Chapter 40 - Page 2

somehow suggesting protection--upon the stiff, clasped fingers.

"No, poor fellow!" he said, as if speaking to him. "You--no, no, there was nothing but this--for you. God have mercy on us."

"No," said Baird, "there was nothing else for him. I know that. Everything was whirled away. I had hours last night thinking there is nothing else for me. Perhaps there is not. But first I shall take his body back to his mother. I must tell her lies. This is the result of an accident. That is what I shall tell her. She is a little old woman who will not live long. I must take care of her--and let her talk to me about her son who loved me--and her daughter."

He began to walk up and down the room.

"A man does not live--for fifteen years--side by side with another--that other loving him wholly--and see the blackness of his own deed laid bare--and hear again and again of the woe he has wrought--he does not live so in peace."

"No," answered Tom.

"I tell you--" wildly--"I tell you there have been hours--as he has talked to me of her--when the cold sweat has stood upon my flesh."

He came back to Tom. He was frantic with agonised restlessness.

"In all the cruelty of it," he cried, "there seems to have been one human pitying soul. It was yours. You were tender to her in those last hours. You were merciful--you held her hand when she died."

"Yes," said Tom, in a somewhat husky voice, since he remembered it so well, "she was frightened. Her little hand was cold. I took it in mine and told her not to be afraid."

Baird flung out his own hand with a movement of passionate feeling--then let it fall at his side.

"We shall not meet again," he said, "you will not want to see me."

Big Tom gave him a long, steady look.

"Good Lord, man!" he said, after it, "am I the man to judge another? I've made nothing of life."

"You have done no creature a wrong," Baird said. "And you have helped some to happiness."

"Well," admitted Big Tom, "perhaps that's true. But I've been a lumbering failure myself. I've just judgment enough now to know that there's nothing a man can say about a thing like this--nothing--and just sense enough not to try to say it."

"If you go back to North Carolina," asked Baird, "may I come to see you--and to see her? She need never know."

"I shouldn't want her to know," Tom answered, "but you may come. We shall go back, and I intend to let those two young ones set up a Garden of Eden of their own. It will be a good thing to look on at. Yes, you may come."

"That is mercifulness," said Baird, and this time when he put out his hand