Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1917 — Then I’ll Come Back to You [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Then I’ll Come Back to You

By LARRY EVANS

Author of “Once to Every Man" Copyright, 1915, by the H. K. Fly Company

SYNOPSIS Caleb Hunter and his sister Sarah welwn> to their home Stephen O’Mara, a homeless and friendless boy, starting from the wilderness to see the city. Stephen O'Mara catches a glimpse of Barbara Allison. The girl la rich. The O’Mara boy falls in love with her. She ta ten, he fourteen. O’Mara daily becomes more convinced that some one is trying to stir up trouble among his men. Wickersham and Allison have a conference. They agree that Harrigan, their t ■ has messed things trying to stir .up trouble among the men. naran says tne regeneration <n Garry is on- er th- things that has made her life most happy. Sarah plans a meeting between Btephen •and Barbara. Woman! :ke, ®he is convinced that, despite her engagement to YFlckoraham, Barbara cares for •'Mara. O’Mara arranges a meeting between Garry and Miriam. Garry no longer Is a Aninkard. O’Mara has worked wonders with him. / O’Mara returns to find the reconciliation of Garry and Miriam. Barbara is present, and her comments puzzle Stephen. Wickersham and Allison begin to realize that O’Mara cannot be defeated. Sarah’• plan to unite Barbara and O’Mara eoeme to be working ■moothly. Stephen gives Harrigan a beating. Wick•rsham sees the fight. O’Mara then challenges Wickersham to fight. Wlckersham refuses. Barbara disappears. Steve rescues her. She sends Wickersham his ring and Wlckersham orders Harrigan to kill his riyal. Harrigan kills Big Louie and wounds Steve.

“Some one traced your name,” he put into words the first thought that had been hers. “Some one who had your signature to copy.” She nodded, whitely, in horror. Joe folded the paper r.nd tucked it into a pocket. “We can touch nobody,” he averred regretfully, “unless we catch Harrigan” Caleb himself took Barbara home, and on the way across the lawn she giggled suddenly at the funny way in which the distance seemed to increase and then lessen between her eyes and her feet. The ground persisted in rising to meet her, she said, until she had to cling to Caleb’s arm. And the outer steps proved difficult to negotiate. But at the sight of her father sunk in silence upon his desk in the ground floor “office” she drew her hand from the crook of Caleb’s arm and went swiftly across to him. “Barbara,” he besought her brokenly the moment her cheek touched his, “you mustn’t believe that 1” She hushed him with gentle fingers laid upon his lips. “I have been a very foolish and hysterical child,” she said. “I’ll try to behave more like a woman now. And you and Uncle Cal have been only—absurd!” ,i

She had to laugh again at the behavior of her feet as she climbed upstairs, but her head seemed steady enough. It was only after she had reached her own room that she complained querulously of the failing lights. Miriam had to help Cecile undress and put her to bed. On the floor below her father had turned again to his desk, his head bbwed under his arms. And total breakdown was imminent for Dexter Allison when a hand touched awkwardly his shoulder. He looked up heavily to meet this time the eyes of Caleb Hunter. Caleb stuttered furiously at first, for sentimentality shamed him. Then a happy thought showedthe way. “Dexter, I secured a few sprigs of very superior mint yesterday.” He made of it a ceremonial. “Do you think you would—care to join me, sir?” They had been friends for close to forty years not because of common tastes, but in spite of innate dissimilarity. Dexter came to his feet. He reached out and crushed the other man’s hand within his soft, white fingers. Nor was his reply quite according to formula. “I don’t mind if I do, Cal,” he accepted fervidly. “Thank God, I don't mind if I do !" Arm in arm they recrossed to the white columned house. And they kept close, each to the other, throughout the hours of suspense that followed, finding a potent though unconfessed reassurance in such companionship. Delirium came again upon the sick

man who lay in the room which Miss Sarah had always kept waiting for him. Fever strode upon him, while the girl who naa Drought him home slept in complete exhaustion. At times Steve lay quiescent, only muttering fitfully; the next moment he called crisply for Fat Joe—he feared for his bridge—and Joe had to exert every iron muscle to hold him down. And always he spoke Barbara's name, with a poignant gentleness that left Miss Sarah on the verge-of collapse.; But be continued to live, through that day and the next night, even when the doctor shook his head and Fat Joe rose to go for the giii, as he had promised he would, in the last extremity. lie continued to live# and with the coming of the second dawn suddenly he was no longer delirious. Stephen O’Mara opened his

eyes and'gazed feebly bur very nnderBtandingly into the eyes of Fat JcM who was watching at that moment. Joe tried to hush him, but he would talk a little. “I know,” he pronounced each word with calculated effort. "I have been very sick, and I must not waste strength. But I have to be clear, first, on .one point. Have I dreamed it, Joe, or—or did she bring me home?’’ With his. voibe alone, when all else seemed failing, Joe had kept his friend alive. The doctor believed it; Miss Sarah knew it to be so. And first of all Joe had to voice his thankfulness, for it was an explosive thing. “Didn’t I tell her so?” he demanded in his whining tenor. “Didn’t I say so, all along? And I let that doctor worry me, just because he’s got a diploma, in a frame, hanging on his wall!” Then he answered Steve’s question. “She found you,” he said. “She brought you home.” A long time the sick man lay and pondered. And finally he found it possible to smile.

“I have not cared whether I lived or died,” he said in little more than a whisper. “All along I have seemed to know how near I was—to going across, and I have been near to quit ting—at times. For I was happier than I’d ever dared let myself be, be forehand then, with the first shot that dropped Big Louie. I knew”— He shook his head, still smiling vaguely. “I have not wanted to live, but I am looking at things—more like a man now. You need not worry any longer, Joe. I’ll sleep a little while, I think, and then I’ll put my mind hard on getting well, when I awake.” That marked the end of delirium, and with sleep which came almost while be wgs? talking the fever began to abate, tie “put his mind on getting well,” when he awoke twelve hours later. Strength was flowing in a steady tide back into his body long before Barbara’s knees wofild again bear her weight. For she had squandered her endurance without counting the cost, and she paid the full penalty. She lay three days and three nights railing at her weakness before she could get up at all, and even then Cecile, her little maid, clucked discreetly at the dark circles beneath her eyes. Joe was several days absent on that errand which had all but emptied the seething town of men. He returned the same day Barbara was about again, forced to admit that Harrigan and Fallon and Shayne had won clear. And there was nothing left to the disgruntled groups which straggled in behind him, save tall and heated conjecture. Some said that they must have managed to cross the border, others maintained that they had found sanctuary in the lumber camps of the lake country to the west, but no matter which guess was right the net result stood unchanged. For it is upon the one who runs away that the blame is always laid, and Archibald Wickersham knew fully as well as did Caleb and Allison and Fat Joe that, without Harrigan, they could not hope to touch him. Harrigan had disapepared from the ken of men, and Wickersbam de-

layed only until his departure could no longer be construed as flight. Then one evening modestly he boarded a train. After she had rested Barbara proved almost humbly amenable to reason, until it was best for her to go to him she would wait as patiently as she was able. Miss Sarah ordered a week of unbroken quiet and rest for her patient, and Steve, and not Barbara, proved the difficult one to manage during dhat period. For with returning strength there came to him recollection of many things which required his attention. He fretted over his work; he swore humorously at Fat Joe, who, coming to make daily reports-as soon as Miss Sarah realized that the good in such visits far exceeded the benefits of sleep and solitude, assured his chief that they had accomplished much, unhampered as they were by carping authority.

But ne my ana orooaed, no. humor in his eye, when he was left alone. Fat Joe had assured him that she had brought him home, but Fat Joe, who was ever averse to anti-climax, ha.d told him no more than that. His efforts at entertainment were only the more spontaneous those days because of the soberness of his friend’s face. And then the same day that Joe raised him against the pillows so that ho might watch a string of flat cars, high piled with logs, roll into the yards, they let her go to him. Steve was listening to the shrill salute of the whistle which he knew was McLean’s pean of victory; he was smiling a little wistfully over the memory which, with McLean, always recurred to him. when lie turned and saw her standing on the threshold. She had come on diffident, mouselike feet. She was watching him. And bsfore he believed it really was she. Barbara faltered his name. “Steve!” It was only a wisp of a sound—an aching, throbbing bit ol tenderness lighter even than the breath that bore it. “Steve!” she breathed again. But thereupon, with a headlong-lit tic rush that scattered spools of bandages and rolls of lint and set the bottles <n his table jingling dangerously, dew to him and came, somehow, » his arms.

They had not told him—at first he could not speak. Dumbly he sat, his face bowed upon that brown head pillowed in his arms. She had told herself that she was a woman now—yet her first words were all girl. “Tell me just once that I’m pretty,” she quavered. “Say that I am stillhalf boy—to you!” His tongue unsteadied with joy, he told her again, as he had told her on that other day, and, watching the old, old wonder of her grow in his eyes, she listened as though she were taking the words, one by one, from his lips. But there was nothing boyish in the crooked little arch of her mouth —nothing boyish in the depths of her dark and brimming eyes. She remembered his wincing shoulder then. Her arms crept higher about his neck. And now her face was uplifted, and there was no more need for words. Afterward when they spoke of Big Louie she loved him more’for the sorrow which he did not try to hide. From Fat Joe he had already learned of Big Louie’s last dereliction. Out of a deeper silence Steve spoke gravely—an epitaph for the man to whom he had been unfailingly kind. “Most any kind of a failure can live,” he said, “but it takes a man—to smile and die.” (To be continued.)

“Say that I am still —half boy—tO you!”