Quitting Misery

by Raymond S. Spears

Quitting Misery

A STORY OF THE WESTERN PEARL STREAMS

By Raymond S. Spears

SHELLING and pearling are linked close together in the lives of a lot of us shanty-boaters. Up-the-bankers sort of give us the once-over and then the go-by. Naturally, people generally don't know any more about us than they do about any one else that isn't joined to them by being married, or related, or in business, church, or society together. Yet somehow, the way things break, we trippers on the rivers never quite manage to untangle ourselves from back yonder in the proud and considerable communities of industry.

I graduated from the Chippewa County high school, the same as quite a class of us youngsters. My average was neither the highest nor the lowest in the list of thirty-six, which included two dozen girls and one dozen boys. I was second among the boys, and Reck Tabore was first.

The sixth among the girls, and the one that I was most interested in, was Cora Doraine. She was the daughter of John C. Doraine, who owned three of the best farms along Shellback Creek. He was also a director of the Cornfield Bank, of which Reck Tabore's father was president; so Reck stepped from high school into the cage as one of the clerks.

My father, Lester Carline, owned the combination shoe-store and jewelry-store down the street, just opposite the park. He was probably the best watch-repairer in all that region, if I do say it. I went to work for him; so sometimes I spelled him repairing jewelry, or selling it, and sometimes I was on the other side of the store, handling shoes or rubbers. Old Tom Glauber, father's assistant, was good-natured, and he taught me a good bit about leathers, kids, and plain repairing.

That was the way things stood at the start; but five years later my father and Reek's father were dead. Reck was president of the bank, and Cora Doraine was teaching, being assistant superintendent in the big district school over at Calbray. She had spent her summers in Indian Hill, our home town, and from the way she developed Reck, who had been a little too proud for what he called "country girls," began to see that he had made a mistake.

Cora was a year younger than I, and she sure was a fine-looking girl. It wasn't so much her good looks, though they counted a lot. Her eyes had sort of a lake blue in them, but it wasn't the color, either, that one noticed most. She danced with the best of them, and she picked up quite a few new dances which she took off the stage in the opera-house and then practised up by herself.

Reck and I were good friends. We rode around in his automobile, first along, and sometimes we had to hire a farmer to haul us back home, for that was in the early days of the machines. Cora used to go with me, and Reck would have one or other of several nice girls around town.

It was in the bad days of 1914 that my eyes were opened, and it was pretty late, then. When the smash came, and I needed money, I went to Reck, the same as always, and explained the situation exactly the way it was. He looked at my note, shook his head, and shoved it across the desk to me.

"Sorry, Jim," he said. "Can't let you have a dollar."

That was the only bank in town. We had never done business with any other.

I went over to neighboring towns, told my predicament, and showed my papers. They called up the Cornfield Bank, of course. I can see it was just as natural as could be. Reck spoke for the Cornfield Bank, and he simply said that he didn't think it was advisable to let Jim Carline have any money, speaking for the Cornfield institution, and no more. Always he said that he spoke only for his bank.

I took a wagon, filled it with shoes, and went off across country. I sold them. I sold out my whole stock. I brought in shoes and harnesses for Tom Glauber to repair, and he repaired them. We fought it out together. Then, when we were clear and on our feet, I turned the shoe-store over to old Tom. He has it yet, and he's a director in the new bank board, too.

But while I was plugging night and day, selling shoes on the road out of a wagon, and while I didn't think I could win through, there was a break with Cora Doraine. It was a mean break. It didn't have anything to do with Reek's refusal to let me have money, or with his putting me in wrong with the other banks around Indian Hill, speaking particularly. Generally, though, I was so worried, so desperate, so nervous, that I couldn't talk to her the way a lover should. She gave me back her ring, and three weeks later I sold my jewelry business for fourteen hundred dollars, packed up, and left town.

 

II

Perhaps I was foolish, but I don't know about that. I had lived all my life in Indian Hill, a nice, pretty little town, with its best street more than half taken up by retired farmers and merchants. There is lots of money there. The day Reck refused me even a small loan, they had about ninety thousand dollars ready to slip into the purchase of securities at low prices. When I couldn't borrow money to keep alive my store, they were buying bonds and stocks, and Reck himself was beginning to dip in on his personal account.

All my life had been spent inside the limits of Chippewa County. I had never been out of the State. The largest place I had ever seen was a city of thirty thousand inhabitants. I took my fourteen hundred dollars in cash and went to Chicago, then to New York; and then, when I had eight hundred left, I went back into the Mississippi Valley, picked up a shanty-boat, with a sheller's and trapper's outfit, and began to loaf off down the rivers, idling.

Just like that I had gone to pieces. Some go tripping down the rivers for adventure and experience, or to hide out. I had simply turned river rat. I trapped on the Missouri River bottoms from Kansas City to St. Louis that year of 1915-1916, and carried seven hundred dollars' worth of skins into the market, at the prices fur was bringing in those days. The next spring, early, I towed up Little Blue Creek, fighting the current with my six-horse-power launch motor, and tied to the bank at what they called the Swamp Eddy, a long still-water.

What notion took me to this creek or this eddy I don't know. A shanty-boater never does know why he goes anywhere like that. The spring flood went down, and there wasn't four inches of water on the shoals, where there had been six feet. I was held there till a good rain should come to float me out.

I was glad to be away from everybody. I was just a river hermit. I let my whiskers grow a week or two at a time. I caught fish to eat, and shot young rabbits, young quail, and other small game, not being particular about the game laws. When I was shy of flour, baking-powder, or something like that, I walked nine miles over to a village to make my purchases.

Nobody knew my name, and I didn't know anybody. I would pick up two or three newspapers, perhaps a magazine or two, and shuffle back to where I had lost myself.

At the same time, I was busy. Swamp Eddy was full of mussel-shells. Having tongs with handles long enough, I went out mornings and caught a few hundred pounds of the shells, poled my banister-boat to the bank, and stewed them out in a two-bushel sheet-iron pan.

When I shucked the shells, I was particular not to leave a mess. I chucked the meats into deep water, and I guess all the catfish in the creek came there to feed. I caught some bass, too. The shells I threw up on top of the bank.

Evidently that part of Little Blue Creek had never been shelled before. When fall came, I had fifty tons of shells that were as pretty as any one ever saw come out of an eddy. They were sands, muckets, and a few butterflies.

I hired a foreigner with a fine big team to haul my shells to the railroad for me. It was only three miles to an old logging side-track. I put twenty-five tons into each of two cars there, jumped a freight with them, took my catch over to the Mississippi button-shell country, and sold them two days later.

A buyer paid me fifty dollars a ton for my shells—twenty-five hundred dollars in cash. Probably I could have forced five dollars more a ton out of them, for there was a good run of fancy shells in the lot, but I felt too good to spoil the buyer's feelings. He didn't know where the shells came from, and I didn't tell him.

I went back to Little Blue Creek, and, catching a nice little cloudburst, I dropped down the current into the main river, to start my fall trapping on two otter and seven full-grown mink, when furs were away up and going higher.

I haven't said anything about the by-products of shelling. Everybody knows that fresh-water clam-shells contain pearls. Generally speaking, there is about one pearl of commercial value to five or ten thousand shells; but the proportion varies greatly, some shells running to pearls much more than others. Some time ago the government made a sort of survey of the industry in various Western streams. It found that on some of them the fishermen made more money from pearls than from shells. For instance. Fox River, in Wisconsin, produced $7,797 in shells and $8,045 in pearls, while the St. Croix turned but $13,872 in shells and no less than $23,160 in pearls. On the other hand, the Mississippi yielded $125,998 in shells and $50,562 in pearls, and the Tennessee $10,149 in shells and only $912 in pearls; but it is well-known that the Tennessee pearls are dark and cloudy, and have no luster.

I lived on my shells and furs, laying my pearls away. I couldn't be lazy, though I went back to the primitive, and some days I'd sit on the stern of my boat, just watching the Big Muddy go coiling by with the murk of six thousand miles of caving banks.

Then some nights I'd sit in my cabin, with the doors locked, the curtains drawn double over my windows, and spread out on the table the spoils I had taken from the shells of crippled mussels. I had been a jeweler, and I knew pearls. I had gone to look at and study pearls where the Eastern buyers gather and the brokers make their bargains. I now had some of the prettiest I had ever seen.

Of course, when the war began, I saw my duty. I didn't have anybody depending on me for anything. I sold out my outfits to old men; and I was glad afterwards that I did, for the old boy who bought my traps and stretching-boards made a good thing on the fur season. The other fellow bought himself a little farm with three pearls and a summer's shells.

I was like a million others—I wanted to go into the front-line trenches, but the nearest I arrived there was a camp, where I helped handle a few thousand dozen mules, and learned to read their characters by the slope of their eyebrows and the point of their winkers.

They threw me home again, and I went back to my shanty-boating. I was tired of being nerved up those desperate years, wishing I could go into the bullets, but ducking heels with alacrity. I took my pearls out of a safe-deposit vault, and drew enough money to give me a twenty-six-foot cabin boat, with a twenty-four-foot hooded launch, and another trapping outfit. In the spring I sold my furs, and bought into the shelling game again.

I settled right back into the river eddies as easy as that. Something had broken inside me when Reck turned me down and surrounded me on all sides by those noncommittal, annihilating statements that he had refused me money. I had struggled through it; I had fought it out; but when I had won, I knew I was no good.

Yet I had to work. I did three hundred days of work a year. I fished shells, shucked them, and shipped them. I was lucky—so lucky that I didn't realize it. I did not think in terms of dollars when I spread my extra profits, the pearls, on the black velvet square that I had bought to hold them for gloating. It takes a good pearl, one of splendid luster, to stand alone on a black, light-absorbing surface. I gloated over those pearls. They were my miser's treasure.

I made good wages, shelling and trapping furs. On the spring tide I caught drift, and I earned a nice sum by salvaging a steam ferry-boat which had caved loose, breaking a mooring-line. I had ample money, as life on the river goes; but somehow the pearls enthralled me.

They filled my eyes with their shimmering lights and colors, their depths of quivering glow. I would look into one and see a human hand, into another and see an eye, into a third and see the parting lips of a smile. Each pearl had its own living light, and I knew them, and what was in their depths—not all that was in them, of course, for there are. mysteries in the hearts of pearls that one may surmise, but may not know for certain.

I had steeled my heart against Cora, because I loved her. The idea of taking her shanty-boating down the rivers didn't occur to me. I went back to Indian Hill once, and shuffled through town. I was on my way to enlist. No one recognized me, and I had no relatives there.

When I was mustered out, I took off my uniform. During my service I hadn't seen a soul I had ever known. I sort of rejoiced in my loneliness, probably.

Now that I was shelling again, I remembered Shellback Creek. It was a deep, sluggish stream, and I knew as a boy that every eddy and shoal was full of mussels. I couldn't exactly remember whether they were good button shells or not; but as it was a nice, clear, green-water stream in summer and fall, coming out of the old glacier belt, and running through some pretty little ponds, I suspected it held good shells.

I wanted to go and try for them. Nobody has any idea how it stirs a man up, thinking about a creek full of shells, and nobody shucking them. I held off quite a while, and then one day I sold my shanty-boat, put my duffle into the big launch, and breasted the spring tide for Shellback Creek.

It was a fight up the current through the rapids at the edge of the river ridges, but I made it. Above there, in the spring flood, I plowed up till I was at what they call Red Maple Falls. There, in a mile-long still-water, I built a banister-boat, from which to tong the shells, and a twenty-foot shanty-boat to live in, and went to work in earnest.

I was sorting shells now. I picked out all the fine white shells, that sell for four times as much as the plain button muckets. The shells were so pretty that I couldn't leave them alone. In the old days I had been satisfied to take up from five hundred to a thousand pounds in the morning and shuck them in the afternoon, and I didn't work every day. Now I pitched into the beds for hours, and many a night I shucked the steams out by lantern-light, though the summer days were long enough.

What possessed me I don't know. I didn't need the money, for I had more than I could use.

I didn't strip the beds clean, at that. Different from many a pearler and sheller, I left the edges of the long beds on both sides—strong, healthy young shells—for seed to make two shell-beds where one had been before.

As I shucked along down the creek, I saw muskrat holes in every bank, and regular mink runways on every peninsula. Even otter were there in plenty, for the fish were in schools in every eddy. Everybody thereabouts had always been so busy tilling the soil and trafficking that not even a farm-boy had set a trap, though more than three thousand dollars' worth of fur was running loose. As for shells and pearls, no one had given them a thought.

I had fitted shoes on the feet of most of the women in those parts, and half the old-timers were carrying watches which I had either sold to them or tinkered for them; and yet, with my bushy whiskers and my shaggy old clothes, I could buy milk from an old customer and she would sniff me short, but would take my little two-bits just the same.

 

III

I'd be ashamed to tell how many tons of shells I hogged out of Shellback Creek, and how much I was paid for them. I began tonging on the 14th of May, and on the 16th of September, late in the afternoon, I was shucking shells when I heard a voice that took all the strength out of me. A shell that weighed only a few ounces fell through my fingers and clattered on my shucking-board.

Know that voice? I would have recognized it in the howling of a mob, or in the rolling thunder of a storm!

"Jim!" it said. "Jim, is that you? It can't be you!"

It was Cora. She walked down the steep bank to my stew-pan, and stood looking through the steam at me. I had about twenty tons of shells on the bank, and about a pound of hair on my head, counting whiskers and mane. Not a soul had seen through my mask to the Jim Carline that was beneath, till she gave one glance—and that was enough.

I fumbled my hand into the shells. I couldn't look her in the eyes. One glance at her, and something came home to me. I could see it in the full, precious bloom of her magnificent figure and in the level gaze of her accusing eyes. I had fallen to this estate; I was a sheller, not too clean, and going worse; but I had come back to Shellback Creek with the old ache still in my heart!

She had in her hand a light little shotgun, double-barreled and beautifully modeled. Two fine dogs romped at her feet. She wore laced boots and a gray hunting-suit with middling long skirt. I had always loved the outdoors, but I had never known that she liked hunting or anything of that kind.

She sat down on my shell measure, which she kicked bottom side up, and I sat down on a flat piece of rock on the bank of the creek. I was holding a big, gnurly shell which the heat had killed, but hadn't opened. I worked it in my hand while she gave me my talking to.

"So you went to pieces!" she said. "So you quit! So you let just one mean thing break you and turn you into this—this!"

There wasn't any excuse for me, so I didn't try to give any. The fact is, there was something in her voice that showed her own hurt too much. I looked at that big shell in my hand. I suspected a good deal, but I wouldn't confirm my suspicions at that moment.

I waited till she had moved on about her hunting, which she did a little later. I put the shell into my pocket, shucked out the half-bushel or so that remained of the day's take, and walked up to my shanty-boat. I threw the shell into an alum and salt taw solution I had there, to preserve a calf-skin I had bought, and left it.

Don't ask why I did this. It is bad enough telling, without being obliged to explain. It was just a sheller's whim—a sort of instinct.

Cora was married to Reck Tabore. She wasn't exactly happy, as I could see. Finding me shucking clams there by the Shellback must have made it a little easier for her; for a man who could fall as low as I had wasn't worth a moment's regret—that was plain. At the same time, it added a bit to the ache in my own heart; but she mustn't know that.

On Sunday afternoon, Reck came down to my shanty-boat, drew a chair up to the table, pulled a cigarette-case out of his pocket, and we smoked together. We talked about things generally, but nothing particularly.

Any bitterness I had felt was all gone. When a roan has lived on the Big Muddy, watching that wide flood roll by, careless of everything but keeping on its own job, the unimportance of human affairs in the universe comes home. I could care without showing it, and I could understand without being hurt by what had gone by.

It meant a good deal to see proud Reck Tabore coming to my little shanty-boat, which was clean, bright, and full of one-man comforts. I gave him roast gray squirrels and a rabbit, with hot bread and gravy for supper. When we were kids, we had once broiled a young jack-rabbit over a bed of coals. He reminded me of it as he ate, wishing in his heart that he had an appetite for what I served.

It was late that night when he went up the bank, followed the path to the road, and walked home. I didn't lay myself out to hurt his feelings. I didn't have to; but if I had wanted revenge, I couldn't have asked for any more than what I saw when I looked at him. He was holding himself in all the time. He was biting his lip. He was turning his eyes away. He had no appetite for our meal, though it was one of the best that had ever been put before him.

My whiskers and denim clothes, my hands cut by sharp shells, and the bare little boat meant just one thing to him—real comfort. With all that he had on the surface, the man whose spirit he had broke was contented—which he himself could never be. His face was thinner than it had ever been, his chin a sharper chisel, his nose a longer prod, his eyes a harder steel; but his whole frame was bending under its burden, while I was broader of shoulder and my eyes were steadfast—a little soft, perhaps, but quiet, clear, contented blue.

If my heart had ached in the past, if I had suffered from envy or jealousy, that all passed away now. The bitterest thing I could feel against Reck Tabore was the sensation of being sorry. I pitied him.

I could not imagine myself doing anything but look up at Cora. She, in her splendid womanhood, could pity me, blame me, despise me, loathe me—I deserved anything she choose to give me. For that matter, so did Reck. A man should be grateful if a woman like Cora bothers so much as to have any opinion of him!

 

IV

My boat was in the most out-of-the-way place I could put it, but when the word went around old acquaintances came down to find me. After my day's work I would sit down on the bank, or in the cabin, and talk to them. Some tried to pry into my personal affairs, and asked—I remember one nice old lady, a friend of my mother—if I didn't feel disgraced, being so shiftless. As it happened, she was wearing a whole set of Little Blue Creek royal purple shell buttons—fancies that I knew in a minute, for they were cut from my own take. I didn't tell her that the prettiest ornaments she had ever worn were the product of my industry.

I swung my boat up on skids in a late fall flood, made all snug for the winter, and began to trap. I was real stylish about my fur business. I built an air-space tar-paper shack, put a wood-stove in it, and did my skinning and stretching there. In that way I could handle even skunks and minks, and my own house-boat wouldn't be a bit musky.

Nobody knew that I was taking more furs than many a green-timber man in the Canadian north country. I had otters, minks, muskrats, red foxes, and coyotes, some good white ermines, and more than two hundred skunks.

I pretended I was loafing. When I met folks, I'd slop along, stooping and shuffling. I made three shipments of furs, though, and my weekly wages were satisfactory. Now and again I'd go up-town and have dinner with somebody, especially old Tom Glauber and his wife. They were about the only ones, except Reck and Cora, who didn't try to reform me.

Tom had all the old store now. Upstairs, where there had been renters in the old days, he had three men repairing shoes. He had had the nerve to start a mail-order shoe-repairing business. The R. F. D. man brought in boots, shoes, and slippers that needed stitches and patches, and the next day the carrier took away everything all fixed up.

"Jim, my boy!" he said to me, "I'm getting rich, and it was you that gave me my chance!"

He was too polite, too instinctively tactful, to offer me anything. He knew that I had plenty to eat; but if I needed anything, if I wanted to come back, Tom and his wife stood ready to give me all they had to put me on my feet again.

I gave Mrs. Glauber a little trinket for her birthday, which was along in April. I had bored and mounted it myself. She never dreamed what it was. She felt a little sorry, perhaps, to think I wasn't in a position to do more—not that she wanted anything more. There are good souls who know that a ten-cent-store trinket, with the heart, is worth more than diamonds.

Tom's wife kind of wiped her eye as she took that nubbin of a trick out of a clamshell, knowing that I'd picked it up shucking shells. The mounting—a sort of twisted wire, probably nickel-plated—reminded her of the days when I made up little trinkets at my father's jeweler's lathe and bench, to give around to the girls, the way country-town boys do.

"If you'd only kept on—" she began, bursting out, because I had wasted all my years.

I felt ashamed of myself. That nice, dumpling-fat woman showed me the waste of my years! I ought to have done better, my own heart told me. It wasn't a pleasant reflection, either.

 

V

I wallowed back through the mud, and found that Shellback Creek had lifted my boats off their skids in the spring flood.

I had had my fill of the old home town, and it was time I tripped away again. I wasn't satisfied—perhaps no human ever is. The pretty girl I had known was now a handsome woman, and I had found that she filled a bigger place in my heart than ever. Reck was going into the background, however, and that would never do—not even in my thoughts.

There was a whisper, a hint of something in the air. People who live in villages know the sensation. No one was really saying anything; no one knew anything; but old Tom seriously drew me to one side and whispered that if I had any savings in the Cornfield Bank, I had better draw them out. I shrugged my shoulders, and let him know I hadn't any worries on that score.

Everybody knew, of course, how Reck had beaten me down. There were a good many who had a suspicion as to why he had done it. In a practical, business-like way, without scandal, without appearance of doing it, he had rid himself of a rival for a hand that he might probably have won in the beginning, only he hadn't noticed its shapeliness.

I couldn't forbear seeing Cora once more. It was all right that I should. We were old schoolmates. Reck had taken me home to dinner with him, and they had eaten dinner on my shanty-boat.

Something in my mode of living seemed to fascinate my friends. After the ice went out, on the evening when Reck and Cora were down, a fog rose and spread out of the creek. A few minutes afterward, they sat and listened to wild ducks quacking in the eddying current within a dozen yards of the boat.

Reck's eyes were bright, his cheeks flushed, and his lips pale blue. I couldn't help but notice. Cora and he were never talkative, but that evening they were very quiet indeed. When they were ready to go home, I led the way with a lantern, and they needed the rubber boots they had put on.

I went to supper at their house the day before I was to cut loose for a trip away down to the lower Mississippi. I was more like my old self. I had shaved and had a hair-cut. I was dressed like a shanty-boater who still has some appearance of self-respect.

Reck could hardly hold the knife in his hand when he sliced the big roast of beef. His nerves were going. He did an awful job of hacking. Cora watched him, and I was sorry I had come. I didn't like the look in her eyes. Her lips were pressed too tight, her cheeks were too full of color one minute, too white another.

I left early in the evening. As we went into the hall of the house, the old Tabore mansion. Reck snatched his overcoat and hat and put on his rubbers.

"I'll go with you, Jim," he said.

Cora shut the door behind us, and he went clear to the boat with me. He sat down at my table, and there, his voice breaking and mending again, tears running down his cheeks, his eyes rolling and blinking, he told me—well, a pretty bad kind of a story.

I talked to him the way a shanty-boater talks to himself. For years I had listened to the wild ducks and geese, to the sucking of the eddies, to the splashing of wavelets along the hull of my boat. My war service had helped me to understand the quiet of the river.

Reck had to tell somebody. On my ears the story should have fallen without stirring any regrets; but when he was gone, I brought out that piece of black velvet, which had cost five dollars a yard, and began to roll my trinkets on it. I didn't think at the moment what I was doing. They were dice, and I was playing with fate.

Their colors, their sheen, their lovely depths—ah, those gracious and satisfying pearls! I restored them, one by one, to their linen paper envelopes, put them into the old leather jewel-case which I had kept in my little kit of jewelers' tools when I sold my business, and thrust them into my pocket. Then I went over to the railroad to catch the midnight train for the East.

 

VI

I got back from my journey at eleven o'clock in the morning of a bright, sunny day. As I left the railroad-station, I saw a good many farm people along the street, and at the Cornfield Bank comer there was quite a crowd gathered. I had been afraid of that!

I broke into a run and hurried along Tossel Avenue to the bank. Sure enough, a line of people had formed there. I stopped to ask a reporter who was standing by, watching in the interests of the papers he corresponded for.

"Yes," he said, "there's a run on the bank. Somebody's short, but they're fighting to save it. The examiner is here."

When I went in, Cora was in the president's office, where the examiner was going over the papers she had handed him. There was a statement which showed to the dollar how much Reck Tabore had embezzled, trying to cover his market commitments.

They both looked at me—the examiner with a frown, wondering what business I had there.

"How do things stand?" I asked her.

"He's short!" she replied laconically, with a hardness of voice I had never heard her use before.

"And the rest?"

"All clear." She shrugged her shoulders. "He threw in everything he had—stock, land, and all—but it was not quite enough!"

"Let me put this to his credit," I said, putting on the table several bricks of currency in bills of convenient size—tens, twenties, and the like.

"Jim!" She started back. "You—how—"

"I didn't realize I had so much," I said. "It was in pearls that I had saved. I raised this on them."

There was no time for argument. The gap to be filled was not large; but my arrival, speaking in terms of cash, was highly opportune. The deficit was made up, and more. The examiner permitted the bank to remain open, and the run ceased.

All hands were there, except Reck. No one knew where he was. The bank board held a meeting that afternoon, and elected me a director. Acting among my own people, I wondered at their confidence in me—a shanty-boater. I reckon my old dad's name stood me in good stead.

No day was longer and harder than this one. When every customer of the bank had been thoroughly satisfied, and details explained to each one, whether a woman with a fifty-dollar deposit or a distant client with tens of thousands at stake, I walked home with Cora. We supposed Reck was there.

"Well, you have done something for me, Jim!" she told me.

"I was grateful for the chance to atone for my cowardice when I quit—ran away," I told her.

"You missed all the toil and struggle, and all the happiness, that we might have had fighting it out together!" she burst forth. "You know, now, the blame that is on your head. You let Reck win, when he needed defeat; you dropped out of the game of life when success was in your hands. Now you have helped me, but your help is a mockery. I shall remain with Reck, as a straight wife must, no matter if—no matter if—"

Thus she had her revenge. It was some relief, though, having her take it out in so many words, telling me exactly what I had done. Despite my despair, I felt the elation that even selfishness must feel from an honest act of self-sacrifice. Those stunning blows of accusation were not all sting or hurt. While they crushed my pride, humbled me, and stirred deep regrets, it warmed my heart to think that she still cared enough to want to punish me. And when I went away I think she was sincerely sorry for me, wondering if she had made me suffer overmuch.

I had paid my debt to her. That must be my reward! I deserved no more.

The largesse of this good old world of ours, however, would not be denied.

I found Reck Tabore dead on the bank above my shanty-boat. He had broken into the cabin, taken my twelve-gage gun, and blown to pieces the brains that had played him false.