Evening Star Newspaper, November 10, 1929, Page 103

ON. D. C. NOVEMBER 10. 1929, ardSworis } BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE e TP A prehend her return but stood blinking at the speaker. It was extraordinary. “You don’t know what you're talking about!” he cried with a causelessness and a disordered vehemence which set them first staring, then speculating. “Come on, you dumbheads; don’t talk—ride!” They were a good six miles to the south of the fence. Already the road backx nome would have to be followed three parts in the dark. Darred was the spokesman. “Frank, I'm going to call it a day.” The others reined up with him, but the man ahead rode on. He didn’t seem to hear. Darred lifted his voice. “Come on, call it a day, Frank. Tomorrow, maybe. But you see we've run it out and they’re not here.” “Wait,” sald Frank over his shoulder, still riding on into the pocket. White's mount, a mare, laid back her ears, shied and stood trembling. After a moment she whinnied. It was as if she had whinnied for a dozen. A crashing in the woods above them to the left and the avalanche came—downstream, erupting, wheeling, wheeling away with volley- ing snorts, a dark rout. Darred, reining his horse, began to shout, “Here they go this way, Frank!” But Frank was yelling: “Up here, boys! This way, quick!” It was the same note—excited, feverish, dis- ordered, breaking like a child's. When they neared him they saw he was off his horse, rifie in hand and down on his knees to study the ground where the woods began. By the time they reached his animal the impetuous fellow had started up into the cover, his voice trailing, “Come on; spread out and come on!” White spoke this time. “Be darned if I do!” He lifted a protesting hail: “Come back here, Frank! You're crazy! It's getting dark!” It was Frank’s own fault. They told him plainly to come back and he wouldn’t listen. For a while they could hear his crackle in the mounting underbrush. Then that stopped, whether he had gone too far for their ears or whether he had come to a halt to give his own ears a chance. . . . Once, off to his right, a little higher up under the low ceiling of the trees that darkened moment by moment with the rush of night, they heard another move- ment, another restlessness of leaves and stones. ‘Then that was still and everything was still. Darred ran a sleeve over his face and swung down. “God alive, boys!” It was the silence. The first they heard was the shot. No voice. Just the one report. Then after five breaths of another silence a crashing of growth, a charge in the darkness under the withered scrub, continuous and diminishing. ‘They shouted, “Frank!” No answer. They called, “Frank Bluedge!” Now, since they had to, they did. Keeping contact by word and guided partly by direc- tional memory (and mostly in the end by luck), after a time they found the storekeeper in a brake of ferns, lying across his gun. They got him down to the open, watching behind them all the while. Only then, by the flares of successive matches, under the noses of the snorting horses, did they look for the damage done. They remembered the stillness and the gloom; it must have been quite black in there. The attack had come from behind—equine and pantherine at once, and planned and cunning. A deliberate lunge with a forefoot again. The shoe which had crushed the backbone between the shoulder-blades was a foreshoe—that much they saw by the match flares in the red wreck. T!EY:eokmlmnfi.lubomthmthey had ta, but it was longer than they would bave wished. With Frank across his own sad- her, and at the rifle she carried.” dle, walking their horses and with one or another ahead to pick the road (it was going to rain, and even the stars were lost), they . made no more than a creeping speed. None of them had much to say on the journey. Finding the break in the boundary fence and feeling through the last of the woods, the lights of their farms began to show in the pool of blackness below, and Darred uttered a part of what had lain in the minds of them all during the return: “Well, that leaves Cam.” X None followed it up. None cared to go any closer than he was to the real question. It answered itself. Camden was at home when they got there. - He had come in a little before them, empty- handed. Empty-headed, too. When Blossom, who had waited all day, part of the time with neighbor women who had come in and part of the time alone to the point of going mad— when she saw him coming down the pasture, his feet stumbling and his shoulders dejected, her first feeling was relief. Her first words, however, were, “Did you get him. Cam?” And all he would answer was, “Gi’ me something to eat, can’t you? Gi’ me a few hours’ sleep, can’t you? Then wait!” Then he relapsed into his stupidity, and not even the arrival of the party bringing his brother’s body seemed able to shake him so far clear of it again. At first, when they had laid Frank on the floor where on the night before they had laid Jim, he seemed hardly to comprehend. “What's wrong with Frank?” “Some more of Jim’s ‘experiment.’ " “Frank see him? He's scared, Frank is. Look at his face there.” “He's dead, Cam.” “Dead, you say? Frank dead? Dead of fright, is that it?” Even when, rolling the body over, they showed him what was what, he appeared in- capable of comprehension, of amazement, of passion, or of any added grief. He looked at them all with a kind of befuddled protest. Returning to his chair and his plate, he grumbled, “Le’ me eat first, can't you? Can't you gi’ me a little time to sleep?” “Well, you wouldn't do much tonight any- way, I guess.” At White’s words Blossom opened her mouth for the first time. “No, nothing tonight, Cam. Cam! Camden! Say! Promise!” “And then tomorrow, Cam, what we’ll do is to get every last man in the valley, and we’ll go at this right. We’ll lay hand on that devil—" Camden swallowed his mouthful of cold steak with difficulty. His obsession touched, he showed them the rims of his eyes again. “¥qQu do and I'll wring your necks. The man that touches that animal before I do gets his neck wrung. That’s all you need to remember.” “Yes, yes—no—that is——" Poor Blossom. “Yes, Mr. White, thinks; no, Cam’s not going out tonight...No, Cam, nobody’s going to in- terfere—nor nothing. Don’t you worry there...” Lightning filled the windows. After a moment the thunder came avalanching down the pasture and brought up against the clap- boards of the house. At this she was behind his chair. She put out a hand. She touched his shoulder. Camden blundered up He started off two steps and wheeled on her. “Why don't you get off to bed——?" “Yes, Cam, yes—right off, yes.” “Well, I'm going, I can tell you. some sleep!” It took her no time to get along then—quick and quiet as a mouse. Z As it had taken her no time to go, it took Blossom no time to undress and get in bed. When Camden was on his way to his room I need he heard her calling, “Cam! Cam!” “Yes? What?” “Cam, set by me a minute, won't you? and Cam, oh, Cam, hold my hand.” Just a second, S he slouched down, his iist inclosing her fingers, thoughts awak:ned and ran and fastened on things. They fastened, tentatively at first, upon the farm. Jim gone. Frank gone. The smithy, the store, and the farm. ‘The whole of Mill Crossing. The trinity. The three in one. . . “Tight, Cam, for pity’s sake! tight!” His eyes, falling to his fist, straysd up along the arm it held. The sleeve, rumpled near the shoulder, was trimmed with pretty lace. A box of apples. That memory hidden away in the cellar of his mind. Hidden away, clamped down in the dark, till the noxious vapors, the murderous vapors of its rotting had filled the shut-up house he was...A box of red apples for the apple-grower’s girl . . . the girl who sniggered and ran away from him to laugh at him. And there, by the unfolding of a devious destiny, he sat in that girl’s room, holding that girl’'s hand. Jim who had got her, Frank who bhad wanted her lay side by side out there in the icehouse under the lightning. While he, the “dumb one”—the last to be thought of with anything but amusement and the last to be feared—his big hot fist inclosing her imprecating hand now, and his eyes on the pretty lace at her shoulder—— He jumped up with a gulp and a clatter of iron. “What the——" He flung her hand away. He swallowed. He moderated his voice with an effort, wip- ing his brow, “Goodnight. You must excuse me, Blossie; I wasn't meaning—I mean—I hope you sleep good. I shall...Good night!” In his own brain was the one word “Hurry!” She lay and listened to his boots going along the hall and heard the closing of his door. She ought to have put out the lamp. But even with the shades drawn, the lightning around the edges of the window unnerved her; in the dark alone it would have bzen more than she could bear. She lay so till she felt herself nearing ex- haustion from the sustained rigidity of her limbs. Rain came and with the rain, wind. Around the eaves it neighed like wild stallions; down the chimneys it moaned like men. Hold it CAMDEN had reached the woods when the rain came. Lighting the lantern he had brought, he made his way on to the boundary fence. There, about a mile to the east of thé path the others had taken that day, he pulled the rails down and tumbled the stones together in a pile. Then he procesded another hundred yards, holding the lantern high and peering through the streaming crystals of the rain. Blue Murder was there. Neither the chain nor the sapling had given way. The lantern and, better than a lantern, a globe of lightning, showed the tethered stallion glistening and quivering, his eyes all whites, at the man’s approach. “Gentle, boy; steady, boy!” Talking all the while in the way he had with horses, Camden put a hand on the taut chain and bore with a gradually progressive weight, bringing the dark head nearer. “Steady, boy; gentle there, gentle!” Was he afraid of horses? Who was it said he was afraid of horses? “Steady, you're going to get yours. Cheer up, cheer up, the worst is yet to come. Come now! Come easy! Come along!” When he had unloosed the chain he felt for and found with his free hand his hammer hidden behind the tree. Throwing the lantern into the brush, where it flared for an instant before dying, he led the staliion back as far as the break he had made in the fence. Taking a turn with the chain around the animal’s nose, like an improvised hackamore, he swung from the stone pile to the slippery back. A moment’s shying, a sliding caracole of amazement and distrust, a crushing of knees, a lash of the chain end, and that was all there was to that. Blue Murder had been ridden before. . , . In the smithy Camden sang as he pumped his bellows, filling the cave bencath the rafters with red. The air was nothing, the words were mumbo-jumbo, but they swelled his chest. His eyes, cast from time to time at his wheeling prisoner, had lost their look of helplessness and surly distraction. Scared? He? No, no, no! Now that he wasn't any longer afraid of time, he wasn't afraid of anything on earth. “Shy, you devil!” He wagged his exalted head. “Whicker, you hellion! Whicker all you want to! Tomorrow they're going to get you, the numb fools! Tomorrow they can have you. I got you tonight!” He was more than other men; he was enor- mous. Fishing an iron shoe from that in- separable apron pocket of his, he thrust it into the coals and blew and blew. He tried it and it was burning red. He tried it again and it was searing white. Taking it out on the anvil, he began to beat it, swinging his hammer one- handed, gigantic. So in the crimson light, irradiating iron sparks, he was at his greatest. Pounding, pounding. A man in the dark ot night with a hammer about him can do wonders; with a horseshoe about him he can cover up a sin. And if the dark of night in a paddock won’t hold it, then the dark of under- growth on a mountainside will, Pounding, pounding; thinking, thinking, in a great halo of hot stars. Feeding his hungry, his insatiable muscles. What he did not realize in his feverish exaltation was that his muscles were not in- satiable. In the 30-odd hours past they had had a feast spread before them and had their fill, , . . More than His foot was heavier of a sudden than ¥ should have been. This 5,000 and first time, by the drag of the tenth of an inch, the heel caught the lip of the nail box. He tried to save himself from stumbling. At the same time, instinctively, he held the iron flame in his tongs away. There was a scream out of a horse’s throat—a whiff of hair and burnt flesh. There was a lash of something in the red shadows. There was another sound and another wisp of stench. . . . WHEN. guided by the stallion’s whinneying, they found the smith next day, they saw by the cant of his head that his neck was broken and they perceived that he, too, had on him the mark of a shoe It lay up oné side of his throat and the broad of a cheek. It wasn’t blue this time, however; it was red. It took them some instants in the sunshine pouring through the wide door to comprehend this phenomenon. It wasn’t sunk in by a blow this time; it was burned in—a brand. Darred called them to look at the stalliom chained behind the forge. “Almighty God!” The words sounded funny in his mouth. They sounded the funnier in - that they were the same ones the blundering smith had uttered when, staring uphill from his clever wreckage of the paddock fence, he had seen the mares striking sparks from the stones where the stallion struck none. And he, of all men, a smith! “Almighty God!” called Darred. “What you make of these here feet?” » One forehoof was freshly pared for shoeing; the other three hoofs were as virgin as any yearling’s on the plains. Blue Murder had never been shod. . . . (Copyright, 1920.) Map of Europe. Continued from Tenth Page mantic and phenomenal spectacle of the war —the passage of the self-constituted and self- disciplined Czechoslovak army across Russia and Siberia in their attempt to join the French army by way of the Pacific and the Atlantic. I immediately joined forces with him and continued to co-operate until the end of the war. From the beginning of the war there had been constant desertions in the armies of the allies, through voluntary capture, of all the subject people of Germany and Austria-Hune gary. This was greatly accelerated when the efforts being made in America were known. September 15, 1918, what was called a “Vice tory Meeting of the Oppressed People of Ause tria-Hungary” was held in Carnegie Hall in New York. A resolution, which I had been asked to write, was adopted. This pledged the nationalities to work for the allied cause because it was the way to secure freedom for themselves. Paderewski, Masaryk and a rep= resentative of both the Rumanians and Jugo- slavs spoke. At a luncheon of the speakers and committee of arrangements just before the meeting, I sug- gested that it would be a good thing if a permae nent organization could be made of the natione alities represented. Masaryk said that was what he was hoping for, because there was so much ~ traditional hostility among these nationalities ° that it greatly weakened their efforts against a common enemy. I engaged a room at the Biltmore Hotel for the next afternoon and also invited representa- tives of four other national groups. On the nomination of Paderewskl, Masaryk was elected * chairman, and I became the director of what was named the Mid-European Union. Offices - were opened in Washington, and a number of conferences were held for the purpose of solve ing problems and getting publicity. One afternoon in October the secretary of President Masaryk handed me an envelope saying that it contained the Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence, and asked my help with the English. With several other men whom I gathered together, I worked most of the night and the next day on it, and succeeded .in reducing it to a forceful and brief state- ment suitable for publication. On the morning of October 19 it was released to the press and a ecopy was given to President Wilson at 4 o’clock that afternoon. The declaration stated very positively that no return to any relation with the Austrian empire was possible. Fortunately it happened that the very morning the Declaration of Independence appeared there also came a letter from the Empercr of Austria proposing a federation. These were printed side by side and made 'the Emperor's appeal fruitless. That afternoon President Wilson cabled a reply to a communication he had rreceived from Austria a few days earlier. With other things he said, “Look to the Czechs for your reply.” A week later Austria-Hungary had wjthdrawn from the war, HE following week the Mid-European Union now representing the 12 nationalities, exe tending from the Lithuanians on the Baltic to the Jews of Palestine—a continuous line making an eastern front which Gen. Glenn had wanted—drew up a Declaration of Common Aims in a three-day conference in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, I had bought an exact replica of the original Liberty Bell. It was set up in the square be- hind Independence Hall, and was rung by the children of the various nationalities as each national representative proclaimed his purpose. President Masaryk was authorized to pro- mote the Mid-European Union on his return to Europe and in his first speech after his to-iumphal entry as the president of the new republic he urged the establishment in Europe of what had begun in America. His efforts brought the little entente. (Copyright, 1929.)