She had forgotten that the old spring was near the public road and that the rail fence was old and fallen. Her revery was interrupted by a bantering, half drunken, jolly laugh:

"Well, I must say I never saw anything quite so pretty!"

She sprang up in shame. Leaning on the old fence, she saw Harry Travis, a roguish smile on his face. She thought she would run, then she remembered her bare feet and she sat down on the gra.s.s, covering her ankles with her skirt. At first she wanted to cry, then she grew indignant as he came tipsily toward her and sat down by her side.

She was used to the smell of whiskey on the breath. Its slightest odor she knew instantly. To her it was the smell of death.

"Got to the Gov'nor's private bottle to-night," he said familiarly, "and took a couple of c.o.c.ktails. Going over to see Nellie, but couldn't resist such beauties as"--he pointed to her feet.

"It was mean of you to slip upon me as you did," she said. Then she turned the scorn of her eyes on him and coolly looked him over, the weak face, the boyish, half funny smile, the cynical eyes,--trying to be a man of the world and too weak to know what it all meant.

The Conway spirit had come to her--it always did in a critical moment. She no longer blushed or even feared him.

"How, how," she said slowly and looking him steadily over, "did I ever love such a thing as you?"

He moved up closer. "You will have to kiss me for that," he said angrily. "I've kissed you so often I know just how to do it," and he made an attempt to throw his arms around her.

She sprang away from him into the spring branch, standing knee deep in the water and among the water-cresses.

He arose hot with insolence: "Oh, you think you are too good for me now--now that the Gov'nor has set his heart on you. d.a.m.n him--you were mine before you were his. He may have you, but he will take you with Ca.s.sius' kisses on your lips."

He sprang forward, reached over the rock and seized her by the arm.

But she jerked away from him and sprang back into the deeper water of the spring. She did not scream, but it seemed that her heart would burst with shame and anger. She thought of Ophelia, and as she looked down into the water she wiped away indifferently and silently the cool drops which had splashed up into her face, and she wondered if she might not be able to drop down flat and drown herself there, and thus end it all.

He had come to the edge of the rock and stood leering drunkenly down on her.

"I love you," he laughed ironically.

"I hate you," she said, looking up steadily into his eyes and moving back out of his reach.

The water had wet her dress, and she stooped and dipped some of it up and bathed her hot cheeks.

"I'll kiss you if I have to wade into that spring."

"If I had a brother,--oh, if I even had a father," she said, looking at him with a flash of Conway fire in her eyes--"and you did--you would not live till morning--you know you wouldn't."

She stood now knee-deep in water. Above her the half-drunken boy, standing on the rock which projected into the spring, emboldened with drink and maddened by the thought that she had so easily given him up, had reached out and seized her around the neck. He was rough, and it choked her as he drew her to him.

She screamed for the first time--for she thought she heard hoof beats coming down the road; then she heard a horseman clear the low fence and spur into the spring branch. The water from the horse's feet splashed over her. She remembered it only faintly--the big gla.s.ses--the old straw hat,--the leathern bag of samples around his shoulders.

"Most unusual," she heard him say, with more calmness it seemed to Helen than ever: "Quite unusual--insultingly so!"

Instinctively she held up her arms and he stooped in the saddle and lifted her up and set her on the stone curbing on the side farthest from Harry Travis.

Then he turned and very deliberately reached over and seized Harry Travis, who stood on the rock, nearly on a line with the pommel of the saddle. But the hand that gripped the back of Harry's neck was anything but gentle. It closed around the neck at the base of the brain, burying its fingers in the back muscles with paralyzing pain and jerked him face downward across the saddle with a motion so swift that he was there before he knew it. Then another hand seized him and rammed his mouth, as he lay across the pommel of the saddle, into the sweaty shoulders below the horse's withers, and he felt the horse move out and into the road and up to the crossing of the ways just as a buggy and two fast bay mares came around the corner.

The driver of the bays stopped as he saw his cousin thrown like a pig over the pommel and held there kicking and cursing.

"I was looking for him," said Richard Travis quietly, "but I would like to know what it all means."

The big gla.s.ses shone in kindly humor. They did not reflect any excitement in the eyes behind them.

"I am afraid it means that he is drunk. Perhaps he will tell you about it. Quite unusual, I must say--he seemed to be trying to drown a young lady in a spring."

He eased his burden over the saddle and dropped him into the road.

Richard Travis took it in instantly, and as Clay rode away he heard the cousin say: "You d.a.m.ned yellow cur--to bear the name of Travis."

CHAPTER III

WORK IN A NEW LIGHT

It was an hour before Clay Westmore rode back to Millwood. He had been too busy plowing that day to get, sooner, a specimen of the rock he had seen out-cropping on Sand Mountain. At night, after supper, he had ridden over for it.

And now by moonlight he had found it!

He flushed with the strength of it all as he put it in his satchel--the strength of knowing that not even poverty, nor work, nor night could keep him from accomplishing his purpose.

Then he rode back, stopping at Millwood. For he thought, too, that he might see Helen, and while he had resolved not to force himself on her after what she had said when he last saw her, still he wished very much to see her now and then.

For somehow, it never got out of his deductive head that some day she would learn to love him. Had he known the temptation, the despair that was hers, he would not have been so quietly deliberate. But she had never told him. In fact, he had loved her from a distance all his life in his quiet way, though now, by her decree, they were scarcely more than the best of friends. Some day, after he had earned enough, he would tell her just how much he loved her. At present he could not, for was he not too poor, and were not his mother and sister dependent upon him?

He knew that Harry Travis loved her in a way--a love he was certain would not last, and in the fullness and depths of his sincere nature, he felt as sure of ultimately winning her, by sheer force of strength, of consistency and devotion, as he was that every great thing in life had been done by the same force and would be to the end of time.

As sure as that, by this same force, he, himself, would one day discover the vein of coal which lay somewhere in the beautiful valley of the Tennessee.

And so he waited his time with the easy a.s.surance of the philosopher which he was, and with that firm faith which minds of his strength always have in themselves and their ultimate success.

It surprised him, it is true--hurt him--when he found to what extent Harry Travis had succeeded in winning the love of Helen. He was hurt because he expected--hoped--she would see further into things than she had. And counting all the poverty and hardships of his life, the Sunday afternoon when he had left her in the arbor, after she had told him she was engaged to Harry Travis, he could not remember when anything had been so hard for him to bear. Later he had heard how she had gone to work in the mill, and he knew that it meant an end of her love affair with Harry.

To-night something told him it was time to see her again, not to tell her of his own love, and how it would never change, whether she was mill girl or the mistress of Millwood, but to encourage her in the misery of it all.

Work--and did not he himself love to work? Was it not the n.o.blest thing of life?

He would tell her it was.

He was surprised when he saw what had just happened; but all his life he had controlled himself to such a degree that in critical moments he was coolest; and so what with another might have been a serious affair, he had turned into half retributive fun, but the deadliest punishment, as it afterwards turned out, that he could have inflicted on a temperament and nature such as Harry Travis'. For that young man, unable to stand the gibes of the neighborhood and the sarcasm of his uncle when it all became known, accepted a position in another town and never came back again.

To have been shot or floored in true melodramatic style by his rival, as he stood on a rock with a helpless girl in his clutch, would have been more to his liking than to be picked up bodily, by the nape of his neck, and taken from the scene of his exploits like a pig across a saddle.

That kind of a combat did not meet his ideas of chivalry.

Helen was dressed in her prettiest gown when Clay rode back to Millwood, after securing the samples he had started for. She knew he was coming and so she tied a white scarf over her head and went again to her favorite seat beneath the trees.