Travelers Five Along Life's Highway

Here he was at last, a free man, although with a sore head and a sprained ankle. The next thought was not so pleasant. He was farther from winning Sade than he had ever been before, by the whole amount of his doctors' bills and travelling expenses. Had it not been for his feeling that it was almost sacrilege to curse a dead man, he would then and there have anathematized Pole with a glad heart but with a vicious gnashing of teeth.

As he sat there in the deepening spring twilight, a tall comely figure came through the little gate at the side of his shop and started across his back yard. It was the short cut towards his home. He started forward eagerly as he recognized the familiar outlines in the dusk, and the slow sweep of skirts. He did not stop to wonder why she should be going to his mother's just then. His only feeling was joy that his eyes rested upon her. It seemed years since he had seen her last. He knocked on the window-pane to attract her attention.

"Sade! Oh, Sade!" he cried, leaning out of the window, his linen duster gleaming ghostly gray in the twilight.

The startling apparition, looming thus suddenly out of the coffin shop, froze the woman's very soul. With a terrified cry she sank weakly in a heap on the ground, and sat there shivering and gibbering, tears of fright streaming down her cold face.

"Lord 'a' mercy, Sade! What's the matter?" he cried, stumbling over his crutches in his haste to unbolt the back door and get to her. As he attempted to raise her she fell limply against him, fainting.

"'Be thankful for your arms. Jane Hutchins,'" chuckled Wexley under his breath, as he realized that for the first time in his long wooing his arms were actually around her, and he half carried, half dragged her to the door-step.

Sade was not given to hysterics, but her fright at seeing what she supposed was Wexley's spirit, and the relief at finding him so very much in the flesh kept her sobbing and laughing alternately for some time. And the time was all too short for the man who listened to her tearful confession of remorse.

As he helped her to her feet he said solemnly: "I'll forgive Pole now for all the trouble he ever got me into. Since this circus affair has made you change your mind, it's the best job he ever did in his life."

Several days later he made the same remark to his mother. "Humph!" she sniffed. "You hain't lived with her yit." Wexley whistled softly as he rubbed up his best sample coffin-plate, with which he intended to adorn the parlour wall, as is the fashion of Gentryville. He would hang it up on his wedding day, in grateful memory of his benefactor, with the name "Mortimer Napoleon Bennet" engraved upon it. At present it bore on its shining surface in large ornate letters only the inscription, "Rest in Peace."

The Fifth Traveler

Bap. SloanTo His Mount of Pisgah

THROUGH the twilight that filled the valley a winding white pike was all that could be seen distinctly. The brown-furrowed corn-fields were blotted out in the dusk. Farm-houses had merged their outlines into the dark mass of the surrounding trees. Only the apple-orchards kept their identity, and that because it was blossom-time, and the dewy night air was heavy with their sweetness.

Somewhat back from the pike, yet near enough for the rattle of passing wheels to give a sense of companionship, a man sat rocking back and forth in a narrow vine-inclosed porch. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and collarless, and the slow creak of the old wooden chair seemed to voice his physical comfort like a purr; but it by no means expressed the state of his mind. That was attuned to something wholly melancholic, like the croaking of frogs in the pond below his house, or the far-away baying of a dismal-minded hound, which, tied behind some cabin across the clearing, was making the peaceful Sabbath evening vibrant with its misery.

"I can't help havin' a sort of fellow-feelin' for that dawg," muttered the man, raising his head to listen, and passing his hand slowly over the bald spot on his crown. "Must be considerable of a relief to let out and howl like that when you feel bad. There's been times when I wouldn't 'a' minded tryin' it myself for a spell."

Then he settled back into his chair with a long-drawn sigh. He was awaiting the second ringing of the church bell. The first one had tolled its summons through the valley nearly an hour before, and vehicles were beginning to rattle along the pike toward evening service. The little frame meeting-house, known as the Upper Beargrass Church, stood in a grove of cedars just beyond Baptist Sloan's potato-field. It was near enough for any one sitting on his porch to hear the preacher's voice all through the sermon, and sometimes when he waxed eloquent at the close, in a series of shouted exhortations, even the words were distinctly audible.

But never in all the years of his remembrance had Baptist Sloan listened to the services of the sanctuary from his door-step. On the few occasions that illness had kept him at home, pain and multitudinous bedclothes had shut out all sound of song or sermon; and at other times he was the most punctual attendant of all the congregation, not excepting even the sexton. People wondered why this was so, for he was pointed out as the black sheep of the flock, a man little better than an infidel, and belonging to that stiff-necked and proud generation which merits the anathemas of all right-minded people.

That he was a riddle which Upper Beargrass Church had been trying vainly to read for thirty years was a fact well known to the reprobate himself; for he had been openly preached at from the pulpit, laboured with in private, and many a time made the subject of special prayer. So, as he sat on the porch in the dark, with only the croaking of the frogs and the distant baying of the hound to break the stillness, it was with no surprise whatever that he heard his own name spoken by some one driving up the pike.

He could not see the horse that plodded along at a tortoise-like gait, or the old carryall that sagged and creaked with the weight of two big men on the front seat and a woman and three children on the back; but he recognized the voice as that of Mrs. Jane Bowles. Thin and strident, it stabbed the stillness like the rasping shrill of a katydid. She was leaning forward to speak to the visiting minister on the front seat.

"We're coming to Bap Sloan's house now, Brother Hubbs," she called in high staccato. "I want you should rub it into him good to-night in your sermon. He's a regular wolf in sheep's clothing, if ever there was one. Twice on a Sunday, for fifty-two weeks in the year, he's sitting in that third pew from the front, as pious as any pillar in the congregation. You can count up for yourself how many sermons he must have heard, for he's fifty, if he's a day. But in spite of all that anybody can say or do, he won't be immersed and join. He's held out against everything and everybody till he's gospel-hardened. I ain't saying he doesn't put into the collection-box regular, or that he ain't a moral man outwardly; but that outward show of goodness only makes his example worse for the young folks. I never can look at him without saying to myself, 'But inwardly ye are ravening wolves.'"

The old horse had crawled along almost to the gate by this time, but Sister Bowles, not being able to see any one on the porch, went on, serenely unaware of being overheard.

"And there's Luella Clark that he's courted off and on for twenty years. It makes me real mad when I think of the good offers she's had and let slip account of him. She couldn't marry him, being close communion, and not tolerating the idea of being 'unequally yoked together with unbelievers.' 'Twouldn't 'a' been right; and yet, somehow, she didn't seem to be quite able to give him up, when that was the only thing lacking. He'd make a good husband, for there never was a better brother lived than he was to his sister Sarah. She kept house for him till the day of her death. They say that last winter, when she lay there a-dying, she told him she couldn't go easy till she saw him immersed; but all he'd say was, 'Oh, don't ask me! I can't now, Sarah. Some day I will, but not now.'"

Here the preacher's voice broke in like the deep roll of a bass drum. "Has this – ah – young woman any idea of what – ah – produces such a state of – ah – obstinacy in the brother's mind?"

"Not an i-dee!" was the reply, jolted out shrilly as the carryall struck a stone. "Not one good reason could he give Luella for putting off attending to his soul's salvation and trifling away his day of grace. Not one good reason, even to get her to marry him. But I think Luella is getting tired of dangling along. The other day I heard her joking about that little bald spot that's beginning to show on his head, and I noticed that Mr. Sam Carter's buggy has been hitched at their gate several times when I've happened to be passing. He's a widower, and you know, Brother Hubbs, that when widowers – "

The loud clanging of the church bell struck Sister Bowles's sentence in the middle, and the end of it was lost to the eager ears on the porch. Although this sound of the church bell was what Baptist Sloan had been waiting to hear for the last hour, he did not rise until the final echo of its ringing had died away in the farthermost part of the valley. Then he went slowly into the house and lighted a lamp.

The open door into the kitchen revealed the table where he had eaten his dinner and supper without removing the soiled dishes. In every corner was the cheerless look that betrays the lack of a woman's presence. He had done his own housekeeping since his sister's death in the early winter. As he passed the table he gathered up a plateful of scraps which he had intended to give to the cat, but had forgotten, and carried it out to the back door-step. He tried to be mindful of the old creature's comfort for his sister's sake; but he was an absent-minded man, irresolute in nearly every action, and undecided in all things except the one for which the neighbourhood condemned him.

Just before he entered the house he had almost made up his mind that he would not go to church that night. Sister Bowles's conversation had startled him with a new idea, and jogged him out of his well-worn rut. He would sit out on the porch till church was over, and then follow Luella home, and take up the thread of his protracted courtship where she had snapped it five years before.

But the habit of decades asserted itself. He bolted the back door, carried the lamp into the little bedroom adjoining the kitchen, and proceeded to brush his hair according to the usual Sunday-night programme of preparation. Sarah had always tied his cravat for him, and his stiff fingers fumbled awkwardly at the knot. That was one ceremony to which he could not grow accustomed, and he had serious thoughts of turning out a beard that would hide all sins both of omission and commission in the way of neckties.

At last he was ready, but even with his hand on the knob and his hat on his head, he wavered again and turned back. Cautiously tiptoeing across the floor to see that the blue paper shade was drawn tightly over the one tiny window of the little bedroom, he opened the door into the closet, and felt around until his hand struck a nail that marked some secret hiding-place in the wall. From somewhere within its depths he drew out a little japanned canister, branded, in gilt letters, "Young Hyson;" but it was not tea that he emptied on the bed and poured through his rough hands, horny with long contact with hoe and plow. It was a stream of dollars and dimes and nickels, with an occasional gold piece filtering through like a disk of sunshine. A wad of paper money stuck in the canister until he shook it. He counted that last, smoothing out the ragged bills one at a time, and then folding them inside a crisp new one so that its flaunting V was displayed on top.

One might have thought him a miser gloating over his gold, so carefully he counted it again and again, sitting there on the edge of his bed. But there was no miserly greed in the wistful glance that followed the last coin into the little canister, and it was with a discouraged sigh that he replaced the cover and sat looking at it, the slavish hoarding of years.

"It will take twenty dollars more," he finally whispered to himself; "and I can't depend on any ready cash until after wheat harvest." He counted slowly on his fingers May, June, July – it might be three months before he could get his threshing done, and three months, now that he was so near the goal of his life's ambition, seemed longer than the years already passed in waiting.

They were singing in the church when he went out on the porch again, and as he did not want to go in late, that decided the question that had been see-sawing in his mind. He sat down in the rocking-chair, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Sister Bowles's conversation still rankled.

"O Lord," he groaned presently, "you know I'm not a wolf in sheep's clothing. More like I'm a sheep in a wolf's. Nobody understands it. Not even Luella. I want to tell her, and yet it seems like I hadn't ought to yet awhile. One minute I think one way and the next minute another. O Lord, I vow I don't know what to do!"

Then he caught the words of the song. It was not one of the usual hymns that floated out to him across the scent of the apple-boughs, but an old tune that he had heard years ago at a camp-meeting:

"John went down to the river Jordan!John went down to the river Jordan!John went down to the river JordanTo wash his sins away!"

Little did the congregation think, as they lifted their lusty voices, that with the thread of that old tune lay the unravelling of Bap Sloan's riddle. For this is the scene it brought back to him, out of one of the earliest years of his childhood. There was a white face lying back among the pillows of a great bed, with carved posts and a valance of flowered chintz that smelled faintly of lavender. Somebody had lifted the big family Bible and laid it open on the edge of the bed, and he saw himself, a sober-faced little fellow in brown dress and apron, standing on tiptoe to look at the pictures. That white face on the pillows was his mother's, and this was the only recollection he had of her. Pointing to a queer old engraving, she had told him the story of John the Baptist, adding, with her thin hand on his curls: "And your name is John, too. Little John Baptist, though we don't call you by all of it. I named you that a purpose. Give you a good name, so 't you'd be a good man. Mebbe it's just a whim of mine, but I've thought a good deal about it while I've been lying here sick. Mebbe some day you'll be able to go to the Holy Land, 'way over the mountains and over the seas, and be baptized in that same river Jordan, where the dove descended. See the pretty dove?"

Even though the baby brain understood but dimly what she said to him, the light in her uplifted eyes filled him with solemn awe, and from that moment the mantle of her ambition rested henceforth on his young shoulders. It was a vague, intangible thing at first, when he used to go back to the old Bible and study the picture in secret. He never understood when it began to fold itself about his life, or how it grew with his years till it completely enveloped him.

He was a man little given to introspection, and with a mind so slow to arrive at a conclusion that it always seemed doubtful if he would ever reach it. Still, when he once settled down on an opinion, his sister Sarah used to say it was with the determination of a snapping-turtle. "He wouldn't let go then till it thundered." His sister Sarah took charge of him, mind and body, when their mother died, and so thoroughly did she manage him that her will was always his, except in that one matter. He would not join the church of his fathers until he got ready, and he would give no reason for his delay.

He was twenty when he made his first stubborn stand against her, and for thirty years Sarah wept over him both in public and private, and for thirty years Luella Clark's heart battled with her conscience, which would not let her be "unequally yoked together with an unbeliever." And through all that time Baptist Sloan had kept his own counsel, hoarding every penny he could save, to the refrain of his mother's remembered words: "Over the mountains and over the seas, and be baptized in that same river Jordan, where the dove descended."

He had so firmly made up his mind that after that pilgrimage to his Mecca he would marry Luella that he had never viewed his conduct from her standpoint until Sister Bowles opened his eyes. Her speech about the widower aroused him to an undefined sense of danger. All that next hour his inclination shifted like a weather-vane, first to take Luella into his confidence, then not to. By the time the congregation rose for the last hymn he had made up his mind.

The moon was coming up now, a faint, misty light struggling through the clouds. He waited until most of the congregation had passed his gate, and then striking out across the potato-field, waited at the turn of the road on the other side of the cedar-grove. It was here that Luella always parted company with the Robinson girls, and went the remaining way alone. It was only a few steps farther to her mother's brown cottage, and he hurried to overtake her before she should reach the gate.

"Land o' Goshen! Bap Sloan!" she exclaimed, with a startled little cry, as he came puffing along by her side. "Who'd 'a' dreamed of seeing you here? Why wa'n't you at church to-night? Everybody was asking if you were sick, it's been so long since you've missed."

"Stop a minute, Luella," he exclaimed, blocking her way by planting himself directly in her path. "I want to talk to you. I've made up my mind at last to tell you, and I want you to come back and sit down on the stile where nobody else can't hear it."

Led by curiosity as much as by the new masterfulness in his tone, Luella turned back a step and seated herself on the stile that led into the apple-orchard. The blossom-laden bough of a gnarly old tree bent over her head and sent a gust of fragrance past her that made her close her eyes an instant and draw a long breath, it was so heavenly sweet. The night was warm, but she drew her shawl around her erect, angular figure with a forbidding air that made it hard for him to begin. "Well?" she said stiffly.

"I don't know just how it's goin' to strike you," he began, hesitating painfully. "That is – well, I don't know – maybe you won't take any interest in it, after all; but I kinder thought – something might happen in the meantime – maybe I'd better – "

He gave a nervous little cough, unable to find the words.

"What air you aiming at, anyhow, Baptist Sloan?" she demanded. "What's got your tongue? Mother'll wonder what's keeping me, so I wish you'd speak up and say what's on your mind, if there's anything a-troubling you."

Then he blurted out his confession in a few short sentences, and waited. She sat staring at him through such a long silence that he forced an uneasy laugh.

"I was afraid maybe you'd think it was foolish," he said dejectedly. "That's why I never could bring myself to speak of it all these years. I thought nobody'd understand – that they'd laugh at me for spendin' a fortune that way. But honest, Luella, it is sort o' sacred to me, and mother's words come to me so often that it's grown to be like one of the commandments to me." His voice sank almost to a whisper: "'Over the mountains and over the seas, and be baptized in that same river Jordan, where the dove descended.' It's been no small matter to live up to, either. Sometimes it seems to me as if I'd been sent out like the children of Israel, and it was goin' to take the whole forty years of wanderin' to reach my promised land. I've spent thirty of 'em in the wilderness of wantin' you, but I begin to see my way clearin' up now toward the end. Only twenty dollars more! I can go after wheat harvest and the threshin'. Good Lord, Luella, why don't you say somethin'! But it's no use; I know you think I'm such an awful fool."

She turned toward him in the dim moonlight, her eyes filled with tears.

"Oh, Bap," she cried, "to think how everybody has misjudged you all this time! It's perfectly grand of you, and I feel like a dawg when I remember all I've said about your not being a believer, when all the time you were better than any of us can ever hope to be. It's like being the martyrs and crusaders all at once, to stick to such an ambition through thick and thin. But oh, Bap, why didn't you tell me long ago!"

"Don't cry, Luella," he urged, awkwardly patting the shawl drawn around her thin shoulders. He was amazed and overwhelmed at this unprecedented revelation of tenderness in what had always been to him the most stony-hearted of natures.

"Then maybe, Luella, after wheat harvest," he ventured, floundering out of an awkward pause, "after I've been and got back, then – will you have me?"

She slipped her hand into his. She would have had him then and there had he asked her, and counted it joy to be allowed to help toil for the funds still needed to carry her saint across the seas. Already she had fitted a halo about the bald spot she had lately ridiculed, and she burned to begin her expiation for that sacrilege.

But in the molding of his plans Baptist Sloan had arranged that marriage was to come after the Mecca, and in the hardening process of the years that idea had become so firmly set in his mind that nothing short of supernatural force could have produced a change. It never occurred to him that it was possible to marry before he went on his pilgrimage.

He held the hand she had given him awkwardly. This was the hour he had dreamed of, but now that it had come, he was ill at ease, uncertain how to proceed. Suddenly a little breeze, swinging through the orchard, stirred the apple-bough above them, and sent a shower of pink-and-white blossoms across their faces. Velvety soft were the petals, cool with the night dew, and unspeakably sweet. She looked up at him, her face grown wonderfully young and fresh again in the moonlight. He stooped and kissed her. The apple-bough swayed again above them, with another fragrant shower of pink and white. It, too, was gnarly and old, but standing glorified, like them, for a little while in the sweetness of belated blossom-time.

It was the talk of the valley – this pilgrimage of Baptist Sloan's. Nobody within its borders had ever been out of sight of land, and the congregation divided itself into two factions regarding him. One division called it sinful pride that sent him chasing away to parts unknown on such an errand. Beargrass Creek was good enough for Bap Sloan's immersion, if it had been good enough for his father's and grandfather's before him. The other side agreed with Luella, according him the halo, and she, in the reflected light of such greatness, beamed proudly and importantly on all her little world.

Several weeks after this disclosure he stopped at the cottage one morning in great excitement. He held a letter in his hand, some railroad time-tables, and the itinerary of a "personally conducted" party to Palestine. "I say, Luella," he cried, "look at this! It's clear providence that the Paris Exposition happened to start up just now. Here's a chance to go to the Jordan on excursion rates, with three days at the Exposition thrown in. I needn't wait till after wheat harvest now, it's so much cheaper than what I had figured on. And the beauty of it is, I can not only kill two birds with one stone, – take in Paris and Palestine both, – but have a guide to look after everything. It's been a mystery to me all along how I was to find my way around in those furrin parts by myself. But this settles everything. I can start to New York next Wednesday, and get there before the ship sails. Lord, Luella! To think it's really comin' to pass after all these years!"

Luella was in a quiver of excitement, but she rose to the occasion with almost motherly solicitude for his well-being. "I'll put up your lunch, Bap," she said. "You needn't worry about a thing; only tell me what you'd like to have cooked. And if you've any clothes that need mending, just you bring 'em right down, and I'll see to 'em. I'll go over to your house after you've gone, too, and fix things ready to be left shut up for the time you're away."