Dangerous Business/Chapter 21
The great regatta made ready under a fair wind; a west wind it was, mostly, a sort of sirocco from the sun-parched prairie, dry and hot. On the harbor jetties and piers, on the docks and breakwaters where the crowds collected, there was stark, staring sum heat; on the verandas of the Chicago Yacht Club, looking out over the big harbor and beyond it to the stake boat, was shade—ninety-two in the shade.
Three hundred and thirty miles away, at the tip of Lake Huron where the tiny isle of Mackinac lay like an emerald goal, it was ten degrees cooler only. Heat lay over all the lakes—violent, fiery July heat; but the wind was Steady and almost abeam, wherefore the crew of the Arletta smiled and sang, and hung a cap over the barometer. For the Arletta was a fair-weather boat, light and fast. Seldom could a sloop stay in sight with her, when all canvas was spread; she liked to lean before the wind and skurry and skim.
If she had to reef and trim, that was another matter; but her crew, with a cap hiding the barometer, did not consider it. They were committed to moderate weather; so, moderate weather must there be, whatever the mercury in the hidden barometer tried to tell them and whatever the forecaster cried.
A cannon fired—the warning gun! And the score of sail—schooners, yawls and sloops—luffed, jibed and jock-eyed for the start. Outside the harbor, now, all of them; outside but short of the line between the jetty and the stake boat.
A gun again! The schooners were off—the big ships of the racing fleet, two masts, mainsail, foresail, topsail and jibs. Heavy weather boats, they; wind and wave, they hoped for, particularly the Vega, first across the line.
Jay, at the Arletta's helm, put about and waited. Hot! He was brown, browner than his hair which, as he tanned, seemed bleached by the sun. Brown were his hands on the wheel, deeper brown than Ellen Powell's but lacking the clear smoothness of her color.
She was not here, of course. She was not even in Chicago, either upon the shore or in any of the big buildings under the sun there in the west; but, recently, he had been watching her hands become brown like a Brahmin's—her smooth, slim hands which he liked. She was north; she'd gone home. Her father, on his last voyage down, had taken her to the Soo because his father was away. Hot!
It was very hot, close to a hundred, in southern Illinois where old Stanley Alban lay and might not be moved. The heat did not help him; he endured it and prayed; and his friend, his best and closest friend since old John Rountree passed away, John Rountree's son, sat at his bedside, reading the Bible and praying with him. Lew also was there. It was no time for Lew to be neglectful.
The gun! The yawls were off—two masts, a jib and a big mainsail and a jigger. The next would be for sloops, and Jay luffed and put about quickly. He had a knack of timing, a feel for speed and for seconds which put in his hands the helm at the start. Ken Howarth, owner and skipper, stood smiling beside him; and Lyman, who was on from Newport, watched Jay's hands and the pilot of the sloop Saracen, bearing away a hundred yards ahead.
She spread identical canvas with the Arletta, from jib-point to topsail. She matched the Arletta in length and beam. Among the sloops, it was, likely, the Arletta to beat the Saracen or the other way about.
Jay glanced at the Saracen and beyond to the stake boat and with his eyes he traced the starting-line to the shore.
"They have it," said Ken Howarth, suddenly nervous. They had the start, he meant; they were timed to the third gun and would cross with its echo, leading the Arletta by a hundred yards, Ken thought.
Jay did not think so; but he did not even shake his head; he stared at the shore; and, for those seconds, he was not even thinking of the race. He'd be cut off from shore, suddenly he realized, for two days and nights and the Lord of the Four Winds only knew how much longer. Cut off, that meant, from the waiting in these last days for word of Stanley Alban, and of Lida.
Not such word as was expected from Stanley, did he fear from Lida; a very opposite word, indeed—news of birth, the exact contrary of death, but with a possibility of death, too, of course. But he could do nothing about it, afloat or ashore. He did not know so much as where Lida was; she had not told him and her mother refused all information.
Ken Howarth clapped him on the back. Lyman called to him: "We got it!" The start, they meant, for the Saracen was ahead of the gun; she was at the line and, not to cross, had to come into the wind, sails flapping.
A puff of smoke! The sound! The gun! And the bowsprit of the Arletta was at the line, with jibs, mainsail, topsail, every inch of canvas drawing. They were across and away with the Saracen astern and to leeward.
It was only the start, and what were yards' advantage and a few seconds in three hundred and thirty miles of crow-flight course—five hundred or six, perhaps, sailing? But it was the start, and they had it.
"Steamboat track!" called Ken. "Straight to Point Betsie!"
Two hundred and three miles away, as a steamboat never swerving from its compass course would log it, north by east and across the lake, beckoned Point Betsie. Clear water all the way, ninety fathoms below them.
Jay gave over the helm to Ken and stretched out on the deck, forward. Lyman lounged comfortably beside him, talking.
They liked each other and the same sort of things: effort of nerve and muscle, a bit of bucking the elements, a bit of depending upon yourself, a bit of risk. Jay, from his schooling, knew the East; Lyman, from visits to his cousins, knew the West, as he called Chicago.
They leaned on their elbows, watching the sails racing them, and talked rig and jib patterns. Now and then Jay remembered that Lyman was a buyer and he was a seller; indeed, that Lyman held, perhaps, the fate of the future of Rountree. But Lyman did not know this. Jay wondered if Lyman remembered even that he was a buyer and Jay a seller. Lyman gave no sign of it, whatever.
Nobody needed the cap hung over the barometer, so nobody picked it up; but the radio set in the little cabin brought in, at six, the weather warning. No harm in hearing it and now you might as well see what the glass said. It agreed with the forecaster completely.
Lyman lit the kerosene stove and Jay beat up batter for flapjacks.
"Mix a lot, Jay," urged Lyman. "This is probably the last time anything will stick to the top of the stove. We'll feed both watches while our appetites are with us. I'll be bus boy." And while Jay cooked, Lyman served the watch on deck.
There was a midnight moon, and land was lost. Under the moon, the fleet—schooners, yawls and sloops—was spread over the lake ahead, astern and on both beams. Tiny jewels of light, emerald and ruby, marked the hulls. The moon showed the sails, and a sloop—the Saracen, probably, she was too far off for a hail—lay even with the Arletta but far to the lee. A disadvantage, perhaps; but also perhaps not, for if the wind swung around with a change in the weather, the positions with respect to the wind would be reversed and they would have the windward position.
Calm had come with the moon—a too sudden, ominous calm; the steady, hot sirocco from the prairies had blown itself out, and now there were dead doldrums in which the water seemed to drag like weeds in the Sargasso sea. But the water was clear like black glass. All through the fleet, balloon jibs, fisherman sails and spinnakers were spread to catch every capful of wind. To the west, down by the watery horizon, lightning flashed and forked.
"Heat lightning," Jay said; for the stillness was very hot, Rolling over the stars came a curtain—clouds, black clouds—and squalls struck the sails. Some took it behind, some took it abeam, some headed into it. Spinnakers came down; balloon jibs and topsails. The fleet was scattering.
The masthead lantern and the red and green lights of a steamer approached. It hailed the Arletta.
"There's a big blow on the way."
"We know it," the skurrying Arletta acknowledged. "You better get in to Gary."
The lightning, leaping from cloud to cloud, became attracted to the lake. Down forked the flashes; down, down and spreading. Distant, at first; four flashes came before the thunder. Then the thunder caught up and was continuous. The squalls stopped. Here was the blow! The lightning showed it coming out of the north. There it struck a schooner's sails; there it carried a yawl's topmast away.
Under jib and reefed mainsail, the Arletta leaned on the starboard tack and skimmed a sloop on the port tack. Lyman shouted to Jay: "This is what they don't believe, when I tell 'em east. The sea can show nothing as sporty. You got to have your water in the center of a continent to work up wind like this."
Then the wind really came, and the Arletta tried to take it. The mast stood; the stays strained but did not snap. Below, not above, was the damage; for the foot of the mast, though it stood, opened seams and water rushed in.
Jay and Lyman bent to the pumps. Pump, pump, pump it went, by hand and arm, with back bent. Pump, pump, to stay afloat at all. Pump; an hour on, an hour off while the port watch pumped, pumped, pumped. Your turn again, yours and Lyman's to pump and pump.
A good thing, training; a good thing, to be used to pull, pull, pull at your oar in a race for four miles. But that, after twenty minutes, was over. No end to this; none in sight; but Lyman and Jay, pumping, made it a sort of Harvard-Yale event against the crew of the Saracen, who were Cornell and Princeton. Jay called like a coxswain to Lyman: "Come up, Yale; come up! Princeton's rowing thirty-six." And, like a Harvard coxswain, Lyman yelled back at Jay.
Rain followed the big blow, blinding, squall-swept rain through which, toward dawn, beat the sound of a steamer's whistle.
Ken replied with the foghorn. Ken had been below, taking his turn at the pumps, but he happened to be on deck for this. It was still so dark that he held flashlights and played them on the sail to increase the chance of being seen; and the steamer came so close that it hailed:
"Want help? Want help?"
Ken called to his crew and replied: "We're racing, thanks; thank you, but we're racing!"
They never had another hail; they never saw another sail that day, through which the wind blew rain and rain and they pumped to keep afloat, navigating by guess largely and seasick, some of them.
Jay wasn't; nor Lyman. Off watch, they consumed crackers and cheese and sardines and, paired at the pumps, they did double time twice.
Shore stood to starboard; they sighted Point Betsie with Frankfort Harbour below but never thought of putting in. They pumped and passed the Sleeping Bear; now the Manitous in a mist of rain. They pumped on.
Ile Aux Galets shoals—"Skilagalee" (the graveyard of the Lakes)—took its turn at them. The steering gear smashed, the wheel-box split, the rudder was useless. So they stripped to a storm jib (pumping meanwhile) and made repairs which let them hoist sail and which held through the Straits and into Huron!
They finished! Seventy-two hours out, indeed—three days and three nights from the start—but they finished. Nine sail ahead of them. The Vega of course and other schooners; yawls, too; and sloops, which had been built for heavy weather; but not the Saracen, light like the Arletta.
"Saracen?" Lyman Howarth hailed. "Where is she?"
"In Charlevoix! They were taken in, sinking."
At this, Lyman hugged his partner of the pumps and did a dance. "Outpumped 'em, b'God; we pumped out Cornell and Princeton!"
The sun was smiling on the little strait between Mackinac and Round Island. The wind had died; only a breeze was blowing, and the Arletta, having finished, lazily was seeking the shelter of the shore. Jay sat at the stem, very tired; sleep, he wanted, nothing but sleep. Scarcely could he keep his eyes open to the motor-craft and sails which witnessed and cheered the finish.
Suddenly he started up, eyes wide and staring at a little white catboat which had come up under the Arletta's lee. A bareheaded girl was standing at the stern, steering with a bare, brown little forearm thrusting at the tiller. Skillfully she brought her boat in close without any interference, while she gazed at the Arletta's crew gathered astern. Jay she did not at first see, for he was forward and she had to look under the sail, but he recognized her.
He leaped up and ran aft and she saw him. "Oh!" she cried out; just that, "Oh!" for all of them to hear, and she put over her helm, steering away again. They all watched her, little and brown and hiding her face with confusion after her cry.
"Friend of yours, Jay?" Ken asked him.
"Catch her," said Jay, reckless in his arousal from his exhaustion. "Catch her!" he begged and Ken obliged him. Jay ran forward again but this time to lee and, as the boats came close, he called to Ellen Powell: "I'm coming aboard!"
She replied not a word but looked him over from head to foot and her little brown arm pulled at her tiller, bringing the catboat almost against the big sloop so that Jay leaped and was aboard with her. Instantly, she let the sheet run; the boats separated. They were off by themselves, he and Ellen and a boy who was her brother.
Jay shook hands with the boy: "Hello," Jay said to him. "Hello; you're Ted." For Ted had come, last summer, with his father to Chicago and had visited the office. To Ellen, Jay said nothing at all but sat on the side opposite the sail and looked at her. Amazingly, his exhaustion was fled; he might never have seen a pump; he might have slept for eight hours, instead of snatches of minutes through the last three nights; he felt wonderfully excited.
"You had a time," said Ellen to him. "You surely had a time."
Still he said nothing to her and he never turned his head to the Arletta. She and he, and Ted, were sailing away from Mackinac and the fleet. "Where should I take you?" asked Ellen, as though he had come aboard for his convenience. "You want to go in?"
Jay shook his head. "Where would you go by yourselves?"
"We'd be going home now," she said.
"Mind taking me along?"
"Mind?" she repeated. "Mind?" Her gray eyes looked away from him to the water and returned to him to glance from his bare head to his canvas-shod feet. "You've been soaked through," she said.
Jay laughed. "Not through much." He was in shirt and canvas trousers. "We got dried this noon."
His sudden excitement was subsiding to a satisfaction made for him by the nearness of this girl in a white linen dress and with bare, smooth brown arms, with a slim, brown hand on the tiller and whose canvas-tipped toes did not quite touch the bottom of the boat, as she sat at the stern—as her leather-tipped toes always had failed, when she sat in his father's big chair, quite to touch the floor.
How utterly unlike that office girl was this Ellen Powell of the sail and tiller, with little strands of her hair blown before her face! But how, then, was he so completely comfortable at having come aboard, as he had, and at having remained with her?
Far, far away from Mackinac, he glanced back and, recollecting his leap, he cared not at all what his mates might be saying of him. Without that sudden, reckless impulse to board this boat, and without having yielded to it, he would not be here; and here he was completely content to be.
She brought the catboat to a wide, sandy beach below a green hillside whereon was a white house which they had seen from across the strait. They climbed up to it together; and not yet did Jay's exhaustion return. But at the odors of dinner—he thought it was dinner but it was meat and vegetable soup for supper—he was ravenous.
Ellen's mother would not have him wait; she brought him a pitcher of milk and he drank and drank.
"I ought to ask for wires," he said to Ellen. "They would be forwarded to Mackinac."
"I'll phone over for you," Ellen said, watching his eyelids droop.
"I'll take a short nap before dinner," said Jay, "if I may."
Ellen led him to the "best" room where he flung himself face downward on the bed and was asleep almost before she left the door. She lingered, listening, near his door. Toward bedtime for the household (nine o'clock) her mother suggested waking him, for the supper which she had kept ready. "He'll sleep better," her mother said. "I fear he'll wake in the night, hungry."
But Ellen wanted him left to sleep, so her mother stole in, while Ellen held a lamp outside the door, and her mother was satisfied to draw over him a blanket, for the cool of the northern night had come. Ellen had a glimpse of him in a shaft of light from the lamp she held—a glimpse of his brown head and his arms flung beside his head, like a child sleeping, face to the bed. He never stirred.
She retreated, at last, to her room where she lay listening and dreaming, with sleepless suspense, in the dark. It was almost like her dream of him with her under shade trees; better than her dream, in some ways, to have him here. But what did it mean that, seeing her, he had leaped to her boat? What did it mean that he was here? In the dark she listened for sound of stir from him, happy and fluttering with fright. Happy? Never, never in all her life had she suspected happiness like this; and never, this fright.
Cockcrow awakened Jay; cockcrow and the clear, slanting shafts of the northern sunrise. It was later than dawn, for the house was on the west slope and the sun had to surmount the hilltop before sending its yellow beams through the windows. Jay stretched and he studied the white ceiling. He looked through one window and saw the strait; through another and he gazed upon a garden sparkling with dew: blue larkspur and Canterbury bells and, beside the window, purple and white and pink morning-glory. Cockcrow and the cluck of hens.
He fingered the blanket, drawn over him by someone during the night. He recollected how he had seen Ellen under the Arletta's sail and he had called to Ken to catch her and, without regard for anyone else, he had leaped aboard her little boat. He recollected, and for the moment relived, his complete content as he had sat watching her, sailing with her to this place, her home.
He realized that, in his exhaustion, he had done exactly what he had wanted to do. If he had not been spent, he must have forbidden himself and controlled himself. Perhaps, if he had not been so wholly spent, he might not himself have known what he had wanted to do, but his exhaustion had stripped him of pretense and inhibition; it had made him, for that hour, utterly free; and so, seeing her, he had leaped to join her; and here he was, in her home.
He sat up; he arose and straightened his clothes and brushed his hair. Through the wide open windows, the morning breeze blew cool and the sunlight lay clear and clean; a waft of wood smoke reached him and he heard the pleasant crackling of a wood fire. He stepped from his room and soon came upon her.
Ellen was laying the breakfast table. She had a great blue bowl of strawberries in her hands—gray eyes lifted to his, smooth brown cheeks and her brown hands on a blue bowl of red berries. She was in a blue and white gingham dress.
She put down the bowl, slowly, not looking at it for looking at him. "Good morning," she said; and he damned within him the loss of his exhaustion; for, having destroyed his denials and pretenses, it had fled and left him with self-control clamped upon him again so that he could not do what he wanted to.
He longed to seize, in each of his own, her little brown hands releasing the bowl; he longed to draw her, by her hands, to him and then suddenly grasp her in his arms, crushing not her—oh, he would not hurt her at all—but he would crush the ironed, provoking smoothness of her fresh gingham dress.
Instead of all this (and this would not have been all!) he had to say, because he had slept, "I was awfully informal with you, yesterday." (But nothing to what he would do to-day!)
"I'm glad you were," she said; and asked: "You slept?"
"The clock around," he admitted. Where was his office Ellen in this blue and white cotton dress? Here, or he could not long for this girl so; impossible, simply from having sailed with her and seen her again this morning, to long so for a stranger; but he felt and, in spite of his having slept, he said:
"You're a sort of a sister of Ellen Powell, aren't you?"
"If you want me to be," she said; and crimson confusion overcame her.
"I don't," he denied swiftly and walked out, by himself.
What message might be for him this morning? What from Lida or of Stanley Alban? Might Lida, in these three days, have sent for him; or Stanley Alban died?
"I phoned to Mackinac," Ellen told him, when he returned. "There were no messages." It was like the office only for a moment; at the next, her mother and sisters and the two boys were about him and he sat down with the family to such a breakfast as never had been spread before him. Sometimes Ellen waited upon him; sometimes her mother; sometimes the smallest of the three girls passed him a dish with her tiny brown hands, very competent (like Ellen's) and with big gray eyes (very like Ellen's) seriously lifted to his.
By all canons of conduct, this self-invited guest should have departed after breakfast, but it was the last thing he desired to do; so he compromised by taking a walk with Ted along old Indian trails which led, here and there, to sudden, silent clearings planted to squash and beans and corn and to weathered cabins from which the black, beady eyes of Chippewa squaws and children observed them. Jay wanted to return to the house, the home where Ellen was.
Noon came on, still, sunny and cloudless but not hot. There was no wind to stir the leaves of beech and maple; the silver poplar scarcely flicked in the sun; yet the strait was not quite calm. You could see from the hillside the sparkle of ripples and you felt cooled by a current of air which failed to disturb the trees. Wood insects droned and hummed, and bees were at the pink clover blossoms.
It was the hour for a swim and Ted had borrowed a suit for Jay. Ellen in bathing suit went with her sisters down to the beach, where Jay and the boys ran foot-races.
Strange to approach him, with her arms bare, her shoulders almost bare, her legs bare and with her blue bathing suit clinging close to her body; strange but not at all unpleasant. He glanced at her as he glanced at her sisters, and he gave one hand to Ann (who was the littlest one) while Ellen held to Ann's other hand and together the three of them splashed into the water.
His body was like her picture of him at his oar, only now he showed no strain at all; he was laughing and he swung Ann high. He liked Ann; he liked the other two girls and the boys; he liked—oh, yes, Ellen knew that he liked her.
They left Ann in the shallow water and swam out, he and she, side by side to the catboat, upon which he clambered ahead of her and gave her a hand, pulling her up. Side by side she sat with him, barelegged and wet.
She had had an idea, when undressing, of keeping Ann with her, but her shyness was gone. It was only pleasant to be with him; pleasant and very exciting. He waited for her to dive and she poised, for a half second, in a bit of a panic. How she wanted to dive well!
She did it; she took the water perfectly, her little brown hands first and her little brown feet last disappearing, so that he praised her when she came up. And he dived in after her.
Dinner at late noonday.
How long could he let himself stay? He phoned to Mackinac and was told, "A telegram."
After it was read to him, he talked with Lyman Howarth. "Our crew is motoring back," he said to Ellen, when he went on a walk with her. "They're leaving the boat for repairs. Couple of men drive down this way to-night. I'll go to the main road at ten to meet them. Can I stay here till then?"
Ellen was slow to speak, for her disappointment; she had dreamed of perhaps another day. "I wish you could stay"—she wanted to say "forever" but she could only say, "much longer."
"I've got to go," he said. "Stanley Alban's dead."
"Oh!" She started up, as though at an alarm.
Suddenly, like the end of a spell, she was swept from the enchantment of her day. He and she were alone on a hilltop under pines between which the sun streamed with afternoon radiance. They had dropped to a soft, brown carpet of pine needles and, from the shade of the jackpine, they looked over the strait, over islets and to the opposite shore and over sail and ships between, but they were returned, in sight of it all, to the office and to another relation.
"Father wired me," Jay said; and he added, unthinking, "There was no other message." None from Lida, he meant, but he had not told Ellen he had wanted word of her. However, Ellen had known it. "Messages," he had said last night, when she spoke of phoning over; now he had one but, Ellen guessed, not the other expected message.
"I've got to go," Jay repeated. "I must go to Stanley as quickly as I can." And he sat silent, thinking of the old man who had died and who had maintained, to his last breath, the epoch of his own youth and loyalty to his friend's son. Jay thought of his father in the old man's silent home and the gathering, in the front room, of the elders of the church which Jay's grandfather and old Stanley together had established; he thought of them on their knees at prayer and his father with them. Then he thought of Lew, but he spoke to Ellen of Stanley.
"He was a fine old man, narrow and self-righteous as the dickens," said Jay, "but he stood for something; and he certainly stood by us. I liked him; in small separated doses," he qualified honestly. "I'm going down there out of respect to him. Lew will be sneering in his sleeve at me, I know. He'll say I came even to a funeral for business."
Ellen offered no comment; she was sifting through her brown fingers the dried pine needles and her heart was thumping and thumping. Every mention of Lew was like a tocsin, arousing her.
"I'll go down no matter what Lew thinks," Jay continued, "though I'll be only adding to his pleasure at spilling us as soon as he gets around to it, now. He'll not cut us off next week; it'd hardly be decent. Besides, he's the sort that likes to kill slowly; but b'God," said Jay, under his breath, "I've a chance to beat him; to live without him, I mean." He looked out over the lake. "We had rather a rotten time racing up here, you know," Jay added suddenly, making his first voluntary reference to it.
"I knew," said Ellen, keeping her eyes on the pine needles. "That's why I went to meet you. I wasn't sure all the sloops would finish—with everybody aboard." And she had not admitted that before.
"We were all right," said Jay, "but it was no loaf. Lyman Howarth and I spent a fair amount of time at the pumps; and there was a while when we had an exaggerated idea of . . . whether we'd be all right, really. Well, Lyman and I were rather thrown together, anyone'd say. He never dished me and he feels I didn't dish him. We never talked business; we never thought business, either, but . . . well, Lyman and I . . ." Jay groped vainly for a word.
"You built your Baptist church together," Ellen offered, surprisingly.
"What?"
Ellen looked up at him, flushing. "Your grandfather and old Mr. Alban built a Baptist church together fifty years ago, and so he's stuck with you ever since," she quietly said. "Lyman Howarth and you started something of the same sort inside you. I thought so, when I heard you talking to him on the phone."
"We started something," Jay said, "and nothing could turn it sourer than for me to ask him for business." He winced at the idea. "Can you imagine it? Even on the business side, it would be the one worst move; but wait and say nothing, and Lyman will work the account around to me."
He struck his fist in the palm of his hand. "But we have to have time—time—and hold Alban, somehow. Lyman can't go to his father and say 'give our business to a failing concern.' We have to be going, and going strong to get Howarth; and never let them guess how we need them."
He flung himself back and lay looking up at the trees; and Ellen longed to move nearer him.
"It's come up to me, hasn't it?" he asked; and she knew exactly what he meant, as she followed his thought to his father in the home of his father's dead friend.
She thought, as Jay was thinking, of his father having dealt through all his business life chiefly—and indeed as far as was possible to him—with things in preference to dealing with people, because he had no knack of dealing with people. John Rountree, in fact, distrusted people; he did not really like them; he trusted, instead, things and liked to deal in things; he understood things; he did not understand personal relations.
Once, he had done well because his father had dealt in personal relations sufficiently to make a lifelong friend of Stanley Alban, and the son had inherited this friend who had stood by him until this day. Moreover, at the start, there had been no competitors; so people had to come to John Rountree and he could succeed, dealing only in things. But conditions changed and required personal relations with many sorts of people; and John Rountree, having no knack for them, forbade them and called them outrageous and wrong.
Suddenly Ellen's breast was aflutter as she gazed at Jay, in the sunlight and spotted shade of the trees, and there was made clear to her the roots of the hostility between his father and him which had enlisted her with him before ever she had seen him.
Jay had been born with the knack to prosper through his liking for people and theirs for him; it endowed him with ability to succeed by merely forming personal relations which set at nothing and ignored the father's training to things; and this, to his father, was what was wrong in the world. His father wouldn't have it, in the world; but his father could not alter it, so he took out his grudge against it in the world by bitter determination to break it and deny it in his son.
Lucky for him he couldn't, Ellen thought. Where would Mr. Rountree be, after burying Stanley Alban, if Jay had gone his father's way and not taken to people and rowed and played around New London with the Howarths and sailed this race with them?
"Yes; it's up to you," Ellen said, whispering.
"What, d'you figure, can I do about Lew?"
She leaped up and he put up a hand and caught one of hers in surprise at her excitement. "It's late," she cried, explaining. "We must be going back."
Against the evening coolness, and for the night drive to the main road, she gave him a coat of her father's. Ted accompanied them but he stayed with the little car at the crossroad, while Ellen and Jay walked away.
Stars gleamed, the Dipper and Cassiopeia and Andromeda. Were they stale as ever to Lida to-night? Jay wondered. Where was she? And might she send for him to-morrow?
Light spread before the northern stars, a dim, greenish glow creeping up and up; it brightened and became serrated and flowed in folds like a curtain of shining cloth, and one great beam reached and reached toward the zenith. Now the whole curtain moved and shifted its folds; it seemed to crackle. You seemed to see it crackling, not hear it. Light, light glowed and crackled in the sky, and the curtain was shattered; shafts of lights swayed and danced, separated, approached, parted and joined again!
"The dead dance," whispered Ellen. "This is what the Indians say. You can believe it a night like this."
"Suppose Stanley Alban's there?" asked Jay—or Lida's restless soul? This he did not say, nor did he think of Lida lost. Not Lida, but the lights kept her in his mind. Suddenly, while Ellen and he watched, the dead tired of their dance; the Aurora dimmed away.
In the dark he grasped Ellen's slim little hand; motor lights, from the north, gleamed far up the road.
"I don't like to leave this place," said Jay. "I don't like to leave you. I'd like to stretch out this day and keep you."
"I'd like to keep you," said Ellen. Her hand drew in his as though she would take it away but suddenly seized his again, and he grasped hers, clinging to her. He would have grasped and enfolded her and held to him the little brown body he had seen this day. He wanted her lips; he wanted her lips as never he had Lida's lips; he wanted to slip an arm down and lift her and in his arms hold her against his breast and kiss her and whisper to her, lips on hers; he wanted her hands upon his face, where so often had been Lida's; he wanted her.
He began to be able to see her, eyes lifted to his; brighter, he wanted it. But this was not the Aurora; it was motor headlights. He had to step from her; he had to let her go.
"Good-by," she whispered. "Good-by, Jay."
"Ellen," he said; but he had lost his chance for more. He could keep only her hand a few seconds longer. "Ellen, good-by," he said and stepped out on to the road.