University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X
THE THIEF IN THE MOUTH

WHEN Lloyd Fenneben could think again, the waters had receded, the rock ledge had turned to a pillow under his head, the river bank was a straight white hospital wall, sunlight and sweet air for the darkness and the rain, and Norrie Wream was beside him instead of the brutal stranger. His heavy black hair was shorn away and his head was bound with much soft cotton stuffs. His left arm was full of prickles, as if the blood had just resumed circulation.

"And meantime?" he said, looking up at Elinor.

"Yes, meantime, it's June time," Elinor replied.

"Well, and what of Sunrise? Did we—"

"Oh, yes, we did. The college first. The ruling passion, strong in the hospital. When a Wream gets to kingdom-come, he always

asks Saint Peter first for a mortar board and gown instead of a crown and wings." Norrie's eyes were shining. "And he's a little particular about the lining of the wings, too —Purple, for Law; White, for Letters; Blue, for Philosophy; Red, for Divinity. Take this quieting powder. College presidents should be seen and not heard." She smilingly silenced him.

Under her gentle ministrations, Dr. Fenneben could picture what comfort might be in store for Vincent Burgess in a day, doubtless only two years away. He resented Joshua Wream's estimate of Elinor. Surely Joshua had never seen her in the place of nurse.

"Now, meantime, Uncle Lloyd," Elinor was saying, "commencement passed off beautifully under Acting-Dean Burgess, considering how sad and heavy-hearted everybody was. The trustees want to raise Professor Burgess's salary next year—he's so competent.

Lloyd Fenneben's eyes were not bandaged, and as he looked at Elinor he wondered at her utter lack of reserve and sentiment, when she spoke of Burgess in such a frank, matter-of-fact way. When he was in

love years ago—but times must have changed.

"The arrangements for next year are all looked after. Everything will be done exactly as you would have it done. There's not one thing to put a worry into that cotton round your head."

"Good! Now, tell me of `beforehand.' " His smile was as charming as ever.

"In your fever you've been telling us about a one-armed man who had two arms to push people into the river, of his wanting you to save some child's life, and of your stumbling over the stone. That's all we know about that. Bond Saxon and Professor Burgess found you in the water at the north bend in the Walnut close to that hermit woman's house. Either you fell in, or somebody pushed you down the bank, headforemost, and you struck a ledge of rock." Elinor's eyes were full of tears now. "You would have been drowned, if that white-haired woman had n't jumped in and held your head above water while she clung to the bushes with one hand. Her dog helped, too, like a real hero. It stood on the bank and held to her shawl that she had fastened round you to hold you. And the river was

rising so fast, too. It was awful. I don't know just how it was all managed, Uncle Lloyd, but it was managed between the woman and her dog at first, and Professor Burgess and Bond Saxon at last, and you are safe now, and on the high road, the very elevated tracks, to recovery. When your fever was the highest, the doctors kept telling me about your splendid constitution and your temperate life. You must get well now."

She bent over him and softly caressed his hand.

"Where is that woman now? Dennie Saxon asked me once to do something for her in her loneliness. She got ahead of my negligence and did something for me, it seems."

"She left Lagonda Ledge the very day they rushed us up here to the hospital. Is n't she strange? And she is so gentle and sweet, but so sad. I never saw such apathetic face as hers, Uncle Lloyd."

"When did you see her?" Fenneben asked.

"She came to ask after you. Nobody thought you would get over it." Elinor's voice trembled. "The fever was burning

you up and it took three doctors to hold you. I saw her face when Dennie Saxon said they thought you wouldn't pull through. Your own sister couldn't have turned whiter, Uncle Lloyd."

"And the one-armed man I seemed to remember?"

"I don't know. I've been too busy to ask many questions. Lagonda Ledge is in mourning for you. It will run up the flag above half-mast when I write how much better you are. Bond Saxon has a theory that some thief wanted to rob you and decoyed you away on pretense of helping somebody out of the river. You are an easy mark, Uncle."

"Why should Bond Saxon have a theory? And how did he know where to find me? And how did that gray-haired woman and her dog happen in on the scene just then? This is a grim sort of dime novel business, Norrie. Things don't fall out this way in real life unless there is some reason back of them. I think I'll bear investigating."

"I think so myself—you or your romantic rescuing squad. You might call the dog to the witness stand first, for he was the first on the scene. I forgot though that the dog

is dead. They found him down the river with his throat cut. The plot thickens." Elinor's frivolous spirit was returning with the lessening of care.

"Tell me about the ball game," Fenneben said next.

"Oh, it rained for hours and hours, and there wasn't any train service for Lagonda Ledge for a week, and all the Inter-Collegiate Athletic events for the season were called off for Sun rise-by-the-Walnut."

"And the students, generally?" Dr. Fenneben questioned.

"Mr. Trench will be back," Elinor exclaimed, "and folks have just found out that it's old Trench who's keeping that crippled boy in school, the one they call `Limpy.' Trench rustles jobs for him and divides his own income for college expenses with the boy for the rest of the cost. I don't know how the story got out, but I asked him about it when he was up here to see you. He just grinned and drawled lazily, `I can save a little on shoe leather, that some fellows wear out hurrying so, and I don't burst up so many hats with a swelled head as some do. So I keep a little extra change on these accounts. We're going down to Oklahoma

when we graduate. Limpy's going to be a Methodist preacher and I a stockman. I'll keep him in raw material for converts out of the cowboys I'll have to handle.' Isn't old Trenchy a hero? He says Dean Funnybone showed him how to think about somebody else beside Trench a little bit."

"Oh, yes; Trench is a hero and I've known about that whole thing for a long while," the Dean asserted. "And Victor Burleigh?"

A shadow in the beautiful dark eyes, a half-tone lowering of the voice, and a general indifference of manner, as Elinor answered:

"I'm sure I don't know anything about him, except that he's coming back next year."

Dr. Fenneben read the whole story in the words and manner of the answer, and he smiled grimly as he thought of Burgess and of the conflict of Wream against Wream if Elinor and his brother Joshua ever came to the clash of arms. But he was too weak now to direct matters.

And meantime, while Lagonda Ledge was holding its breath in anxiety and dread,

and all the churches were joining in union prayer service for the life of their beloved Dean Fenneben, and the college year was ending in a halting between hope and dread —meantime, the same queries of Dr. Fenneben as to motives were also queries in Professor Burgess' mind.

To the school and the town Dr. Fenneben's recovery was the only thing asked for. There was as yet no clew regarding the cause of the assault. Bond Saxon had avoided Burgess since the event, so the young man himself made occasion to get Bond up into Dr. Fenneben's study one June day just before commencement.

"Saxon," he said gravely, "you are a man of sense, and you know that there's something wrong about this Fenneben assault. You've put up some smooth stories about our happening to be out at the bend of the river that night, so I guess suspicion will be turned from us all right when Lagonda Ledge gets time to think about causes; but I must be let into the truth now." Burgess was adamant now.

For a little while the old man looked away through the study window at the prairie empire to be found for the looking.

"Do you see that little twist of blue smoke over west?" he queried presently.

"What of it?" Burgess asked.

"Nothing, only the man huddlin' down round the fire makin' that smoke way down where it's cold and dark, that's the man who—say, Professor!"

Old Bond looked up appealingly, and the pitiful face touched Burgess' heart.

"What is it, Saxon? Be frank now, but be fair, too. Sooner or later, this thing must be run down. Fenneben will do it himself, anyhow, as soon as he's well enough."

"Professor, I have asked you twice if you'd be good to Dennie—"

"Yes, yes; you always come back to that. Anybody would be good to her, and she's a capable girl who doesn't need anybody's care, anyhow. Now, go on."

"I will"—it seemed an heroic resolve— "I asked this for Dennie, because my own life is never safe."

"So you have said. Why not?" Burgess insisted. There was no way to evade the question now.

"That's my own business—just a little longer," Bond answered slowly. "One thing more; I want your promise not to tell what

I say—yet awhile. It can't hurt anyone to keep still, and it will help some folks."

"Oh, I'll help you all I can." Burgess's kindly patience now was strangely unlike the aristocratic, resentful man to whom old Bond Saxon had appealed one stormy October night.

"I'm a failure, Professor. I've spoiled my life by my infernal weak will and appetite for whisky. I know it as well as you do. But I'm not meant for a bad man." There was unspeakable pathos in Saxon's face and words.

"Nobody would call you bad. You are a lovable man when you—keep straight," Burgess declared cordially.

"I graduated from the university back in the sixties," Bond went on.

"You!" Burgess exclaimed.

"Yes, I'm one of your alumni brothers from Harvard. It takes more 'n a college diploma to make a man sometimes, although this would mighty soon get to be a cheap, destructible nation, if we should pull the colleges out of it. The boys I've seen Sunrise make into men does an old man's heart good to think about! But there's more than book-learning in a Master's Degree. There must

be mastery in it. I never got farther 'n an A.B., partly because Nature made me easy going, but mostly because whisky ruined me. I finally came to Kansas. I'd have had tremens long ago but for that. But even here a man's got to keep the law inside, or no human law can prevent his making a beast of himself."

Saxon paused, and the professor waited.

"The man that sets the cussed trap for me is a law breaker, an escaped convict, and a murderer. That's what drinking did for him; drinking and injustice in money matters together."

Burgess started and his face grew pale.

"Oh, it's a fact, Professor. There are several roads to ruin. One by the route I've taken. One may be too much love of money, of women, or of having your own way. You can ruin your soul by getting it set on one thing above everything else. Education, for instance, like the Wreams back there in Cambridge."

"The Wreams!" Burgess exclaimed.

"Yes, old Joshua Wream sold himself to an appetite for musty old Sanscrit till he'd sacrifice anybody's comfort and joy for it, same as I sold out to a fool's craving for

drink. You'll know the Wreams sometime as I know 'em now. Fenneben's only a stepbrother and the West made a man of him. He was always a gentleman."

"Go on!" Vincent's voice was hardly audible.

"This outlaw, boot-legger, thief, and murderer was a respectable fellow once, the adopted son of a wealthy family back East, who began by spoiling him, lavished money on him, and let him have his own way in everything. He was a gay youngster on the side, given to drinking and fast company. He fell in love with a pretty girl, but when she found him out, she cut him. Then he went to the dogs, blaming her because she had sense enough to throw him over where he belonged. She fell in love—the right kind of love—with another man. And this young fool who had no claim on her at all, swore vengeance. Her family wanted her to marry the young sport because he had money. They were long on money—her father was, anyhow. But she wouldn't do it."

"Did she marry the one she really cared for?" Burgess asked eagerly.

"No; but that's another story. Meantime

this fellow's father died, leaving the boy he, himself, had started on the wrong road, entirely out of his will. The boy went to the devil—and he's still there."

Saxon paused and looked once more at the tiny wavering smoke column, hardly visible now.

"He's over yonder hiding away from the light of day under the bluffs by the fire that sends that curl of smoke up through the crevices in the rock, an outlaw thief."

Saxon gazed long at the landscape beyond the Walnut. When he spoke again, it was with an effort.

"Professor, this outlaw got a hold on me once when I was drunk, drunk by his making. It would do no good to tell you about that. You couldn't help me, nor harm him. You'll trust me in this?"

A picture of Dennie down in the Kickapoo Corral, with the flickering firelight on her rippling hair, the weird, shadowy woodland, and the old Indian legend all came back to the young man now, though why he could not say.

"I certainly would never bring harm to you nor yours," he said kindly.

"I can't inform on the scoundrel. I can

only watch him. The woman he was in love with years ago, who wouldn't stand for his wild ways—that's the gray-haired woman at Pigeon Place. Her life's been one long tragedy, though she is not forty yet."

The anguish on the old man's face was pitiful as he spoke.

"She has a reason of her own for living here, and she is the soul of courage. On the night of the Fenneben accident, I was out her way—yes, running away from Bond Saxon. I knew if I stayed in town, I'd get drunk on a bottle left at my door. So I tore out in the rain and the dark to fight it out with the devil inside of me. And out at Pigeon Place I run onto this fiend. When I ordered him back to his hiding place, he vowed he'd get Fenneben and put him in the river. There's one or two human things about him still. One is his fear of little children, and one is his love for that woman. He really did adore her years ago. I tracked home after him, and you know the rest. He put up some story to the Dean to entice him out there."

He hesitated, then ceased to speak.

"Why the Dean?" Burgess asked.

"Because Lloyd Fenneben's the man she

loved years ago, and her folks wouldn't let her marry," Bond Saxon said sadly.

Burgess felt as if the limestone ridge was giving way beneath him.

"Where is she now?"

She's gone, nobody knows where. I hope to heaven she will never come back," the old man replied.

"And it was she who saved Dr. Fenneben's life? Does he know who she is?"

"No, no. She's never let him know, and if she doesn't want him to know, whose business is it to tell him?" Saxon urged. "I have hung about and protected her when she never knew I was near. But when I'm drunk, I'm an idiot and my mind is bent against her. I'd die to save her, and yet I may kill her some day when I don't know it." Bond Saxon's head was drooping pitifully low.

"But why live in such slavery? Why not tell all you know about this man and let the law protect a helpless woman?" Burgess urged.

Old Bond Saxon looked up and uttered only one word—"Dennie!"

Vincent Burgess turned away a moment. Dennie! Yes, there was Dennie.

"This woman had a husband, you say?" he asked presently.

Bond Saxon stared straight at him and slowly nodded his head.

"What became of him? Do you know? Vincent questioned.

Saxon leaned forward, and, clutching Vincent Burgess by the arm, whispered hoarsely, "He's dead. I killed him. But I was drunk when I did it. And this man knows it and holds me bound,"