The Seventh Noon Part 53

"Just a little tiff? But he took it hard. I never saw a man so worked up over anything."

"It belongs to the past," she hurried on, eager to allow it to pa.s.s as he interpreted it. "It would be cruel to him to bring it up again.

Will you promise me, Ben?"

"I will promise. But I 'm afraid you overdid it. It is going to be hard to straighten him out."

"No. It is all straightened out now. All that remains for you to do is to find him and say that I--that I wish him to come back for lunch."

"Is it that simple?"

He smiled, his easy-going nature glad to seize upon anything that promised relief from such a jumble as this.

"You must say nothing more than that," she put in, frightened at the sound of her own words. Supposing that he would not come--supposing that even now she had presumed too far?

"You will tell him just that?"

"Yes," he agreed, "and this morning I would have thought that it was enough."

"It is enough now--whatever happens," she said hastily.

"I must hurry back to Marie," she concluded breathlessly. "You must not delay. It may be that he is planning to leave town. If so, you must catch him before he starts."

He placed his arm tenderly about her slight waist and led her to the foot of the stairs.

"You will let me know as soon as you come in?" she pleaded.

"Yes, and don't worry while I 'm gone."

Arsdale did not take a cab. He needed a walk to clear his head. The air was balmy with the fragrance of growing things and he was sensitive to its influence as he had never been in his life. As he strode along he felt twice his normal size. And yet what a puppet he was as compared to this Donaldson who had been willing to take upon his shoulders the ghastly burden which had been his own. He himself might bear it to-day, but yesterday it would have crushed him. He had not realized how low he had sunk until he learned that it was considered a possibility that he might have committed such crimes as those. If at first the suspicion had roused his wrath, the sober truth that Jacques under the same influence was actually guilty had been enough to disarm him. The past was like a nightmare, and this Donaldson was the man who had found his hand in the dark and roused him. He quickened his pace.

A small black dog nosing about the fresh dirt thrown from an excavation to his left attracted his attention to a new house which was going up.

He glanced at the men at work and then stood still in his tracks. Down there, in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, bent over a shovel was Peter Donaldson.

It was impossible to believe, but he stared at the illusion with his hands getting cold. Then he turned back to the dog. It was the same pup Donaldson had brought into the house with him.

He riveted his eyes once more upon the figure standing out among his fellow workers like a uniformed general in a rabble. He strode to the side of the foreman of the gang who stood near.

"Who is that man down there?" he demanded.

"Dunno," the foreman answered briefly, "he asked fer work this mornin'

and I give him a job."

"I 'm going to speak to him."

"Fire erway."

Arsdale clambered into the hole and reached Donaldson's side before the latter glanced up. When he did raise his head, it was with an easy, unembarra.s.sed nod of recognition.

"Good Lord," gasped Arsdale, "it _is_ you!"

"Yes."

Donaldson wiped his wet brow. He was not in particularly good training for such heavy work.

"But what the deuce--"

"I needed money for a night's lodging and took the first job that offered," he explained.

There was nothing melodramatic in his speech or att.i.tude. He was not posing. He spoke of his necessity in the matter-of-fact way in which he had accepted it. It was necessary to earn the sheer essentials of life, in order to get a footing--to get sufficient capital to open up his office again. He would not have borrowed if he could, and a penniless lawyer in New York is in as bad a position as a penniless tramp. Not only was he glad of this opportunity to earn a couple of dollars, but he found pleasure, in spite of the physical strain, in this most elemental of employments. There was something in the act of forcing his shovel into the earth that brought him comfort in the thought that he was beginning in the cleanest of all clean ways. He was earning his first dollar like a pioneer. He was earning it by the literal sweat of his brow.

He turned back from Arsdale's astonished expression to his task.

"See here, Donaldson," protested the latter excitedly, "this is absurd!

You must quit this. I 've money enough--"

"And I have n't," interrupted Donaldson heaving a shovel full of moist dirt into the waiting dump cart.

Even Arsdale was checked by the expression he caught in Donaldson's eyes. He ventured nothing further, but, bewildered, stood there, dumb a moment, before he remembered his message.

"I came out to find you," he managed to speak. "Elaine wants you to come back to lunch."

"What?"

Donaldson paused in his work and searched Arsdale's face.

"What did you say?" he demanded slowly.

"Elaine wants you to come back for lunch. She sent me to find you."

Arsdale saw Donaldson's lungs expand. He saw every vein in his face throb with new life. He saw him grow before his eyes to the capacity of two men. He saw him step forth from this aching begrimed sh.e.l.l into a new physique as vibrant with fresh strength as a young mountaineer.

It was as startling a metamorphosis as though the man had been touched with a magician's wand.

"Thank you," answered Donaldson on a deep intake of breath. "I shall be glad to come."

"Drop your shovel then and come along now."

"No," he replied, as he dug his spade deep into the soil, "I can't quit my job. The whistle blows at noon."

At noon! At the seventh noon, the whistle was to blow! He tossed the weight of two ordinary shovelfuls of gravel into the cart as lightly as a child tosses a bean bag.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _At noon! At the seventh noon, the whistle was to blow!_]

Perceiving the uselessness of further argument Arsdale climbed out to the bank, and, sitting on a big boulder, watched Donaldson with dazed fascination. The foreman pa.s.sed him once.

"May be cracked," he remarked, "but I 'd' take a hundred men, the likes of him."

"You could n't find them on two continents," answered Arsdale.

The dog made overtures of friends.h.i.+p and he took him on his knee.