If you should see a fellow man with trouble’s flag unfurled, An’ looking like he didn’t have a friend in all the world, Go up and slap him on the back, and holler “How d’ you do?” And grasp his hand so warm he'll know he has a friend in you. Then ax him what's a-hurtin’ him, an’ laugh his cares away. And tell him that the darkest night just before the day. Dont talk in graveyard palaver, but say it right out loud, That God will sprinkle sunshine in the * trail of every cloud. This world at best is but a hash of pleasure and of pain; Some days are bright and sunny, some are sloshed with rain, And that’s just how it ought to be, for when the clouds roll by, we'll know just how to 'preciate the bright and smiling sky. learn to take it as it comes, and don’t sweat at the pores, Because the Lord's opinion doesn’t coin- cide with yours; Put always keeep rememberin’, cares your path enshroud, That God has lots of sunshine to spill is and fo when SRL a ' of auburn, gold or brown uponslen- der, napes. i : { Twilo listened to their passing voices and their laughter. Sometimes she caught snatches of their talk. These words and phrases would haunt her like the rhythms of al foreign tongue, so that she mur. mured them oyer to herself. “I haven't the vaguest motion!” “But darling, what do you think I am!” Emphasis where emphasis seem- ed uncalled for gave a queer import- ance to these speeches. Past Twilo’s window at dawn and at dusk there went another sound that unconsciously memory, bres in and out of chatter, and clatter, like a silver thread; the assistant roustabout’s whistle on his rounds with water and with wood. A melody, haunting and unknown to her; a rise and fall delicately searching; a whistle, sad, She would look down gravely into his grave and music smitten face as it went past her. He did not smile nor did she. Drudge to drudge their souls salut. ed, too patient for a° mutual con- tempt. “Yes, ‘here we are, SO young and so enslaved.” Twilo felt pain as he went by, again. But his melody lifted up her heart and let it fall. The ranch took a holiday on Satur- days. Most of the boys and girls rode out before noon, but Twilo had silvery and | pig; He found that Mrs. McCrae had stopped fishing. She sat ona fallen cottonwood, her handsome chin on her handsome hand, and looked up at him with a new and somewhat impersonal eagerness. “Randy,” she asked, “who is the young man dr glanced towards the slim ure moving at the moment out of sight, and glanced back. Gertrude McCrae's eyes, dark and young for her forty years of full experience, were bewildered as if by something she could not understand. «J didn’t know that any living wheeled; she gave a cry of fear, of creature could be so beautiful.” she intrigued her | said. Hastings stared and laughed, more loudly than he had meant to laugh. “That boy?” he said, “Why, that’s my roustabout’s assistant. He brings you the bucket of hot water for your tub, carries in the logs for your fire, cleans fish and feeds the 3,” She stared ahead of her, her face curiously flushed. “Where does he come from?” “I haven't a motion.” “Don’t you know anything about the people who work for you?” “Not many questions asked in the West—not in hiring for such jobs as or—But you mast have seen this lad a hundred times.” ¢T've never seen him.” said Ger. trude McCrae, positive, defiant— “never. Let's fish.” She stood up with a certain vio- there above us?” and silvered; their horses started down the steep hill trail. ‘Before we get down, Gertrude, please! You know what I'm asking, don’t you?” “Yes, my dear, I know.” Where the trees came close to. gether about their path, just before they must turn down and out into .the frequented space of the corrals, Gertrude pulled up her horse and ‘looked at him. Her lips were res- ' olutely shaped. i Sharp, clear, with a golden start. ling fluency, a whistle flashed across 'a pine. Gertrude’s horse shied, | “Heaven—that tune! That tune!” | Whether she spurred her horse or merely loosened the rein, Hastings , could not tell, but she went from him at a sudden broken gallop and shot ‘out, white-cheeked, dim_eyed, into the dusty publicity of saddle shed 'and tiebar where Sandy, Dan and | Jerry strolled forward to take her horse, | The master of Circle dismounted ‘and came instantly close to her, put she looked haunted, rigid, white. She had no eyes for him, no smile. | He let her swing away alone to her ‘own quarters. i Dan grinned. fight.” { “Ain't that the truth!” Sandy ‘agreed, remembering the boss’ grim ' face. It is as true of earthly spirits as of devils that, one being violently “They've had a He fancied that she went through the gate and that someone came up to meet her from the river bank, but the moving darkness of the trees all about him filled him with a charming sort of fear as though they had run forward to stand in his way—alive —watchful —suspi- cious. He turned chill with enchant- ment and reached the shelter of his ranch house, out of breath. Next morning Gertrude did not appear; she sent a note asking for breakfast in her “cabin” and for a morning undisturbed, and not until she had seen Hastings set forth de. terminedly on horsebask did she come out, pale, order her own horse and clatter up the cobbled trail. All afternoon she rode, haunted by her tragic memory, staring dreamily above her horse’s friendly ears or at the passing ground. When it was dark and when gold shone in the cabin windows, she came back, wearily. Inside the house she could see Hastings, unconscious of her, She was tired, composed, ready with her acquiescence to his suit, for now, at last, after long riding, she had laid her ghost. Near the well stood the slender figure of the roustabout’s assistant, filling his buckets. Clad in blue overalls and shirt, black-haired, he bent and turned, pausing for an in. stant to look at her as she went dumbly past, and, as he looked, his lips fell into their piping habit; _— '! I may be mad, but I am terribly, dangerously happy—except for the thought of an injury to you. But last night, dear friend, your love was warm, not wild, ahd that has | reassured me. Forgive me. I couldn't believe in my own “pos- ! session” until after a wakeful, a | most tremendous night, God bless you. Good.by. | Gertrude—not David's and not yours—but Tom's. Don’t send the little piping roust- ‘about away! Randy Hastings said, “The little roustabouts be damned,” and took his fishing rod in hand going for com. fort to his river-ripples. He returend to his cabin that eve. ning, dinnerless and late. He was wet from wading, angry and—free. To and fro, up and down the big room he went. The fire he had lighted on his hearth danced in his face and eyes. Winter, he remembered was not so far away. He could not now go citywards to hunt for ease and the companionship of all the Many Things. He must find beauty, he must entrap some temporary com- panionship of loveliness and youth. _ Opening his door to a slow pass. ing footstep, he called. The roustabout, whiskered and grim, stopped. “Eh?” “Where's Twilo—Tom ?” “Seed her near the gate.” “You will pass her on your way behind: the cloud no horse. She packed herself a lit- | lence. thrown out, another will take its dreamily, absently they blew, soft back?” Jemes Whitcomb Riley. | t1€ luncheon. That a woman of his world and place sevenfold enforced. Hastings’ as a flagelot. “Surely. 2 | "Up the river, an easy distance | of his years should be so moved by mood. from which tenderness had She was past him but now she| ‘Send her to me, will you? ——— for tired feet, she had watched a |the physical beauty of a garbage been shocked hy the consequences wheeled back, every nerve tight, her Pronto. THE PIED PIPER OF CIRCLE | Jimmie Gates, slow limbed, it voiced, hard.eyed, overseer of Circle Ranch, sat in the shack he calle his office and made out the pay roll for his “boys.” A speckled and cloud- ly mirror in front of him above his desk showed him through his | open door a view of bare and soar- | ing rocks against the carmine sky. | Through his brain went, unheeded. the sounds of evening: cicada, | thrush and linnet, a running river, pine branches lending the breeze a speech, horses rattling down a cob- | bled path, voices talking at a dis. | tance with the contented soberness of day’s end, ! Jim wanted to be done with his job and to add his own slow con- versation to the comment of corral and bunk house. He bent closer to the figure fretted page. | A throaty voice strange to his ears spoke. “Say, now, look-a_here, | mister.” : The mirror showed Jim a tatter. | ed boy leaning against the lintel of his door. “You haven't got a job fer now, hev you?” Jim Gates, without troubling him- self to turn, again consulted his mirror. “Give a boy a job, you gotta hire two men to keep him at it,” said the. “Circle don’t hire boys.. Just one vacant—gal’'s job, dishwasher.’ me, | Goody-by.” | He went on with his figuring. ' The evening comments continued, soft and small After five minutes: “I kin wash dishes, mister,” said that voice. “By heaven!” shouted Jim Gates and wheeled. “Get out of here!” The persistent little intruder clung to the door-side with both hands, as though to resist flight, and Jim faced a pair of dilated azure eyes, “Why in the thunder didn’t you say you was a gal?” he inquired. One knee, its slim ‘brownness visible through a rent in the dilapi- dated overalls, was turned in against the other and there was a troubled motion in the long round throat above the faded open collar of her shirt. The creature’s body was half smothered in a man’s ragged coat, once a Mackinaw. She now pulled off her dingy sombrero and pushed back the mad black hair of a golliwog. “I kin wash dishes,” smiling at Jimmie Gates: “All right. Go look up Mrs. Laney. Get her to give you a dress. We don’t let our gals wear pants. What's your name?” {“Twilo Bodine.” “Where you come from? “Out yonder.” A vague gesture seemed to include the “everywhere.” “On Tool?” she said, Yes, sir.” i Jim stared. “We get a-plenty of male hobos,” he said, “but you're the first hobo gal I've ever seen yet.” He hesitated only for a min. ute. “All right. Get along.” He did not know why, child as she looked, she seemed so strange and compelling a presence on his doorsill, why he wished to be so swiftly rid of her. She went, soft. : footed, and dropped out of his cogn- | izance into the life of kitchen and of garbage can. In a faded gingham dress, i of some former dishwasher, she toiled. What the haughty Korean | cook disdained to do, what the! waitresses, pretty and high-headed, ! forgot to do, these things did TWilo working with the inhuman tireless. ! ness of a machine. ! There was in her ways a mingling of patience and of desperation, and in her face, of rebel and .of slave. Rebellion of some sort must have sent her out into the everywhere and slavery was only the livery ot her release. She had no time and no inclina- tion, it appeared, to amuse herself with the other workers. Her great. est relaxation, it would seem, was to watch from her kitchen window, while she dried her plates, that most remote being. the master of Circle Ranch. A tall man of more than forty years, eagle-eyed, beak.faced and Indian brown, with a feather of gray across his lean dark head, most beautifully clothed in English riding togs, who moved about across her vision, interminably trailing guests. Women in riding clothes— and Twilo wondered why hiréd girls could not ‘‘wedr pants”—men in tweeds or putties, fat men and lean, tall men and small, ‘women with cropped heads or women with knots 1 relic { i reach of water always bright about ‘boy! Hastings felt both impatience an elbow of dark pines. She would ! go there and lie on her back for all the afternoon and evening and hear the watér, It clean and quiet. To her kitchen_draggled senses, that world she stepped into was blinding new, vast vividly unknown, a crazy quilt of pied delight. She had forgotton the taste of sunlight and the smiting strength of high air. The big pines, when she reach- ed them, made her a temple of pur- would be cool and ple columns and a tent of indigo shade, She stripped and dropped her body for an icy instant into a sud- den pool hindered from its travel by a root. Afterwards, dressed in her faded livery, she lay supine and let her eyes climb up the swinging stairways and along the swaying corridors of branches to the blue. There she lay, most utterly con. tent. 3 : The master of Circle, with a fish- ing rod in his hand and a trailing woman three hundred yards down. stream, came close to her. He had never looked at her before. “Where do you come from?” he asked. “Don’t move.” She fell back as if in simple obedi- ence. “I'm Twilo.” «“Twilo?"” “I'm the dishwasher—the hobo gal.” “BEr—the dryad tramp.” ‘He sat down on-the log beside her. ‘Tell me about yourself,” he suggested, rolling his cigaret, not smiling. There passed through her head one of those phrases. “I haven't the vaguest notion,” and disgust. But this Mrs. McCrae represented a definite goal towards | which he shaped his life, using this summer. with its easy comradeship and outdoor loneliness for a manip- ulating tool. | Hastings was tired of ranching. | There wasn’t much money in it for (him. He was weary for the noise | of cities, for excitement, for the | crowded ease of Many Things. i Gertrude was handsome, comrade. ily, rich, and she liked him. He felt ‘sure that in her life, a doubly dis- | appointed one, he represented a def- { inite intention and that she too meant to use the summer for a tool. So he would not let the | momentary criticism keep its nip {upon his humor. He gathered up her | “catch” half an hour later and smiled. {Gertrude,” he said, ‘you're not | so grown-up, after all. There's a | child in your eyes sometimes.” | She moved beside him soberly, no longer bewildered or remote. ‘“There’s {a child in everyone's eyes, isn't there? I've seen a bad small boy {in yours, Randy —a wild boy. He {was in them just now when you came to me up there among the | cottonwoods. Do you know what I ! fancied ?” | “What?” Again he felt impatient, critical. , “I thought you had the look that ‘a knight at arms must have had of a whistle melody, was fiercely open to less conventionalized emo. tions and, as he neared his ranch house, across the empty threshold of his consciousness drifted the shadow of an occupant. Not unfamiliar. , She had stood there before, unbidden by his will. In a world of ordinary matters there should not be such little girls as this one, thought Hastings, ashe moved slowly past the open kitchen door. By dawn and dusk they are sufficiently disturbing. But when they stand in a doorway, in the dappled light of a new moon, with drapery flowing back like water across a marble loveliness, there descends upon them a mysterious power. When a man is forty-five, master of Circle Ranch and set to careful plans, it is not happy to be haunted by a dryad-tramp. Hastings, have passed rigidly into the shelter of his own log walls, leaned just inside an open window of the living room to smoke and to watch. The ranch house was built about three sides of a cobbled court in the center of which was placed the rustic well top. Twilo stood in her doorway across the space, looking, Hastings sup- posed, at the new moon above the well. on her, so still she stood. The check his carefully fostered emotion had suffered at the hands of Mrs. Mc- Crae had left Hastings filled with a when he first, met upon the MOO feverish restlessness. la, farie child.” i Across the field which they were. now treading, a bell rang brazenly, | insistently. {| “Thank a just heaven for lunch!” | ejaculated Hastings with hard dry ' she began, and startled him so that! emphasis. he spilled his makings; startledher. There are courtships impromptu self, too, into a momentary silence and courtships planned. There are and a blush. “I—I mean—Well, sir, there ain’t a thing to tell.” “What there is to tell—please tell me.” “I —run—away.” “Why? And from whom?” She merely looked at him. “And now?” he said, and felt bewildered. “I'm dishwasher. I draw your pay. And I've been saving it.” “What for?” He could not imag- ine her in need of anything. She seemed to listen. too heard below the stream bank someone who whistled softly to him. self. “I haven't the vaguest notion,” Twilo murmured, smiled with a cer- tain wildness. “Something,” she said, and moved a brown hand, “something—like that.” The silver whistle weaved. “You are most astoundingly, most perilously beautiful,” said Hastings, and added her name softly, ‘“Twilo.” An inner voice mocked Twilo’s moment of vacuity. “But darling,” it said, “what do you think I am!” She did not say it aloud, but a queer mock_flash of wordly wisdom twisted her lip and shot a gleam into her eyes. “You're expecting one of the boys’ to lunch here Hastings asked, flushed. “No, sir, That's the roustabout’s hoy. He never speaks to no one. But he must ’a’ knowed I'm here.” “Tll bet he—knowed.” “Fer that’s my tune.” She lifted her azure silent laughter to him and whistled with a rose mouth. “The ‘Blumenlied,’ ” said Hastings. “Let's see this whistler.” He strode over to the river bank. At a distance the lonely lad whip- ped the water with a skillful grace. : Hastings stood, undetected, above him. “Hi-’ he called. Round wheeled the stripling, look- ing up. . A face thin, cerie and re. mote. Hastings felt chilled. The grove behind him and the river edge below seemed strangely peri- Then he with you? inspirational wooings and wooings mathematically prearranged. Hast. inngs’ suit with the widow of that Scotch magnate, Dave McCrae, he- longed to the later category. She had come to his ranch in July carrying her chaperoning aunt, and she would leave it in Septem- . ber. During July he had put him. self and her at splendid comradely ease; during August he had intens- ified the mood of intercourse. By September, his ultimate inten- tion must, he thought, have become entirely manifest to a woman of ex- | perience, and in’ the last fortnight of her visit he meant to wind up his summer's symphony to the final chord of a proposal. He had chosen, for his signal, the new moon. It hung that evening in the west. ‘For three hours they had ridden to. ‘wards it, side by side, across the gray-green safe. 2 Their ponies’ hoofs made pleasant . muffied rhythms, crushed out the safe perfume and the pungent pow. der of sunflowers. All the long : golden-dusty afternoon, Hastings had shaped and trimmed his rare sen. | tences, had timed his ardent looks, calculated his smiles. The feeling that inspired his { symphony was genuine enough to give its measures reality and sweet- ness. He could see the audience soften. She had considered, she had waited, had pondered, was now ripe. | “Gertrude,” he said, “that’s a new ' moon in the old west.” | She smiled, her eyes upon it. “You're not afraid of new moons, (are you? I've sometimes wondered if life has made you slow to risk a new experience.” Troubled, but resolute, she turned from the new moon to him. | “I used to be afraid after, that first terrible thing, Tom's failure and—imprisonment. But I took up courage—it was rather a hard cold sort of courage, I suppose—to mar- ry again after my divorce. I've nev. lous to man, | er lacked courage since that plunge, “Good. fishing ?” | my friend. David's death was a “Yes, sir.” | stunning blow to my reasonable A murmuring voice, a greenish, level look. Hastings moved down- stream = to where that trailing solid sportswoman of his waved him her summons. He was no poet, though troubled at times with sudden sen- sitiveness: a practical rancher, he called himself, but there was some- thing queer about the river bank today. . Those two— He remembered something he had read somewhere: “Children, lepre- chaums and women beautiful and young, these be foreigners all.” There had been a wild green wis. dom in the young fisherman's eyes—leprechaum eyes. Hastings shook nonsense out of his mind and waded back to sport and human comradeship. happiness, but it could not shatter {my nerves as poor Tom's catas- trophe did—as bewildering to him, poor impractical misguided soul, as it was to me! Nothing, of course, will ever make my heart as young ‘as your new moon.” “Why not?” He drew her horse ‘over with a hand on the rein. | «Can't you create a new heart for (Indian summer, Gertrude? We're ‘still young.” . ‘She rode in silence, her head bent. | “You must have been thinking {gbout this all summer, my dear; | about me, haven't you?” They had come to the sudden dip in the {wide plain. Below them now the bending river glittered, the golden tops of the ranch ‘aspens turned "The girl he watched moved sud- denly- and went past his post of observation towards the moon, which dipped now into the trees. Hast- ings heart plunged back into a forest as he swung out through the window to follow her. The real woods received them both, pursuer and pursued. The air inside that wood was made of moon tatters, elfin and green. Through them went Twilo. She seemed something he had con- jured out of his mind, a will_o'-the wisp of his vanishing youth. He followed her, it seemed, as a man’s brain weary of sense will lend itself to the guidance of folly in a dream. That day reality had mocked him. He ran after the dryad’s shadow, brushing moon- cobwebs from his face. So, hurrying and soundless, trunk to trunk he moved until he almost missed her near the high ranch gate. She had drawn her. self there between the boles of two tall aspen trees, a hand on each, and watched his coming with her air of a nymph. “He faced her and laughed. “I saw you going past my window with your head lifted as though you meant to climb up into the air and steal my moon,” She gazed at him from between from the trees with her listening look. “I haven't stole it,” she said, “but the mountain’s going to in five more minutes. It’s not rightly yours that moon.” “Everything on this ranch, above it or below is mine,” said Hastings, close to her, his hand near hers on the smooth trunk. “You'll be off one of these nights, I reckon, like the moon, trying to cheat me, to get beyond my range, eh, Twilo? A runaway, that’s what you are.” i “No.” “You won't run?” “I'm through with running.” “You're tired?” “Yes. I'm tired of running. All my life's been that. T've made a promise to myself. ri stay, unless—” She closed her eyes and threw back her body like a child in a swing, so that her mad hair hung and her long lovely throat led like a white path to the half seen per- fection of her little face. Deep in her tilted eyes hung a glimmer of the dipping moon. Carefully Hastings bent above her, cupped the small silken head in his hand and gently, wildly, as a man kisses dreaming, he kissed her young mouth, The moon dipped and was gone— from her eyes and from the woods. The air darkened; no more tatters, This time, It must have put a spell up.. face fury-white, her hands clenched on a threatening switch, surging formidably up to him, so close that he stepped back and set down his buckets with a panic clatter. “What do you mean?” she cried. “Explain yourself. You know some. thing. Why do you whistle that air . blanched. green and elfin, only the ashen eve. ning that would turn purple when the stars grew bright. In the darkness Twilo stood free from his Kiss. Her hands, which for an instant had held to him rather than to the trees for sup- port, now slid away. “Twilo. Twilo.” She murmured something in an. swer to the troubled passion of his calling, something reassuring, plain- tive, not in accusation of reproach. whenever I come past you? Answer me. The truth.” After a pause he replied con- fusedly: “Why lady, I don’t rightly know.. Have I whistled that tune?” Her switch moved eagerly. “You know you have.” “Twas just somethin’ in your face, I reckon, that reminded me—" | “My face reminded you?” “Yes, ma'am. I see it now, like a prisoner's.” Her weapon fell, her face was “A prisoner?” “J knowed him once. I worked once in a prison”—the boy's voice spurn- ed the memory as though it hurt him. “That man. I liked him. He was a whistler—like me. That was his tune, when I seed the look in your face like his’'n—as though he was tryin’ in’ forget them bars—well, ma'am it surprised me, like, to see it in your free face so—so that I kinder without knowin’ it got to whistlin’ his tune.” There was an interval {He'd be free youth softly. 'Tis of silence now,” added the Gertrude McCrae went from him and stumbled in at the ranch house door. She spoke huskily and fast. “Randy you must discharge that boy. You must pack him off at once-—the boy at the well, the boy that whistles, I can’t bear it. He —he knows that he—that he is in- nocent, Hasting made no delay. “Come back here, you!” he shouted as he swung forward to the well The roustabout’s assistant turned, set down his buckets and became a vaguely astonished slenderness in the vague light. “You're fired,” snapped Hastings. “Get your time from Gates tomor- row and be off the ranch before the night.” He provoked no answer and no protest. The youth stood still, then raised his burden and moved grace. fully away. “You heard me?” “Yes, sir.” He whistled softly as he disappeared into the velvet mov. ing curtain of the whistled a melody of escape, release. It laid a pattern of music like a gypsy’s signal at Randy Hastings’ feet. When he came back into the ranch house, his woman greeted him with tears. “Randy, you know that I will marry you,” she said. “Forgive me for acting yesterday, today, like a whimsical girl. Forgive me. Love me—oh, as warmly, as wildly as you can.” It was not wildness that he had to give her; the wildness had been charmed out of him in the moonlit woods, but she had his friendliest warmth. They parted that night, affianced and assured, with their fu. ture mapped out as by a mathe- matician’s chart, saefly to its com. fortable end. So assured and so safeguarded by self-fastened comfortable locks and bars did Randy Hastings, banishing young and lovely spirits, fall to sleep that night. He was up early before Gertrude waked, and off to his business on distant range. By noon, he return. ed, full of an easy elation, to find a ranch deserted by everyone but a’ dubious, inquisitive-looking boy” or so, who directed him to a letter on his desk. “Miss Austen and her niece, Mrs. McCrae,” they told him; had “left the ranch, gone out over the pass— ‘fore noon.” The letter was from Gertrude. Randy, dearer than you will ever now believe, I am mad, perhaps, but the pressure of one fact is past sane bearing. Tom is free. I always loved him most; I always loved him, only him. Trying won't tear aside that deep secret imprisonment thatI have suf. fered. Now, he is free and by a sort of haphazard wizardry he has been made unbearably vivid to me. I find myself wanting to take him away from bars and shame and his long, long gray unhappiness and to put back the music he loved into his life—if he will let me. It's the end of everything for me, dear Randy. in one sense, but in another, truer one, it’s the beginning. 1 ma'am, and I reckon, | starry dark, | “Surely. And that means,” com- mented Tom to himself, “she’s fired | along with the whistlin’ kid—likely. | Well, they're young—they’re young.” | He wandered, goatlike and gray, {along the stony little path to the | frees. ang } To ndal Hastings where h | waited, heer and tight. { lipped, before his fire, Twilo slid in, | half-smiling, doubtful, but not 'afraid. It occurred to him that he had never seen her look afraid. | “You sent for me?” | “Yes. Sit down.” . But shaking her head a little, she took her place, as though absently, close to his open window. =n are going 'to discharge me?” oo 0.” The firelight played like golden water across the room between them. | “Winter's coming,” he said. | “And that’s the truth.” She shiv. ered. | “It’s lonesome—the winter Twilo.” “It’s sure lonesome, sir.” “And it’s cold.” “It's very cold.” “My friends have gone and soon the boys will be leaving me. There'll be [the cook and old Tom—that'll be Like the inside hollow of a tree" the log-walled room stood between them and that nearing loneliness and cold. “That will be all,” Hastings re. peated; “a yellow man and a gray |one—and me. That's a grim pros- { pect. for me, Twilo.” He came over ito her and stood close, taking her hand. “I —kissed you the other evening— in the woods.” | “Yes.” “You didnt hate me. You weren't angry. You know how beautiful, how magically beautiful you are.” “That's why I always run away.” “But when I kissed you, Twilo, | i he (you didn’t run away. That is, it i didn’t seem to me that you had run away.” “No sir.” | She was sweet, vague, submissive, ‘but with a tormenting, absent air, as though she listened to some. thing just beyond his speech." ¥You don’t want to run away from me?” She shook her head, wearily, per- (haps. “I will never run away again. ‘I won't run away from you, un. |less—" She was really listening to something that he could not hear. “That means you'll stay here with me, Twilo, all through the winter so that I won't be alone? You'll let me kiss you, love you? Perhaps you'll love me too?” Impatient of her gentle, acquies- ‘cent detachment, he took her in his arms. And then the silver whistle blew, faint and far away, out in the night. She stirred a little in his grasp. ‘I’m sorry, sir,” said Twilo, as sweetly as before, “I'm sorry thatI | have to leave you lonely. I thank you, too.” Her gratitude was grace and simple, as though the shelter of his tree hollow against the cold were largesses to a dryad-tramp. “I thank you. I must go. He’s whist- ling for me. I was waiting lest he should want me. He's leaving, go- ing away. “I'll have to go away with him, I think. You see, he wants me, he - wants me for always, summers and springs, not just for the winter, sir, like you. Listen. You can hear my tune.” As water slides, or the wind, she left his arms. not even try to hold her. no power. The silver whistle piped, piped in. to silence, piped away. Rose mouth, he thought, and leprecahum eyes, out into the green gray world together, hand in hand. After a long silence, Hastings moved and shut his cabin door.— The Hearst's International Cosmo. politan. = empty He could He had —A kind logking old gentleman was stopped by a tramp, who asked for money to get a night's lodging. “Well, look here, my man,” the old gentleman said, “what would you say if I offered you work?” “Bless yer life, sir,” came the re- ply, “I can take a joke same as most people.” —Out in New Mexico even public signs come directly to the point. In a garage in Albuquerque is posted the following notice: “Don’t smoke around tank, If your life isn’t worth anything, gaso- line is!”
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers