Published by Good Press, 2021

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664581396

Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE

       CHAPTER II A DRY-SALT MAN

       CHAPTER III THE SPARK IN THE CLOD

       CHAPTER IV A STRANGER AT THE GATE

       CHAPTER V THE SECRET OF THE CLOVER

       CHAPTER VI BLOOD

       CHAPTER VII DELIVERANCE

       CHAPTER VIII WILL HE TELL?

       CHAPTER IX THE SEALED ENVELOPE

       CHAPTER X LET HIM HANG

       CHAPTER XI PETER’S SON

       CHAPTER XII THE SUNBEAM ON THE WALL

       CHAPTER XIII UNTIL THE DAY BREAK

       CHAPTER XIV DESERTED

       CHAPTER XV THE STATE VS. NEWBOLT

       CHAPTER XVI “SHE COMETH NOT,” HE SAID

       CHAPTER XVII THE BLOW OF A FRIEND

       CHAPTER XVIII A NAME AND A MESSAGE

       CHAPTER XIX THE SHADOW OF A DREAM

       CHAPTER XX “THE PENALTY IS DEATH!”

       CHAPTER XXI OLLIE SPEAKS

       CHAPTER XXII A SUMMONS OF THE NIGHT

       CHAPTER XXIII LEST I FORGET

CHAPTER I

       DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE

       Table of Contents

      Sarah Newbolt enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which clustered coppicelike in her dooryard, were ready to unlock and flare forth leaves. On the porch with its southern exposure she sat in her low, splint-bottomed rocker, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

      The sun tickled her shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail-drawn, warped, and beaten floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were large and toil-distorted, great-jointed like a man’s, and all the feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships of her life had developed.

      She did not seem, crouched there like an old cat warming herself in the first keen fires of spring, conscious of anything about her; of the low house, with its battered eaves, the sprawling rail-fence in front of it, out of which the gate was gone, like a tooth; of the wild bramble of roses, or the generations of honeysuckle which had grown, layer upon 2 layer–the under stratum all dead and brown–over the decaying arbor which led up to the cracked front door. She did not seem conscious that time and poverty had wasted the beauties of that place; that shingles were gone from the outreaching eaves, torn away by March winds; that stones had fallen from the chimney, squatting broad-shouldered at the weathered gable; that panes were missing from the windows, their places supplied by boards and tacked-on cloth, or that pillows crowded into them, making it seem a house that stopped its ears against the unfriendly things which passengers upon the highway might speak of it.

      Time and poverty were pressing upon Sarah Newbolt also, relaxing there that bright hour in the sun, straying away from her troubles and her vexations like an autumn butterfly among the golden leaves, unmindful of the frost which soon must cut short its day. For, poor as she was in all that governments put imposts upon, and men list in tax returns and carry to steel vaults to hoard away, Sarah Newbolt had her dreams. She had no golden past; there was no golden future ready before her feet. There was no review for her in those visions of happy days and tender memories, over which a woman half closes her eyes and smiles, or over the incense of which a man’s heart softens. Behind her stretched a wake of turbulence and strife; ahead of her lay the banked clouds of an unsettled and insecure future.

      But she had her dreams, in which even the poorest of us may indulge when our taskmaster in the great brickworks of this hot and heavy world is not hard by and pressing us forward with his lash. She had her dreams of what never was and never could be; of old longings, old heart-hungers, old hopes, and loves which never had come near for one moment’s caress of her toil-hardened hand. Dreams which roved the world and soothed the ache in her heart by their very extravagance, which even her frugal conscience 3 could not chide; dreams which drew hot tears upon her cheeks, to trickle down among her knotted fingers and tincture the bitterness of things unrealized.

      The crunch of wheels in the road now startled her from her profitless excursions among the mist of visions and dreams. She lifted her head like a cow startled from her peaceful grazing, for the vehicle had stopped at the gap in the fence where the gate should have stood warder between its leaning posts.

      “Well, he’s come,” said she with the resignation of one who finds the long expected and dreaded at hand.

      A man got out of the buggy and hitched his horse to one of the old gate-posts, first trying it to satisfy himself that it was trustworthy, for stability in even a post on those premises, where everything was going to decay, seemed unreasonable to expect. He turned up the path, bordered by blue flags, thrusting their swordpoints through the ground, and strode toward the house, with that uncouth giving at the knees which marks a man who long has followed the plow across furrowed fields.