Argosy All-Story Weekly, November 13, 1920 — page 133: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

WHAT WAS THAT? member that, together with what Nathan lost, I am more gentle in my judgment of him. “*Mary ’ meant love, for Nathan,” I said that evening, as Billy and I sat out in the end of the big punt. “I wish he had not lost Mary, and that he could have been as gentle as I am sure he wanted to be, deep inside.” ‘April is love for me,” said Billy, and then: “‘ when?” And we fixed a date which involved Bil- ly, myself, and a clergyman, two witnesses, a ring, and a fee. CHAPTER XXVIIL THE END—WHICH I8 THE BEGINNING. 5S I said, the resolve is interesting; but it is the thing which doesn’t resolve that holds. Little things like the true reading of Judge Harkins’s note slipped from my consciousness after being an- swered. It was, ‘“ Vl get you some dry,” and it was a promise made to Rudolph Loucks, made when he and the judge had met at a lecture given by the local clergy- man at his home. | The magazine the divine took, the only subscription in town, you will remember, was afterward sent by him to Rudolph Loucks because of an article he wanted Rudolph to see, and in that manner found its way to the dark corner of the store- room. But Nathan’s going on grips the question mark in me. For the gentleness of Nathan was real, in spite of the horror of what he did, the warnings he wrote on our bunga- low walls, the fear he tried to fix in us on that first day with—blood from a chicken. It was he who caused the unusual noises, sneezed in the cellar that absurd afternoon of the crowded bath-tub, and—he who shielded us from MHarry’s more vicious forms of attack. It is the unanswerable that makes con- jecture. I thought of him a good deal, and I did of Joseph Harkins and the judge. “I hope,” I said to Billy, on the afternoon before we left the bungalow for good, ‘“ that old Nathan has left the twisted side All of him here, with his ailing heart and world- worn body.” Billy hoped so, too. ‘I can imagine him taking pictures of the little angels,” I went on, “ hiding be- hind a cloud, as he hid in trees here, to catch them off-guard and at play!” “So can I,” Billy agreed. Then he sat down by me,’on Nan’s trunk, which was waiting to be taken to the sta- tion. We were out on the porch of the bungalow, looking down on the creek, that creek that had made possible so many hor- rors. “Heard that Joseph Harkins was iden- tified in a morgue in Cincinnati,” said Billy, ‘Who identified him?” asked Jane, who came out carrying a hat which she had just shoe-blacked. “The judge,” replied Billy. “H-m!” said Gustave, who had_fol- lowed, having come to be Jane’s second shadow. ‘“ Don’t believe it,” asserted Jane. “‘ He’s gone abroad, hasn’t he?” (4 Yes.” ‘Well, can’t you see him—meeting that boy? Trying to step from the bitterness of all his wasted hopes? To forget his own failure to do the right, and the boy’s crime? I can see him ’—Jane twirled the hat and inspected her work—“ sitting opposite Jo- seph-at a boulevard café, listening to studio gossip and for the voice of some one from home—some one he knows, who may at any moment intrude—”’ ‘That old soak?” sneered Gustave, who had never forgiven the judge for the head- ache his hospitality had given him. ‘He is capable of feeling,” I asserted. ‘““ It was he who wrote Midgette about lone- liness, after she had left her father—he wrote of loneliness too graphically; it was a confession of his—’’ We were all silent, thinking of Mid- gette’s wedding, which we had witnessed that afternoon. In the strange way that weddings have, it had left us sad. Per- haps it brought to us the seriousness of the step which we were all about to take. “Dick was frightened,” said Laurence, who arose from the bosom of a porch swing 300 EOMIE <S (<0) mn