This was true. It was the man himself. Nature had armed him well--with strength, with magnetic force, with a tragic sense of the anguish of things, and with that brain which labours far in advance of the thought of the hour. Men with such brains--brains which work fiercely and unceasingly even in their own despite--reach conclusions not yet arrived at by their world, and are called iconoclasts. Some are madly overpraised, some have been made martyrs, but their spoken word passes onward, and if not in their own day, in that to-morrow which is the to-day of other men, the truth of their harvest is garnered and bound into sheaves.

At the closing of his lectures, men and women crowded about him to speak to him, to grasp his hand. When they were hysterical in their laudations, his grace and readiness controlled them; when they were direct and earnest, he found words to say which they could draw aid from later.

"Am I developing--or degenerating--into a popular preacher?" he said once, with a half restless laugh, to his shadow.

"You are not popular," was Latimer's answer. "Popular is not the word.

You are proclaiming too new and bold a creed."

"That is true," said Baird. "The pioneer is not popular. When he forces his way into new countries he encounters the natives. Sometimes they eat him--sometimes they drive him back with poisoned arrows. The country is their own; they have their own gods, their own language. Why should a stranger enter in?"

"But there is no record yet of a pioneer who lived--or died--in vain,"

said Latimer. "Some day--some day----"

He stopped and gazed at his friend, brooding. His love for him was a strong and deep thing. It grew with each hour they spent together, with each word he heard him speak. Baird was his mental nourishment and solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney's Mills--squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man friends. Baird possessed this temperament, and his home was a centre of all that was most living. It was not the ordinary Willowfield household.

The larger outer world came and went. When Latimer went to it he was swept on by new currents and felt himself warmed and fed.

There had been scarcely any day during years in which the two men had not met. They had made journeys together; they had read the same books and encountered the same minds. Each man clung to the intimacy.

"I want this thing," Baird had said more than once; "if you want it, I want it more. Nothing must rob us of it."

"The time has come--it came long ago--" his Shadow said, "when I could not live without it. My life has grown to yours."

It was Latimer's pleasure that he found he could be an aid to the man who counted for so much to him. Affairs which pressed upon Baird he would take in hand; he was able to transact business for him, to help him in the development of his plans, save him frequently both time and fatigue.

It fell about that when the lectures were delivered at distant points the two men journeyed together.

Latimer entered Baird's library on one occasion just as a sharp-faced, rather theatrical-looking man left it.

"You'll let me know your decision, sir, as soon as possible," the stranger departed, saying. "These things ought always to be developed just at the right moment. This is your right moment. Everybody is talking you over, one way or another." When the stranger was gone, Baird explained his presence.

"That is an agent," he said; "he proposes that I shall lecture through the States. I--don't know," as if pondering the thing.

"The things you say should be said to many," remarked Latimer.

"The more the better," said Baird, reflectively; "I know that--the more the better."

They sat and talked the matter over at length. The objections to it were neither numerous nor serious.

"And I want to say these things," said Baird, a little feverishly. "I want to say them again and again."

Before they parted for the night it was decided that he should accede to the proposal, and that Latimer should arrange to be his companion.

"It is the lecture 'Repentance,' he tells me, is most in demand," Baird said, as he walked to the door, with a hand in Latimer's.

CHAPTER XXXI

Frequenters of the Capitol--whether loungers or politicians--had soon become familiar with the figure of one of the De Willoughby claimants. It was too large a figure not to be quickly marked and unavoidably remembered. Big Tom slowly mounting the marble steps or standing on the corridors was an object to attract attention, and inquiries being answered by the information that he was a party to one of the largest claims yet made, he not unnaturally was discussed with interest.

"He's from the depths of the mountains of North Carolina," it was explained; "he keeps a cross-roads store and post-office, but he has some of the best blood of the South in his veins, and his claim is enormous."

"Will he gain it?"

"Who knows? He has mortgaged all he owns to make the effort. The claim is inherited from his father, Judge De Willoughby, who died at the close of the war. As he lived and died within the Confederacy, the Government holds that he was disloyal and means to make the most of it. The claimants hold that they can prove him loyal. They'll have to prove it thoroughly. The Government is growing restive over the claims of Southerners, and there is bitter opposition to be overcome."

"Yes. Lyman nearly lost his last election because he had favoured a Southern claim in his previous term. His constituents are country patriots, and they said they weren't sending a man to Congress to vote for Rebs."

"That's the trouble. When men's votes are endangered by a course of action they grow ultra-conservative. A vote's a vote."

That was the difficulty, as Tom found. A vote was a vote. The bitterness of war had not yet receded far enough into the past to allow of unprejudiced judgment. Members of political parties were still enemies, wrongs still rankled, graves were yet new, wounds still ached and burned.

Men who had found it to their interest to keep at fever heat the fierce spirit of the past four years of struggle and bloodshed, were not willing to relinquish the tactics which had brought fortunes to them. The higher-minded were determined that where justice was done it should be done where it was justice alone, clearly proved to be so. There had been too many false and idle claims brought forward to admit of the true ones being accepted without investigation and delay. In the days when old Judge De Willoughby had walked through the streets of Delisleville, ostracized and almost hooted as he passed among those who had once been his friends, it would not have been difficult to prove that he was loyal to the detested Government, but in these later times, when the old man lay quiet in what his few remaining contemporaries still chose to consider a dishonoured grave, undeniable proof of a loyalty which now would tend to the honour and advantage of those who were of his blood was not easy to produce.

"The man lived and died in the Confederacy," was said by those who were in power in Washington.

"He was constructively a rebel. We want proof--proof."

Most of those who might have furnished it if they would, were either scattered as to the four winds of the earth, or were determined to give no aid in the matter.

"A Southerner who deserted the South in its desperate struggle for life need not come to Southern gentlemen to ask them to help him to claim the price of his infamy." That was the Delisleville point of view, and it was difficult to cope with. If Tom had been a rich man and could have journeyed between Delisleville and the Capital, or wheresoever the demands of his case called him, to see and argue with this man or that, the situation would have simplified itself somewhat, though there would still have remained obstacles to be overcome.

"But a man who has hard work to look his room rent in the face, and knows he can't do that for more than a few months, is in a tight place," said Tom. "Evidence that will satisfy the Government isn't easily collected in Dupont Circle. These fellows have heard men talk before. They've heard too many men talk. There's Stamps, now--they've heard Stamps talk. Stamps is way ahead of me where lobbying is concerned. He knows the law, and he doesn't mind having doors shut in his face or being kicked into the street, so long as he sees a chance of getting indemnified for his 'herds of cattle.' I'm not a business man, and I mind a lot of things that don't trouble him. I'm not a good hand at asking favours and sitting down to talk steadily for a solid hour to a man who doesn't want to hear me and hasn't five minutes to spare." But for Rupert and Sheba he would have given up the claim in a week and gone back to Talbot's Cross-roads content to end his days as he began them when he opened the store--living in the little back rooms on beans and bacon and friend chicken and hominy.

"That suited me well enough," he used to say to himself, when he thought the thing over. "There were times when I found it a bit lonely--but, good Lord! loneliness is a small thing for a man to complain of in a world like this. It isn't fits or starvation. When a man's outlived the habit of expecting happiness, it doesn't take much to keep him going."

But at his side was eager youth which had outlived nothing, which believed in a future full of satisfied yearnings and radiant joys.

"I am not alone now," said Rupert; "I must make a place and a home for Sheba. I must not be only a boy in love with her; I must be a man who can protect her from everything--from everything. She is so sweet--she is so sweet. She makes me feel that I am a man."

She was sweet. To big Tom they were both sweet in their youth and radiant faith and capabilities for happiness. They seemed like children, and the tender bud of their lovely young passion was a thing to be cherished. He had seen such buds before, but he had never seen the flower.

"I'd like to see the flower," he used to say to himself. "To see it would pay a man for a good deal he'd missed himself. The pair of them could set up a pretty fair garden of Eden--serpents and apple-trees being excluded."

They were happy. Even when disappointments befell them and prospects were unpromising they were happy. They could look into each other's eyes and take comfort. Rupert's dark moods had melted away. He sometimes forgot they had ever ruled him. His old boyish craving for love and home was fed. The bare little rooms in the poor little house were home. Sheba and Tom were love and affection. When they sat at the table and calculated how much longer their diminishing store would last, even as it grew smaller and smaller, they could laugh over the sums they worked out on slips of paper. So long as the weather was warm enough they strolled about together in the fragrant darkness or sat in the creeper-hung porch, in the light of summer moons; when the cold nights came they sat about the stove or the table and talked, while Sheba sewed buttons on or worked assiduously at the repairing of her small wardrobe. Whatsoever she did, the two men sat and admired, and there was love and laughter.

The strenuous life which went on in the busier part of the town--the politics, the struggles, the plots and schemes, the worldly pleasures--seemed entirely apart from them.

Sometimes, after a day in which Judge Rutherford had been encouraged or Tom had had a talk with a friendly member who had listened to the story of the claim with signs of interest, they felt their star of hope rising; it never sinks far below the horizon when one's teens are scarcely of the past--and Sheba and Rupert spent a wonderful evening making plans for a future of ease and fortune.

At Judge Rutherford's suggestion, Tom had long sought an interview with a certain member of the Senate whose good word would be a carrying weight in any question under debate. He was a shrewd, honest, business-like man, and a personal friend of the President's. He was much pursued by honest and dishonest alike, and, as a result of experience, had become difficult to reach. On the day Tom was admitted to see him, he had been more than usually badgered. Just as Tom approached his door a little man opened it cautiously and slid out, with the air of one leaving within the apartment things not exhilarating on retrospect. He was an undersized country man, the cut of whose jeans wore a familiar air to Tom's eye even at a distance and before he lifted the countenance which revealed him as Mr.

Stamps.

"We ain't a-gwine to do your job no good to-day, Tom," he said, benignly.

"He'd 'a' kicked me out ef I hadn't 'a' bin small--jest same es you was gwine ter that time I come to talk to ye about Sheby. He's a smarter man than you be, an' he seed the argyment I hed to p'int out to you. Ye won't help your job none to-day!"

"I haven't got a 'job' in hand," Tom answered; "your herds of stock and the Judge's coal mines and cotton fields are different matters."