Earth

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ARTHUR B. REEVE

CRAIG KENNEDY AND THE ELEMENTS
AIR—WATER—EARTH—FIRE

EARTH

RGL e-Book Cover^©

First published in Flynn's, 25 Oct 1924

Reprinted in Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, 20 Sep 1925

Collected in "The Fourteen Points,"
Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1925

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2022
Version Date: 2022-01-28

Produced by Art Lortie, Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan

All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

Click here for more Craig Kennedy stories

Flynn's, 25 Oct 1924, with "Earth"

"The Fourteen Points," Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1925

Illustration from "Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine."

"It's in the cupola!" I exclaimed. "You don't suppose
it's Mary Sanford—getting ready to jump again?"

"MEADOWBROOK FARM is rightfully mine! I am the daughter of the rightful heir. And I am the only living heir of my uncle Jasper, who holds it. It was my grandfather's and my great-grandfather's, on my mother's side, before that. It is mine. Is there no justice, Mr. Kennedy, in the earth?"

Ruth Sanford Saxton's big brown eyes seemed almost black in the intensity of her feeling as she leaned forward on the hassock on which she was sitting. Tears of passionate disappointment were perilously near the surface.

"Only once. My natural curiosity took me down there with some friends. I left them in the car in the lane and knocked at the door alone. I waited a long time and then the door was opened by a wizened, bent old man.

"I was frightened and for a moment I thought he was, too. He had to hold on to the door to steady himself. Hate and fear were in his face as he saw me. He put up the shaking fingers of his other hand as if to shut me from his eyes. 'Uncle Jasper,' I said, 'this is Ruth Saxton.' At that his claw-like fingers reached and pushed me away. His voice was so cracked he could hardly speak. 'Go 'way! Go 'way! Don't look at me!' he gasped. 'Sammy's eyes and Mary's face! My God!' He slammed the door in my face, locked it, and I could hear him running, actually running, away from me down the hall. That is all I have seen of my precious relative and the ancestral farm," the girl added bitterly.

KENNEDY and I had met Ruth Sanford Saxton at a club luncheon some days before, a club composed of well-known New York women who were trying to give young genius an opportunity on the stage, in opera and concert engagements. I felt that there was a future for Ruth Sanford Saxton. Her beauty would carry her far; big brown eyes, limpid and melting one minute, gay and impish the next.

"But why should he be afraid to see your mother's and your father's face?" I asked with curiosity.

"That is what I want to know! It may be only a woman's intuition, but I think strange things happened down there that no one knows anything about. And I—" the girl hesitated, "I have no money to find out with, now. Some day, maybe, when my ship comes in—"

Craig was thoughtfully studying the earnest face of the girl. She had that something which is born in an actress—feeling, charm, personality. From a drawer of a little desk she took two yellowed photographs.

"My mother and father," she said simply to Craig. "You see, I am very like my mother there—only I have my father's big brown eyes.

"You know, my mother died when I was a baby, under particularly harrowing circumstances. My grandmother raised me and we had a terrible struggle to make ends meet. Then when success began to come, I lost her, too. I feel bitter toward my uncle. The thing I can never forgive is his callousness to my mother's wants before her death."

"Mr. Kennedy, it is a strange story." She settled back on the hassock. "My grandfather, Eli Saxton, was an old Scrooge of a man. Hard times for other people had made him rich, in a way. He built up an old Scrooge fortune by oppression and sharp dealing—small dealing, small fortune. He had been dead twenty years, but from the tales my grandmother told me I wonder yet if he is able to rest in his grave." Ruth seemed very much ashamed of her father's people and hesitated.

"Well, in the hard times of 1893, he took away the big Meadowbrook Farm from my mother's family, the Sanfords. They had owned it for generations. Then through sickness and death of my other grandfather, the Sanfords sank lower and lower socially. They lived in a little house, not much more than a shanty, across the railroad.

"But grandmother and her daughter, Mary, my mother, though they were terrifically poor, struggled on. Mother had to work, too. Poverty forced her into some situations that caused unfounded gossip. Finally she had to go out as a household servant to the rich families in the neighborhood. It was hard. Mother had lots of pride and was really a beautiful girl as you can see. But work and worry and poor clothes made her look like a slattern.

"At last their finances were in such a condition that my mother, much against every instinct, was forced to take a position as the servant in the great house of her own ancestors at Meadowbrook."

"There the two sons of old Eli Saxton saw much of her. Both fell in love with her, but in different ways. My father, Samuel Saxton, the elder, was evidently a quixotic sort of man, with a twist to right the wrongs that the Saxtons had committed. He married my mother secretly."

"The marriage was kept a secret successfully until one day the Saxtons' servant did not appear in the Saxton kitchen. In the shanty I was born that day. It seemed after my birth that misfortune came alike to both Sanfords and Saxtons.

"Just about a week later, when the news was being gossiped about the country, my grandfather made my father confess the marriage. In his apoplectic wrath he cut him off, disowned him. Uncle Jasper was in a secret jealous rage, too, at the way things had gone. He had lost out with my mother, for whom he had been scheming. To the public, his open righteous wrath—if righteous it was—was made to seem like Jacob over Esau, and birthrights, and messes of pottage, and all that.

"That same night," Ruth continued, "my father was killed. Along the railroad that ran through the valley of the meadow from which the farm took its name, my father's mangled body was found. It had been tossed many feet. He must have been crossing the track from the shanty where his young wife and baby were. He had been struck by the train. The head was never identified, but the body was, completely. They assembled it as best they could for burial and it lies interred in the Saxton plot. The shock killed my grandfather, old Eli Saxton.

"It was awful, Mr. Kennedy, this tragedy. It made my mother delirious. She got up too soon from her bed and that night she wandered out of the little house into the darkness. When my grandmother found her, she was near the Saxton house, in the meadow, demented. She never recovered from the shock."

Ruth's big eyes gazed distantly out of the window as if peering into the past. Her lips trembled as she went on.

"You see, now Uncle Jasper was sole heir. He refused to recognize me as a Saxton. Then a few nights later my mother in her madness disappeared again. She had resumed her wandering over the Saxton meadows, for some reason, out of her head, I guess."

The girl left the room and returned with a package which she handled almost reverently. "Mother's shoes," she murmured.

The wrappings fell off and in Ruth's lap were Mary Saxton's shoes, preserved by her own mother, Ruth's grandmother. They had been torn by briers; the marks of red mud were still incrusted on them, uncleaned, just as they were after the wandering in the delirium.

With eyes fixed on the mute evidence through all these years of her mother's suffering, Ruth continued softly. "Mother went at last to the old Saxton house, which was still her home, in her upset mind. She denounced Jasper for disinheriting me. He only laughed at her. Finally, with a wild cry she fled from him, up the stairs, through the halls, up to the cupola from which she threw herself in her delirium to her death.

"Ever since then, on wild nights, people say they have seen the spirit of Mary Sanford in the tower. Everybody thinks the place is haunted. But Uncle Jasper lives on in it, hanging on grimly to the little ill-earned fortune, never increasing it by much, never diminishing it by ever so little, a crabbed old man who never married, for there was none who would marry him.

"I have heard that servants came and went in the old house at first. But none stayed long. Finally none would come. Uncle Jasper didn't seek to encourage them, then, to come. Gradually the old house up Saxton Lane, off the high road, has become the house of a hermit.

"Grandmother moved to New York with me, a tiny baby. Some charitable relatives helped provide for us.

"Now I am fighting life alone, Mr. Kennedy. But it is hard to be kept out of what is really mine!"

Ruth confessed that when the play in which she had her first important part had looked like a success, she had dreamed of saving money until some day she might buy back Meadowbrook. She had heard of her uncle Jasper's intent to sell now and it made her eyes flash with indignation when she mentioned it. But they had withdrawn the play. It had gone the way of so many productions of real merit that season. Her dreams had gone glimmering. There was no fortune, no pot of gold at the very beginning of stardom.

"SPRING is here!" exclaimed Craig one bright morning later in the week. "How would you like to take a ride down Jersey way, Walter? Wouldn't you like to get out into the country on a day like this?"

The night before Craig had talked to Ruth Saxton over the telephone, but I had not heard the conversation, nor did I think of it at the moment. The idea seemed good; I needed a change, so I took the day off with him. I must admit that on the way down through the state that morning in his speedy roadster, Craig's enthusiasm for country life was a bit infectious. A country club on the road proved an added argument. By the time we reached New Brunswick I was wavering.

Down the hill, over the bridge into the quaint town, on a street not very wide, one receives the impression of a hustling, much-alive little city, with trolley cars, taxi-cabs, banks, good hotels, and a state university to add distinction.

It was then that Craig confessed a desire to look over the old Saxton farm. "Ruth Saxton says it is a splendid investment and that it's on the market at a ridiculously low figure, if you can get on the right side of that peculiar old Uncle Jasper of hers."

We stopped to make inquiries as to the road to the Saxton farm. What amused me at once was the way people spoke of Meadowbrook Farm—with bated breath, a catch in the voice, an almost awed inflection, even an incredulity at our assuming a desire to go to the old place. They regarded us with interest and city-wise superiority at our suggesting it.

"Why, man alive," said one, "no one would spend a night in that place, no one around here, not for a thousand dollars. It has the haunts!"

Kennedy thanked the volunteer for the information, but we went on. Gradually I was getting an angle on what I came to think of as the secret of the Saxtons.

JASPER SAXTON was prematurely old. His was a strange countenance, too, with a protruding forehead, pinkish and shiny, surmounted and crowned with snow white, thin hair which showed a pink scalp peeping through on the top where nature had been least kindly. He wore his hair long and was not particularly neat about it. Now, in the sunshine and the breeze, wisps and strands of it lifted gingerly from his brow and back of his neck and waved like tiny flags of truce to halt relentless time in its further ravages.

In spite of his age, the man had not acquired poise or ease of manner. His fluttering hands were constantly and unconsciously smoothing the small flat top of the little wooden gate post, as if to give him confidence, an added strength, as he stood and looked at us under heavy, bushy, grizzled eyebrows.

His eyes were a faded blue and afflicted with tear ducts that refused to function fast enough in the March winds. His cheeks were sunken and his chin pointed, narrow. His ears were tiny, mostly flat and close to the head. They were peculiar, too. The middle extruded, as it were, reddened and hairy, beyond the outer edges, and gave one the impression that the whole ear had been turned inside out. A long scraggly neck with a prominent, thrusting, active Adam's apple completed the weird physiognomy.

The clothes which hung upon this strange specimen were of a sort more useful than ornamental, made for him when his girth was a bit greater and his shoulders square instead of round. And when he talked it was hard to understand him. Shrunken gums caused a shifting and dropping of false teeth.

"Ye say, d'ye, ye wanter look at the farm?" he inquired, still sizing us up shrewdly.

"Yes, Mr. Saxton," ingratiated Craig. "I would like to look around. I'd like to see the house first, then the land."

"Going in for psychic research?" I remonstrated. Craig shook his head thoughtfully as he scanned the broad acres of the farm. "I don't think I'd want the house. Probably I'd tear it down. What a site on that knoll overlooking the meadow! I would build there. The brook—I'd leave that as it is, winding through the sweep of open space. What a glorious quiet here!"

"But, you, of all things, what do you want of a house in this out of the way country? What's wrong with the city?"

"Tired of the city; fed up on the city; that's all. I want rest—and exercise. I want health—and quiet."

"Then this is your place," drawled old Jasper Saxton, who had been listening and watching Kennedy keenly, paying little attention to me. He straightened slightly and opened the gate for us to enter. "I ain't put it in the hands o' none o' them agents. One o' them offered me a little money down. But the rest was to remain on mortgage. I seen his game. He was a goin' ter cut it up into little lots an' pay me that there mortgage as he sold 'em. Sharpers! I don't wanter see the old place sold on the instalment plan. I'd like to sell it to some-one'd keep it whole, pay for it whole. I'm gittin' ter be an old man, and the winters up here don't agree with me like they use ter. I'm thinkin' of locatin' down in Floridy, somewhars south."

Things might have looked better and more salable for a coat of paint. Also one could see no signs of the recent presence of a carpenter. The house was just dull and uninteresting. It lacked, to me, that decrepit picturesqueness of houses haunted and neglected. This house was haunted and prosaic. I thought of it as built of frame, with clapboards, rather than as being romantic and eerie. Perhaps it was because I was looking at it rather as a story than as an investment.

The front door opened on a rather wide central hall with rooms on either side, four of them, and a broad staircase to the second floor. Rambling from the main floor was an extension in the rear, with an extension to the extension, back of that. Surmounting this house was a cupola on one corner.

There were four rooms also on the second floor, opening from the hall. And everywhere inside the house was dust, gray dust, thick dust, feathery dust. It betrayed one thing: the lack of a woman in the household. The furniture, too, was fair, far from modern, yet not old enough to be of any value from the point of view of a collector.

Downstairs we noted that there were no telephone or electric lights; upstairs no modern bathroom. Jasper Saxton had lived alone so long that his wants were few and simple. Two parlors, unused, a dining room with closed and broken shutters, a huge kitchen made up the first floor. The kitchen and extensions showed evidences of most use.

Upstairs, to the big front room to the right, dimly lighted from small-paned windows, all a dull drab, Jasper Saxton led us.

"I've never been in it since father died. It's all right, y'know, but it's just the way I feel about it. It's the largest room up here, too. The hall is cut off from the others."

It had a commanding view of the meadow and the knoll beyond. Jasper did not enter, however, just stood by the door. Was he, too, a believer in the haunted house idea? None should have known better. Besides, none of these bedrooms so far looked as if they were used. Everything was too dust-grimed and dust-covered.

The old man must have known intuitively of what I was thinking. "I never come upstairs at night—to sleep. Downstairs I sleep, mostly in a big chair. I'm troubled with asthma, bad. I eat, sleep, and live downstairs in that kitchen facing the woods."

He tried to make out that it was a humorous idea, this using only one room when there were so many. At least that was the only funny thing I could see in it. But the slipping of his teeth in his whistle-like mirth was all the humor I could extract from it.

He seemed to avoid entering the rooms at all, just hung on the knobs of the doors and extolled their wonderful qualities as to size, light, and air. Even a dead chimney-swallow, long since nothing but feathers and bone, did not interest him in the other front room. This room was smaller. Something was cut off it.

"What's up these stairs?" asked Craig, opening a door next it in the hall "Oh, the cupola. Do you use that for anything?"

Kennedy looked at the old man rather keenly as he murmured his hasty answer. Here was a strange personality. What was it, fear or laziness? Apparently there was everything at hand, with a little care, to make him contented and comfortable.

Downstairs again to go out and look over the place, Jasper stopped in the kitchen for his hat. It was a queer old thing, a little circular crown with a plain band that settled down on his head like a turban. Made of black, it gave him a look almost of a gnome.

Preceded by Jasper we started to look over the barns, the stable with a pretty sound old horse in it, a box wagon, a buggy, a plow, a harrow in a shed, a com crib built on four piles surmounted by inverted dishpans, a chicken house, a pig pen. We paused by the old well, looking out over the meadow. Tall and lean, Craig stood with a glow of pleasure on his strong face as he turned his back on what was sordid of man and looked forth on what was glorious of nature.

As he spoke of rest and health and quiet, and of what a site was the knoll across the meadow, Jasper Saxton listened keenly. Kennedy asked about boundaries, landmarks, acreage, title. Old Jasper excused himself to go back to the house to get some ancient deeds, papers that would settle forever the confines of Meadowbrook Farm and the ownership.

Leaning on his stick, Craig waved his arm. "Out there, Walter, with a saddle horse, two Great Danes I have just bought, work to do on the farm, getting close to the old earth from which we sprang, I feel I'd get away from crime. There's too much of it in the world."

As I looked at him more closely, he showed plainly the lines of care and overwork on his face.

"It isn't the house that means anything to me," went on Craig. "But over there on that grassy knoll, the other side of that little grove of buttonwoods, is an ideal place for a rambling type of house. I can see it now, protected by the trees from the north winds in the rear, the sloping hillside merging into the meadows by the river in front. What a place to dream and ponder—and write!"

Old Jasper had been listening patiently, a great deal more patiently than I had, as Kennedy rambled on about his ideas of what should be done with the farm by himself as country gentleman. I did not understand the reversal of the usual process. But this was, as a matter of fact, Kennedy's sales talk, to the seller.

"And ye'll build out there, maybe tear down the house, keep the meadowland, not cut the old place up in little building lots and sell it to these here city people?" drawled Jasper. "Well, p'r'aps ye're right. It's not much of a house, not in these days. And if ye were to fix it up, ye'd still have an old house. And then ye might divide and sell to pay for the improvements. But ye would not want to sell if these new little boxes of houses was goin' ter spoil yer view from the knoll, now would ye?"

"And ye'll pay my price, agree not to divide the property, say, for twenty years?"

"Then p'raps ye'll drive me back to the city with yer in that fine car o' yourn and we can see my lawyer, old Ezra Throop, and draw up the papers, maybe pay a little to bind the bargain?"

"I'm a-thinking, maybe I'll buy me one of these here flivvers, now," commented old Jasper, hanging on to his brimless hat as the car whizzed back to town. "Kin I get one second handed? Do they cost much? Do ye think it's any trick to make the durn things go?"

AT the lawyer's Kennedy arranged for a search of the title to the place and a guarantee. It was stipulated also in the contract that everything must be left as it was, the furniture, all but old Jasper's personal effects in the creepy old house.

Though bad luck had pursued the Sanfords and the Saxtons in the ill-omened mansion, it was a gloriously beautiful April day that Kennedy took possession. The buds were peeping out here and there on the trees, the delicate green tips of leaves giving promise of beauty to come.

Craig did not bring much out there with him to the old house. "I'm going to wait, Walter," he said, "until I get my plans for the other house."

"I noticed," I returned, "you were very particular in stipulating that everything must be left as it was. I'm sure it's good enough for this place until you build on the knoll."

But I had not much heart in it. To tell the truth I was worried over Craig's buying of that house. I had often wondered why a man of his engaging personality had never married. There had been plenty of girls I knew who had been deeply interested in him, had he but returned the interest. I wondered whether Ruth Sax-ton had anything to do with it. She was pretty enough to please any man, and talented, too.

Apparently Craig's mind was not traveling along my road at the time. "I've had a couple of rooms downstairs in the front cleaned out. We'll sleep in one of them to-night. There are two old couches there and I think we'll be more comfortable than upstairs in those musty bedrooms. Jasper Saxton will never be mayor of spotless town."

"Give them the run of the place at night. They will keep intruders away, or at least notify us of their presence."

The dogs were two beautiful Great Danes who had romped their ponderous way already into our hearts. I loved to watch them. They were scarcely more than out of their puppy days yet, but their blooded qualities were manifesting themselves. Nothing escaped their watchful eyes and ears. Their voices were formidable. Every stranger warranted suspicion. None got by until we had given the word. We felt very safe—from material intruders.

We had dinner at a hotel in town and while we were there Jasper Saxton joined us. The sale of the property seemed to have made him a bit remorseful, already, in spite of his new acquisition, a second-hand flivver, in which he was deeply interested and awed.

Kennedy nodded and after dinner we went out to the Saxton house. The old man seemed reluctant to leave, but now, even after the papers were signed, sealed, and delivered, he showed no hesitation in talking about the haunts of the house. Still he was leery at the mere suggestion of going upstairs after dark.

It was just damp and cold enough to make the warm glow from a couple of logs in the fireplace feel snug. Jasper acted as if he never could get warm. Even as late as it was in the spring when the farmers in the vicinity were undertaking their spring plowing, he stood with his back to the fire and would suddenly turn and stretch his two thin, pasty white hands over the blaze and rub them.

"I wanted to sell," confessed Jasper frankly. "Now, Mr. Kennedy can't believe the old house has strange things a happening into it—and maybe it is my imagination," he added, shaking his head.

"Well, there will be a chance to find out soon enough," put in Craig. "When do the haunts start work? Will you stay and play with them?"

The invitation failed to please. Jasper's interest in Craig's plans for the Saxton farm vanished. He mumbled under his breath some unintelligible apology and left to go back to his room in town.

KENNEDY and I sat and talked late over the good times we would have in that farm. We were planning a tennis court and even a little golf course, though not of nine holes. It was well on to midnight when we retired.

We had to make our own beds that night. Each of us had one of those couches that were popular about thirty or forty years ago, green leather and lightest of oak frames. The springs were stiff and the leather covering tufted tightly and fastened with little leather-covered buttons. Even with blankets, they were uncompromising. I rolled and tossed on those hard biscuit-like protuberances.

I could hear the clock in the hall striking twelve. Again at the half hour it reminded me I was still awake.

"What's the matter with you, Walter? The haunts getting you?" Craig called unsympathetically.

I counted sheep. I got up and ate some crackers and drank some water. Nothing made me sleep. By this time, however, I knew Kennedy was in the land of dreams.

Suddenly I heard a noise. Tap, tap, tap! It must be in the house. The dogs were quiet. "Craig!" I called softly. No answer.

So lightly it came that I felt that only hands capable of working invisibly could ever hope to have a touch as light as that.

Craig was still sleeping soundly. On second thoughts I did not want to wake him. I might be imagining things. I wished it would stop. Tap, tap, tap! I got up softly and steeled myself to go into the kitchen. Everything was all right. I couldn't hear it there. Tiptoeing back into the dark, unfamiliar yet with the positions of the furniture, I stumbled and fell over a chair as I heard overhead the unmistakable noise of soft feet, ghostly feet.

On the table was an old-fashioned oil lamp, with a plain square iron base and a glass oil bowl. I felt indeed that we had skipped back thirty years when Craig lighted it.

We started to look for the noise. As we entered the lower hall it seemed louder, coming from upstairs.

"I'll say old Jasper Saxton showed good judgment when he refused to use those upstairs rooms—if he had to listen to those taps, all night. That's someone moving, above!"

Craig was silent. As we were ascending the steps to the second floor, noiselessly, a sudden draught seemed to strike us. The lamp went out in Craig's hands. We were in total darkness.

I felt as if old Eli Saxton's bony hand was at my throat. I might even have sworn I saw the ghostly filaments of Mary Saxton fleeing before me.

"Whatever it is," I tried to whisper nervously, "it sounds as if it had been either to a graveyard or a butcher. Bones! I don't like haunting noises like that in the dark—in this house!"

"I don't know whether I do or not. Jasper didn't. If it's what people say it is, if it's a ghost, I want it to stay invisible."

Outside one of the pups howled, dismally, in which he was joined by the other. They were too old to miss their mother, knew us too well to be lonesome, I thought.

By this time Craig had another light. As it flashed up there was a sharp hollow sound as of knocking on wood. Or was it of something small that had dropped suddenly and rolled? I glanced about, fearful of being pelletted with ghostly missiles.

We went on until we came to the cupola door. We could find nothing. But the sounds were still plain.

"It's in the cupola!" I exclaimed. "You don't suppose it's Mary Sanford—getting ready to jump again?"

I climbed after him. Anyone on the high road seeing our wavering forms in the light must have thought the cupola haunted. Standing, holding the light in one hand, Craig pointed with the index finger of the other, to a hole in the ceiling.

"Squirrels! The thing you heard drop was a walnut. It roiled away, the squirrel after it. See, they can make a jump from the branches of that old tree—and in this window."

I had a feeling of disappointment in spite of the certain satisfaction that it was nothing supernatural. I followed Craig down and now indeed I was soon sleeping, tired.

Yet it haunted my dreams. The strange rappings, those rappings, were explained. But what was the secret of the Sanford-Saxton place? What was it that loosed Jasper's tongue about the house, talking much, but saying little?

THE following day was Craig's first full day in actual possession of old Meadowbrook Farm.

We rose early. How strange this old place was! To realize the conveniences of electricity and gas and plumbing one must live in a house without them. We took our cold tubs in a cold tub, an old wooden tub that leaked through the sides all over the kitchen. The result was that the kitchen had to have a mopping, too. We built a wood fire in the old range and managed to get a little breakfast. It was funny while the experience lasted and was new. I shall never forget that first meal in the farmhouse.

We fed the dogs, the horse, the chickens, and the rest of the live things about the place.

All that day we had to stay on the farm. Craig was expecting an architect and a landscape gardener whom he knew, and also a man who was to help with the chores.

"It's been a long time since I walked back of one of those things," he remarked meditatively. "That will be great exercise." Craig looked in the direction of the meadow. My heart sank. There were a good many acres. It would be some exercise.

"You don't mean to tell me that you're thinking of plowing in those meadows to-day?" I asked. Country life to me was country clubs; I was used to a putter, not a plow.

Still Craig took the old horse and hitched him up to the old-fashioned plow. Then he started off in the direction of the meadow. I followed.

Here we were dressed in sport tweeds, out to do our spring plowing! I felt more like swinging a driver than a whip. Along the meadow ran a public road too. Some of the wiseacre farmers in the neighborhood must have enjoyed the sight of us in our unusual attire for work in the fields. The only things we lacked in their estimation must have been silk hats and gloves.

With a chirrup to the horse, we started around the meadow. Craig plowed deeply and thoroughly, taking his time to do it carefully. Close to the wire boundary fence he worked as he came back after once around the other sides, smiling at the people who went by.

The soil in that part of the country is very peculiar, of a dark red color. It is called red shale and is the discouragement of every neat farmer's wife on a rainy day. It tracks in and stays tracked.

Craig was almost completing his first lap, singing as he bent to it, now and then stopping to joke with me.

Up the road, coming in from the direction of the highway to town was what looked like a car. As it came nearer I could make out that it was Jasper Saxton in his second-hand flivver, rattling along, "I-think-I-can-do-it. I-think-I-can-do-it!"

"That's queer. He told me he was going to start on his trip to-day in that can. He must have changed his mind. I wonder what he wants now."

Looking down the road where it swept up the knoll and was pretty soft and squashy I smiled involuntarily. The old flivver was swinging from side to side, and bumping. It was as if a ship pitched and rolled, both at once. How old Jasper's teeth must have rattled! "I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can— I-know-I-can-n-n't!"

He got out of the stalled bus and as he came nearer he waved his scrawny hand. Nearer still I saw that he was smiling, a smile that was most uncanny. His teeth had dropped and the smile lost itself in the cavity between teeth and gums. I thought, if Alice had only been there she might have solved the mystery of the Cheshire cat.

"Purty hard work ye're doin', Mr. Kennedy," he called, still smiling that ghastly smile without teeth.

"I don't mind it, Mr. Saxton. It keeps my hands busy. I feel I'm doing something really worth while, at last!"

"Yeh. I s'pose it's all the way ye looks at it. Ye want to begin it. I'm glad to be able to stop it. He! he! he!" He laughed a ridiculous laugh. If there were derision in it, it would be hard to determine whether it was objective or subjective.

"Perhaps so. I haven't decided yet just what it will be. I want to get some advice from a soil specialist."

"Yeh? Labor's purty scarce hereabouts, and purty high. Ye can't get a good man fer love nor money. And the prices ye gets ain't so good any more. Acres and acres of potatoes rotted hereabouts last year. It didn't pay to dig 'cm."

Kennedy paused as he finished his once around, looked back contemplatively over the roll and sweep of meadow and field. It was pretty big. Evidently, too, he was thinking of that last remark.

He turned again to the old horse, "I think, after all," he said with a sudden decision, "I'll plow up only about an acre or so, right here at the corner by the barns."

Saxton's face seemed to become more natural. He had his teeth back in sub-normal. He stood silently with me a long time as Kennedy went once around what he judged to be a good acre, then twice. Finally the old codger sloughed back over the uneven ground, with a curt good-by, to his flivver. It started down. Gravity was with it, not against it. "I-think-I-can-do-it; I-think-I-can-do-it." Only once did he look back. Then he nearly ran into a tree.

THE second day of our stay at the farm was another of those spring days when it is a joy to live but how irksome to work. The golf links called; every glimpse of good road was an invitation to step on the gas, to go, one didn't care where, but just step on the gas and go.

This morning Craig dressed for work. I looked at him in amazement, a bit peeved.

I hated the very word work. "Craig, you're a hog—a hog for work! Look at us. We're thin enough. We don't need that kind of work."

For some reason, to me inexplicable, perverse, Kennedy had changed his mind. He decided to plow much more than that acre in the corner of the meadow. He had gone back to his first idea. Round the great meadow he started again. Occasionally he would stop, break up a clod of earth with his foot, or examine the character of the soil.

I watched him, amused, interested in spite of myself. Round and round the great meadow we went, taking turns back of the plowshare. Each time we did it a shorter time by a few minutes was required. Craig would straighten up frequently and look over the plowed ground with satisfaction. I'll say it was plowed well. Spring though it was, I mopped moisture off my brow, felt it trickling down my back. I felt like an advertisement for Omicron Oil for all aches. Kennedy was caroling a ribald ditty we had heard "over there" during the war:

WE were smoking and resting when a neighbor rolled by in an old farm wagon on his way home from town. He was a shrewd native and looked askance at our city farming.

"How's things comin' along? I seen old Saxton back a piece on the road. He was swearin' a blue streak over puttin' a new tire on his gas wagon. I expect he might be comin' down to see ye."

"We thought so, too. But it is purty hard to pull up stakes on short notice and clear out when it's home yer leavin'."

He clucked to his old mare and passed on. Sure enough, soon we had another visit from the recent owner. "Changed yer mind?" he inquired.

"About yer plowing up the field." He smiled at us indulgently as if he thought we were mythical characters of old from the pages of a fairy tale book, set to work emptying rivers with a spoon in order to win some fair princess held in durance by a wicked fairy or a cruel giant.

Jasper leaned against the fence, legs crossed, an elbow on the post, his hand cupped to hold his wizened face. Out over the meadows he looked.

"Some job ye got before ye, boys. It looks easy now. But weedin' and harrowin' and dry spells 'long about the end of July are troublesome visitors to pester ye." He cackled dryly. Kennedy looked at him silently, nodded and smiled and completed the furrow.

Once again he went around in the ever-decreasing oblong. Slowly, slowly but constantly he was plowing. By nightfall he had completed perhaps a score of furrows about the meadow in addition to the acre or so plowed in the corner by the barns.

As he drove the old horse back to the barnyard, turning him over to be fed and made comfortable by the man we had hired, his eyes swept the neatly furrowed paths the plowshare had left. "It's work, Walter, but it's worth it!"

I did not feel his enthusiasm. I felt if it were to be plowing every day, I'd put in a fictitious hurry call from the Star. I was bored to death at this first manifestation of eccentricity on the part of Kennedy. Back to the soil meant nothing in my life.

THE third day was much like the other two. We plowed all morning, ate our lunch, and started the after-noon's plowing. I was tired looking at dirt. I hated red shale with a bitter hatred. I saw red at the very idea of the growth of the soil.

But things went a little faster. For that I was thankful. The furrows were quite a bit shorter in length and I had the satisfaction of seeing a new one started much more often.

That day we had no visit from Jasper Saxton. I thought perhaps he was tired watching us make such industrious fools of ourselves.

But late in the afternoon we had an interruption. It was a real-estate agent from town who had driven out. He was anxious to buy the place. He had been told by neighbors our freshly plowed meadows showed promising soil. I wondered if they were becoming envious. He hinted that he had a client who wanted to farm for a living, a dirt farmer, not for exercise. He told the old story of the gentleman farmer who asked his guests whether they would have milk or champagne. "It costs the same!"

At last he came around to the purpose of his visit. "Will you sell this place, neighbor?"

"Oh, that's all right," came the airy reply. "If you don't care to sell it that way, I'll help you make a pile of money out of it another way. I'll let you make a reasonable profit, something pretty fair on the turnover of your money."

"It would make a good development," persisted the agent. "The railroad right past it and all that. With my influence I could get a station located there. We'd run a parked avenue right up from it to the knoll. Tell you what I'll do, neighbor. I'll make a dicker with you, pay you a fair cash advance, let you in on the profits of selling the lots as a bonus. You can name your figure, your advance, your cut-in. I'll consider them—if they're within reason, leave me a chance for a profit, a chance to live under them. In a few years we'd both be on easy street, sitting on the top of the world, pretty—you with this land, me with my selling organization and experience."

Craig listened patiently to the very end. "Not a chance, sir," he returned flatly. "You see, when I bought it, it was restricted. I can't cut it up for twenty years."

"I'll take a chance on getting that restriction removed by old Saxton," persisted the agent. "I know how I can get around his sentimental reasons. Come on. Make a dicker. Here's my check." He had pulled out a check book and a fountain pen, resting them on a brief case he carried. "I'll make an advance on the contract,—five thousand, say—name it!"

The agent gone, his persuasive arguments and his valuable time wasted, Kennedy turned back to his plow horse. "Gee!"

He turned the horse's head at last to the barn again and as I looked at the meadows for the last time that day, I felt that the poor animal and myself had earned our dinners. I was never made for a farmer.

"Got up. Bathed. Breakfasted, Plowed. Lunched, Plowed. Dined. Bathed. Went to bed. Slept."

I was reaching the end of my patience. To show how I felt about this plowing, I kicked the old plowshare maliciously as I went by it. I was childish, I know, but it gave me some satisfaction.

THE end of the fourth day of plowing found us with many of the acres of the meadow ready for planting.

"Are you going to rest any before you start to plant, Craig?" I asked desperately.

I looked at my blistered palms and felt the tired, sore spots over my shoulders, all over my back. The furrows were going quickly, now, compared to the start. Every oblong was decreasing in size fast. Each day Craig was getting nearer and nearer to completing the task he had set himself to do.

But after these days of grinding, monotonous work I was ready to go on strike. I swore at the mere mention of the plow. The old horse had been presented with a new set of shoes; his harness had been patched up pretty by the hired man. The plowshare had been braced and strengthened. But nothing had been done for me.

Craig was just as zealous, just as painstaking. Each lump of dirt, each clod was broken patiently and serenely.

"I'm going to call up the 'Follies,' if you persist in this cussed hobby!" I exclaimed, "Right down there, I'll build a platform. And I'll have the show transported to the banks of the Raritan. We'll have a sylvan frolic, end it with a Jersey lightning party, hitch all the girls to the plowshare and drive them around the last furrow!"

IT was somewhat after lunch time when plowing was in order for the afternoon performance that we saw old Jasper Saxton stop again. He had driven by nearly every day. So had the rest of the countryside. Our industry was quoted far and wide. I was looking even for a special writer from the Star to come down to see if I had gone insane, what institution they expected to place me in. I was never known to have worked so hard in my life. I really believe I felt personally acquainted with every horse hair in old Dapple's tail. I had found myself counting them, counting furrows, counting anything.

Jasper sidled over toward us. "By golly! I'd like to have had men working for me the way the two of ye work!" He turned to Craig at length and asked sort of casually, "Be ye goin' ter finish the whole durned meadows?"

"Then what will ye do? What will yer next exercise be? Will yer tear down the old house yourself, maybe?"

I smiled, but to me the old man's inquisitiveness and interest were only natural. Probably he was thinking if he had showed the same ambition as we were exhibiting the last few days he would have had money enough to keep his old home and go to Florida, too.

Kennedy looked at the old man's face sharply. "I thought you were going away, Mr. Saxton."

Jasper Saxton seemed ill at ease. His manner diverted me for the moment from the plowing. "It takes longer to get things settled up than I thought. I'll be goin' in a few days, now." As I regarded him now more closely, I noticed he was even whiter, thinner than when we had first seen him hanging over the fence the day Craig started negotiations for the old Meadowbrook Farm.

Then, too, I noticed he was constantly expectorating. That was a new habit I hadn't seen before. What was the matter with the old codger? Was he getting homesick? There was no evidence of banter in his tone today. It was grieved, peevish.

Looking over the meadows he remarked slowly, "I calc'late another day an' ye'll be finished with this meadow." He was looking away, his eyes squinted up shrewdly, deep crows' feet about them.

Jasper Saxton turned to go away, without even a good-by. He plodded over to his flivver.

"Durned fool! Durned fool! Durned fool!" I heard him muttering under his breath. I wondered was it Kennedy be meant, or himself?

I WAS tired that night, tired and hopeful. Only one more day and that plowing would be over, anyhow. I had been glad to hear Craig admit it when old Saxton had asked him. I wanted to go to bed early and be fresh for the morrow's work.

But Craig was alert, active, full of nervous energy. He could not even sit still in any chair for long. By this time we had all the rooms on the first floor cleaned. He roamed the length of the house and back again.

"Not yet, Walter, please. I feel like talking, like having company. Stay up with me."

I marveled at his stamina. There must be some good in plowing for him. Was the strength coming to him out of Mother Earth direct? The physical exercise of the days past could not dull that mind nor still that nervous energy. I sat back resting in the one big comfortable rocking chair, silent. Craig was pacing quietly back and forth in the room. It was getting late, near midnight.

Bedlam had now broken loose with the dogs. They were barking furiously, deep, low, long barks. Now they were sharp, snappy barks that indicated the sight of their quarry.

Craig had thrust a gun in my hand. We dashed out of the house, never stopping for hats or coats. Ahead we plunged in the blackness over to where the sounds of the dogs indicated trouble. In the darkness I could make out someone running desperately, stumbling over the furrows. Who was it?

We were still too far away to recognize either the voice or the form. We ran. Now I could see it was a man, that he was getting winded. Blindly stumbling, he had used up all his strength.

Out of the darkness, out of the plowed meadow came a voice, imploring. "Call off them dogs, Kennedy!"

Craig called. "Down, Raffles! Here, Sherlock!" The dogs obeyed, crouched. As we came up to the man, he sank to the ground, exhausted. There, before us, was Saxton, haggard, winded, all in.

Saxton's head dropped low on his breast. He was silent. I looked on, amazed at this inexplicable thing that seemed unfolding before me. He put out his trembling hand furtively, as if grasping for some support. Then with an effort he raised his eyes to Craig's face. The whiteness, the pallor stood out in the circle of light from my flash.

Kennedy leaned over and raised the tottering old man to his feet, still weak, quivering with fear. His face wore a hunted, haunted look. Kennedy half dragged, half led him toward the barnyard and house.

"Kennedy!" old Jasper Saxton peered forward, wringing the words from his chattering teeth. "Every day you are getting closer and closer to the middle of that meadow!"

Then there was a silence in the darkness, a silence charged with tragedy, with crime. "You know—and you know I know!" Another pause. "Kennedy—it's in the earth!"

In the shadow of the shed he turned trembling, shuddering, away from the meadow. I kept the dogs quiet. A train, the midnight "Owl," whistled shrilly. The old man jumped as if he had been on the track, chattering.

"That night," his voice had sunk to little more than a hoarse whisper, "that night, I met my brother Samuel on his way to the Sanford shack, across the railroad. We quarreled, over Mary Sanford, the baby, the estate. In the heat of it I shot Samuel—with the derringer of the old man! There was his body, at my feet! It would be found in the morning. The whistle of the train! I dragged the body to the railroad track, laid it across the track.

"But what I had hoped did not happen. The head was severed, tossed forty feet or more from the body. And in that head was gaping that bloody bullet wound! I buried the head—in the meadow, somewhere in the middle!"

A stifled groan escaped the trembling lips of the old man. "Out there, in the meadow, you will find my shovel. I was going to try and dig it up. I dropped the shovel when the dogs heard me."

Kennedy dragged him on into the house. There in the kitchen he sank into a chair, his chair, quaking. Outside the dogs were at the door. He shuddered again, apprehensively, as he thought of their burly forms, interrupting him, pursuing him.

Kennedy was toying with a pair of worn woman's slippers he had drawn from a package in the old secretary in the front room. I recognized them. They were the slippers of her mother that Ruth Sanford Saxton had once shown us. On them was incrusted thick yet the red shale of the meadow.

"I know! I know! I know I The memory of it has driven me insane, too!" In the half dark, his coat off now, his white hair whiter than ever, he started forward from the chair, his arms raised in agony to heaven. "My life has been hell! Sam has been paid—paid in full! Everywhere I looked I saw them. Every voice sounded their voices. They were with me all the time. I couldn't stand it any longer—at my heels, at my elbows, pointing fingers at me in my sleep! I couldn't get any comfort in the house I stole from their child. I sold it, to lose them. And in selling it, they have found me—come closer to me than ever! Oh, my God! Have more mercy than I showed!"

"Though they did not know how well they builded," pursued Craig relentlessly, "those people who said this house was haunted were right. It was haunted, Jasper Saxton, haunted by Mary Sanford's spirit. She knew—and it had driven her insane—to her death!"

"And, now, what are you going to do with me, Kennedy? To-morrow—" He paused as if what would happen to-morrow were too terrible even to think.

"No statute of limitations runs against this crime of yours, Jasper Saxton!" Kennedy's voice had a hard impersonal ring in it, more menacing than anger. "The spirits of Samuel Saxton and Mary Sanford haunt justice. There is no change of venue for that case!" Kennedy stopped. "You can make a will that shall do justice to the baby Ruth. All else is between you and your God!"

Craig dropped the shoes on the deal table. Jasper jumped at the clatter. "It's not what I am going to do with you, Jasper Saxton. It's not what the law is going to do with you. It's what you are going to do with yourself!"

The old man rose, tottered toward the front room. "K—Kennedy, is there a pen—and ink—and paper—in that there secretary of father's?"

Jasper Saxton lay across the hearth. On the secretary lay a hasty, trembling scrawl, leaving all to Ruth. On the floor, beside the body, was the old derringer with which he had killed his brother Samuel.

"In the end," muttered Kennedy, "he was his brother's keeper. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth!"

THE END

"The Fourteen Points," Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1925

ARTHUR B. REEVE

CRAIG KENNEDY AND THE ELEMENTS AIR—WATER—EARTH—FIRE

EARTH

THE END

CRAIG KENNEDY AND THE ELEMENTS
AIR—WATER—EARTH—FIRE