CHAPTER I. "As the ship left the harbor, and went outside to the open Atlantic, she encountered a heavy sea. It was so rough that the majority of the passengers disappeared below. I didn't suffer in the least, and didn't go to the cabin for two or three hours. There I found that my new friend was in his bed with the very malady he had predicted for me." A GRASS OVERCOAT. A GRASS OVERCOAT. The Doctor took another glance at the barometer, and discovered something. The mercury was stationary! "Why, I suppose I'm to find there a road down Cole's Creek to Clifton." "She ain't awa-ay." "No, the doctor said 'plunged,' but--did Ned Fer'--who put that into your head?" It was a sweet mercy in her to change the subject, and tactful to change it to Charlotte, as if Charlotte were quite an unrelated theme. The cousins vied with each other ever so prettily in telling how beautiful the patient was on her couch of enfeeblement and pain, how her former loveliness had increased, and what new nobility it had taken on. That any such problem overhung her life as that which we had just been weighing, seemed never to have entered their thought, and if they had ever conceived of a passion already conscious between Charlotte and Ferry, they veiled the fact with charming feminine art. "What are you playing at?" the Doctor demanded, glancing at the crumpled bonnet of his car. "It's a wonder I didn't kill you." Here, however, the discussion came to an abrupt conclusion, for something was happening to the Clockwork man.
When he looked up again the mask of evil passions was gone. The Countess was smiling in her most fascinating manner. Gordon could not know that the long filbert nails had cut through the woman's glove, and were making red sores on the pink flesh. He did not know that he would have stood in peril of his life had there been a weapon near at hand. The numbers were forthcoming, of course--190753 to 190832, the first half of which eighty 5 notes had been alluded to in the murdered man's letter. "No one to help me at all?" she pleaded. Her voice was low, but she shook with passion. The big financier growled out that he would trust her to 50. In two minutes this was gone, and the banker made no further sign. "I see, I see," the Countess replied. "If we could only scheme some plan----" As she would have cried out he laid his hand on her lips. He could feel that she was trembling from head to foot. Hetty gave the desired information. There was a peculiar smile on the face of her companion. First. Gravity wheels, acting directly from the weight of the water which is loaded upon a wheel revolving in a vertical plane, the weight resting upon the descending side until the water has reached the lowest point, where it is discharged. I now come to note a matter in connection with draughting to which the attention of learners is earnestly called, and which, if neglected, all else will be useless. I allude to indigestion, and its resultant evils. All sedentary pursuits more or less give rise to this trouble, but none of them so much as draughting. Every condition to promote this derangement exists. When the muscles are at rest, circulation is slow, the mind is intensely occupied, robbing the stomach of its blood and vitality, and, worse than all, the mechanical action of the stomach is usually arrested by leaning over the edge of a board. It is regretted that no good rule can be given to avoid this danger. One who understands the evil may in a degree avert it by applying some of the logic which has been recommended in the study of mechanics. If anything tends to induce indigestion, its opposite tends the other way, and may arrest it; if stooping over a board interferes with the action of the digestive organs, leaning back does the opposite; it is therefore best to have a desk as high as possible, stand when at work, and cultivate a constant habit of straightening up and throwing the shoulders back, and if possible, take brief intervals of vigorous exercise. Like rating the horse-power of a steam-engine, by multiplying the force into the velocity, the capacity of a man can be estimated by multiplying his mental acquirements into his vitality. Moulders generally rap patterns as much as they will stand, often more than they will stand; and in providing for draught it is necessary to take these customs into account. There is no use in making provision to save rapping unless the rapping is to be omitted. So far we have followed the evolution of Platos philosophy as it may have been effected under the impulse of purely theoretical motives. We have now to consider what form was imposed on it by the more imperious exigencies of practical experience. Here, again, we find Plato taking up and continuing the work of Socrates, but on a vastly greater scale. There was, indeed, a kind of pre-established harmony between the expression of thought on the one hand and the increasing need for its application to life on the other. For the spread of public corruption had gone on pari passu with the development of philosophy. The teaching of Socrates was addressed to individuals, and dealt chiefly with private morality. On other points he was content to accept the law of the land and the established political constitution as sufficiently safe guides. He was not accustomed to see them defied or perverted into instruments of selfish aggrandisement; nor, apparently, had the possibility of such a contingency occurred to him. Still less did he imagine that all social institutions then existing were radically wrong. Hence the personal virtues held a more important place in his system than the social virtues. His attacks were directed230 against slothfulness and self-indulgence, against the ignorant temerity which hurried some young men into politics before their education was finished, and the timidity or fastidiousness which prevented others from discharging the highest duties of citizenship. Nor, in accepting the popular religion of his time, had he any suspicion that its sanctions might be invoked on behalf of successful violence and fraud. We have already shown how differently Plato felt towards his age, and how much deeper as well as more shameless was the demoralisation with which he set himself to contend. It must also be remembered how judicial proceedings had come to overshadow every other public interest; and how the highest culture of the time had, at least in his eyes, become identified with the systematic perversion of truth and right. These considerations will explain why Greek philosophy, while moving on a higher plane, passed through the same orbit which had been previously described by Greek poetry. Precisely as the lessons of moderation in Homer had been followed by the lessons of justice in Aeschylus, precisely as the religion which was a selfish traffic between gods and men, and had little to tell of a life beyond the grave, was replaced by the nobler faith in a divine guardianship of morality and a retributive judgment after deathso also did the Socratic ethics and the Socratic theology lead to a system which made justice the essence of morality and religion its everlasting consecration. I cut gymnasium and took it down to them right after luncheon,
Great snakes! cried Sandy, then lowering his voice. How did that get there? The emeralds? Some pilot was getting the phib ready to fly and chewed gum as he worked and put the gauge out of order to keep anybody from knowing he had filled the gas tanks. 256 The ill-smelling room filled, and various games, chiefly faro and monte, began. At one table two men were playing out a poker game that was already of a week's duration. The reek of bad liquor mingled with the smell of worse tobacco and of Mexican-cured leatherlike which there is no odor known to the senses, so pungent and permeating and all-pervading it[Pg 42] is. Several of the bracket lamps were sending up thin streams of smoke. He helped her out. "I have drifted in a way," he went on to explain. "I left home when I was a mere boy, and the spirit of savagery and unrest laid hold of me. I can't break away. And I'm not even sure that I want to. You, I dare say, can't understand." Yet he felt so sure, for some reason, that she could that he[Pg 71] merely nodded his head when she said briefly, "I can." "Then, too," he went on, "there is something in the Indian character that strikes a responsive chord in me. I come of lawless stock myself. I was born in Sidney." Then he stopped short. What business was it of hers where he had been born? He had never seen fit to speak of it before. Nevertheless he intended that she should understand now. So he made it quite plain. "Sidney was a convict settlement, you know," he said deliberately, "and marriages were promiscuous. My grandfather was an officer who was best away from England. My grandmother poisoned her first husband. That is on my mother's side. On my father's side it was about as mixed." He leaned back, crossing his booted legs and running his fingers into his cartridge belt. His manner asked with a certain defiance, what she was going to do about it, or to think. Landor paid very little attention just then, but that same night he had occasion to think of it again. She jumped to her feet. "I ain't going to do it." "Well," said Cairness, twisting at the small mustache, and levelling his eyes straight as the barrels of a shot-gunand they gave the journalist a little of the same sensation"I think, Mr. Stone, that you can get out of the country within the next three days." He seated himself upon a low branch of sycamore, which grew parallel to the ground, and went on to tell what he had seen on the hilltop in the hostile camp. "They are in capital condition. A lot of them are playing koon-kan. There were some children and one little red-headed Irishman about ten years old with[Pg 295] them. He was captured in New Mexico, and seems quite happy. He enjoys the name of Santiago Mackinplain James, originally, I suppose."
"How do you know this?" And he fell back exhausted on his blanket. "Jehosephat, the way that does take the wrinkles out down here," said Shorty, rubbing appreciatively the front of his pantaloons. "I feel as smooth as if I'd bin starched and ironed, and there's new life clear down to my toe-nails. If me and Si could only have a chicken a day for the next 10 days we'd feel like goin' up there on the Ridge and bootin' old Bragg off the hill. Wouldn't we, Si?" "I brung her here." bring u bAk. "What's all that shootin' about?" he demanded of Harry Joslyn. "You are masters," Cadnan said. "You know everything." There was an air-conditioning duct, but Cadnan did not know what such a thing was, nor would he have understood without lengthy and tiresome explanations. He didn't know he needed air to live: he knew only that the room was dark and that he was alone, boxed in, frightened. He guessed that somewhere, in another such room, Dara was waiting, just as frightened as he was, and that guess made him feel worse. Chapter 3
Chapter 7 With Richard things were different. He despised Reuben as bestial, and sometimes jeopardised his skin by nearly showing his contempt. He now had a peculiar friendship with Anne Bardon. They had met accidentally a second time, and deliberately half a dozen more. In Richard Anne had made a discoveryhe appealed to her imagination, which ran on severe lines. She sympathised with his ambition to break free from the grind and grossness of Odiam, and resolved to help him as much as she could. She lent him books, and guided him with her superior knowledge and education. "Wot?" he asked her, and she, in her dream, felt a spasm of delight, for it was all happening so naturallyit must be true. They walked on down the lane; she pouted and swung her hat. Reuben, anxious to propitiate, picked primroses under the hedge and gave them to her. The conversation had quite deserted Reuben, who sat silent and forgotten in his corner, thinking what fools all these people were. After he had wondered what they were talking about for a quarter of an hour, he rose to go, and gave a sigh of relief when the fresh air of Iden Hill came rustling to him on the doorstep. "Confound him, he has escaped us!" exclaimed Byles. "See the whole herd scudding off, as if the hounds were in full cry at their heels. But forward, Sam, and creep to the edge, for he may not have fallen into the stream." "Let his wife follow him!" repeated Calverley, looking at Oakley with unaffected astonishment; but instantly recollecting himself, he added"I don't know;" and again, after pausing a moment, continued"You, of course, do not mean to keep faith with that seditious monk?" looking with a scrutinizing glance at Oakley. "Well met, then," said Wells; "for the true commons are upno time is to be lostthe prophet is in prison. Let each man steer his own course, muster all the hands he can, and meet on Tower-hill. Hark! that stroke tells oneremember we meet at two, and we will see if the Londoners and men of Kent cannot shake hands before the clock has tolled three."