Motion Picture Story Magazine (Aug-Dec 1913)

94 THE MOTION PICTURE STORY MAGAZINE been driven from the house on the hill. Big with his resolve he was up betimes the next morning and, dressed in gaudy summer tweeds, shook his father 's hand in farewell. Two hours afterwards, in seedy store-clothes, he tramped into the mill-yard and asked Neilan for a job. The foreman took careful note of the applicant's broad shoulders, with the driving power that went with them, and assigned the green hand to the boiler-room. In the steam and stench of summer heat and the withering glare from the furnace pits, Wallace first found out what work really meant. And as the days went on, and Neilan had taken him into his own home, the boy became as lean as a tiger under the gruelling test. But, with night, Neilan 's little cottage appeared a perfect heaven to his red-rimmed eyes and sweated body. He began to see things from the men 's side. They were underpaid, overdriven, menaced w^ith fear by wornout machinery and boilers. Yes, the boiler-house was a stalking death, as even his unskilled mind could grasp. There was a girl in the foreman's cottage, Jim's sister, and at first he paid scant attention to her. He realized, in a vague way, that she cooked their food, and that her shapely hands danced nimbly before his tired eyes, with the dishes and table things. She was pale and tall, with brown hair coiled low like a mask, and sometimes he thought that she looked at him — he couldn't be sure — the evenings were too short. But when the day came that Archie Lloyd's boy, Bert, was cut down by a broken flywheel, and they brought the slip of a body to Jim's house, then, that night, he watched the girl as she hovered over the poor thing in the corner and tried to patch up its torn clothes against the coming of Archie, and her definite likeness began to fasten in his brain. She was sweet, that was the word, sweet to a tired man, and he wondered where a foreman's sister could have caught her graceful way and the ■ straight-eyed look of her. It was terrible the way Archie Lloyd went to pieces when they led him in before the wreckage of his boy, and the old man went quite wild with his cries and ravings against McInarrie up on the hill. Wallace tumbled savagely in his bed from the thought of the thing, and resolved to seek his father out the next night. It was under the glow of a readinglamp that Wallace found his father, J and, with the pouring out of his story, * the relentless man's eyes hardened to the glint of steel. "Dinna come to me," he cried, "wi' your silly vaporings. I have no ither son^^a pretty one I've fathered!" "Father!" "Go back to the shameless quean," roared Mclnarrie, beside himself, "that has driven ye daft, and be a slave in my quarry for the rest of your life. God forgive ye, for I canna abide an unnatural son. ' ' Wallace walked out of the house of his father, resolved never to enter it again and thinking shame of his insult to Neilan 's sister. All his way down the sheer hill she stumbled into his thoughts — her calm way, her supple, strong body, her mother's eyes — and he made up his mind to become her devoted friend. And so, of nights, he, in turn, took to watching her, until her full, young bosom rose and fell, and the telltale tinge of youth worked thru the white of her cheeks. It was the daftness of Archie Lloyd that first started a bond of sympathy. The old weaver had gradually gotten worse and worse after his boy 's death, and brooded, with slack hands and staring eyes, over his empty shuttles. Neilan and Pauline discussed his case in lowered tones, and it was only by dint of repeated attempts that Wallace was allowed to counsel with them. The fact was that they half-suspected him of double-dealing. On one of the foreman's visits to Archie, the