The Land of Content. Edith Barnard Delano
into the pike.
But again there echoed through the woods the unaccustomed sound that had aroused the doctor. This time it was too near to be mistaken; not even White Rosy's calm could ignore it.
"Hel—lo!" said Ogilvie. "A big horn and a noiseless car! Pretty early in the season for those fellows. Make way for your betters, White Rosy!"
He drew well into the green of the roadside; for, highway and turnpike though it was, the road was narrow enough in this unfrequented part to make passing a matter of calculation. The driver of the automobile had evidently discovered that for himself, for he was climbing slowly and carefully, sounding his horn as frequently as if driving through a village. As the car came out upon the cleared space of the crossroads, Ogilvie turned, with the frank interest of the country dweller in the passer-by, and with the countryman's etiquette of the road waved to its solitary occupant.
The driver of the car returned the greeting, drew slowly forward, and stopped beside the doctor's old buggy. Ogilvie was not so much of a countryman as not to recognize in the machine's powerful outlines the costly French racer. But that was only another of Destiny's disguises. The two men met on the mountain-top, took cognizance of each other in that high solitude where the things of the world lay below them; and, face to face, each measured the other and insensibly recognized his worth of character. Both knew men; both had been trained to the necessity of forming quick judgments. Before they had exchanged a word they were sure of each other; before the hour was out their friendship was as certain as if it were years old.
The occupant of the car had a smile which was apt to be grimly humorous, as Ogilvie noted in the moment before he spoke.
"I'm lost!" the stranger said, as if admitting a joke on himself. "I've come around in a circle twice, looking for a place called Bluemont Summit, and I've sounded my horn right along, hoping somebody would run out to look, somebody I could ask my way of. But you're the first person I've seen this afternoon!"
Ogilvie laughed aloud. "No wonder, if you've been blowing your horn all the way," he said. "If you had kept still, you might have come on someone unawares; but nobody around here would run out to look at you in the open."
"Is there anyone to run?" the other asked, again with the grim twist of his lips.
"Yes, but they are shy, and too proud to seem curious. There may be eyes on us now, peeping through those woods," said Ogilvie. "But you're not far from the Summit, not far, that is, with that car of yours. This is the Battlesburg Road, and you're ten miles or so to the northwest of Bluemont."
The driver of the car had stepped down into the road to do something to his lamps; it was already so dark that their gleam shot far ahead. White Rosy eyed them dubiously.
"Only ten miles! Jove, I'm glad of that! Mountain air does whet a man's appetite! The High Court is the best hotel, isn't it?"
Ogilvie looked at the other for a moment or two before answering: looked, indeed, until the stranger glanced questioningly up at him, as if wondering at the delay. Then he said:
"My name's Ogilvie, and I'm the doctor around here. I wish you'd let me prescribe a hot meal at my house for you. It's this side of the Summit."
The other man's smile had lost its grimness. "That's mighty good of you," he said. "And you won't have to coat that dose with sugar!"
"I wonder," the doctor went on, "if you'd play host first, and give me a lift? I'm as hungry as you are, and White Rosy here likes to choose her own gait. If you'll take me home, we'll be at my house in one tenth the time, and Rosy can find her way alone. She's done it many a time."
The other man looked at the old mare, and as he answered stroked her nose and gave her shoulder a friendly smack or two.
"Certainly I'll give you a lift," he said. "Good of you to suggest it. This old lady looks as if she knew as much as most of us. I hope you won't hurt her feelings by deserting her!"
Ogilvie had come down to the road, and already deposited his black bags and his old brown cap in the automobile; now he was busy unbuckling Rosy's reins.
"Not a bit of it," he said. "She'll come home all the quicker for not having me on her mind! It's home and oats, Rosy, oats, remember," he said as he got up into the automobile with the reins in his hand.
"My name is Flood—Benson Flood, and I've been down in Virginia buying a little old farm for the shooting they tell me the neighborhood's good for. I never use road maps—like to discover things for myself. That's how I got lost to-day."
Ogilvie, leaning back, could inspect the face of the man beside him. Involuntarily, his expression had slightly changed at the name. Benson Flood was as well known to readers of the daily papers as Hecla or Klondike or Standard Oil, and stood for about the same thing—wealth, spectacular wealth. The name had heretofore interested John Ogilvie neither more nor less than any of the others; now, sitting beside its possessor, it carried a different and more personal significance. It seemed almost grotesquely unreal that an actual living person, a man to be met at a mountain crossroads, could calmly introduce himself as Benson Flood, and be as frankly and comfortably hungry as anyone else. These thoughts, however, took but an instant.
"Well, you've seen a bit of country, anyway," he replied, quite as if his mind were not busy on its separate line of speculation. Flood's face was not what he would have expected to find it. It had not lost its lean ruggedness, nor put on those fleshly signs of indulgence that are so apt to follow the early acquisition of great wealth. The well-cut mouth was very firm, and there was something of the idealist, the questioner, the seeker of high things, about the eyes and brow that Ogilvie found puzzling and interesting.
"Yes; and what a view there was from that crossroads up there! I wish I could transplant my Virginia farm to that mountain-top.
"A good many men have seen that view; the army retreated from Battlesburg along this old pike, you know."
"Ah, Battlesburg! I'm from the West, where history is not much more than we fellows have made it; it fairly stirs my blood to come across a place like Battlesburg, with its monuments, and its memories, and where Lincoln spoke, and all that. I'm going to run up there to-morrow, if the hotel people can set me on my way early enough."
"I'm afraid you'll have to trust me to do that," said Ogilvie. "There's my house, there where the light's in the front porch; and—I hope you won't think I've kidnapped you, but I'm going to keep you over night. The hotels aren't open at this time of year."
As the car stopped before the doctor's cottage, Flood turned to his host. "Oh, I say! That's mighty good of you! Won't I put you out? Isn't there some place I can go to?"
But Ogilvie laughed. "There is not, but I wouldn't tell you if there was! Why, Mr. Flood, I haven't talked to anyone from beyond the mountains for six months!"
II
Spring, that stole upon the mountains with an evanescent fragrance, and unfolding of delicate greens and shy opening blossoms, swept into the city with a blaze of life and color, with a joyous outpouring of people and bedizening of shop-windows; and nowhere else was its influence so marked as on the Avenue. Motor vehicles crowded from curb to curb, held back or permitted to sweep onward by the uplifted hands of mighty creatures in uniform, horseback and afoot, imperturbably calm, lords and rulers and receivers of tribute; the sidewalks swarmed with people, lines of men and women swinging northward and southward, some buoyantly conscious of new-fashioned raiment, their eyes apparently unaware of the jostling crowd, some with tiny dogs under their arms, some looking at the passing faces, or bowing to people in motor cars, a few glancing into the brilliant windows of the shops, a few chatting and laughing with companions.
Benson Flood, returned from Virginia the day before, was one of those who, marching northward, looked searchingly into the faces of the people he passed, and frequently glanced into the automobiles on his