Bill Barlow's Budget

Satan Sanderson
By Hallie Erminie Rives.
Author of "Hearts Courageous," Etc.
Copyright, 1909, by the Bobbs-Merrill Company.

"Only since last night. You've had a fever."

"Where is my dog?"

"Dog?" said the other. "I never knew you had one."

Harry's lips set bitterly. It had fared more hardly, then, than he. It had been a ready object for the crowd to wreak their hatred upon, because it belonged to him—because it was Hugh Stires' dog!

"Is this your cabin, my friend?"

The figure bending over the hearth straightened itself with a jerk, and the blinking yellow eyes looked hard at him. Prendergast came close to the bunk.

"That's the game you played in the town," he said, with a surly sneer. "It's all right for those that take it in, but you needn't try to bamboozle me, pretending you don't know your own claim and cabin! I'm no such fool!"

A dull flush came to Harry's brow. Here was a page from that iniquitous past that faced him. His own cabin! And his own claim! Well, why not?

"You are mistaken," he said calmly. "I am not pretending. I cannot remember you."

Prendergast laughed in an ugly, derisive way.

"I suppose you've forgotten the half year we've lived here together and the gold dust we've gathered in now and again—slipped it all, have you?"

Harry stood up. The motion brought a temporary dizziness, but it passed. He walked to the door and gazed out on the pleasant green of the hillside. On a tree near by was nailed a rough weather-beaten board on which was scrawled:

"The Little Paymaster Claim."

He saw the grass-grown gravel trenches, evidence of abandoned work. He had been a miner. That in itself was honest toil.

"The claim is good, then," he said over his shoulder. "We found the pay?"

Prendergast contemplated him a moment in grim silence, with a scowl.

"You're either really fuddled, Hugh," he said then, "or else you're a star play-actor and up to something deep. Well, have it your own way—it's all the same to me. But you can't pull the wool over my eyes long!"

There were mockery and threat in his tone; but, more than both, the evil intimacy in his words gave Harry a qualm of disgust. This man had been his associate. That one hour in the town had shown him what his own life there had been.

What should he do? Forsake forever the neighborhood where he had made his blistering mark? Fling all aside and start again somewhere and leave behind this disgraceful present, with that face that had looked into his from above the dusty street?

If fate intended that, why had it turned him back? If such was the bed he had made, he would lie in it. He would drink the gall and vinegar without whimpering. Whatever lay behind he would live it down.

This man at least had befriended him.

He turned into the room. "Perhaps I shall remember after a while." He took the saucepan from Prendergast's hand.

"I'll cook the breakfast," he said.

Prendergast filled his pipe and watched him. "I guess there are bats in your belfry, sure enough, Hugh," he said at length. "You never offered to do your stint before."

Chapter 16

From the moment her kiss fell upon the forehead of the delirious man in the cabin, Jessica began to be a prey to new emotions, the significance of which she did not comprehend. That kiss, she told herself that night, had been given to her dead ideal that had lain there in its purifying grave-clothes of forgetfulness. Yet it burned on her lips, as that other kiss in a darkened room had burned afterward, but with a sense of pleasure, not of hurt. It took her back into crimson meadows with her lost girlhood and its opaled outlook—and Hugh.

But largest of all in her mind next day was anxiety. She must know how he fared.

In the open daylight she could not approach the cabin, but she reflected that the doctor had been there and no doubt had carried some report of him to the town. So as the morning grew she rode down the mountain ostensibly to get the cherry cordial she had left behind her the day before, really to satisfy her hunger for news.

As it happened Mrs. Halloran's first greeting set her anxiety at rest. Prendergast had bought some tobacco at the general store an hour before while she had been making her daily order, and the storekeeper had questioned him. To an interested audience he had told of the finding of Hugh on the mountain road in a sort of crazy fever and enlarged upon the part the girl on horseback had played. Hugh was all right now, he said, except that he didn't remember him or the cabin or Smoky Mountain.

What Prendergast had said Mrs. Halloran told Jessica in a breath. Before she finished she found that Jessica had not heard of the incident in the saloon which had precipitated the fight with Devlin, and with sympathetic rhetoric Mrs. Halloran told this too.

"Why does Smoky Mountain hate him so? What has he done?" asked Jessica.

Mrs. Halloran shook her head. "I never knew anything myself," she said judiciously. "I reckon the town allus counted him just a general low-down. The rest is only suspicion an' give the dog a bad name."

There had been comfort for Jessica in this interview. Mrs. Halloran's story had materially increased the poignant force of her pity. What had seemed to her a vulgar brawl had been in reality a courageous and unselfish championship of a defenseless outcast. Thinking of this, the self-blame and contrition which she had felt when she listened to the violin assailed her anew, till she seemed a very part of the guilt, an equal sinner by omission.

Yet she rode homeward that day with almost a light heart.

As Harry stood in the cabin doorway looking after Prendergast toward the town, glistening far below in the morning sunlight, he thought bitterly of his reception there.

"They all knew me," he thought. "Every one knew me on the street. In the hotel. They know me for what I have been to them. Yet to me it is all a blank. What shameful deeds have I done?" He shrank from memory now.

"What was I doing so far away, where was I going, on the night when I was picked up beside the railroad track? I may be a drunkard," he said to himself. "No, in the past month I have drunk hard, but not for the taste of the liquor. I may be a gambler. I may be a cheat, a thief. Yet how is it possible for bad deeds to be blotted out and leave no trace? Actions breed habit; they do not spring from it, and habit automatically repeated becomes character. I feel no inherent propensity to rob or defraud. Shall I? Will these things come back to me if my memory does?"

In the battle that he fought now he turned, even in his weakness, to manual labor, striving to dull his thought with mechanical movement. He cleaned and put to rights both rooms and sorted their litter of odds and ends. But at times the inclination to escape became well-nigh insupportable. When the conflict was fiercest, he would think of a girl's face once seen, and the thought would restrain him. Who was she? Why had her look pierced through him? In that hateful career that seemed so curiously alien could she have had a part?

He did not know that she of whom he wondered in the bitterest of those hours had been very near him: that on her way up the mountain she had stolen down to the Knob to look through the parted bushes to the cabin with the blue spiral rising from its chimney.

Though the homely task to which he turned failed to allay his struggle by nightfall, Harry had put the warring elements under. When Prendergast returned at supper time, the candle was lighted in its wall-box, the dinted tea-kettle was singing over a crackling fire and Harry was perspiring over the scouring of the last utensil.

Prendergast looked the orderly interior over on the threshold with a contemptuous amusement.

"Almost thought I was in church," he said. He took off his coat and lazily watched the other cook the frugal evening meal.

"Excuse my not volunteering," he observed. "You do it so nicely I'm almost afraid you'll have another attack of that forgettery of yours and go back to the old line."

Presently he looked at the bunk, clean and springy with fresh-cut spruce shoots. He went into it, knelt down and thrust an arm into the empty space beneath it. He got up hastily.

"What have you done with that?" he demanded, with an angry snarl.

"With what?" Harry turned his head as he set two tin plates on the bare table.

"With what was under here."

"There was nothing there but an old horse-skin," said Harry. "It is hanging on the side of the cabin."

With an oath Prendergast flung open the door and went outside. He re-entered quickly with the white hide in his arms, wrapped it in a blanket and thrust it back under the bunk.

"Has any one been here today since you put it out there?" he asked quickly.

"No," said Harry, surprised. "Why?"

Prendergast chuckled. The chuckle grew to a guffaw, and he sat down, slapping his thigh. Presently he went to the wall, took the chamois-skin bag from its hiding-place and poured some of its yellow contents into his palm.

"That's why. Do you remember that, eh?"

Harry looked at it. "Gold dust," he said. "I seem to recall that. I am going to begin work in the trench tomorrow. There should be more where that came from."

[To be continued]