” he observed. “You must be tired.”

“I am,” she acknowledged. Weariness and the warmth of the room, he could see, had brought a droop to the tangle of lashes above the meditative hazel eyes.

“Then it’s time we turned in,” he said as he got to his feet.

It was the phrasing of that statement, Judd concluded, that brought her questioning gaze quickly about to him.

“It’s time you turned in,” he amended, conscious of the look of uncertainty on the other’s face.

“I’ll be all right,” she answered as she got up and crossed to the rain-washed window.

“But I still wish you’d sleep in my bed,” he announced.

Her second inspection of his face reminded him that he had made a second blunder in his phrasing. His effort to force a laugh was plainly a failure.

“Don’t forget that I’ve slept in some queer places myself,” he hurriedly explained. “These floor boards would seem soft after seven or eight nights on Psiloriti cave rocks.”

She had turned back to the rain-streaked window.

“I’ll be all right,” she listlessly repeated.

He studied the motionless figure for a moment or two. Then, with a shrug, he went off to find a pillow and blankets for her. To these he added a tattered long cushion in which mice had all too plainly been nesting between the cornhusks.

“Shall I fix these for you?” he asked, depressed by some absence of gallantry in the situation.

“You’ve done enough,” answered the woman at the window, without turning to face him.

Judd stood regarding her for another moment of silence.

“Good night,” he said as he crossed to the door.

“Good night,” she responded in an unexpectedly small voice.

He closed the kitchen door and went to his room.

That room, remote from the warmth of the kitchen, impressed him as a cold and bald chamber of silence. He kept wondering, when sleep was slow in coming to him, how his guest with the page-boy bob of hair was getting along on her narrow cushion of cornhusks. He kept picturing her as wrapped in her blankets, watching the cherry glow of the stove front as the wind and rain lashed against the house. He had, after all, only done the decent thing. He mistily remembered Cordelia’s line in King Lear, “Mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire.” He listened to the rain on the roof. It wasn’t the sort of night to turn anyone away. And once more he concluded he had only done the decent thing.

When Judd awakened the next morning, the rain was still beating on the roof. Lake Erie, still lashed by its sou’easter, was pounding mournfully along the cliff base. It would, he drowsily remembered, be another wet day. And that meant a day lost in his work on the land.

He sat up in bed, as that thought came to him, startled by the unfamiliar smell of coffee and bacon. He recalled, of a sudden, that he was not alone in that gray and gloomy house of silence.

He dressed hurriedly, touched by both a ghostly sense of discomfort and a still ghostlier sense of adventure that refused to define itself. When he stepped into the kitchen he found the fire going and the table laid. The room, for some reason, had lost its customary squalid look. It seemed warm and homelike. Its familiar masculine disorder had vanished.

His gaze wandered from the fresh-scrubbed table top to the woman who was skimming cream from a pan of milk. If he resented something slightly overproprietory in that action, he screened it under a forced smile and a casually uttered “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” was the other’s equally casual reply. She had, he saw, dried her own clothes and dressed in them. The warmth of the kitchen had brought a tinge of color to her face, but her arms, he noticed, were arrestingly white. They were as rounded and smooth as the white neck under the abbreviated cloud of dark hair.

“I see you’ve taken possession,” he observed as his gaze coasted about the room. It wasn’t until he detected the deeper tinge of color that came into her face that he realized the observation had not been a happy one. But, looking up at him, she was able to muster a laugh.

“Not very successfully,” she said with an achieved quietness of voice. “You see, I don’t know where things are. You seem to have a system all your own.”

He mustered an answering laugh.

“Men get a bit careless about those things,” he admitted. There was something intriguing, he also admitted to himself, in that contralto voice of hers with its faint overtone of huskiness. But his glance went back to the fresh-scrubbed table top that was no longer an archipelago of grease spots.

“Where did you learn to do this sort of thing?” he asked with a hand wave about the reorganized room.

“Did you think I was merely a cabinet piece?”

That took his gaze back to her face.

“You look good enough to be under glass,” he solemnly announced. But the compliment went past her and lost itself in the dish shelves.

“Will you have breakfast now,” she asked as she moved the coffeepot to the back of the stove, “or later?”

He wondered why some new sense of the luxurious should surround him.

“Stock comes first with a good farmer,” he said as he reached for his milk pail.

Yet, out in the stable he hurried through his chores with an impatience that was new to him. It seemed to make a difference, he told himself as he strode houseward through the driving rain, when you had something to come back to, when you had a quiet and friendly voice to drown the dull thunder of rain on the roof.

She had the strainer and pans ready for the milk he brought.

“What do you do with all this cream that’s going sour?” she asked as she emerged from the coolness of the stone cellar.

“Feed it to the chickens.”

“That’s wasteful,” she admonished. “You should make your own butter.”

“I haven’t time for the fripperies,” he proclaimed as he seated himself at the breakfast table. “You have to simplify the indoor things when you’re living alone.”

Her smile was almost a pitying one.

“There seem to be a lot of things you haven’t time for,” she observed as she seated herself across the table from him. But she declined to meet the quick glance which he lifted to her face.

“I prefer the simple life,” he said as with a defensive sort of matter-of-factness he proceeded to eat his meal.

His companion made no reply to that. But he noticed the nervous twitch of her mouth as though a smile were being smothered at birth. Her eyes remained impassive, however, as he made away with his bacon and eggs. Yet there was no unfriendliness, he found, in her silences.

“That’s the best coffee I’ve had in a week of Sundays,” he said on downing his second cup.

It was after an especially heavy blast had shaken the house that she raised her eyes to the runneled window.

“This rain will keep you off your land,” she observed.

He nodded his assent to that, wondering why he had been so slow in deciphering some basic womanly appeal in the shadowed face across the table from him. In her time, he surmised, she must have made more than one heart beat a little faster. But, reaching for his pipe, he turned away from that avenue of speculation.

“I’ve got to take a plowshare to the village blacksmith to be repointed,” he casually announced. “I’ll go on to that parson’s house and pick up your things.”

That brought her questioning eyes once more up to his face. She seemed about to speak. But afterthought, apparently, sealed her lips.

“When I’m doing it,” Judd added, “I’ll give those Bible-thumpers a piece of my mind.”

“What’s the use?” she demurred. And the abruptly clouded eyes, the limpid hazel eyes that made him think of the eyes of an ill-treated animal, deepened the lines of resoluteness about his lips. His spine stiffened as he reached for his old slicker. He even found something warming in her retarded smile of gratitude. That perilous softening of the face, he supposed, came from the discovery there was still someone in the world to champion her cause.

“By the way, what’s the name of your village Jezebel?” Judd asked from the doorway.

“Mrs. Amos Bangham,” Joyce answered. “But you’ll find her a Jezebel without face paint.”

“And she won’t find me a Naboth,” announced Judd. But the allusion, he felt, was lost on his companion.

“Would it be all right,” she asked as she began piling the dishes, “if I did a bit of organizing while you are away?”

“God knows, it’s needed,” Judd acknowledged, his gaze about the place a slightly abashed one. “But you won’t find much to work with here.”

“I’ll make out,” she said as she added wood to the fire. “I’ve had to do dressings in a bomb crater, in my time, remember.”

“Thanks,” said her host.

She smiled at the touch of acid in his voice, conscious as she was that she had ruffled his pride of possession. But his frown disappeared as she lifted a pot of water to the stove top. She was not, he realized, as fragile as she looked. There was no peasantlike largeness to her frame. Yet even her hands, slender and unroughened and inadequate looking as they were, had a quick-moving adeptness all their own. And he wondered, as he looked back from the open door, if what had seemed like an invasion of his privacy might not eventually have its compensations. It took a woman, after all, to get a house like that in running order.

It was only temporary, he told himself on the drive to Buckhorn. When the weather cleared, of course, his involuntary guest would go on to Chamboro. She would go her own way and drift back to her old world, and leave him once more to his solitude. But he wondered if she had been right in her claim that no man should live alone. Was there, after all, something morbid in his hunger for seclusion? Was he missing something out of life, in that sequestering search for a peace of mind which came to him when his sloping acres were bathed in spring sunshine? It was all fine enough in fine weather. But days of rain could make a house seem dismal. And it might be a different story when winter came with its snows and storms, and he had only his own embittered days to remember.

But that picture he promptly brushed aside. Winter, he remembered, was the farmer’s time of leisure. Before the ice floes were on the lake he would have his cellar bins filled with vegetables and his dooryard ramparted by a wall of neatly cut stove wood. He would have time for magazines and books. He could even swing back to work on his own book. He pictured himself, of a winter evening, in his living room with the old Klondike stove glowing red in the warm air, with a plate of nuts and apples at his side, and with a home-made desk where he could write when the mood for writing came to him. Being a man of thought, he had resources unknown to the illiterate. He could den up like a bear and defy the storms of winter. And self-sufficiency, he contended, was still the only pathway to independence.

He would be alone there, he acknowledged, but he felt grateful that he did not have to depend on the people about him. Their world was not his world, he decided as he faced the faded clapboard front of the village parsonage with its untidy porch and its curtainless windows that made him think of dead eyes. There was no response to his knock, though his ear caught the sound of scurrying feet and a querulously complaining voice.

It was only after his repeated knock that the door opened.

He saw a gaunt and faded woman in faded merino. Her face was lean and joyless. The thin-lipped mouth and the flat chest gave him an impression of barrenness, an impression plainly erroneous, for behind her stood a huddle of staring and silent children.

“Are you Mrs. Bangham?” Judd asked, resenting the opaqueness of the eyes so coldly inspecting him.

“I am,” announced the woman in faded merino.

“I came for Miss Landis’ things,” he said. And the hostility in the other’s face prompted him to add: “You turned her out last night.”

The thin lips tightened in a smile that merged into a sneer.

“And you took her in?”

“What I did,” Judd retorted, “is my own business.”

“Perhaps it is,” said the other, “but it won’t help you any in this neighborhood of decent and God-fearing people.”

“I’m not interested in this neighborhood,” Judd said, “or in your opinion of Joyce Landis.”

“You would be if you knew her as I know her,” was the unexpectedly impassioned reply. “Lazing around in men’s clothes, and filling my house with cigarette smoke, and corrupting my children with her army-life ways! And thinking herself better than an honest wife who has a sick husband and seven children to look after! And walking the roads at night when decent people are a-bed! And saying my coffee’s like something that’s brewed in an old boot!”

“She was probably right,” said Judd, untouched by that tremulous tirade. He looked over his shoulder to make sure his horse and wagon were where he had left them. “Is that all you’ve got against her?”

The flat-chested figure drew itself up to its full height.

“No, it’s not,” was the indignant response. “I could have stood for that woman’s insolent ways. But when she started purring about my Amos, about the father of my seven children, and ladling out drugs and sidling into his room to give him cough medicine in the middle of the night, I began seeing through her trickery.”

“Dear me,” Judd said with mock concern, “you don’t mean she intended to break up your home?”

The note of derision in that query brought a new hardness to the opaque eyes fixed on his person.

“Oh, you men!” was her indignant cry. “You’re all alike, young and old. A pretty face and you’re nothing but putty!”

“It keeps the world going,” was Judd’s wearied response.

“But it didn’t keep me from knowing what that woman was after.”

Mrs. Bangham’s indignation grew deeper as she realized her fury was leaving her caller quite untouched. A smile even broadened on that caller’s face, for once or twice he had caught sight of the dehydrated shepherd of souls carrying his asthmatic cough about the village.

“You were lucky to get rid of her,” he said with mock solemnity. “And if you’ll let me have her things we can call it a clean sweep.”

“And I’ll feel cleaner when they’re taken from under this roof,” cried the woman whose home life had been so dolorously threatened. She pointed with a lean finger to a little pile of Joyce’s possessions on the porch floor. “They’re there, every shred of them. And I hope you get more joy out of that smooth-faced trouble-maker than I did for her paltry seven dollars a week.”

“I probably will,” said Judd with a show of unconcern.

“And you probably won’t be paid in dollars!” retorted the flat-chested mother of seven. And with that Parthian shaft she stepped back and swung shut the door.

Judd’s face remained untroubled as he filled his pipe and lighted it. He stared at the faded house front that seemed a fit habitation for faded lives. Then he looked at the neat pile of Joyce’s possessions, the slightly abraded pigskin steamer trunk plastered with foreign labels, eloquent of old and happier days, the striped canvas suitcase initialed in black, the English carry-all from which the handle of a tennis racket protruded, the broken orange crate into which had been tumbled a collection of books.

They were, he noticed as he carried them out to the wagon, an odd collection of titles. One was Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, and another Stephens’ Crock of Gold. Beside them lay Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine, the latter stippled with autographs and inscriptions that reminded him its owner must have known scenes and experiences remote from a rain-swept Canadian village. Before he covered the books with his tarpaulin, his eyes fell on Hardy’s Tess and Logan Pearsall Smith’s Youth of Parnassus cheek by jowl with Santayana’s Last Puritan and a medical dictionary almost as dog-eared as the Palgrave Golden Treasury that lay beside it.

He hadn’t given much time to books of late, he remembered as he headed homeward in the rain. They had threatened to bring an added complication to life when his one fixed desire was to simplify it in some way. All he asked for, at the moment, were the elemental things. And the most elemental thing in the world, he felt as he drew up in front of the dripping veranda of Pine Brae, was a fire and a laid table and a woman to welcome a sodden wayfarer in out of the wet.

“I’ve got your things,” he announced to Joyce when she met him at the door.

He looked down at her face, which remained impassive as she lifted the tarpaulin and inspected her restricted belongings. It was not like the face that had confronted him at the Buckhorn end of that odyssey. It was not an easy face to read. But it was without hardness and without guile. And it was plainly not made for a sunless life in a clapboarded village parsonage where destitution took on a double edge in its tattered scabbard of gentility. No wonder she had stolen away from that pious rookery and looked for a little peace on a broken-down veranda that faced the lake.

“Couldn’t we leave these out on the porch here?” Joyce was suggesting.

Judd, who had caught the implication of transiency in that suggestion, said he thought not. He’d had trouble enough in keeping them dry. Decent books should be treated in a decent way. And these southeast storms sometimes kept up for three or four days.

“We’ll put ’em in that empty room next to mine,” he proclaimed.

The questioning hazel eyes, for a moment of silence, rested on his face. It was a face marked by honesty touched with melancholy, a face that took the troubled look from the hazel eyes so quietly studying it. But, for some reason, she lost a little of her color as Judd carried in her trunk and bags.

“You’ve certainly made this dump of mine more shipshape,” Judd observed as he returned with an armful of books.

“It was only a lick and a promise,” she answered with a shrug. “I didn’t want to disturb the established order of things.”

“There is no established order,” he acknowledged. He watched her as she piled the books in a corner. Her attitude seemed one of silent humility as she knelt beside him in the shadowy room. He had, he recalled, been niggardly in his help to her.

“There’s a broken cot in the tool shed,” he found himself saying. “I’ll put new legs on it.” Then, conscious of her suddenly arrested movements, he added: “I won’t have you sleeping on the floor.”

“Is it worth while,” she questioned, “for so short a time?”

His pulse quickened a little as he looked down at her.

“Must it be so short a time?” was the question that came to his lips. But he shut his teeth on it. The thing that impressed him, at the moment, was her defenselessness. It was his duty to be kind to her.

That thought remained with him as with hammer and saw and plane he repaired the broken cot in the tool shed. He always liked working with tools. But from his task, in this case, he wrung an unexpected satisfaction. That narrow cot, he remembered, was to be the nest of a white and slender body. She would lie on it, in the darkness of the night, lost in her dreams. She would lie there, enisled in a world of her own, yet within a biscuit toss of his own hard bed. He found something consolatory in the thought that he might even be able to hear her breathing, on quiet nights. They would be close together in their loneliness. But always, of course, there would be a ghostly barrier between them. There would be a dividing wall, as obdurate as iron. They would be as sternly apart as though they lay underground in their coffins.

When he carried the cot back to the house, he found Joyce on the veranda, staring out over Lake Erie. Her set face disregarded him.

“What is it?” he asked.

“There’s a boat out there,” she said in an oddly flattened voice. “It—it must be in distress.”

He put down the cot and stood beside her, peering through the rain in the direction of her gaze. It took a moment or two before he could discern the vague hull of a freighter plunging and rolling in the waves.

“She’s pretty close in shore for weather like this,” he admitted. “She must be heading for the Eau Harbor. And that harbor’s not easy to make with a heavy sea on.”

A shiver went through Joyce’s wind-swept body.

“But supposing they can’t?” she cried. “Supposing they go down?”

He tried to laugh away the foolish terror in her eyes.

“Oh, they’ll manage. They’re pretty tough birds, those lake freighters.”

“But it looks so helpless,” gasped his trembling companion. “Supposing they have to lower a lifeboat!”

He could afford to smile at her fears.

“She’ll wallow through,” he proclaimed as he stood arrested by the pallor of the other’s face. Her rain-lashed body, he noticed, was swaying a little. She even raised an unsteady forearm and held it across her eyes.

“But you don’t know what it’s like,” she cried out, almost fiercely. “You don’t know what it’s like to toss in an open boat in seas like that!”

He remembered, as she swayed toward him, that she had learned her bitter lesson along that line. It had, apparently, left wounds he knew little about. A wave of compassion went through him as he reached out to support her.

He held her there, fraternally, pityingly, conscious of the tremors that were going through the shaken frame already sodden with driving rain. He was conscious, too, of the blossomlike odor of the cloud of hair so close to his lowered face. He wondered why it made him think of wood violets.

“It’s all right,” he consoled, standing between her and the beating rain. His hand, he discovered, was stroking the wind-blown cloud of hair. “You’re not out there. You’re here with me, safe and sound.”

She rested passive against him, for a moment or two. Then she stiffened in his clasp.

“It must never happen again,” she gasped. “It was five days and five nights—five endless days. We hadn’t clothes enough to keep warm. And the sea water kept washing in on us. The men got too weak to row. And I got too weak to bail. It got so awful I didn’t seem to care what happened.”

“But that’s all over,” he contended, tightening his clasp on her shaking body. He held her so close that he could feel the throb of her heart against his ribs. And that very closeness sent a somber joy through his frame.

“I was the only woman in that boat,” she said with a childish whimper of protest. “And in the end I wanted to die.”

“But you’re here with me,” he repeated. He even made an effort to shake her into attentiveness. “You’ve got me to protect you, to protect you from everything.”

Judd’s gesture was masterful as he took possession of her drooping body. Holding her close once more, he could think of no sweeter mission in life than shielding that troubled breast from the blows of the world. It was what men were made for. And in that mood of softness he bent lower over her face, searching for her lips.

But she twisted away from his grasp and took a deeper breath or two, staring wide-eyed out at the tumbling water. Her shoulders resumed their familiar Flying-Victory lines.

Judd was conscious, as her contorted face grew calmer, of a sense of deprivation, of the passing of something pleasurable. He knew a feeling of loss when the warm softness of her body no longer leaned against him. Yet, a brief minute later, that feeling of loss was eclipsed by a feeling of escape, of timely deliverance from some ghostly peril.

“It’s all right now,” she protested, standing straighter. She made an effort to control the last small twitching about her lip ends. “I didn’t intend to be such a fool.”

But the look of tragedy had not entirely left her eyes.

“There are certain things,” he admonished, “we can’t afford to remember.”

Yet even as he spoke he knew there were certain things they could not afford to forget.

“Let’s eat,” he said with a stabilizing sort of brusqueness as he ushered her in through the door and shut out the rain and the thunder of the waves.

Judd saw that the weather had cleared. The morning sun poured beams of daffodil-yellow light down on the hill slopes, leaving them steaming and seminal, waiting for their seed. The orchard lost its draggled look. The buds on the apple trees seemed ready to open. A commingling chorus of bird notes orchestrated the return of warmth to the land.

But Judd wrung no happiness from the brightened world about him. The storm was over. That meant there was no further need, and no further excuse, for his guest to remain under his roof. He had known, through the rain-swept days she had been there, a muted sort of satisfaction not altogether untouched with foreboding.

Yet a pang went through him when he found Joyce stooping over her open trunk, studiously packing her possessions.

“What does all this mean?” he demanded with a defensively jocular note.

“It means,” she answered without looking up at him, “that I have to be on my way.” She folded a white nurse’s uniform and placed it carefully in the trunk. “I’ll never forget your kindness,” she added as she shook out a pink slip and regarded its filmy bordering of lacework. It impressed the watching man as mysteriously feminine and delicate.

“I haven’t done much,” he said, depressed by the inadequacy of speech. He was wondering, at the moment, what resources she had to fall back on, what money she had to keep going on with until she found her new niche in the world. Yet it was a question he stood unwilling to put to her.

“I hope you make a go of your farm,” she said as she rose to her feet and stood beside him. The valedictory note in that speech hung a new weight on his heart.

“Farms aren’t everything,” he said, turning away from the limpid hazel eyes that were studying his face.

“But it’s the one thing you’re interested in,” was her quiet reply.

He was prompted to deny that. But still again the inadequacy of words kept him silent.

“I suppose you want to go?” he hesitatingly suggested.

Her smile was a wintry one.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Why?” he asked as he crossed to the window.

“Because you’ve got a fight on your hands,” she said as she closed and locked her trunk. “And it wouldn’t be fair to hamper you.”

“Hamper me?” he echoed, his gaze wandering about the walls where her quick hand had brought order out of disorder.

“You’d lose the respect of your neighbors,” she quietly explained. “And you’ll need that, before you really take root.” Her laugh was brief and caustic. “They’d say we were sleeping together. They’re probably saying it already.”

He stiffened and stared at her.

“What do I care about those clodhoppers? I intend to live my own life here.”

She shook her dusky head from side to side.

“It can’t be done. You’re one of them, now. And you have to conform to their standards. They may be narrow. But you can’t afford to disregard them.”

“I have my own standards,” he maintained. “And I don’t need to go to a bunch of corn-rustlers for moral guidance.”

“Of course,” she acceded. “But I know these people a little better than you do, from Mrs. Bangham down. You saw what she was like.”

“To hell with her,” said the glowering Judd.

“But you’re in her power just as I am,” contended the other. “When I wrote to the Chamboro hospital to see if I could work in their training school, or even be put on their registry, the superintendent asked for a letter from the minister’s wife I’d been living with. Now, of course, I’ll never get that letter.”

“Chamboro isn’t the only town in Ontario,” Judd called after her, as she went into her room and began piling her books together.

“But it’s a chance lost,” Joyce answered over her shoulder. She said it listlessly, as though life had drained her reservoir of emotion. “And you mustn’t run risks like that.”

Judd’s frown of indignation deepened. He seemed about to call out an answer to that foolish warning. But he stood arrested by the sound of a knock on the door. When repeated, with an air of impatience, it echoed almost ominously through the quiet house. It reminded Judd, as he reluctantly crossed to the door, that he was not as completely cut off from the world as he had asked to be.

When he opened the door he found himself looking into the broad and stubbled face of Spike Slocum. Spike stood in top boots fouled with barnyard manure. Behind him stood a team and wagon, equally fouled.

“Howd’y, neighbor,” said the newcomer. His tone was friendly but an air of the transitory hovered over the heavy-limbed figure. He even seemed a little out of breath.

“Come in,” said Judd, remembering the lesson that had just been delivered to him.

But Spike declined to come in. His slightly abashed gaze, in fact, was exploring the room behind Judd.

“Is that nurse who calls herself Mis’ Landis here?” he hesitatingly inquired.

“Why?” asked Judd with a quick hardening of the jaw line.

“ ’Cause we’re in trouble up to our house,” was the hurried and husky answer.

“What sort of trouble?”

“My wife’s just slipped on the milk-house steps—and I can’t get a doctor.”

“Is she hurt?”

“No, but she’s havin’ a baby. And it’s comin’ too soon. She’s in a bad way. We’re sure needin’ help.”

“Come in,” Judd repeated, conscious that Joyce’s preachment on neighborliness had not been entirely wide of the mark.

“I was haulin’ manure when it happened,” Spike said as he stopped to wipe his boots. “A man ain’t much use at a time like this.”

He stepped inside, hat in hand, and blinked with relief when he found himself face to face with the object of his search.

“I heard you,” Joyce said with a glance at the waiting team and wagon. “Has labor started?”

“It sure has,” said the unhappy husband.

“Give me two minutes,” said the girl as she threw open her trunk and unearthed the neatly folded uniform of white. Judd, when she disappeared in her room, turned to his visitor.

“How did you know Miss Landis was here?” he questioned.

The other’s mouth movement was too grim for a smile.

“It’s pretty common talk along the Ridge,” he answered after a moment of hesitation.

“So it’s common talk,” barked Judd, remembering the grapevine circuit of rural life that flowed through party lines and post-office greetings and road-gate conferences.

Spike’s shrug was obviously a gesture of forbearance stemming from a predicament more important than morals.

“We ain’t none of us perfect,” he was prompted to condone.

A tingle of revolt went through Judd’s body.

“Do you know why she’s here?” he demanded.

“I’d ruther not say,” protested his embarrassed neighbor.

Judd’s retort to that was cut short by the appearance of Joyce. She was all in white, with a bag in her hand into which she was impersonally thrusting a syringe and thermometer case. She looked taller in her uniform, endowed with a new dignity. About her hovered an odd and unexpected air of the virginal.

“Let’s go,” she said with a curt casualness that seemed to exile Judd from the periphery of her attention.

“It’s a purty dirty wagon,” said the abashed owner of the waiting team. “Hadn’t time to put the mare in the surrey.”

“I’ve been in dirtier,” Joyce announced as she climbed aboard.

Judd watched them round the curve of the driveway and go rumbling up through the orchard. It seemed very quiet there, once they had disappeared over the brink of the hill.

The house seemed equally quiet, when he came in at noon and set about preparing his midday meal. When he looked in the room where Joyce had slept, his nerves tightened with an unexpected twinge of loneliness. It was a bald little room, but it seemed haunted by her presence. He stood studying her few possessions, wondering why they should take on a poignancy like that which hovered about the belongings of someone who had passed away. When he bent over the pillow where her head had once rested, he caught a ghostly aroma that brought an increasing tightness about his heart. He was glad to escape to the open and lose himself in his work on the land. There was, he found, something stabilizing in toil.

It left him so leg-weary that when nightfall came he refused to give thought to the silence and emptiness that reigned in his lamp-lighted kitchen. His movements were listless as he prepared his evening meal. It was a foolishly late hour, he remembered, to be eating. A man who lived alone got careless about such things. Even his bread was stale, so stale that he was prompted to toast it. And in the midst of cleaning up after a meal where nothing had tasted as it ought, he asked himself if there wasn’t something unmanly in all such food wrangling and dish washing. It took time, time which should be given to other things. And eating alone that way, he suspected, tended to leave him as animal-like as a tired work horse in its evening stall. There was something missing.

During his plowing of the upper field, the next day, his gaze went often to the Slocum house amid its huddle of out-buildings. He was tempted to stop his work and go over and make inquiries as to how things were going there. But something held him back. He consoled himself by watching the polished moldboard as it threw dark furrow after furrow across the field that was waiting for its seed. He was working his land, the land that always loyally repaid everything that was put into it. And that land would always have to come first. All he asked from it was a living, the elusive and long-awaited gift of being his own master. And he intended to succeed. It would not be easy, especially for the first season or two. But he would win out, in the end. He’d learn his lessons, bit by bit, and take root there and be a son of the soil. And from that soil he would eventually wring a peace of mind that had always seemed to escape him.

But his steps were slow with weariness as the sun sank low and he stalled his tired horse. He missed the familiar sense of joy in feeding his stock and completing his barnyard chores. It was only as he trudged houseward, carrying his pail of milk, that his heart knew a sudden lift. For he could see the blue smoke of a wood fire going up from his kitchen chimney. It went up in the cooling evening air like a pennon of valor.

Joyce was there, waiting for him. She had just taken a pan of biscuits from the oven, and was stooping over them with a quietly triumphant smile when he stepped through the door.

“You’re back,” he said, trying to fight down the surge of relief that went through him. The table was laid, the kettle was singing, and even the polished milk pans were waiting for him.

She turned and looked at him, apparently held poised by the noncommittal nature of that greeting.

“I came down through the orchard,” she explained as she took the milk from him and strained it into the pans. “I didn’t want to disturb you at your work.” She smiled for the first time, conscious that his hungry eye was on the pan of hot biscuits. “I made these when I was doing a meat pie from what was left of your beef.”

His gesture of protest was only a half-hearted one. That beef, he remembered, had been almost as dry as his loaf ends of bread.

“How did you get along at the Slocums’?” he asked when she had reappeared from the cellar. She was, apparently, determined to keep everything on the solid ground of the casual.

“Better than I expected,” she answered. “They’ve an eight-pound boy up there. He came three hours before the doctor. So I had rather a busy night of it.”

Judd stopped and stared at her.

“You mean you did the job?” he questioned.

“Of course. But that mother will need a bit of looking after for a few days.”

He knew an unlooked-for lift of the heart at those words. But the tone of his voice remained a casual one.

“Does that mean you’re going to stay on?”

Her level gaze met his.

“You know I can’t do that,” she reminded him. He watched her as she lifted the teapot from the stove to the table end, wondering why, even in movements that were open and obvious, she should seem mysterious. It was her unknown past, he assumed, that left her impenetrable. She made him think of northern waters, waters that are clear and untainted and yet tinged brown by the peat soil through which they flow, the honest brown water beloved of all anglers, the clouded translucency that left things draped in dusky uncertainties.

The sense of her mysteriousness grew stronger as they sat face to face across the supper table that became an island of light as the world darkened about them. They were like two castaways on a desert island, cut off from the interests of the Banghams and Slocums and Pretlows and all the gossiping countryside. Even their silences, he found, could seem companionable.

“This is more like living,” Judd said as he pushed back his chair. Yet his lips hardened, a moment later, when he caught a look of pity on his companion’s face. “You know, of course, what you’re doing to me?”

“What am I doing?” asked the woman with the barricaded eyes.

“Teaching me that Thoreau was all wrong,” he said with the ghost of a laugh. “That men weren’t made to live alone.”

“Some men,” conceded the other, “seem happiest that way.”

Judd knew a shadowy sense of escape. But it was escape in no way touched with happiness.

“What are your plans?” he found the courage to ask.

“I haven’t any,” Joyce admitted. The forlornness of her voice sent a twinge of pity through him. “But you mustn’t worry about me. I’ve quite enough to get along on, until things straighten out.”

“You said you liked country life,” he announced out of the silence that fell between them.

“I love it,” she acknowledged. “I think I love it almost as much as you do.”

“Of course you would,” he said, more to himself than to her. “And it’s what you need.”

Yet the one aim of the younger generation along that countryside, she pointed out, was to get away to the city. Spike Slocum, she explained, had been telling her how the smart ones all slip off to Detroit or Cleveland or Chicago.

“To be shut up in offices and factories,” was Judd’s impatient rejoinder, “where they trade open sunlight for carbon monoxide, and salve their loss with tin-pan music and movies!”

But Joyce shook her head.

“Cities aren’t all sin and ugliness,” she maintained. “I’ve seen some that were beautiful. Paris was that way, when it was still Paris.”

“I’ve had enough of them,” said Judd.

Her smile, at that, was fleeting and forbearing.

“All the world, of course, doesn’t share your Tolstoyan impulse toward rusticity.”

She saw reproof in his quick glance about at her.

“I mean,” she said by way of amendment, “that to the farm boys around here the cities seem to hold the short-cuts to success.”

“It depends on what you call success.”

Joyce looked at the stained and broken plaster in the ceiling.

“Mrs. Slocum was telling me how old Cantwell’s son was able to make more out of a year of rumrunning than his father did in twenty years of farming.”

“Rumrunning,” Judd asserted, “went out with Prohibition.”

“It did,” Joyce agreed. “But it came back with the new taxes here. Even that Buckhorn minister talks about the truck loads of bootleg liquor that keep coming over the border. He claims the power boats unload it along the beach, and cars carry it right along this Ridge Road to Hamilton and Toronto. And there, with the revenue taxes so high, the smugglers get as much as ten dollars a gallon for it.”

Judd’s gesture was one of impatience. Rumrunners and bootleggers seemed to belong to an earlier and shoddier era, an era he had no wish to remember. He disliked even the sound of the words. They seemed dulled and outdated.

“Well, I’m not as interested as your Parson Bangham in rumrunners and their profits,” Judd asserted after glancing through the window to where twilight deepened about his garden. “Those farm boys are welcome to their buccaneering. My job, from now on, is going to center about getting a decent living off this land.”

Judd wrung no happiness from the repeated smile of forbearance that showed on his companion’s face.

“You may not find it as easy as you imagine,” she observed after a glance at his scarred and sun-reddened hands. “But you’ll probably get your own fun out of the fight.”

“I’m not looking for fun,” Judd said with a note of asperity. “But I’ve a human interest in making my own decisions and bringing a little dignity back to life.”

That statement, with its touch of passion, left his companion wondering what could have happened to take the dignity out of his earlier days. There was something, she knew, from which he was a refugee, something more than war-front horror. He had suffered, in some way, just as she had. And again Judd could see his companion’s face softened by its fleeting look of pity.

“We’re both in the same boat,” she reminded him as she got up from her chair and put wood in the stove.

The thought came to Judd, as he sat watching her, that she had the gift of bringing dignity to her smallest movements. Her posture, in even menial tasks, had the trick of becoming memorable. And that thought kept recurring to him as the dishes were washed and the room was put to rights.

“Do you mind if I do a bit of sewing?” she surprised him by asking. “I got a tear in my uniform worming through the barbwire fence on my way back from the Slocums.”

Judd sat moodily watching the fire until she returned to the kitchen with needle and thread. The silence remained unbroken as she seated herself at the table end, where the light was strongest, and began to sew. It suddenly came home to him that this was life reduced to the elemental: a fire to keep warm, a circle of light, a woman sewing beside a table, the outer world shut away.

He shifted his chair a little so as to study the lowered face silhouetted against the light of the lamp. He noticed how the level brow gave a cast of thoughtfulness to the profile that might have seemed marblelike in its clearness of line, except for the humanizing mistiness of the curved lashes. Those thickly planted lashes threw a shadow across the cheek and blurred the narrow bridge of the nose that held the ghost of a tilt at its end, a tilt that took the austerity out of the wider shadow of the side face where duskiness ended in darkness. He noticed, too, the tuliplike curve of the lips that came together as though reluctant to come together, the upper line, a little fuller than the lower, giving a bee-stung air of childishness to the firmness that might otherwise have seemed hardness.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you have a lovely mouth?” he found himself saying out of the silence.

The woman beside the lamp sewed on, for a moment or two, with her head bent lower.

“I don’t hear the lake tonight,” she finally observed. And that deliberate digression gave Judd the impression of a door being quietly closed in his face.

He shrugged and reached for his pipe. Yet his glance went back to the dusky head bent over its sewing. It brought a sense of contentment to him, even with the newer sternness that rested on the fluted lips, a sternness that could not rob them of some almost childlike touch of the inconsequential. He even wondered how often they had quickened the heartbeats of troubled men. They had even quickened his own. But it had, he told himself, been against his will. And life had taught him it was best to keep free of all such entanglements. He had already adventured deep enough along that primrose path where the milestones of rhapsody end in disillusionment. Yet a sense of loss went through him when Joyce, conscious of his continued stare, shifted a little in her chair so that all he could see was the rounded column of her neck, half in shadow and half in light. He even resented that trivial withdrawal. It left him puzzled by the feeling that they were wasting something precious, letting something that might prove momentous slip through their hands.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he found himself saying.

“What is funny?” she questioned, without looking up.

“Our being together this way.”

She lifted her head at that, her brow slightly puckered with thought. Then she took a deeper breath.

“I should never have billeted myself on you the way I did. But it won’t be for long.”

The emptiness of that silent house, when she was away on her mission of mercy, had touched him with a new-born sense of desolation.

“Why shouldn’t it be?” he asked.

She met his gaze with a flicker of a smile.

“It wouldn’t work out. We have our own ways to go,” she said as she smoothed out her white skirt and folded it together. The smile with which she confronted him was a valorous one.

“We ought to be partners,” he suddenly and stubbornly proclaimed.

Her quick gaze once more questioned him.

“What does that mean?”

“It means it would be better for both of us, if you just stayed on here.” He caught her head movement of negation. “You’d be safe enough.”

“I might be safe enough from you,” she acceded, “but not from the others.”

“What others?”

“The people you have to live among, the people whose tongues are already wagging.”

“Do you care?” he challenged.

“Not for myself,” she answered. “But I do for you.”

His frown deepened.

“I don’t see why outsiders should count, if our own consciences are clear. A good many men have had women under the same roof with them. There’s no law against that.”

“I’m not thinking about laws. I’m thinking about your own happiness. And a little about my own, I’m afraid. For a time would come when you’d rather hate me.”

“So I size up that small to you?”

A shadow of pain crossed her face.

“I’m not saying how you size up to me.”

“But you insist on taking the rural interpretation of all this?”

Joyce winced and waited a moment before answering.

“It’s not rural. It goes deeper than that. It’s mixed up with everything we’ve been or want to be.”

Judd’s body shift was one of impatience.

“But I’m not trying to argue you into whoredom.”

The lash of that left her untouched. There was even a smile on her lips as she looked at him.

“I’m quite aware of that,” she announced. “But I’m equally aware we can’t always do what we want to.”

He seemed to catch hope from that announcement.

“Then it’s merely that you’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid. In one way, I’m quite fearless. And also quite lawless, in another way, though I have a code of my own. And I prefer keeping to that code.”

“I’ve a code of my own,” Judd said. “And, naturally, I’d respect yours. There could be a chalk line, and neither of us would cross that line.” He met her level gaze without flinching. “Let’s make a try at it. Let’s show ’em we can make it work out. And if it promises not to work out, everything’s off.”

It surprised him to see that she had lost a little of her color, for all the heat-lightning smile that played about her lips.

“But you don’t know anything about me.”

“I know enough,” said Judd.

She smiled her gratitude for the note of faith in that proclamation.

“And I know you’re a man of honor,” she said as her color came back.

“There’d be no—no entangling alliances,” he stoutly asserted.

Her gaze coasted about the room.

“There’s so much to be done here,” she said, more to herself than to her companion. The note of hunger in her voice did not escape him.

“Then let’s shake on it,” he said, “man to man.”

She sat silent a moment, looking down at the hands that lay passive in her lap.

“All right,” she finally said. She tried to say it casually. But there was a small quaver in her voice. “Man to man!”

Yet it was not entirely man to man, he realized as he took her small hand in his toil-hardened hand. For there was something inalienably womanly in the smaller fingers about which his strong fingers closed. They suggested softness where his suggested strength. He even knew an impulse, when the warmth of that hand flowed into the warmth of his own, to complete some ghostly sense of capture by drawing her closer to him. But a look of pathos in her eyes, a look like that of a child to whom the world had not been overly kind, sent that impulse of possessiveness scattering.

He turned away and crossed to the door, which he swung open, letting the cool night air flow into the room. He could hear the frogs piping from the swale beyond the garden sumacs. And tomorrow, he reminded himself, he would have to get busy in that garden with his one-horse plough and get the waiting soil ready for its seeding.

Everything, Judd stubbornly maintained, was going along as usual. And, as far as he was concerned, everything would continue to go along that way. He had a battle to fight, a battle against time and neglect. The one issue before him was to get his garden planted and his orchard trimmed and his land into crop. With the cares of the house off his hands, he kept telling himself, he could give longer hours to his field work.

It was only in the house, he observed, that a change was taking place. There Joyce functioned with a quiet efficiency that confronted him with its daily surprises. But when she returned from a day of shopping in the county seat of Chamboro, and he awakened to the extent of her purchases, his conscience troubled him a little. He was accepting too much from her, and giving too little in return.

That thought goaded him into an unexpected extravagance on his own part. It grew out of a discovery he made when he drove over to the Cantwell farm to carry home a load of secondhand whitewood siding needed to repair his barn. At the back of the Cantwell wagon shed he stumbled on a bedstead that promptly arrested his attention. It was an old-fashioned four-poster with pineapple pillars that had been painted a sickly yellow, maculated with fowl droppings where the farm chickens had plainly been using it as a roost. But the ponderous lines of that old bedstead held Judd’s eye.

He opened his pocketknife and scraped away some of the paint. The rich darkness of the wood, under its defacing coat of yellow, prompted him to heft the headpiece, to test its weight.

“That’s mahogany,” he gasped.

When Kirk Cantwell came out, to be paid for his lumber, Judd casually referred to his find.

“I see you’ve got an old bed in there against the back wall. Would you care to sell it?”

Cantwell looked at the bed and laughed.

“Sure I’ll sell it. I’d sell anything. The wife always held that bed was too big and clumsy for our ten-by-twelve rooms.” The sagacious small eyes grew narrower. “You got any use for an old-timer like that?”

“I need a bed,” Judd announced. “And this would do, if I could get it at a reasonable figure.”

Kirk Cantwell reached for a wisp of hay and brushed aside some of the chicken dung. He studied the bedstead with a more appreciative eye.

“She’d be a great old bed,” he proclaimed, “once she’s cleaned up. The wife’s grandfather brought her out from the Old Country ninety long years ago. Came in a sailin’ ship.”

“And not doing much good out here,” suggested Judd, who had of late been initiated into the intricacies of rural bargaining.

“But she’s a solid old piece,” Cantwell observed with an affectionate shake of the pineapple pillars.

“What do you want for it?” asked Judd.

The older man estimated the newcomer from the city.

“Twenty-five dollars.”

Judd laughed and walked out to his waiting wagon.

“I’m not interested,” he announced as he picked up his reins. But his pulse had quickened a little.

“Fifteen dollars,” amended the owner of the bed.

Judd, with a head movement of negation, climbed up on his wagon.

“Ten dollars and it’s yours,” conceded his anxious-eyed neighbor.

“I’ll take it,” said Judd. And each had a gleam of triumph in his eye as the yellow-painted old frame was piled on the wagon top.

But Judd, after storing the four-poster away in his work shed, said nothing of his purchase to Joyce. He forgot his weariness, after nightfall, in working there by lantern light. He scraped and sandpapered until the coat of bilious yellow was removed. Then he polished and rubbed and oiled, watching the dark luster come back to the close-grained wood. Then he waxed and rubbed and polished again, until the burnished surface threw back the light of the lantern swinging beside it. It was, he saw, a beautiful bed. There was something regal about its dark-wooded richness, about the massive convolutions of its dully shimmering posts. It was like a baldachin.

But a bed like that, he realized, called for the proper accouterments. To obtain them he fabricated an excuse for a visit to the county seat, where he threw caution to the winds and possessed himself of box springs and a hair mattress, making it a point to return after the fall of night. He wanted his secret to remain a secret.

He waited, the next morning, until Joyce started out on a trip to the village post office. Then he removed the unseemly cot from her bedroom, replacing it with the heavy four-poster. It was, he acknowledged, overly big for the narrow room. But it struck an appeasing note of grandeur. And when it had been draped with a coverlet of blue and white patchwork, it looked like a bed where a queen might sleep.

He was carrying stovewood in to the kitchen when Joyce returned.

“You shouldn’t interrupt your work,” she admonished, “to do things like that.”

He looked at her and laughed. The spring sunlight, he noticed, had brought a darker tinge of color to her face.

“I owe you a little help, now and then,” he brusquely announced. But his brusqueness was merely a mask. He watched her as she opened the stove draught and filled the kettle. He continued to watch her as she stowed away her village purchases and ran a comb through her hair. When she went to her room and he followed her, she paused at the door and glanced back at him over her shoulder. But he stood silent, hugging his secret, waiting for her to get her first glimpse of the bed.

Her gasp of surprise was an audible one. She stood quite motionless, for a moment or two, absorbing her shock.

“What does it mean?” she asked in low-voiced wonder.

“It’s your new bed,” said Judd, wondering why perplexity more than happiness should show on her face.

“My bed?” she echoed as she stared at the burnished pillars.

“You deserve something better than a broken-down cot,” he protested, conscious of her receding color. “There’s not much a down-and-outer like me can give you. But I owe you that much.”

Her hand caressed the glossy woodwork.

“But where did it come from?”

He explained how he had unearthed it from the Cantwell wagon shed and had done it over in his secret hours of night work.

“So that’s why you’ve slipped away every evening after supper,” she said after a quick study of his face. “I thought it was because you were afraid of me.”

“I wanted to make it a surprise,” he explained. And the almost boyish constraint with which he spoke seemed to bring reassurance back to her face.

“It’s beautiful,” she said as she stood back and studied the towering posts with their pineapple carvings. Then she laughed a little. “I’ll feel like Cleopatra, sleeping there.”

That thought, for some reason, did not add to his happiness. He made an effort to shut out the sudden vision of her lying bare-shouldered and relaxed, as he had once seen her lying on his sun-steeped veranda floor.

“You deserve a little slice of comfort,” he found himself saying. He thought of soft-handed city women, luxuriously idle women for whom life had always been made easy, women with nothing to work and plan for, cheated out of their birthright of service without being quite conscious of their loss.

“But you’re being too good to me,” Joyce was saying. “I’m here to help, and not hold things back.”

“You’re helping too much,” averred Judd.

Joyce prodded the mattress to test its softness.

“Then if we’re sliding into luxury,” she casually suggested, “let’s not eat in the kitchen.”

“But it’s the custom of the country,” Judd protested. “And it saves time.”

“But we’re not that sort,” she said as she restored a volume or two to her bookshelf. “And tablecloths seem more—more civilized.”

Such things, he assumed, meant a good deal to a woman. That was why she was making curtains and pillowcases, and buying odd pieces of china and cutlery for the house. It was, in a way, heading in the wrong direction. It was taking the simplicity out of life.

“It will mean a good many more steps,” he ventured, thinking of a table duly laid in the living room.

“I don’t mind the steps,” she told him as he picked up The Last Puritan and turned it over in his hand. “And it seems odd that a man like you should shy away from books the way you do.”

Judd laughed.

“It’s only an armistice. I wanted to get the printer’s ink out of my system. And the one thing I’m trying to find here is peace.”

“We get that, sometimes, from books.”

“Oh, I’ll be swinging back to ’em,” Judd acknowledged, “after we get going here. I’ve got a living to make, remember, out of this farm.”

“I know,” said Joyce. She ran her fingertips along the satin-smooth mahogany of the four-poster. “That’s why there shouldn’t be extravagances like this.”

She said it reprovingly. But the reproof was softened by a smile of gratitude touched with wistfulness.

“The extravagances will come later,” observed Judd. But that reference to the unfathomable future brought a cloud to her face. She remained silent until they were seated at the supper table.

“There are other beds we have to think about,” Joyce said out of that silence. “I want to help with the garden. That can be my job, if you’ll show me how to mark out the beds.”

“Let’s get started tonight,” said Judd. “We can work together there in the evenings.” The prospect of planting and tilling, side by side with her in the lengthening twilight, sent a pleasurable wave through his body. He found it equally pleasurable, an hour later, to talk over plans with her and stake out plots and decide what vegetables should be planted. But they had to give up when darkness descended on them.

“The days are so short,” Joyce complained as she studied the last of the afterglow beyond the tree-crowned Ridge. The air was clear and cool, yet it held a promise of coming warmth. The knee-deeps boomed from the swale beyond the sumac grove and a sleepy bird twittered in the twilight. A star or two came out in the high arch of azure above them.

Joyce, who had been looking out over the misted silver of the lake, turned slowly about and pointed.

“That’s north,” she said. And Judd smiled at the quiet conviction in her voice.

“How do you know?” he questioned.

“I always know,” she answered. “I can feel the north. I always could.”

“When the wind blows cold,” suggested the doubting Judd.

“No, it’s an instinct with me. You could shut me up in a room, or blindfold me and turn me around a dozen times, and I could still point to where the polar star ought to be. It was really a help, when we were in that open boat and the weather was thick. Those tired sailors didn’t know which way to head. They had to depend on me. And every time I was right.”

That reference to the old, unhappy far-off things chilled Judd a little. But he remained skeptical.

“You probably knew your stars,” he suggested.

“There were no stars,” Joyce maintained.

“Then let’s try it here and now,” challenged the other. He tied his handkerchief over her eyes. Taking her by the hand, he led her about in a double circle.

“Now, which is north?” he demanded.

She stood motionless a moment. Then, wheeling partly about, she extended her right arm.

It pointed directly toward the North Star that hung above the Ridge treetops.

“That’s north,” Joyce said. And Judd, at that confident announcement, experienced a faint stirring of nerve ends.

But he insisted on another trial. This time he placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her about several times.

Still again, when she pointed, her extended arm was directed toward the north.

“That’s queer,” he exclaimed, stooping close to her face, to make sure her eyes were properly covered. But that nearness to her filled him with a hunger to be still nearer. He placed his hands on her shoulders, as though about to repeat the earlier revolving movement. But his arms went about her and he drew her body close in against his own pulsing body, his face pressed against hers.

She showed no surprise and she made no effort to free herself. She merely drew a deeper breath and became more rigid.

“That is verboten,” she said in a straitened voice.

Judd’s arms went slowly down to his side.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

But as they walked back to the house, under the stars, a ghostly sense of peril took possession of him. That vague feeling of insecurity remained with him through the night as he turned and twisted on his hard bed, half dreaming and half waking, haunted by the memory of a momentary warmth and softness against his beating heart. The call of sex to sex, he remembered, was as old as the earth. But there were times when it had to be met and conquered. And the first duty imposed on him was to show compassion to the compassionate.

Just how compassionate the woman committed to his keeping was, stood evidenced the next day as the mounting sun warmed the lake cliffs and Judd worked the garden soil that seemed impatient for its seed.

“Summer must be here,” Joyce called out to him from the doorway. “The swallows are back.”

Judd, when he stopped his work to look up, could see the small and feathery bodies circling about the cliff front. Their airy arrowing brought a sense of release and a sense of promise to his heart. And it seemed natural enough that Joyce should even turn to song as she hung her clothes on the line. She sang absently and artlessly, surprising Judd with the full-throated purity of her voice.

“What was that?” he asked when the singing stopped.

“That, son of the soil, is Rimski-Korsakov’s ‘Hymn to the Sun.’ And this is the time your hill slope should be hearing it.”

But the sun, for all its noonday warmth, did not keep the afternoon from being a cool one. The wind, shifting to the north, brought a sharpening chilliness to the air. It grew colder as evening approached. It grew so cold that the bewildered cliff swallows flew disconsolately back and forth across the lawn. They weaved and wavered just above the grass, as though in search of warmer air there. As the cold increased, they began to collapse, one by one, and fall inert on the ground.

That catastrophe brought a cry of horror from Joyce. She went out, armed with a market basket, and gathered up a dozen of the limp but still breathing bodies. She carried them in beside the kitchen stove, which she kept going late into the night. In the morning she found five of the swallows dead. But seven of them, when the sun had warmed the cliff front again, she released to life and freedom.

“They came back too soon,” she lamented over the dead birds.

“And in that,” said Judd, “there may be a moral for us.”

When Judd came back from Chamboro with a secondhand Ford truck that he had picked up for one hundred and forty dollars, the rattle of the old engine brought Joyce to the door. He smiled down at her as her bewildered gaze coasted about the melancholy-looking jalopy.

“It’s mine,” he announced. “And it goes.”

“Aren’t you getting extravagant?” Joyce questioned.

“No; this is going to be a time-saver. We’re mechanized now. And if I have to peddle fruit and vegetables to the summer cottagers at Erie Beach, I can do it in state.”

Joyce refused to join in his laugh. The picture of him peddling garden truck to the summer cottagers, going discreetly to back doors and doing his best to stand in with the cooks and housemaids who’d hold his fate in their hands, proved an unpalatable one. He was too big for that sort of work. It was, for all his talk of freedom, only an escape from one sort of bondage to another.

Judd was still smiling as he descended from the driver’s seat and all but stepped on a saucer of cream on the back doorsill. He stopped short and stared down at it.

“It’s that wild-cat of ours,” Joyce explained. She hooded her eyes with an uplifted hand and peered about the remoter garden shadows. “I’m trying to tame him. But he won’t come near, even for cream, if I’m anywhere in sight.”

Judd’s ruminative eye rested on her face, the face that could make him forget his weariness and awaken unrest in the cave of his heart.

“Hunger tames most of us,” he observed.

He was not unconscious of Joyce’s quick glance, as though probing for some second meaning in those casually uttered words. But her eyes went back to the garden.

“I hate to think of a killer like that prowling about the place,” she protested. “Yesterday I caught him robbing a catbird’s nest over there in the sumac grove. And the day before I saw him go across the lawn with a baby robin in his mouth.”

Judd bristled at the thought of that insinuating small enmity in his new world of peace.

“He ought to be shot.”

A small tremor went through Joyce’s body.

“I hate shooting and seeing things shot,” she murmured. And Judd, conscious of the tremor, abruptly sobered. He too had his own memories of such things.

“You needn’t worry,” he announced. “There isn’t a firearm about this farm. That’s something we’ve shut out of our world.”

“I wish they’d never been invented.”

“Why?” asked Judd.

“Because I’ve seen too much of what they can do to men.”

Judd lifted the saucer of cream to the lower step. He was remembering what it was like to stand against a wall with a row of rifles facing him.

“Well, you’ll win this gangster over. It may take time. He’s had a hard life, remember.”

“It must have been hard,” Joyce agreed, “when he keeps turning his back on cream and kindness.”

It was Judd, this time, who directed a quick glance at his companion, as though in search of muffled implications. But Joyce’s eyes, as her gaze wandered about the garden reaches, remained unresponsive.

It struck him as strange, when the last chore was done and the lamp was lighted and Joyce sat across the table from him with her never-ending sewing, that he and this woman who was so near and yet so remote from him should be housed as they were under one roof. He sat watching her, as her needle went back and forth, held by the uncertainty of the inclined profile and the shadows that touched her face into mystery. There was something flowerlike, he observed, in the flesh luster of the throat and neck played on by the light of the lamp.

“I dropped up to see Mrs. Slocum today,” Joyce explained over her sewing. “When I told her husband your feed was running low, he said he could spare you a half-load of hay any time you wanted to come and get it.”

She was more practical-minded, Judd remembered, than most women of her station in life. She was more of a realist than he was, he admitted, as with pencil and pad he figured up his dolorously narrowing margin of money in hand. He even wondered if that impulsive purchasing of the Ford truck had been a mistake.

“A half-load of hay would help out,” he said, “but we can’t afford it just now.”

“You wouldn’t have to pay for it,” Joyce announced. “Slocum says he owes us more than a jag of hay.”

Judd made an effort to hide his wince at the “us.”

“That makes it a different story,” he gravely admitted. The thought of dependence on her, for some reason, did not add to his happiness.

Yet the next day, when he pulled up beside the mow door with his load of hay, he found it no easy matter, singlehanded, to stow away his fodder. It meant climbing into the mow every few minutes, and clearing away the accumulated pile forked up from the wagon rack. He was mopping his brow when Joyce came around a corner of the barn, a pan of eggs in her hands.

“You need help there,” she suggested, after putting down her eggs. “I’ll go up in the mow and fork it away as you unload.”

“It’s not woman’s work,” Judd objected, conscious of the play of light where the sun glinted on her wind-blown hair.

“I’ll make it woman’s work,” Joyce called out as she possessed herself of a hayfork and climbed into the mow. “I love the smell of hay,” she added as she stationed herself at the mow door.

Judd found his unloading easier, with someone to keep the opening clear. It had been that way, he remembered, with their fruit-tree spraying. There were some farm jobs that called for an extra hand.

“Am I giving it to you too fast?” he asked as he saw the flash of the busy fork tines.

“I can take it as fast as you give it,” cried the bell-like voice from the mow gloom. Toil, Judd found, could be less somber when shared with a light-handed and light-hearted companion. He was even prompted to put his helper to the test by hurrying his own movements, quick forkful by forkful, until a gasp of protest came down to him.

“Are you buried?” he called out as a final crescendo of pitching emptied the wagon rack.

When no answer came to that half-jocular challenge he swung down from the wagon and mounted the ladder to the mow. He could see how the gloom was bisected by one narrow shaft of sunlight in which a million motes of gold floated and eddied. Then he saw Joyce. She was lying on the slope of loose hay, her arms outstretched, staring up at the dust that danced in the slanting sword blade of sunlight above her. Her hair was in disorder. Her waist, loosened at the throat, showed a V of the familiar gardenia-white faintly veined with blue.

“Tuckered out?” he asked, arrested by the utter impassivity that seemed to exclude him from the kingdom of her consciousness.

Instead of speaking, she merely moved her head from side to side in dissent.

“You made it easier,” observed Judd as he picked up her fork and deposited it beside the ladder opening. Moving knee deep across the hay slope made him think of wading in water. And the smell of the hay, the pleasant and slightly acrid aroma of sun-cured clover and timothy, took him at a bound back to his boyhood days.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked as he stood over her. The rise and fall of the bosom under the taut cotton waist, he noticed, had become less rapid.

She lay silent a moment.

“I was thinking how primitive it is,” she finally answered. “It’s as though time had gone back a thousand years and two hillside peasants were plotting and planning how to keep hunger away.” She lifted up a handful of hay and sniffed at it. “It’s—it’s so rudimentary.”

“We’re not peasants,” said Judd, wondering what had suggested that line of thought to her.

“That’s the funny part of it. We’re really what you’d call sophisticates. But the world went down under our feet. And now we’re only castaways, doing our best to wring a little animal content out of life.”

Judd sat down beside her, his brow furrowed with thought.

“Not altogether animal,” he countered. “One has to keep going on. And one goes on in the way that seems best.”

Joyce sat up and studied his face, the familiar heat-lightning smile of pity hovering about her lips.

“But you’re so alone,” she murmured.

“And you feel sorry for me?” he questioned.

“I’m sorry,” was her slightly retarded answer, “that you’re not as happy as you’d hoped to be.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I can see it in your face, every day. You try to hide it away, but it’s there. You try to forget it in hard work. You tire your body out so that your brain will go to sleep. But all the while there’s something wrong, something missing.”

Judd declined to agree with her. There was a fullness to country life that he had never found in the city. There was a joy in watching the changing season, in being close to the soil, in the fragrance of fresh-turned earth, in going out to one’s work in the crystal clearness of early morning, in hearing the fluting of robins in the cool of the evening, in catching a whiff of wild crab-apple blossoms along the lane fence, in walking land that was one’s own and seeing the green and orderly rows of plant life where weeds and neglect had once reigned.

“And I like being alone,” he concluded.

The ruminative hazel eyes once more rested on his face.

“Then I shouldn’t be here,” she said as she rose to her feet.

He caught contritely at the hand with which she was smoothing down her unruly hair.

“I didn’t mean that,” he cried out. “It’s been wonderful, since you came. It’s been almost too wonderful.”

Her smile was a misty one.

“I don’t see why it should,” she said as she glanced down at her imprisoned hand. “Men and women were made to live together. It was planned that way, from the first.”

“But it doesn’t always work out,” contended Judd, releasing the hand that asked for release.

“You mean it didn’t with you?” she suggested, conscious of the cloud that crossed his face. There was something elemental in her posture as she sank back on the hay slope, apparently to avoid the shifting shaft of sunlight that had brought a pucker to the meditative hazel eyes.

“You can put it that way if you like,” he listlessly admitted.

“So that’s why you’re afraid of women,” she said, more to herself than to him.

“I’m not afraid of them,” he said after looking down at her for a moment of silence. She seemed so small and defenseless, beside his towering strength, that a melancholy smile took the sternness out of his lips. “I’m afraid of myself.”

“Why?”

Any answer to that was not easy to frame.

“Because I’m not free,” he finally admitted.

Joyce failed to follow the links in his chain of thought.

“Free from what?” she asked, studying the bronzed face to which sternness had so abruptly returned.

It was, to Judd, like uncovering something that had been long coffined and concealed. But his voice, when he spoke, was one of deliberated quietness.

“I have a wife,” he said. “A wife still living.”

Joyce’s eyes rested on the slanting lance of sunlight above her.

“But not living with you,” she said out of the prolonged silence.

“She preferred another man to me.”

That confession, Joyce could see, had come at a cost. But neither surprise nor pity showed in the contemplative hazel eyes.

“I thought it was something like that,” she said with an antiphonal sort of quietness. Then she looked up at him. “And you’ve never asked for your freedom?”

“I preferred stepping out from under. That’s what brought me to Pine Brae.”

He detected the belated look of pity that came into her eyes, even though her voice, when she spoke, remained consolingly matter-of-fact.

“But that leaves everything so unfair to you, so unsolved. You’ve still the future to think of.”

“I haven’t wanted to think,” Judd said, almost harshly.

Her commiserative eyes once more regarded him.

“So it hit you that hard,” she observed. “You must have loved her a lot.”

“I prefer not talking about it.”

“Poor Peter!” she murmured as she clasped an arm about his knee and pressed her face against the bleached denim of his trouser leg. It was the first time, he remembered, that she had ever spoken his name. He wondered why so trivial a thing should seem to send so many barriers down.

“Don’t pity me,” he gasped as he dropped down beside her. “I may not be free, but I’m still human.” He bent over her, almost fiercely, and clamped a hand on either rounded slope of her shoulders.

“Poor Peter,” she repeated, moving her head slowly from side to side.

“Perhaps I am,” he admitted, his eyes on the warm curve of her mouth. “Perhaps we are just castaways here. But you’re a woman. And I’m a man. And if the world’s gone down under us we’ve still got ourselves.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, forcing herself to meet his gaze.

“Because when we’re together like this there’s a hunger in my heart that shouldn’t be there.”

He could see the deeper breath that tautened the flimsy cotton waist open at the throat.

“I know,” she said with a meditative nod of the head. “But what can we do about it?”

The color ebbed from his face, even under its sun tan.

“We can go on,” he cried, “starving our souls and pretending we’re not flesh and blood.” He leaned closer over her. “Or we can forget the world and wake up to what is really missing.”

“We mustn’t do that,” she said as her glance once more locked with his. But from her face, too, a little of the color had ebbed away.

“Why?” he exacted, conscious of her quickened breathing.

“Because I don’t want you to hate me.” Her gesture seemed one of perplexity touched with helplessness.

“Hate you!” cried Judd, with a tremor in his voice. “I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you on that veranda of mine. I’ve loved you without having the manhood to acknowledge it. To acknowledge it even to myself. I didn’t want it to happen. But it did happen.”

That declaration brought no happiness to the woman with her eyes upturned to his. She drew away from him a little, with what was almost a gesture of protest.

“It’s not fair,” she cried, “to say things like that.”

“But it’s the truth,” said Judd. “And it’s about time we faced the truth.”

“We can’t afford to,” she protested. But what seemed like a small sound of helplessness escaped her slightly parted lips.

“Doesn’t life owe us something?” Judd asked as he imprisoned her unsteady hand in his. He could feel his heart pounding. He had the impression of being on an abyss from which there could be no turning back. And yet not to turn back implied calamity. “We can’t go on like this.”

“I know,” she whispered as he drew her closer and his arms tightened about her. She lifted her own arms and clasped them about his neck. “Oh, I love you, I love you,” she cried as she drew his face down to hers.

When their lips met and clung together he could feel her body go limp. “I love you,” she repeated with her face pressed against the hollow of his throat. And the thought of descent over an abyss-edge seemed confirmed when their hungrily locked bodies subsided on the muffling hay slope. That cushioning mattress of timothy and clover, with its dusty aroma of earthiness, seemed as elemental as their own elemental impulse. It was as though the earth itself had opened and engulfed them. It was like being in a grave where everything was forgotten.

“Kiss me first,” Judd heard the muffled voice imploring. It came home to him, during that delaying kiss, how a movement that should have been marked by gentleness was proving explosively rough and explosively fierce. But the current that had caught him up was stronger than his own clouded will. He was conscious of invasions that could not be resisted, of receiving softness that called for hardness, of some accruing dark wave of ecstasy mounting until it collapsed with its own shuddering weight.

Then, as he lay passive and panting, he was conscious of other things. He savored a dull sense of triumph, of easement after imprisonment, of relief after long strain. Yet as he felt the heart still beating so quickly under his own heart his moment of triumph merged into one of regret, the regret of the strong for a weakness that had proved unconquerable. They were, after all, the mere playthings of Nature. They were two primitives, two unremembering children of the soil, gasping and straining for a happiness that was not altogether happiness.

For when Judd roused himself and stared down at the gray-white face so close to his own he saw how the dusky-lidded eyes remained closed and the slightly parted lips wore an expression of tragedy touched with pain. Still again, from that pale and relaxed face, he harvested an expression of defenselessness, of a spirit bruised and bewildered and helpless on a current that was too strong for it. It held no sense of conquest, Just as his own heart nursed no final feeling of triumph. His one feeling was one of sadness, of sadness shot through with regret. His touch was almost valedictory as he leaned closer and kissed the slightly parted lips.

Her eyes opened, at that, and her strained gaze rested on his face.

“This must never happen again,” she said in a low-voiced protest that made him wonder if she, too, knew the feeling that they had been trapped.

“I know,” he agreed. “And it won’t.”

Her gaze went up to the thin shaft of sunlight in which a million motes of dust still floated. Then her hands fell to her side. She lay beneath him so quiet and passive, so vulnerable to his violence, that an impulse toward some compensating tenderness went through him. He had been unkind to something that had been committed to his keeping.

Her smile, after her gaze had gone back to his troubled face, was a tremulous one.

“Don’t be unhappy,” she murmured as her hand smoothed back his hair. “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

He made an effort to rise to his feet, but she held him down.

“Are you going to hate me?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he answered with protective gruffness. For even as he spoke he had to fight back the impulse to take her in his arms again.

“And everything can go on as before?” she exacted.

“Do you want it that way?” he questioned, conscious of the renewed tremor about her mouth.

The deeper breath she exhaled was almost a sigh.

“Is it important, what we want?”

Judd, bending closer over her, noticed the velvetlike texture of her unsmiling lips. They were a warm red, stippled with the minutest fretwork of lines almost too fine to be deciphered as lines. He found a challenge in their richness.

“What we want,” he asserted, “is about the most important thing in life.”

She considered that for a moment, her gaze on the amber penumbra of the mow door.

“I know,” she acquiesced. “That’s true enough, when we’ve only ourselves to remember.” Her repeated sigh seemed freighted with the pathos of human insufficiency. “And that’s the danger, when you’ve seen your world gone to smash. There’s so little left, so little you can be sure of.” She placed a hand on his sunburned arm. “That makes you feel you ought to take what you can get out of life as you go along.”

“Why shouldn’t we?” asked Judd, leaning still closer over her.

Her smile was faint and fleeting as she moved her head from side to side.

“We can’t,” she said, “when we’ve those other things to remember.” A new fortitude seemed to come to her as she sat up and brushed a clover stalk from her tangled hair. “That’s why everything must go on as before.”

“Can it?” Judd questioned.

“It must,” said Joyce, moving to the mow door and staring out at the world that had been momentarily forgotten.

Judd kept telling himself, during the days that followed, how everything would go on as before, how everything would have to go on as before. But, for all his studied efforts at casualness, he was repeatedly conscious of an alteration. He could not escape the impression of having crossed a great divide on his continent of contentment. Where the declining road before him would lead to he refused to debate. He did his best to escape that problem by tiring his body and drugging his mind with hard work on the land.

Yet even when out in orchard or field, some small tooth of remorse kept gnawing at his heart. No word of regret, it is true, had come from Joyce. But her very silences, coupled with the thought that he had been ungenerous to her, prompted him to a mood of tenderness, of guardianship. He remembered to carry wood and water for her. He helped her, through the lengthening evenings, in the garden. He liked being near her. He liked to watch the play of her lips when she talked, to follow the flow of line in her stooping body as she bent over a radish bed. His path would have been a smoother one, he felt, if she had seemed less womanly, less alluringly vital in every careless movement and posture. She even invaded his dreams and troubled his sleep with ghostly intimacies that prompted him to a sterner remoteness when he faced her in the exacting clear light of day.

She responded to that demand for remoteness with a studied composure all her own. He had the impulse, at times, to crash through that flimsy barrier, to storm back through the walls where a breach had already been made. But the quiet hazel eyes, when he looked into them, seemed to semaphore a message that violence would be a mistake. For she too, he sometimes felt, was carrying on a silent struggle. It was, apparently, without the tinge of bitterness that marked his own battle, a bitterness that made him wonder if they were not too much alone, if friends and neighbors and the impact of outsiders would not make easier their way.

Yet when Spike Slocum invaded their dooryard Judd was conscious of a rough constraint in his caller.

“Just dropped down to see how you’re gettin’ along,” announced the neighbor from over the hill. He let an appraising eye circle about the well-worked garden. “Looks like you and your missus won’t be lackin’ in table truck this summer.”

“She’s not my missus,” Judd coldly proclaimed.

“You and your nurse friend,” amended Spike, conscious of a misstep. “But garden truck don’t get you far.”

Judd was ready to agree with him. Much of his latter-day unrest, he suspected, hinged on his narrowing margin of safety. His funds were all but gone and he saw no promise of anything that would produce immediate revenue. Farming, he had discovered, was a long-range enterprise. And now he had more than himself to consider.

Spike’s narrowed eye rested on his neighbor’s none-too-happy face.

“I know this Ridge soil better’n you could,” he ventured. “I know what she can grow and what she can’t.”

“But I’m seeding down every spare acre I’ve got,” Judd pointed out.

“I know it,” conceded Spike. “And you’re doin’ it better’n we all expected. But you’re still missin’ your main chance.”

“My chance at what?”

“At seven or eight acres o’ tobacco. First year o’ the war they started yowlin’ for tobacco. They couldn’t get enough last year. And this year-end they’ll be yammerin’ for it worse than ever.”

Tobacco, Judd remembered, was a newcomer to Kentish soil since he had worked on a Raleigh farm.

“But I haven’t the land for that sort of thing.”

“Then how about rippin’ out that old peach orchard o’ yours and puttin’ that whole hill slope into burley?”

“Burley?” questioned Judd.

“Yep, light-leaf tobacco. That slope o’ dark soil’d give you a crop worth workin’ for. Even a measly quarter-acre of A-one burley’d give you more’n you’d get for ev’ry last peach in that run-out orchard.”

Judd, at the moment, was remembering how Joyce loved that old peach orchard with its serried rows of trees that had blossomed so valiantly. But years of neglect, he knew, would week by week exact their toll from that delusively brave blossoming.

“I might get in too deep for a tenderfoot,” Judd objected. “They tell me tobacco means mighty hard work.”

“That,” said Spike, “is why a crop brings in hard cash.”

Judd explained that he was not equipped for burley growing.

“You’d have to have plants to set out,” Spike was saying. “And it’s too late to make beds o’ your own. But, shucks, I’ll have plants for an extra eight acres, easy. I’d throw that much away when I thin out my beds.”

Judd stood deep in thought.

“But I’d have to have a planter,” he objected, “and extra help.”

“I’ve noticed your missus givin’ you outdoor help now and then,” observed Spike. “And a decent neighbor lends his planter around when it’s needed.”

Judd, under the circumstances, let the repeated “missus” pass without comment.

“Supposing I wasn’t able to pay you for those plants,” he dolorously questioned, “until I got my crop sold?”

Spike’s laugh was rough but friendly.

“They’re paid for already,” he proclaimed. “I figger your nurse friend just about saved mother and babe for us last month.” His honest face took on a tinge of wistfulness. “It’ll take some doin’ to wipe out that debt.”

Judd, for the first time since his advent at Pine Brae, felt a fraternal surge go through his body. Joyce, after all, had been right. There was a rough friendliness in these sons of the soil, a friendliness one was apt to overlook because it remained so largely inarticulate. And he, in his unreasoning urge for solitude, had lost sight of the value of friends.

Joyce’s quick and searching side glance when, with supper over, he suggested they have a stroll up through the peach orchard, did not escape him. There had been very few of those strolls, of late, and her face as she joined him at the hedge end seemed singularly relaxed and softened. The evening was warm and the robins were still noisy in the maple tops. The land breeze, seeping down the farm slope, was softly odorous, suggestive of vernal growth. And Joyce, Judd observed, was inhaling that air with a small body-quaver that was not altogether hunger and not altogether rapture, but an odd mingling of each. It was that aliveness to things, that undercurrent of intensity uncheapened by speech, he decided, that cuirassed her in the armor of mystery. He could see the luminous glow in her eyes as she paced slowly between the greening trees and studied the lacework of their tops that stood dark against the opaline evening light.

“Such brave old trees!” she said as Judd stopped in a pretence of determining the “set” for the coming season.

“Why are you so fond of trees?” he asked as she stooped beside him to gather a cluster of morels growing close about a leaning trunk.

“They were so beautiful in bloom,” she answered, standing beside him. “And they were in bloom, remember, when I first met you.”

The unexpectedness of that lyrical note held him arrested for a moment.

“That’ll make it hard to tear them out,” he conceded. “But they’ll have to go.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because I’m going to grow tobacco on this slope.”

She stood silent, oddly statuesque in the twilight. She did not speak, but her gesture said as plain as words: “Our beautiful trees!” Her eyes were abstracted as her fingers idly picked a pale-fleshed morel to pieces.

“They’re good enough to look at,” Judd explained. “But we can’t afford to be sentimental over them. They’ve outlived their usefulness.”

“Like me,” she cried, with a little shiver of apprehension.

“That’s not true,” said Judd, fighting back the temptation to take her in his arms. He scraped away a tangle of sod and picked up a handful of soil. It was rich and loamy soil, soil ready to produce what might be demanded of it. “I’ve got to have money. And I can make it out of tobacco.”

She continued to gaze, with tragically opaque eyes, along the undulating line of the fruit trees, as though that hill slope, without its softening foliage, would always seem bald and empty, like a head without hair. Instead of a vernal sea of blossoms, bee-haunted and tender pink and purple, there would only be flat brown earth baking in the sun and a cloud of dust following a clanking horse-cultivator as it snaked its way back and forth across the slope.

“I’m sorry.” She said it in little more than a throaty whisper.

Women, Judd concluded, were like that—at least, some women. Their passion for the imponderables of life left them the victims of their own ghostly cravings.

“We can’t afford to be failures,” he reminded her. He spoke with a new gentleness as the thought came to him in the failing light that they were two human derelicts forlornly alone in the world and forlornly dependent on each other.

“Perhaps we’re failures already,” she quietly asserted.

“We’re not,” proclaimed Judd with a new note of passion in his voice. “And I’m going to make good this year.”

“There are so many ways of making good,” his quiet-voiced companion reminded him.

“As a farmer?” he exacted, stern-browed before her smiling face.

“No, not altogether as a farmer,” was Joyce’s slightly delayed reply.

He scrutinized her face, that was no longer smiling, as though he scented a reproof in her reply.

“As a shipmate?” he suggested. “As a shipmate in an open boat where there isn’t even a sea-biscuit when we’re hungry?”

The allusion, he saw by the quick tragedy that spread over her face, was an unhappy one. A shudder went through her body. And she was groping toward him, a moment later, with a small movement of helplessness that had the power of making him both mistily apprehensive and mistily happy.

“We mustn’t fail,” he said, “all along the line.”

“You won’t fail,” she murmured, with a small cooing sound that was too throaty to be a sigh. She captured and clung to his toil-thickened arm. “But I don’t want the other things to change you. I’ve seen it all around me here. Don’t—don’t get like them.”

“But we’ve got to live,” he reminded her.

“There are different ways of living,” she said with a wistfulness that in no way added to his peace of mind.

“And we’re not doing it the right way?” he questioned.

“I didn’t say that.”

He lifted her chin and looked down at her face.

“Are you happy?”

Her smile was a wintry one.

“Yes, I’m happy,” she finally answered.

“Just to go on this way?”

That left her with a moment of silence.

“Is there any other way?”

It took an effort, on his part, to resist bending closer to the curved lips that had the habit of squaring themselves before speech.

“I’m afraid not,” he answered, standing straighter.

“Then why not be satisfied?” she answered, also standing straighter.

If making ready for his tobacco-growing was more work than Judd had expected, he still wrung a morose sort of joy out of the resulting weariness of his body and the stiffness of his joints. It was good medicine for the inner unrest that troubled him.

His first intention had been to chop and grub the peach trees from their rows, tearing out the more stubbornly rooted trunks with horse and chain. But this proved too laborious. He hated the thought of explosives. But against his will he was forced to lay in a stock of blasting powder and convert the quiet hill slope into a battlefield. Tree by tree he grubbed down between the roots, planted his charge, and blew the doomed trunks bodily from their row. It turned the pitted soil into a scene of luftwaffe vengeance, echoing with thunderous detonations and overhung with drifting smoke. There was enough dead wood in the old orchard, he found, to start a fire that could conquer even the green and sappy trunks, the trunks that hissed in protest as the heat ate at their hearts. It made him think of an army of warriors being incinerated where they had fallen in battle.

Joyce declined to take any part in that destruction; she even shut herself up in the house until the repeated explosions were a thing of the past. She had a double-edged reason, Judd remembered, for avoiding any such scene of violence. She had her woman’s unreasoning affection for what could take on even a momentary glow of beauty, and that orchard slope in its delusive springtime flowering had caught her fancy. But deeper than that was her horror of those abrupt and bomblike sounds that took her thoughts back to darker days on the war front. It was, Judd concluded, a sort of mental scar, as fixed in her inner consciousness as the scar of the shrapnel wound on the flesh of her shoulder.

Her smile was a slightly condoning one, in fact, when he came in from his final assaults on the peach rows.

“You’ve had a long day at that work,” she said as he sat down to his meal.

“It never seems long,” Judd answered, “when it’s work you like.”

She recalled the ancestral sort of joy he took in felling a tree in his wood lot. He was, after all, the son of a pioneer race.

“I’m beginning to understand,” she observed, “why you’re here.”

His quick glance up at her was an unworded question.

“I mean it’s something in your blood,” Joyce explained. “It’s the closest you can get to the pioneering of your forefathers, who had to chop down trees and clear land and beat back the wilderness. You get the feeling you’re doing over again what they did before you.”

She was right, in a way, but he declined to accept his labor as rooted in mere instinct.

“Well, this farm was a wilderness,” he protested. “And there’s nothing unnatural in wanting to bring order back to chaos.”

She nodded her assent to that. But a new abstraction crept into her face.

“It’s what we all want to do,” she acknowledged, “if life would only let us.”

“We’ll make life let us,” he contended.

She sat thinking that over. But she could not escape the conviction that his passion for manual toil was merely a curtain dropped between him and his earlier life, the earlier life that she knew so little about. And a curtain so heavy implied there was much to forget.

A spell of dry weather, as Judd worked on his tobacco ground, made his labor unexpectedly arduous. The days grew hotter and the grubbing and plowing became more exhausting. He would return to the house dust-powdered and streaked with sweat, morosely grateful for the fresh clothes Joyce would lay out for him after his walruslike bath in a wooden tub inadequately screened by the canvas of an old binder-carrier. And in the late twilight he would watch her carrying water to her flower beds, marveling at her white-clad trimness and coolness. She could never, he concluded, be slatternly. No matter what she had to do without, no matter how meager her resources, she would always maintain that shell of bodily dignity. It was her training as a nurse, he assumed, that gave her a fixed passion for cleanness. When he found her ironing by lamplight, after darkness had silenced the lake front, he asked her if it wasn’t about time to call it a day.

“I mustn’t be a slacker,” she said as she folded one of the sheets which he so perversely regarded as a luxury, a luxury, at least, for a clodhopper like him.

“But it’s too hot in this kitchen,” Judd objected, “on a night like this.”

He was tempted to ask her to go out to the cliff edge with him, where they could watch the reflection of the stars in the windless lake water and wait for some awakening stir of air.

She smiled as she reached for a flat-iron and waxed it with a candle end.

“I don’t mind the heat. And something tells me it’s going to be cooler before morning.”

Judd stepped to the door and stared about the star-lit heavens where no promise of either wind or cloud confronted him.

“It’s what our friend Spike would call a weather breeder,” he said through the screen on which a thousand insects buzzed. “And what we ought to have, what we’ve got to have, is a good soaker.”

Joyce put away her ironing board and joined him in the darkness. He could see her uplifted face as she scanned the heavens. It looked flowerlike in the uncertain light. It seemed surrounded by a misty loneliness that left him disturbed by the thought of how human beings are shut up in a world of their own. His impulse to bridge that abyss between body and body prompted him to bend a little closer over the upturned face.

“Tired?” he questioned in a dangerously softened voice.

“A little,” she answered as she moved away from the shadowing figure that seemed to carry a threat to their tenuously maintained armistice. She took three dish towels from the clothesline across the veranda end. “And it’s time we were both in bed.”

That brought to Judd’s mind the memory of her body relaxed in sleep, a quickly painted picture of softened contours and shadowy planes of flesh that quickened his pulse a little. But he fought back the impulse to draw nearer her again.

“Will you be able to sleep,” he asked, “in this heat?”

She said she would, after six pages of Rupert Brooke.

Judd gazed out over the long skyline of the lake. Then he surprised her by quoting:

“You know Brooke,” she cried with a gasp of gladness.

Judd laughed.

“I haven’t always been a clodhopper,” he reminded her. “I interviewed Brooke when he first came to America. And my first job in the Eastern Mediterranean was to hunt out his grave on Skyros.”

“He died too young,” Joyce said out of the silence.

“But he seems to have known what living was,” affirmed the man at her side.

“That’s something,” said Joyce.

Judd felt a note of reproof in those brief words.

“While I don’t?” he questioned.

“I didn’t say that. But it seems strange that you can go along and give so little time to books now.”

Judd laughed again.

“Don’t forget that I’ve got a battle to fight out here. And once it’s over we can talk about taking our souls out of moth balls. It’ll be different, my dear, when winter comes.”

That venture into the future held her silent a moment.

“Winter,” she quietly observed, “is a long way off.”

Judd, in the close-aired room where his turned-down bed awaited him, was willing to agree with her. He declined to keep even a sheet over his moist body. But his day had been a long one and the toxins of fatigue soon numbed him into forgetfulness.

He was awakened by a sense of chilliness that prompted him to reach for a blanket. Wind was soughing in through the open window, and a remote grumble of thunder told him the hot spell was about to break. When the wind increased in violence, slamming a door at the far end of the house, he inventoried the animals under his care and concluded they were all well sheltered. It struck him as odd that the lake waves, in such a wind, should not be thundering against the cliff sides. Then he roused himself sufficiently to realize that the storm was coming from the northwest, with the wind off land. He lay back in drowsy gratefulness at the soaking his parched soil would get.

It would be a real soaking, he decided as the thunder rolls increased in volume and came rumbling across the counties between Huron and Erie. He contentedly watched the blue-white flashes of lightning through the window square. They grew more frequent and more vivid as he watched. It was a real storm, he told himself. The house timbers were already shaking with the fury of the wind.

He got up and closed the window as the rain came pelting down. The thunder claps, by this time, had grown into a cannonading that brought a new tremble to the antique timbers about him, flash by flash that brightened the rattling window-panes and left an ozonic odor in the air. Above the howl of the wind he could hear the snapping of branches, branches still brittle with their spring sap.

“Rumble your bellyful,” Judd muttered as the repeated flashes tore the darkness apart. The song of water in the sagging eave trough reminded him that Joyce’s rain barrels would be filled again. His thirsty hill field would be more friable. The withering grass in his wood lot would take on a new greenness and make better pasturage. Even his garden rows would show new signs of life.

But he lay less lethargic as the thunder claps thudded closer about the little shell of wood between him and the wind-riven heavens. Something along that bolt-pounded Ridge was sure to be struck. The thought of his barn taking fire sent a small tingle of alarm through him. He tried to argue with himself that the storm was passing, that the worst was over. But even as he sought consolation in that thought a tree crashed across the end of the veranda. It fell with an ominous splintering of timber.

“This can’t keep up,” he maintained. He lay rigid, counting the seconds between each lurid flash and each resultant thunder thud. It was as he watched and listened that his ear caught a newer sound, a thinner sound in no way like the reverberations assailing the roof over his head.

It was a woman’s cry. It impressed him as a cry not so much of terror as of protest. And it could come, he remembered, from no one but Joyce.

He threw the blanket aside and sat up.

He was still listening, in hesitation, when a flash of lightning showed a ghostly white figure in his doorway.

“I can’t stand it again,” wailed that cringing figure. “We must find a shelter somewhere.”

“What’s wrong?” was Judd’s inadequate demand.

“They’re coming,” was the quavering response. “And they do such terrible things to you.”

Judd groped for her in the darkness and drew her closer.

“You’re dreaming,” he told her. “It’s only a thunderstorm. And it will be over in ten minutes.”

“They’re bombing us,” she persisted. “I—I can’t stand it again.”

“Why, you’re shaking,” he said, conscious of her body tremors as his foolishly defending arm went out to her.

“There must be a shelter,” she maintained, still in the accents of somnambulism.

“Of course there is,” he consoled, holding her closer.

“Where?” she panted.

“Here,” he answered with a surge of pity as he drew her in beside him. She seemed almost childlike, with her small sobs of terror, as she nestled closer to the warmth of his body. He could feel her shivering knees relax and her breathing grow quieter as the sobs dwindled down to a faint cooing sound that was habitual with her in her moments of contentment.

He could feel the warmth returning to the curving back cupped against his body. She remained so quiet there, as the diminishing thunder rolls reminded him all danger was over, that he thought she had fallen asleep.

“Are you all right now?” he whispered in the darkness when she stirred and sighed.

“Yes, I’m all right,” she answered, so low-toned that he hardly heard her. The odor of her hair, close to his face, filled him with a narcotic sort of satisfaction. The thought that some last barrier had gone down between them brought him no tinge of possessiveness. He knew merely a tranquilizing sense of guardianship, of power to protect something frail and lovely when protection was called for.

“It’s all over now,” he assured her when a roll of thunder, a little louder than its fellows, sent a small tremor through her.

She turned about, as he spoke, and locked her arms about him.

“Hold me close,” she pleaded with an unexpected small wail of abandonment. . . .

Judd awakened early, with the first gray light of morning seeping through the window square. He sat up with studied quietness, gazing down at the sleeping face of the woman beside him.

He studied that face long and intently. He could see the blue arc of weariness that shadowed each eye under its tangle of lashes. He could see how the dark cloud of hair accentuated the paleness of the smooth brow, how the faint hollow of the cheek carried an indeterminate note of tragedy which the almost smiling lines of the vital red mouth seemed to contradict.

But what surprised him most on that sleeping face was its sense of peace. It seemed an autumnal sort of peace, the peace of consummation, of final surrender. And he knew a pang of envy as he listened to the quiet breathing of the gently moving breast so delicately veined with blue. For in his own heart he carried a sense of Rubicons crossed and bridges burned behind him. It was, he knew, the end of the armistice.

He knew that even before she stirred and wakened, and, after staring up at him through a co-ordinating moment of silence, reached inarticulately up for him to take her in his arms.

Joyce had gone trudging off along the beach sand to the fish house, for a basket of herring and perch, fresh-hauled from the pound nets, and Judd was busy setting out a flat of tomato plants when he beheld a spare figure slowly approaching along the orchard lane.

He worked on, intent on watering the last of his newly set plants, as that unwelcome figure slowly circled the drive and stood hesitantly before the old house that faced the lake front. For the intruder, Judd finally decided, was the Reverend Amos Bangham. There was no mistaking the slightly stooping figure with the sad eyes and the pendulous cheek flaps that made him look like a diminutive mastiff. He may have given an appearance of shabbiness in his faded black and his foolish-looking straw hat yellowed with age, but about him clung a stubborn sense of dignity.

Judd put down his watering-can, wiping his hands on his overalls as he approached his visitor.

“I don’t suppose you know who I am,” the latter observed with an abstracted smile.

“I do,” answered Judd, without enthusiasm. The silence that followed that curt admission was not a comfortable one.

“May I sit down?” his visitor asked. “It’s quite a long walk from the village. A long one, at least, for me.”

“By all means,” said Judd, conscious that the figure confronting him was both a frail and a forlorn one.

“It took courage to bring me here,” observed Mr. Bangham after seating himself on the house steps.

“Why?” asked Judd.

“Because I’m told you call me a Bible-thumper,” he said with a wan smile. Then his face sobered. “And perhaps I am. But I can still find strength in the word of God.”

Judd’s fear that his morning’s work was about to be held up by a sermon was quickly dissipated.

“I missed you when you came for Miss Landis’ things,” Mr. Bangham quietly announced. “I’m sorry the task was an unpleasant one.” He sighed. “I’m sorrier Miss Landis is no longer under our roof.”

“Your wife didn’t seem to feel that way,” was Judd’s brusque retort.

Mr. Bangham disregarded that thrust. His gaze remained discreetly abstracted.

“Miss Landis is a very wonderful young woman.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Judd retorted.

The man of the cloth sighed again.

“Mrs. Bangham didn’t understand her. We people of the church, I’m afraid, are sometimes restricted in our outlook. You’d find it hard to understand the demands that are made on a rural churchman.”

“I’ve a suspicion what you have to stand for,” Judd grimly acknowledged. “It’s the one thing I hate about country life.”

Mr. Bangham held up a protesting hand.

“I’m not indicting country life,” he promptly protested. “These people about us, on the whole, are an honest and hard-working lot. They are interested in their neighbors. And they are especially interested in a newcomer.”

Judd began to see a little light at the end of the tunnel.

“Does that apply to me?” he demanded.

“I’m afraid it does,” acknowledged Mr. Bangham.

“And I’ve done something they disapprove of?” challenged his host. His tone was a defiant one. Yet even as he spoke he remembered how, two nights before, he had drawn a shivering and terrified woman into his bed and warmed her chilled body against the warmth of his own morosely happy body.

“I’m afraid you have,” answered the sad-eyed man of the cloth. “It is not for me to judge, of course. But the Scripture admonisheth us to avoid even the appearance of evil.”

That relapse into the canonical brought a flash of anger to Judd. It was a flash, however, that diminished a little when he discerned the fixed kindliness in the worn face before him.

“What have I done?” asked Judd.

“That is not for me to say. But there are a good many people in this neighborhood who feel Miss Landis made a mistake in—in coming to live with you as she did.”

Judd laughed, but there was no mirth in his laugh.

“Then what should I do about it?” he demanded. “Turn her out the way your wife turned her out, just because a lot of long-nosed gossips read evil into a situation where there was none?”

Mr. Bangham sat silent a moment.

“I hope,” he finally observed, “you are not going to make life harder for her.” A second silence fell over him. “She has been through a very unhappy experience.”

“Then it’s about time someone showed her a little decent kindness.”

“I don’t deny that,” Mr. Bangham admitted. “But kindness is not always understood. And outsiders are not always generous in their interpretation of a situation like this. Much of the difficulty, I’m afraid, reposes in the fact that your—er—your house-partner is an exceptionally attractive young woman.”

“Is being attractive a crime?”

“It may not be a crime,” was the other’s gently uttered retort, “but it is quite often a creator of malice. And, frankly, the Ridge folk are not taking kindly to your partnership. I may as well tell you, in fact, that some of the younger spirits around Buckhorn decided to shivaree you.”

The word was new to Judd.

“Shivaree me?” he questioned. “What does that mean?”

“The word is a local corruption of the old French charivari. It is usually a group visit of neighbors to a newly married couple. They creep up on the house—at night, of course—with pans and horns and kettles and make a good deal of noise.”

Judd’s dark face flushed still darker.

“And they proposed to come here?”

“They did,” was the reluctant reply. “But I managed to stop them. I felt pretty sure you wouldn’t understand a noisy invasion like that.”

But Judd showed, by the grimness of his face, that he understood only too well.

“They’d have had a warm reception,” he said between his teeth. For he sensed clearly enough that any such visit would have been in a spirit of mockery. And any such derisive din about his walls would have brought him out with a club in his hands. His one demand of life was for peace. But he was no coward. And an affront like that to the woman who had been consigned to his care would have left him as reckless as he had once been in the hills of Crete.

“It would have been unpleasant, of course, for Miss Landis,” the sad-eyed Mr. Bangham was saying. “And I wanted to save her from further unhappiness.”

But to save Joyce Landis from further unhappiness, Judd felt, was his own particular job. From that day forward it was his duty to shield and protect her. Her broken life had been put in his hands. Something bruised and precious had been committed to his care. And he intended to see to it that she did not regret that commitment.

“She has suffered enough,” Mr. Bangham was saying, “and through no fault of her own.”

“What do you know about her suffering?” was Judd’s curt challenge. For Joyce, he remembered, had been brave enough in turning her back on the past. That past may have scarred her soul, but it had in no way broken her spirit.

“I happen to know her story,” said the man of the cloth. That claim sent a thin and ghostly pang of jealousy through Judd. For he too had an idea of what she had gone through.

“She was bombed, of course,” he acknowledged. “And she had those five awful days in an open boat.”

The mastifflike face took on a new melancholy.

“It goes further back than that.” Mr. Bangham sat for a moment listening to the notes of a catbird in a neighboring syringa bush. “She has told you, I take it, why she went to the front?”

“She went, naturally, for war service,” was Judd’s retort. He was remembering how little he actually knew of Joyce’s earlier life.

“That was not the primary reason,” Mr. Bangham proclaimed with a melancholy shake of the head. “She sailed for England two years ago to marry the man she was in love with.”

Judd’s first feeling was one of incredulity.

“The man she was in love with!” he echoed in a toneless voice. His sense of shock was almost a seismic one, as though the earth under his feet was not the solid thing he had imagined it.

“Unfortunately for her,” amended the other. And Judd, as his shaken world grew steadier, was conscious for the second time of a thin blade of something like jealousy turning in his vitals. It took an effort to pull himself together.

“Did she marry him?” he inquired with a shielding show of casualness.

Again his visitor’s melancholy face moved from side to side.

“She did not. Three days before she arrived in England that man married a canteen worker from Dorset, a girl who claimed she was about to become a mother because of him. He was a pilot in the Royal Air Force, a Canadian, and, I understand, quite young. But a week after his marriage he was shot down in a night raid over Bremen.”

Mr. Bangham looked up as the silence lengthened between them. That silence seemed to disturb him. But the harshness of Judd’s abrupt laugh startled him even more.

“Then we are in the same boat,” was the cry from the younger man.

“I fail to follow you,” said the older man.

“You wouldn’t,” said Judd, whose twisted mouth had lost a little of its bitterness.

“It was a very sad affair,” Mr. Bangham observed as he rose to his feet. Then, taking a deep breath and turning to the other, he abruptly questioned: “Are you a believer?”

“In what?” was Judd’s sharp counter-question.

“In God and His eternal mercy. And in His commandments.”

“Not when He does things like that!”

The embittered note in the younger man’s response brought the other’s gaze about to the sun-browned and bony face confronting him. It was not a happy face. But it was without meanness and it was without the animal coarseness he had expected there. It held a promise of honesty that prompted the older man to say what he had hesitated about saying.

“It is not for us to judge His ways. But, Bible-thumper or not, I didn’t come here to preach a sermon. I don’t know whether or not you have ever sought the consolations of religion. I’m afraid our services might seem too simple for a man of your—your varied experience. But it would make me very happy if Miss Landis could see her way to coming to my church now and then.”

Judd’s gaze was still an abstracted one.

“I’m afraid Miss Landis isn’t much interested in churches.”

“But she sang in my choir, Sunday after Sunday,” asserted the sad-eyed cleric. “And sang beautifully.”

That came as a shock to Judd. It reminded him how one-sided had been his knowledge of her. And of her inner life. And of her needs. He had never thought of her as being musical, as nursing a private hunger for music under a roof where no note of music ever echoed. That was another of the things he had failed to give her. And if this village parson was right he had even deprived her of the consolations of religion. He had turned her into a pagan. He had made her name a by-word along the back concessions. But there was one thing he could still give her. And that was the consolation of love, of earthly love, but love crowned with tenderness to lift it above any mere animal-like mating, of love that could be loyal and understanding and surround her with a sense of security that had never been hers.

“I’d like to see you both there,” the man of the cloth observed in a tone suggestive of impending departure.

“Where?” asked Judd, who had been following his own line of thought.

“In my humble little church. That would make me very happy. And I’d be happier still, if you’ll pardon an old man saying such a thing, if the service you attend might some day be a marriage service.” . . .

Judd was waiting at the cliff edge when Joyce came up the zigzag path from the lake shore. Her cheeks were flushed, after her long walk at the water’s edge where the loose sand was not always the surest footing, and the familiar fluted lips were parted a little from the climb up the cliff. He could detect no suggestion of tragedy in her face as she stopped short at sight of him. It startled him, in fact, that she could look so girlish and virginal.

Her smile vanished as she studied the face bent so hungrily over her.

“Has anything happened?” she asked, puzzled by some uncalled-for look of intensity in his eyes.

“Yes,” he acknowledged as he drew her close in under his shoulder.

“What?”

“I’ve found out something.”

“About me?” she asked, dropping her basket of fish the better to encircle his denim-clad body.

“About both of us.”

“Then tell me,” was her contented murmur. Her nestling movement against his sinewed strength was like that of a robin in its new-made nest.

“I’ve discovered how much we need each other,” Judd said with an unlooked-for tremor in his voice.

“And you’ve been waiting here to tell me that?” she questioned when her lips were once more free to speak.

“I wanted to feel you in my arms.”

“In the middle of the morning like this?” she said in happy protest.

“Now and always,” proclaimed Judd, once more taking possession of her. He could hear her habitual little coo of contentment as he strained her against his heart. “Do you love me?” he demanded.

A bubble of laughter escaped the fluted lips.

“So much, darling, that it hurts.” She raised a hand and pressed it against her side. “It hurts right here under my floating ribs.”

“And I’m not any old port in a storm?” he exacted.

That held her silent a moment. Then she freed one hand and with it smoothed the rough denim of his overalls.

“To me,” she answered with a tremulous little laugh, “you are a knight in shining armor.”

It was an answer that seemed to satisfy Judd. For when he went back to his work, half an hour later, those nine quaveringly uttered words kept turning over in his memory.

“There are a thousand parachutists landing on our lawn,” Joyce said as she sat beside Judd on the veranda edge watching the evening shadows grow long.

That cry brought his quick gaze about to her face.

“Parachutists?” he repeated, wondering if the dead hand of the past was once more reaching into the present with her.

“Look at them,” cried Joyce, pointing toward the sward between the untidy driveway and the lake front.

Judd, between puffs at his pipe, looked as directed. He was conscious of the relaxing of some inner tension when he realized what she meant. He could see where the dandelions had gone to seed on his neglected lawn and countless little balloons of fluff were drifting and dropping on the grass.

When he laughed, with relief, Joyce took the pipe from his mouth and kissed him. It was not a brief kiss. The hunger and warmth in it even made the consolations of tobacco seem thin.

“You haven’t been smoking lately,” he said in the startled accents of discovery.

“I’ve given it up,” said Joyce, avoiding his eye.

“Does that mean you’re out of cigarettes?” he demanded, suffused by a quick sense of shame.

Joyce nodded and shrugged. “It’s not important,” she affirmed.

“It is important,” he contended. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You had trouble enough,” was the other’s quietly voiced reply.

“That means you’re out of money.” Judd’s laugh was harsh as he said, “I’m afraid I’m not a very good provider.”

She leaned over him, with her hand buried in his hair.

“You’re giving me something better than tobacco,” she said with a candor that startled him. It left him wondering if women were not more amoral than men. For she seemed to be sharing none of his hesitations and ghostly regrets, none of those sequestrating qualms of conscience which left him glad to avoid his neighbors and prompted him to make his Buckhorn visits both brief and silent. They were in a world of their own, all the outer world of hate and tumult well lost for love. But love, he felt, was not always enough.

Joyce tried to smooth away the frown that furrowed his brow.

“You’re not ashamed of loving me?” she asked as she drew his face about to hers. He forgot his unhappiness in kissing the fluted red lips.

“What I’m ashamed of,” he said, “is that this partnership of ours has to be so one-sided. You’re giving so much, and I’m able to give so little. You deserve security. And I’m such a down-and-outer I don’t seem able to give it to you.”

“I’m not complaining,” she said with a small smile of contentment.

Judd studied her face, puzzled by the brooding twilight happiness he could see in the unfocused hazel eyes. He saw no shame there, no regret for their retreat from monasticism. She seemed, if anything, more vital and self-assured, touched with an autumnal sort of completion that tended to bewilder him.

“You’re not sorry?” he questioned, wondering if his own tendency to look before and after didn’t keep life foolishly complicated for him.

“Sorry about what?” she asked.

He was about to say: “That we’re sleeping together.” But he modified that reply to words more tempered with compassion. “That you ever fell in with a failure like me.”

A hungrier look came into her face.

“We’re never failures,” she contended, “until we admit it.”

Judd’s glance wandered along the uneven line of the house front.

“I don’t see many signs of success around here.”

The woman at his side drew a deeper breath.

“I’m glad to be alive, just to be alive, at a time like this. And in a world like this. What I went through last year leaves me grateful for even little things. It’s the way the pilot of a bombing plane must feel when he’s safely back in his messroom hearing music and drinking hot coffee.”

Judd wondered why it was that any savoring of death could give an afterglow of preciousness to life itself. He too, he told himself, was glad enough just to be alive.

“But that isn’t everything,” he said aloud.

Joyce reached for his hand.

“There’s just one thing I want,” she said with an unexpected note of fierceness. “That’s for you to love me. It’s all I’ll ever ask for. It’s all I need now.”

Judd smiled at the intensity that had come into her eyes. But his face sobered when she reached for his hand and clung to it.

“Just love me,” she pleaded. “It’s the one thing I ask. Do you? Will you?”

“Of course I will,” answered Judd, conscious that his reply was not an entirely adequate one. But it seemed enough for the woman who subsided so contentedly against his shoulder.

It was, he felt, her unquestioning faith in his power to protect her, to keep things going as they were, that brought a wayward heaviness about his heart. For love could fly out of the window when penury crept in at the door. And he was, he remembered, confronted by life’s age-old problem of dollars and cents, of meeting the needs of the moment.

It was a problem that was new to him. Yet it had to be met. And the one way to solve it, he decided as he felt that childlike clinging to his toil-hardened hand, was to do what other straitened tillers of the soil did. He would put a mortgage on his farm. It was the one thing left to the landowner who had come to the end of his rope. And he was mighty close to the end of his.

“I think I’ll tune up the old truck,” he announced out of the passing silence, “and go in to see Lawyer Scullard tomorrow.”

“What for?” asked Joyce as she lifted her head from his shoulder.

“To slap a mortgage on Pine Brae,” he said with a grim abruptness that brought a twitch to her lips. She knew how he loved his land, how great was his new-found pride of possession, how he gloried in walking those acres and telling himself they were all his own.

“Can’t we get along,” she asked, “without that?”

“Perhaps Scullard would accept my note,” he conceded, “until I got paid for my tobacco crop.”

Joyce knew enough about rural life in that district to sense something calamitous in notes and mortgages. They brought up a picture of foreclosure sales, of bailiffs serving papers, of glib auctioneers knocking implements and household furniture down to the highest bidder.

“I could live on milk and eggs,” she maintained.

“Not forever,” he answered, rewarding her valor with a fraternal handclasp that brought home to him the consolation of companionship. They were, after all, like people in an air raid, with a hunger to huddle together before a common peril and the hope of a common deliverance.

“Why couldn’t we sell our mahogany four-poster?” Joyce questioned. “Some of those summer-cottage nabobs ought to know its value. And they’ll be here soon.”

Judd winced at the plural possessive. It reminded him of his migration from his own hard-mattressed bed to the softer and more spacious four-poster. It had, in a way, been casual enough. But it seemed to mark, in another way, a turning point in his life. That hegira from nightly solitude had its consolations. It brought a sense of tension relieved, of some long-delayed fulfillment demanded of nature. But he could not escape the impression that it was unearned, that he was demanding more than he could repay, that he was reaping his tangled-up harvest of rapture from acres not his own.

“It’s your bed,” he maintained, “and you’re not going to give it up. It’s the one dignifying thing you have left to you around here.”

“Dignifying?” she echoed with a questioning glance that deepened his color a little. For she was thinking, he suspected, of those midnight intimacies that brought a bitter-sweet ending to their days of toil.

“You said there were to be no regrets,” he reminded her.

“I haven’t any,” she said, with her head once more against his shoulder. “But I hate to think of you giving up an inch of this land.”

“I don’t intend to,” said Judd. He wasn’t asking for much. All he wanted was a chance of survival, the simple pleasures of living next to the soil, of quiet labor and quiet days, of plain fare and plain tasks, of free thoughts and sound sleep and the last bridge of memory burned behind him.

“But I’ve messed things up for you, haven’t I?” Joyce was saying with a hand on his knee.

“How?” demanded Judd, covering her small hand with his big and bony one.

“I’m an encumbrance,” she announced.

Judd laughed as he felt the companionable weight of her body against his shoulder. He looked about, through the open door, at the orderly house behind him, the lonely cave of desolation that had so gradually been translated into a home.

“An encumbrance?” he cried. “You’ve been a windfall, something I didn’t deserve. And I intend to see that you’re not sorry for it.”

But his trip into town, the next morning, was not a happy one. The old truck was balky, and twice he had to stop and make adjustments to his engine. The streets of Chamboro, after the quietude of Pine Brae, impressed him as disconcertingly crowded and noisy. Life was a more complicated affair, he dolorously admitted, than he had imagined. He wondered if, after all, there was no final escape from it. The only escape from it, he told himself after motoring to the outskirts of the town and parking in the quietness of the cemetery where he frugally ate the lunch Joyce had prepared for him, seemed to be in the place of silence about him. Only the dead knew rest.

But he was still alive, he maintained as he headed for Lawyer Scullard’s office, and it was the weaklings who went down in defeat. His step was more resolute as he climbed the stairs and confronted the same tired-eyed stenographer who had so impassively drawn up his deed for Pine Brae. It seemed a long time ago. And the hiatus between that happy day and the present seemed longer than ever when he realized the hydrogenated lady at the typewriter had failed to remember him.

“Anything I can do for you?” she languidly inquired.

She gave him the impression of being bloodless and listless. The thought of the woman he had left behind him at Pine Brae, the quiet yet mysteriously vital figure with its almost lyric promise of ardency, made him wonder if it could be that Joyce would always spoil women for him.

“Could I see Mr. Scullard?” Judd said with a glance at the inner office door from which he had earlier that spring emerged the proud owner of forty acres, one half in fruit.

“Mr. Scullard is in Dresden drawing up a will for a very sick man,” was the indifferent response to his inquiry.

“When will he be back?”

“You couldn’t see him before tomorrow,” announced the tired-eyed stenographer. Yet the frustration on her visitor’s face prompted her to ask: “What is it you want?”

“Money,” barked Judd.

The lady shrugged and bent over her copy-holder. Her gesture seemed an inarticulated question of “Don’t we all?”

“Why not try the bank?”

Judd had his own reasons for not trying the bank. He was, he knew, already slightly overdrawn there. And he resented being accepted as a disconsolate share-cropper trying to chisel a few dollars out of a loan shark.

“Good day,” he said with acerbity. He turned and went out, his steps laggard with an unlooked-for disappointment.

His smile was sardonic as he made a few restricted purchases and handed over his last dollar bill for gasoline. That left him with forty cents in silver. With this he bought cigarettes for Joyce.

But if his pockets were light, as he headed for home, his heart was heavy.

Judd was unexpectedly late in getting home. All the way out from Chamboro the old truck had stuttered and balked and threatened to go dead on him. Even his lights had failed, when darkness came on. And it began to rain, thinly and quietly, as he left the Town Line and turned into the Lake Highway.

But he knew, by the darker line bastioning his horizon on the north, that he was crawling past the row of pines fringing the Chinnick farm. And he wouldn’t care much, once he got to his own gate. From there, if the tired old truck engine finally lay down on him, he could coast to the end of his run, coast right to the door of the converted cowshed where he stored his car.

Joyce, he knew, would have everything shipshape at home. She had overruled his objections to her learning to milk, though her milking was satisfactory to neither the cow nor its owner. But she would have done her best. She would have the chickens shut up and the farm animals fed and watered and the woodbox filled and the stove fire banked against his return. There would be supper waiting for him on the white-clothed table with a bunch of flowers of some sort at the center. Joyce herself, he surmised, would be in bed, drowsy and bird-like but not too sleepy to stir and smile as he came in with his clumsy quietness. For her day, of course, had been a full one. She had said something about slipping up to the Slocums, during the afternoon, to have a look at the baby. And she needed that contact with outer interests. It kept farm life from being too narrow. It reminded her there were other people and problems in the world besides that improvident cave-mate of hers.

Judd found something appeasing in his mental picture of Joyce stretched out in the big four-poster. She would be lying there, he told himself, with her bobbed hair showing seal-brown against the white pillow and one hand folded under her cheekbone. She would be enthroned there, at the end of her toil, like a queen lying in state. Yet with the coming of morning she would descend from her throne and be the Penelophon of the kitchen, though never a ragged one.

More than once, Judd remembered as he drew well over to the side of the road to let an interurban truck thunder by with its tarpaulin flapping in the wind of its own speed, Joyce had laughed about that Jekyll-and-Hyde existence of hers. But the time would come, he told himself, when she could be regal by day as well as by night. Once he got things going, he’d see that she was less of a drudge. He’d have help for her in the house. And the things every decent woman had a hunger for.

There was a determined set to his jaw as he sensed his two heavy gate pillars of fieldstone in the darkness and slowed up to take the turn. He wouldn’t be a quitter. He’d find his way out yet. His shoulders even stiffened in a momentary gesture of aggression as he stepped on the gas and made the old engine roar for the final pull up into his orchard lane. He dropped into the familiar ruts, made the grade, and saw his engine go dead on the crest of the slope that fell off southward to where Lake Erie lay vaguely pallid in the darkness.

The engine refused to start again. But it didn’t matter much, he decided as he sat on the worn leather cushions, confronting the midnight silence that seemed intensified by the soft drizzle of rain brushing his face. He’d made his grade. A final push or two would start him downhill, would end his worry and carry him home, home to shelter and food and Joyce.

But in another way, in a larger way, he hadn’t made the grade. He had come back empty-handed. He had pretty well failed, he remembered as he stared over the shadowy orchard land, failed, at least, as an amateur farmer. His one hope, he felt as he turned about to the fresh-plowed hill slope, lay in the tobacco crop he might wring from that dark soil now drinking in its needed moisture. For tobacco seemed to be the cry of the day, even though Parson Bangham still expatiated to his dwindling congregation on the sin of growing so filthy a weed. It did well, as a rule, along that southerly lake slope where the stored warmth of the water kept back the threat of early frosts. It took more work than other crops, and he was told it was harder on the land. But Spike Slocum had cleared over two hundred dollars an acre from a fourteen-acre field of burley. And he could do what Spike had done. Once he had that slope well worked up and a curing barn for housing his crop, he’d have his fighting chance again. But a tobacco barn, of course, couldn’t be wished into existence. It would take eight or nine hundred dollars, he’d discovered, even though he cut and squared the sills from his own wood lot and all but broke Joyce’s heart at the thought of losing still more of their precious oak trees.

Money, Judd remembered, didn’t grow on gooseberry bushes. He might, of course, get enough for his passing needs from his Duchess and Northern Spy apples, from the decrepit old trees which Joyce still loved with the altogether unreasoning love of a woman. She had even helped him in a belated spraying of their boughs, buttoned up to the chin in a raincoat, holding the hose nozzle while he worked the hand pump, yellowed from top to toe as she was with the lime-and-sulphur mist the raw wind blew back on her. But silently happy through it all. She had stuck to it, hour by hour, feeling she was medicining the flock she loved. She had worked over them, as she once must have worked over a ward full of broken men.

Judd sniffed wistfully at the rain-misted night air, cooler on the south side of the Ridge. That, he knew, was caused by the lake, the beneficent big lake that retarded blossomtime until the danger of frost was over and made the Ridge slope just about the best fruit land in the province. He almost knew the smell of his own acres, wondering, as he blinked about in the darkness, if he couldn’t have nosed them out blindfolded, like a homing hound-dog, any old day or night. And down by the lake front, where there wasn’t enough surf to stir the shingle pebbles, was the ramshackle old house that harbored the few things that were left to him in this life. It was there, sleeping under the shadow of its guardian pines and maples. And sleeping under the shadow of its none too even rooftree was the woman he loved.

That thought promptly revived in him the impulse to get home.

But, for a moment or two, he sat motionless, arrested by the sound of a car on the highway behind him. Along that highway, in all kinds of weather, went the heavy trucks between Detroit and Buffalo and Hamilton and Toronto. And as soon as the resort season opened, he knew, would come the hurrying stream of pleasure cars, tourists and sightseers sweeping by him and his wobbly fence posts as he worked on his land.

But this midnight bird was no holiday idler. He was tearing along at a good sixty miles an hour, shooting wavering pencils of light against the Chinnick pines as he took the curve and pulsated on through the darkness. And at Vinegar Hill, Judd saw as he twisted about in his seat, the speeder would meet another car coming east, another car that would be wise to keep well over on its own side of the road.

But those cars, for some reason, never quite met.

They came to a stop, almost nose to nose, with a squealing of brakes and a quick call of contentious voices that floated muffled through the night air. Then came a moment of silence, followed by a series of sounds that led the watching Judd to assume an overstrained engine was backfiring in protest against abuse. For already one of the cars was under way again, with the roar of its cylinders drowning out a short volley of shouts.

“Drunks!” Judd commented under his breath.

Yet he felt, on second thought, that those repeated barks of sound were too quick and too sharp to come from a backfiring engine. He sat with a faint bristling along the spine, wondering if they could possibly be pistol shots.

He’d heard village gossip about such goings-on, along that highway. But he accepted it as the cracker-barrel talk of rural idlers, talk of how nocturnal hijackers still preyed on smugglers and rumrunners. Not a mile from his beach, Spike Slocum had solemnly asserted, revenue officers had shot at a power boat unloading an illicit cargo of alcohol from Cleveland. And at Gordon’s Creek, three miles west, two drivers of an outlaw liquor-ring truck had been held up and left, tied back to back, against a telegraph pole. Even Joyce had believed in Parson Bangham’s report of underground liquor traffic and gangsters growing rich since the country’s war-boosted revenue tax had grown so heavy.

Judd’s aversion to violence prompted him to keep away from that midnight mix-up. If there were gangsters and racketeers who wanted that sort of life they were welcome to it. He’d had enough of turbulence, both first and second hand, on the other side of the Atlantic. And he’d come to this out-of-the-way corner of the world for peace.

Yet a vague stirring of curiosity teased him as he sat passive on his worn leather truck seat. It was, he felt, his old-time news instinct asserting itself. And curiosity eventually stirred him into action.

He got quietly down from his seat and groped his way back to the gate. There he reached out a hand and felt for the familiar pillar of fieldstone.

But his outstretched fingers, instead of coming in contact with cold stone, touched a human figure. It was a figure slumped limply against the road-fence.

Judd’s blood curdled. For that stooping figure was warm and wet and swayed drunkenly as his hand rested on it.

It was a man, a man leaning there for support, wheezing and bubbling a little as he breathed, a man who moved dully at that unexpected touch in the darkness.

“What’s happened?” asked Judd, dreading the news of what was making his groping hand so viscid.

“The bastards got me,” came in a throaty mutter from the stranger. The voice was rough, but singularly lacking in vigor.

Judd could feel a second uneasy stirring along his spine as the figure beside him sagged still lower.

“Are you—are you hurt?” he asked in an inadequate stammer.

“Me?” dreamily questioned the other.

“Yes; what’s wrong here?”

It was several seconds before the stranger could frame his answer.

“They plugged me,” was the labored answer. The stranger coughed and spat. “But the polecats got damned little out of it.”

He made an effort to rise to his feet, only to slump back against the fence wire. There was nothing formidable about his size. To Judd’s straining eyes he appeared little more than a stripling. But there seemed something venomous in his quickened and slightly hissing breathing. And the chances were that he would bleed to death there.

“Don’t you want help?” demanded Judd.

He remembered, in his excitement, how much more efficient Joyce would have been in that predicament, with her nurse’s training and her quiet-eyed knowledge of what should be done in such cases. His impulse was to race down the hill slope and waken her. But afterthought brought its objections. He didn’t want Joyce mixed up with violence like that. She’d had troubles enough of her own. She still had them.

Yet something had to be done, and done quickly. The man on the ground moved and moaned a little. Then he coughed and muttered: “The sons-o’-bitches said I was holdin’ out on them.”

Judd bent over him, a little ashamed of his own helplessness.

“What can I do for you?”

The response to that did not come immediately. Judd even wondered if the other had lapsed off into unconsciousness.

“Keep this,” was the unexpected answer that came out of the darkness.

Judd felt an arm fall limp across his foot. When he reached down he felt the warm metal of a revolver at the end of that arm. But the fingers clinging to its stalk seemed unwilling to relinquish it.

“No, this,” the weakening voice was still able to mutter. And Judd, groping for the other hand, felt a larger cylinder, a cylinder that was soft and moist to the touch, thrust into his fingers.

“I’ll come back for it,” wheezed the man on the ground.

Judd, at the moment, gave little thought to the stranger’s words. For beside him there was a wounded man, a man apparently bleeding to death. And it would be inhuman not to summon help. He’d have to go down to the house, after all, and waken Joyce and come back with a lantern and bandages. And he’d have to hurry, he told himself as he headed into the orchard lane.

He was hesitating beside his stalled truck, wondering whether to coast down or go afoot, when a speeding car swept along the highway, came to a stop below the hill crest, and left its flaring headlights picking out the treetops along the roadside.

He could hear voices, quiet voices, just over the ridge of his orchard end, a half-grunt and a half-cry of pain, and then the conferring voices again, cut short by the crescendo whine of the car engine as the headlights wavered and moved on, and, gathering speed, faded down the deserted highway.

For a full minute Judd stood silent beside his truck. Then he moved quietly up the slope to the gate, where he groped his way to the post of fieldstone. He quartered back and forth, feeling along the wet ground. Then he found the courage to strike a match or two, peering along the road shoulder as he walked.

The wounded man was no longer there.

Judd stood in the rain for another silent moment of thought. Then, turning up his coat collar, he trudged back to his truck, oppressed by a sense of unreality.

It was like a nightmare, something he might have dreamed after falling asleep in his car seat. The only tangible thing out of it all was the moist soft cylinder that he had dropped in a cushion corner. He felt for it, abstractedly, as he released his brake and went coasting down the shadowy lane. Even to that, however, he gave little thought until he had pushed his truck in under its sheltering roof. Then, after a contemplative stare back through the rain, toward the upper highway, he swung shut the shed doors and struck a match.

He found the moist roll in the seat corner. And the first thing he noticed about it was that it was stained with blood. Then he saw that it was merely paper. But not ordinary paper. It was tough and fibrous paper rolled into an oddly compact cylinder and held together by two rubber bands.

It made Judd think of a small barrel hooped together with rubber. But what took his breath away was the discovery that it was made up of bank notes, a disconcerting number of them, oblongs of yellow and green with two and three figures in every corner. Only the outer bill or two, he observed, was stained; the inner ones were clean and unmistakable in design.

And it was unmistakably money, Judd knew as he stared down at the roll and his match end burned out, his reddened fingers slightly tremulous with excitement. They were good American gold certificates, he saw as he riffled through the bill ends. He had handled enough of them, in his time, to know them when he saw them. And he had lived long enough to know the stored-up power that lay in those oblongs of paper threaded with silk.

Yet his first definite reaction to that loathsomely moist cylinder was almost one of horror, as though he held a poisonous snake by the neck. It made him think of a time bomb that had fallen at his feet, a time bomb that would have to be removed before it announced its explosive possibilities. He would, of course, have to get rid of it. His peace of mind would not come back to him until it was out of his hands and passed over to the police.

It wouldn’t be an easy thing to explain. There would be questions and counter-questions and a prying into the whys and wherefores of his life at Pine Brae. They would want to know why Joyce Landis was living with him there.

That brought him up short. He was, in a way, already within the shadow of the law. He was himself a bootlegger, a bootlegger in that rarer wine known as love. And he wanted nothing that was going to threaten the happiness of his helpmate. He was committed to a campaign for her security. Yet she was without that, he remembered, because he was without money, without what at the moment he held in his hand, hooped together by two little rubber bands. There, in his grasp, was what he had planned and toiled for, week after week, and in the end failed to get. There, thrust on him in the darkness of midnight, was the only thing that could save Pine Brae for him, that could save Joyce for him, that could keep them together on the land they loved.

He clutched the roll more tightly between his fingers. The blood on its outer bills had lost a little of its repulsiveness to him. His mind again centered on the thought that it was money he held, more than he had ever held in his hand before. It was wealth, strangely compact and concrete, wealth that could change life at a stroke, change it magically and fundamentally. And it had been given to him to keep. It had been put in his hand by a half-conscious gangster who knew neither him nor his name, who had never seen his face, who even at that moment might be dying somewhere in a ditch, who would never be able to keep his muttered promise to come back for it.

Judd wiped his forehead with an unsteady hand. Then he lighted another match and once more studied the maculated roll. It might remain unclaimed. It would, as time wore on, become more and more his. It was, in a way, already his. It had come to him as casually yet as finally as though it had been washed up by one of the lake waves along his lonely beach, as though it had dropped like a worm-tainted Elberta from one of his orchard boughs. It was his find, his windfall. And in the end it could be the key to his escape from failure.

He held it tightly clutched in his hand, clinging to it as a half-drowned man might cling to a buoy rope. It seemed little to hold, in a way, yet it was as much a symbol of power as a magician’s wand. It could smooth roads and open doors and work the final miracle he had so blunderingly dreamed about. It could bring him peace and security and keep his land clear. And when the time was ripe he could take up that magic wand and work his miracle.

Yet the time, of course, would have to be ripe. He would have to sit tight until some margin of safety widened between him and possible discovery. He even resisted an impulse to thrust the soiled roll down in his pocket. For that, he remembered, would never do. He had a secret to guard. It must be guarded even from Joyce. She may have stood beside him an exile from the ordinary rules of life; she may have flouted a tribal ordinance as to the relations of man and woman; but she had a stubborn honesty that would never condone a questionable move where material things were concerned.

It was his secret, he repeated. From that night forward, he told himself, he would have to be wary and watchful. And, after another moment of silent thought, he turned and groped his way to the end of the cowshed. There, by standing on his truck end, he could reach the cross-beam under the slanting roof. Into the dusty crevice between beam and roof boards he thrust the moist roll. No one, he knew, would ever think of searching for wealth in any such corner. And he wanted time to think things over.

His steps, as he entered his own home, were almost stealthy. It would be best, he decided, not to awaken Joyce. Yet it was the first time, he remembered, that he had ever wished to exclude Joyce from his movements. It left him wondering if the thin edge of some ghostly wedge was not already coming between them.

He felt easier in mind when he had washed the bloodstains from his hands and coat sleeve. Yet a touch of the conspiratorial in his movements as he kept one eye on the door revived the thought that his best course of action might be to come out into the open, to get up in the morning and go to the county authorities and lay the whole incredible case before them.

But he still demanded time to think things over. There was a new deliberation about his movements as he opened the stove draught and brewed his tea and draped his wet coat over a chair back. He faced his belated supper thoughtfully and abstractedly, his moist knees steaming a little in the warmer air of the kitchen. He remembered, as he mechanically piled his dishes, that Joyce always liked things in order. That, he supposed, was the result of her hospital training. Even her kitchen was appealing to the eye. It was more homelike, with its chintz and its scalloped self edgings, than many a corn-rustler’s best room. And yet it was a busy laboratory of toil, of toil which only a woman like Joyce could lift above drudgery. And again it came home to him that she was the cleanest woman he had ever known, clean in body and spirit, clean in almost an austere sort of way. He was sometimes even a little frightened by that meticulous cleanness of hers, he remembered as he took off his damp shoes and placed them on a folded newspaper behind the range.

Judd decided for the second time that it would be best not to waken the sleeper on the wide four-poster. So he was studiously quiet as he undressed in the dark, grateful for the quiet breathing that came from the white blur of the double pillows.

There was no break in that breathing as he crept slowly and cautiously in beside the aura of warmth that made him forget how dog-tired he was. It was something to come home to a little cave of security like that. And to a cave-mate like that. It meant the best that a war-broken world could offer a man. And by hook or by crook, Judd decided, he was going to hang on to them both.

Judd pretended to be asleep when Joyce slipped quietly out of bed the next morning. He even wondered if there was not something symbolical in that slow withdrawal from his side, in that widening of space between him and the bodily warmth which had the power to bring peace to his restless spirit.

He could hear her guarded movements as she dressed—and she always dressed with incredible quickness—though he guessed, during an interval of silence, that she had turned back to the bed and was studying his face. He kept his eyes shut, conscious of that inspection. But he knew a feeling of relief when he heard her quietened steps along the floor boards, followed by the reassuring sound of the iron pump in the dooryard.

He resented the sense of strain that remained with him as he sat down at the breakfast table, where he had placed Joyce’s cigarettes beside her plate. She made no open comment on that gift. But Judd was troubled by her quick glance of gratitude. For in that glance was a tenderness which seemed to imply some new-born dependence on him. He was now the source of her security. He was the man of the house, the man, as Buckhorn would phrase it, who brought home the bacon. Yet Joyce, he knew, would not interrogate him as to the outcome of his trip to Chamboro, crucial as that trip might stand in their careers. It was not her way. She would no more question him than she would have stopped to cross-examine a surgeon in her earlier hospital work.

Judd also knew, as he watched the efficient quiet hands that brought the frugal breakfast of oatmeal and milk and coffee to his side, that his masterly claim of being her protector had been more or less of a polite fiction. He felt, as he sat there stalwart and sunburned, that he in some way had been the protected one. And that, he told himself, would have to end.

Her gaze went to his face, once or twice, after seating herself at the table opposite him. She seemed puzzled by his silence.

“I had a caller last night,” she announced, finally breaking that silence.

Judd’s heart came into his throat.

“Who?” he asked, wondering if any strings could tie his highway adventure up with his home.

“A woman named Morner. She has a summer cottage at Erie Beach.”

Judd could feel the tension ebb from his body.

“What did they want of us?”

“She was under the impression Pine Brae was still for sale. They’re the Detroit Morners who build automobiles.”

“And she wanted to buy us out?”

The brusqueness of his tone held Joyce arrested for a moment.

“She wanted to look at the house. So she had her chauffeur swing in here on her way back to the city.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing much. But she spotted your mahogany bed.”

“You mean our mahogany bed,” Judd deliberately amended.

Joyce’s lip ends quivered a little, but her tone remained casual.

“She seemed to know an antique when she saw one. And the plutocratic lady promptly wanted to buy that bed. But I didn’t know, of course, what to ask for it.”

Judd’s face hardened.

“Did she want to know who slept in it?”

Joyce wondered at the iron in his voice.

“I told her I did. And that seemed to give her something to think about.”

“You didn’t add that I slept there too?”

He regretted that speech as soon as it was uttered.

“Would you expect me to?” Joyce quietly inquired.

Judd looked down at his plate, puzzled by his Joblike impulse to embitter love with groundless accusations. He was merely being cruel, he remembered, to something that had been committed to his care.

“She won’t get that bed,” he announced.

“But wouldn’t it help out?” Joyce questioned, after a moment’s study of his averted face.

“We’re not that far gone,” he proclaimed as he wondered why Joyce had not reached for one of her cigarettes.

“But you didn’t have any luck in Chamboro,” she prompted.

“What makes you think that?”

The old look of tenderness had returned to her eyes. But from it the man opposite her could extract no happiness.

“I know by your face,” Joyce acknowledged.

Judd’s laugh was not an easy one. It would be his duty, he told himself, to see that his face was no longer an index of his thoughts.

“Well, your guess was wrong,” he said with an achieved roughness of voice. “I’ve fixed it up with old Scullard.”

His effort to square his shoulders was not a persuasive one. But he compelled his glance to meet Joyce’s.

“Then why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. And a two-edged feeling of guilt surged through him at the tremolo in her voice.

“It’s practically settled,” amended Judd, disturbed by a recurring sense of his own inadequacies. He wasn’t a good liar. “I’ve got to go in again the first of the week.”

The shadow went from her face, slowly, as the full meaning of Judd’s words crept home. Yet she sat outwardly composed, even if a new light did shine from her eyes. She knew well enough his aversion to demonstrations. And even his success, she remembered, was coming at a cost.

“How’ll you pay old Scullard back?” she asked. She wondered if he would not always be “old Scullard” to them, a legendary enemy with legendary possibilities of oppression.

“I’ll get the money,” maintained Judd.

He said it stoutly enough. But he was sorry, the next moment, that he had said it at all. For it seemed to close the door on the confession that he was even then tempted to make to her. He had the feeling of a bridge burned behind him.

“I’m glad,” Joyce said. But her face remained clouded as she rose slowly from her chair.

Judd rounded the table end and stood beside her, conscious of a hunger to be near her while he was equally conscious of an unknown something that widened between them. It was like a lead in drift ice. And that vague feeling of separation prompted him to reach out for her and take her in his arms.

That roughly abrupt movement, and the hungry clasp that followed it, brought her eyes up, searching his face. But he disregarded that look of inquiry. He merely held her closer, conscious of the warmth of her mouth as she drooped, heavy-lidded, under the narcotizing effect of his kiss.

“We’re going to stick to Pine Brae,” he proclaimed, with a foolish new wine of power flowing through his veins, “and we’re going to stick together.”

But Judd was not as happy as he had hoped. It was almost a relief to get out in the open, to be alone again. And more than once, as he trudged back to the cowshed, he glanced over his shoulder, to make sure that Joyce was still in the house. He was now in an enterprise, he remembered, entirely his own.

He even closed the shed doors carefully behind him, before mounting the truck end and reaching into the dusty crevice above the cross-beam. He nursed a vague fear, a fear that took on a coloring of hope, that his exploring fingers would come into contact with nothing of consequence there.

But it was all real enough. It was not something remembered out of a dream. The compact roll of colored paper banded with rubber was there. It was there, his secret windfall, the hidden key that could unlock the cell door of failure.

He dropped to the floor boards with the money in his hand. Then he stood behind the tailboard of the truck, turning the stained roll over and over in his fingers. He made an effort to be matter-of-fact about it all. He even stood for a silent moment without moving, like a swimmer fortifying himself against a plunge into cold water. Then he slowly removed the rubber bands from the stiffening cylinder and as slowly unrolled the bills on his truck floor, pressing them out flat and frowningly studying them. His fingers, he noticed, were disappointedly unsteady. Yet he was methodic enough as he counted through the bank notes, one by one. He counted them twice, taking note of how some of them were twenties and still others were fifties. But most of them were for one hundred.

Those three-figured bills rather frightened him. For, leaning against the truck end and essaying a simple enough problem in arithmetic, he realized that he held exactly nine thousand and seven hundred dollars in his hand. That meant nearly ten thousand dollars in cold cash. And it meant deliverance.

Yet Judd frowned heavily as he studied his fortune. He looked over it for secret marks. He could find none. He tested the texture of the silk-threaded fibre, disturbed by the sudden thought that this wealth might, after all, be counterfeit, might be something even dangerous to possess.

But it impressed him as authentic. Instinct told him it was real money, more money than he had ever before held in his hand. The only thing wrong about it, he felt, was the darkening stains on two or three of the outer bills. Some day, when Joyce wasn’t home, he could sponge and iron out those stained notes. The entire roll would then be clean and fresh, with its history washed away.

He would, however, have to be cautious. It would be better, on the whole, to try a single bill at his Chamboro bank. And, once that went through, he’d feel safe. He could then be sure of himself, sure of his future. He’d no longer have to go cringing about thinking of mortgages and loans. His land would be free.

A new grimness was in Judd’s face as he restored his roll to its hiding place. That grimness merged into wariness as he circled up through his orchard and approached the Highway. He preferred not being seen there.

Once out through the gate, he wandered back and forth, looking for some evidence of the previous night’s adventure.

But no signs of that midnight encounter remained. The steady rain had washed away the bloodstains he had expected to find there. Even the footprints along the roadway were vague and meaningless. They were blurred, like a bad memory, a memory that in time would pass entirely away.

Yet Judd’s movements, during the day, were overshadowed by a sense of anxiety, an expectation of the unexpected. When evening came on he fabricated an excuse for going to Buckhorn, where, he knew, the cracker-barrel philosophers would be clustered about the village store. There he guardedly inquired as to the rumor of a midnight smash-up somewhere along the Highway. He even sounded out the bespectacled postmaster.

But the village gossips had nothing to give him. He was willing to overlook their aloofness and their side glances as a new courage stiffened his spine. When he looked through his county-seat newspaper, on the way home, he could find there no report of a robbery or a shooting affair in the neighborhood.

Everything, so far, seemed in his favor.

But he waited for another three days, determined to widen his margin of safety. Then he once more crept into the shadow of the cowshed, where he guardedly reached up for his hidden treasure and blinked down at it for a full moment of silence. He tried to be casual about it all. But his pulses quickened and a colder look came into his lean-jawed face as he slowly withdrew three of the bank notes, made sure they were clean, and as slowly folded them together and hid them away in his pocket.

When he presented himself at the Chamboro Bank, the next morning, he actively resented the tremor that played like heat lightning along his spine. But, by taking himself in hand, he could keep his fingers satisfactorily steady as he approached the cashier’s wicket and unfolded one of the bills. His earlier impulse had been to try out one of the notes of smaller denomination. But nothing, he decided, could be gained by quibbling. He declined to compromise on anything less than a one-hundred-dollar bill. That would give him his answer.

“Can you break this for me?” he inquired with a laugh that sounded hollow in his own ears. “If it’s any good!”

The cashier’s glance was quick and comprehensive.

“It’s as good as gold,” was his prompt reply. “We need all we can get of ’em this side of the Line.”

“Then we’re both in luck,” said Judd. He laughed again, consoled by the dead-pan face confronting him.

“How do you want it?” asked the impassive man behind the wicket.

Judd stood silent a moment.

“Give me ten tens,” he finally said. “And I’ve a small overdraft here I’d better wipe out with the exchange premium.”

“Just a minute,” said the impassive one.

Judd, watching his receding figure, was stabbed with the thought that he might be going to telephone the police. That quick suspicion brought a singing to his ears.

But the impassive one returned and announced the overdraft was fourteen dollars and forty cents.

Judd curtained his relief by slowly and frowningly counting through his money. He kept both his talk and his movements deliberate as he wiped out his indebtedness and received his change.

But, once away from that barred wicket, he breathed more freely. His last fears had been dispelled. He was no longer a down-and-outer. He had a store of wealth, all his own, as good as gold. He could begin life over again, a free man. He was no longer a failure, with no hope for the future.

He passed along the shop fronts with a new sense of dignity, pondering what his immediate purchases would be. He’d have to buy himself a pair of shoes and some decent tobacco and a set of new spark plugs for the truck engine. But, what was more important, he could carry home towelling and bungalow aprons for Joyce. And the coffee percolator and bread mixer she had mentioned more than once.

But those purchases impressed him as too practical, as almost pinch-penny. His widened horizon called for widened expenditure, something more personal. Women, he remembered, had a weakness for silk. So he decided on a peach colored slip and a box of stockings, of three-thread silk. This relapse into luxury left him with sufficient recklessness to break a second bill, one for fifty dollars.

Then in a store window along the block he caught sight of a white fur bedside rug that struck his fancy. He thought of Joyce’s slender white feet coming in contact, every morning, with the rough floor boards of her room. And that soft bedside rug struck a note appropriate to her queenly four-poster. His attitude was almost one of unconcern as he proffered yet another bill for fifty dollars in payment for the rug. He counted and stowed away his change, which began to feel heavy in his pocket. He knew at last what it meant to be a moneyed man. And the surge of power this thought brought to him prompted him to turn in at a white-fronted candy shop and buy a three-pound box of Queen Mary chocolates, as a topping gesture of magnificence.

It would be worth something, he kept telling himself, just to see the look in Joyce’s startled hazel eyes as he casually handed those things over to her. She deserved them. She deserved a thousand things more.

As he headed for home, oddly light of heart, he more than once let his hand rest on the pouched money in his pocket. There were, he remembered, many more equally potent slips of paper hidden away where he could put his hands on them when need be, a cache he could draw on through all the indefinite future. From that day forward he could be a good provider. He had the power, at last, to dole out to Joyce the happiness that belonged to her.

Yet his blood chilled, of a sudden, as he approached his own gate and saw a car parked at the roadside, within six feet of his pillared gate posts. It abruptly brought back to him too many things he was trying to forget. He was even swept by an impulse not to turn in, but to pass his own gateway and proceed guiltily along the roadway.

Then the tension about his heart went as suddenly as it had come. For the stranger, he saw, was merely a preoccupied tourist replacing a blown tire. It meant no danger to the home-comer with the illicit pile of parcels behind his truck seat.

But some backwash of that shock remained with Judd, even after he chugged down through the orchard and came face to face with Joyce. He could see, by the empty pail in her hand, that she had been carrying swill to his penned young pigs, though that toting of household garbage up to the barnyard, he had always insisted, was a man’s job. A flash of revolt went through him at the thought that because of him she was being degraded to tasks so sordid. Many washings, he noticed, had faded the striped azure of her dress. Yet it was clean, too clean to be swinging next to a swill pail. There would have to be an end, he told himself, to that sort of thing. And the sooner it came the better.

“What’s happened?” asked Joyce, quick to see the frown that was furrowing his face.

“Nothing but good luck,” Judd answered with a forced laugh.

Instead of meeting her questioning glance he looked quickly about the fresh-raked dooryard.

“Anyone been around here today?” he inquired with an effort at casualness.

“Only Mrs. Slocum,” was Joyce’s answer, faintly touched with wonder at the repeated question that marked his repeated home-coming. “She came down to show me the baby.”

Judd realized, for the first time, that she was lifting up her face for the kiss he had forgotten to give her.

“Then you weren’t lonesome?” he said as he released her.

“I’m always lonesome,” she quietly admitted, “when you’re not here.”

She stood wondering why that confession should bring a new hardness to his face. But she made no effort to exact explanations from him.

“Why are you so quiet?” he asked as they ate their evening meal together.

“I think it’s because Mrs. Slocum told me something I wish she’d kept to herself,” Joyce answered as she looked out over the evening lake water.

“What was that?” was Judd’s prompt demand. The thought of some vague threat always over him brought a frown to his face.

“She was telling me how the neighborhood feels Pine Brae is a bad-luck place,” Joyce explained. “The couple who lived here last lost their child by drowning in the lake.”

Judd’s gesture was one of impatience.

“That’s just dunderheaded rustic idiocy,” he maintained. “Pine Brae’s going to be a place of good luck. And to prove it I want you to come out to the truck and see what I’ve got for you there.”

Yet he wondered, as he followed her out to their newly acquired treasures, why his heart was not as light as it should have been.

Judd, slowly turning his furrows, wondered if his love for a polished plowshare was merely a matter of sentiment. That blade of metal was a symbol, he felt, of man’s mastery over the earth. Battles were fought and won, cities came and went, but that curving sheath of steel remained the source of man’s daily bread. The mere handling of a plow, to Judd, always brought a deep and abiding satisfaction.

This, he told himself as he guided the plodding Homer along the steaming hill slope, was one of the verities. It seemed to simplify life. It touched him with a sense of the primitive and brought peace to his soul. He liked the smell of the freshly turned earth, where robins and blackbirds hopped about the furrows in search of worms. He liked, too, the striated tones of the soil, umber and ochre and black in the slanting morning sunlight. He liked the promise of renewal that brooded over a field well tilled and cleaned for its coming crop. It was, in a way, aboriginal. But it had a dignity all its own. It justified itself.

Yet there were back-water moods when he asked if, after all, he wasn’t missing something out of life. When he stopped in his plowing and watched a twin-motored plane drift across the blue above him he remembered there were busy cities beyond those quiet acres where he was hidden away from the world, cities where wheels turned and turbines hummed and crowded workers swarmed. When he paused at a furrow end to mop the dust from his moist neck he recalled that this was the season when happy classes of seniors were singing on college greens and graduates were dancing the night away before marching proudly in cap and gown across campuses they would tread no more.

But the job of throwing a straight furrow soon wiped such thoughts from his mind. For the plowing of root-tangled sod was not easy work for him. After three steady hours of such toil, he found, he had to refill his water jug. He was trudging pumpward for that purpose when he caught sight of Joyce coming down the lake-front garden path. In her hands she carried a milk pan, mysteriously filled with eggs. Judd noticed, as she came closer, the Indianlike brown that was overlaying the earlier whiteness of the firmly muscled arms, the tan that was slowly imposing itself on the smooth-textured shoulders above the faded blue of her wash waist. The face with the sibylline brow, he also noticed, was lighted up with excitement.

“See what I’ve found,” was the cry that greeted him. “Seventeen eggs, and every one of them good!”

“Where’d you get ’em?” asked Judd after taking a drink from his jug. For eggs, after all, were only eggs.

“Down in the raspberry patch by the old ice house,” explained the foolishly elated woman. “For over a week now I’ve felt there was a stolen nest somewhere in those bushes. And this morning I sleuthed it out.”

“You’re a good detective,” said Judd, frowning over a proclamation that proved slightly dispiriting.

“I know it,” Joyce surprised him by saying. “It’s like my instinct for the north.”

He avoided her eyes by looking over the collection of eggs, wondering as he did so if any secondary meaning reposed in her words.

“How many did you say?” he asked.

“Seventeen,” Joyce answered. She lifted her hooded gaze to his face. “Isn’t that a windfall?”

That word “windfall” held Judd arrested for a moment. It had, only too recently, been his. It brought too abruptly back to him things he preferred to forget.

“Yes, it’s a windfall,” he solemnly agreed as he took up his water jug. But it was a windfall, he remembered on his way back to his plowing, without strings to it. It was honest and open. It was not like his tainted wealth tucked away in a shed corner.

Yet it was plain that Joyce herself, as much as anybody else, liked getting something for nothing. She could nurse, in her own small world, her own personal weakness for windfalls. She loved to gather morels and fairy-ring mushrooms, to get water-cress from the gully stream, to salvage from the sandy cliff hollows along the lake front the wild growing asparagus, seeded from their garden bed. She had even helped him drag up the cliff the smooth deck boards of a wrecked schooner, the white boards of Norway pine from which he had fashioned his work desk. Those, of course, were the windfalls that came for nothing. And she was glad enough to accept them.

But with his particular windfall, Judd knew, it would always be a different story. For the issue there was a clouded one. And Joyce was innately and passionately honest. He had never known her to compromise with her conscience. Never, at least, outside the basic wrongness of their relationship. But that aside, she would never condone what was dubious on his part. Yet he, on his part, could never keep up a campaign of deceit.

It even came home to Judd, after long and troubled thought over his problem, that something was already essentially wrong. He would, eventually, have to find some way of clearing up the whole unsavory mess. His windfall, he admitted, wasn’t bringing him the freedom he had looked for. It wasn’t bringing him happiness. Instead of that, it was slowly but surely building up a barrier between him and Joyce.

The mere thought of that nameless divorce tended to drive him more and more in on himself. It left him self-immured and guardedly silent where he had once been open and aboveboard. Nor could he altogether escape the conviction that the quiet-eyed woman under his roof was constantly watching and assessing him. She was practical-minded, he remembered, and she knew that things duly purchased had to be paid for. She had, plainly, been puzzled by his Chamboro expenditures. And she couldn’t forever be put off with a laugh and a wave of the hand.

Yet he dreaded that her faith in him should be shaken. It was the thought of how some day and in some way she must eventually know the truth, the truth that would leave him naked and cringing before her austerely judicial eyes, that persuaded him the thing couldn’t possibly go on. It was costing him too much. And that secret hoard, he began to see, was useless, almost as useless as though it had indeed been counterfeit.

But it was equally true, on the other hand, that the situation could never be cleared away by a mere gesture of withdrawal. He’d already taken his bite from the apple. He’d already crossed his Rubicon. Even now the stain was there. For he had unequivocally taken and used what didn’t belong to him.

The best he could hope for, he concluded, would be the chance to restore what he had taken from that altogether too appropriately soiled roll and leave it once more intact. That would give him the backbone to stand aside and await the final verdict of time. Then he wouldn’t need to watch the road, with a sinking of the heart at every shadow that fell across his gateway. He wouldn’t know a sick feeling at every step that sounded on his porch floor. And he’d be through with that morose shrinking in on himself every time Joyce swept him with her lucid and level gaze.

He realized, a few days later, how closely that vaguely formulated dread dogged his hours, when a disturbingly silent midday meal was cut short by the sound of car wheels on the drive outside. Judd could feel his heart come up in his throat.

Joyce, conscious of his change of color as he sat there waiting for the unknown to disclose itself, got up from her chair and glanced out through the screen door.

“It’s that Detroit woman,” she told him over her shoulder. “That Mrs. Morner who was so interested in your mahogany bed.”

Judd was able to breathe easier. But his face hardened.

“The trouble with plutocrats,” he proclaimed, “is that they think everything has its price.”

Joyce studied the clouded face confronting her.

“Are you going to tell her it’s not for sale?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

Joyce overlooked the note of stubbornness.

“But couldn’t it help out?” she suggested. “If she’s interested enough to come back she’d probably pay a good price for it.”

“Does that mean you want to get rid of it?” he demanded.

“I didn’t say that. But there are so many things we need more than a four-post bed.”

“Perhaps there are,” Judd gloomily agreed. “But you might remember what we were saying about dignity the other night.”

She failed, for a moment or two, to follow his line of thought.

“Isn’t it a doubtful sort of dignity?” she questioned with a slight increase of color.

“Let me talk to that woman,” said Judd when a knock sounded on the door.

Joyce, after a second study of his face as he crossed the room, reseated herself at the table. She sat there, bent over her empty teacup, as though searching it for the answer to an enigma. She was wondering why two people swayed by a common hunger couldn’t sleep as happily on a spindle bed of plain beechwood, even if it did have a broken leg. That broken leg, she mordantly told herself, might even be a constant reminder of a broken commandment.

Judd noticed the self-estranged figure at the table as he admitted Mrs. Morner.

“I came,” explained his caller, “to ask about that mahogany four-poster of yours.”

“I’m afraid it’s not for sale,” Judd answered, and answered more politely than Joyce had expected.

Mrs. Morner’s face fell.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment of silence. She glanced about the room with its stained and broken plaster. “I could pay a very good price for it.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Judd after an inspection of her opulent person. “But that bed doesn’t happen to be on the market.”

The note of finality in his voice did not escape her. The silent figure at the table seemed to puzzle her almost as much as the obduracy of the tanned young farmer who failed to know the value of money.

“Might I have another look at it?” asked the lady who was not used to such bucolic rebuffs.

“If you insist,” said Judd.

He looked for Joyce to join them as they invaded her room. But his silent housemate, he saw, was busying herself clearing the table.

Mrs. Morner’s slightly aquiline face, after a survey of the burnished mahogany, took on a look of perplexity.

“It seems so out of place here,” she observed after backing away until the wall stopped her.

“It is,” was Judd’s acid retort. But his visitor remained impervious to his ill humor.

“Such a beautiful bed,” she murmured.

“But it calls for a grandeur we can’t give it,” acknowledged its owner.

“Where did it come from?” asked Mrs. Morner.

Judd told her it came from the Old Country, in a sailing ship, almost a century ago.

“Many people must have been happy in it,” observed his visitor as she stood studying the scrolled posts with the pineapple carvings at the top.

That, for some reason, brought a darkening light to Judd’s eyes. He himself had known happiness there. But it was not a happiness he had any wish to parade.

“I don’t doubt it,” he admitted. “And people died in it, and babies were born in it, and a good many important decisions must have been made on it.”

Mrs. Morner, instead of regarding the bed, regarded its owner.

“Are you a farmer?” she questioned.

“Not a very successful one,” Judd said. “But why do you ask?”

“Because you don’t talk like one.”

“I’m only one by adoption,” Judd admitted. But Mrs. Morner, he saw, wasn’t listening to him. Her attention had gone back to the bed.

“I suppose it’s your wife who loves it,” she said as her fingers caressed one of the burnished dark pillars.

“She isn’t my wife,” said Judd.

“Your sister?” inquired his visitor, after a glance through the open door.

“She isn’t my sister.”

Mrs. Morner felt the frost in the air. But she smiled condoningly. She made her glance at the four-poster a valedictory one.

“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” she said as Judd held the screen door open for her. Having gone through it, she turned and regarded her saturnine host. “I hope you have many happy times with your bed,” she said in a voice sharpened with animosity.

Judd felt the sting in that. But rancor went out of his face as he turned back and let his eyes rest on the towering baldachin that seemed too big for the room housing it. That bed, he felt, was a symbol of the bigger and better things that had been taken out of his life. It was the one luxury left to him and Joyce. It was, in a way, as dignifying as a marriage service.

Then he remembered that his land was waiting for him. More than ever, now, he would have to depend on what that land brought back to him.

“She didn’t get it,” he announced to Joyce on his way out through the kitchen. But Joyce, busy with her dishes, failed to look up. The firmer line about her faintly fluted underlip, however, did not altogether escape him.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” he interrogated, stirred by some note of forlornness in the figure before him. He waited until she put the teapot in its accustomed place on the shelf beside their motley array of crockery. “Do you think I should have sold that bed?”

“You must know,” she answered, “if you can afford to keep it.”

“I sure can,” he said in a sharpened voice. His feeling of resentment at her remoteness was shadowed by the thought that he had problems to which she remained a stranger. “I haven’t quite gone bust yet.”

That announcement brought his thoughts back to his hidden windfall. The hardened light was still in his eye as he stopped at the stable for his stalled horse. He hesitated for a moment and then made his way back to the cowshed. There, after closing the door behind him, he reached up to the top of the roof sill.

His wealth was there, intact. Intact, at least, except for the two hundred dollars he had already taken from it. Yet the time would come when he could put that two hundred back where it belonged. For that roll, he knew, must still be regarded as a trust fund. And he’d sleep easier when every dollar of it lay banded together there. Every day that passed made it more and more his, and when the time came to——

But all thought stopped abruptly and a tingle of nerve ends went through him. For the cowshed door had swung open and a stalwart figure stood between him and the light.

“So here’s where you’re hidin’!”

It was the roughly jocular voice of Spike Slocum.

Judd swung down from the truck end and made a pretence of adjusting the tailboard snap-hook. But a quick dewing of moisture had already chilled his body.

“Noticed you’d got that tobacco land o’ yours pretty well worked up,” Spike was saying. “Yes, sir, pretty well worked up for a tenderfoot. And I dropped down to tell you our planter’d be free over the week end.”

“That’s fine,” said Judd, breathing more freely.

“The plants’re gittin’ crowded up in our beds,” pursued the denim-clad neighbor, “and the sooner they’re thinned out the better.”

“Then I’d better be getting busy,” Judd conceded.

“I could loan you the old mare to make up a team. But where’ll you get helpers to drop your plants?”

“Couldn’t I hire them?” asked Judd, remembering he was no longer without the sinews of war.

Spike Slocum shook his shaggy head.

“Not at this season. There’s nary a spare hand in the country. She’s plumb drained o’ manpower. And even the girls’re gettin’ three dollars a day for droppin’ plants.”

“Then I’ll get girls.”

Again the shaggy head moved in negation.

“They’re all spoke for, weeks ahead. How about the nurse lady down to your house?”

Judd recoiled at that suggestion. The thought of Joyce squatting on an iron seat four inches from the ground, squatting there under a dusty canopy while a horse-drawn planter crawled across an equally dusty field, proved repugnant to him.

“I’m afraid she was never trained for that sort of work.”

“But she’s mighty quick-handed,” announced Spike. “And you’ve got ’o be quick when you’re workin’ where two ought ’o be workin’.”

It was Judd’s turn to shake his head.

“I couldn’t ask it of her. She’s doing too much for me as it is.”

Spike’s averted gaze implied he was reading some darker meaning into the other’s words. His shrug was a condoning one.

“Reckon she might s’prise you,” he affirmed.

“Why do you say that?” exacted Judd.

“B’cause when she was up to our house, to see the missus, she watched us work the planter and had a try at it. She allowed it was a job she might be facin’ before long. She’s a smart woman, son.”

“She is,” agreed Judd, feeling oddly humble and at the same time oddly contrite.

It was Joyce who now and then went to the village post office for the little mail that came to Pine Brae. That mail had dwindled to such a feeble trickle that the arrival of a letter stood out as an event. So when she returned from Buckhorn with a letter for Judd, postmarked in New York and bearing no less than three forwarding inscriptions, she was surprised by the smile of disdain with which he inspected the envelope. He tossed it aside unopened until he had done his milking and finished his devious farmyard chores. The sight of it, lying there on the table to which Joyce brought a trimmed and lighted oil lamp, reminded her how tenuous were their connections with the outer world.

She tried not to seem curious as Judd finally seated himself at the table and tore open the envelope. He sat silent so long, after reading his letter, that Joyce turned about in an effort to decipher some answering expression on his face.

Judd laughed quietly at the anxiety in her eyes. Then he tossed the letter aside.

“It’s from old Phil Perlow,” he explained. “We were at college together.”

“Oh!” was Joyce’s noncommittal response. She did her best to keep any ghostly echo of jealousy out of her voice, jealousy of that shrouded past which he would never be able to keep entirely out of his memory. When Judd pushed the typed letter toward her, in fact, she made no effort to take it up.

“He used to like my stuff,” continued the man in the sweatstained overalls. “And now he’s been made the junior member of a publishing firm, he wants to turn a bunch of my war dispatches into a book.”

“And you’ll let him?” questioned Joyce, with a more vibrant note in her voice.

Judd’s laugh was slightly barbed with bitterness.

“I’m not an ink-slinger any more,” he said with a glance at his calloused hands. “I’m a farmer now.”

Joyce glanced down at the letter.

“But wouldn’t that keep the other part of you alive?” she questioned.

She regretted that question, a moment later, when she saw the slow darkening of the other’s face.

“I’m afraid I’m too far gone for that,” he affirmed with a touch of acid. Then, conscious of her own deepened color, his tone became a quieter one. “I don’t want to seem foolish about what you’d call the bigger and better things. I don’t mean that I intend to put my brain to bed for the rest of my life. But those dispatches are old stuff now. They’d all have to be rewritten. And I haven’t time to do it.”

“You mean you don’t want to.”

“Not just now, thank you,” Judd answered with an almost impatient shake of the head. “And I’m a little fed up with those war-front writers. They’re suffering from goitre of the ego. And I get tired of their offhanded hints of how fine and brave they can be under fire.”

“Weren’t you fine and brave,” asked Joyce, “when you had to be?”

Judd heaved a disdainful shoulder.

“Oh, it wears off, I’m afraid. And a superiority complex sometimes outlives the conditions that brought it into existence. I used to get the feeling we were a lot of vultures, just a flock of harpies hovering along the front and living on death and disaster.”

“That’s neurotic,” Joyce contended. “You were needed there as much as—well, as nurses were. But instead of patching up broken bodies you patched up broken records. It may have seemed insane. But you were there to get a little order and meaning out of the insanity.”

“When the censors would let you!”

“But wasn’t that a worth-while job?” asked Joyce, remembering how success was apt to be resented by people who were not having it.

Judd’s shoulders stiffened. His companion could see a faraway look come into his eyes.

“Sure it’s a worth-while job. It’s a grand job, interpreting a cockeyed world to a million or two readers. But you can get too much of it. And sometimes, somewhere, a little bell rings at the back of your brain and you sit wondering if a world of madmen is worth writing about.”

Such a thought, Joyce felt, was morbid. But she declined to say so, remembering as she did that an ulcerated mind, like an ulcerated stomach, sometimes called for a bland diet.

“But surely, later on, you’ll want to take the cover off that old typewriter of yours? You can’t give half a lifetime to a thing and then toss it aside.”

Judd looked at her for a half-minute of silence. Then he managed a laugh. But it was a laugh with a quaver of protest in it.

“Lay off, Lady Macbeth! You’re talking, at the moment, to a tiller of the soil.”

“But to a man who once knew how to write!”

“Perhaps I did. But my job just now is to get this old farm on its feet again.”

Joyce crossed to the window, looked out at the star-lit lake, and returned to her seat at the table.

“Couldn’t I help you with your writing?” she persisted.

“When?” he demanded.

She had no answer for that, remembering how full his days already were. She knew that the issue was closed, that there would be no stepping aside from the straight and narrow path that led to the fields where the last vestiges of his earlier troubled days were being plowed under. It was his escape, apparently, from the inescapable.

For Judd, she could see, found little to object to in the steady round of his farm work. He seemed almost to welcome the early rising and the long hours that tired him in body and brain.

His toil on the land, Judd himself knew, kept him from brooding on other things. It took his mind off the bloodstained roll of bills hidden away under his cowshed roof and the shadowy alteration that secret cache had brought about in his relation with Joyce. It gave him less time to worry about every car that stopped for a moment along the Ridge Highway.

But that relief, he saw, was coming at a cost. For fatigue such as his could take the edge off sensation and dull the mind to what he had once regarded as important in life. He no longer reveled in the dewy freshness of the morning or the early robin chorus that came from the cliff maples. He no longer loitered along the lane to inhale the scent of red clover in blossom. And as dusk came on he no longer sat with Joyce at his side watching the evening light pale along the wide blue line of the lake. Those were luxuries denied him.

Instead, he savored to the full the stolid-mindedness of the peasant, his body stiff with weariness and his spirit dulled into an acid listlessness that left him sparse of speech and uncertain of mood. He was, he felt, not even being fair with Joyce. For she too was sharing in that toil. It was deepening the hollow in her cheek and bringing a bluer shadow under the tangle of lashes that hooded the ruminative hazel eyes. It was leaving her both more silent as they worked, and more ready to tumble into bed when her long-houred day was over.

Yet no complaint came from her lips. As she sat, alert and light-fingered on her little iron seat under the planter’s dusty canopy, dropping her plants where the caressing iron shares shaped the soil about the roots and the water barrel clicked its essential little gush of water to keep life in the set tendril of green, Judd nursed a vague regret that any demands of his should consign her to a task so earthy and a posture so humble. She was not made for jolting over a plowed field behind a slow-moving team until the powdering dust caked on her moist neck and weariness brought a droop to her shoulders. But she never failed him. She even seemed to share his hunger to get that hill field planted. She sat unprotesting beneath her faded shred of canopy as the crawling planter clicked and weaved back and forth under a scorching sun, leaving dimples of moisture and a row of despondent-looking yellow leaves in its wake.

But those wilted yellow leaves, in a few days, took on a promise of life. And it seemed like a battle already fought and won when the last row was placed and watered and the planter returned to its owner.

“That’s over,” said Joyce as Judd trudged in through his gate pillars leading his tired horse. Both man and beast, she saw, moved with the same laggard steps. And both, she remembered, would be thinking of food.

“You can be a lady again,” Judd told her as his half-shamed gaze rested on her dust-covered figure.

But Joyce was not entirely a lady again. For the battle, Judd found, was only beginning. There were re-sets to go where a space had been missed or an overfragile plant had died. There were hand plantings to be made where cutworms kept thinning the line, or where an unguarded hoe movement had severed a stalk. There were weeds to be kept down and moisture to be conserved by stirring the soil. And he realized, as the summer days lengthened, that the hoe movements demanded by a growing field of burley were countless.

It was more than he could manage, in fact, and he spent two evenings scouring the countryside for possible help. But none was to be found. There were too many battles, similar to his own, taking place in other fields.

It was Joyce, in the end, who came to the rescue.

“There’s no reason I can’t handle a hoe,” she said one morning while he was hurrying through his breakfast. “I could finish up here by ten and give at least five or six hours to field work.”

Judd’s words, when he spoke, had a familiar ring.

“It’s not women’s work.”

“I saw plenty of WLA women doing it back in England,” contended Joyce. “And it did those farmerettes good. It took a lot of them away from bridge and bars and put them down to bed rock.”

“And spoiled a lot of complexions,” Judd added.

“Service should mean more than skins to the right sort of woman. And I’m going to help you with that crop.”

“It’s not as easy as it looks,” Judd warned her.

“I know it isn’t,” she admitted. He could see the commiserative glance with which she inspected his lean and knotted arms. “And I also know you’re working too hard.”

So she joined him, that day, in the hill field, where she proved more adept at cleaning the rows than he had expected. The second day she did even better. And it soon became a fixed habit to hurry through her housework, fill the water jug and join him on the sun-steeped slope where he worked on the soil that absorbed so much of his thought.

“Everything has its enemies,” she said as they hoed side by side along the narrowing rows. She stooped and crushed a fat cutworm between her fingers, without flinching.

“What makes you say that?” asked Judd, stopping to mop his brow.

“I was thinking of this field,” Joyce answered above her busy hoe, “and my garden down by the house. We’ve grubs and we’ve worms and caterpillars and cutworms; we’ve those awful striped cucumber beetles. And blackbirds to tear up our corn. And even rabbits to nibble at our lettuce heads.”

“There’s always something,” Judd admitted, “to keep us from being too happy.”

That admission brought her about, to attempt a study of his face. But his attention, at the moment, seemed centered on his hoeing.

“Being too happy,” she ventured, “is always dangerous.”

It was Judd’s turn to wonder just what she meant by that. For he felt safe enough, if there was indeed peril in felicity. And a part of his unhappiness, he knew, stemmed from the thought that he was failing to make life any easier for her. He hated to see her, hoe in hand, stooping and scratching between the lengthening plants, grubbing in the soil like a peasant. He hated to see her hands hardened and calloused, just as he hated to see the newer drawn look about her unsmiling lips and the ennui of exhaustion in her shadowed eyes. It made him wonder if hearts as well as hands couldn’t become calloused from overwork.

But he had no choice in the matter. He was giving every hour of his day and every ounce of his strength to a battle he couldn’t afford to lose. Yet, alone, he could never win it. He even wondered, as he trudged stained and stiff-muscled from the field, why his work, up to the time of this new enterprise, had once seemed almost light-hearted. He had liked his earlier half-hour at noon, talking things over with Joyce, just as he had liked his evenings side by side with her in the garden. Those hours took on the halo of things loved and lost. For they were now a thing of the past. The new tobacco field seemed to absorb him, suck him in like a quicksand. He even toiled there after sunset, hoeing in the deepening twilight until he could no longer distinguish between plants and weeds, until the ache in his tired muscles drove him animal-like to his hard bed in the east room where he had been sleeping since Joyce had suggested they would rest better in separate rooms. It had seemed like divorce. But he had accepted it. There were times when every woman, he assumed, had a hunger for privacy, with screened-off and secret corners in her make-up where the best of men could be only a blundering intruder.

But his sleep failed to deepen with solitude. On his own hard bed he muttered and moaned and after his hours of tossing, awakened with the first light of day and once more went out to his land. There he worked with a drugging sort of desperation, watching his crop with a morosely satisfied eye at the same time that he watched the stone-pillared gateway for any visiting stranger.

For always, at the back of his brain, was that vague worry, that dull consciousness of something unsavory and unwelcome, shot through with undefined fears. It made him feel like a prisoner, with the jury out and his sentence not yet announced.

The full force of that feeling came home to him, sharp as a rifle shot, when a few days later he looked up from his hoeing and caught sight of a bony young stranger advancing leisurely down the field.

Judd, as he bent over his work again, could feel his body chill. He could even feel his heart skip a beat as that intruder’s shadow fell across the fresh-stirred soil at his feet.

But the man with the hoe kept on with his work. He refused to look up, in fact, until the stranger stepped closer and touched him on the shoulder.

Judd, at any other time, would have resented that movement. But his glance, when he finally lifted his eyes, remained a studiously abstracted one.

“Yuh’re hard at it, ain’t yuh?” observed the newcomer.

Judd, as he mopped his wet face with his shirt sleeve, chilled at the other’s note of careless mockery. It implied a venomous sort of fortitude that disturbed him. And equally disturbing, after a second glance, was the general appearance of the intruder, the telltale pallor of the lean face, the cool assurance of the overdapper body with its blue-gray vest and its pointed yellow shoes.

He knew the type. He had seen it often enough about city honky-tonks and cellar night clubs and street-corner pool-rooms.

“You’ve got to keep hard at it to make a living,” averred Judd, depressed by the reptilious composure of that too urban-looking stranger.

He could not be sure whether or not it was the same voice that had once come to him through the rain-swept darkness. But he had no hesitations about its slurred and insolently cadenced speech. He knew such voices. And he knew they were not born of the soil, but of the city slum.

Judd nursed a feeling that his time was upon him. Yet the intruder impressed him as an oddly fragile-looking and thinblooded enemy, for all the catlike restlessness that kept the lean body twitching in the sunlight it seemed to pollute.

“Yuh rubes are kind o’ hidden away down there,” observed the thin-waisted youth, after a quiet scrutiny of the lower reaches of the farm. His narrowed gaze swerved about to the gate pillars of fieldstone. He considered them for a moment of silence, a querulous frown on the face that was youthful yet looked incredibly hardened and old. “Yeh, yuh’d never know from the road there was a house buried behind them pines.”

“We live pretty much by ourselves,” said the man with the hoe. A flash of revolt even prompted him to add: “And we prefer it that way.”

“Do you now?” observed the stranger. Judd could feel the flippantly assessing eyes studying his face. “But I guess yuh could do with a little help on this farm o’ yours, if yuh got it cheap?”

Judd felt the need for caution. That inquiry had been put casually enough. But behind the careless words was a hint of something steely, like a razor blade wrapped in lamb’s wool.

“I couldn’t afford to hire help,” Judd finally explained.

The other’s smile was one-sided.

“Yuh wouldn’t need t’ hire me. I’d jus’ come. I’d jus’ swing in for my board and keep. And it might pay yuh, in the end.”

Judd refused to meet his enemy’s eye. He felt like a bluebottle being slowly enwebbed by a wary and watchful spider. And he needed time to think.

“Just why’re you looking for farm work?” Judd found the courage to inquire.

“It might be good for my health,” was the curtly ambiguous reply.

Judd stepped back and inspected the narrow-chested youth. He found something fortifying in the meager lines of the thin and twitching body.

“What’s wrong with your health?”

The youth’s laugh was dry and noncommittal.

“Yuh see, I’ve got a bum lung. And they tell me I’ve got to be in the open air for a spell.”

Judd pondered the cause of that bum lung.

“We haven’t much room for outsiders,” he asserted, resenting the feeling of helplessness that was prompting him to temporize before the inevitable. He resented even more the cool nonchalance with which the intruder took the hoe from his hand and essayed an experimental chop or two at the sun-baked soil.

“I’m tougher’n yuh’d imagine,” he announced.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Judd. “But farm work calls for another kind.”

“Another kind o’ what?”

“Of toughness,” said Judd, turning his back on the intruder.

That intruder, for a moment, stood considering what was plainly a rebuff.

“Yuh’re not afraid o’ me, are yuh?” he questioned.

“Of a squirt like you?” answered the harried Judd. “Why should I be?” And again his questioner stood silent.

But a new earnestness had crept into his voice when he spoke again.

“Yuh’re missin’ a chance, mister. I’d work steady and eat light.” The newcomer was blinking down toward the cowshed that abutted the fowl run. “Why couldn’t I bunk in a corner like that?”

Judd’s heart tightened. He reached for his hoe and pretended to be busy with his plant row before he had control of himself again.

“It’s not merely a matter of bunking,” he pointed out. Then he added, with a labored sort of flippancy: “I’m not the boss around here. The real boss is down there in the house.”

The intruder’s eye rested on the roof slope all but hidden by the clustering pine trees.

“You got a wife?”

“I’ve got a housekeeper,” amended Judd, annoyed by the darker flush that mantled his face.

“So that’s the setup!” was the other’s overcomprehensive comment. He lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke. “Don’t yuh run your own farm?”

“I rather think I run it,” answered Judd. “And I run it in my own way.”

The anger in that retort left the other untouched.

“And make good jake out o’ your crops?” he queried.

“Nothing to brag about. A farmer has to scratch for a living.”

“That’s why he ought ’o have a little help,” said the stranger, “when he can get it cheap.”

“So what?” snapped Judd.

“What I’m tryin’ to tell yuh, mister. I could make myself useful around here.”

Judd resumed his hoeing. But as he strove to put distance between him and his tormentor the dapper figure followed him along the plant row.

“Even if you could,” he announced, “I’m not the one to decide a thing like that.”

“You mean it’s up to your lady friend?”

The muffled insolence in that brought Judd about.

“Who are you, anyway?” he demanded, exasperated by the closeness of that leechlike figure.

“Oh, yuh can call me Slack, Banty Slack. That’s what I answer to back in the big burg.”

“What big burg?”

The intruder tossed away his cigarette end.

“Where I come from don’t cut much ice. What counts is where I’m headin’ for.”

“Then don’t let me detain you,” said Judd as he went back to his hoeing.

“Wait a minute,” warned the newcomer. He stepped closer and regarded the other from under thinly puckered brows. “Yuh remember ever seein’ me before?”

The sharpened note of challenge in that query did not escape Judd. It brought with it a smothering sense of peril closing in about him.

“Not that I can recall,” he answered with a carefully achieved casualness.

“Yuh don’t remember me?” persisted the other.

“Nope; can’t say I do,” answered Judd, his tone defensively rustic.

This seemed to puzzle the stranger.

“I kind o’ thought we’d bumped together, a while back.”

“Where?” Judd asked with sustained unconcern as his hoe blade uprooted a thistle.

“Oh, up yonder,” retorted the other, with a left-handed gesture toward the Highway fence.

“Not me, son,” answered Judd, playing his part.

The man who called himself Slack frowned over this, still plainly puzzled. And from that bewilderment Judd wrung a small but persistent hope. The one thing he asked for was time to think out some fit and proper plan of suppression.

“S’posin’ I amble down to the house and talk to the big shot?” suggested his enemy.

“It won’t do much good,” Judd warned. But a sense of pressure relieved went through him.

“I’ll take a chance on that,” was the venomously cool retort.

Judd watched him as he pushed his way down the field slope, disregarding the thick-leaved plants as he went. He wavered back and forth with a sort of reptilious unconcern, like a copperhead fortified with a knowledge of its own secret poison sac.

Judd’s feeling, as he saw the stranger round the lane turn and disappear behind the garden hedge, may have been one of relief. But any sense of escape that came from momentary deliverance came at a cost. For it wasn’t, he knew, the open and courageous thing to do. It was what this man Slack would have called passing the buck.

Yet it wouldn’t take Joyce long, with that quietly estimative gaze of hers, to size up her visitor and start him on his way. She’d face him with a free mind and be frank enough in saying she didn’t fancy his presence. And the mere fact that she could be a factor in solving his problem gave Judd a tenuous feeling of support, of companionship in a world where he had seemed abysmally alone.

When Judd went in for his midday meal, after hearing the familiar clarion call from Joyce’s swinging plowpoint pounded with an old claw hammer, he was startled to find the stranger there. The young man who answered to the name of Slack had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and was engaged, at the moment, in meekly carrying wood in to the kitchen woodbox.

Judd could hear Joyce exclaim, “That’s fine,” as though speaking to a child. He could hear Slack ask, “What’s next?” and the lighter voice reply, “That’s all for just now.”

Judd, with his jaw set, watched the intruder wander down the garden path and quarter over to the cliff front, where he sat studying the gulls on the pound-net poles above the blue-green lake water. He looked solitary and small against the wide sweep of the horizon.

“Are you going to feed that man?” Judd questioned as Joyce joined him beside his outdoor wash bench.

“Why not?”

“What’s he been telling you?”

“How he wants work,” answered Joyce as she drained the water from her pot of potatoes. She disregarded her housemate’s gesture of disapproval. “I think we ought to give him a chance.”

“At what?”

“At working here. He could really help us out.”

“Help us out of what?” demanded Judd, quick in his search for second meanings.

Joyce’s eyes widened at a brusqueness where brusqueness was uncalled for.

“You know how scarce men are. And you’ve simply got to have help. You can’t keep on this way much longer.”

Judd’s laugh was harsh.

“I guess that’s about all I’m good for,” he said with an abrupt wave of self-pity. It was so unexpected that it brought the other’s quick gaze about to his face. But she withdrew the hand which, for a moment, threatened to reach out to him. Her voice, when she spoke again, was matter-of-fact.

“All he’s asking for is his board and keep.”

“That’s probably more than he’d be worth.”

Judd detected the repeated flinch before his repeated harshness. But Joyce, apparently, was determined to remain realistic.

“We could manage all right,” she said with an achieved sort of patience. “And we might be helping someone who needs help.”

“Helping him to what?” exacted Judd as he turned to hang up his towel.

“Back to health, for one thing,” answered Joyce.

“Then he’s been telling you the story of his life?” challenged Judd, startled by the bitterness in his own voice.

“Very much in the way I told you mine,” she quietly reminded him.

Judd scented some meant reproof in that. It even left him disturbed by a second sense of betrayal, of final supports failing him in his moment of need. She could be exacting enough with him. But she could be foolishly tolerant with a chalk-faced stranger who had happened to touch her pity.

“He said something about sleeping in the cowshed,” Joyce observed.

“He won’t sleep in that cowshed,” Judd averred. “And he won’t sleep under this roof.”

“Then where can we put him? Why not the tool shed? It doesn’t seem to be used much.”

“All right, the tool shed,” Judd wearily acquiesced.

Joyce stood perplexed by hardness where hardness had not been expected.

“Anyone could see he’s been a sick man,” she said with a glance out toward the lake front where the solitary figure was still pensively watching the gulls.

Judd, as he busied himself combing his wet hair, was remembering just why that pallid-faced stranger who’d come to hound the peace out of his life had been a sick man. One naturally would be that, after getting a hijacker’s bullet through one’s lung.

“And it’s up to us to nurse him back to strength?”

“Not unless you say so,” was Joyce’s ominously quiet answer. “But he might get out of it what we seem to be missing.”

“Thanks,” said Judd as he unrolled his shirt sleeves.

She looked up, quickly, and he knew that the eyes that could probe so deep were studying his averted face.

“You seem to have changed your point of view,” she observed, “since you took me in.”

The barb in that did not escape him. He was even tempted, for one fleeting moment, to turn on her then and there and tell her the whole unsavory story. But that impulse vanished when he saw Slack strolling back toward the house.

“All right, take him in if you want to,” Judd said with protectional roughness. He resented the sense of helplessness that enmeshed him. Yet his frown deepened as he stood conscious of some ever-widening estrangement between him and the woman who was supposed to be his mate. She was still close enough beside him in the midday sunlight, so close that he could see the throb of a pulse in her sun-browned neck. But at the same time she seemed a thousand miles away, inaccessibly remote from him and his troubles. And he felt, as he walked slowly in to the white-draped dinner table, that his days of peace in that house were destined to be a thing of the past. For having that pinch-shouldered intruder billeted on them, he remembered, was going to be singularly like having a diamond-backed rattler wandering about their dooryard.

“Our fare is pretty plain,” he observed as his furtive-eyed guest sat eating his dinner.

“It looks good to me,” Slack acknowledged with unexpected meekness. It was a meekness, Judd noticed, that brought an eyeflash of approval from Joyce.

“We can’t afford the frills,” pursued the man of the house, intent on establishing the fact of his poverty.

“Yuh got frills enough for me,” said the other as he pushed back his chair. “And now, folks, I’m ready to start showin’ I’m something better’n a city bum.”

Joyce came to Judd’s rescue in his moment of hesitation.

“You can start,” she announced, “by paris-greening our potato patch. The bugs are getting the best of us there.”

That, Judd remembered, was something he had overlooked. But there was something more important, he also remembered, that must not be overlooked. For he was already the prey of a new anxiety, a nagging worry as to the safety of his secret hoard. The cowshed, he felt, was no longer the proper place for it.

He made sure, on his way to the barn, that his movements were unobserved. He, as custodian of that illicit wealth, would be responsible if anything happened to it. He couldn’t run the risk of having rats carry it away or red squirrels chew it up for a nest lining. Nor, if Slack was to sleep there, could it be left where it was.

He decided, after crossing from the barn to the cowshed and back again to the barn, that the best thing to do would be to bury his roll. Arming himself with a shovel and a battered zinc toolbox, he made his way guardedly back to the cowshed, his eye always on the lower slope where Joyce and her new helper were hidden behind the tangle of pine and cedar and shrubbery. He crept in through the cowshed door as furtively as a murderer making his way to the scene of a crime. There, after closing the door, he groped along the sill and lifted his luckless windfall from its hiding place. He pushed it down inside a pocket-size tobacco tin, and this tin, in turn, he enclosed in the old zinc toolbox.

Then, making sure the coast was clear, he crept into his fowl run. There he dug a small grave and buried his box, tramping the earth well down over it and masking the fresh-stirred soil with a scattering of straw from his horse stall.

He felt safer, after that. But he wished, as he went back to his work in the tobacco field, that memory could be buried as deep as he had buried his battered zinc box and all it held.

It was Joyce who helped Slack transform the unused tool shed into sleeping quarters for the new farm worker. She swept out the worn floor boards, converted a packing case draped with calico into a table, on which a kerosene lamp could stand, and carried out what bedding could be spared from the house. She even hung a pair of dimity curtains at the loose-sashed window and made an extra pillow which she stuffed with frugally saved chicken feathers.

In that rough bunkroom Slack diffidently assembled his meager belongings and decorated the walls with beauty-contest figures from a movie magazine. There, night by night, he retired to his unpredictable meditations, and there, morning by morning, he remade his narrow bed and swept up the cigarette ends from the floor. Never once did he have to be called in the morning. He was astir, as a rule, with the first robins.

If he worked better than Judd had expected, the owner of Pine Brae found little happiness in that restless and furtive intruder. Judd accepted him with the grim toleration of a noncombatant on whom an invading enemy has been billeted. And Slack himself, it was soon discovered, stood willing to impart precious little about either his past or his point of origin. He curtly admitted that he had come from somewhere “across the Line.” The rubes and hay-tossers of the immediate neighborhood, he also admitted, were of no interest to him. All he wanted was to be left alone by an outside world which he seemed willing to forget. He had the habit of slipping away out of sight, like a rabbit, when an occasional visitor appeared at Pine Brae.

With Joyce he was less remote. He carried out her casual orders with a blithe listlessness that implied at least a qualified acknowledgment of her authority. When he came in from his work, wan and wilted, Joyce persuaded him to drink fresh milk, which he volubly scoffed at but obediently made away with, eventually confessing that it put starch in his spine. When he ran out of cigarettes, it was Joyce who brought him a fresh supply from the village store. When he asked about a pair of overalls, for the rougher work, it was Joyce who cut down and patched over an old pair that had belonged to Judd.

“The boob from the burdock patch!” he observed after donning that rustic garment. “I sure look like a native now.”

Joyce laughed at his honky-tonk pirouette.

“Even your best friends mightn’t recognize you.”

“That’s jake with me,” announced Slack. Yet a moment later he seemed to regret that admission.

“Now I’ll show the big shot how to hoe,” he proclaimed.

But he was not altogether a success in the tobacco field. He proved singularly abstracted and slow-moving, seeming at times lost in a world of his own. He appeared passive yet tense, as though patiently awaiting the unexpected. And to Judd he seemed always to carry an air of watchfulness, an oblique and animal-like watchfulness that knew no interruptions.

For Judd, immersed as he was in his field work, did a little watching of his own. He kept a narrowed eye on the intruder, the cynical and abstracted intruder whose very passiveness added to the other’s perplexity. He said nothing when Slack mysteriously disappeared for a day and a night and returned to the farm with a new frown of worry on his lean and furtive face. But Judd could not rid himself of the impression that they were harboring an enemy. And that knowledge touched him with exasperation when he now and then found his new farm hand and Joyce talking together, talking about things that stood so obviously foreign to a third party that he was more than once arrested by the silence that fell over them at his approach.

“You seem to understand that city runt,” Judd ventured as he watched Slack disappear, hoe in hand, for the field.

“I don’t,” admitted Joyce. “But I feel sorry for him.”

“Why?”

That question, apparently, was not an easy one to answer.

“I think it’s because he’s so without resources, inner resources. And he’s so utterly alone. He doesn’t fit in here, of course. And he never will. The thing that puzzles me is why he ever came.”

Judd had his own suspicions along that line. But he preferred keeping them to himself. Instead, he suggested that Slack give up his tobacco hoeing and work with Joyce in the small fruits, which were ripening and being neglected. The robins were already making away with the black-heart cherries. Early tomatoes were coming in and would bring a better price than would prevail at the main-crop rush. And the tangled patches were almost ready to yield an occasional crate of berries.

Joyce promptly agreed to that arrangement. And Judd knew a sense of relief as he toiled in the upper tobacco field without the languid-moving Slack at his elbow. But his relief was a qualified one. For with him there still remained a foggy sense of waiting, of impending convulsion, which the older man could neither define nor forget. It was, as he had already felt, like having a rattlesnake in one’s cellar, a noiseless menace moving about in the darkness, with a never-ending uncertainty as to when and where it would coil and strike.

For Judd knew, notwithstanding all Slack’s delusive air of abstraction, that he was being spied on. He found it impossible to rid himself entirely of the conviction that he was being covertly watched. And that stood confirmed, after he and Joyce had been away half a day, trucking a load of their early tomatoes in to Chamboro, when he encountered numerous small signs that the house had been well searched during his absence. Even the lock of his work-desk drawer, he discovered, bore signs of having been picked.

It was the following Sunday that Slack, restless with the heat, decided to try a swim in the lake.

“Can you swim?” asked Joyce with a maternal-like note of concern.

“Like a duck, lady,” was the offhand answer. “I could paddle across the canal b’fore I was five.”

“What canal?” questioned Judd.

A veil dropped over the other’s lean face.

“Let’s call it the Suez,” was his evasive reply.

When the mealtime came, and Slack had not reappeared, Joyce suggested that Judd give him a call. The latter, threading his way down the cliff path, pondered how small would be his dismay if he found the narrow-waisted body floating face-up and lifeless in the lake water. It might make his path in life a little easier.

But that narrow-waisted body he found stretched out, quite naked, on the sloping beach sand, with a towel across his face to keep the sun from his eyes. Judd thought, at first, that he was asleep. It was only when the naked one slapped a bluebottle from his sparse ribs that Judd realized the other was merely luxuriating in a sun bath, oblivious to the passing of time. The pebbled white body looked bloodless and bony. But what held Judd’s attention was a puckered and purplish scar where the flesh fell away between the ends of the floating ribs.

That scar, he knew, was a bullet wound.

And that scar left him no longer in doubt. The man on the sand was the man who had thrust a moist roll of bills into his hand and murmured, as he lay bleeding in the darkness, that he would come back for them.

Judd backed away, silent-footed in the sand. He backed away deep in thought and strangely depressed in spirit. He waited for a minute or two, to make sure he had control of his voice. Then he shouted to the recumbent sun bather.

“Soup’s on,” he called out with a careless note of blitheness that had no echo in his heart.

He could see Slack come to life and scramble into his clothes. But he declined to wait for the man who was now established as a spy in his home. He told himself, as he climbed the winding cliff path, that he would have to be doubly guarded from that hour on.

When, a day or two later, he stumbled on Slack prowling about the stable and cowshed and even invading the fowl run, the intruder explained, truthfully enough, that the lady of the house had sent him out to gather eggs. But Judd’s blood chilled at the thought of his enemy walking so casually over his buried treasure. It made life a trifle too much like a game of cross-tag on ground that held a cache of dynamite.

He worried over that encounter for half a sleepless night, and then slipped quietly out of bed and groped his guarded way to the fowl run. There, after making sure he was alone in the starlight, he exhumed the battered toolbox and made sure its secret hoard was still intact.

That discovery brought him a momentary sense of victory. But he knew, as he stood in the darkness with his disinterred fortune in his hand, that those closely banded bank notes were now of no earthly use to him. There was no longer anything alluring in their texture, no longer anything appealing in their delicate-lined artistry. And there was no longer any sense of power in their possession. All they could ever stand for was menace clouded with mendacity. He had, he knew, even grown to hate them. And that hatred prompted him to debate the possibility of soaking them with gasoline and burning them to ashes somewhere up in the wood lot where no one would see the blaze.

But that, he realized on more sober second thought, would merely add to his final predicament. For he was, after all, only their custodian. And at any time in the uncertain future the hour might come when he would be called on to account for them.

He smoothed and tramped down the soil turned up by his shovel and once more covered it with fowl-run litter. Then he emerged into the open and crept about the shadowy barn end, moving cautiously on until he came to the lower-roofed stable. At the far end of this stood the manure pile that would some day go back on his land, the fetid accumulation of his stall-cleaning since springtime. A portion of this pile he shoveled away. Then, working as silently as a grave-robber, he dug down into the moist soil. He dug deeper than before, and once more buried the box, again smoothing the ruptured earth and covering it with its concealing dung.

He went back to the house buoyed up with a feeling of satisfaction that was new to him. The house was reassuringly silent as he tiptoed into the kitchen, where he removed first his shoes and then the denim overalls which he had put on over his pyjamas.

He was groping his way back to bed when a figure in white confronted him in the dimness of the living room.

“Is anything wrong?” Joyce’s voice asked out of the silence.

It took a moment for Judd to absorb his shock.

“Not that I know of,” he said with a forced laugh. “I heard a noise that seemed to come from the stable. I thought one of the animals might be in trouble. So I slipped out to make sure.”

He wondered if there was doubt on the face confronting him in the darkness.

“You’re sure there’s nothing wrong?” asked the voice that quickened his pulse.

He surrendered to an impulse, at that quietly uttered question, to silence her doubting lips with something more than mere words, swept as he was by a sudden hunger to bridge the hateful canyons of uncertainty that yawned between them.

Some power stronger than himself compelled him to move closer to the ghostly figure that floated before him in the nebulous light. A surge of resentment went through him when he saw how that figure receded as he advanced. It prompted him to a newer roughness of movement as he swung out his arms and took possession of her. He held her close, swept by a determination to beat down flimsy barricades that had no right to be there.

“There’s something wrong here,” he said, low-voiced, “between you and me.”

She made an effort, with the heel of her hands, to force space between their two fast-beating hearts. But he was too strong for her.

“Don’t,” she gasped as he held her closer.

But the possessive arms refused to relax.

“I’m tired of don’ts,” he said as his mouth sought her mouth. But, averting her face and still straining away from him, she evaded his lips. Yet the odor of her hair, so close to his face, unleashed impulses too long repressed.

“Don’t,” she repeated as he buried his face in the soft hollow of her neck. He could feel the defiant stiffening of her body. And her resistance, of a sudden, stood a challenge to his own blindly pulsing body.

He swung one arm about her knees and the other about her waist, the waist that was so slender-ribbed it made him think of a cat’s body. He caught her up in his arms, slightly perplexed by the discovery that she was no longer struggling against him. He could hear his own quickened breathing as he carried her, as though he were carrying a sheaf of wheat, through the darkness of the larger room into the darkness of the smaller room.

It was her passivity, as he dropped her on the wide four-poster, that brought a glimmer of remembrance through the mists of passion.

“What is it?” he asked with his face close over the face that was a blur of white in the uncertain light.

She remained for a moment quite motionless, with her eyes shut.

“It’s everything,” she said in an oddly flattened voice.

Judd failed to find much meaning in that statement. But suddenly, under the weight of his shoulder, she looked fragile and pitiful to him. The memory of all he had taken from her, in the past, touched him with shame. And now he was making a demand to which there could be no response.

He drew back a little, the dwindling fire dying completely out at the thought that sleeping beside her, at such a time, would seem like sleeping beside a corpse.

“Don’t kill the little that’s left,” he heard her pleading in a straitened small voice.

“You don’t make it much,” was his foolishly embittered retort.

She surprised him by reaching for his hand.

“It isn’t this that holds us together,” she quietly proclaimed. “It never can and never will. But nothing seems to count if we can’t be honest and open with each other.”

Judd found it hard to frame an answer for that.

“So you’re losing faith in me?” he said, conscious that the fingers clinging to his had tightened a little.

“There are certain things I can’t understand,” was Joyce’s low-toned reply. “I can’t understand why you’ve changed so in the last few weeks.” She stopped him as he was about to speak. “Oh, I know you’ve been overworked. But that doesn’t explain everything.”

He knew that the path they were treading was a perilous one.

“I guess I’m pretty much of a failure,” he said as he stood up beside the burnished four posts that had once been accepted as bringing dignity to their midnight hours.

“No, I’m the failure,” said Joyce. “It’s what we have to pay, I suppose, by starting wrong.”

“That’s all the more reason,” said Judd, “that we should end up right.”

“If it’s not too late,” were the words that came to him through the darkness. And the valedictory note in those words sent a tidal wave of contrition through him. He had, he remembered, tremendous amendments to make. And, once free, he would make them.

“It mustn’t be too late,” he said as he knelt contritely beside the bed where she lay so passive and motionless. He searched for her hand in the darkness and held it hungrily against his down-bent face. He held it there for a long time, both bewildered and depressed by her silence. Then he rose to his feet.

He turned away, with an ache of desolation in his heart, desolation at the thought of his own inadequacies. There was so much to say, he remembered, and so little that could be said.

His movement was penitential as he turned back to the silent woman on the bed. He drew the covers up over her relaxed body, through which he could feel small tremors going. There was even an incompetent rough tenderness in his actions as he pressed the covers close to her, very much as he would have tucked up a sleeping child. Then he groped his way through the silent house to his own room.

It was Joyce’s habit, during the hot spell, to move the dining table out on the lawn, in the breeze-swept shadow of the maples, where Slack swore at the sand flies that marinated themselves in his meat gravy and the sparse-worded Judd from time to time studied the face of his busy but self-contained housemate.

It remained, Judd saw, a barricaded face. It left him with the impression that he was a prisoner out on suspended sentence. It also touched him into a suspicion that the owner of that face had in some way hardened against him. He even wondered, after reaching for his pipe and remembering he was out of tobacco, if the time would come when Joyce would openly and actively hate him.

That, he acknowledged, was what he deserved. Yet he had his man’s right to his privacies of life, to make his own decisions and steer the course that seemed best to him. And he had no intention of showing the white feather, of playing the penitent and crawling about asking for mercy.

His gaze was morose as he watched Slack light a cigarette and indolently exhale a lungful of smoke. For Slack too, he remembered, was quietly and eternally watching his companions, watching them with the covert silence of a treed red squirrel. All he could do, Judd told himself, was to mark time and wait for the worst. It was his fight, and his alone.

The silence was broken by a cry from Joyce.

“There’s our wild-cat. It must be trying to track down a rabbit.”

The two men, following her gaze, saw the low-crouched body twine like a shadow through the herbage at the garden end. There it came to a stop, waiting and watching, immobile as a stone.

It crouched there, a shadow amid shadows, as a robin ran back and forth along the lawn edge, looking for worms. The watchers saw the unsuspecting bird draw closer to the garden tangle. Even before they were prepared for it they saw the spring, the lightninglike blow of the clawed paw, and the ruffle of feathers that floated up in the quiet air. The robin, though wounded, fluttered free. But a second spring and a second stroke of the curved claws left it a prisoner.

The lean furred body, with its tail moving slowly from side to side, crouched over its feathered captive, leisurely silencing the high-noted cries from the torn throat.

“The slinkin’ bastard,” gasped Slack, tight-lipped with indignation.

He got up from his chair. But instead of advancing on the cat, he retreated along the driveway and disappeared beyond the garden hedge.

“It’s always killing something,” complained Joyce, scarcely conscious of Slack’s disappearance. “I’ve got to hate the sight of it.”

Judd, remembering how that roving outlaw in fur had resisted all efforts at appeasement, wondered when his once peaceful farm was to be cleansed of its stalking enmities. He scarcely noticed Slack as the latter recrossed the lawn and slipped back into his seat. The younger man said nothing. He merely sat there, leaning slightly forward across the table, his narrowed eyes watching the cat.

“The slinkin’ bastard,” he repeated as the sharp feline teeth suddenly clamped closer about the feathered neck.

Slack’s hand went down to his pocket and came up again. He leaned farther across the table, with one elbow resting on the cotton-covered board, as though steadying himself for an effort that demanded steadiness.

It was Joyce who first discerned his intention. She caught sight of the snub-nosed black automatic in Slack’s out-thrust right hand and saw the compressed thin lips twitch a little as the leveled barrel end came to rest.

“Don’t,” she called out, covering her ears with her hands.

But Slack disregarded that call. Her repeated cry of “Don’t” was swallowed up in a louder report that was succeeded by a yowl of pain. The cat somersaulted up in the air, raced forward in a dozen frantic leaps, and collapsed on the grass. It writhed in a convulsive movement or two and then lay quite still.

“Why did you do that?” cried Joyce, white-faced with revolt.

“Do what, lady?” asked Slack. He put down his pistol and reached for a cigarette, making the movement an obvious expression of indifference.

“Why did you shoot anything?” Joyce demanded with a fury that was plainly incomprehensible to the man with the one-sided smile.

“Wasn’t it time somebody bumped off that bird-killer?”

“But what right have you to bring firearms to this farm?” demanded the white-faced woman. Her voice was still tremulous with a mixture of anger and repugnance. “I hate them. And I won’t have them about this place.”

“Won’t you now?” said Slack, sitting back and studying her with an indifferent eye.

“Just a minute,” interposed Judd, remembering there were far-off reasons for that outburst, reasons which the youth with the cigarette-stained fingers could never understand.

But Slack’s gaze remained on the woman who had gone berserk over a pot-shot at a cat.

“And just what’ll yuh do about it?” he coolly inquired.

“I’ll do this,” was Joyce’s unexpected reply. Her movement was equally unexpected. She caught up the black-metalled automatic and in twenty quick steps crossed the lawn to the cliff edge. There she flung the firearm as far as she could. She threw it with all her strength, threw it so it went catapulting through the air and fell in the lake water sixty feet below.

“Jeez!” said Slack, more in astonishment than in anger. His smile was almost sardonic as he turned to the silent Judd. “Yuh’d think a gat didn’t cost good money.”

Judd was wondering why he wrung no elation from the knowledge that his enemy had been disarmed. He was wondering, too, if there was a chance of the surf some day washing that sunken firearm up on the beach sand. It was, he told himself, something that would have to be looked into.

“Yuh were right, mister,” Slack was saying.

“Right about what?” demanded Judd, resenting the fraternal tone in the other’s voice.

“When yuh said your lady friend was the big shot around here.”

Slack stiffened in his chair as Joyce returned to the table and stood staring down at him. Her eyes were still bright with something more than anger.

“I won’t have shooting around here,” she cried. And the unreasoning note of passion in that cry brought a frown of perplexity to Slack’s lean face.

“Jeez, lady, how d’ yuh get that way?”

Joyce disregarded that query. There was indignation in her eyes as she turned to Judd, who sat passive in that strange conflict where one hate seemed eclipsing another.

“Why don’t you do something?” she demanded.

But Judd, knowing what he knew, felt that nothing was to be gained by speech. It was Slack’s curt and mirthless laugh that broke the silence.

“Ain’t yuh done enough?” he questioned.

Judd rose to his feet. There was work awaiting him, he recalled, in the upper field that fringed the highway where he had once held a drooping figure with an automatic in its hand.

“You’d better bury that cat,” was his curt command to Slack.

Slack sat silent a moment. Then he got slowly up from his chair and crossed to where the furred body lay stretched out on the grass. He turned it over, with an indifferent toe-thrust. Then he picked it up by the hind legs and crossed leisurely to the cliff front. There he swung it about his head and sent it hurtling out into the lake water.

“He ain’t worth a funeral,” was his coolly defiant comment as he stopped at the table end to light another cigarette.

“How was it?” Judd asked when Joyce returned from an afternoon at the Women’s Institute meeting. She had gone with Mrs. Slocum, and she had gone unwillingly. But Judd had argued that she had been too much a prisoner at Pine Brae, that some outside interest would leave life less humdrum.

“How was it?” Judd repeated, less hopefully. For something in the silent face of Joyce forewarned him that the venture had not been a too happy one. Her eyes, fixed on the blue expanse of the lake, even held a touch of revolt.

“Rather awful,” she answered without looking at him.

“They’re not, of course, your kind,” he said in an effort to cushion a blow which he had hoped would never fall. For she herself had often enough contended that neighbors were necessary to them both.

“No, they’re not my kind,” was Joyce’s unexpected admission. “They’re all honest and respectable. And they seemed rather set on letting me know I wasn’t one of them.”

Judd could picture that afternoon of farmers’ wives, with their patriotic knitting and sewing and singing “God Save Our King” in a crowded room where ice cream and cake and overly weak coffee failed to impart any final air of festivity to the occasion. It might prove exciting to Mrs. Slocum and her rural companions. But to a woman who had traveled in far countries and known life at its widest sweep, it might indeed take on the coloring of the commonplace.

“You’re too good for them,” said Judd, disturbed by a moodiness that was new to her.

“On the contrary,” said Joyce. “To them I’m merely a fallen woman.” Her laugh was brief and brittle. “Mrs. Bangham seems to have got in her fifth-column work along this Ridge.”

“That underfed old cat!” cried Judd. “What do you care about those Bible-thumpers?”

“I don’t care, in one way. In another way I do. For it brings home to me how dependent I am on you.”

That statement both elated and depressed him. The look in her eyes seemed to say, “You’re all I have now.” But the thought of how little he was able to do for her left him with a touch of uneasiness.

When he came in from his field work and found Joyce picking the crate of berries that would be bartered for groceries to tide them over another week, he stood disturbed by the thought that her dependence on him was only a polite fiction. For, with all their efforts at frugal living, they found the advancing summer leaving them with little money in hand. With little honest money, Judd amended as he recalled the bank roll so mockingly hidden away in the mulch at his barn end. That windfall of his, he began to feel, was no longer an asset. It was merely a lurking menace.

Even Slack grew into a puzzled consciousness that all was not going well with the worried lord of the manor. He could not escape a knowledge of the leaner meals, the less frequent trips to the village store, and the greater dependence on what the farm could produce. He noted the sense of strain between Judd and his self-contained housekeeper, who, even when the evening lamp was lighted, could be seen patching and darning and mending rents in faded work clothes. And with the passing of time his perplexity grew deeper.

Judd, who had once felt that the same passing of time would bring relief to his troubled soul, found little comfort in the fact that the summer days were shortening. He still went about with a sense of waiting. He still toiled with a floating anxiety at the back of his brain. He still went to bed and wakened again shadowed by a feeling of undecided issues that no power of his own could now bring to a conclusion.

That souring self-absorption left him a prey to unpredictable moods. After an especially restless and dream-harried night he even nursed a momentary impulse to escape. He knew a brief and rebellious longing to slip quietly away, to take what little he needed and go while the going was good, before he stood revealed as the weakling and impostor he really was. He had done it once before, and he could do it again.

But that first flight, he remembered, had solved no problems and had brought no peace where he had sought for peace. There was no triumph in retreat. And he would be leaving behind the one thing he wanted.

He tried, as best he could, to picture life, or what was left of his life, without Joyce. But his effort to imagine a newer existence, an existence without that selfless and quietly assuring figure somewhere in the background, left him with a sudden tightness about his heart. She had uttered no complaint. She had left him to his own devices. But she must have known, in her own secret soul, that he had somehow failed her. And she might never again bathe him in that pure white light of faith which he had once so offhandedly accepted. She might even nurse her sedulously guarded contempt for his incompetences. But his soul recoiled at the thought of trying to live without her. She was all he had left out of his shipwrecked life.

He needed her. He needed her just as his farm needed him. And he had his crop to think of. He had to stick to his land, he told himself as he fought down that brief and bitter mood. It held his one chance of making good, now that about everything else had failed him. It meant the re-establishment of his manhood. And tainted souls, he maintained as he took up his milk pail and went forth for his morning milking, were like tainted waters: their one hope of purifying themselves was by keeping in motion.

Yet if Joyce found something mystifying in his moods he also, at times, found something enigmatic in her actions. When she returned from a visit to the Slocums, where she inspected a rash on the baby’s body and announced it was merely prickly heat, she brought back with her a twist of home-grown tobacco from the store which Spike had rubbed with maple syrup and rum and dried out for personal consumption. Judd found it beside his plate at suppertime.

“What’s this?” he demanded, puzzled by the rough coil, as long as a baby’s arm.

“It’s tobacco,” said Joyce. “Especially cured by Spike Slocum.”

“And what brought it here?” he asked with a harshness that derived from the thought he could be thus obliquely dependent on her charity.

“I did,” was Joyce’s clipped reply.

“Why?”

“You haven’t been smoking lately. And I thought it would be good for your frazzled nerves.”

“What makes you think I have frazzled nerves?” Judd demanded with a betraying flash of resentment.

“You do,” Joyce answered with a smile that unedged the curtness of her reply.

The tenderness in that smile overspread his harshness with a tinge of repentance. But he could see no way to put it into words.

“You’re being very patient with me,” he said as he went on with his meal.

Even Slack was conscious of these undercurrents he could not altogether understand. He took up the coil of home-grown tobacco and sniffed at it with disdain.

“Yuh’re sure up against it,” he averred, “if you’ve got ’o smoke stuff like that.”

Judd turned on him.

“If I can’t afford things,” he said, “I prefer doing without them.”

Yet even as he made that declaration he remembered how he had once raked through the straw and dust of his Psiloriti mountain camp for stained cigarette stubs, stubs from which he abstracted tobacco shreds enough to encase in two inches of despatch paper and soothe his lungs with their acrid smoke. There was no fruit, he remembered, as wonderful as want. And there was no pride as sharp as the pride of the penniless.

“Yuh tryin’ to tell me yuh can’t afford smokin’ tobacco?” questioned the perplexed Slack.

“If I can’t,” said Judd, “it’s entirely my own business.”

“Pipe down! Pipe down!” cried Slack. “Yuh needn’t snap my head off for puttin’ a simple question to yuh. But I can’t see why yuh’re workin’ your guts out on a broken-down farm when it’s not gettin’ yuh anywhere. Ain’t there easier money than that?”

“Where?” demanded Judd.

“Oh, somewhere out in the wide, wide world,” Slack retorted with a shrug of diffidence.

That reference to the outer world brought a troubled look to Joyce’s face. But she remained silent until Slack had taken his departure. Then she turned to Judd.

“There’s something I should have told you,” she said with a note of restraint that brought his glance about to her face. His pulse even quickened a little.

“What is it?” he asked, remembering it was always the galled jade that winced.

“I had a letter from Dr. Crombie a couple of days ago,” was Joyce’s low-toned reply.

“Who’s Dr. Crombie?”

“He’s the head of the sanatorium at Byron,” she explained with carefully achieved casualness. “He’s just offered me a place on his staff.”

Judd’s lean brown face took on a look of desperation. But his voice remained a controlled one.

“What made him think you wanted a place there?” he asked.

Joyce, refusing to meet his gaze, looked out over the long blue line of the lake.

“I wrote to him a couple of weeks ago,” she quietly acknowledged. “He says I can come any time I’m free to.”

It was Judd’s silence that brought her gaze back to the brown face where she could see the jaw muscles twitching a little.

“Isn’t that a place for tubercular patients?” he finally inquired.

“It is,” said Joyce. “But there are plenty of things that are worse than tuberculosis.”

“You mean our arrangement here?”

It was Joyce’s turn to wince.

“I mean from a medical standpoint,” she amended.

A sense of estrangement tightened about Judd’s heart.

“And you’ve decided to go?” he asked, doing his best to keep his voice steady.

“That decision doesn’t rest with me,” was Joyce’s deliberated reply. It took an effort for her to meet his gaze. “When I make a promise, I try to keep it.”

“Do you want to go?” Judd persisted.

Joyce once more looked out over the lake.

“We can’t go on like this.”

Judd, after considering that, moved his head slowly up and down.

“You’re not getting much out of it,” he conceded.

“Neither of us is getting much out of it,” she corrected.

“I know it,” he gloomily agreed. “And it’s entirely my fault.”

His face, that looked so abruptly old, brought a look of pity to her eyes.

“I didn’t say that. But there isn’t much in life if you can’t get a little happiness out of it as you go along.”

Judd was willing to agree with her. But the thought of his own insufficiencies left him with the feeling of a castaway who had given up any hope of sighting a sail along the horizon.

“And you’re not happy, of course,” was his grim-noted admission.

“You’re not happy,” cried Joyce. “And I only seem to be making things worse for you.”

That, he knew, was tragically wide of the truth. It was he himself who had made everything wrong. And only time could put it right.

“I may have a problem or two you don’t know about,” he said out of the silence that had fallen between them.

Joyce’s smile was wan but valorous.

“Shouldn’t I be sharing that?” she questioned.

“You’ve had troubles enough,” he temporized.

“But I want to believe in you,” she went on. “I’ve got to believe in you, or there’s nothing left.”

That statement did not add to his happiness. He lifted his eyes and looked into her face. Then he reached across the table and captured her toil-hardened hand.

“Don’t leave me,” he said, quite simply.

That brought a responsive gasp to her throat. He could see the quickened rise and fall of her faded waist and the heat-lightning quiver of her unsmiling lip ends.

She came slowly about the table and stood beside him, with one hand resting on his tangled hair.

“I haven’t much left,” she said with a quaver in her voice, “if you fail me.”

Judd stood up beside her.

“I won’t fail you,” he proclaimed, with stiffened shoulders.

It was only as he took her in his arms and held her close to him that a stifled sob or two shook her body. Then, lifting her face, she looked up at him. She even broke into a tremulous small laugh as she smoothed back the hair from his troubled brow.

“We’re going to stick it, aren’t we?” she said in a voice in which valor and tenderness seem tangled up together.

Joyce could see that her work-harried farm mate was making an effort to be more openly considerate of her and her needs. She was not ungrateful for those small services, but she did her best to see they were not too numerous. She, like Judd, seemed waiting for the undefined to disclose itself.

When the bushes of her long-neglected rose arbor grew spindly in the summer heat, she decided to follow Mrs. Slocum’s advice and mulch them with a barrow-load of farmyard manure. It was not a savory task. But she remembered how Kipling had said manure was the mother of all good things.

When Judd rounded the stable end and saw her digging at the edge of the steaming manure pile he stopped short, with a chill mouse-footing up and down his spine.

“What are you doing there?” was his quick demand. For directly under the soil where she was plying her manure fork lay his buried windfall.

Joyce dumped a forkful of manure into the waiting wheelbarrow.

“I want some of this for my rosebushes,” she explained.

The tremors along Judd’s spinal column died away.

“That’s no work for a woman,” he protested, his voice still harsh with shock. “You’re not a Russian moujik yet.”

“Perhaps I ought to be,” Joyce ventured, bewildered by the abruptness with which he took the fork away from her.

“I’ll finish this for you,” he said with diminishing roughness, “and bring it down to your garden.”

“You’re needed for more important things,” she pointed out.

“I’ll attend to this,” was his curt response as he shifted the wheelbarrow a few steps away from the danger zone and covered the denuded soil with hurried forkfuls of mulch.

But that momentary threat to his safety left him shaken and silent. And even when back at work in his tobacco field a nebulous sense of shame remained with him. He could have wiped the whole thing off the slate, he told himself, if he’d only had the manhood to tell her what lay a few inches under her feet. But he still lacked the courage to confront her with that confession. He dreaded the thought of facing that level and lucid gaze of hers in the open sunlight. It would have to be done, of course, in the end. It would have to be cleaned up, just as neglected land had to be cleaned of its weed growth.

But not yet, he conceded as his busy hoe stirred the soil about him. And in cleaning and sweetening that land of his he tried to forget other noxious growths not so easily uprooted. He labored with a rapt sort of sullenness, drugging himself with the work he found there, toiling with a sullenly frantic energy that served, as a rule, to keep him from thinking.

From sunup to sunset, as the prolonging days dragged by, he hoed until his denim shirt was streaked with sweat stains. He topped and suckered his plants until his thickened fingers were black with leaf gum. He stooped and stripped away low-hanging sand leaves until his back ached. He was glad of the weariness it brought him as the sun swung low and he ate his supper in self-immured silence and finished up his farm chores and tumbled into a bed where weariness blackjacked him into unconsciousness until the first gray light showed along the eastern lake rim.

He was at work again in his waist-high tobacco when his pulse quickened at the sight of a figure pushing down through the plants. His heart beats went back to normal when he saw it was Sam Dooey, a neighboring farmer from whom he had borrowed a mower at haying time.

“For a greenhorn,” proclaimed Sam as he quartered down the crowded rows, “you sure believe in workin’ your land.”

“Don’t you?” demanded Judd, his hoe still busy.

“Bein’ an old-timer, I do,” conceded Sam, his enviously admiring eye traveling along the ripening crop. Then he stooped to inspect the arched and thick-ribbed leaves almost as long as a man’s arm. “ ’Pears to me, neighbor, you’ve got about the best t’bacco in the county.”

“I need it,” was Judd’s curt rejoinder.

“If you git it,” qualified Sam. “T’bacco’s always a gamble along this stretch o’ country. That’s why we git big money for it when we win out.”

“I’m ready to take a chance.”

“Chance is right, son. For no t’bacco grower can count on his crop until it’s cut and slatted and hung.”

“Well, you’ll see this crop slatted and hung,” proclaimed Judd as he turned back to his work.

For all existence, to him, now seemed to center and swing on that hill slope of wind-ruffled green leaves. Other things, viewed through his dull lethargy of weariness, became more and more phantasmal, more and more remote. This was his battlefield. This was something he had brought into existence through the sweat of his brow. And, in the end, it would be his vindication.

He was willing to leave to Joyce and Slack the management of the small fruits. He no longer gave much thought to what they talked about when they worked almost side by side in the berry patch. Nor did he continue to give thought to Joyce’s speculative silences as she went about her housework. His blood no longer curdled at the unexpected sight of Slack prowling about the farm buildings, just as he refused to acknowledge the old tension when he witnessed that narrow-shouldered intruder going through his measured gestures of earning his board and keep. There were other issues to remember. And time, after all, took the tension out of things.

Slack might still be accepted as an enemy. But Judd no longer racked his brain for some ponderable excuse to get rid of that enemy, just as he no longer waited, morosely expectant, for some act of violence that might bring things to a head.

Slack, however, seemed willing enough to wait, protesting with his one-sided smile that the open-air life sure was good for that bum lung of his. It was, in fact, a duel of waiting. When Joyce, not unmindful of a recent scene where money matters had been discussed, hesitatingly reminded Judd about the twice deferred payment of their grocery bill, Judd continued his noonday ablutions at the wash bench.

“That soap-slinger,” he finally said to the waiting Joyce, “will have to wait a few months for his money.”

“It makes it rather hard for me,” objected Joyce. “I ought to can more fruit. And I can’t do it without sugar.”

“Won’t he take more berries?”

“He says they’re a drug on the market now.”

“Has he refused you credit?”

“He says he wants his bill paid, and paid in cash. He was particularly unpleasant about it.”

Judd tried to hide a shame born of helplessness.

“Well, he can’t get money from me until I get it first. So I guess your village Shylock’ll have to wait.”

Slack, studying his face in the cracked porch mirror, looked about at that sharp-noted proclamation. The remote and rat-like eyes were narrowed in perplexity.

“I thought yuh had oodles o’ money,” he said as he combed his scant hair. His tone, for all its flippancy, had a background of bewilderment.

“Me?” barked Judd, turning to hang up his towel.

“Yeh. I kind o’ thought yuh’d hit it rich.”

Judd remembered the need of treading lightly where coiled reptiles were concerned.

“How’d I ever hit it rich?” he questioned with a note of scorn that was largely histrionic.

“Didn’t yuh come into some easy dough?” was the insolently casual inquiry. Yet it was pointed enough for its purpose.

“What gave you that idea?” demanded Judd. His laugh was harsh. “Are we living like people with half-a-million up their sleeve?”

“Ever hear o’ Hetty Green?” was Slack’s elliptical inquiry.

Judd glanced out toward the shadow-dappled lawn where Joyce was placing their frugal meal on the deal table under the towering maples. It made a peaceful and appealing picture, the stooping blue-clad figure half in sunlight and half in shadow, the white of the patched tablecloth bright against the dull green of the turf, and in the background the misty blue-green of the all but windless lake. But its peace, he remembered, was merely that of a sleeping volcano.

“What’s Hetty Green got to do with us?” he asked with well-paraded impatience.

“That dame had a hundred million,” answered Slack, “and went hungry.”

“So what?” snapped Judd.

“Nothin’, bright boy, nothin’. We all get a bughouse notion now and then.”

“And you regard me as a Rockefeller in disguise?” scoffed Judd.

“Not by the way you’re livin’,” retorted Slack with a short laugh of contempt.

Judd turned on his enemy with an answering show of contempt. Life was making him into a better actor than he once had been.

“Well, any money I get,” he said with a shake of passion in his voice, “I sweat out of this soil.” He threw out his wash water and unrolled his shirt sleeves. “And it hasn’t brought me any too much to worry about.”

Slack stood silent a moment. He seemed to be turning this over in his mind as estimatively as a squirrel turns over a nut.

“Yuh never know, mister, yuh never know,” he said with flippant unconcern as he unrolled his own shirt sleeves and buttoned them about his lank wrists. But his air, as he walked frowningly out to the waiting table, was one of suspended judgment faintly touched with bewilderment.

It was Joyce’s face that held Judd’s attention during their none too happy meal. He was responsible, he knew, for the shadow behind that facade of silence. And he was glad when Slack slipped away and left them alone.

“Sam Dooey was looking over my tobacco,” he announced as Joyce began clearing the table. “He says it will grade high.”

He could see a little of the shadow go from her eyes.

“Is it sold in the field?”

“Not by a long shot. It has to be cut and slatted and cured. And after that it has to be handed up for the buyers. That’s usually done some time after Christmas, when the January thaw leaves it in case, so it can be handled without breaking.”

Joyce’s face lost a little of its hopefulness.

“That’s a long time to wait.”

Judd’s laugh was forced but defiant.

“We’ll get along,” he asserted. For he had a pig to slaughter, he remembered, and potatoes and apples to pit, and garden truck to stow away in the cellar. And on Sundays they could still have roast chicken, even though their breakfasts were mostly of oatmeal and milk.

It was two days later that Joyce announced her need of going into Chamboro for half a day. Judd pondered over that unexpected excursion but could offer no objections to it.

“It would save time,” she explained, “if I could have the truck.”

“Could you drive the truck?” he questioned.

Joyce smiled at his forgetfulness.

“I’ve driven army ambulances,” she reminded him, “without lights and full of wounded men. I think I could manage the truck all right.”

“I’ll miss you,” he said, quite simply. He thought, from the expression on her face, that she was going to cross to his side. But she checked that impulse and went to her room, leaving him with a vague sense of desolation hanging about his heart.

He came in early from the field, to make ready the midday meal for Slack and himself. His hand, he found, had lost a little of its adeptness at such tasks. The potatoes were underdone and the boiled cabbage was tough. The tea was black and bitter. And even Slack’s sardonic face registered disapproval of the fare before him.

“It’s sure rougher goin’,” he announced as he inspected his scorched pork slice, “without a woman around.”

“Aren’t you satisfied with what you’re eating?” demanded Judd, wondering why he should resent such an announcement.

“I can take it if I have to,” said Slack. “But yuh’re a luckier bird than you imagine, mister.”

“In what?”

“In havin’ the side-kick yuh’ve got here.”

Judd made no reply to that. He was glad, in fact, when the meal was over and Slack had returned to his perfunctory hoeing in the upper garden rows.

The house seemed silent and empty as Judd put on his butcher’s apron of patched cotton and proceeded to wash the dishes. It took him longer than he expected, but he made it a point to see that everything was put to rights. He even went so far as to sweep out the kitchen, sending dust and scraps out through the door to the veranda end. He was applying his broom to the dooryard steps when a car cruised about the curving driveway and came to a stop.

Judd, with his broom held poised, inspected that car. The sight of a liveried chauffeur made him think, for a moment, that Mrs. Morner was again paying him a visit.

But it was not Mrs. Morner who descended from the car and stood studying him with a frown of incredulity on her face. It was the woman who had once been his wife.

Judd, as she stepped slowly toward him, put down his broom. He had an impulse to rid himself of the demeaning butcher’s apron. But he resisted that impulse.

“Judy,” murmured the still incredulous lady. And back in his other world, he remembered, that had once been her pet name for him. But it seemed a long time ago.

“Judy,” she repeated, this time with a note of reproval at the blankness of his face as she held out a gloved hand to him.

Judd, after a moment of hesitation, accepted the extended hand. If he was at all conscious of the insulating glove, he was even more conscious of an insulation which Time could weave about a woman he had once loved and lived with.

“You don’t seem very glad to see me,” complained his visitor.

He looked into her face as that rich and throaty voice brought another world back to him.

“Why should I be?” he found the courage to inquire.

He had expected that to wound her. But it was more wonder than reproof that showed in her eyes as they pioneered about his person.

“You’ve changed,” she announced with a note not at all to his liking. Her smile was even a pitying one.

“While you are as beautiful as ever,” he said as he studied the unaltering face under its make-up.

But, instead of listening to him, she was staring about the shabby house front and the unkempt garden space behind it.

“So this is your estate,” she observed with a perceptible note of irony. “It’s certainly not easy to find. We’ve been lost three times between here and Detroit.”

“We’re pretty deep in the jungle here,” Judd meekly acknowledged. His antiphonal note of irony brought her gaze back to him. Her face even hardened a little.

“Why did you ever bury yourself in such a hole?”

The abruptness of that question brought a flush to his face. What he did with his life was no longer any concern of hers.

“What hole?” he demanded.

Her hand wave included the shabby house and everything about it. Then her gloved finger pointed to the patched butcher’s apron.

“You weren’t made for this sort of thing.”

Judd’s jaw tightened a little.

“Oh, I get along,” he announced. Her very remoteness, he discovered, was leaving him with an unexpected sense of freedom. His glance went out to the burnished car and the liveried chauffeur. “And the same, I take it, can be said of you.”

It was the lady’s turn to color a little under her make-up.

“I wanted to tell you about that,” she said, after a moment of silence. “But you haven’t even asked me to sit down.”

“In such a hole?” was Judd’s embittered query. For he was, of course, merely a clodhopper in her eyes. Yet some consolatory inner voice kept telling him that the earth was indestructible, and the sense of being next to it and bound up with it and its quietly creative forces could bring its own secret rewards.

But he made no effort to put that feeling into words. He merely stepped meekly into the house and brought out a broken-back chair which he placed on the sloping veranda floor. It was there, he remembered as the lady seated herself, that Joyce Landis had slept relaxed in the spring sunlight, the day he had trudged down that same winding driveway to begin life over again.

“Now we can talk,” said his visitor, with a little sigh.

But Judd remained silent. His brooding eyes rested on the woman who had once been his wife. She too, he could see, had changed. But time had dealt lightly with her. She still carried a delusive air of youth and innocence. Yet he wondered if that invulnerability to time didn’t imply an inner hardness, a conserving marblelike coldness that had once been suspected and now stood confirmed. She was still beautiful, in her own statuesque way. But the years, he remembered, couldn’t mean much to a statue. And it startled him a little to find that what he had once hungered for so passionately could now be viewed so objectively.

“I’m glad you can take this visit so calmly,” the familiar rich and throaty voice was saying. “We may as well be modern.”

“About what?”

“About what happened when you came back from the Near East.”

Judd wondered why a discovery that had once seemed so tragic could now seem so remote.

“I should have warned you I was coming,” he said with an autumnal sort of unconcern.

His visitor looked out over the lake. Her sigh was an audible one. It seemed like an acknowledgment of the difficulty in trying to remedy the irremediable.

“You didn’t show much pity,” she complained, “when you walked out on me like that.”

“It seemed the only thing to do,” observed the man who had been her husband. “You hadn’t shown much decency.”

She stiffened at that, but remained composed.

“You stayed away too long.”

A wry smile twisted Judd’s lips.

“A lady named Penelope didn’t fall back on that excuse,” he quietly observed.

An inner flow of color deepened the tinge of color on his visitor’s cheek.

“Literary allusions,” she announced, “aren’t going to solve a problem like ours.”

“But isn’t it already solved?” Judd challenged.

“Not quite,” was the lady’s firm-noted reply. “And recriminations won’t help any.”

“No, they won’t help any,” Judd dully acquiesced. But the disinterring of the dead, he remembered, could never be an occasion for mirth. That, plainly, was why a dull ache hovered about just under his breastbone.

“What we’ve done, we’ve done,” observed his visitor, “and saying bitter things about it isn’t going to do much good now.”

He once more agreed with her that it wouldn’t do much good. But the passivity with which he spoke brought a slight frown to her face.

“I suppose you feel I shouldn’t have come here?” she ventured.

“Why not?” he said, without emotion.

Her glance went out to the opulent-looking motor car and the uniformed chauffeur who sat deep in the perusal of a tabloid. Then her eyes rested on the shabby figure in its incongruous patched apron.

“We seem to have gone different ways,” he said, conscious of the commiseration in her glance.

She withdrew her gaze and let it wander about Joyce’s none too orderly garden.

“I remember how you used to talk about thirty acres and freedom. But we don’t always get freedom, do we?”

“It depends on the kind you’re after,” said Judd.

Some muffled thrust in that held her silent a moment.

“Are you happy here?” she finally questioned.

“Oh, we get along,” he wearily repeated.

“Who are we?” she asked with a glance in through the open door.

He had learned the danger of vacillation.

“It means me,” he said, “and the woman I’m living with.”

She considered those words, for a moment or two, her face hardening a little as the announcement took on the coloring of an ultimatum.

“That,” she affirmed, “seems to simplify my problem.”

“What problem?”

Her laugh was a trifle forced.

“Laurence Trainor wants to make an honest woman of me.”

The line of Judd’s lips abruptly hardened. For it was Laurence Trainor, he remembered, who had cut their marriage in two as definitely as a knife cuts a dinner roll in two.

“Won’t that take a bit of doing?” he was cruel enough to inquire.

But she disregarded the thrust.

“That means, of course, I’ve had to go to Nevada. Not to Reno, but to Silver City, where Laurence has business interests.”

His thoughts, at the moment, were on the service in the North Side rectory, the service remembered through the mists of time, where the solemn voice of the church had intoned: “Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” That promise, at the time, had seemed irrevocable. But life can play ducks and drakes with the most pontifical of words.

“Are you listening?” asked the lady in the broken-backed chair, perplexed by both his silence and his unfocused gaze.

“Of course,” said Judd. “You are going back to Nevada to get a divorce. And when you get that divorce you’re going to marry Laurence Trainor. Isn’t that the program?”

“I wanted to make sure, of course, that you wouldn’t make it difficult.”

“Me?” said Judd. “How could I make it difficult?”

She rewarded him with a wintry smile.

“Then you’d be generous enough not to contest the suit?”

“Why should I?” asked Judd with a brusqueness that brought a tinge of disappointment to his visitor’s face.

“We should both have our freedom,” the rich and throaty voice was asserting.

“Freedom from what?” questioned Judd. For he was, he told himself, already free. There was no longer anything to bridge the gulf that yawned between them.

His visitor preferred to let that question remain unanswered. Her voice, when she spoke, carried a note of the valedictory.

“I felt sure you’d be broadminded about it,” she said as she got up from her chair. And still again disappointment showed on her face at the remoteness of the gaze with which he was contemplating her. She was, he told himself, in a world of her own, just as he was in a world of his own. And forever they would go on, down the gray spaces of time, as remote from each other as two lost asteroids. Yet even as he thought that, he remembered how the touch of her lips had once meant rapture to him. It struck him as strange that he should remember, too, the strawberry birthmark just at the end of her second floating rib.

“This isn’t making you very happy,” she said as she turned away and once more looked out over the long blue line of the lake.

“I guess I don’t deserve to be,” he quietly acknowledged. He took off his foolish-looking apron and folded it together and dropped it on the broken-backed chair.

“And you’re not very successful here,” she suggested after a second glance about the dooryard.

“I’m still a bit of a tenderfoot at farm work,” he said. “But I’m learning.”

Her slightly condoning smile held a touch of doubt.

“Perhaps, later on, I could help you out a little,” she ventured after a moment of hesitation.

“How?” he demanded.

“There must be things you need,” she said, perplexed by his dark flush of resentment at that Lady Bountiful gesture.

“Not from you,” he said with a quiet finality that brought a harder line to her lips.

“I suppose that falls to my successor,” she asserted with her first note of bitterness.

“Let’s not go into that,” he said with wearied remoteness.

She studied his face, for a silent moment, and then held out her hand.

“We needn’t part enemies,” she said as the toil-hardened hand finally closed diffidently about the smaller hand in its glove. It startled him a little to see tears in her eyes.

“Good luck,” he called after her as she went slowly to her waiting car. He tried to say it blithely, but there was a catch in his throat.

She stopped and looked back at him.

“Good luck,” she responded with a smile that he knew to be forced. “And thanks for everything.”

He watched the car as it got under way and rounded the drive. He stood looking after it until it disappeared from sight. Then he returned to the house. He wondered why it seemed so abysmally empty. He went from room to room, as abstracted as a sleep-walker, as depressed by a feeling of broken ties as though a burial service had taken place there and a coffin had been carried out the sagging door.

He was glad to escape those silent rooms and go back to his work in the field. When a plane flew overhead, glinting silver in the sunlight, he stopped and wiped the dust from his wet neck. He watched the plane until it disappeared, vaguely saddened by the thought that a richer and fuller life was going on, far away from him. It left him with the feeling of being cheated out of something that should have been his. Then he looked along the leafy rows, the deep green rows drinking in the afternoon sunlight, and his heart lightened a little. His farm would not betray him. From that soil of his he would yet wring some final consolation.

It was mid-afternoon when Judd saw the truck turn in between the stone pillars and go rumbling down the orchard lane. The knowledge that Joyce was back gave him an unlooked-for lift of the heart, for the thought had occurred to him, while working there gloomily conscious of a new loneliness, that Joyce might never return to him. She might have balanced her woman’s ledger of gladness and pain, and, finding the debit figures more persuasive than the credit columns, turned her back on a partnership in which she could see no promise of final success.

But that dark thought, he knew, was unjust to her. And for half an hour he resisted the impulse to go down to the house, sharp as was his hunger to be near her, to hear her voice. He worked his way to the end of the long row. Then he dropped his hoe and strode down through the orchard, where the falling apples reminded him that summer would soon be over.

He found the house empty and silent. Equally empty were the garden paths and the lawn spaces parched into summer-end pallidness. It was not until he rounded the house and came to the primitive bathing cabana he had fashioned from the canvas carrier of an old binder that he caught sight of her. Hearing the splash of water, he threw back the flap and found her standing almost knee deep in the familiar wooden tub that had been commandeered for bathing purposes.

He startled her, but she did not scream. Her hand went out for the towel that hung over the carrier edge and she stepped from the tub to the pine board that lay across the cabana door. Her hair, which had grown longer during the summer, was twisted into a knot on the top of her head. The pebbling of water drops on her skin made it look marmoreal. The brown line of tan above her shoulder blades accentuated the whiteness of the tapering torso that swelled again into the lithe strength of the hips. Yet her slightly crouching posture, her instinctive recoil from his assessing eye, gave more an impression of weakness than of strength. It struck him, of a sudden, that there was something mysterious and magical in the architecture of a woman’s body. It was beautiful in its flow of line, in its balance between strength and fragileness, in the cunning with which the compact machinery of life was overlaid with smoothness and softness. It was made to allure and be loved. It was like soil, dormant yet expectant, waiting the plowshare.

Joyce turned away and began toweling her wet body.

“You frightened me,” she said over her shoulder. The modeling of that shoulder and the uplifted arm and the curving hollow between the shoulder blades made him think of a Dresden figurine seen somewhere in his misty youth.

“Let me do that,” he said, taking the towel away from her.

Her glance went up to his face for a moment. Then, without speaking, she submitted to his gently meditative towel strokes.

“You have an adorable back,” he said as he bent down and kissed the hollow between the curving shoulder blades.

That touch must have sent a feral flash through her body, for, still without speaking, she turned and locked her arms around his neck. There was a new hardness in her face as she clung to him.

“Kiss me,” she whispered. And an answering feral flash went through him as he felt the need of some wider sweep of emotion to wipe clean the slate of his troubled life.

Yet there was no roughness in his movements as he took her up in his arms and carried her in to the shadowy silence of the house. He knew an urge to batter down all reservations between them. It might not be all the reservations of the spirit, but it must and should be those of the body. It was, apparently, something beyond his own will. His only sense of shame came from the explosiveness of that fleshly urge. He even made an effort to extenuate it by the claim that living next to Nature, where the biologic processes were simple and open, had left his own perspective less tangled and his own impulses more primitive. It was his manhood calling for fulfillment. And it justified itself by its own force, just as a summer thunderstorm justified itself. You couldn’t argue against it any more than you could argue against a roll of thunder.

“What are you thinking about?” asked the woman who lay so relaxed beside him.

“How much I love you,” he answered as he cupped his hand over the mounded breast where he could feel the steady heartbeat under the circling ribs.

“Then why aren’t you happier?” she asked after a glance at his troubled face.

It was a problem, he felt, as old as Time.

“Because, in one way, this is all wrong,” he said with a post-orgastic qualm of conscience.

“Not if you love me,” she contended, moving closer to him.

“I do,” he said, quite calmly, “but how is it going to end?”

She lay silent, considering that question.

“Why should it end?” she asked. “You want me. And I want to be wanted. Why can’t it just go on that way?”

It could, he knew, if they were the animals of the field. But they were human beings, with man’s dolorous tendency to look before and after.

“Isn’t it about time,” he asked, “we began thinking about putting our house in order?”

“Our house in order?” she echoed, unable to follow his line of thought.

“You once said it wouldn’t be fair to me, our living together this way. Now I’m beginning to see it isn’t quite fair to you.”

“And you want to end it?” she asked, her hand movement in his hair suddenly arrested.

He was tempted to say, “I want to make an honest woman of you.” But he remembered the source of those words and shut his teeth on them.

“I want you to be my wife,” he said instead.

“I am,” she affirmed with a simplicity that impressed him as childlike.

“I mean my legal wife,” he said with an accruing feeling of constraint. “It doesn’t mean much, those few mumbled words. But, as you once reminded me, we do have the future to think of.”

The solemnity of his face seemed to puzzle her.

“But you have a wife,” she quietly reminded him.

“Not for long,” he announced.

“What does that mean?” she asked as she moved away from under the weight of his arm.

He told her, briefly, of what had happened that day during her absence in Chamboro. It surprised him that her eyes should soften with pity as she listened to him.

“Poor Peter,” she said out of the silence that had fallen between them.

“You don’t seem very happy over my promise of freedom,” he said as he watched her reach for her slip and girdle.

“Does it make so much difference?” she asked as she sheathed her whiteness almost as promptly as a sword blade is covered by its scabbard.

“Because I have so little to offer?” he said, foolishly wounded by a movement that seemed one of withdrawal.

That brought her back to his side.

“Oh, my dear, my dear, you don’t understand women. It’s not what a man has to offer. It’s what he’s willing to let them give.”

“But you’ve given too much,” he objected. He noticed how numerous were the darns in the stockings she was pulling up about her rounded knees.

“Supposing I like it,” she said as she fathomed the source of his frown. “Supposing I’m happy in giving you everything.”

She got up from the side of the bed where she sat and crossed to her hangbag on the dresser.

“I want you to have this,” she said.

He saw that she was holding out to him a small bundle of bank notes held together by two rubber bands.

“What’s this?” was his sharp demand. And his recoil from those banded bills was so prompt that it puzzled her.

“It’s exactly two hundred dollars,” was her still smiling response, “two hundred dollars that you’ll need.”

“Where did this come from?” asked Judd, a quaver in his voice.

“I sold a ring I had,” Joyce answered. “It was my mother’s and had quite a decent diamond in it. I’ve always kept it as a sort of nest-egg.”

“What made you do that?” demanded Judd with a foolish quiver of the lips.

“Darling, you’ve been so in need of money,” she reminded him.

“It’s not quite that bad,” Judd retorted, a faint flush spreading over his face. He was remembering that it was the second time in one day that a woman had offered to help him. And his spirit revolted against what seemed like a repeated affront to his manhood.

“But you’ll take it?” Joyce was asking, still puzzled by the desperation she could see on his face.

“No, I won’t take it,” he cried out with a harshness that left her more than ever bewildered. Her hand dropped to her side.

“Then I’ll have to use it,” she quietly affirmed, “to get things for the house.”

“You’ll not,” was Judd’s embittered cry as he towered over her. “Not while I live in it.”

She stood with compressed lips, for a moment or two, staring up at him.

“What makes you like this?” she questioned.

“Because I’m not as poverty-stricken as you imagine,” was his harsh response as he watched her restore the banded bills to her handbag. He was prompted to tell her that he had a roll of his own, a roll fifty times bigger than her little cluster of bank notes. He had that to fall back on, if the worst came to the worst.

But the judicial light in the lucid eyes studying his face held him back. This was not the time, he remembered, to tell about his windfall.

“I’m afraid you haven’t much faith in me,” Joyce said, her gaze following him as he crossed to the door.

His impulse was to cry out that he hadn’t much faith in himself. But no further words escaped him as he went to the pump and filled his water jug and trudged morosely back to his work in the tobacco field.

When Slack, after disappearing for a day and a night, returned to Pine Brae with a hangover and a half-bottle of Bourbon, Judd declined to make any comment on that hegira. Yet he pondered long as to its meaning.

Slack slept for half a day in his shed bunk, from which he emerged pinched of face and curt of speech.

“Did you sleep off your headache?” Joyce demanded, making no effort to keep the scorn from her voice.

“What’s it to yuh, lady?” was Slack’s indifferent query.

Joyce’s glance went to Judd, who surprised her by his silence.

“It’s merely that there’s more work on this farm than two people can manage. And I never did approve of drunkenness.”

Slack laughed his careless laugh.

“I can’t stay buried in the burdocks like yuh two birds. I got ’o come up to breathe now and then.”

Joyce’s narrowed gaze rested on the pinched and bony face.

“Why did you ever come here?” she questioned.

Slack turned about on her, almost sharply. Then he shrugged a thin shoulder.

“Why did yuh?”

“Cut that,” cried Judd. But his anger seemed lost on Slack, who merely laughed again and blinked down at his empty cup.

“The tea leaves tell me certain folks’re gettin’ kind o’ fed up with their hired help.” He leaned back in his chair and drew a deeper breath. “Well, it won’t be long now.”

“What does that mean?” exacted Joyce.

“It means, lady, that I’ll be hittin’ the road in a week or two.”

Judd could feel a small trickle of relief flow through his body. But he was willing to let Joyce do the talking.

“And where are you going to head for?” she asked.

Slack’s face became shuttered.

“Oh, I guess I’ll be hikin’ back to God’s country.”

Joyce considered this for a moment.

“When you left God’s country,” she inquired, “how did you get across the border?”

Still again Slack laughed his curt laugh.

“There are ways, lady; there are ways.”

“Have you a registration card?” Joyce pursued.

“Who, me?” queried Slack. His covert glance at his questioner seemed to imply that he was finding her more astute than he had expected. He made a half-jocular examination of his pockets. “Gee, I must’ve lost that card.”

Joyce nodded a confirmation of her suspicions.

“I thought as much,” she acknowledged. “Supposing somebody should report you.”

“Just let ’em try it,” was his bristling retort.

Joyce could afford to smile at his bluster.

“But how will you get across the Line?” she questioned.

Slack blinked at her for a moment.

“There’s a guy’ll row me over the St. Clair to Algonac for twenty bucks,” he casually announced.

“When are you going?” Joyce as casually inquired.

“That all depends.” Then he looked at her, with one eyebrow upraised. “I don’t see any weepin’ round here at the thought o’ my leavin’ yuh.”

His gaze slewed about to Judd. But Judd, at the moment, was looking out at the lake.

“And you got what you came after?” was Joyce’s next question. It was a question that brought the covinous small eyes slowly back to Joyce’s face.

“And just what did I come after?” he quietly inquired. But Judd was conscious of a new tenseness in the spare body leaning forward in its chair.

“Why, to get your health back,” explained Joyce. “You said you had a spot on your lungs and needed a summer of open air.”

The tense body relaxed a little.

“Sure, I’m Okay again,” said Slack with a hand slap against his breastbone. “But now the katydids’re startin’ to croon I’m gettin’ restless.”

Joyce’s meditative gaze studied him for a moment of silence.

“You’ve never told us much about yourself,” she ventured. “Is it because you did something that—that didn’t turn out right?”

“Yuh can put it that way,” said Slack, “if yuh want to.”

“And am I right in my feeling that you’ve really been hiding away from somebody here?”

The question was a bold one. It was so bold that it served to drive the half-insolent smile from Slack’s face.

“Yuh’ve got me wrong there, lady,” he said after his own moment of silence. His gaze flickered over to the impassive Judd. “It’s more that I thought someone was hidin’ out on me.”

That claim, however, made nothing clearer to Joyce.

“Then why,” she questioned, “did you feel you had to sleep with a revolver under your pillow? Even after I threw that automatic of yours away?”

“Did I?” parried Slack. But his eyes had hardened.

Joyce reached down and placed a Smith and Wesson six-shooter on the table.

“I found this in your bunk,” she proclaimed, “when I took clean sheets up to the cowshed.”

Slack blinked down at the firearm. Then he began to laugh, his eyes once more on Judd’s impassive face.

“And me thinkin’ the big shot here had swiped that gun on me!” he exclaimed. “I sure done yuh wrong, mister.”

That, for some reason, brought Judd back to life.

“I’ve got other things to think about than you and your slum-life artillery,” he said with an unexpected shake in his voice. But even as he spoke Slack’s hand went out, with catlike quickness, and took possession of the firearm.

Joyce, with equal quickness, clutched at the youth’s thin forearm. But Judd quietly disengaged her fingers.

“Let him have it,” he commanded.

“But you hate such things,” said Joyce, “as much as I do.”

“What I hate,” said Judd, “is having a place where I looked for a little peace turned into the back room of a honky-tonk.” He swung about on Slack. “When are you leaving?”

Slack sank back into his chair and considered that question.

“It all depends, mister; it all depends.”

“On what?” demanded Joyce.

Slack’s smile was one-sided.

“Why should I burden yuh with my troubles?” he wearily inquired. “Yuh two’ve had quite a dose o’ me. But when the green light says go, I go.”

Joyce’s questioning gaze went to Judd’s face, as though puzzled that a man of strength should remain patient before a parade of insolence, and something more than insolence.

But Judd’s face remained a mask. All she could detect there was a dull impatience as he rose to his feet.

“There’s been about enough of this,” he said. “I’ve got work waiting for me up in the field. And I expect a little honest work from you, Slack, if you’re still sleeping on this farm.”

“Okay, Simon Legree,” was Slack’s listless retort. “I’m still ready to scratch for my three-square a day.” He reached for a cigarette, lighted it with deliberation and blinked meditatively about the garden and the sagging house front. Then, with a half-defiant shoulder movement he added: “But I ain’t gone yet.”

If Judd’s preoccupation with his tobacco crop was like a kennel into which he could crawl, like an ill-used collie, it was never a complete escape from a shadowy anxiety that darkened his working hours. Time, he knew, was slipping away. And every day that passed left him with a stronger claim on his buried windfall. Time, in that respect, was playing into his hand.

But time, in another respect, was against him. For as the days shortened Judd was more and more worried about his tobacco. His one fear, now, was an early frost. And more and more often as the nights grew cooler and the katydids became more strident he found himself getting up from his broken sleep and consulting Joyce’s churning thermometer hung out on the side porch. He could always breathe easier when he saw the threadlike streak of silver still up in the forties.

Even before talking it over with Spike Slocum he knew that he needed every day he could exact from the closing season. His crop stood clean and even-rowed, well suckered and topped and stripped of its sand leaves. But that sloping field so thickly forested with cascading green, now as high as his waist, seemed dolorously slow in ripening. Yet he wanted it right, right in color and weight, after all his work. For more than his future seemed to hang on that crop. It held, as well, his shaken claim to manhood.

It was his vindication and his answer to those who might no longer believe in him. It was something born of his own thought and toil. It was the soil’s response to his faith in it. And through it he could go on. Through it he could show Joyce he wasn’t altogether a misfit and a mirage-chaser. He’d even be able, eventually, to make things at Pine Brae a little easier, a little less peasantlike. And some day, perhaps, a little of the glamour that belonged to life might creep back into their too arid hours.

That thought seemed to strengthen him as he worked. Yet he noticed, while toiling between the long rows where the reluctantly yellowing leaves almost overlapped one another, that there was a nippier tang in the air, a faint feeling of completion. The summer-end haze had gone from the lake front and the familiar slow-cadenced pulse of the surf no longer sounded in his ears. The wind, he saw for the first time, had shifted overnight to the northwest, bringing a clearer breath of air along the Ridge.

In that air he detected the aroma of autumn. It seemed confirmed when he caught sight of Joyce carrying a hamper of apples down the orchard lane. He could see her stop and watch an irregular stream of robins flying along the shore line, like a broken army heading south. And that meant summer was over.

“Why ain’t you cuttin’, son?”

The voice was that of Sam Dooey, from beyond the Highway fence.

“I’ll cut,” answered Judd, “when the leaf’s ripe.”

Sam climbed the fence and came nearer, fingering the leaves as he came.

“She is ripe,” he averred, “as ripe as she’ll ever be. The question is, son, do you want to save your crop?”

“I not only want to,” admitted Judd, “but I’ve got to.”

Sam looked at the bronzed face where the cheekbones stood out with Indianlike sharpness.

“Then take the word of an old-timer,” he advised. “If that crop ain’t cut and covered before nightfall, she’s as good as lost.”

“Lost?” echoed Judd, his muscles going limp.

He stood staring down the wide slope of yellow green that looked like a forest, a forest able to hide an army. And forests like that weren’t felled in a day.

“I know this section, neighbor. It’s sure goin’ to freeze before mornin’. And you can figger about what you’ll git for frost-nipped leaf.”

Judd stood chilled by something more than the wind that blew thinly out of the north. He stared about at his windrowed sea of yellow green that stood so defenseless under a high-arching sky where the crows were flying noisily along the Ridge.

“But I’ve got to save this crop,” he repeated.

“Then you’ll have to hump, son,” announced his neighbor. “We’ll be cuttin’ and truckin’ in until midnight ourselves.”

Judd, still studying his plant rows, had the feeling they were an army threatened by a thousand invisible bombing planes. And it was his duty to save that army.

He went running down toward the house, shouting for Slack as he went. At the end of the orchard lane he came face to face with Joyce. She had a hoe in her hand.

“I’m coming to help,” she announced.

“It’s too late for that,” he told her with a gesture toward the hoe. “Old Dooey’s just said our crop will freeze if it isn’t cut before nightfall.”

Joyce’s frown deepened as she lifted her face to the cooling wind out of the north. In it, apparently, she sensed a promise of frost. Judd could see her face work, like a hurt child’s, as her gaze went to the yellow-green slope of the upper field. Then she drew a deeper breath.

“Couldn’t we do it?” she questioned. “Couldn’t we, together?”

He found something kindling in the quiet valor of her eyes.

“We’ve got to,” he said, wondering why she should seem closer to him than she had for many a long day. He caught strength from her smile of understanding.

“We’ll do it or bust,” he grimly proclaimed. “Listen. You get water and food to keep us going. I’ll get the two tobacco hatchets and a whetstone from the tool shed.” He stopped, conscious of the slightness of the figure confronting him in the slanting sunlight. “It won’t be easy, remember.”

“I’m tougher than you’d think,” she quietly reminded him.

“Where’s Slack?” Judd demanded as he emerged from the tool shed.

“He’s gathering up windfalls for the cider mill.”

“Tell him to get up into that tobacco field,” Judd called back over his shoulder. “If he can’t cut plants, he can at least pile ’em.”

“I’m afraid we can’t count much on Slack,” demurred Joyce. “He’s not much interested in farm work, these last few days.”

“He’ll get interested today,” Judd announced with an unlooked-for burst of blasphemy. “He’ll work, or I’ll knock his brains out with a hatchet.”

“We’ll all work,” said Joyce.

Back in the field, and still slightly out of breath, he showed her how to hold and bend the plant stalk to one side before striking at its base. He showed her, twice over, just how to make a clean cut that would let the tower of leaves fall quietly over in the row. Then he showed the languidly moving Slack how to drag the fallen plants into piles, how to lift and place them without undue injury to the leaves.

When Slack, listening with an averted eye, casually reached for a cigarette, Judd knocked it from the smaller man’s startled fingers.

“You’re here to work, not smoke,” cried the tense-nerved tobacco farmer. “So get busy, or I’ll bust you open.”

Slack, turning on the other man, regarded him with a coldly measuring eye.

“Yuh’ll what?” he challenged.

Judd stepped closer to him. Fear no longer had any place in his scheme of things.

“I’ll bust you open,” repeated Judd as their glances locked.

Slack was the first to turn away. His shrug was a condoning one as he walked slowly over to the end of the row where Joyce was already sinking her hatchet head into the woody plant stalks. There, with a frown of wonder on his face, he proceeded to drag the fallen plants into piles.

But Judd, by this time, was thinking only of his tobacco. Never before had that sloping field seemed so big to him. And never before did the sun seem to sink so hurriedly toward the skyline. He worked with a sort of Berserker madness, sinking his polished blade into stalk after stalk, swinging and striking and felling the yellow-green army that lay wilting in his wake.

And Joyce followed him, as best she could. She knew the meaning of that cool high breeze out of the northwest that brought the sound of the bush crows so disturbingly near and made the echoing bark of a farm collie, a mile away, bell-like in its clearness. That meant frost along the Ridge. And frost meant the end of Peter Judd’s crop, the end of their hopes.

She worked until her knees quivered and a singing came in her ears. She couldn’t hope to keep up with the gaunt figure in blue jeans, the figure whose movements, as he left row after row wilting in the sun, seemed to take on a touch of ferocity. But she did the best she could. She rested, when she had to, and drank deep from the water jug and went back to her work again. She saw the sun swing lower in the heavens, and the wind die down. And with the breeze almost gone and the afternoon sun warm on her back she wondered if they weren’t wrong in all their talk about frost that night.

But she kept at her work, row by heartbreaking row. Leaf gum blackened her fingers and water blisters formed on her hands. They formed and thickened and broke. But she forgot about them. She kept on, knowing that Judd was keeping on. She felt the afternoon grow old and the ache in her forearm grow sharper. But still she kept on.

Judd ate a little as he worked, for there could be no stopping for meals. Nor did he stop when he saw Slack pause in the midst of his exasperatingly languid movements and walk slowly up to the stone-pillared gateway, where a stranger stepped in from the highway and awaited his approach.

Judd could see them talking together. But what passed between them was of small concern to him. They were shadows, in a world of their own. They seemed, as they stood there above the half-denuded field, oddly remote and mistlike. And there was still much work to be done.

Yet Slack, apparently, had no further intention of participating in that work. He stood, strangely limp-bodied, looking after the stranger who stepped out through the pillared gate and climbed into a car that awaited him there. Then, with great deliberation, Slack took out a cigarette and lighted it. He stood motionless for a moment, like a man deep in thought. Then he turned and made his frowning way down the field slope, heading for the orchard lane.

“Where are you going?” demanded Judd as the other passed within ten paces of him.

Slack neither stopped nor turned.

“I’m goin’ to quit,” he announced over his shoulder.

“But there’s still work here.”

Slack’s laugh was barbed with contempt.

“So I see, hatchet-man. But I’ve got troubles of my own. And I’m through with this plant wrastlin’ for today. If yuh corn-rustlers want ’o work your guts out, go to it. As for me I’m goin’ to eat and rest up for what’s ahead o’ me.”

Judd had not time to argue it out. He had other things to think about. It was only for a brief moment that his eyes followed the receding figure. He even nursed a vague feeling of relief as he turned back to his plants and fell to cutting them down, stalk by stalk.

He kept on at his work, ignoring the accruing aches in his back and arms and finger joints. He kept on until the late afternoon faded into evening. There was no stopping for supper. There was no stopping even when the sun went down over the Ridge and the wind dropped with it and a quietness fell over the fields saddened with their first breath of autumn.

It was when the last row had fallen that Joyce sank on the ground beside Judd, who stood draining the last drop from their water jug.

“Don’t people use a smoke smudge for this?” she asked.

“For what?” he asked.

“For keeping frost away. There’s no wind now.”

Judd shook his head.

“We haven’t time for that. And we’ve still got this job to finish.”

For a glance about the field showed him how negligible Slack’s work had been. There was still a disheartening army of fallen plants to be dragged into piles. As this was being done, row by weary row, the long twilight deepened into night and the stars came out.

Joyce groped her way to her fellow toiler.

“Hadn’t I better get the stable lantern?” she asked. “And when I’m doing it I’m going to make a pot of coffee.”

“Yes, and make it black,” said Judd.

By the light of the lantern he loaded his single-horse hay-rack with what was left of his oat straw. Then he went creaking and tugging along the hill slope, covering each leafy pile beside which Joyce held her guiding lantern. And when the wagon was emptied he went back for what was left of his hay, goading himself on with draughts of black coffee. But when he stopped to lean on his fork, he noticed that the stars of the Great Bear seemed to waver in the sky and the ground under his feet seemed to rock and heave like a sea.

“You’ve done enough,” Joyce cried out to him. For she had seen how his knees quivered uncontrollably during that last desperate half-hour of work.

Judd poured a mugful from the coffeepot. It was cool by this time, but still strong.

“We’ll finish it,” he said as he wiped his mouth.

Joyce reached for her lantern. Her body was a cradle of whimpering aches and she felt oddly lightheaded. But she stayed with him, holding the lantern up with a none too steady hand, until the last pile was covered, covered as patients might have been covered in a ward, or as one’s own children should be covered, of a cool night, in a nursery.

She noticed, a little later, that Judd staggered a trifle as he stabled and fed his tired farm horse and milked his complaining cow. She wanted to make him more coffee, when they were back in the kitchen, but he merely drank a glass of the warm milk and sat staring at the wall.

“I’m all right,” he said with the listlessness of utter exhaustion. When Joyce crossed to his side and knelt beside him he got slowly up on his feet. He seemed unaware of the crouching figure that looked so wistfully after him as he groped his way to his room, to his bed and oblivion.

It was some time later in that midnight of oblivion that he was wakened by Joyce, stooping mistily white beside him.

“I—I can’t sleep out there,” she told him in a voice thin with misery.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, only half awake.

“I think it must be the coffee,” she said with the ghost of a laugh. “And old Dooey was right. I just went out to the wash bench. There are needles of ice in the basin.”

“Ice?” Judd echoed. “What about it?”

“Does that mean we lose our crop?”

He sat up, lean and rumple-haired, blinking at the lamp she put down on the highboy beside the bed. He noticed where the line of tan ended on her shoulder, the curving cornice of brown above the curving hollow of milky whiteness.

“Lose our crop?” he repeated. “Not by a long shot. It’s cut and covered.”

“Then it’s all right?” she questioned, shaking in the cold.

“Of course it’s all right,” he told her.

There was no triumph on her face that showed sharp with fatigue in the side light.

“Then we’ve won that battle,” she listlessly observed.

“Yes, it’s won, in a way. But later on, of course, every stalk of that crop will have to be slatted and hung.”

“And it’s the crop that always comes first,” she said with a catch in her voice.

It was not like her, he remembered, to complain. But in every woman were moods and impulses unknown to men.

“You’re tired out,” he conceded. For blunted as his own senses were with the toxins of fatigue, he was not unconscious of the shiver that went through her body. As always, in its thinly draped covering, it impressed him as oddly frail and defenseless. Yet it was the shell, he remembered, of a stern and uncapitulating spirit.

“I don’t understand about Slack,” Joyce hesitatingly observed.

“Slack doesn’t count any more,” announced Judd.

“Then why have you put up with him so long?”

Judd knew an impulse to wipe the slate clean, to tell her everything. But it was the wrong moment for any such confession. At an hour like that things were apt to take on false tones. Even one’s thoughts, in the middle of the night, could get strangely twisted.

“Isn’t there something you want to tell me?” Joyce persisted.

“About what?”

“About why you have endured that rat-faced stranger.”

Judd’s movement was one of impatience.

“This isn’t the time for arguments. You’re as tired as I am. What you need is sleep.”

“Yes, sleep,” acceded Joyce as still another shiver went through her body.

The forlornness of the figure beside the highboy touched Judd a little.

“Hadn’t you better come in here and get warm?” he suggested with a faltering effort at casualness.

Joyce studied him for a moment of silence. Then, as she turned to take up the lamp, she moved her head slowly from side to side.

“You’ll sleep better alone,” she said with answering casualness.

The room, when she had left it, seemed abruptly and dismally empty. Judd turned his pillow and looked out at the stars. He felt, as he lay in a perverse wakefulness stronger than the passing fatigue of the flesh, that he might be saving his crop but that he was losing something more important than a few wagonloads of tobacco leaves.

Judd was unable to sleep. Grimly as he fought for forgetfulness, after Joyce had left him, he could not overcome a pulsing sense of wakefulness that kept the wheels of his brain purring like an overdriven engine. He lay, febrilely awake, with a violet-colored mist floating before his closed eyes. He twisted and turned on his creaking bed, wondering why rest should be denied him when rest was the one thing he asked for. It was, he felt, like his demand for peace. And when you are too feverish in your demand for a thing you are apt to lose it.

He might have slept, he kept telling himself, if Joyce was there at his side. The neighboring warmth of her body and the mere knowledge of her nearness had always eased away the strain of fatigue and brought a consoling sense of comradeship that had no touch of the carnal. She seemed able to polarize him into passivity. Yet it was, he knew, more than mental. For when bodies lay side by side in that frank surrender to intimacy they got bound together in some way, bound together as though a thousand filaments quietly threaded them into one pulsing unit. And there was pain in the thought that those invisible tendrils could be ruptured.

“It’s that damned coffee,” Judd muttered as he turned his pillow.

But it was, he knew, more than coffee. It was mixed up with a leaden sense of solitariness and the thought of his own inner weakness even in his moment of outer triumph. He had saved his crop. But he had failed to save something more important.

For Joyce, after all, had made herself the one thing that was really important in his life. Without her there could be no peace and no completion. Yet an invisible barrier had grown up between them, a barrier that grew out of a bloodstained roll of bills, ridiculously buried like pirate’s loot in the tainted soil of his stableyard. That bloodstained little sheaf of bank notes, once accepted as a windfall, had soured his summer and eaten away his peace of mind and mysteriously estranged him from the one human being he hungered to hold close to him. It had been his hunger to hold her, he contended, that had led to his hesitation in an hour of temptation. It seemed a promise of protection, an escape from the starveling days and denuding meannesses that took the romance out of life. He may have wanted to show himself as something bigger and better than he really was. But his primary impulse had been to smooth the path for those overloyal feet of hers. In that, however, he had failed. The path he had hoped to smooth was quietly but inevitably leading her from his side.

If he lost her, he told himself as the ghostly hounds of remorse bayed about him in the darkness, it would be his punishment for a double-rutted drifting into evil. For just as his hidden bank-roll had been bootleg money, so his love had been a sort of bootleg love. Instead of being open and honest, it had been illicit and clandestine. It was not exactly shame that he felt. But he had little of that self-reliance which he could detect in Joyce, who seemed ready to stand superbly reckless of the world, buoyed up, apparently, by an exalted feeling of being her own unrepressed and untarnished self. He needed her allegiance, her faith in him. For even the brief and tangled joys of the flesh, once trust was taken away, could become a thing of bitterness to them both. And along that road disaster lay.

Yet everything might yet be put right, Judd argued with himself. He was no coward. He had faced dangers enough at the front. He had waded through so much violence that it had left him with an almost neurotic hunger for peace. And a compensating craving for a little love. He was, in fact, merely one member of an army hungering for comradeship as it marched along the hard road of its daily toil and its daily turbulence. He had lost step with that army. But in a few months’ time, when he would once more be a free man, he could again swing blithely along with his fellows. What Buckhorn and the Banghams and their rural neighbors regarded as a blot would be wiped out. It might not mean much to him and his unrepentant housemate. But he and the woman he loved could be made man and wife and know the satisfaction of finally walking with the conformists. They could be tied together, legally, and for life. It might not bring them any closer together. But it would end the uncertainties and anxieties that had been clouding a world where he had hoped to find a second blooming of contentment.

But before there could be any such union, he told himself, there would have to be understanding. The one thing to be done, the first thing to be done, would be to clear the slate. He’d had about all the hesitation and halfway deceit that he could endure. His only avenue to any eventual peace of mind would be to go to Joyce and tell her everything, tell her of his weakness in a moment of temptation and the price he had been paying for a security that was not security. And in explaining that he would be explaining about Slack.

The thought of Slack left him wondering just where that rat-eyed invader of his peaceful acres might be. For where Slack walked also walked peril. He had come there plainly as a spy, intent on just one end. Yet he had said, Judd remembered, that he was heading back to his own country. That meant he was giving up his quest, that his interest in his lakeside host had lapsed.

Judd, sitting up in bed, asked himself if this could mean that Slack had finally sleuthed out his secret. That intruder’s searching may have been furtive, but it had also been persistent. He might have detected the loosened soil at the stable end and quietly investigated and groped his way down to the banded roll hidden away in its battered old box of zinc.

Judd told himself that he didn’t much care. Neither Slack nor his underworld wealth was the important thing now. The thing that counted was clearing the slate with Joyce. It would have to be done, eventually. And the sooner it was done the better. He might not be thinking straight in those black hours of wakefulness. He might be getting things twisted. But he at least knew that nothing was to be gained by postponing the inevitable. And he knew the inner strain that was tensing his overtired body would soon have to be eased. It would have to be eased, or something would snap.

He lay rigid for a few minutes, praying for the balm of sleep. But sleep was denied him. And he began to feel there was something ominous in the very silence about him, something menacing in the midnight cold that was trying to take his tobacco crop away from him.

He may have outwitted the frost king and saved his crop, but the thought that even nature was against him made him feel more than ever friendless and alone.

It was after a second twitching interval of misery that he decided to go to Joyce, and go at once. It was a crazy time to waken her, but there was a load he had to get off his chest. He had to cleanse his soul of what was souring it even in his ironic hour of triumph.

He got up from his bed, while that impulse toward absolution was still strong in his body, and groped his way through the darkness. His hand, he noticed, was none too steady as he swung open Joyce’s door. He stood there arrested, perplexed by the quietness of the little room.

“Are you awake?” he asked in a tense and slightly tremulous whisper. His voice, as he repeated that question, even took on a touch of timidity. The figure he made there, he suspected, was a ridiculously infantile one. The memory came back to him how, as a small boy, he had once gone to his mother in a midnight mood of repentance and with his sin explained had slept at her side until morning.

“Are you awake?” he whispered for the third time.

But there was no answer to that forlornly qualified call of his. All he could hear, in the quietness, was the deep and regular sound of a woman’s breathing. And that woman, he remembered, was dog-tired. She was no longer on the same world with him, but off somewhere in the untroubled islands of sleep. She was getting the rest that had been so richly earned, with no baying hounds of remorse to keep her awake, as was the case with him. She could still sleep, as a child sleeps, untroubled by the passing trials of the passing day.

Judd knew, as he stood listening to that soft and regular breathing, that it would be more than unfair to waken her. She needed her rest. And whatever his own need, it would be utterly selfish to startle her in the middle of the night with the wails of his unworthiness.

He would have to wait, he decided, until morning, until from force of habit she opened her eyes at daybreak and found herself back in a forlornly tangled-up world again. She had done enough for him that day. And the thought that she had all along done too much for him gave a new edge to his misery.

He groped his way dolorously back to his room, where he sat for an irresolute moment or two on the edge of the bed. Then he stood up, forgetful of his stiffened muscles. Before everything else, he felt, he must make sure of his hidden windfall. He must have that miserable roll of bills definitely and indisputably in his hands before he talked to Joyce. It would be better to get it at once, he decided. That would be easier than facing the ignominy, later on, of digging it up from its hiding place with Joyce’s reprovingly silent figure at his side.

He forgot his weariness while feeling feverishly about in the darkness for his clothes, glad to have sufficient covering once more on his chilled body. His shoes he carried in his hand as he groped his way out through the silent house, squatting on a gloom-estranged porch step while he slipped them on his feet and laced them up. And, once fully clad, a new fortitude came to him.

A screech owl, wailing from one of the lower orchard trees, seemed a fitting accompanist to his movements as he pushed his way through his frost-whitened sweet-corn patch, and, avoiding the open lane, swung up toward the stableyard. There, after making sure that no light showed from the cowshed, he caught up a manure fork. Then he rounded the stable end and scraped away the covering straw and litter and began to dig.

He dug until his fork tines came in contact with a zinc toolbox, which he shook free of the soil that clung to it. Then he opened the battered lid and from a smaller tin box took out the neatly banded roll of bills. No feeling of triumph went through him as he explored them with stiffened fingers. He held them close to his face for a moment, in the starlight, and then thrust them down in the pocket of his worn old blue jeans.

They were, he told himself, no longer important to him. Yet he knew a thin sense of relief in having that money close to him. It was a small step in the troubled journey still ahead of him, but it seemed to leave him a little more master of his own destiny. He had dillydallied and waited and worried too long. And now it was about time for the final showdown.

He even quickened his steps as he turned back toward the house, forgetful of the fork he still carried over his shoulder, forgetful of even the numerous aches in his body as he followed the shorter path that skirted his blackberry patch. Back over the Ridge that seemed to bring the starlight closer a dog barked. South of his cliff maples the lake surf, pulsing feebly on the beach sand, sounded leisured and mournful. Judd, listening to it, told himself that at the moment, ironically enough, he was surrounded by the peace he had looked for and had failed to find.

But that slow-cadenced murmur, as Judd listened, was shot through by a more purposeful sound. It was the sound of a car somewhere along the Ridge, growing more and more distinct on the cold night air. And that car, he saw, was turning in through his stone-pillared gate and weaving its way along his orchard lane.

He could see the headlights brush the tree tops as it lurched past him and circled the house and reappeared within a stone’s throw of the cowshed. There seemed something insolent in the casualness with which its lamp beams streaked across the sleeping farm slope. Judd, crouching low between the blackberry canes, crept closer to those triangulated beams that flooded the frost-whitened shrubbery and made his three snow-apple trees look like the painted backdrop of a stage.

Those visitors of his, whoever they might be, were making small effort to conceal their presence. They were pretty sure of themselves. And Judd, as he moved still closer through the screening berry canes, could even hear their voices, insolent and unguarded, above the rhythmic swish of the lake surf. He saw a light show for a moment in the cowshed and then go out again. Out of the darkness he could once more hear a voice, clipped and carelessly commanding.

“Come closer, kid, for here’s where we talk turkey,” that voice was proclaiming. “Palambo told you we was comin’ for you, didn’t he?”

“Yuh got me dead wrong, Dutch,” an answering voice announced. And the intently listening Judd knew that the speaker was the youth who called himself Slack.

“Sure I got you dead wrong, three months ago,” said the first voice. “And you picked a pretty good hideout, down here in the sticks, holidayin’ with a hay-tosser and thinkin’ you was buried for good. But your time’s up, buddy.”

Judd found something abhorrent in that underworld talk. It seemed out of place there, coming across the rustling canes, corrupting his peaceful farm slope with its low-life lingo that belonged to the slums. It touched him with the feeling of being at the front again, thrown back into a world of brute passion and brute violence. Even Slack seemed conscious of the forces of evil confronting him. For there was something close to terror in his voice when he cried out against the menace behind the other’s casual mockery.

“I wasn’t hidin’ out on yuh. I was workin’ overtime to dig out that roll. And Saracco knows it.”

“Well, I know something that stacks higher. Unless you come across, here and now, you’re goin’ to be buried a damn sight deeper’n you’ve been buried in this bean patch.”

“What makes yuh that way, Dutch?” demanded Slack in a fluttering note of complaint. “Yuh talk as though I’d been double-crossin’ somebody.”

“Well, the time for talk’s over. The only thing that can talk now is them bank notes.”

“Your time’s up, buddy,” proclaimed a second voice, unconcernedly deep and pectoral.

“You’re holdin’ out on us, and you know it,” resumed the first speaker. “You’ve had three months now to make good on that story you handed to Saracco. You’ve hid out here and stalled off all summer; you’ve——”

“Where d’yuh get that stuff about me hidin’ out?” cut in the shriller-voiced Slack. “I ain’t been welchin’ on yuh boys. All I been doin’ is barkin’ up the wrong tree.”

“Well, we want more’n barkin’ where ten grand’s concerned. And as Pip says, your time’s up.”

“What’re yuh goin’ to do?” cried Slack. There was no mistaking the terror in his voice as he put that question.

“What’re we goin’ to do?” said the deeper and more mocking voice. “Why, rat, we’re just naturally goin’ to take you for a ride.”

This was followed by a moment of silence.

“But that ain’t givin’ me a Chinaman’s chance,” cried the voice of Slack, higher pitched than before. “Yuh don’t know what I’ve been up against. Yuh don’t know this crab. Yuh couldn’t get anything out o’ him with a crowbar. I kept thinkin’, at first, he was hangin’ the Indian sign on me. But I got him wrong.”

“Then you welched from the first.”

“No, I didn’t, Dutch,” said the quickened and almost pleading voice of Slack. “I gave it to Saracco straight. I thought I had those ninety-eight centuries sewed up here. But I missed out. This corn-rustler’s been breakin’ his neck scrapin’ a few dollars out of a tobacco crop. He’d go nuts over a tin bank half full o’ nickels. He’s workin’ his guts out, just t’ get a livin’ off this land.”

“Then where’s the roll?”

“That’s more’n I know. That’s what I’d——”

“You’ll be sayin’ next,” cut in the guttural voice, “that Spud Gleiger got it, after all.”

“No, Dutch, Gleiger didn’t get it. I never said that. I slipped it to the bird who bent over me, after I got plugged up there. It seemed the——”

“Just passed it on to a passin’ stranger!” mocked the insolent guttural voice. “Just let a dickey-bird flutter down from the fence post and fly away with it! Bah! You know that’s all flooey, rat. And now you’re goin’ to know what you walk into when you double-cross the home office in this business.”

“But croakin’ me won’t get yuh anywhere,” quavered Slack. “And this ain’t the States, remember. Yuh swing for murder over here. And they’ve a bunch o’ beaks yuh can’t buy off.”

“Your time’s up, kid.”

“But wait a minute, Dutch,” pleaded Slack’s voice, thin with desperation. “I still got a chance with this clodhopper. I still got a hunch he’s the bird who bent over me, that night in the rain. He may’ve been puttin’ one over on me. And if yuh’ll gimme another twenty-four hours, I’ll put it up to him flat.”

“Ain’t you had about all summer for that?”

“It never came to a showdown. He’s not as much of a moss-back as he’d like to make yuh believe. He’s a guy yuh’ve gotta handle with gloves.”

“To hell with gloves,” was the impatient retort. “Why haven’t you pushed a gat against his ribs? Or burned it out o’ him with a hot stove lid?”

“Yuh’d be wise to that, Dutch, if yuh’d ever given him the once-over. He’s not so easy to handle.”

“Oh, he’s not easy to handle?” echoed the indifferently mocking voice. “Well, let’s get straight on that right now. Let’s dig this rube out and see what he’s got ’o say about it all.”

Judd, who had been leaning on his fork as his listened, felt a martial flash go through his body.

“Get your gats out, boys,” he heard the guttural voice command.

Judd could see one of the riders emerge from the car and step closer to the driver’s seat.

“What’s the program?” was that stranger’s curt inquiry.

“It’s short-arm jabs now,” was the answer, “after three months o’ stallin’.” The speaker got stiffly down from his seat. “Are you all set?”

“All set,” was the obedient answer.

“Okay then. And if this hay-tosser can’t satisfy us in two minutes’ time, they’ll be diggin’ a hole for him down where the cornstalks are rustlin’.”

But a protest came from the car side.

“Then gimme a chance to get my stuff together,” said the complaining voice of Slack. “It’s about all I’ll be carryin’ away from this summer outin’ o’ mine.” He leaned closer in over the car door. “And for the love o’ Gawd, Dutch, don’t forget what side o’ the Line yuh’re on. If there’s goin’ to be gat work, we’re sure gotta get off on the run.”

“All right, all right,” responded the mordantly indifferent voice. “Dig your things out, kid, and do it quick. You go with him, Lefty, to keep it straight. You, Sam, swing the car around and be ready for a runnin’ start. And you, Pip, cover the back o’ the house in case our bird tries a break-away.”

Judd did not wait for more. Yet it was not fear that hurried him on as he crouched low between the berry canes, pushed through the cedar hedge, and crept back to the sleeping house under its shadowing maples. It was more impatience to have things put right with Joyce, put right with his own words, now that his time was upon him. His one impulse was to let her understand and judge, before those underworld intruders began corrupting the quietness of his home with their violence. And his place, at such a time, was at her side, to give her the protection a woman merited from her mate. For they were as good as man and wife now—or they soon would be. They would be, he repeated, if they got through this night.

For Judd knew a feeling of helplessness as he groped his way in through the silent house where he had lived so remote from the world about him. He even knew a moment’s regret at the thought that he had lived there without a weapon, without rifle or revolver. He would have felt safer, in such a predicament, with a good automatic in his hand. But, like Joyce, he had a well-earned aversion to such things. And, like her, he had asked for peace under that roof.

But her next hour, he realized as he stood in the doorway of the room where she slept, would not be a tranquil one. Nor a happy one, for either of them. Yet it had to be faced. There could be no further hesitations. His hour was upon him.

He crossed to the bed and placed his hand on the body that lay warm and relaxed under its double blanket of wool.

Joyce neither stirred nor answered, and a passing dread of awakening her out of sleep so deep held him back a moment. Then he took a fuller breath, calling out her name as his fingers closed about her shoulder, which he shook gently but determinedly.

“Joyce, are you awake?” he said through the darkness.

She had heard him, he knew, for a moment later she was sitting up in bed, fumbling for the matches on the lamp stand.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, clear-voiced and collected. Judd remembered that she must have been no stranger, in that earlier war-front life of hers, to midnight emergencies.

“No, don’t light the lamp,” he said, arresting her as she went to strike a match. “We haven’t time for that.”

“What’s happened?” she questioned, perplexed by both the tenseness of his voice and the discovery that his hand, feeling along her arm, had found and was clinging to her own startled hand.

“I’ve done something I’m ashamed of,” was his hurried and husky confession. “And I’ve got to tell you about it.”

He had dropped on his knees beside the bed, not so much in a posture of penitence as in an effort to lean closer to her in the darkness.

“I came in here an hour ago, but I hadn’t the heart to waken you then. Now you’ve got to know.”

Her fingers tightened about his hand.

“I knew there was something,” she murmured.

“And it’s got to be cleared up,” he went on in a voice that was more hurried and husky than ever. “It’s—it’s made life a hell for me. It’s stood between us all summer.”

He raised his head, in a posture of listening, as the sound of stirred shrubbery came through the partly opened window. It gave him the feeling of being slowly and cautiously surrounded.

“Go on,” Joyce prompted, conscious of the tremor in his body yet doing her best to remain calm.

“It’s about Slack,” he hurriedly explained.

“Slack!” she echoed in a voice that carried a hint of old suspicions finally confirmed. “What has he done?”

“Last spring he’d been working with a gang of whisky switchers up here,” Judd told her in a quiet tumble of words. “They’d just put a truckload of alcohol off a rumrunner’s power boat ashore somewhere along the beach, a smuggled cargo that had to be paid for in cash. Slack was carrying nearly ten thousand dollars in bills. Hijackers shot him, up by our gate, and I found him there, that night I came home so late from Chamboro. He asked me to keep his roll for him. I thought he was dying. So I took it and hid it away. I took it from him, in the dark, before some of his people picked him up and carried him away.”

“So that was it!” Joyce said in a whisper.

“I kept that money. And all along I was afraid to tell you about it.”

“Oh, Peter, Peter, why did you do it?” cried Joyce, more in wonder than accusation.

“It seemed like a windfall, something that nobody would ever know about. It seemed to solve a problem that was nearly driving me crazy. And I was fool enough to think I could get away with it.”

Judd listened for the sound of steps along his veranda floor.

“Where is that money now?” Joyce asked.

“I have it here,” he acknowledged. “But it’s too late to do anything.”

“Why do you say that?” demanded Joyce.

“Because Slack’s gang leader has just found out he’s been with us all summer. He’s out there, right now, waiting to walk in here and third-degree the truth out of me.”

Joyce threw back the covers and swung out of bed, feeling about for her slippers and dressing gown.

“Why should we be afraid of that man?” she asked. “We’ll give him back his money, every unclean dollar of it.”

“I can’t do that,” Judd huskily confessed.

“Why can’t you?”

“Because I was a big enough fool to use two hundred dollars of it.”

Joyce’s hand groped for his shoulder.

“Oh, Peter, I knew there was something. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was afraid to.”

She left him for a moment and he could hear her as she rummaged through a bureau drawer.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m getting that two hundred dollars of mine,” was the answer that came to him through the darkness. A moment later she was beside him again. “Give me that money of theirs,” was her quiet command.

“Why should I?” countered Judd.

“So I can hand it back to them,” said Joyce. “Every dollar of it!”

“You’ll not face those killers,” he cried. He moved toward the doorway, as though to block it. “This is my job.”

But Joyce was too quick for him.

“I’m not afraid of them,” she said. She slipped past him in the darkness. She hurried over to the broken walnut clock above the fireplace and produced a sound of metal against metal as she groped about the clock’s interior and found what she wanted.

“Where are you?” asked Judd, wondering when a bull-like shoulder would be sending his front door splintering in.

“I’m here,” said Joyce, once more close to him. “And I’ve got this!”

“What is it?” asked Judd, trying to make out what she held in her hand.

“It’s Slack’s automatic,” was her hurried response.

“Where’d you get it?” was his equally hurried query. His hand went out for the weapon, but she refused to surrender it.

“I fished it out of the surf with a garden rake, the day after it was thrown in the lake. Then I cleaned and oiled it and hid it away in the clock.”

It was not the possession of the firearm that brought a surge of assurance through him; it was more the knowledge that he had a comrade who was both clearheaded and courageous.

“Now give me that money and I’ll take it out to them,” she was saying.

“You will not,” was Judd’s determined whisper. He even backed away from her in the gloom.

“I’ve got to,” she answered, following him step by step. “They’ll only kill you.”

“They’ll kill me, will they?” he challenged. “Then let them try it.” He brushed her aside, almost roughly. “But you’re going to keep out of this. It’s my fight. And I’m going to stay in it to the finish.”

“I don’t want you to go out there,” cried Joyce, her hand pressed close against her quickening heart. “They’ll only kill you.”

“I’ve got to go,” retorted Judd. A foolish sense of power welled through his overtired brain, the power he had been waiting for. He was not alone in the world. He had found somebody worth fighting for. And that thought made him feel more of a man.

“Then take this,” Joyce gasped. She was pressing the slips of paper into his hand.

“What is it?”

“It’s what you took from their roll—the roll that wasn’t even honestly theirs. But they must have their blood money back.”

“They’ll get it back,” he grimly announced. His step was firm as he strode along the echoing floor boards and caught up the rusty-tined manure fork he had left resting there.

He could see the black mass of the car that stood, hearse-like, at the end of the cedar hedge, with its headlights brazenly flaring across Joyce’s drying green, picking out the worn path to the ice house, the gooseberry row along the garden’s edge, the four abandoned beehives between the damson plum trees. They picked out, even more clearly, the bucolic-looking figure in blue jeans, with the absurd fork over its shoulder, as it walked resolutely toward the car, over which a sudden silence fell.

“Will you look who’s here!” said a mocking voice from behind the widening light rays. “Why, it’s the hay-tosser himself!”

Judd strode on, scarcely conscious of the second figure that sidled about the hedge end, and took the shorter path to the car side.

“Watch him, Dutch,” warned a voice from the car back.

But Judd pushed determinedly on, the stiffness of his overtired muscles giving him the appearance, as he waded into that wedge of light, of a surf-bather wading into sea water. He knew, as he went, that he was walking into danger. But from that risk he wrung a sense of the purgational. It seemed to wash something unclean from him. He even wrung a grim satisfaction out of it. For no further tinglings of fear were arrowing through his body. He no longer dreaded even their silence, which seemed more insolent than their speech had been. They were so sure of themselves they could sit and wait for him.

Yet he knew well enough, as he strode on past the flaring headlights into the comparative darkness at the car side, why two of the men in that car moved at his approach. They waited quiescent enough, beyond that one small movement. But Judd could see the highlights on their half-poised revolver barrels.

The silence, prolonging itself, was broken by a voice from the front seat, a contemptuously casual voice.

“What’re you looking for, yokel?”

Judd’s movement seemed equally casual as he pressed closer to the car side, trying to make out the shadowy faces confronting him.

“I’m looking for a man called Slack,” proclaimed Judd, conscious of the glimmer of steel within four feet of his face.

“And what d’ you want of him?” was the contemptuously indifferent query.

It was the guttural-voiced man, the man known as Dutch, who spoke up before that question could be answered.

“Let me handle this, Pip. If he’s the bozo behind all this stallin’ and squealin’, he’s goin’ to do his talkin’ to me. Now, what’s on your mind, big boy?”

“Where’s Slack?” demanded Judd. He was no longer afraid of them. They seemed to him, now, merely a coiled nest of venom, something to avoid and leave to its own dark ends.

“What d’ yuh want with me?” a thinner-voiced shadow that leaned out from the back seat was asking. And the speaker, Judd saw, was the man he knew as Slack.

“I want to pay you what I owe you,” announced Judd, reaching into his blue jeans.

He was conscious of an advancing glimmer of steel on two sides of him as his hand sank into the wide patch pocket. But his mind was on other things.

“This belongs to you.”

Judd’s voice, as he held out the banded roll of bills, was tense but low of tone. “It’s yours,” he added in a higher note, “blood and all!”

The silence was broken by a laugh, careless and deep-chested, at the same moment that a lean hand reached out and took possession of the little stained cylinder banded with rubber. A flashlight winked and went out and flowered into light again as three heads bent low and a voice muttered, “Geez, he’s got it!”

Judd could see yellow-stained fingers riffling carelessly through the curling bill ends, with a voice counting mumblingly as they went. It was the repeated laugh, insolently indifferent as the car engine began to purr, that proved too much for the hay-tosser’s long taut nerves.

“Take your bloody money,” he cried in a voice suddenly hoarse with a passion that could no longer be controlled. “Take it, d’ you hear me, and get off this farm of mine!”

It was the heavy-bodied man in the front seat who leaned brazenly out for a better view of the odd figure in blue jeans.

“And just what’ll you do, nit-wit, if we don’t?” he mockingly demanded. He even lifted a cigarette to his lips, drew smoke into his lungs, and slowly exhaled it.

“I’ll kill you!” shouted Judd, his embittered body shaking with an ague of hate. “D’ you hear me, I’ll kill you, you damned copperheads!”

His face was twitching, uncontrollably, as he suddenly planted his heels wider and poised to swing his heavy tined fork high in the air.

But the dark mass of the car, abruptly purring with life, moved quietly and quickly away from that descending blow. It slipped away from the foreshortening arc of the fork as softly yet as promptly as its wielder had once seen a blacksnake slide away from his threatening hoe blade. And Judd realized, as he stood panting on his fork handle, that a well-timed foot had merely been lifted from a clutch pedal. They had swung away from his side, leaving behind a crescendo whirr of machinery punctuated by an indifferent hoarse laugh.

Judd stood watching the winking red tail-light as it rocked insolently up his orchard lane, crested the hill, and finally disappeared in the darkness.

He felt very old, very old and tired and time-worn, as he turned his head and stared at the vague shadow where his home stood under its sentinel maples. It startled him when against that shadow he caught sight of the ghostly figure of Joyce. She stood there without moving, with Slack’s black automatic in her hand.

“I was waiting to kill them,” she said in an oddly flatted voice, “if they killed you.”

It was foolish, he knew. But it brought a flicker of happiness to his body that had seemed drained of all emotion.

“I’m not worth it,” he said. His morose eyes were directed toward the east, where a faint gray rind of light, touched with rose, was showing along the level rim of Lake Erie.

“You are to me,” Joyce contended.

He felt, from the light in her eyes, that she expected him to take her in his arms. But all he did was to wrest the firearm from her fingers. He looked down at it, studying it with a stare of repugnance.

“There’ll be no more of this,” he said as he tossed the automatic into her petunia bed. For at the core of his weariness burned a stubborn small fire of deliverance, of freedom regained. He gazed northward, toward the Ridge, where he knew his tobacco crop slept under its covering of oat straw and hay. In the morning, he remembered, he would have to start slatting.

But it was already morning, he realized, for the gray rind along the lake rim was turning to gold. He could hear the metallic slam of a stove door and the gush of water from the kitchen-yard pump. That meant, he knew, Joyce was busying herself in getting breakfast ready, quietly preparing food to fortify him for another day. His mind went back to the morning in Elbasan, where after a night of bombing he had watched the stunned Albanian housewives gathering bits of wood from the ruins and building little fires to boil their morning coffee. For things like that, Judd told himself, had to go on.

He made his way, from force of habit, to the wash basin on the back porch. He felt with exploring fingers along the rim of the basin where the ice had formed. It would be cold to wash in. But he needed that splashing cold to shock him into wakefulness. For you had to be awake, he told himself, or you missed too much out of life. He could see the blue smoke coiling up from the red brick chimney. Beyond the chimney he could see two worlds melting into one, the star-spangled darkness of night fading away in the widening promise of another day.

It looked peaceful to his tired eyes. And he had always wanted peace. But, like everything in life, it came at a price. It came, apparently, only when you stood four-square with your own conscience.

He waited for a moment or two, with a frown on his lean face, before going in to join the woman who was foolish enough to share his penury. He would know a deeper peace, he told himself, when his doorstep had been swept clean of his second and more serious lapse into the illicit. Yet it wouldn’t and couldn’t make much difference. The only thing that counted, in this tangled-up thing that was known as love between men and women, was trust, trust in each other.

“Coffee’s ready,” Joyce was calling from the doorway.

It sounded commonplace enough, that summons to a laid table and the everyday plane of existence. But in the half-light of early morning it became memorable and took on the coloring of the miraculous. There was even a listless sort of wonder on Judd’s face as he stepped slowly in through the door and sat down. He sat silent, gazing at his partner.

She too, he felt, must be very tired. His impression of her face, in the qualified light of the kitchen, was one of mistiness. The eyes under the hooded brow were a misty hazel. Her mouth, rich even in weariness, was a misty rose, with a faint blue shadow between the lip ends and the cheekline. This gave a further shadowiness to her smile, which was fraternal and understanding. It was also, he felt, infinitely valorous.

“You’re not eating,” she gently reminded him.

Judd pushed back the plate in front of him.

“It’s not food I want,” he huskily confessed, “it’s sleep.”

Her smile of pity had a touch of the maternal.

“My poor tired angel,” she murmured as she leaned closer to fill his coffee cup.

“Not much of an angel,” was Judd’s unhappy retort.

That brought a gesture of protest from her.

“Let’s not think about that now. It’s over and done with. And what happened last night has no more place in your life than a nightmare. It’s like a snake that crawled into a flower bed and then crawled out again.”

“That’s easy to say,” Judd protested. “But it doesn’t clear my slate.”

“Darling, darling, don’t worry about your slate,” was Joyce’s counter protest. “It’s clean enough for me. It’s clean enough, when I remember how everything you did was done out of generosity, out of blind generosity. And generosity to me.” Her lips trembled as she put down her cup. “I’ve just been wondering what I’d ever have done if they’d killed you last night.”

Judd’s indifferent smile was lost in a wave of weariness that brought a new droop to his shoulders. They hadn’t killed him. But whatever was lost or won, he mistily remembered, the one thing essential to his soul’s peace, to his body’s peace, was to have this one woman of all the world there close to him. For without her, now, life would be as foolish and futile as a street lamp left burning after the sun was up. Watching her as she turned away to put wood in the stove, he wondered why a singing kettle and a woman in a slightly threadbare dressing gown should make a place so much like home.

Joyce’s voice, when she spoke, seemed to come through a fog.

“You’re going to rest,” she quietly announced, “while I dress and look after the animals. You’ve got to.”

She disregarded his muttered protest and left him slumped in his chair. When she returned from the barnyard, half an hour later, she found him stretched out on her Navajo blanket, fast asleep in the sunlight that warmed the worn boards of the old veranda. She could see how that same warming sun had already licked the frost from the grass and brought a summerlike shimmer of silver streaked with lilac to the windless lake beyond the white birches that were already turning into towers of gold.

It was the same spot, she remembered, where she lay stretched out in slumber when he had first wandered into her life. He looked rough and battered, in his worn clothes. He looked old and haggard, as he would look, she told herself, with the passing of the years. Yet even the thought of age and alteration brought a keener pang to her aching body. An abrupt sense of loneliness prompted her to droop down at his side. The hunger to be close to him brought her near enough to have her head pillowed on his outstretched arm and her own arm clasped about his sun-warmed shoulders. She was, she remembered, very tired. There were a thousand things to do; but they would have to wait. It was very peaceful there. It might not last. It never did last. But it was something to lie warm against the quietly breathing body of the man you loved.

When the noon hour brought a hiatus in Spike Slocum’s field work he sauntered over to the row of lordly chestnut trees that stood between his farm and Pine Brae. The early frost, he surmised, ought to be bringing down a sprinkling of nuts, nuts that the women-folks liked to roast on the stove front of an autumn night.

After gathering a hatful of the mahogany-brown kernels he inspected his disheveled old hay shed, where a hundred holes in the roof sent pencils of sunlight through the gloomy interior. Then he returned to the line fence and stood in silent contemplation of his neighbor’s hill field. He studied the wide slope with its straw-covered mounds, nodding his head over a job well done. When he failed to see any sign of life about the deforested slope, and no stir about the lower fields and the silent barnyard, he decided to drop down to the lakeside house for a word or two with his tenderfoot neighbor. He wanted to warn that neighbor about handling his wilted tobacco piles without injuring the leaf.

A frown furrowed Spike’s broad face as he pioneered cautiously about the clumped maples that shadowed the house, where he could see no smoke going up from the kitchen chimney. His pace even slackened as he circled deeper about that abode of silence. Then he stopped short, staring at the sun-bathed slope of the veranda front.

On the sloping boards there he saw two sleeping figures, so defenseless that they made him think of the Babes in the Woods. They lay side by side, so shameless in their comradeship that a trouble crept into Spike’s honest face. He felt as abashed as though he had invaded their bedroom or blundered in on them in their nudity. He remembered, to his discomfort, the Babylonian epithet Mrs. Bangham had publicly applied to the designing hussy who had so brazenly trapped an innocent stranger into a life of sin. He recalled what the countryside was saying about them. But as he blinked down at the two abandoned sleepers in the sun, a shadowy feeling of compassion touched with envy crept through him. They might not be churched, as most folks felt they ought to be. But they seemed to be getting their own private satisfactions out of living together without benefit of clergy. It was, after all, nature’s way. And what they did, Spike felt, was entirely their own affair, seeing it was bringing hurt to no one but themselves.

It was their own affair, he repeated to himself, but he had no intention of getting mixed up in it. He had troubles enough of his own. And he decided to get back to them.

It was the sound of his retreating steps on the gravel drive that wakened Judd, who promptly disentangled himself from his partner’s arms. He sat up with a blink of bewilderment, stretched his stiffened body, and caught sight of the hesitating figure at the house corner.

“Don’t go,” he called out. He even laughed a little as he aroused the sleeper beside him, the dazed sleeper who wakened and oriented herself and gave a little laugh as shameless as her mate’s before gathering up the Navajo blanket and carrying it into the house.

“We’ve just been making up for our lost sleep,” Judd explained to the still hesitating Spike.

“Guess you need it,” the latter admitted. His head shake was a solemn one. “That was a close shave you had last night.”

Those words brought a chill to Judd’s blood. It sharpened his memory of events he had been trying to translate into the mistiness of a nightmare.

“What do you know about it?” he demanded. There was a catch in his voice as he put the question.

“Why, I could see you wrastlin’ with that burley o’ yours late into the night,” was the relieving reply. “You sure had a fight on your hands. But you come out on top all right.”

Judd breathed easier again.

“The fight’s not over,” he said, remembering the work still ahead of him.

“But you saved your leaf from gettin’ frost-nipped. And it’s sure worth the work. A day or two back that farm expert on the radio was sayin’ Canada’s tobacco crop ran to nigh eighty million pounds last year, and this year there’ll be a call for ten or fifteen million more. What with the war and all, he says, the Dominion Bureau’s arrangin’ to export twenty million pounds into Great Britain alone as soon as she can be gathered up.”

It struck Judd as odd that the war, which had worked such evil to him and his, could contrive to bring him any belated benefits.

“So handle them plants right,” Spike was advising him. “They’re goin’ to bring you in good money when the buyers get around.”

Judd surprised Spike by grasping his hand.

“Anything I get out of that tobacco crop,” he admitted with a note of humility, “I owe to you.”

“Shucks,” said Spike, “it’s danged little I did, son. A neighbor’s a neighbor.”

“But you’ve been a mighty good one to me,” Judd protested, not unconscious of the rural tendency to be inarticulate about the things that mean most.

Spike shifted from one foot to the other.

“My missus holds anything we can do for you folks ain’t half payin’ back what your miss—what your nurse friend here did for us.”

If that faltering admission brought a cloud to Judd’s face it was only a momentary one. It reminded him how much he remained an outsider in that neighborhood of honest toilers and how much he owed to his housemate who was merely a housemate. He had asked for independence. He had fought for independence. But his daily life was still disturbingly tied up with others.

“There’s another point I wanted to bring up,” Spike was saying. “It’s about that sway-back old hay shed o’ mine. She leaks like a sieve. But if you’re willin’ to get busy and reshingle her old roof, with me supplyin’ nails and shingles, of course, she’s yours for the winter to hang your burley in.”

A small glow of gratitude went through Judd’s stiffened body. The world, after all, wasn’t entirely a place of plundering and rapine.

“But you’ve already done too much for me,” he demurred.

His neighbor from over the hill brushed that aside.

“You’ll earn your shed room all right,” he gruffly maintained. “That new roof’ll take a good half-week o’ shingle nailin’. The old buildin’ is a bit moldy in the beams and she may look like the leanin’ tower o’ Pisa. But she’s good for a few more years, I reckon, if we give her a new roof and shore her up on the east side.”

Judd, with an accruing lightness about his heart, not only promised to do the job but to do it right. Life, of late, had endowed him with a new humility.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” he admitted.

“Shucks,” said Spike, with a shrug of dismissal. He shied away from the emotional by blinking about at the blue arch of the sky. “We’ll be havin’ a spell o’ mild weather after this killin’ frost.”

Judd deferred explaining his plans until after supper that night. He sat, pencil in hand, trying to figure out the number of lath bundles that would be needed for his tobacco slatting. But laths cost money, just as the need of daily household supplies did. And the surest way to acquire a little ready cash, he decided, would be to truck the best of his Northern Spies into Chamboro and sell them on the open market. They would not grade high. But they ought to bring at least a dollar a bag.

“I’ll help you, of course, with the slatting,” Joyce said. “And the Spies will have to be picked over.”

“Slatting,” demurred Judd, “is pretty heavy work.”

“I’ve seen women doing it.”

Judd turned to study the cameo-like face into which sheer weariness had brought a touch of the spiritual.

“Perhaps you have,” he protested, “but they weren’t women like you.” His short laugh was not without its trace of bitterness. “And they weren’t working for an incompetent like me.”

“Don’t say that,” she cried out, almost sharply.

“You know what I am now. You’ve seen me stripped to the bone,” he contended. “I can never strut around again as a strong man. Not after last night.”

“I’m not thinking about last night,” was her prompt reply to that. “I’m thinking about the future. And I suppose it sounds all wrong, but I’m almost glad you’re not too good. Your goodness might have been too much for me. I’m afraid I’m too pagan to care much for good people. I’m glad, in a way, you really have a redeeming weakness or two.”

“And you’re not going to despise me?”

She crossed to his chair and stood behind him, thrusting her fingers deep into his hair. He heard the familiar rhapsodic coo as she pressed his tired head against her equally tired body.

“I’m going to love you,” she murmured, “until the trump of doom.”

Winter sometimes comes riotously to that fertile farm country which lies in what should be the sheltering lap of the Great Lakes. The autumnal contest between temperance and cold often takes on a touch of fury.

The seasonal change, on this occasion, came out of the northwest to the Kentish plains with a burst of wind that swept the fields and flailed the woodlands and prompted the last of the open-water ore-carriers and freighters to steam closer to the lee shore of Ontario. It also prompted Judd to keep his stock stabled and his ruffled hens confined to their run.

“It’s a howler, all right,” he acknowledged as the wind lashed and whined through the old orchard trees and imparted seismic shudders to the equally old cottage. Joyce, looking out, could see how the silver birches along the cliff front were tossed into streamers of horizontal fury. She saw the over-aged Bartlett pear tree at their garden end go down with a crash.

“It’s God pruning His world,” she observed with a touch of awe in her voice.

Judd left that claim unanswered. He was remembering how during his years of city life he had given scant attention to the weather. But in the country where you stood face to face with her moods you were more dependent on nature. And that wind gave him a feeling of uneasiness. When Joyce ran out to salvage an empty washtub that was rolling grotesquely across her drying green, he saw her suddenly statuesque as she leaned against the wind that flattened skirt and waist against her body. Her dark hair, blown back from her lowered head, made her look like a maenad. But she was laughing when she regained the shelter of the house.

“I thought it was going to blow me into the lake.”

Judd, watching her smooth down her hair, remembered how a storm had once blown her into his arms. He was wondering what it was about her that always prompted an impulse of protectiveness in him, when Spike Slocum and his wagon rack came swinging about the drive.

Judd went out to him.

“I’m plumb scarey about that old hay shed,” his neighbor announced. “She ain’t built for a blow like this.”

Judd’s pulse quickened with apprehension. His tobacco crop, so laboriously slatted and hung, was housed in that shed. His summer of toil and his hopes for the future were stored away in that hilltop building.

“What can we do?”

“We’d best cut some timbers in the wood lot and shore her up against this wind,” was Spike’s hurried response. “It’ll take two to handle them boles. Bring an ax.”

He declined to waste further time in talk. He rounded the house, his wheels scattering the drive gravel as he went.

Judd, struggling into his old trench coat, explained the situation to Joyce.

“Can’t I help?” she asked.

“Not in this,” he said as he caught up his ax. He fought his way out through the orchard and across the sloping field swept clean by the wind. He joined Spike trimming a freshly felled black oak.

“Bring down a couple more o’ these,” Spike called out across the gale. “And cut ’em this length. Half a dozen, I reckon, will do the job.”

Judd made the chips fly. A half-cut, in that wind, was all that was needed to fell his oak. Then he busied himself trimming the long trunk. He was glad to be able to prove to the old-timer beside him that, tenderfoot or no tenderfoot, he knew how to handle an ax. But the long boles of oak, he found, were not so easy to handle. He was panting by the time he had helped carry the second timber to the lee of the quaking building.

“These’ll hold her,” was Spike’s confident cry as they went back for another bole.

Judd hoped he was right. But the sway of the creaking stringers gave him an empty feeling in the pit of the stomach. It struck him as unfair that honest work should be subjected to such a gamble. For if that building collapsed it would leave his crowded and half-cured tobacco plants practically worthless. Even if he could save a half or a third of his crop from the ruins, he knew of no place where that salvaged remnant might be stored. It was the penalty of trying to run a farm without proper equipment. There may have been a dull joy in the hazard, in the blind struggle against big odds. But it was as foolish, in a way, as trying to fight without firearms.

“We’ll prop her up,” contended Spike, conscious of the tragic look on his neighbor’s face. “We’ll keep the old girl——”

He stopped short, with the sharpened lash of the wind whipping the words from his mouth. Then he turned in his tracks and stared at the shaken hay shed. He saw it heave a trifle toward the southeast and slowly resume its earlier posture, as though making a hesitating bow to a world from which it expected no kindness. He noticed the waver that went through the bright new shingles, and the second slow bow of the roof, this time deeper than before. But instead of a recovery of position, there was a crackling of timbers and a splintering of wood that mounted to a roar as the building collapsed. It sank down on itself like a tired horse at the end of its day of work.

Judd stared at the flattened ruins. It gave him the feeling of being once more in the midst of a blitzkrieg, of violence and bomb craters close about him.

“She’s gone,” gasped Spike, a frown of wonder on his broad face.

Judd stood silent, lashed by more than the whip of the wind. Through the confused pain of his thoughts crept the conviction that he was finally a failure.

Spike, disturbed by the other’s stricken face, moved over to his side.

“I thought I was helpin’ you out, neighbor,” he said as the wind tore between them, “and this is all I’ve brung you!”

Still Judd made no response. He was thinking of the woman down in the storm-shaken cottage, the woman to whom he owed so much and could now offer so little.

It was a week later, when the scarred earth was still nursing its wounds, that the weather changed and a soft pall of inertia grayed the overcast sky. Then, as the day advanced, it began to snow.

Joyce, standing in the doorway, could see the white flakes falling down from a windless and wool-colored sky. She heard, or thought she heard, the honking of unseen wild geese winging southward. But she continued to watch the curtaining snowflakes. They fell quietly but steadily, seeming to pile silence on a mysteriously silenced world. They softened the contours of the garden beds and coroneted the pines with mounded caps of whiteness. But still they fell, giving an evening-tide gloom to the light of midday and covering the world with an ever-thickening blanket that made the familiar farm slopes seem alien and astral, touched with a new peace.

But that falling snow brought no peace of mind to Joyce. She wondered if Judd, well on his way to the county seat with his load of Northern Spies, would be having trouble with the truck. It would be hard driving, she knew, in weather like that, especially with worn tires and an engine that couldn’t always be depended on. She would breathe easier when he was safely back, and with the Spies they had so sedulously picked over and bagged the day before safely sold. For Pine Brae sorely needed what those apples were to bring them.

When she had finished her housework she made an effort to fight back the foolish sense of loneliness that darkened her spirits, by carrying in wood and making a fire in the old Klondike stove. Its singing draught seemed to take the desolation out of the shadowy and silent living room. She was on the point of checking the damper when she heard the sound of a car engine come to a stop in front of the house. Her heart gave a lift at the thought that Judd was getting back so early.

But instead of Judd she found a stranger at the door, a lean-faced stranger who stamped the snow from his feet and from behind horn-rimmed glasses blinked about at the whitened landscape. He had a bag in his hand and the unmistakable evidence of being a metropolitan product in his bearing.

“Pretty close to the North Pole up here,” he averred as he mounted the veranda steps. “And you’re Miss Landis, I take it?” he added as he blinked down at her through the horn-rims that gave an owlish look to his face.

Joyce acknowledged that she was Miss Landis.

“Then you can probably tell me where I can get my hands on Peter Judd.” His laugh, at her hesitation, was plainly intended to be disarming. “No, I’m neither a G-man nor a county sheriff. I’m merely an old friend of Peter’s from across the Line. And, frankly, I had a hell of a time getting here.”

Joyce explained Judd’s absence at the county seat. He would be back, she felt sure, before nightfall, unless the roads got blocked.

“May I come in and wait for him?” her visitor said with a casualness that persuaded Joyce he stood uncommonly sure of himself.

“Of course,” she said, studiously cool before the prolonged and estimative gaze with which he was regarding her.

“Then I’ll get rid of this Blenheim jehu before he’s snowbound on your doorstep. He may be a native, but he knows darn little about his own district. We had to interview most of Buckhorn before we found out where this farm was hidden away.”

Joyce, studying him as he paid and dismissed the car driver, wondered just how much he had learned from those Buckhorn interviews. She tried to tell herself it was not a matter of importance. Yet anything and everything that had come to his ears, she felt, would be colored with the green-tinted animus of outraged village morality.

Her barricade of austerity, however, had no effect on the stranger who came stamping up the steps.

“My name’s Perlow, Philip Perlow,” he said after striding briskly in through the open door and brushing the snow from his shoulders. He tossed aside his overcoat and hat and scarf. “Can you take care of me overnight?”

Joyce found herself smiling in the teeth of a virtue that had all the aspects of a necessity. There was now no escape for him or from him.

“If you’re satisfied with the simple life,” she responded with carefully achieved casualness.

“It looks cosy enough here,” he conceded as his gaze came to rest on the Klondike stove with its catlike purr of contentment. But his smile became ironic as he turned and glanced out the window. The falling snow brought a shrug to his shoulders. “It must be pleasant in summertime.”

The qualifying note did not escape Joyce.

“It’s pleasant at any time,” she retorted, “if it’s what you like.”

“If it’s what you like,” he repeated after a moment of silence. His eyes became ruminative as he watched the falling snow. Then he laughed and murmured, “Judd the Obscure!”

Joyce, catching the allusion, felt her lips tighten. But the coldness of her face in no way intimidated the brisk-mannered invader. He glanced about the bare-looking room, seated himself in front of the stove and let his gaze rest on the woman who in some mysterious way made him think of a Joan of Arc in modern clothes. It was, he assumed, the raptness of the thin face framed in its dark halo of bobbed hair.

“That Buckhorn parson,” he ventured out of the lengthening silence, “told me you had been a war nurse.”

Her gaze, at that, locked with his.

“Then you talked with Mr. Bangham?”

Perlow smiled at the new note in her voice. But there was no hostility in the eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses.

“Yes, we had quite a powwow. He rather straightened out a few of the tangles those village busybodies were trying to tie me up in.”

Joyce resented the feeling of defenselessness that took possession of her.

“Then you know why I’m here?”

Perlow’s laugh was noncommittal.

“I thought I did,” he acknowledged, his assessing gaze once more on her. “But I see a doubt or two creeping in.”

“A doubt or two as to what?”

“You’re not,” he said, “quite what I expected.”

“Were you looking for vine leaves in my hair?”

“Let’s not go into that,” he said with a hand sweep of dismissal. “What I want to dig out is why Peter Judd is satisfied to stay hidden away in this God-forsaken neck of the woods.”

“That,” said Joyce, “is something he must answer for himself.”

“I’m afraid our friend has been studying too many of those Currier and Ives rural prints.”

Joyce resented the sarcasm in that claim. Knowing what she knew, it even angered her a little.

“Life here,” she said with a cutting edge to her own voice, “hasn’t been exactly a barn dance for him.”

The alert eyes behind the horn-rims, the eyes with an almost snakelike steadiness in their concentration, took on an appeasing look of mildness.

“I suppose it hasn’t,” Perlow acknowledged. “But I never expected him to play ostrich.”

“That’s not fair to him,” was Joyce’s quick claim. “It was more like being hospitalized. He was a wounded man, remember.”

Perlow smiled at the flash of opposition on the Joan-of-Arc face.

“Oh, I know he got a jolt, all right,” he said with a shrug. “But I think you’ll agree with me that no problem is ever solved by running away from it. If he were an older man I’d be willing to say let it ride. But he’s got the best of his life in front of him. He can’t kiss the world good-by. Not without going to seed.”

If Joyce felt a threat in those words, she gave no sign of it.

“That’s why I didn’t want to see him living alone here,” she found the courage to confess.

“Who could?” Perlow protested as he crossed to the window and blinked out at the lonely lake misted in its curtain of falling flakes. His movement, when he finally turned back to her, was casually abrupt.

“You’re in love with him, of course?”

Joyce, overlooking the brusquerie, decided that frankness merited frankness.

“Naturally, or I wouldn’t be here.”

Perlow nodded his understanding.

“That being the case,” he promptly proceeded, “you don’t want to see him a double-barreled failure?”

“Our ideas of success,” she said after a glance at the emissary from a more turbulent world, “may not be identical.”

The other’s gesture was almost one of impatience.

“But you know he can’t succeed at this backwoods farming idea of his.”

“It seems to be the life he likes.”

“For the moment, yes. It’s probably giving him a chance to get his wires untangled. But he’s not made for this sort of thing. He’s got a brain. He can put words together like nobody’s business. And there’s work along that line waiting for him right now in the city.”

That announcement brought no happiness to the woman with the Joan-of-Arc eyes.

“Do you regard farm work as altogether ignoble?”

“Of course not,” answered the man from the city, conscious of the sharpened note in that question. “It brings us the bread of life. And butter and eggs and all that sort of thing. But Peter’s had his rest cure, or his rural interregnum, or whatever you care to call it. And when you tie a man like that up to work like this for life you’re—well, you’re wasting the best part of him. I’m not trying to say we could make a second Jimmy Sheean out of him overnight. But I know his stuff. I know what he’s done and what he can still do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

Joyce fought against the feeling of being confronted by a fifth-columnist behind her lines.

“I never tried to tie him up,” she announced in a voice touched with hopelessness.

“Good!” cried the other. “And now he’s back to normal it’s up to us to let him know what he’s losing.”

Joyce tried to keep her glance from being a combative one.

“I’ve never,” she affirmed, “regarded him as abnormal.”

Perlow’s shrug was an acknowledgment that her reproof had not been wasted on him.

“Perhaps not abnormal,” he conceded. “But we mustn’t forget he got rather a knockout wallop and got it when he was already punch-drunk from what he’d gone through at the front. His whole applecart went over. And it may have been the most natural thing in the world for him to hide away here until he could get his upset world reorganized. But he can’t go on feeding pigs and growing spuds and scratching a hay-tosser’s living from a back-concession hill farm.”

That gruffly articulated expression of her own vague fears hung a weight on Joyce’s heart.

“He’s been rather happy here,” she ventured in a voice that brought the other’s glance once more about to her shadowed face. His answering voice, in fact, seemed without its earlier brusqueness.

“And you, of course, helped him in that. You gave him what he needed. Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I know poor old Peter, and I know he wanted something more than a bedmate. He was, I think, groping for someone or something to believe in. And he seems to have believed in you.”

“Thanks,” was her slightly acid comment. That quarantining monosyllable, however, had no effect on the man confronting her.

“Oh, I’m not blaming him. I imagine you’re rather wonderful. You must be. That’s why I’m being so unforgivably frank about all this. That’s why I still think you can help me get Judd back where he belongs.”

Her impulse, in the face of an adroitness that could be sensed more easily than it could be combated, was to cry out that Judd belonged at her side, that life had taught them the need of each other. But that, she remembered, was something outsiders would never understand.

“What would you suggest?” she quietly inquired.

His quick glance went back to her face again.

“Don’t throw me out when I say this. And don’t think I’m not in dead earnest. But my first suggestion would be that you walk out on him.”

Joyce’s face showed no sense of shock. But her smile remained edged with ice.

“Wasn’t it a betrayal like that brought him where he is?” she inquired of the overvoluble molder of destinies confronting her.

Again Perlow’s glance sought her face. She was cleverer than he had counted on.

“Then he’s told you just what happened to him?”

“I know what happened,” Joyce answered with no perceptible show of emotion.

Perlow seemed to feel the need of reorganizing his own scattered lines. This woman, he felt, most unmistakably had a mind of her own. His tone became more expostulary.

“Then for God’s sake let’s get him back on his feet. Let’s get him where he belongs. He’s a misfit here, and I think you know that as well as I do.”

“He doesn’t seem to agree with us on that,” Joyce asserted. “And he has a fondness for making his own decisions.”

“But our house could use that man. It needs what he can give us. We’d even grubstake him, if we had to, until he—until he got in the swing of things again.”

“And you feel I’m anchoring him here?”

That brought a moment of hesitation to Perlow.

“I wouldn’t put it that way. But I can see how you’re sugaring his pill of isolation. If he were alone here, he wouldn’t stick it. He couldn’t. And you’d be doing him a kindness if you crowbarred him out of this backwoods rut.”

There was no enmity in Joyce’s quiet laugh.

“He doesn’t regard it as a rut. He keeps saying there’s a great future for the farmer, with so much of the world going hungry. And you’d never know how hard he works on his land.”

“But where’s that work getting him?”

Joyce pictured Judd standing in the market square at Chamboro, flailed on by falling snow as he wheedled skeptical housewives into purchasing a bag of his second-grade apples. Perlow, conscious of her none-too-happy smile, decided on another line of approach.

“But, all things considered,” he ventured, “wouldn’t a change of scene be better for you both?”

The implications in that brought a touch of color to Joyce’s thin cheek.

“I’ve nothing to run away from,” she quietly affirmed. And that affirmation left her visitor with the repeated feeling he was facing a woman with a will of her own. She was not the rural cowslip shrinking behind a hedge of shame that he had so foolishly expected to find there.

“Don’t think I’m being pharisaical and old-fashioned about all this,” he protested to the woman with the bobbed dark hair that gave her the delusive appearance of a sixteenth-century page boy. “You’ve a right to your own happiness. So long, of course, as you can keep it happiness. But now and then we have to take the long-range view of things and make sure our little Eden is built on something that’s going to last.”

“I agree with you,” Joyce said as she put wood in the stove and realized from the thinning light that evening was coming on. “But this talk doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.”

“On the contrary,” Perlow contended, “I’m learning more than you imagine. But I warn you I’m going to work on Peter when he gets back. I’m going to make that man see the light, even though it takes me half a week.”

Joyce’s smile was an abstracted one. She was remembering how, no matter what the problems and perplexities of life might be, the humble and humdrum duties of daily existence were not to be overlooked.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you,” she explained, “while I attend to my stable chores.”

“Stable chores?” the city man echoed, staring at her in amazement. “You don’t mean you have to feed horses and cows and that sort of thing?”

“Why not?” countered Joyce, smiling at his bewilderment as she arrayed herself in her rubber boots and her old trench coat. “It’s a part of the rut we’re in.”

She left him in front of the stove, with a frown of perplexity on his face and her copy of Santayana’s Last Puritan in his hand. But her outdoor tasks extended beyond the mere feeding of the farm animals. She invaded the chicken coop, captured two of her plumpest cockerels from the crowded and clucking roosts, and on Judd’s chopping block promptly beheaded them. This, she remembered as she made her broilers ready for the pan, was her partner’s first overnight visitor at Pine Brae. And, being ruralites, they had certain rural traditions to maintain.

She was still busy over her stove when the kitchen door swung open and Judd came stamping in out of the snow. He swung the door shut behind him and stood regarding her with an eye as abstracted as though she were a stranger to him.

“You didn’t sell your apples,” she said with a gasp of disappointment.

“Oh, I sold ’em all right,” was his indifferent reply. “But that isn’t the important thing. Here’s what I picked up at the post office in Buckhorn.”

“What is it?” she asked, puzzled by the unofficial appearance of the oblong of yellow paper he was holding out in front of her.

“It’s a telegram those Buckhorn fools didn’t have the decency to send down to me. It’s been lying there exactly three days.” He thrust the yellow oblong into her hands. “There’s something maddening about these hay-tossers who stay half dead in their own damn hay-tosser ruts.”

That, she felt, didn’t sound like Judd. But she had a secret knowledge of his trick of armoring his shaken spirit in shielding side issues.

“But where did it come from?” she asked after an unrewarding glance at the vague lines of writing.

“The operator at Blenheim, of course, had to send it on to our Buckhorn post office by phone. And those cracker-barrel bastards, of course, have all had a look at it.”

“Buckhorn and Blenheim both knew we hadn’t a rural phone,” she reminded her indignant mate.

“But a telegram’s a telegram.”

Joyce, still puzzled by a show of anger that seemed unreasonable to her, held the crumpled sheet closer to the lamp and studied the lines of penciled writing. Her heart tightened as she saw the words “Silver City, Nevada.” But she read on, knowing that Judd’s glance was fixed on her face.

The message, Joyce saw, was signed “Mrs. Laurence Trainor.”

Judd’s face, she also saw, was heavy with a moroseness she still found it hard to account for. He remained silent even when she handed the message back to him.

“You don’t seem very happy about it,” she said as she stooped to take her biscuits from the oven.

“I hate having my private affairs spilled all over Kent County,” he said, his wind-darkened face still darker with resentment. “It’s just like her to put that sting in the tail of a message that had to go through half a hundred hands.”

Joyce found herself unable to follow his line of reasoning.

“But the message,” she reminded him, “is rather an important one.”

“I suppose so,” he admitted as he unburdened himself of his sodden cap and overcoat. He looked tired and old and time-worn in his shabby farm clothes.

“There’s something more important waiting for you,” Joyce announced. It came home to her, as she spoke, just how much she had had him to herself. “Your old friend Perlow has come up from New York to talk to you.”

“You mean Perlow’s here?” he said with a quick look of opposition.

“He’s waiting for you in the living room.”

Judd’s laugh was quiet but tinged with gall.

“To gloat over the dirt farmer who didn’t make good!”

“I think not,” said Joyce, turning to her dish shelf so that he would be unable to read the compassion in her face.

He stood for a full minute without speaking. His unseeing eyes even followed her as she opened the trap door and went down to the cellar for a jar of preserved peaches.

She stood there, waiting until she heard his reluctant steps cross the floor above her. She heard his slightly acid salutation of “Hello, straphanger!” But she made no effort to participate in that reunion. She was glad of the closed door between them as she went on with her work.

But the broken murmur of voices from the other room touched her with a feeling of disquiet. She felt that life as she had learned to live it was being talked away from under her feet. More than once, beneath that roof, she had dreamed the encroaching lake waves had eaten away their cliff front and left their cottage perched on the crumbling edge of an abyss. And now, listening to the voice of that emissary from the outer world, she had the feeling of a nightmare catastrophe repeating itself in real life.

If Perlow ate his supper with the honest appetite of a hungry traveler he did not let his eating interfere with his talk. His unstudied flow of words, after sampling his sixth biscuit and heaping clotted cream on his preserved peaches, reminded Joyce that rural life did not tend to volubility.

Judd, she could see, was not as much at ease as he pretended. He was masking his constraint behind a responsive talkativeness that was new to him. But in that forced lightness of tone Joyce detected a sense of strain that both disturbed and distressed her. He seemed like a man finally on the defensive. It was the bar sinister on her presence there, she began to suspect, that stood at the root of his discomfort. It was the world at last invading their Eden, the world they had so foolishly tried to forget but could never completely escape.

Perlow’s smile, after lighting a cigarette over his second cup of coffee, seemed a reluctant acknowledgment that there might, after all, be something to this sort of life. But, being a man of business, he did not permit the main issue to be obscured.

“I don’t see a radio around,” he said after a glance about the room.

“You won’t,” was Judd’s prompt and rasping retort. “I’ve rather lost interest in those reports from the sick bed of civilization.”

“It may be a sick bed,” was Perlow’s equally prompt rejoinder, “but there’s nothing heroic in forsaking a patient you should be helping.”

Judd’s laugh was curt.

“Perhaps I needed a little helping myself.”

“And you seem to have got it,” acknowledged Perlow as he looked over his friend of other days. “You’ve hardened up your body. But I’d hate to see your mind hardened up.”

“Which, of course, your city life never does,” Judd taunted.

“I find it keeps you alive,” was Perlow’s almost impatient reply to that. “And I’ve never had much faith in this away-from-it-all stuff.”

“A little of that away-from-it-all stuff might be good for you. And for those arm-chair strategists and commentators who never saw three inches beyond their own nose. They might sit back and get a perspective on things.”

“Sit back?” cried Perlow. “What decent American wants to sit back when our whole ant hill of life is being trampled down by a lot of Huns and Japs and Wops? You think you can take a pill and sleep it off. You think it’s fine and dandy to stay wrapped up in the cotton wool of woodland quiet. But how are you going to feel when it’s over and you realize you sidestepped standing beside the fighters?”

Judd sat silent a moment, a new grimness about his mouth.

“Perhaps I’m doing my bit,” he finally said, “in this little cotton-wool world of my own.”

“Chopping wood and feeding chickens!” was Perlow’s impatient retort.

Joyce, watching Judd, could see a new light in his eye. But she could also see the belligerent flexing of his bony jaw. And she remembered the strain of stubbornness in his make-up.

“Anything I could do,” he said, “won’t decide this war.”

Perlow leaned closer to him.

“But you can get back into harness and do your bit. I always thought you were a fighter.”

Judd stiffened at that thrust.

“Oh, I can fight, if I have to. But battles aren’t won with typewriters.”

“And they’re not helped along by sojourns in the wilderness,” proclaimed Perlow. “Not at a time when this old world of ours is clamoring for the clearer heads to get together and map out some escape from the bloody mess.”

Judd turned away and looked at the stove. But his visitor nursed the suspicion that the man lost from life was more shaken than he would care to admit. And it was no time, Perlow felt, for pulling his punches.

“Do you intend to keep him buried here?” he demanded of the silent and slightly flushed lady at the foot of the table, the lady who plainly continued to puzzle him.

“Not against his will.”

Those four words brought a look of reproof from Judd, as though she was forsaking him for the enemy. From Perlow, at the same time, they brought a modified smile of thanks. But the smile vanished as he gazed about the none-too-opulent room.

“A little world of your own,” he ruminated aloud.

Judd, nettled by a suspicion of the derisive in that comment, remained silent. Joyce, helpless before his unhappiness, had the feeling of standing beside an operating table where surgery was effecting its essential ends.

Perlow, conscious of a wavering in the forces opposing him, leaned back in the prolonging silence and watched the smoke coils eddy up through the yellow shade of the oil lamp. Then he turned and glanced out the darkened window. “A little world of your own,” he repeated in a note of mingled wonder and unrest. He seemed to be waiting for something that failed to come to him. “But how in the name of God can you stand such quietness?”

Judd, filling his pipe with the languor of well-earned weariness, searched his housemate’s face for some sign of protest.

“We like it that way,” he stubbornly retorted.

“Do you?” the man from the city demanded of Joyce.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she promptly countered, even as she wondered if, as the man from the city claimed, the toil of farm life didn’t do something to the very mind and spirit of people. Any peace it brought seemed to come at a price.

“But not forever,” Perlow quietly protested. “Not after seeing the other side of life. It would seem too appallingly like being buried alive.”

“You’re welcome to your other side of life,” asserted Judd after searching Joyce’s face for a response he failed to find there.

“That,” said Perlow, “is what we’re going to talk about tonight.”

And talk they did, into the small hours of the morning. Joyce, stretched out on Judd’s hard bed, could hear their contending voices and catch the smell of their tobacco smoke. The feeling that they were in a world of their own brought a new sense of solitariness about her heart. Yet this, as the conference dragged on, was lost in a newer feeling, the feeling that her battered and bewildered mate would need her in his hour of indecision. She refused to think of him as a runaway fighter finally captured and facing a court-martial. But she suspected he had already discovered that peace of mind was not a matter of geography. She knew that he loved Pine Brae even as she did. But the thought of his future there, year by toiling year, filled her with disquiet. It was, as Perlow so brutally claimed, too much like being buried alive. It would hurt her lover of the soil to tear up roots and start over again. That sort of thing always did hurt. It might even seem like an acknowledgment of defeat. But the final and lasting defeat would be to accept the second-best and turn your back on adventure.

She was still awake when Judd groped his way into the room and stood hesitant beside the bed. It was only after a full minute of silence that he sat down on the edge of the hard mattress. His exploring hand, reaching out in the darkness, coasted along the upthrust curve of her hip, moved lightly along her narrowing waist, and finally found her own relaxed hand. He clung to it, as though to exact from it some needed confirmation of the unconfirmed.

“I’m not asleep,” she whispered up to him. And life, for some reason, became very simple again.

Yet she wondered, when he remained silent, why he sat there so motionless.

“Am I swimming in a vacuum?” he abruptly demanded.

She knew that the road ahead of her was not an easy one. But her first and final task was to make smoother the path of that stubborn-minded partner of hers.

“Who said you were?” she temporized, conscious of his tightening fingers.

“This man Perlow,” was the embittered reply. “And he’s been talking us out of our Eden.”

“Has it been such an Eden?” she found the courage to question.

“Not for you, I’m afraid,” was his slightly retarded answer. She gathered, from the forlornness of his voice, that her task might not be an impossible one. “Yet I hate to acknowledge I’m a failure.”

“You’re not a failure,” she contended, wondering why he released her hand, “and never will be. But it’s time we looked facts in the face.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” he concurred. “It’s what Perlow’s been telling me to do. But all it does is leave me out on a limb.”

“About going back?” she was bold enough to prompt.

As she lay wondering why he remained silent so long instinct told her he had been facing less an argument than an adjustment. And that suspicion seemed confirmed when, with suddenly clenched hands, Judd exclaimed: “I’ll show him that all bulls aren’t Ferdinands.”

“That means you’re going back,” she said, doing her best to keep any undue note of triumph out of her voice.

She was conscious of his indrawn breath and the sag of the mattress under his shifted body as he moved closer to her. The knowledge of his nearness consoled her with the thought that they were already like two trees with interwoven roots.

“I’ve got to,” he said. “I’ve got to,” he repeated, “even though it hurts.”

“Why should it hurt?” she asked, groping for his hand and failing to find it.

“Because I can see now how I was only shadow-boxing here. What I kept wanting to hear was ‘taps’ instead of ‘reveille.’ And something tells me it’s time to wake up.”

“Is that,” asked Joyce, “what your friend Perlow did to you?”

“Perlow? Oh, it goes deeper than Perlow and his palaver. I knew it all along. I knew it from the first day I walked down that orchard lane. But I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself. I suppose it’s what old-fashioned people would call duty.”

She finally succeeded in capturing his hand.

“Duty,” she repeated. “I’m glad to hear you say that word, darling. I’m terribly glad. And I’m glad you can see what’s straight ahead of you.”

“Yes, I can see it now, as clear as day,” he said as his free hand clasped the curving ridge of her shoulder. “There’s only one catch.”

“What one catch?”

“That I don’t lose you,” he said as he leaned closer over her.

It was not the answer she had expected. But, being a woman, she wrung her own secret joy out of the fierceness with which those five short words were uttered. The mortal sweetness of loving and being loved made other issues seem trivial.

“You won’t,” she said, her hand still in his. She hoped that declaration would bring the clasp of his arms about her. But Judd, immured in his own thoughts, remained motionless.

“It would be taking you into a new world,” he foolishly protested.

Joyce, after bridging the ellipsis, laughed a little.

“I’m used to change,” she quietly affirmed.

That held him a moment.

“But am I worth sticking to?”

Her fingers tightened on his hard-muscled arm.

“Whither thou goest,” she intoned, “I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.”

She could not be sure, in the darkness, but she felt that he was smiling. And she knew, even before he spoke, that a decision had been made and sealed.

“It will be another fight,” he reminded her. “And we can’t face it with the odds against us.”

“What odds?” she demanded.

His answer was not an immediate one. He turned to the window and looked out at the curve of the drive where the headlights of an outlaw car had once flared insolently in his face.

“There’s been one unsavory mess cleared up around here,” he said as he turned back to the woman on the bed. “And I guess it’s about time to clear up the other.”

She knew what he meant well enough. But she rebelled against the manner in which his message was phrased.

“It hasn’t been unsavory,” she contended, with a catch in her voice.

“Not to us,” he contended with no show of happiness in his quietly spoken words. “But it certainly was to Buckhorn.”

“Is Buckhorn important?” demanded Joyce.

Judd, before answering her, sat pondering the ancient problem of how and why an earthly passion should seem bigger than mere goodness and badness.

“Perhaps it isn’t,” he said with a new note of determination. “But when I motor Perlow in to Chamboro tomorrow I’m going to do something else. Have you a birth certificate?”

Joyce pondered that curt question.

“Yes, of course,” she answered. “It’s tucked away in one of my old passports.”

“I’ll need it in town tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to bring home a ring and a license—and a bag of rice we can throw at ourselves. Then we’ll go to our reverend friend in Buckhorn and put their minds at rest.”

The man beside her, Joyce knew, was shielding the momentous behind a sadly transparent mask of flippancy. Catching her cue from him, she forced a second inconsequential little laugh.

“Mrs. Bangham will still disapprove of us.”

Judd sat up in the darkness.

“There’ll be no Mrs. Banghams where we’re going,” he said.

But that thought of a traverse to another world sent a wave of sadness through him. He looked out the window at the snow-covered garden slope and the wide expanse of the lake that lay under its blanketing sky, the lake that would always be there, dark and wide and alluring to the eye, the lake that had given depth to their daily outlook.

“But don’t run away with the idea I’ll ever give up Pine Brae,” he said with an unexpected note of passion. “I’m going to keep this farm.”

She had no wish to combat his allegiance to the land, even though it seemed an unreasoning one. But somebody, she felt, had to be a realist in that partnership.

“How can you,” she asked, “if we’re going away?”

That phrase, “going away,” held him arrested for a moment. His voice, when he spoke, was almost listless.

“I imagine I can arrange with Spike Slocum to take over my stock and crop, and keep an eye on things. That’ll give us something to come back to.”

“Come back to?” she echoed.

“In the summers, when we’re tired of stone and steel and getting the inkstains off our fingers.”

Joyce, leaning on her elbow, looked out to where the wide line of the lake lost itself in the receding gray of the sky.

“Who was it said that when we go away we die a little?” she asked with a small tremolo in her voice.

Judd groped back to her in the darkness.

“You once said there must be no regrets,” he reminded her. But his own voice was not as steady as it should have been.

“No regrets,” she dutifully repeated, grateful for the certainty of his nearness in a world that still seemed full of uncertainties. But a small and secret barb of anxiety that had been tearing at her breast vanished when he leaned closer in the darkness and took her in his arms, as she had been waiting for him to do.

The next ten days were not happy days for Judd. He found that it took more than a birth certificate and a five-dollar bill to make smooth his path of retrieval. The law he had flouted even seemed designed to make difficult the pious intention of the penitent. Since he stubbornly refused to have the banns proclaimed in the local church, it was necessary, he discovered, to forward to the provincial secretary in Toronto a duly certified copy of his divorce decree; an affidavit enumerating the details of that decree; another supplying corroboration of domicile; and an acknowledgment and affirmation, in the prescribed departmental form, of sole responsibility, executed by both applicants for the license, accompanied by the legal opinion of a solicitor that the divorce was valid in Ontario.

“The seventh commandment,” Judd complained, “hasn’t the ghost of a chance with red tape like that.”

“It’s the penalty,” said the quietly smiling Joyce, “of having a black-velvet past.”

But as Judd’s indignation deepened, while waiting for his essential papers, the snows also deepened along the wind-swept Ridge. By the time all was in order, in fact, and the sad-eyed Amos Bangham had agreed to the hour and day of the ceremony, the drifts between the lakeside cottage and the road made the use of the truck out of the question. So Judd in his old ulster and Joyce in her belted trench coat and her fleece-lined rubber boots trudged soberly to Buckhorn and entered the pallid-fronted parsonage from which an outraged Mrs. Bangham promptly and indignantly absented herself by way of the side door, herding her numerous progeny as she went.

Joyce, glimpsing that migration, found consolation in the solemn faces of Spike Slocum and his wife, waiting there in their constricted Sunday-best to act as witnesses.

The less solemn man and woman from Pine Brae were not long in the parsonage, which smelled of boiling cabbage and creosotic cough-medicines. When they emerged from the house with the windows that looked like blinded eyes they declined to ride home with the Slocums, who remained vaguely depressed by a ceremony in which so much seemed missing.

“It will be tough goin’,” Spike reminded them.

“We like it that way,” proclaimed Judd as he glanced down at Joyce to see if she harvested anything prophetic in that casual reminder.

But Joyce remained silent as they crossed the village street and picked up their mail at the post office. They then proceeded to the wooden-fronted grocery, where they bought matches and sugar and half a pound of tea.

“A half-pound will do us until we’re packed,” Joyce announced as they went trudging homeward through the blue-white drifts whose ridges took on a pallid coloring of rose between them and the lowering sun. Those drifts prevented them, most of the time, from walking arm in arm. “Until we leave,” Joyce murmured, her gaze on the farm slopes that seemed tinged with a new and foreign beauty, a beauty touched with the sadness inherent in all things being seen and done for the last time.

But Judd turned his back on any surrender to the emotional. That only led out to a pathway as uncertain as the drift ice that streaked in broken lines of silver along the dark blue of the lake. He stopped when Joyce stopped, after facing the wind that cut sharper across the Chinnick farm, and watched her as she took the woollen glove from her hand and glanced down at the band of gold on her finger.

“Is it still there?” he asked, his voice caustic but his smile not unkindly.

Joyce nodded.

“And it will stay there,” she said with a note of intensity that made Judd suspect a second voice might thereafter sway his worldly decisions. He glanced down at the ring again.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit too big,” he observed in an effort to keep things to the commonplace.

Joyce nodded and drew on her glove. She resisted the impulse to say: “Like your faith in me!” She realized the need of keeping everything down to the casual. One had to pick one’s steps, she remembered, where there was a mounded grave or two along the way.

“I can wrap some darning wool around it,” she announced as they trudged on again. “That’ll keep it from slipping off until——”

She did not finish the sentence. The future, she contended, could take care of itself. She agreed with Marius that the secret of happiness was to drain what you could from the passing day. But a moment later she was wondering if her fire would be out by the time they had fought their way down through the orchard lane.

It was as they came to the half-buried gate pillars of Pine Brae that Judd stopped and turned back to her. There was, apparently, something on his mind.

“That ring make you feel any different?” he asked with a challenging sort of gruffness which she accepted as largely defensive.

“Not a bit,” was her dutifully prompt reply. It was also slightly defiant.

But Judd, staring down over his snow-covered acres, felt that she was in some way being cheated. Women demanded glamour at a time like that. And there had been no glamour.

“It wasn’t very impressive, was it?” he ventured, with a head nod toward the village they had left behind them.

“Not with that smell of cabbage from the kitchen,” Joyce said with a laugh that impressed her husband, for all its effort at indifference, as infinitely brave.

The thought that she would always be brave drained away his ghostly fears of the future. But it disturbed him to think of the tremendous amends he would some day have to make to her. His bony and wind-reddened face, as he looked down at her, lost a little of its grimness.

He was thinking, not of her beauty, but of her valor. For with valor there would and could be no defeat.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of Intruders in Eden, by Arthur Stringer]