Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/96



Toyo had brought me tea, and I told her, as she sank down on to the cushion, that the song was pretty; that Haru San sang well.

"The heart that is happy is full of song," said Toyo quickly; "she is to be the wife of Tanaka, who comes, wounded, to escape the fighting."

"Bah," she said, "Tanaka is a coward."

But I knew different — so did Haru San.

WHEN WAR EAGLE THROBBED

By C. H. Henry

WW ^^J^ "^Y^ OU'RE my style of a man, Prescott, for a bookkeeper, but as a son-in-law — well, twenty years from now you'll probably still be humped on a stool for a hundred a month. Not saying but your job's a notch above the pick handle and you've prospects of climb- ing; but, man, the honeymoon trip would break you and then you'd be down on earth again with a lead pencil and no figures to work on. You say she loves you, and I suppose she does, in a way she'll naturally get over."

When Superintendent Banners, of the War Eagle Mining Compan}"^, concluded, Prescott's face showed the red and his lips moved as if to resent such an off-hand refusal.

Banners held up his finger. "The man who marries MoUie has got to look down the ladder, not up it."

Prescott winced and nodded. He understood.

It was noon hour and hastily changing coats he left the office just as the big mill whistle screeched the joyful news. A mule in a freight outfit unloading at the company store brayed a sonorous approval and the night shift turned over in their bunks and yawned a curse.

"I don't believe I want any lunch today," mused Prescott, and he turned aimlessly into a trail that crept around huge bowlders here and there and then with frightful acclivity darted up and up.

"The great and only superintendent of the War Eagle Mining Company can't iceep his bookkeeper from thinking of her, anyway," he confided to the trail, as he dug his toes into it and unforgivingly eyed a steep place ahead. "I guess it's up to some fellow with the glitter. It acts like an injection of strychnine on that heart of his."

The ceaseless stamps below pounded and the occasional boom of a blast was tossed from one echo to another till the last seemed to hush it with a reproving whisper. Old War Eagle Mountain was being utterly disembowled.

A low beckoning whistle halted Prescott. He threw a pebble at a chipmunk that scolded him from the branch of a mountain mahogany and then the flutter of a blue parasol in the mouth of the old tunnel used as a powder liouse cauglit his eye, and the very face that caused him to climb steep trails instead of lunching, peeped down at him. The chipmunk ran scolding to its mate as Prescott sat down beside the girl on an empty powder box.

"Well Mollie, I've done it."

"Pooh ! anybody can climb that hill ; you're short winded, that's all !"

"Short-sighted, too, I guess. At least I don't see how you are going to be Jlrs. James Prescott."

The girl was pretty, small and dark. Anybody could love her on an hour's ac- quaintance and even a bookkeeper could be pronounced sane for begging a few moments' private conversation with the superintendent.

"Papa says I shouldn't come here. It's dangerous you know, because there's a carloafl of giant powder stored behind us. Don't you feel a little creepy?"

"Mollie, I'm a nonentity in his eyes. Luck has got to work double-