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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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The American, May 1935, with "Still Fishing"
KEMP resented the girl in the waders. The one thing he'd asked for, that day, was peace and quiet and a few hours of worm fishing. He wanted solitude to flow over his battered spirit like amber water over a channel rock. And he regarded that stream, hidden away between the Kittatinny Hills, as peculiarly his own, his own by right of discovery and occupation. He had nosed it out eight long years ago, and always it had stood there, a secret haven to which he could steal away from the noise of the world and recover his soul's composure.
But the girl in the ballooning waders of tan rubber was spoiling his day for him. He saw her long before she happened to catch sight of him. He sat in the deep shadow of the swamp maples, where the elderberry bushes fringed his favorite pool, studying her as she waded slowly but resolutely upstream, whip-ping each pool as she came. Her skin, he noticed, was a butternut-brown. Her profile, he also observed as she emerged from shadow into sunlight, was clear-cut and rather boylike under the faded brown felt which she wore tilted at a definite angle of adventure. Equally arresting was the fringe of leaders and artificial flies so carelessly depending from an equally faded hatband, reminding the silent watcher of a live oak festooned with Spanish moss. But the adroit and purposeful way in which she cast, as she pursued her preoccupied way up towards the swamp maple shadows, persuaded Kemp that she would be ready to laugh at his still fishing, at his long bamboo and his lowly worms. The fly-fisherman always did. They were made that way.
So he pointedly disregarded her. He sat motionless, studying a dragon fly that hovered above the pool dimples. When the girl came to a stop, within twenty paces of him, he refused to look up.
"Still fishing?" she casually and somewhat contemptuously inquired.
Kemp resented both the question and the intrusion. And he attempted, in his deliberated reply, not only to incorporate some shadow of that feeling in his speech, but also to intimate to the invader that he was not a back township yokel with the brain of an angleworm.
"If you are using the word 'still' in its adjectival sense," he answered, "I must acknowledge that I am resorting to the more primitive and also perhaps the more natural method of piscatorial enterprise. If, on the other hand, the qualifying word is adverbial, I'm equally ready to admit that, even in the face of singularly discouraging results, I am continuing my efforts."
The girl with the poised three-ounce rod looked at him, for a solemn moment, with quite solemn eyes.
"Any luck?" she inquired, still with her exasperating casualness.
"Nothing to speak of," Kemp was compelled to admit.
She moved a little closer, the ghost of a smile curving her lips. Her cool eye assessed his empty creel, his bait can, the copy of Marius the Epicurean lying between the sandwich box and the wicker-covered thermos.
"Well, we're both in the same boat," she said, growing suddenly solemn again. " I haven't had a strike all the morning."
"The day is still young," proclaimed the mordant-eyed Kemp.
HER frown deepened as she looked up from studying the brown water that rippled about her wader-tops.
"There's something spoiling this stream," she pointedly announced.
"Does that mean me?" promptly demanded the man on the bank.
She looked at him for a moment and returned to her study of the water.
"You're welcome to fish here if you want to," she airily conceded. She essayed a skeptical cast across the limpid-surfaced pool. "But what's the use of fishing when you can't land anything?"
He looked at her with open disapproval.
"Fish," he tartly retorted, "isn't everything to fishing."
"Have it as you will, Izaak Walton. But I prefer waters with fish in 'em. And there ought to be trout here."
Kemp withdrew his line, examined his bait, and returned it to the water.
"There would be, I assume, if noisy intruders didn't frighten 'em away."
That held her for a moment. But her eye, as it ranged along the tumbling water, remained speculative.
"Father had this stream stocked twice, this spring, from the state hatchery. And we haven't bothered much about trespassers. They don't seem to know much about it."
"I knew about it," Kemp stubbornly asserted, "when you were still in rompers."
"Did you, now?" said the girl in waders. Her cool eye once more regarded him. "You've been poaching here for quite a long time "
"Why poaching?" demanded Kemp, disturbed by the other's unassailable air of fortitude.
"Because my father happens to own that bank you're sitting on," she said. "He's owned all this old Fletcher Farm property for over three years."
Kemp's pole and pride went down together.
"I'm sorry to be the intruder," he said, with what remained of his dignity. " I rather thought the fish belonged to the fellow who came and caught 'em."
Her laugh was both crisp and brief.
"But you're not catching 'em," she pointed out. "And this is the third day I've gone without a strike."
"With all that equipment?" he demanded, with a laconic head-nod towards the leather-fringed hat.
"I don't like the look of this water," she impersonally announced.
"Handsome is as handsome does," ventured Kemp as he removed the bait from his hook. " What's wrong with it?"
INSTEAD of answering him, the girl scooped up a handful of the running water and sniffed at it.
"I don't even like the _smell ^of it," she was triumphantly proclaiming.
Kemp took his turn sniffing at a handful of the amber-tinted fluid.
"It is a bit brackish," he finally admitted.
"But it shouldn't be," objected the girl. "Something is polluting this stream."
Kemp had his doubts about that. " Perhaps it's a dead horse," he suggested.
The reproof in her eyes, as she studied him, slowly turned to a look of triumph.
"I know where I saw you before," she proclaimed. "It was last June at Princeton, when it rained and we all had to go scrambling into the faculty-room at Nassau Hall. They gave you a degree or something just after Dad got his."
The girl waded ashore and sat down on the bank-slope.
"The important thing," she said, "is to know what's spoiling our fishing."
Kemp, in spite of himself, had to admit that he liked the Flying Victory way in which she held her shoulders. And he liked the parenthesizing small laughter wrinkle at either end of her full lips.
"Let's find out," he surprised himself by saying.
"How?" she exacted.
"By following up this stream," he explained, "until we come to the trouble."
"All right," she agreed. "My name's Allie Sencourt," she added.
"Mine is Richard Kemp, commonly known as Dick. I try to be a corporation lawyer, when I don't run away from work."
"That's great," said Miss Allie Sen-court. But her brow clouded again. "There's something distinctly wrong about this water," she solemnly averred.
Kemp didn't seem to mind the flies and mosquitoes. Even his wet feet didn't bother him much.
The lady in waders, it's true, had the advantage whenever they came to deeper water. For on several occasions Kemp was compelled to take to the bank, where there were rocks to be clambered over and underbrush to be pushed through.
The girl stopped abruptly, when they came to half a dozen strands of barbed wire bridging the stream.
"Here's where our land ends," she explained as she wormed her way through the wire.
"So we're both trespassers now," said her companion.
She nodded her head and laughed.
"But there doesn't seem to be anybody to stop us," she pointed out as they continued their laborious course.
THEY were in a world of their own, where time and space became trivial. Yet the shadows, Kemp observed, were growing perceptibly longer, just as the watercourse they were skirting became perceptibly smaller. Its increasing turbidity continued to puzzle him.
"Would there be any factories up here? " he asked.
"Who'd want a factory in country like this? " countered his fellow explorer. Kemp stopped and looked about him. " It does look a bit desolate," he acknowledged.
"That's what I like about it," averred Allie Sencourt.
"You're not tired?" he asked. "Not a bit," answered the girl. "And we're going to see this thing through, aren't we?"
"We are," proclaimed Kemp. It was wild enough, Kemp thought, as they went on in silence. They might just as well have been at the headwaters of the Amazon. The silence was so sustained that the girl stopped short at the sudden scream of a kingfisher.
It seemed almost like a warning. " Are you afraid? " asked Kemp. "Not with you here," was her promptly valorous reply.
And Kemp, as they went on again, felt very brave. An army of bushmen loaded down with poisoned arrows, after that, would have proved a triviality in his path.
But instead of a bushman with poisoned arrows, half an hour later they came face to face with a dubious-looking prowler with a rifle in his hands. He stood on the bank above them, with a scowling and saturnine face.
"Jus' a minute there, buddy," commanded the man with the rifle, stepping closer to the water's edge.
"What is it, my good man?" asked Kemp as Allie steadied herself with a hand on his arm.
"Where in hell you folks headin' for?"
Kemp considered that question.
"What business is it of yours? " he asked.
The man with the rifle spat into the water at his feet.
"You'd better be swingin' back," he said, with a sort of wearied indifference,
"We're looking for fishing pools," protested Kemp.
"The further back y' go the better the fishin'," announced the guardian of the upper reaches.
"Why shouldn't we go on?" challenged the girl.
"B'cause I say so."
Kemp could feel her small body stiffen.
"It'll take more than that to stop me," she smilingly asserted.
"Then b'cause you're trespassin' on private grounds, sister, an' the sooner you're off 'em the better."
The girl met and held his glance.
"Are you attempting to threaten us?" she challenged.
"No, baby, I'm not threatenin' you," was the insolently deliberate reply. "I'm jus' speakin' firm but friendly-like. And the sooner you turn back the better."
Kemp's surrender to that ultimatum was a distinct disappointment to the girl in the waders.
"All right," he said. And without further argument he took Allie's hand, swung about, and went slushing silently downstream. They plodded on, conscious of the silent figure regarding them, until they rounded the first bend.
"Why did you turn back?" asked the indignant girl.
"Who's turning back?" countered Kemp.
Their glances, as they stood face to face, locked together. The frown that had clouded the girl's brow cleared away.
"That's great," she said, quite simply.
"It's getting worth while," agreed Kemp. "We'll circle around him."
"Did you notice that funny-looking drum on his rifle?" Allie asked as they clambered up the bank.
"That," said her companion with an effort at indifference, "was a submachine gun."
"Hot dog!" said Allie, a little out of breath from climbing.
"Don't talk," warned Kemp, as they pushed their way cautiously up through an alder thicket. And they remained silent as Apaches as they effected a discreetly wide detour, keeping well under cover as they went, and once more swung down to their stream.
THEN Kemp came to a sudden stop. He stood looking at a ditch that debouched into their trout stream. It was a man-made ditch, flowing with a small but steady current of discolored water. He stooped and thrust his hand into what looked like a brownish-yellow sand bank, lifting out a viscid mass which he sniffed at, and then washed from his fingers.
"I thought so," he observed. "What is it?" asked the girl. Kemp, instead of answering that question, crawled cautiously up the shallow stream-bank, parted a fringe of raspberry canes, and studied a huge barn that stood in a hollow between the wooded hills.
"What is it?" repeated the girl as she clambered up beside him.
"It's the answer," he told her, "to what's spoiling our trout fishing."
"What's the answer?" persisted the puzzled girl.
"That," said Kemp, pointing to the brownish-yellow sand bank. "It's sour mash refuse."
"Sour mash?" she repeated.
"Yes, from fermentation vats." He showed her the lonely-looking barn in the lonely-looking hollow. "That building over there is a place where bootleggers make illicit alcohol."
"Are you sure?" she questioned.
"It's certainly not a shoe factory," asserted Kemp.
"But it looks absolutely deserted."
"Deserted?" cried Kemp. "Don't you see that sheet-iron vent pipe coming out from under the eaves there? And the smoke curling away from it? And that truck trail winding down between the hills?"
She saw all of these, in time, her eyes widening with excitement.
"What are we going to do?" she asked.
Kemp had to confess that he didn't quite know. "But I'd like to get a look inside that barn."
"Why?" asked the girl.
"To confirm my facts," replied the man of law.
SHE returned, with mounting disapproval, to a study of the building. "There's a man there," she whispered. Kemp, peering through the raspberry canes, saw the man. He was long-armed, like a gorilla, and singularly thick of shoulder. He wore a vest and a fedora, and he was indifferently smoking a cigar as he indifferently circled the barn. "Be careful," warned the girl. "There's likely to be more than one of them," Kemp meditated aloud.
"Then you mustn't go up there," proclaimed his companion. "At least, not alone. If they're outlaws, running a still, they'd certainly give you a royal welcome. They're always killing somebody."
"I'm not afraid of them."
"Of course you're not. But I'd much rather have you alive."
"Then what are we going to do?" he demanded.
The answer did not come from the girl at his side. It came from behind him. And it came in a voice barbed with venom:
"You're goin' to stay jus' where you are."
It was their old friend from downstream, the saturnine-faced man with the submachine gun.
"Oh, no," he quickly cautioned, "don't move."
Kemp, looking into the menacing metal O, remained where he was.
"Be careful with that thing," cried the girl. " It might go off."
"Sure, it might," mocked her captor. Yet he surprised Kemp, a moment later, by grounding the weapon. But any relief stemming from that action was brief, for the intruder, with a quick and casual movement of his right hand, produced a dark-metaled revolver from under his coat-flap.
"Stand up, both of you," he commanded.
"I prefer staying where I am," said the resentful-eyed girl. She even showed her scorn for Kemp, who rose slowly to his feet.
"Stand up," barked her captor.
"Why should I?" objected the girl. "I don't see that I've—"
Her speech was cut short by the repeated thunder of the firearm. The double
report split the silence of the quiet valley-side, echoing up to the outer hills. Their enemy had fired two shots into the sand bank.
"You jus' wouldn't listen to reason, would you? " that enemy was saying, with a glance towards the barn in the hollow.
And Kemp, glancing over his shoulder, awakened to the fact that the revolver-shots had been a deliberate call for help, for, hurrying out from the building, came the thick-set man who had earlier circled the barn. That second man came to a stop, in the evening shadows, as he caught sight of the trio in the trampled-down raspberry canes.
"What've you got here, Slim?" he casually inquired.
"Two bull-headed rubbernecks, jus' set on committin' suicide."
The thick-set man refused to show surprise.
"Just what're you lookin' for?" he questioned.
"We were fishing for trout," Kemp said.
"And did you get what you were after? "
"We did," answered the girl.
"And what was that?"
"The knowledge," she answered before Kemp could stop her, "that you're running a still here."
THAT statement brought a new grimness to the swarthy face considering her.
"You two married?" he curtly inquired.
"Of course not," answered the girl.
"That's just too bad," he said, with his sardonic smile.
"Why?" demanded Kemp.
"Because you're sure goin' on a honeymoon," was the altogether unexpected reply.
"What does that mean? " challenged the girl.
"You'll find out when the time comes," retorted her captor. He turned to his confederate. "Take 'em up to the shack, Slim. And if they duck for a get-away, give 'em the works."
"Okay," said the man with the revolver. The barrel-end prodded unpleasantly against Kemp's ribs. "Git movin'," was the curt command.
They moved forward, walking measured step by step across the evening meadow slope. The man called Slim walked close behind them, his pot-bellied rifle balanced on his left shoulder, his black-metaled revolver balanced in his right hand. And behind him again, equally vigilant, walked the thick-set man with arms like a gorilla's.
They did not, as Kemp had expected, go to the barn. They were herded along the i winding wagon-trail up through the hills, where they came, in time, to what looked ' like a hunter's cabin in a clearing.
"Get inside," commanded the man who 1 looked like a gorilla.
Kemp felt that it was time to take his ; stand.
"I want to talk to you," he said. " It's too late for talkin'," retorted his captor.
"What happens to me," persisted the solemn-eyed Kemp, "may not be of much , consequence. But it's different with this , girl. You've got to let her go." ,
"Go where?" casually inquired their j enemy. ]
"Back to her home, of course."
The other's laugh was brief and caustic.
"Sure she'll go back t' her home. But
she'll go when I say so, and not before."
The girl, as the second outlaw unlocked and opened the door, turned on the man in the fedora.
"What are you going to do to _him?" ^she demanded, indicating her companion of the trout stream.
"If he doesn't listen t' reason," was the prompt reply, "I'll sure take him for a sleighride."
Kemp faced him without flinching.
"That won't get you far," he proclaimed.
"I know jus' what I'm doin'," proclaimed the other.
"So will the state police," Kemp was foolish enough to assert, "inside of twelve hours."
He said it bravely enough. But men of that breed, he remembered, could be rather ruthless. They had little respect for either law or life. There was, in fact, something not at all to his liking in the face of the gorilla-armed man, who, with an unexpectedly quick movement, jerked Kemp's creel from its owner's shoulder, glanced contemptuously inside, and tossed the wicker basket out the door.
"Take off your shoes," he commanded. "And that means both o' you."
The girl's eyes questioned her companion. Her face even clouded a little as Kemp, after a moment of thought, silently nodded his head. Her frown deepened as her fellow-captive sat meekly down on the floor and began to unlace his shoes. But his eyes, as he did so, were quietly studying the cabin. It was empty, except for a maple table, small and scarred, against the end wall. In one side wall was a smoke-stained fireplace of field stone. In the other side wall was an oblong window, high above the floor, screened with metal mesh. Beyond that the room was disappointingly empty.
Kemp's attention went back to his companion. The gorilla-man, plainly resenting her lack of response, had sent her, with a sudden insolent push, staggering against the fireplace stonework.
"Take off those shoes," he barked.
Kemp could hear her broken gasp of indignation. He could also see the insurrectionary fire in her eye as she subsided on the cabin floor beside him. But, without further protest, she began unlacing the heavy wading-shoes.
"I don't suppose it makes much difference," said the girl as their enemy took possession of the footwear, "but I happen to be extremely thirsty."
"Slim," their captor called out over his shoulder, "fetch a pitcher o' water. And that haulin' chain with the two snap-locks from under my car seat."
KEMP rose slowly to his feet.
"I expect you," he said with what dignity he could command, "to treat this young lady with respect."
The gorilla-armed man's laugh was in the nature of a challenge.
"Watch me," he retorted as he took a length of steel chain from his returned confederate. With altogether unlooked-for celerity he swung one end of the chain about Kemp's ankle, securing it there with the snap of a thick-metaled padlock. It was as he turned to repeat the operation on the more slender ankle of Allie Sencourt that Kemp suddenly saw red. He lunged forward and grappled with his enemy.
But, from the first, it was a hopeless fight, an unthinking eruption of violence that led to no good end. It merely resulted in a minute or two of manhandling, followed by a bruised skull and a period of inertia during which Kemp remained only vaguely interested in the things about him. When his brain cleared he found Allie Sencourt stooping over him, moistening his throbbing temple with water from a ridiculously small handkerchief.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
He decided, in time, that he was. He saw, for the first time, that the chain padlocked so closely about his ankle was also attached to the ankle of his companion. They were linked together in ignominious intimacy, like two farm fowls destined for a market stall. And their captivity had been made complete, he saw, by the fact that the chain had been passed through a heavy iron ring, presumably to support a pot-crane, set in the masonry of the fireplace arch.
"Where are they?" Kemp asked.
"They've gone," said Allie, as she leaned forward to ease the tug of the steel links that pressed into her ankle bone.
HIS morose eye studied the empty room. Then, in the uncertain light, he examined the padlock just above his ankle bone, and the stout links of the chain, and the iron ring so firmly embedded in cement. He studied and tested each, in turn, and found nothing on which to base any hope.
"I'm glad you're here," said the girl, out of the silence that had fallen over them.
Kemp stiffened his shoulders.
"They'll think I'm drowned," she murmured.
"That's fine," asserted Kemp, whose abstracted finger had been exploring a darker slab of granite incorporated in the fireplace masonry beside him.
"Thank you," Allie retorted in a voice edged with ice.
"I mean," explained Kemp, "that once you're missed you'll be hunted for. They'll find us, of course. But we can't sit back and wait for them."
"What can we do?" asked the girl.
"I don't know yet," said Kemp. "But there's always a way."
That, he remembered, was his business in life, to devise escapes from predicaments, to use the brains that God had given him and meditate his way out of an impasse. And he had no intention of being beaten by a bootlegger.
He reexamined the chain and ring and padlocks. He studied the empty room, wall by wall, from the fireplace masonry to the oblong window, from the locked door to the old maple table well beyond their extended finger tips. And for the second time his gaze went back to the granite slab in the masonry.
"I want that table," he suddenly announced.
"It's out of reach," she reminded him.
"Only temporarily," he corrected.
"But how'll you get it?"
"Since we're fishermen," he proclaimed, "we'll fish for it. Could I have those flies and leaders from your hat-brim?"
When, in silence, she passed the hat itself over to him, he doubled the leaders and knotted them together. To the end of them he attached a cat's claw of feathered hooks. Then, straining out to the extreme limit of his chain, he began to cast for the nearest table leg.
"I'm better at that," said the girl behind him.
"I'll manage," maintained Kemp, intent on his own ends.
But his first efforts were not successful. On his fourth cast, however, one of the hook-barbs bit and held in the wood. Slowly and guardedly he pulled in on his line. Then, inch by inch, he maneuvered his strange catch to a landing. He breathed easier when he was able to reach out and take possession of the table. And he grunted with satisfaction when he was finally able to turn it over on the floor beside him.
As he had hoped, each embedded leg-top was held against the crosspieces by an iron bolt. The nut on one of these was loose enough to be turned by hand. With the binding bolt removed, he was able to wrench and twist the leg free. That leg, he explained, was a mallet and the bolt was a chisel. And with such a mallet and chisel he could remove the slab of granite from the fireplace masonry.
"And then what?" asked the girl.
With the serrated edge of his granite slab, he proclaimed, he could eventually saw through one of the chain links and release the two of them from their anchorage there.
"What's more," he said, as he balanced the thick-wooded table-leg in his hands, "this makes a mighty good war club."
HE pounded and pecked for a long time at the sullen masonry. And the granite slab, when released, was neither light in weight nor easy to handle. But it had what might be called a cutting edge. He could see how it abraded away the metal of a chain link held close against the table-leg.
Yet to weaken that link, so that it could be snapped asunder by his table bolt, required an unconscionable amount of sawing. The watching girl found her lids drooping. The monotonous sound of stone rasping on metal made her drowsy. But she was wakeful enough when, in the end, the link was pried open and the ruptured chain fell free of the ring.
"That should help," said Kemp, wiping his wet face.
The knowledge that she was able to move about again brought with it a renewing sense of personal dignity. She felt less like an animal chained to a stake. Then she wondered why Kemp was kneeling before her in the growing darkness.
He was, she saw, wrapping the chain-end still padlocked to her ankle closely about her leg. It hung there, when he tied it in place with one of the leaders, like a barbaric amulet. He could not be sure, as he knelt before her, if it was purely an accident that her hand should rest lightly on his bowed head. But he nursed the hope, before turning to wrap his own chain-end about his ankle, that that contact was something more than a blind groping for support.
He tried the door, and found it locked. So he moved the three-legged table close in to the wall under the window, mounted it, and explored the edges of the metal mesh. Then he stood suddenly arrested, in an attitude of listening.
"What is it? " whispered the girl.
He slipped down from the table. Instead of answering her question he swung her behind him as he pressed close in
against the wall next to the door frame. The table-leg, she knew, he held poised high in his two hands. She could feel the flexing of his shoulder muscles as a key grated in the lock.
It was as the door swung open, at the same time that the beam of a flashlight stabbed the darkness, that the waiting table-leg descended. It descended with such force that the man holding the flashlight went down like a clouted rabbit. Kemp was on him, like a catamount, calling out for the girl to pick up the light.
"Now take that revolver from his pocket," gasped Kemp as he removed the prostrate man's belt from his waist. "And if anybody comes, kill 'em."
The girl, as she stood in the doorway, could see that Kemp was trussing the unconscious man's hands behind his back. Then he dragged the denim trousers from the still inert legs, tore them into four long strips, knotted them together, and with them securely bound his enemy's ankles.
Then, having turned over their quietly moaning prisoner, he saw that it was the man called Slim. This seemed a disappointment to Kemp. But it was only momentary.
"Let's get along," he said to the girl in the doorway.
"Hadn't you better take this?" she asked, feeling for him in the darkness. It was the revolver, he realized, that she was pressing into his hand. He pocketed it, leaving his right hand free to hold the flashlight.
"Wait," he said in a whisper, as they stopped at a turn in the path.
Out of the blackness emerged a deeper blackness. When the girl heard a sound, half grunt and half gasp, she knew that moving shadow was a man, a man breathing hard.
"Stick 'em up!" cried Kemp, with altogether unexpected ferocity. His revolver end, where the flash flowered in the darkness, advanced until it pressed against a protuberant vest-front. "Don't move, or you're a dead man."
The chest behind the vest front continued to heave and pump, but the gorillalike arms went slowly upward.
"Get his gun," commanded Kemp.
THE girl, stepping closer, reached into the bulging side pocket. It was as her fingers found and clutched at the automatic that the gorilla-armed man decided to take his chance. He did so by exploding into action. With a quick body-thrust he sent the girl toppling back against Kemp, whose hand went out to keep her from falling. She still clung stubbornly to the automatic. But that hiatus of confusion gave their enemy his moment. He ducked low and went crashing through the underbrush, intent on escape. Twice Kemp's revolver barked ineffectually in the darkness. The third shot was followed by a howl of pain.
"Have you killed him?" asked Allie Sencourt as she groped after her companion.
He was bending over a blasphemously voluble figure on the ground, a figure with two thick hands clasped about a reddened shinbone.
"Winged him," said Kemp, quite without emotion. "That'll anchor him where we want him until the state troopers come."
"What state troopers?" asked the girl.
"The ones we're going to summon," answered Kemp.
"When?" questioned his companion.
"When we get out to a motor road." He reached for her hand in the darkness. "Do you think you can make it?"
She failed to answer him, at the moment, for it was not easy to grope and feel their way back to the path. But Kemp was conscious of her tightened grip on his hand.
"You know," she finally said, "you've been rather wonderful."
Kemp turned on the light and studied the rutted trail at their feet.
"Here's the wagon road," he explained. "That ought to lead somewhere."
It would lead, he remembered, back to a world of order and security, to a world where there would be no golden-throated girl to press close to one's side in the velvety darkness of an embattled midnight.
"I don't want to start back," he found the courage to say, "until you promise me something."
"What?" she asked, a little closer to him in the darkness.
The answer to that question, it must be recorded, was not expressed through the clumsy and inadequate medium of words....
THE high-shouldered misanthrope who presided over the lonely little hot-dog stand at Hillboro Corners was about to lock up for the night when a strange-looking couple wandered into the island of light that encircled his gas pump. The woman wore waders and was without shoes, and festooned about one ankle she carried a length of steel chain, singularly like the amulet of a Fiji Islander. The man, who looked both tired and unkempt, was also adorned with numerous coils of metal, which clinked musically as he walked in his stocking feet.
"Got a telephone?" that metal-laden stranger curtly inquired.
"Sure," answered the stand owner, with an indifferent thumb-jerk over his shoulder.
The newcomer promptly clinked his way into the booth.
"What have you to eat here? " asked the young woman, who, for all the abraded waders and the shadows under her eyes, seemed not unsatisfied with life in general.
"I'm pretty well sold out tonight," admitted the high-shouldered man, "except for ice cream."
The girl moistened her lips.
"I think we'll take two quarts," she said, with a hungry light in her eye.
Her misanthropic host tarried to look over the torn waders.
"Been fishing?" he sardonically inquired.
"We have," acknowledged the girl.
"Catch anything?" he asked as he rounded his counter.
"Yes," was the slightly retarded reply, "we caught a still."
"Is that all?" the other ventured, with purely ironic intent.
The girl's face softened as the chain-bearer at the telephone turned back to her. "And something much nicer," she added, with a smile that washed the weariness off her face.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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