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Arriving at the sugar-house, tired yet strong, Gabriel put the wounded girl down, quickly raked together a few armfuls of dead leaves, in the most sheltered corner of the ramshackle structure, and laid the heavy auto-robe upon this improvised bed. Then he helped his patient to lie down, there, and bade her wait till he got water to wash and dress her cut.
"Don't worry about anything," he reassured her. "You're alive, and that's the main thing, now. I'll see you through with this, whatever happens. Just keep calm, and don't let anything distress you!"
She looked at him with big, anxious eyes—eyes where still the full light of understanding had not yet returned.
"It—it all happened so suddenly!" she managed to articulate. "He was drunk—the chauffeur. The car ran away. Where is it? Where is Herrick—the man?"
"I don't know," Gabriel lied promptly and with force. Not for worlds would he have excited her with the truth. "Never you mind about that. Just lie still, now, till I come back!"
Already, among the rusty utensils that had served for the "sugaring-off," the previous spring, he had routed out a tin pail. He kicked a quantity of leaves in under the sheet-iron open stove, flung some sticks atop of them, and started a little blaze. Warm water, he reflected, would serve better than cold in removing that clotting blood and dressing the hurt.
Then, saying no further word, but filled with admiration for the girl's pluck, he seized the pail and started for water.
"Nerve?" he said to himself, as he ran down the road toward a little brook he remembered having crossed, a few hundred yards to southward. "Nerve, indeed! Not one complaint about her own injuries! Not a word of lamentation! If this isn't a thoroughbred, whoever or whatever she is, I never saw one!"
He returned, presently, with the pail nearly full of cold and sparkling water. Ignoring rust, he made her drink as deeply as she would, and then set a dipperful of water on the now hot sheet-iron.
Then, tearing a strip off the shawl, he made ready for his work as an amateur physician.
"Tell me," said he, kneeling there beside her in the hut which was already beginning to grow dusk, "except for this cut on your forehead, do you feel any injury? Think you've got any broken bones? See if you can move your legs and arms, all right."
She obeyed.
"Nothing broken, I guess," she answered. "What a miracle! Please leave me, now. I can wash my own hurt. Go—go find Herrick! He needs you worse than I do!"
"No he doesn't!" blurted Gabriel with such conviction that she understood.
"You mean?" she queried, as he brought the dipper of now tepid water to her side. "He—he's dead?"
He hesitated to answer.
"Dead! Yes, I understand!" she interpreted his silence. "You needn't tell me. I know!"
He nodded.
"Yes," said he. "Your chauffeur has paid the penalty of trying to drive a six-cylinder car with alcohol. Now, think no more of him! Here, let me see how badly you're cut."
"Let me sit up, first," she begged. "I—I'm not hurt enough to be lying here like—like an invalid!"
She tried to rise, but with a strong hand on her shoulder he forced her back. She shuddered, with the horror of the chauffeur's death strong upon her.
"Please lie still," he begged. "You've had a terrific shock, and have lived through it by a miracle, indeed. You're wounded and still bleeding. You must be quiet!"
The tone in his voice admitted no argument. Submissive now to his greater strength, this daughter of wealth and power lay back, closed her tired eyes and let the revolutionist, the proletarian, minister to her.
Dipping the piece of shawl into the warm water, he deftly moistened the dried blood on her brow and cheek, and washed it all away. He cleansed her sullied hair, as well, and laid it back from the wound.
"Tell me if I hurt you, now," he bade, gently as a woman. "I've got to wash the cut itself."
She answered nothing, but lay quite still. And so, hardly wincing, she let him lave the jagged wound that stretched from her right temple up into the first tendrils of the glorious red-gold hair.
"H'm!" thought Gabriel, as he now observed the cut with close attention. "I'm afraid there'll have to be some stitches taken here!" But of this he said nothing. All he told her was: "Nothing to worry over. You'll be as good as new in a few days. As a miracle, it's some miracle!"
Having completed the cleansing of the cut, he fetched his knapsack and produced a clean handkerchief, which he folded and laid over the wound. This pad he secured in place by a long bandage cut from the edge of the shawl and tied securely round her shapely head.
"There," said he, surveying his improvisation with considerable satisfaction. "Now you'll do, till we can undertake the next thing. Sorry I haven't any brandy to give you, or anything of that sort. The fact is, I don't use it, and have none with me. How do you feel, now?"
She opened her eyes and looked up at him with the ghost of a smile on her pale lips.
"Oh, much, much better, thank you!" she answered. "I don't need any brandy. I'm—awfully strong, really. In a little while I'll be all right. Just give me a little more water, and—and tell me—who are you?"
"Who am I?" he queried, holding up her head while she drank from the tin cup he had now taken from his knapsack. "I? Oh, just an out-of-work. Nobody of any interest to you!"
A certain tinge of bitterness crept into his voice. In health, he knew, a woman of this class would not suffer him even to touch her hand.
" Don't ask me who I am, please. And I—I won't ask your name. We're of different worlds, I guess. But for the moment, Fate has levelled the barriers. Just let it go at that. And now, if you can stay here, all right; perhaps I can hike back to the next house, below here, and telephone, and summon help."
"How far is it?" she asked, looking at him with wonder in her lovely eyes—wonder, and new thoughts, and a strange kind of longing to know more of this extraordinary man, so strong, so gentle, so unwilling to divulge himself or ask her name.
"How far?" he repeated. "Oh, four or five miles. I can make it in no time. And with luck, I can have an auto and a doctor here before dark. Well, does that suit you?"
"Don't go, please," she answered. "I—I may be still a little weak and foolish, but—somehow, I don't want to be left alone. I want to be kept from remembering, from thinking of those last, awful moments when the car was running away; when it struck the wall, at the turn; when I was thrown out, and—and knew no more. Don't go just yet," the girl entreated, covering her eyes with both hands, as though to shut out the horrible vision of the catastrophe.
"All right," Gabriel answered. "Just as you please. Only, if I stay, you must promise to stop thinking about the accident, and try to pull together."
"I promise," she agreed, looking at him with strange eyes. "Oh dear," she added, with feminine inconsequentiality, "my hair's all down, and Lord knows where the pins are!"
He smiled to himself as she managed, with the aid of such few hairpins as remained, to coil the coppery meshes once more round her head and even somewhat over the bandage, and secure them in place.
At sight of his face as he watched her, she too smiled wanly—the first time he had seen a real smile on her mouth.
"I'm only a woman, after all," she apologized. "You don't understand. You can't. But no matter. Tell me—why need you go, at all?"
"Why? For help, of course."
"There's sure to be a motor, or something, along this road, before very long," she answered. "Put up some signal or other, to stop it. That will save you a long, long walk, and save me from—remembering! I need you here with me," she added earnestly. "Don't go—please!"
"All right, as you will," the man made reply. "I'll rig a danger-signal on the road; and then all we can do will be to wait."
This plan he immediately put into effect, setting his knapsack in the middle of the road and piling up brush and limbs of trees about it.
"There," he said to himself, as he surveyed the result, "no car will get by that , without noticing it!"
Then he returned to the sugar-house, some hundred yards back from the highway in the grove, now already beginning to grow dim with the shadows of approaching nightfall. The glowing coals of the fire gleamed redly, through the rough place. The girl, still lying on her bed of leaves and auto-robes, with the mutilated shawl drawn over her, looked up at him with an expression of trust and gratitude. For a second, only one, something quick and vital gripped at the wanderer's heart—some vague, intangible longing for a home and a woman, a longing old as our race, deep-planted in the inmost citadel of every man's soul. But, half-impatiently, he drove the thought away, dismissed it, and, smiling down at her with cheerful eyes and white, even teeth, said reassuringly:
"Everything's all right now. The first machine that passes, will take you to civilization."
"And you?" she asked. "What of you, then?"
"Me? Oh, I'll hike," he answered. "I'll plug along just as I was doing when I found you."
"Where to?"
"Oh, north."
"What for?"
"Work. Please don't question me. I'd rather you wouldn't."
She pondered a moment.
"Are you—what they call a—workingman?" she presently resumed.
"Yes," said he. "Why?"
"And are you happy?"
"Yes. In a way. Or shall be, when I've done what I mean to do."
"But—forgive me—you're very poor?"
"Not at all! I have, at this present moment, more than eighteen dollars in my pocket, and I have these! "
He showed her his two hands, big and sinewed, capable and strong.
"Eighteen dollars," she mused, half to herself. "Why, I have spent that, and more, for a single ounce of a new perfume—something very rare, you know, from Japan."
"Indeed? Well, don't tell me ," he replied. "I'm not interested in how you spend money, but how you get it."
"Get it? Oh, father gives me my allowance, that's all."
"And he squeezes it out of the common people?"
She glanced at him quickly.
"You—you aren't a Socialist, into the bargain, are you?" she inquired.
"At your service," he bowed.
"This is strange, strange indeed," she said. "Tell me your name."
"No," he refused. "I'd still rather not. Nor shall I ask yours. Please don't volunteer it."
Came a moment's silence, there in the darkening hut, with the fire-glow red upon their faces.
"Happy," said the girl. "You say you're happy. While I—"
"Are not unhappy, surely?" asked Gabriel, leaning forward as he sat there beside her, and gazing keenly into her face.
"How should I know?" she answered. "Unhappy? No, perhaps not. But vacant—empty—futile!"
"Yes, I believe you," Gabriel judged. "You tell me no news. And as you are, you will ever be. You will live so and die so. No, I won't preach. I won't proselytize. I won't even explain. It would be useless. You are one pole, I the other. And the world—the whole wide world—lies between!"
Suddenly she spoke.
"You're a Socialist," said she. "What does it mean to be a Socialist?"
He shook his head.
"You couldn't understand, if I told you," he answered.
"Why not?"
"Oh, because your ideas and environments and interests and everything have been so different from mine—because you're what you are—because you can never be anything else."
"You mean Socialism is something beyond my understanding?" she demanded, piqued. "Of course, that's nonsense. I'm a human being. I've got brains, haven't I? I can understand a scheme of dividing up, or levelling down, or whatever it is, even if I can't believe in it!"
He smiled oddly.
"You've just proved, by what you've said," he answered slowly, "that your whole concepts are mistaken. Socialism isn't anything like what you think it is, and if I should try to explain it, you'd raise ten thousand futile objections, and beg the question, and defeat my object of explanation by your very inability to get the point of view. So you see—"
"I see that I want to know more!" she exclaimed, with determination. "If there's any branch of human knowledge that lies outside my reasoning powers, it's time I found that fact out. I thought Socialists were wild, crazy, erratic cranks; but if you're one, then I seem to have been wrong. You look rational enough, and you talk in an eminently sane manner."
"Thank you," he replied, ironically.
"Don't be sarcastic!" she retorted. "I only meant—"
"It's all right, anyhow," said he. "You've simply got the old, stupid, wornout ideas of your class. You can't grasp this new ideal, rising through the ruck and waste and sin and misery of the present system. I don't blame you. You're a product of your environment. You can't help it. With that environment, how can you sense the newer and more vital ideas of the day?"
For a moment she fixed eager eyes on him, in silence. Then asked she:
"Ideals? You mean that Socialism has ideals, and that it's not all a matter of tearing down and dividing up, and destroying everything good and noble and right—all the accumulated wisdom and resources of the world?"
He laughed heartily.
"Who handed you that bunk?" he demanded.
"Father told me Socialism was all that, and more,"
"What's your father's business?"
"Why, investments, stocks, bonds, industrial development and all that sort of thing."
"Hm!" he grunted. "I thought as much!"
"You mean that father misinformed me?"
"Rather!"
"Well, if he did, what is Socialism?"
"Socialism," answered the young man slowly, while he fixed his eyes on the smouldering fire, "Socialism is a political movement, a concept of life, a philosophy, an interpretation, a prophecy, an ideal. It embraces history, economics, science, art, religion, literature and every phase of human activity. It explains life, points the way to better things, gives us hope, strengthens the weary and heavy-laden, bids us look upward and onward, and constitutes the most sublime ideal ever conceived by the soul of man!"
"Can this be true?" the girl demanded, astonished.
"Not only can, but is! Socialism would free the world from slavery and slaves, from war, poverty, prostitution, vice and crime; would cleanse the sores of our rotting capitalism, would loose the gyves from the fettered hands of mankind, would bid the imprisoned soul of man awake to nobler and to purer things! How? The answer to that would take me weeks. You would have to read and study many books, to learn the entire truth. But I am telling you the substance of the ideal—a realizable ideal, and no chimera—when I say that Socialism sums up all that is good, and banishes all that is evil! And do you wonder that I love and serve it, all my life?"
She peered at him in wonder.
"You serve it? How?" she demanded.
"By spreading it abroad; by speaking for it, working for it, fighting for it! By the spoken and the printed word! By every act and through every means whereby I can bring it nearer and nearer realization!"
"You're a dreamer, a visionary, a fanatic!" she exclaimed.
"You think so? No, I can't agree. Time will judge that matter. Meanwhile, I travel up and down the earth, spreading Socialism."
"And what do you get out of it, personally?"
"I? What do you mean? I never thought of that question."
"I mean, money. What do you make out of it?"
He laughed heartily.
"I get a few jail-sentences, once in a while; now and then a crack over the head with a policeman's billy, or maybe a peek down the muzzle of a rifle. I get—"
"You mean that you're a martyr?"
"By no means! I've never even thought of being called such. This is a privilege, this propaganda of ours. It's the greatest privilege in the world—bringing the word of life and hope and joy to a crushed, bleeding and despairing world!"
She thought a moment, in silence.
"You're a poet, I believe!" said she.
"No, not that. Only a worker in the ranks."
"But do you write poetry?"
"I write verses. You'd hardly call them poetry!"
"Verses? About Socialism?"
"Sometimes."
"Will you give me some?"
"What do you mean?"
"Tell me some of them."
"Of course not! I can't recite my verses! They aren't worth bothering you with!"
"That's for me to judge. Let me hear something of that kind. If you only knew how terribly much you interest me!"
"You mean that?"
"Of course I do! Please let me hear something you've written!"
He pondered a moment, then in his well-modulated, deep-toned voice began:
His voice ceased and silence fell between the man and woman in the old sugar-house. Gabriel sat there by the dying fire, which cast its ruddy light over his strongly virile face, and gazed into the coals. The girl, lying on the rude bed, her face eager, her slim strong hands tightly clasped, had almost forgotten to breathe.
At last she spoke.
"That—that is wonderful!" she cried, a tremor of enthusiasm in her voice.
He shook his head.
"No compliments, please," said he.
"I'm not complimenting you! I think it is wonderful. You're a true poet!"
"I wish I were—so I might use it all for Socialism!"
"You could make a fortune, if you'd work for some paper or magazine—some regular one, I mean, not Socialist."
He shook his head.
"Dead sea fruit," he answered. "Fairy gold, fading in the clutch, worthless through and through. No, if my work has any merit, it's all for Socialism, now and ever!"
Silence again. Neither now found a word to say, but their eyes met and read each other; and a kind of solemn hush seemed to lie over their hearts.
Then, as they sat there, looking each at each—for now the girl had raised herself on the crude bed and was supporting herself with one hand—a sudden sound of a motor, on the road, awakened them from their musing.
Came the raucous wail of a siren. Then the engine-exhaust ceased; and a voice, raised in some annoyance, hailed loudly through the maple-grove:
"Hello! Hello? What's wrong here?"
Gabriel stepped to the sugar-house door:
"Here! Come here!" he shouted in a ringing voice that echoed wildly from between his hollowed palms.
As the motorist still sat there, uncomprehending, Gabriel made his way toward the road.
"Accident here," said he. "Girl in here, injured. Can you take her to the nearest town, at once? She needs a doctor."
Instantly the man was out of his car, and hastening toward Gabriel.
"Eh? What?" he asked. "Anything serious?"
In a few words, Gabriel told him the outlines of the tale.
"The quicker you get the girl to a town, and let her have a doctor and communication with her family, the better," he concluded.
"Right! I'll do all in my power," said the other, a rather stout, well-to-do, vulgar-looking man.
"Good! This way, then!"
The man followed Gabriel to the sugar-house. They found the girl already on her feet, standing there a bit unsteadily, but with determination to be game, in every feature.
Five minutes later she was in the new-comer's car, which had been turned around and now was headed back toward Haverstraw. The shawl and robe serving her as wraps, she was made comfortable in the tonneau.
"Think you can stand it, all right?" asked Gabriel, as he took in his the hand she extended. "In half an hour, you'll be under a doctor's care, and your father will be on his way toward you."
She nodded, and for a second tightened the grasp of her hand.
"I—I'm not even going to know who you are?" she asked, a strange tone in her voice.
"No," he answered. "And now, good luck, and good-bye!"
"Good-bye," she echoed, her voice almost inaudible. "I—I won't forget you."
He made no answer, but only smiled in a peculiar way.
Then, as the car rolled slowly forward, their hands separated.
Gabriel, bareheaded and with level gaze, stood there in the middle of the great highway, looking after her. A minute, under the darkening arches of the forest road, he saw her, still. Then the car swung round a bend, and vanished.
Had she waved her hand at him? He could not tell. Motionless he stood, a while, then cleared away the barrier of branches that obstructed the road, took up his knapsack, and with slow steps returned to the sugar-house.
Almost on the threshold, a white something caught his eye. He picked it up. Her handkerchief! A moment he held the dainty, filmy thing in his rough hand. A vague perfume reached his nostrils, disquieting and seductive.
"More than eighteen dollars an ounce, perhaps!" he exclaimed, with sudden bitterness; but still he did not throw the handkerchief away. Instead, he looked at it more keenly. In one corner, the fading light just showed him some initials. He studied them, a moment.
"C. J. F." he read. Then, yielding to a sudden impulse, he folded the kerchief and put it in his pocket.
He entered the sugar-house, to make sure, before departing, that he had left no danger of fire behind him.
Another impulse bade him sit down on a rough box, there, before the dying embers. He gazed at the bed of leaves, a while, immersed in thought, then filled his pipe and lighted it with a glowing brand, and sat there—while the night came—smoking and musing, in a reverie.
The overpowering lure of the woman who had lain in his arms, as he had borne her thither; her breath upon his face; the perfume of her, even her blood that he had washed away—all these were working on his senses, still. But most of all he seemed to see her eyes, there in the ember-lit gloom, and hear her voice, and feel her lithe young body and her breast against his breast.
For a long time he sat there, thinking, dreaming, smoking, till the last shred of tobacco was burned out in the heel of his briar; till the last ember had winked and died under the old sheet-iron stove.
At last, with a peculiar laugh, he rose, slung the knapsack once more on his shoulders, settled his cap upon his head, and made ready to depart.
But still, one moment, he lingered in the doorway. Lingered and looked back, as though in his mind's eye he would have borne the place away with him forever.
Suddenly he stooped, picked up a leaf from the bed where she had lain, and put that, too, in his pocket where the kerchief was.
Then, looking no more behind him, he strode off across the maple-grove, through which, now, the first pale stars were glimmering. He reached the road again, swung to the north, and, striking into his long marching stride, pushed onward northward, away and away into the soft June twilight.