Clung E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Another great Western by Max Brand aka Frederick Faust, Clung is one his most memorable and intriguing characters. As a Western author, Brand did not shrink from controversial topics such as race relations in the Old West. There is a mystery about the birth of Clung, who is raised by an old Chinese man in a small Arizona town, but none about his skill with weapons. At first he shoots in self-defense, then recklessly to avenge an insult. With a price on his head, he begins a long journey that takes him far beyond the border country into strange and dangerous encounters. Here, readers will find the Eastern mysticism they seek, Confucian ethics, and a kind of loyalty they may not expect set against one thrilling action scene after another.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 1

THE Lord having made Clung and placed him where he did, the rest followed by the inevitable law of matter-of-course. Nobody understood this. Clung least of all. The whites said he was “just a plain, no good Chink, growing up for a rope necklace;” the Chinese said he was “possessed of a devil.” Clung probably thought that both parties were right. He never said so, but then Clung was not given to words. The whites would probably have lynched the boy save for two things: first, Clung confined his attentions to the Mexicans; second, everyone had a warm spot in his heart for old Li Clung, the boy’s father, who ran the laundry in that Arizona town. In the Southwest they will tell you that when a Chinaman is good he’s not too good to bear watching, and when a Chinaman is bad–well, he’s awful. Clung was bad. He killed men. Everybody knew his record, or at least a part of it, but for the sake of old Li they postponed the inevitable hanging. Nevertheless, if Clung had been built in a different way, or had lived in a different place–

The lot of a weakly man in the Southwest is peculiarly unfortunate. There is no place for him; people wonder why he exists. He’s a public encumbrance–an eyesore. Clung was weakly. For a Chinese he was tall; among whites he was of middle height; but he was exceedingly frail. His hands were like the hands of a woman, small, transparent almost. It was a graceful thing to watch that delicate hand against the ugly red-brown of a whiskey glass. His wrist was so slenderly made that if a strong man had grasped him there the bones would have crunched together.

Obviously he was a half-breed of some sort–perhaps his mother was Spanish, though old Li would never speak of that. She must have been white; otherwise there was no accounting for the fine, pale complexion of Clung. His eyes, too, were not slanted, but wide, gentle, brown. His hair was black and as smooth as silk.

Being weakly, Clung was early forced to find something which would take the place of physical strength, because without protection of some sort he was sure to perish early. For this was the Southwest, and the border was in a continual need of taming. Clung had not far to look before he found out what he must do. He became expert in the use of weapons.

Nothing is very really mastered unless it is first at least commenced in childhood. A man must begin to learn acrobatics before he’s ten. The same thing is true of language study and other things–amongst them of guns. Clung began using revolvers when he was hardly more than an infant. His father, old Li, pampered the boy; he used to show off his accomplishments to his patrons. When he was eight years old, Clung had a little twenty-two rifle. And he practiced with the weapons continually. Li paid the bills and Clung banged off countless rounds of ammunition. The cowpunchers showed him many ways of carrying a gun and how to pull it, and whirl it, and shoot with a quick turn. Of course he could never have been great with a gun if he had not had the instinct for it; anyone in the Southwest will tell you that. A man may practice all his life, but unless he has an instinct for shooting quick and sure he will never be a startling success near the border.

Those early times were golden days for Clung. The patrons teased him and talked with him; old Li adored him. Little Clung, when he was not playing with his knives or guns, sat cross-legged on a table near the front door of the laundry, and kept his blank brown eyes fixed on the passers-by, and smiled the faint, faint smile of the Orient. He always wore his pig-tail twisted in a funny knot on top of his head, and Li kept it tied at the end with a ribbon of black silk. When he turned his head, with one of his catlike motions, the ribbon flounced foolishly from side to side. Then the golden days ended.

Clung had grown up; he possessed his full portion of slender, erect height; the cow-punchers were beginning to ask him when he would open a laundry of his own, and Clung, in place of answering, would wave those fragile hands unmeant for work, and smile that faint smile of the Orient. Then one day a stranger came to town and entered the laundry. He was a Mexican of much importance; he had two followers in the street on horseback. The Mexican did not know Clung. How should he? Neither did he know that after the midday meal Clung loved to sit in the sun on the little table near the door, with his legs folded cat-wise under him, and sleep, and smile into the sun while he slept. Also, Clung did not like to be roused from that afternoon siesta. Of all this, however, the Mexican was ignorant. He came in with the sun flashing on his silver braid, and started to ask Clung a question.

It was not answered, so he snapped Clung on the end of the nose with his riding quirt.

It must have hurt exceedingly, but Clung merely opened slowly those wide, brown, gentle eyes, and his smile never altered. He looked beyond the Mexican and into a thousand years of space. It angered the Mexican to see that impassive face. He reached out to grip Clung by the shoulder and shake him into complete wakefulness. Then it happened.

Before that hand touched the Chinese shoulder a knife appeared from under the silken tunic of Clung, and the knife blade passed in and out of the palm of the Mexican’s hand. There is no place on the body more sensitive than the palm of the hand. Perhaps that’s why school-mistresses whip refractory children there. Strong men have been known to weep when hurt in the palm of the hand. The Mexican screamed with pain, leaped back, and drew his revolver with his uninjured hand.

There was a white man in the laundry at the moment, and he swore in court afterwards that the gun of the Mexican was out of the holster before Clung made a move. Then a gun appeared, as if conjured out of thin air, and the Mexican dropped in a heap with a bullet fairly between the eyes. His followers started shooting from the road; Clung killed them neatly and with dispatch; a bullet through the head of each.

And he remained sitting on his table by the door. The marshal found him there, smiling into the sun. The judge cautioned him, declared it self-defense, and dismissed the case.

CHAPTER 2

In the Southwest any man can be excused for one shooting match, provided that the other party is Mexican; but a second affair causes people to frown, and a third is almost sure to bring down the heavy hand of the law. Now, within a week Clung killed his fourth man; within ten days he had killed his fifth.

Always he was apprehended sitting cross-legged on the little table at the door of the laundry, drowsing after dinner; always his excuses were allowable; always the Mexicans were the aggressors. They were avengers come to wipe out the blood-debt. They waylaid Clung and fell upon him at weird times and in strange places, and they were killed suddenly, neatly, with bullets through the head.

This caused his marksmanship to be more admired than ever, but the cowpunchers ceased to linger at the table of Clung and he was no longer asked to show his skill with the guns, shooting at fantastic targets. This caused Clung to wonder. Finally he went to Li with one of his rare questions, but Li merely raised his calloused hands to the witnessing gods and shook his head.

The silent feud went on. The Mexicans had marked Clung, and now and again they came in parties or one at a time, heated with mescal and eager to win a great name. They departed again the worse for wear, and Clung still sat cross-legged on the little table near the laundry door. This continued; men began to refer to Clung as a bad ‘un.

In the end it was sure to result in tragedy to someone more important than a Mexican, but the fatal day delayed. Li grew older, more withered, more like a yellow mask of grinning comedy; Clung continued to bask every day in the sun.

And so it came to a spring day when the air was cool and a little crisp and gently fanned the cheek of Clung where he sat on the table. He raised his head and saw a triangle of wild geese winging north; their honking dropped to him, now a single cry, now a faintly jangled chorus, wind-blown; the smile went out on the lips of Clung.

He uncurled his slender legs and asked money of Li, and received it, for the old Chinese had forgotten how to refuse. So Clung went out and returned with a little Victrola. It played with a wheeze and a rattle, but nevertheless it kept a rhythm. Clung brought in an Indian girl and in the evenings he learned to dance.

He practiced diligently, silently, for hours and hours, until the girl would drop to a chair, exhausted. Having mastered the steps, he wound his pig-tail in the most obscure of knots and put on store clothes–the clothes of the whites–and rode many miles to a country dance.

Now, as anyone from the Southwest will tell you, this was very rashly done. Men were loth to touch Clung, however. They would as soon have put hands on a rattler coiled to strike.

It seemed that tragedy would be averted again from the path of Clung and the day of reckoning postponed, for it chanced that there was in the crowd a marshal exceedingly wise in the ways of the border. He came to Clung and spoke softly–with his hand on the butt of his gun. He explained that Chinese were not welcome at dances of whites. The dreamy smile returned to the lips of Clung. He tried to shove his hands into the alternate sleeves, but was prevented by the unaccustomed cuffs of the white man.

He stared about the hall until he saw a girl laughing at him. She had pale yellow hair and the light burned like a fire in it, and her throat was white, and the bosom that curved out below it was as keen as snow. Clung turned very pale; he was whiter than the whitest man in that room. He managed to wriggle his fingers into the alternate cuffs; he bowed to the marshal, and turned on his heel.

According to all rules of man and the unwritten laws of the Southwest, the thing should have ended there, but where the laws of the Southwest leave off, John Barleycorn often begins. He stepped in here in the person of Josiah Boyce.

Now, Josiah wore guns because everyone else wore them, but he had never been known to use them on even a rabbit. He probably wouldn’t have known what to do with them if they had been naked and loaded in his hands. Ordinarily Josiah was a sleepy fellow who sat in corners twisting his long moustaches and looking out upon the world from beneath shaggy brows with moist, pathetic eyes. But when he had a few drinks of whiskey under his belt Josiah became a noisy nuisance. He was always either extremely confidential, going about and assuring everyone that they knew him and that he was their friend; or else he waxed boisterous and insisted on telling greybearded jests. He was in his boisterous mood this night. Unfortunately he forgot for a single second about the record of Clung. The moment the marshal turned his back, Josiah rushed up, clapped his hand on the shoulder of Clung, and whirled him around as if he were a top. He started to bellow out that the damned Chink ought to be whipped, and that if no one else would do it, he’d take the job on his own hands.

Everyone laughed, except the marshal, who started on the run. Clung was smiling, and the marshal had seen that smile before. What Clung really saw was not Josiah at all, but the convulsed mirth of the girl with the yellow hair. The laughter, apparently, thrilled Josiah with joy. He saw himself at last in the role of a successful entertainer, and grasped Clung by his pig-tail, preparatory to dragging him out of the hall.

The marshal was only a step away when this happened–only a step away–one step too late. He arrived just in time to receive the toppling body of what had been Josiah Boyce in his arms. Clung vanished through the door.

They started a half-hearted pursuit, but Clung rode one of the best horses in Arizona and his weight was so light that the marshal knew he had no chance of wearing down the fugitive. He called off the ride and went back to town to have Clung outlawed. In the meantime Clung cut back by a sharp detour and went to the house of his father.

Li sat on a cushion on the floor with a taper-light rising high on either side of him. Across his knees a large volume was opened; he wore on his head a little black silk cap with a crimson tassel. Clung closed the door softly and stood very conscious of his store clothes–waiting.

When Li finally looked up, it was with a slow glance, starting at the boots of Clung, and the further the glance traveled up the person of Clung, the paler Li became until he looked like parchment which has first been yellowed with age and then bleached in the sun. Then he got up without a word and went to a little safe at the side of the room. He opened it and took out a bag of money–a canvas bag plumply filled.

“It is all I have, my son,” said Li. “Go!”

Clung took it in his hand, weighed it, and slipped it into his pocket. He seemed very excited and his nostrils were quivering, so that he was not a pleasant sight to see.

“I have killed a white man,” he said.

“It is true,” nodded Li.

They talked much more perfect English than the whites around them, and Li, for some reason, would never talk their native tongue with his son.

“Father,” said Clung, “I am not well about the stomach.”

The old Chinese ran to him swiftly, making a little sound of dole, a sort of guttural whine.

“No,” said Clung, “they have not hurt me, except here.”

And he pressed both slender hands against his breast.

He said: “I have seen a white woman and I am hungry with a hunger that food will not fill up; and I am weak and sick here.”

Old Li cried out in Chinese, a harsh wail.

“Mix herbs for me,” said Clung rapidly. “Make me strong before I leave, for I have far to go. They will never leave my trail.”

“Oh, my son,” moaned Li, “there is no drink of herbs that will help you. No water will put out the fire of woman; it will burn you to ashes; it will make you hollow.”

“You,” said Clung in his soft voice, “are not like me. No woman could make you burn or make you hollow. Why am I different?”

“Your mother was white,” said Li.

“I am neither white nor yellow,” said Clung. “Father, I am damned two ways. I go.”

He stood stiff against the door, one hand raised high over his head; old Li stiffened in the same manner. Then Clung turned and caught the knob of the door. He swung it open and then closed it again. He turned on Li.

“Your eyes have told me one thing and your tongue another,” he said. “Which lie shall I hold to, father?”

Now one does not need to live in the Southwest to know that the last crime for a Chinese is to turn against his father. Li grew green with horror; he could not speak.

“It is true,” said Clung, smiling his own faint smile. “You have lied to me. Now tell me the truth.”

CHAPTER 3

“You have doubted your father twice,” said Li. “For each doubt you shall be tortured a hundred years hereafter.”

“And for the third doubt,” said Clung, “I shall be tortured terribly for a thousand years. I doubt you again. Why am I different?”

“It was the will of God that made you unlike your father. You are all your mother.”

“It is true,” said Clung. “You have been good to me, but if I were like you, father, I would take this knife, so! and cut my throat wide and die. As it is, I take it, so–and take you by the throat, so!–and hold this knife at your breast, so!–and say: ‘The truth–tell me the truth!’”

Old Li was a brave man, as many a riotous cowpuncher had learned in his time, but now a tremor like the palsy of old age struck him. He stared fascinated up at the changed face of Clung.

“A ghost!” he whispered.

“Of whom?”

“Of your father.”

The knife glimmered, twisting slowly in the hands of Clung.

“Devil,” he said, “who was my father?”

“A white man–an American,” said Li, “and your mother white also.

“But,” said Li softly, “you are my son! See! the knife trembles in your hand–you are shaking with hunger to strike–but you cannot–you are my son.”

“I,” said Clung slowly, “am white?”

He stepped back; he uncoiled his pig-tail with a single movement, held the hair taut, and severed the sinuous, snaky length with a single slash of the knife. The black hair, springing back, fell wildly about his face.

“Why?” said Clung.

“A man wronged me,” said Li. “He was not young; his wife could have no more children. I stole the baby. I made him my son.”

“Who?” said Clung.

“He is dead; she is dead.”

“And I am living,” said Clung.

“As my son. Will the white men believe you are white? Will the yellow men believe you are yellow? No, you are nothing, but my son. In your mind you may know you are white; in your heart you know you are my son. It is done; it is perfect.”

“You are not afraid?” asked Clung.

“Shall a father fear his son?”

“Yellow devil!”

“True. And there is a devil in my son; my people have seen it.”

Clung took out the canvas bag of money and dropped it clinking on the floor.

“So,” said Li, nodding. “But you will come back.”

“Never.”

“No man can live alone. It is written.”

“It shall be unwritten again.”

“The white women,” said Li. “The hunger, my son.”

“Damn you!” whispered Clung.

But he dropped to his knees; he folded his hands on his breast.

“I go,” he said. “Give me the blessing of one who departs.”

The calloused, yellowed hands touched the black, rough-shorn head, and Li uttered a sing-song incantation in the language of his fathers. Afterwards Clung rose and spurred out of the town of Mortimer, but because of the devil that was in him, he chose a way through the very heart of the place where men could not choose but see him pass. A crackle of firing rose on either side of him, and Clung fired four times in return. Spenser and Wilson fell with bullets in their legs; Jefferson was hit in the shoulder and spun like a top before he dropped; Marshal Clauson was not touched, but his best horse was shot under him. The tall dapple-grey which Clung rode flickered out into the night and the men of Mortimer rose in crowds and formed six different posses and combed the desert in every direction. For four days they stuck by the trail.

Nevertheless, they did not catch Clung. They sighted him several times sliding over the hills or down some hollow as swiftly as a cloud shadow on a windy March day, and as soundlessly. They tried to chase him in a circle, as men chase wild horses; Clung broke through that circle and left Sandy Matthews and young Glover badly shot up behind him. That put heart in the men of Mortimer, because it proved conclusively that Clung was not shooting to kill. If he had been–well, the men of Mortimer remembered sundry Mexicans shot neatly through the head. So they rode recklessly on the trail of Clung, but at the end of four days he had disappeared hopelessly into the desert; the purple hills which shroud men and their doings had swallowed him up. The posses went back to Mortimer and a fat price was placed on the head of Clung.

As for Clung, he was sorry when the posses went back. It had been good fun–much better than any game of tag; he even followed the posses to the outskirts of Clauson in the late afternoon of the fourth day, and he sat his horse on the brow of a hill and watched the lights grow out in the dusk of the evening, street by street, striping the broad heart of the night. Then he turned his horse about and rode towards the northern hills.

All was not well with Clung. He was thinking of those days when he sat cross-legged on the little table at the door of the laundry, with his eyes closed, smiling into the heat of the sun. Also, he thought of old Li, sitting with the tall taper on either side and the big volume spread across his knees; he thought, last of all, about the yellow-haired girl who had laughed at him. The hollowness returned to the heart of Clung.

He remembered now that he was white–he remembered it every time the edges of the rough-shorn hair flipped in the wind across his face; but what good was there in being white if no one would believe it? He hardly believed it himself, and hardly prized it, as yet, for the old precepts of Li swept through his brain: “The white man is a fool before whom one listens twice and speaks once.” The chief new sense which came to Clung was one of freedom, of a power and a will to roam at ease through all the desert and the hills. He was an American; he felt a sense of ownership in three million square miles; the first spark of patriotism smouldered in him, the first sense of nationality.

As yet, it worked obscurely. He had lived with his thoughts harking back to the lives of his ancestors. Now those yellow ancestors were gone, but still his thoughts harked back. Newness overwhelmed him; his blood ran faster; the air drew keenly down in his lungs; there was a tang to life; there was a birth of pride of race.

It was this same thing that caused his loneliness, perhaps, for he was like a mariner who returns from a long voyage and meets all his old friends, and knows them, but they will not recognize him. On the very day that he became a white man, the whites commenced to hunt him.

He knew perfectly well the outcome of the chase. They had missed him today; they would miss him the next time and the next that they hunted him, but in the end he would be taken; his destiny was no less certain through being postponed. There is no outlaw who has not known, and there is none who has not thrown away, the thought of tomorrow and lost himself in today. The law of compensation worked in Clung; freedom was doubly sweet because it would not last forever.

He had led a strange, shut-in existence. Now he saw the world, since he was in danger of being lost from it, and behold! it was fair to see, and filled, now, with his white brothers. At this point in his reflections a gun banged close by and a bullet whizzed by his head; a group of the posse, returning late, had sighted him through the dusk. He raised his gun, poised it–and then spurred the grey off through the dark. At that moment he had no further taste for blood, but he carried away at that galloping pace the certainty that his white brothers who filled the world would be in no hurry to claim their relationship with him.

CHAPTER 4

There followed a month of comparative inactivity for Clung. On several occasions he descended upon stores and purchased what he needed in the way of supplies, but the most picturesque incident recorded of him during that period was the ride into San Marco, where he held up a barber’s shop–backed the customers into one end of the room, and then took his seat, guns in hand, and forced the barber to trim his wild, black hair. He had the image of the barber in the glass before him and the latter could not make a suspicious move without being seen. When his hair was cut Clung ordered one of the men to drop a five dollar goldpiece in the hand of the barber, and before he left, he announced that if the stranger attempted to collect that five again he would have to reckon with Clung later on. The five was never collected; and the heart of the barber was softened towards Clung.

Rumor had not dealt too gently with the fugitive in the meantime. Crimes performed hundreds of miles away from Clung were saddled upon his luckless shoulders, and all men believed the tales. They could hardly accumulate fast enough; men taxed their inventions to create appropriate crimes for Clung. He was the only Chinese desperado known to Arizona, and much was expected of him. In the episode of the barber’s shop, for instance, rumor made him kill everyone in the place before leaving, winding up his pleasant little party by cutting the throat of the barber with his own razor.

Meanwhile, Clung rode by night and slept during the day. He missed the long sun baths at the door of the laundry and moreover this continual life by night was beginning to dim his tan; once when he saw himself in the mirror behind a bar he hardly recognized the rapidly changing color of his face. He did not mind the loneliness–all his life he had had it, and it might be said that he was educated for the part of a lone rider of the mountain-desert. Only one vision returned to disturb him both by day and by night, and this was the picture of the girl with the pale yellow hair, laughing sometimes, sometimes merely smiling; but always with an air of mockery as if she had something to confide in him if he could only reach her and listen.

It was because of this troubling vision, perhaps, that he started riding one day before the dusk had set in. His goal was nameless; activity was his only end, until, in the slant light of the late sun, he caught a flash of color. He swung the grey to the left and raced for two miles up a gulley; then he dismounted and crept to the top of the ridge and sheltered himself behind a bush.

In due time the color reappeared–bright blue, with a splash of yellow, developing into a girl riding at a dog-trot. The blue was the color of her waist, and the yellow was the straw of her hat. She passed close, but not close enough for Clung to see her face. He followed her with his eyes until she had passed out of view around a winding of the trail; the moment the sun had winked for the last time on the bright yellow of her hat, something went out in Clung. It was as if a light had been shining in him, and being puffed out, he was suddenly left all dark and cold inside.

He went back to the gulley, swung into the saddle, and pursued the blue and yellow vision, keeping always just out of her vision, lurking, and trailing her like a dangerous shadow until she came to the largest ranch-house that Clung had ever seen. It was rather more like some fine old Colonial house in the south, and around it, on every side, stretched a deep verandah, with a roof supported by white pillars. There were evidently artesian wells near the house, for green things grew around it–a stretch of lawn–a hedge of some unfamiliar plant–a number of spreading palms whose fringed limbs brushed together, like whispers in the wind of the evening.

The barn behind the house was almost as large as the residence itself, and up to this the girl rode, dismounted, tossed the reins to a man who came from the barn-door, and ran into the house carrying a small parcel. All this Clung witnessed from behind the brow of a hill, squinting his eyes to pierce the distance and it seemed to him that all the brightness and the happiness in the world was bounded there by the four walls. Truly, he was marvelously lonely.

He left his horse again, waited until the darkness formed a sufficient screen, and then approached the house, soft as one of those oncoming shadows of the night. It was completely dark, now, and he sat comfortably on the moist, cool sod under a palm, only a few yards from the front of the verandah.

A servant appeared–a Chinese–and Clung smiled to himself, tilting back his head with half-closed eyes; the yellow race were servants in his land–but he was one of the white brothers. There is no warmth like that of self-content. It stole over Clung now like a man from the Arctic warming himself before a pleasant fire and caressing the objects of comfort with his eyes. The servant lighted a row of square-framed Japanese lanterns; at once the verandah grew bright with the soft flames. Now the Chinese turned, his pig-tail flopping awkwardly, and the door clicked shut after him.

The doors opened again almost at once, held wide by a little old man in black clothes with a white vest, crossed by a golden chain. He was stooped from work at a desk, and age had bared his head as religion bares the head of a monk. Against the redness of that bald head the circle of silver hair made pleasant contrast. As he held the doors he was smiling and speaking back towards the hall within, which lay just out of range of Clung’s vision. Next came an invalid chair wheeled by the girl he had seen riding. Her clothes were now filmy white, to be sure, and until this moment he had never seen her face; nevertheless, he knew that it was she. He closed his eyes. He felt that he could tell her presence as one tells the species of a flower in the night–by its peculiar fragrance.

Clung had the Oriental love of perfumes. He could construct the history of his life out of the smells he had known. The peculiar, steamy aroma of the ironing room in the laundry, to be sure, was the background out of which all else grew, but against that background other things were trebly precious. Old Li had some rare silks from China and there hung about them a faint lilac fragrance which had clothed Clung’s boyhood as with an atmosphere of poesy. Then there was the garden of Marshal Clauson. Flowers were to Clung what wine is to others. He had loved to walk slowly past the garden of the marshal in the night, slowly, inch by inch, breathing deeply–his head back and his eyes half closed–distinguishing the various scents and naming each unseen flower in the dark. He thought of this now when the girl came out on the verandah, wheeling the invalid. He hardly knew whether she were beautiful or ugly, young or old; he merely wished suddenly to be close enough to have the wind blow a fragrance from her to him. He sat there on his heels in a sort of happy expectation until this thing should be.

It was a rather sad emotion, also. It reminded him of certain paintings of flowers upon silk–Chinese work which old Li also owned and brought forth on state occasions.

Clung had loved these paintings but they always made him sad. There were other flowers, to be sure, which he could have and enjoy, but these peculiar, beautiful ones which the artist had painted, they must have been dust a thousand years before. It was the same with the girl. She entered his life with the scents of the flowers of other years; she was apart from him, unpossessed, unpossessable–another age and another world. He wondered that the two men did not sit before her as he would have done–with his head tilting back and his eyes half closed, drinking in her presence. This thought made him lower his head with a frown and look more closely upon the two fortunate ones who sat so close to her–see! they could reach out their hands and touch her, if they wished!