HARRINGTON reached out and touched the button and began to get through with his callers.
Quickly but considerately, although with that slightly bored air which characterized his manner, he dealt with each.
A certain accumulated atmosphere of misery and gloom, these clients left behind them; then all at once sweetness and light came in, dispelling the gloom as the morning sun dispels a fog. The young woman had entered. She presented quite as much beauty to Henry's gaze as she had to Charlie Clayton's, only Harrington was not so much impressed by beauty.
The young lady was not over five feet and an inch. She wore a belted suit of some tan shade, with brown silk stockings and oxfords that matched. She was unmistakably Caucasian and yet there was something about her just as unmistakably not Caucasian.
"Kanaka strain—Kanaka away up here where the Japan Current comes down," thought Henry to himself as he noted the spun jet gloss of her hair.
"Mr. Harrington?" the girl inquired in a voice that was low and rich and carried the slightest possible trace of accent.
"I am Henry Harrington," said the young lawyer, rising politely, while noticing that his visitor's expression beneath its mask of modest beauty was wistful and concerned. "Will you be seated?"
The young lady advanced but instead of sitting down immediately, stood with a certain something of the wild in the intentness of her scrutiny. "I am Miss Marceau," she vouchsafed; "teacher of the Indian School at Shell Point."
"Yes?" encouraged Henry. "Won't you please be seated?"
Miss Marceau decided that she would, and the big velvety black eyes rested upon the lawyer's face concernedly while she announced surprisingly: "I have come to you because you are the one man in this community who is not afraid of John Boland."
This was a compliment in an absurdity—for who that was honest would be afraid of John Boland?
"How did you guess it?" the lawyer bantered, frankly amused.
But the young woman was not amused at all. "Because I know that you are not afraid of anything," she returned with simple seriousness. "Some of the Indians who were in your company in the war are in my school now—Adam John and others, grown men struggling among the youngsters for more of the white man's knowledge—and they call you Hellfire Harrington."
Henry laughed blushingly.
"You do not look like Hellfire now," observed the young lady almost disappointedly.
"I guess I'm not, any more," chuckled Harrington. "I guess I never was," he deprecated. "Besides, let me assure you that it requires no special brand of courage not to be afraid of Mr. Boland."
The pretty little woman in the chair looked stubbornly doubtful. "Oh, I don't know," she almost shivered, as if under the spell of some intuitional awe; "Mr. Boland has very great power and he mistakes his will for God's sometimes, don't you think?"
This conceit was so quaint that Henry had to smile again. This woman-girl or girl-woman—she looked eighteen but must have been twenty-four—was an odd piece certainly. She proved it now: "Someone will have to stand up against John Boland some day," she prophesied gravely, "and that someone will have to be very strong. It has seemed to me that that someone might be you."
"But why ever, Miss Marceau, should you think it might be necessary for anyone to stand up against Mr. Boland?"
"But if it ever should be necessary," his caller persisted, "as a matter of truth and justice—for someone to stand up against him . . ."
There was a charm so irresistible about the young woman's exhibition of concern, that Harrington felt compelled to humor her by entertaining this preposterous conception. "Why, it would be some fight," he smiled. "Some fight!" His lids lowered and his glance became far-away as his imagination kindled with a fighting man's love of conflict. Unconsciously he turned from Miss Marceau and gazed into the street and along the line of wharves and warehouses. Every where he looked he saw, as before, the name of Boland—Boland this and Boland that. It was written over all the town.
And the spirit of Boland went even where the name did not. It stalked along the pavements; it reigned in the lives of the people around. If any man ever did stand up to oppose John Boland in this community—one lone little man against the massed might of Boland General, well, the little man would know he had been in a fight, all right.
The vernacular of Harrington's thought portrayed exactly that kind of hopeless odds which alone could have challenged the imagination of one who thought that all his great fights were behind him; and it fascinated him whimsically until his mind was side-tracked by something unusual that his eyes fell upon.
The ferryboat Salmon Queen was just discharging a load of passengers, apparently amid considerable excitement. The center of this excitement was a very shiny open automobile in a very extreme design. As this car rolled off on to the dock a crowd pressed round waving hats and handkerchiefs and hands. If Harrington had been sufficiently interested to raise the window he would have heard cries of "Billie!" "Billie!" "Hello, Billie!" "Welcome home, Billie!" with notes of affection in these greetings.
But he was not sufficiently interested. He only took account of what he saw—a John Boland automobile and in the rear seat the tall chesty figure of Mr. Boland himself with his full-fed wife beside him; and a standing, gesticulating, girlish figure in the front seat at whom everybody was waving and shouting.
The girl had a spirited bearing, he conceded at once. There was an audacious poise to her head, which was crowned by a small hat with a long rakish plume that swept down over a black circular cape of military cut, thrown back over the left shoulder to reveal a bright blue facing, thus imparting a swaggerish, blue-devil effect. As the car rolled slowly forward she steadied herself with one hand upon the wind-shield while the other waved to the enthusiastic group of welcomers.
"You must be seeing something very interesting," commented a demure voice from the chair beside the desk.
"Oh, I beg your pardon!" exclaimed the lawyer, conscience-stricken, instantly recalling his mind and his eye. "No; a train of thought—rather," he dissembled. "I was just thinking how odd it would seem to be fighting John Boland, and why on earth anybody should think of doing such a thing."
"The Shell Point Indians believe he is planning to rob them of their land," announced the teacher of the Government School.
"Rob them?" inquired Henry with a certain indignation. "Why, that, Miss Marceau, is absurd. Mr. Boland is the soul of business honor."
"My Indians—I call them that—have an unexplained fear of John Boland, almost traditional, it seems," expounded Miss Marceau. "They mutter vague hints that Indian rights have suffered before when John Boland wanted land. They offer no details, no specifications. They have a superstition that keeps them silent about their past wrongs—a superstition or a pride—and I have come to respect this reticence. But I have also come to respect their intuitions. They fear John Boland. They say that someone some day must stand up against him for them.
"The oldest of these tribesmen are children in many respects and they are all so pathetic in their fear," the girl ranged on, naively appealing. They are so reduced that they depend on me for advice. Yet they still hope. Disappointed so often by the white man's word and the white man's law, they find their faith once more centering in a man of that race. That man is you. Your name, your character is almost worshiped for what it became to the half-dozen Indian boys from Shell Point who fought under you, and some of whom—did not come back.
"Mr. Harrington," she concluded, lifting sincere eyes to his, for somehow they were standing and fronting each other, "those helpless, fear-stricken children of the woods and water have asked me to tell you of their fears and to appeal to you to consent to be their champion if the need arises; provided, of course, that you have not been retained by the other side," she concluded anxiously.
Harrington straightened proudly, "I will never be retained by the other side," he declared with emphasis. "I'll help your Indians, of course, any time they need me."
"Oh, thank you!" breathed the ambassador of the Shell Pointers, and gazed at him with such gratitude as made the young man feel that in the appealing faith of these dark eyes there was being conferred on him something a little finer than the decoration which a three-star general had once pinned upon his breast.
He was, moreover, surprised to discover, from its impulsive pressure, that there was a warm little hand in his, almost flaming hot. He got a thrill of pleasure in the contact, and, rather astonishingly, he continued to hold this warm little hand and it continued to grasp his.
"Mr. Harrington, at the first sign of what we fear, I shall come to you," Miss Marceau was saying earnestly. "In the meantime, you will be carefully guarded. Your life has, by your promise, become of the greatest importance to a now humble, ignored people who are capable of rare faithfulness and devotion. From this hour forward some one of its members will be always near you. You will not often be conscious of this watchful eye or guarding hand, but it will be near if danger threatens."
With difficulty Henry kept his lips straight. "Why, thank you!" he said courteously. "But"—he permitted himself an amused frown—"look here, now, Miss Marceau," he warned, "I don't want anybody bothering round like that about me. Just tell 'em I can take care of myself and that I'll be glad to advise 'em if anything comes up."
Miss Marceau was verbally noncommittal, yet looked demurely submissive and at the same time extremely well satisfied. "I will tell them what you say, Mr. Harrington, and it will encourage them immensely. Thank you ever and ever so much! Good-by, Mr. Harrington." And the black eyes presumed to flash him both a grateful and an understanding look.
Harrington had smoked half a cigarette upon the subject of Miss Marceau, leaving her Shell Point Indians out of consideration altogether, when he was interrupted first by Sergeant Thorpe announcing another caller, and then by the caller himself.