FullReads

“Hello, chief. Buffum speaking. Held up for about an hour. Apogee, Iowa. Think I can make it up. But better move the schedule up through Illinois and Indiana. Huh? Radiator leak. ‘By!”

He inquired the amount of toll, and rambled out to the garden. He had to hurry away, of course, and get some sleep, but it would be good for him to see Aurilla Rivers again, to take with him the memory of her cool resoluteness. She was coming toward him. He meekly followed her back through the hall, to the front steps. There he halted her. He would see quite enough of Roy Bender and the car before he reached New York.

“Please sit down here a moment, and tell me—”

“Yes?”

“Oh, about the country around here, and uh—Oh! I owe you for the telephone call. ”

“Please! It’s nothing. ”

“But it’s something. It’s two dollars and ninety-five cents. ”

“For a telephone call?”

He caught her hand and pressed the money into it. She plumped down on the steps, and he discreetly lowered his bulk beside her. She turned on him, blazing;

“You infuriate me! You do things I’ve always wanted to—sweep across big distances, command men, have power. I suppose it’s the old Yankee shipmasters coming out in me. ”

“Miss Rivers, I noticed a portrait in there. It seemed to me that the picture and the old sofa make a kind of shrine. And the fresh flowers. ” She stared a little before she said:

“Yes. It’s a shrine. But you’re the first one that ever guessed. How did you—”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s because I went through some California missions a few days ago. Tell me about the people in the pictures. ”

“You wouldn’t—Oh, some day, perhaps. ”

“Some day! Now, you see here, child! Do you realize that in about forty minutes I’ll be kiting out of here at seventy miles an hour? Imagine that I’ve met you a couple of times in the bank or the post office, and finally after about six months I’ve called here, and told your mother I like pansies. All right. All that is over. Now, who are you, Aurilla Rivers? Who and what and why and how and when?”

She smiled. She nodded. She told.

She was a school teacher now, but before her father had died—well, the enlarged photograph in there was her father, Bradley Rivers, pioneer lawyer of Apogee. He had come out from Cape Cod, as a boy. The side-whiskered man of the central portrait was her grandfather, Captain Zenas Rivers, of West Harlepool, on the Cape. The house in the picture was the Rivers’ mansion, birthplace of her father.

“Have you been on the Cape yourself?” Buffum queried. “I remember driving through Harlepool, but I don’t recall anything but white houses and a meeting-house with a whale of a big steeple. ”

“The dream of my life has been to go to Harlepool. Once when Father had to go to Boston he did run down there by himself. That’s when he brought back the portrait of Grandfather, and the painting of the old house, and the furniture and all. He said it made him so melancholy to see the changes in the town, and he never would go again. Then—he died. I’m saving up money for a trip back East. I do believe in democracy, but at the same time I feel that families like the Riverses owe it to the world to set an example, and I want to find my own people again. My own people!”

“Maybe you’re right. I’m from the soil. Di-rect! But somehow I can see it in you, same as I do in the portrait of your grandfather. I wish I—Well, never mind. ”