Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Presently, looking over his shoulder, he caught Rittenfeldt’s eye, signalled him to drive up, and, when the waggon arrived, he took the horses’ heads and turned into the brush field along the course of a tiny spring brook.

  Higher on the slope stood a grove of silver birches, and Kemper, leading the horses, made toward it. It was good camping ground; the trees gave shade; the icy rivulet formed a deep blue pool under them; dead wood from acres of slashings was handy for fires.

  An hour later the horses had been fed and picketed, dinner cooked and eaten, and Rittenfeldt sat on a bleached pine log, seizing, chloroforming, and eagerly pinning specimen after specimen of the longicorne beetle, several species of which genus were continually alighting on the dead and sun-dried wood.

  “So iss recht!” he said excitedly, consigning a huge specimen to his cork-lined collecting box, and grabbing another at the same time. “Ach, suss big vones! Suss a grand collecting ground! Sehst du, Kemper, here iss it a paradise of beetles — my Gott von a dozen genera! Dot is a scarab as example — und dot iss a Buprestis! Also! I haff come to the longicornes to observe and to collect. So shall I principally collect the Cerambycidae!”

  Kemper, smoking his cob, lifted a preoccupied face and watched the German’s nimble manœuvres with a war-like specimen, pitchy-black in colour, which nipped his captor viciously when incautiously seized.

  “Prionus brevicomis!” panted Rittenfeldt. “He feeds on the balm of Gilead and Lombardy poplar. So! — He feeds no more!” — dosing the insect with chloroform.

  A moment later he nabbed a large beetle of a light bay colour, with the characteristically long antennœ of the genus. This one also bit him.

  “Orthosoma unicolor!” he exclaimed; “feeds on the grape!”

  “They all seem to feed on you, too,” remarked Kemper. But the entomologist had discovered a gorgeous yellow and black Clytus speciosus — the bane of the maple tree — and was triumphantly pushing the creaking, biting, kicking beetle into a cyanide jar.

  Kemper sighed, refilled his pipe, and sat back clasping his knees in his strong, brown hands, gazing around him.

  A noble woods had stood here; now nothing but bleached slashing remained, acres and acres of whitening limbs and tops. Under them ferns grew, and here and there a small pine seedling was venturing to push up in the shade of grey or white birches.

  It was a difficult place to plant, but it ought to be planted with pine after the menacing dead wood had been removed.

  Kemper mused in his fragrant pipe smoke, marking with speculative eye the evening flight of birds, listening to the sweet, wild piping of finch and vireo, the lonely and exquisite call of the white-throat, the robins’ headlong but limited melody.

  A bluish bloom rested on the western hills: on slopes to the east sunlight burned red But Kemper’s troubled thoughts were elsewhere; and finally, when the descending sun hung low above the woods, and already an owl had called from the darkening flank of Lynx Peak, he got up, took a dozen impatient steps to and fro, lifted his shotgun, threw out both cartridges from the breech, and slipped in a couple which he took from his waistcoat pocket. Rittenfeldt, observing him, looked up inquiringly. “Buck?”

  “Salt.”

  “So?”

  “Yes.... Pm going to find out what this fellow Billet is about.”

  “Shall I go?” asked Rittenfeldt simply.

  “Oh, don’t disturb yourself, Hugo.”

  “As you please,” said the entomologist, placidly squinting through his field microscope at a tiny speck that kicked.

  Kemper, his light fowling piece cradled in his left arm, stepped around the fire. A few sunbeams still reddened the tree tops. Chancing to glance aloft, he saw a scarlet tanager on a hemlock top, glimmering like a live coal of fire in the setting sun.

  “Hugo!” he called, pointing; “a fire-bird!”

  “Dot leetle ‘girl of Billet’s iss dressed like your firebird, too,” chuckled the German. “It iss of her you think, not of dot leetle bird. Yess?”

  “I am worried about her.... I think I’ll go to the house and see whether she’s all right.”

  “Shall I come mit?”

  “No, thanks.”

  So Kemper sauntered off down the slope, threading his way through the slashings until the squat shape of Billet’s shanty rose on his right.

  He was a young man who came to quick conclusions and who did what he had to do with a directness disturbing to many. And what he did now was to walk up to the door and knock.

  Nobody opened. The last rays of the sun glittered on the unwashed window panes; a film of blue smoke rose from the chimney.

  Kemper knocked again, very loudly. And after waiting a reasonable time, and there being no response, no sound from within save a sudden shuffle and the slam of an inside door, he backed off, laid down his gun, picked up the loose doorstep, and, swinging it, drove in the door with a crash.

  Instantly young Billet rushed toward him, but Kemper, swinging the remains of the doorstep, knocked him headlong into a corner.

  Then he stepped out of the shattered doorway, picked up his shotgun, and came back. Billet had risen, dazed, and was leaning against the wall, spitting blood.

  But to him Kemper paid no attention: there was a closed door — a flimsy barrier — at the other end of the room. He walked over to it, found it locked, and kicked it open.

  Mazie sat on the bed, looking at him.

  “Well,” he said bluntly, “are you married?”

  “Who? Me?” she faltered. “No, not yet.”

  “Oh. When is the parson coming? It’s getting late, you know.”

  She was silent.

  “He’s coming today — tonight — isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.... Jim said he might not come till tomorrow — or next week.”

  “Or the week after that,” suggested Kemper grimly, “ — or perhaps not for a month or two. Is that what he means, Mazie?”

  “I don’t know.... I guess he means to marry me — sometime—”

  “Sooner or later? Is that the way he talks?”

  “Yes.... It’s often that way in this country.... I guess he means to do right.”

  “Is that so!” snapped Kemper savagely, and swung in his tracks. “Billet,” he said very distinctly, “you’re no good — you and your can of kerosene! Do you understand? Why, you dirty weasel, there isn’t a lamp or lantern in your shanty that burns anything except a candle!”

  He took a step nearer to the big, sullen lout who stood nursing his battered countenance by the window.

  “The next time you come slinking around when the Fire Warden sends out a call, you’ll find yourself kicked headfirst into the lock-up. And Heaven help you if the woods burn within forty miles of Lynx Peak. Do you get that? And God help you if you ever monkey with my trees!”

  “Prove it!” snarled Billet. “An’ lemme tell you I’ll hev the law onto you — a-breakin’ into a honest man’s—”

  “Cut it out P’ said the other sternly. And, turning to Mazie: “Come,” he said, “it’s getting late.”

  “She shan’t stir outen this here house P’ yelled Billet. “Why not?” asked Kemper, staring at him.

  “She’s mine!”

  “No — she’s mine. Are you not, Mazie?”

  There was a silence, then came a low whisper.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, by Gawd,” screamed Billet in a fury, “she kin take off them clothes an’ gimcracks!”

  “What!”

  “They’re mine! I paid for the makin’ o’ them. Take ’em off, d’ye hear!” he shouted, lurching out into the room. Kemper shoved him back and slapped his face till he howled. Then turning to the girl:

  “Mazie, is this true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you any clothes of your own?”

  “A gingham dress and sunbonnet in my valise.”

  “Put them on.”

/>   The two men waited in the darkening house while behind the half-closed door the girl exchanged her finery for gingham and sunbonnet. Billet, enraged but in deadly fear of the man who had so coolly damaged him, slouched in the doorway and gnawed his knuckles and glared; Kemper smoked and tried to think. But events were occurring too rapidly for him to analyze the reason why they were happening at all. And in a few moments Mazie came out in her clinging gingham gown.

  Scant were her skirts, moulding the straight, young figure in limp and modest folds; her hair was lovely in its disorder; her eyes all starry with unshed tears.

  “There are your duds,” said Kemper to Billet. “Now, get out of my way P’ And he reached for the can of kerosene.

  Then, in a flash, Billet had snatched it and dashed out of the door, headed for the forest.

  “Damn you!” he panted back, “I’ll spile your woods for you before I git out o’ this!”

  “Stop!” shouted Kemper, levelling his gun. “You won’t? Well, then here’s yours!”

  The room roared with the double explosion; and Billet was down in the grass, screaming and clawing at his trousers’ seat.

  “Have you killed him?” whispered the girl, clutching Kemper’s arm.

  “No; it’s only salt,” said Kemper quietly. “Come, are you ready to go with me?”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever I take you.... Will you come?”

  “Yes.”

  Billet, yelling lustily, had run squattering into the bushes. The can of kerosene, uncorked, lay in the dust, the last drops trickling out. Kemper gave it a kick as he passed, then, drawing his arm around the girl’s slender body, moved slowly beside her up the hill.

  Through the violet twilight Rittenfeldt’s camp fire glimmered like a heap of dusty rubies as they came up and halted at its edge. Rittenfeldt rose, took off his cap to her politely, and then resumed a squinting observation, through a magnifying glass, of something that wriggled in the palm of his hand.

  “Oncideres cingulatushe remarked in his big, pleasant voice. “I haff today already yet twenty-seven species identified.”

  Mazie seated herself on a log; Kemper wrapped her in a blanket and seated himself beside her.

  “As soon as your head touched my shoulder, there in the waggon,” he explained under his breath, “I knew that I wanted you.... I never took love seriously. But it’s hit me like lightning.”

  Her pretty head drooped; he put his arm around her, and her head sank on his shoulder.

  “You said,” he whispered, “that you didn’t know what love was.... Do you know now, Mazie?”

  After a few moments, under the blanket her small hand, moving, encountered his and clung. It was his answer.

  At the fire Rittenfeldt had caught another beetle:

  “Clytus pictus!” he exclaimed excitedly. “So iss it that I have alretty today twenty-eight species of coleoptera identified!”

  THE BETTER MAN

  ALTHOUGH their respective fathers had been cordial enemies for years, these two young people had never even heard of each other. They lived more than a thousand miles apart, geographically speaking, and about a million, socially.

  It happened that their fathers put on immortality within a few hours of each other. It also happened that the two youthful heirs came into their respective inheritances on the same day.

  Kings and commis-voyageurs are born upon the same day: queens and couturières. It’s one of those things that happen.

  The newspapers noticed nothing extraordinary in the coincidence. But Fate smiled and made a memorandum on the border of her tunic, while her two sisters continued spinning and snipping.

  Now, these same two young people, who had never even heard of each other, appeared to be perfectly capable of handling what the kind gods had so suddenly dumped into their laps: both, properly advised, entered into possession and enjoyment of their individual birthrights, and settled down to responsibilities which might have appalled maturity, but which merely mildly excited a young man of twenty-two and a girl of twenty-one. Felices errore suo.

  The business in life for the young man was to maintain the social and financial prestige of his race and name. Conservative investments, financial and social, were traditional in his family — which happened to be one of those few families known abroad as well as at home. William de Montfort Clifton was his name; Clifton the hundred-year-old home of his race — along the Hudson somewhere; Montfort House the name of his Southern estate; and No. 1650 1/2 Fifth Avenue his turreted metropolitan stronghold. He did his best to live up to these things, but he was only twenty-two. Also, he had the Three, Fate Sisters Three, to reckon with, and a girl who lived more than a thousand miles away, and had a capacity for chewing-gum and romantic fiction.

  It was part of her business in life to hold tight to what her father, Ritter the Brewer, had amassed for her. He left, along with much money, a flock of breweries, a meaningless mass of domestic architecture in a Western metropolis known to her as “home,” and a tract of scrubby Florida land, decorated with what her father had usually referred to as a “chatoo,” and at other and more modest intervals as a “pungaloo.” However, Edna never confused her p’s and b’s.

  These material tokens of parental thrift Miss Ritter understood were to be adroitly cherished. So she first learned how to cherish them and then did it. The first six months of her administration showed profits increased all along the line.

  The remainder of Edna’s business in life was to better herself socially. And she went about it with that same vivid imagination and fearless enthusiasm which had made Peter Ritter the malt monarch of New Mexico. At the end of a month her manœuvres had landed her in a magnificent apartment at the Hotel Arabesque, Manhattan, from the windows of which she could gaze upon the locked gates of the city’s social fortifications. One good look at them ought to have settled the social ambitions of any brewer’s daughter with brains.

  But Edna Ritter, endowed with brains, was also cursed with a magnificent imagination. And in addition to these handicaps she thoroughly believed in the fiction she read.

  For a week she sat beside her windows, perusing bestsellers, the social columns in all the papers, and inspecting a certain chilly mass of limestone and bronze architecture which composed the abiding place of William de Montfort Clifton. How to get into it and stay there was her problem.

  The house stood just across the Avenue, in a direct line from her windows.

  Now the young man who resided there was Edna’s ideal of all that was desirable socially, financially, and sentimentally. And she knew that, speaking colloquially, she had the chances of the classic snowball.

  Had it not been for American literature, hope had died within her the instant she set her dainty foot in Gotham Town. But even in full realization of the social gulf which now yawned before her in all its hideous proportions, American literature came to her aid.

  And after a week’s steady study of the month’s bestselling books, and after a cool survey of her fresh, young face and figure in a triple mirror, she was perfectly persuaded that a personal encounter with this young man, under romantic circumstances, would prove as deadly to him and as satisfactory to her as any similar episode in any best-seller ever dictated.

  It took her two or three days to create, mentally, the romantic setting and circumstances for the scene. Then she prepared to enter the great mansion.

  But when at last Edna set out to scale the gilded bronze railing, she started in the opposite direction; for her Ritter imagination, now all afire, was inspiring her to an attempt as stupendous as any coup ever executed by her father. And she knew, deep in her determined mind, that in all romantic novels the shortest distance between two given points is always the longest way round. Otherwise there would be no novel.

  As for young Clifton, he had decided to look over his Southern domain, Montfort House, with a view to a two weeks’ house party. This Edna read in several social columns. Also, he wanted some dove shooting. And being a
man, and a young one, he went about this business of pleasure as straight as a flying bullet.

  Which resulted in the hooking up of his private car to the end of the same train-de-luxe that was carrying Edna Ritter southward through the first snowstorm of the new year.

  It was no coincidence. She had read about his plans in the daily papers.

  He, in his handsome private quarters aboard, slept as innocently as a child, awoke refreshed, and dictated business letters to his private secretary.

  But her imagination burned her like a living flame, and she lay tossing, with white hands clenched and cheeks afire far into the night.

  Thus, also, had old Peter Ritter conceived those lightning strokes which delivered into his acquisitive fists all malted opposition to the monopoly of a territory doomed already to gulp down Ritter’s Extra Golden Brew — or nothing.

  It gulped the Golden Brew.

  And Edna swallowed everything the modern romantic novelist offered to a cloyed but still unexterminated clientèle.

  Peter Ritter’s recognition of a social aristocracy which did not recognize him had been limited to an expensive imitation of what that aristocracy did with its money.

  When he discovered that it built houses instead of sojourning at huge hotels, he, also, built a house — the largest of homes, with more kinds of architecture to it than any mansion in all the West. Which was going some.

  When he learned that the aristocracy were affecting the life of landed, gentry — very carefully imitated from the real thing — Peter Ritter also bought land wholesale, erected a “chatoo” as near Montfort House as possible, and defiantly awaited the next social idiocy with stolid determination to “see it and raise it.”

  That was really all he wanted — to match, aggressively, the best that challenged, then glare grimly across his own frontiers at a boundary line he had no desire to cross, but merely to defy. For at the social deadline his imagination stopped; that was its limit; he never could conceive himself crossing that Rubicon. So, of the two imaginations, his daughter’s was, perhaps, the more superb. Cæsar’s offspring was not afraid to go a-paddling. Her shoes and stockings were off already, her skirts tucked up.