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Show r E 1 Hawk Wind f M 1 '"mr m BY HELLN TOPPING MILLER QlSSS?tt M P TOE STORY THUS FAR Virgie Morgan, widow, and owner of the Morgan paper mill in the Carolina mountain district, turns down a marriage mar-riage proposal from Wallace Withen. He leaves in a rage. Branford Wills, a young stranger, who has been lost in the mountains moun-tains for three days, finds his way to the Morgan home. He is fed and allowed to remain overnight. He identifies himself as a government employee, working with surveyors in the district. Wills develops pneumonia and is forced to remain in the household. Marian, Virgle's daughter, dislikes Wills. Trouble is developing as Withers meets Stanley Daniels, the mill's chemist. Virgie learns someone is attempting at-tempting to obtain title to timber lands owned by Tom Pruitt, life-long friend of her deceased husband and part owner of the mill. She advises Tom to clear up title to his property. A love affair is developing between Daniels and Lucy Fields, Virgie's secretary. Withers attempts at-tempts to bargain with Daniels to have him help in getting possession of the Morgan mill. Daniels refuses. CHAPTER IV Continued 5 "No nope. I don't aim to sell none. I figure to hang on to that. I'll save up the money. I got a little lit-tle saved already." Old Tom locked the safe carefully, wiped off the shining knobs with a blue handkerchief. handker-chief. "Well, good night." Daniels put on his coat, went out. He walked away slowly, but his thoughts were racing. Wallace Withers' With-ers' words came back to his mind. Virgie Morgan, so the dry old man had said, did not own all the stock of the mill. There was a block of stock loose and now Stanley Daniels Dan-iels knew where that stock was. CHAPTER V Branford Wills improved rapidly. His breathing ceased to rasp through the room and, though his voice was little more than a reedy croak, his cracked lips managed to frame a scrap of a smile whenever Marian Morgan came into view. For days, while Wills was ill, Marian Mar-ian had been strangely gentle and quiet and concerned. Born electrical, electri-cal, difficult, and with a dainty chip forever poised on her shoulder, she was troubled by this new uncertainty uncertain-ty that came over her whenever she took her turn at watching in the sick-room. And when Wills' eyes lost the vagueness of fever and began be-gan to survey the scene with new, masculine interest, she withdrew a little, turned tart and airy, though whenever she hurled an acid barb her heart recoiled as though the point had pierced herself. And Wills refused to be humble. He had, so he had told Virgie several sev-eral times, an insurance policy that would take care of the expense of !.; ;n,. TJ ....... Uiia lulled. aac was pi uiuuiiui grateful but there was dignity in his attitude. He would not fawn nor placate and the indomitable fire in Marian crackled against the cool steel of his assurance, till sparks flew far and wide. Virgie Morgan observed her daughter, with a dry and quizzical smile on her face. In a world where she walked in mastery, meeting bankers and bark-choppers bark-choppers on their own ground, Virgie Vir-gie was abashed only by her own daughter. Marian could make her aware that her hair-pins were loose and that she needed to buy a better fitting corset Virgie liked young Wills, but she kept a still tongue around the house and watched Marian with wise amused eyes. But when Tom made remarks at the office she cut him off curtly. "Ain't that feller never going?" Tom demanded. "He hit it pretty soft, looks to me. Good thing he didn't knock on my door." "That's your torn-down stinginess!" stingi-ness!" Virgie snapped. "You don't need to livex like white trash, Tom Pruitt! Have you taken those papers up to Pratt like I told you to?" "No'm." Tom was swiftly meek. "I ain't had time." "If you lose everything that rightfully right-fully belongs to you it's nobody's fault but your own." "Bill Gallup was over from the power-house. He said he wanted to see you." "Bill always wants to see me. He wants me to junk a good steam plant, that's been turning this mill for twenty years, and put in motors. mo-tors. I don't blame Bill. He's a smart young fellow trying to get along." She went home tired, out of patience pa-tience with Tom and his affairs and a little out of patience with herself. Marian was right She ought not to be trailing around in the wet woods, doing man-chores, things she had kept on doing because David had always al-ways done them. Her throat was raw and burned now, from exposure and wet feet. Marian had said that a woman in her position ought to have more pride, and that was true, too. David Da-vid had kept his hand on every operation op-eration of the mill, kept the plant going on the old hand-craft system of the ancient guild. But David had been a man and those days were passing. What she needed, she had been telling herself for days, was a young man to take over a lot of this responsibility re-sponsibility that was getting her down. Tom was all right so far as his ability went but the slightest ac-cela ac-cela .ation of pace left Tom hopelessly hope-lessly behind. He was still living and working in a day when the men had carried pulp out of the warehouses ware-houses on their backs. He could not keep step. He liked to spend a whole morning tinkering with a fifty-cent lock on an oil house. He was getting get-ting old. "Not that I'm so young any more myself," Virgie humored her rheumatic rheu-matic twinges, "but I haven't begun to collect moss on the north side of me." "Hello," she said, as she entered the sick-room. "How does life look this morning? Any brighter?" Mr. Wills turned on his engaging and gallant grin. "Swell," he croaked in his husky whisper. "He et all his breakfast," beamed Ada Clark, "and he's only got one degree. I took it twice to see." "Go on down and eat, Ada," Virgie Vir-gie ordered. "I'll sit here a few minutes." Ada departed and young Wills followed fol-lowed her starched back with an impish grimace. "The stars," he said, "are propitious today. Virgo just looked it up in the book." "Too bad something propitious doesn't happen to poor Ada. A widower wid-ower with six children would be just grand. Look here, I sent her out because I want to talk to you." Virgie Vir-gie edged her rocker nearer the bed. "Do you still think the pulp people are the despoilers of the earth?" "Do you have to keep rubbing it in, all the time? I'm so low now I could walk out of this room without opening the door. You've been so fine to me, Mrs. Morgan, that I'm keeping on living just to pay you back. I might be lying over there in the laurel now, like that poor photographer." pho-tographer." "You got yourself out of the laurel. laur-el. I didn't. And I didn't take you in for pay. I'm a mountain woman. What I want to talk to you about is, what comes next. What do you figure fig-ure you'll do when you get loose from Ada and the zodiac?" He wrinkled his forehead and his dry lips straightened. "I'll go back to Washington, probably. If I have any job left there. I hope I won't be a nuisance to you much longer and I have to pay, you know this nurse and the doctor." "I wish you'd hush up about paying pay-ing and let me say what I want to say before Ada bounces back. You say you may not have any job in Washington. If you had a job here do you suppose you could stand it or would it be too painful to you to work for pulp people?" He clutched the mattress, turning on his shoulder, dull color burning in his face. "You mean you'd give me a job after " 'T hflvpn't said sn rlirpr-flv. T'm just speculating. I couldn't pay very much and I'd work you hard. I work myself hard." There's no mercy mer-cy in me. ' I'm a hard old woman, but I'm fair. But I'm going places with my mill and I'd take the people peo-ple along who work ' for me and play fair with me. Don't make up your mind suddenly mine isn't made up yet'" "I think that I'd rather work for you than for anybody I've ever met," he said, "but I might not be much use." "People who work for me have to be of use." Virgie rose, briskly, and gave her corset the usual disciplinary discipli-nary jerk. "Well, good-by I'd better bet-ter get to work. You'll have a quiet day. Lossie's got washing to do and Marian is organizing the Little Theatre." The-atre." "Your child," said Mr. Wills, "does not like me." -' "There are times," Virgie grinned dryly, "when she doesn't admire me a whole lot, but maybe we'D grow in grace." She went downstairs and out to her muddy old car. She was wondering, wonder-ing, as she drove toward the town if she had been a sentimental old fool. Tom would say so and so would Marian. But Marian had had the idea in the first place. She said nothing to Tom about young Branford Wills. Tom wanted to carry on the pulp business with a double-bitted ax and a wheelbarrow. wheelbar-row. He was rooted, hating change, fearing it. She was exasperated with him anyway. Her exasperation increased when she found Bill Gallup waiting for her. Lucy was typing at a furious pace, as she always did whenever a man sat in the chair beside Virgie's desk. "Hello, Bill," she said, as she spiked her limp hat and bumped her brief-case down. "Are you back again to try to talk me into throwing throw-ing away a good old boiler that has been tooting our whistle for going on thirty years.' "No." Bill punched out a cigarette. ciga-rette. "I'd like to see that ancient kettle go into scrap, of course, and you've got to come to it sooner or later. But I'll wait. Wait till a couple cou-ple of engineers and a fireman or two go out through that rusty roof of yours. But that isn't what's on my mind today. I wanted to talk about a tract of hardwood timber over across the ridge on Little Fork. I found out that Pruitt has a first-mortgage first-mortgage lien on it." "What about it?" "Some eastern timber grabbers are after it. Fellow named Cragg stayed at my house last night. I heard, after he left, that they have raided a piece already over on the Tennessee side moved in and cut it oil quick before the different claimants claim-ants could get together and get court action. They have papers usually that will hold water stand off the courts for a while. Then they settle set-tle for about a tenth of what the timber's worth and leave the land worthless." Virgie had not sat down. Her mobile mo-bile face had stiffened into grim lines. "Lucyl Get Willis Pratt on the line. Tell him to get over here right away. And then go out In the mill and find Tom Pruitt. Tell him I want him quick." Willis Pratt was not in his office. He was, so Lucy reported, after much telephoning, over at the county-seat trying a case concerning a cow hit by a switch engine. Virgie and Tom and young Bill Gallup sat for an hour in the office, looking at each other, Tom uneasily and unhappily, Virgie with an accusing accus-ing grimness about the set of her mouth, young Bill too interested to depart "If they get into that timber before be-fore you can get an injunction, Tom Pruitt, and make it stick," Virgie said, savagely, "it's your own fault for being so dumb." Tom said nothing. He rose and jammed on his old hat "You come back here!" Virgie shrilled at him. "We're going to wait here for Willis Pratt Lucy got a call through." But Tom did not turn back nor answer. He went across the yard "Do you still think the pulp people peo-ple are the despoilers of the earth?" and out the gate, along a hard path by the railroad tracks. The path turned sharply up a gullied hill through a gap in an old fence and Tom turned, too, heading for the little lit-tle unpainted house on a knob behind be-hind the town, where for forty years he had lived. He unlocked the heavy padlock and opened the door, into a wide, dark room that smelled of ashes and unaired clothing and ancient grease. Over the fireplace hung two long rifles, polished and shining in a place where nothing else was clean. Tom took them both down, opened a tin safe, and brought out oil and rags and a slim ramrod. He was a mountain man. CHAPTER VI Three days passed and Tom did not come back. Virgie grew anxious and irritable, irrita-ble, snapping at every one, exasperated exas-perated at Tom. "The contrary old mule!" she stormed, as she poked at the fire. "What's he pouting about, anyway? After I go to a lot of trouble to save his timber land for him, he goes off in a sulk! Afraid he'll have to go to court, I suppose." Lucy Fields, sitting meekly at her desk, chirped an agreement. "Do you want me to go to Tom's house, Mrs. Morgan, and see what has happened hap-pened to him?" "No, I don't. It's a mile and all uphil. You'll go traipsing around in that thin coat and get pneumonia, pneumo-nia, and then where will. I be? 1 haven't got enough trouble, shipments ship-ments late and stove full of ashes " "I'll have Jerry clean those out. They were so busy in the yard I hated to stop them." "Let Jerry alone. And don't pay any attention to me either. I'm tired. I m going to have a man around here to take some of this work off my shoulders. I've hired that young Wills up at my house, to start in Monday. He ought to be well enough by that time. You can tell the boys he's going to work here. Well, what are you looking like that for?" Lucy's face had changed oddly. Her sensitive mouth had straightened straight-ened and stiffened a little, her eyes looked frightened first and then withdrew and were guarded and unhappy. un-happy. "What's on your mind?" Virgie persisted. "Is there any reason why I shouldn't hire a man to get timber tim-ber in and pulp out and go wading wad-ing around in wet woods, instead of doing it myself?" "None at all, Mrs. Morgan." Lucy's Lu-cy's voice was small and prim. "T was just thinking I was wondering if the boys in the mill were going to like having a stranger put over them an outsider." Virgie's broad, amiable facs burned with crimson patches and her eyes were as metallic as gun sights. "Listen, here!" she said, grimly. "If you hear any remarks around this property about who's hired or who isn't, you tell those hillbillies I'm running this mill will you?" "Yes, Mrs. Morgan." "And for gosh sakes," Virgie fairly fair-ly snorted, "don't be so darned humble!" hum-ble!" "I won't Mrs. Morgan." "Get Perry Bennett on the tele- 1 phone. Tell him I want an answer about that spruce acreage today." "He told Tom he had decided not to sell." j "He always decides not to sell. , Then he boggles around and devils my life out of me to get the price up. But he always sells. Tell him if he wants to talk to me to come over here." Lucy Fields went home that night in an uneasy state of mind. She had worked for and loved Virgie Morgan loyally for several years, she would have defended Virgie passionately pas-sionately against any criticism, but now she had a feeling that Virgie's generous impulses had betrayed her. This young Wills might be a I very fine fellow but Lucy had a feeling that he would not be a success suc-cess in the Morgan mill. Stanley Daniels was coming to call. She would talk to him about it. But she was quite certain that he was not going to be pleased either. But at night when she went home, she forgot Branford Wills in her excitement ex-citement over Daniels' visit. The house was in confusion, as always. Lucy hurried from room to room, opening the outer doors to get the smell of coffee and frying out of the house; ignoring her mother's peevish complaints, whisking and brushing, hiding away the bottle of liniment, the lurid calendars, and the handleless souvenir tea-cup filled with matches that decorated the mantel shelf. She washed up the dust of spilled ashes and brought out the two precious pre-cious embroidered pillows she had worked in lonely evenings. "Anybody'd think some king was coming!" protested Mrs. Fields peevishly from the dishpan. "You're the one that's always complaining about coal costing so much, and now you're trying to heat up a whole countv. Just because vmi'vo got a beau coming " "He isn't my beau. Can't I have one friend without a lot of excitement excite-ment and hysteria over it? Other girls have company and go out places " "They don't tear the house down to please their company, I'll bet!" Lucy closed the doors with a patient pa-tient sigh. There was little use, the sigh said, trying to be anybody. Stanley Daniels would look at all her pathetic artifices the rug pulled a little crooked to cover a hole in the old carpet, the picture hung too high to hide the stain on the wall-paper. He would be amused. But at least he was coming. com-ing. He had stopped at the office to tell her so, and she had to hurry to press her good dress and be ready. The dress was old but the soft shade of blue helped the paleness of Lucy's coloring, and the lace bow she contrived at the throat had an air. Her hair fluffed softly over her ears and the dab of rouge she put on made her eyes brighter. "Well," remarked Mrs. Fields, hanging up her apron, "having a feller fel-ler sets you up. You look real nice." "I'm going to fix cocoa ready to heat Mother, and put the cups on the tray. And, Mother, please don't nibble at these little cakes. I couldn't get many." "I wouldn't touch one of 'em with the broom handle!" Mrs. Fields was offended. "And one thing I'm bound to say. If you aim to get married, leave me alone here in my own house. I can live on cornpone and greens, I can chop my own stove wood if it comes down to that, but I can't stand being fussed at. And there can't nobody fix me over. I'm too old." She sniffed audibly and marched into the bedroom, her neck stiff. Lucy flew to the door. "Mother if you dare suggest such a thing I haven't the slightest idea of marrying marry-ing anybody!" She choked on her weak anger, let despair sink heavily into the bottom of her heart. It was no use no use at all! "Well, that's him a-knocking," stated her mother with acerbity. "You better let him in." Stanley Daniels had a new overcoat over-coat and a jaunty new gray felt hat. Lucy let him in with a flutter, wishing that her throat would not get so pathetically red. She reached for the hat but Daniels did not surrender sur-render it. "I was sent to bring you," he said. "They're having some kind or a meeting going to get up a show. Marian Morgan told me to bring you." "Oh the Little Theatre. I heard about it That will be fun. Wiit till I put on my coat." Lucy hurried away thankfully. (TO BE CONTINUED) |