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He looked at no one but Rosalie Burt, but the girl had followed her sister's warning nod and met the angry glare of the Chief. "Shall we break it up altogether?" Randall was eagerly asking her. "Come on, Miss Burt. When they change partners in Allemande Left-it's the next call— I'll two-step with Mabel and you dance off with Jean. We'll turn this into a real dance. Who wants these stiff sets?" "Let's do it," Jean pleaded. "Come with me, Rosalie." But the girl at his side did not answer.

"Won't you?" begged the boy. "You haven't told me yet and I'm waiting, you know." His eyes shouted what his lips dared not say.

"We'll break it up," urged Randall. "This is stupid."

"Come with me!" Jean Feroux's plea was for more than the dance. "Stay my partner-forever. He's calling it now. Won't you come?"

"Allemande-allemande-allemande!"

chanted the fiddler.

"Alleman' Left!" The call resounded back and forth under the low ceiling. "Change partners, everybody!"

Jean Feroux turned to Rosalie Burt with outstretched hands, but as she hesitated, silent and abashed while a slow flush of color burned in her cheeks, Mabel Klondike caught him from the other side. "Oh, change!" she cried stridently. "Rosalie!" he said, but she turned away from him. With his eyes still watching Rosalie Burt he turned to the Groundhog Circe with a show of obsequious gallantry. He saw the flash of Rosalie Burt's gown pass him before he found Mabel Klondike staring at him with the calculating spite of wounded vanity. She laughed sneeringly as she looked over his shoulder. "Two can play at your game, Monsieur Feroux," she said. "Miss Burt has just gone out with Mr. Bannister." All the pride of his people rose in Jean Feroux to meet the need of pride. For he needed no words to assure him that this was the answer of Rosalie Burt. In a flash of vision he saw the truth that his love for her had hidden from him. Rosalie Burt, not Gwen Lantry, was to marry the Chief and he, Jean Feroux, had been a blind fool led by her caprice. With his house of hope crashing in ruins about him he smiled at Mabel Klondike as bravely as if she had not

VOL. L.-70

been the willing weapon with which fate had pinioned him and he turned to Gwen Lantry with the bow of a grand seigneur, knowing that every dancer in the room had stopped to watch the play. "Isn't this our dance?" he asked her.

"Yes," she said with a little gasp of relief and sympathy under which his quickened perception winced. "We'll follow them." And with a gay disdain of the watching crowd they waltzed from the room.

Outside in the moonlight they saw a man and a girl a little distance down the river road. Gwen Lantry looked after them thoughtfully, then held out her hand to Jean. "You're a thoroughbred," she said swiftly. "Rosalie's my sister, but she hasn't been square with you. She's young, though, and Ned was angry and she didn't dare break with him."

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"Why not?" Jean asked tensely. "She's to marry him, you know, and"I didn't know till now," he told her. "I thought it was you. Some one said

that

"It was never I," said Gwen Lantry. "I hope it won't hurt long, Jean." "Oh, it's all in a summer," said Jean Feroux.

"And there will be so many summers for you," said the woman. "Jean," she added suddenly, "for your own sake, don't think too hard of Rosalie. There are reasons why

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"I think I know them," he said quietly. "But don't you think that there are other things to live for besides luxury?"

"Yes," said Gwen Lantry," but Rose and I need that most of all. She couldn't be happy up here with any one, and this is your only way up, isn't it? Don't you see?"

"I see," he replied. He turned away sharply and Gwen Lantry watched him go down the moonlit road with head defiantly high and shoulders defiantly square as he bravely whistled the song he had trilled on the night when Rosalie Burt came to the Bush.

He whistled while he dragged the speeder to the track. He whistled as he sent it spinning down the steel along the bright path that the setting moon made in the clearing between the dark shadows of the low forest. Still whistling, he passed a forest ranger's hut and crossed three culverts. But when he came to the trestle of his bridge over the

Frederick House the whistle suddenly ended. He threw the brake of the speeder and brought the car to pulsing attention, noting his surroundings for the first time since he left Groundhog and looking on the familiar scene with eyes that had grown alien to it. Back of him shone the Steel, before him the Right-of-Way narrowed into the darkness. The moon had gone down and the morning star gleamed above the trees across the river. From the dizzy height of the framework he gazed down on the white birches looming like phantoms against the blackness of pine and spruce, on the log houses of the Residency nestled in the clearing, and on the pier of the bridge that he had built.

He listened dully to the roar of the river from the rapids above, to the hushed tremors of the pines, to the thousand rustling sounds of the underbrush. Dully he felt that this was the same world that he had known for two years. Something that had flashed on that world for a brief time, making it scintillant as the Lights made bright the whole North Country, was gone now, leaving the world as dark as the gloomiest night on the Bush. Loneliness and longing, the drear ache of old homesickness, and the stronger, stranger ache of new loss swept over Jean Feroux.

Memories of the splendid career that Rosalie Burt should inspire shrieked jeeringly at him in the wailing winds. Thoughts of the house of life he had planned for her came back to taunt him with their futility. The rush of the river was a torrent of fate whirling down the ruins of his hope. "It's all gone," he moaned his first word since he had spoken to Gwen Lantry, "gone as the pier went before the logs." His hands gripped the bar of the speeder as the memory of the crash of the pier marshalled his thoughts toward the road of his labors. "But you built another," he told himself with sudden emphasis and as if he were another man, and it stayed built. That's it!" he cried. "It stayed built!" He rose in the speeder, looking forward toward the dim apex of the Right-of-Way and raising his voice in a curious exulting: "You'll do it again-you'll build another. It's Allemande Left for you, Jean Feroux. Change partners, nageons, nos gens! Work as the old Feroux did, for the greatness of your country and the glory of your name-for it is a great country and it is a glorious name.

Work for your work and not for a woman and you're going to win!”

"You're going to win," he repeated over and over in the way of a child. With that strange clairvoyance of vision that sometimes comes to men who have lived in the wild places he saw the road of his life before him, a narrow trail through wildernesses of the world where he pushed onward, blazing the ways of empire. He heard faint whispers of the praise of men who would follow on his path, but he knew that far behind him would ever lie the life he loved, the quick, responsive thrill of the city where his old crowd pursued their old ways. Just as the Feroux of the Old France had left their beloved Normandy for the new lands of the West, he was leaving forever the world they had founded and setting forth to a world of conquest, and adventure, and the work of men. Not now with boyish bravado, not now with memories of another's ambitions, not with stubborn decision, not with dreams of glory blazoned in bronze nor with hope of woman's love, but with the calm exaltation of faith that this was the task toward which his life had been directed and that he should not fail in its accomplishment, Jean Feroux entered the province of his manhood. Once he looked back in the thought that the lands he would come to would never be quite as dear as the land he must leave. and all his boyish home longing surged into the sadness of remembering the song of the hill of San Sebastien. But the light of his purpose shone before him steady as the beams of the morning star. For through love, and sorrow, and loss Jean Feroux had found the high road of his course with the compass of knowledge that for him work was greater than woman and that the bridges of life spanned the rivers of eternity.

When Kenyon, and O'Hara, and Donald Ferguson, Randall, and Steve MacDonald went down to Groundhog the next night Jean Feroux, alone at the Residency, watched their handcars thread the trestle. Over the rush of the river he heard Ferguson's whistle. A little while he mused, smoking savagely as he listened to the softening strain; but when the brooding winds of the Bush had garnered all lesser sounds within their sighing he went in from the starlit, pine-odored night of the north to the bare little shack where he set himself to the making of maps.

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OHNNIE—his name was John, of course, but he was small and gentle and affable-that morning. walked into the Broadway office of the Eastern Pacific Railroad, where only figures are handled, hung up his coat and hat on the hook by his desk, drew on a pair of black sleeveprotectors and sat down to bury himself in tonnage calculations. This is the last day he will be the same Johnnie, and may be you would like to consider him before the change begins.

This office was then in charge of a division freight agent, a congenital miser, whose only hope of advancement lay in holding down expenses, and it was an axiom there that every man should get out of it as soon as he could. Men were constantly leaving, but the agent relied on refilling his clerical staff, through newspaper advertisements, from the great army of downcast unemployed strangers in New York, and cheaply. It doesn't matter what ambitions were in Johnnie's mind when he came up from Touraine, La., to the city; one of these advertisements had brought him, with his first hopes dead, to the Eastern Pacific office.

Anybody with a high-school training can begin work there, if he can live on the salary. Johnnie just could. Up through four grades he rose or drifted, rather until now he was tonnage clerk at twenty dollars a week. In the beginning the salary was eight dollars.

It was 2 P. M. on this day that Johnnie rose from his desk, as usual, to stretch and snatch a smoke in the washroom. Passing down the middle aisle, he came near the office-boys' bench.

"Who's he?" he heard a new boy ask. "Old Johnnie, the tonnage clerk, several hastened to reply. "Name's John Coutrier," went on the best-informed boy. "He's been here ten years, they say. They

call him Old Johnnie when he ain't around."

Then they laughed.

The little tonnage clerk had never heard himself referred to in that way before. "Old Johnnie!" It exploded its meaning in his mind. In the vague way in which he had thought of himself he had considered himself young man, though he had drifted on unobtrusively into time until he was now thirty-five years old.

He stood still in the dimly lighted washroom, the cold cigarette hanging in his mouth. There was an undefined shame in his soul that numbed him. If the boy had said, "Everybody knows he's a thief," it could not have stunned him more.

Striking the match he had taken out of his pocket for the cigarette, he held it before the dingy mirror in the wall, and pushing his face close to the glass scrutinized himself. The thinning hair above the forehead, the touch of gray on the temples, the curious little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the settling of the lines of his face, the slight downward curve of the corners of his mouth-did not all these cry out in corroboration of the frightful implications in the office-boy epithet?

"Thirty-five years old, four hundred dollars in the savings bank, twenty dollars at week, a boarding-house bachelor!"

He repeated this summary three or four times, then threw down his cold cigarette and went back to his desk. Two weeks later he gave the veteran office-boy who had explained him a five-dollar Christmas present.

"Old Johnnie!" It did not lose its effect on the little tonnage clerk with the passing of a few days. Constantly it exploded its implications in his mind, and amidst the upheaved débris there he saw again old shining ambitions that he longed to seize and save. His routine of ten years began to fail to return its usual mild pleasure. He came to loathe the boarding-house and all its miscel

laneous company. The Sunday afternoon walks in Central Park, along Riverside Drive, and in the Bronx Park with casual acquaintances from the landlady's shifting foster family palled on him; he walked alone, choosing new parks and new streets. A chum who could catch all the good in his passing remarks, a friend in whom he could trust implicitly, a comrade in whom he could be deeply and genuinely and worthily interested-now he knew that he had not had such a one in all the ten years he had been in New York. And he yearned for one. He was inexpressibly lonesome in the midst of five million people.

Even the Wednesday nights at the theatre no longer lifted him out of himself and sent him to the street elated. The illusions no longer took complete possession of him, for that office-boy epithet held him captive most of the time. He smiled sarcastically at the sign, "Family Circle," above the door of the second gallery, which he patronized, and in the middle of an act he would catch himself looking around in the obscurity at the sour old maids and the unspeakable old bachelors, murmuring to himself, "Family Circle-good God!"

The casual conversation of the married men in the office now enthralled Johnnie. Hemerich, the damage clerk, always brought cold lunch from home-though sometimes he didn't eat it and Johnnie found himself dwelling tenderly on the imagined picture of Mrs. Hemerich getting the lunch ready of a morning.

Taking the earliest vacation assignment he could get, which was in June, Johnnie rode on his pass to his small home town, where his father had a store. Every year he had gone home to Touraine, been petted by his mother, fished a little and gone about some with an old schoolmate.

Some people said Alice was "getting to be an old maid," but Johnnie always thought of her as young. When it had come time to return to New York he would pack his suit-case in a fever of hurry and shake Alice's hand good-by in such haste that he never noticed the wistfulness in her face. Though the city took little account of him, he loved it with such a devoted passion that he could never stay long away from it in peace.

Surely you see why it was that Johnnie this year rushed back to Touraine in the

spirit of his former rushes to New York. As the train passes the water-tank you can catch sight of the Duflot home, and the steeple of the Catholic church further across town. These thrilled Johnnie this year as never before. And this time he saw all that was in Alice's face, and it blotted out the office-boy epithet. Alice called him John.

There is no need to go into details about the marriage; about how the Touraine Trumpet, after an introductory paragraph concerning "joyous wedding-bells," referred to Johnnie splendidly as "tonnage expert of the Eastern Pacific Railroad,” and to Alice gracefully as "one of our fairest flowers"; nor about how Amos, the aged 'bus driver, who drove them up to the midnight train, observed to the station-master, "It do beat the band how little men get fine, big women"; nor about the grand air of guardianship Johnnie assumed when Alice showed some trepidation in the presence of the stupendous city.

Half of Johnnie's four hundred dollars came out of the bank to furnish a threeroom flat in South Brooklyn. Now he summarized himself thus: "Thirty-six years old, two hundred dollars in the bank, twenty-five dollars a week, a home and a wife-oh, such a wife!"

This summary had implications that steeled his spirit with pride, opened his imagination to the wide survey of resources and electrified his energies. To rise as high as possible in the Eastern Pacific and to get with a better-paying company-that was his plan of action. Johnnie was confident that he would carry it through in some gratifying measure of success, was happy that he was confident.

Alice had been in her flat four months when one night Johnnie walked in on her before she could dry the tears out of her gray eyes.

"I'm ashamed, John," she ran on hastily in explanation, "but I get so lonesome. I can do the work in the flat within an hour after you leave. Then what's ahead for me until you get back? Won't you stay home to-morrow? I'll get used to being alone after a while. I do wish you would let me go out and get a position in a department store. A lot of women do that, and it wouldn't tire me, John, and it would help along with the one thousand dollars."

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