XLIII

JOHN like all the others signed steel trust certificates until his hand became an automaton. If he noticed what it was doing it faltered and forgot. He sat in the big room at the long table, a clerk standing by to remove the engraved sheets one by one and blot the signature. Suddenly he saw it all as for the first time, in an original, unfamiliar manner.

“What are we doing?” he asked the clerk.

“Signing the certificates, sir. They want this lot before 2 o’clock.”

“Yes, but what does it mean?”

[THE TREES SAID TO THE BRAMBLE COME REIGN OVER US]

BY

GARET GARRETT

Author of “The Driver,” “The Cinder Buggy,” “Satan’s Bushel,” etc.

NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1927

By E. P. Dutton & Company

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Man is the only animal that can think as if. Hence the Arabian nights, the flying carpet, the pyramids, the zodiac, the artifacts, discontent, utopias and politics. He says, Lo! and the world is not there. Or Lo! again, and he is not there.

I

It was a filthy night. The February harpy had lost her wind brats and was running wide in the avenues, railing, calling, tearing her hair; and her demented brood was brawling in the by-ways.

Empty ash-cans were overturning, rolling, bumbling, saying scandal. Gray streaks of feline terror. Sounds of grating, snapping, creaking, whamming, unholding, unfastening, all for an instant swallowed up suddenly in deep holes of stillness. An electric gong unable to stop. A female shriek, the same for murder or the loss of a hat. Then the din again.

I

Capuchin returned to New Freedom moving the waters before him. He had in his pocket a blind draft on a New York bank for a sum fifty thousand dollars more than enough to buy the one important newspaper in the state. At the last moment he had had the inspiration to exaggerate the purchase price; afterward he justified it neatly on the ground that the excess was working capital. He meant to put it all in.

With him to New Freedom went Dwind, to write him a banking law, loaned for that purpose by the Lothian College, and Semicorn, to do what should turn out to be best.