Part 42

"Do--do you wish--that--now?" she faltered.

He picked up the paddle; she caught his hand, trembling.

"No, no!"--she whispered, with bent head--"I cannot; don't take me so--so quickly. Truly we must be mad to think of it."

He held the paddle poised; after a while her hand slid from the blade and she looked up into his eyes. The canoe moved on.

"Oh, we are quite mad," she said, unsteadily.

"I am glad we are," he said.

The mellow dip! dip! of the paddle woke the drowsing red-winged blackbirds from the reeds; the gray snipe wheeled out across the marsh in flickering flight.

The aged parson of Foxville, intent on his bobbing cork, looked up in mild surprise to see a canoe, heavily hung with water-lilies, glide into his pool and swing shoreward.

The parson of Foxville was a very old man--almost too old to fish for trout.

Crawford led him a pace aside, leaving Miss Castle, somewhat frightened, knee-deep in the purple iris.

Then the old parson came toddling to her and took her hand, and peered at her with his aged eyes, saying, "You are quite mad, my child, and very lovely, and very, very young. So I think, after all, you would be much safer if you were married."

Somebody encircled her waist; she turned and looked into the eyes of her lover, and still looking at him, she laid her hands in his.

A wedding amid the iris, all gray with the hovering, misty wings of moths--that was her fate--with the sky a canopy of fire above her, and the curlew calling through the kindling dusk, and the blue processional of the woods lining the corridors of the coming night.

And at last the aged parson kissed her and shook hands with her husband and shambled away across the meadows.

Slowly northward through the dusk stole the canoe once more, bearing the bride of an hour, her head on her husband's knees. The stars came out to watch them; a necklace of bubbles trailed in the paddle's wake, stringing away, twinkling in the starlight.

Slowly through the perfumed gloom they glided, her warm head on his knees, his eyes fixed on the vague water ahead.

A stag crashed through the reeds ashore; the June fawn stared with eyes like rubies in the dark.

Onward, onward, through the spell-bound forest; and at last the windows of the house glimmered, reflected in the water.

Garcide and Crawford awaited them on the veranda as they came up, rising in chilling silence, ignoring the offered hands of greeting.

"I've a word to say to you," snarled the Hon. John Garcide, in his ward's ear--"and another word for your fool of an aunt!"

She shrank back against her husband, amazed and hurt. "What do you mean?" she stammered; "we--we are married. Will you not speak to my--my husband?"

A silence, too awful to last, was broken by a hoarse laugh.

"You're all right, Jim," said the elder Crawford, slowly. "Ophir Steel won't slip through your fingers when I'm under the sod. Been married long, Jim?"

THE FIRE-WARDEN

"And of course what I buy is my own," continued Burleson, patiently. "No man here will question that, I suppose?"

For a moment there was silence in the cross-roads store; then a lank, mud-splashed native arose from behind the stove, shoving his scarred hands deep into the ragged pockets of his trousers.

"Young man," he said, harshly, "there's a few things you can't buy; you may think you can buy 'em--you may pay for 'em, too--but they can't be bought an' sold. You thought you bought Grier's tract; you thought you bought a lot o' deer an' birds an' fish, several thousand acres in timber, and a dozen lakes. An' you paid for 'em, too. But, sonny, you was took in; you paid for 'em, but you didn't buy 'em, because Grier couldn't sell God's free critters. He fooled ye that time."

"Is that the way you regard it, Santry?" asked Burleson. "Is that the way these people regard private property?"