The chief greeted him with temper, and soon Saxe learned why. The woman had left the hut before dawn, taking with her her master's largest knife. She was found later in her own little hovel, dead, with a clean stab to her heart. Suicide is virtually unknown among savages, and the village was astir. Saxe asked to see the body at once, but that, it seems, was not etiquette: he had to wait until it was prepared for burial. For an instant, he said, he thought of bargaining for the body, but forebore. He had a difficult return journey to make, and the point was, after all, to see it. When they permitted him to enter the hut, the face had been piously disfigured beyond recognition. He told me that he lifted the tattooed hand and kissed it: he did not know why. It was clear that if the woman had—preposterously-been Mary, she would not have wished it; and if she were the other, it was almost indecent. But he could not help it. This impulse of his seems to have been his only recognition of Mary Bradford. In life and in death, she suppressed every sign of herself with consummate art.

We were a fevered group that waited for Saxe day after day at the Mission; and he seemed to have been gone an intolerably long time. The broken leg that had kept me from going with him was almost well when he returned. Yet he had taken the shortest way back. It was also the unhealthiest. He said that he had heard war rumors that made him avoid the more frequented trail, but I fancy he rather hoped that the swamps he clung to would give him fever. In that sense-and in that sense only-Saxe could perhaps be said to have committed suicide. He stumbled into the Mission dining-room at noon one day. "And Mary?" we all cried, rising. "Oh, did you expect to see Mary?" he asked politely, but with evident astonishment.

We got him to bed at once. After the days of delirium were over, he told his story quite simply. It was pitifully short. The concrete facts seemed to be perfectly clear in his mind, and he gave them spontaneously; but what he himself had felt during that dramatic hour, I learned only by close questioning. He died suddenly, when he was apparently convalescent. The year he had been through had simply killed resiliency in him and he went down at the last as stupidly as a ninepin. I cannot imagine the source of the rumor that he had killed himself, unless it was some person who thought he ought to have done so. He started, at the end, to speak to me: "If Mary ever-" He never got beyond the three words; they showed sufficiently, however, that he was considering the possibility of Mary Bradford's being discovered after his death. He may have been wandering a little at the last; but,

in my opinion, Saxe had never believed, even after the suicide, that the woman he had seen had been his betrothed.

Some weeks after Saxe's death, we received incontrovertible proof -if testimony is ever incontrovertible-that it had indeed been she. We had been surrounded for a year by a hideous jungle-blind, hostile, impenetrable. Now out of that jungle stalked a simple fact. One of the native girls who had been taken captive with Mary Bradford returned at length to her own tribe. She had shared Mary's fortunes, as it happened, almost to the last; then the chief who had bought them both sold her, and by the successive chance of purchase, raid, and battle she had reached her own people. It was hardly more than crawling home to die; but she managed to send word by one of her kinsmen to the white people down the river. Apparently she and Mary had promised each other to report if either should ever reach friends again. Her message was pitifully meagre: Mary had talked little in those wild months; and after she had seen that they were too well watched to escape, she had talked not at all. But the two had evidently clung together an extraordinary tie, which was the last Mary Bradford was to know of friendship. The burden of the native's report was that the white girl was the favorite of a chief who gave her much finery. The dying woman seems to have thought it would set Mary Bradford's friends at rest—her kinsman, I remember, said that he had good news for us. The news was no news to me-I had been thinking; but I was glad that Saxe had died before he could hear it. Even the comfort of knowing that Mary was surely dead would never have made up to him for the ironic memory of the last hour he had spent with her. Besides, Saxe would never have understood.

I should probably never have touched this chapter of history with a public pen, if I had not heard a woman say, a few months since, that she thought Mary Bradford's conduct indelicate. Had the woman not said it to me directly, I should not have believed, even at my cynical age, that such a thing could be said. I greatly regret, myself, that the facts were ever told: they should have been buried in Africa with Saxe. But the Prices returned to America not long after it all happened, and apparently could not refrain from talking. Even so, I should have let Mary Bradford's legend alone, forever, had I not learned that she could be misjudged.

Consider dispassionately the elements of her situation; and tell me who has ever been so tortured. Physically unable to escape by flight, morally incapable, as you might say, of escaping by death-for there can be no doubt that, difficult as suicide would have been to a guarded

captive, she could have found some poisonous root, courted the bite of some serpent, snatched for one instant some pointed weapon; and that she was deterred, as Saxe said, by the simple belief that to take one's life was the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost, the Comforter— she could but take what came. As a high-priced chattel, she was probably not, for the most part, ill-treated-save for the tattooing, which was not cruelly intended. The few scars that Saxe noted doubtless bore witness to her protest against the utmost bitterness of slavery, some sudden saint-like frenzy with which she opposed profanation. She may have wondered why God chose so to degrade her: her conduct with Saxe shows beyond a doubt how she rated her degradation. She made not one attempt to dignify or to defend her afflicted body. Her soul despised it: trampled it under foot.

What Mary Bradford suffered before Saxe came we cannot know, but the measure of it lies, I think, in the resolution she took (if we believe the jealous slave girl) when she heard of the white man's approach. She must have divined Saxe, leagues away, as he was unable to divine her, face to face. Her one intent was to deceive him, to steep herself in unrecognizable savagery. If Mary Bradford had conceived of any rôle possible for herself in her own world, she would not have created her great part. If she had felt herself fit even to care for lepers at Molokai, she would have washed away her paint and fallen at his feet. It is perfectly evident that she considered herself fit for nothing in life-hardly for death. Her hope was clearly that Saxe should not know her. I do not believe that it was pride. If there had been any pride left in Mary Bradford's heart, she could not have stood quietly ("apathetically," was his word!) before Saxe in the flare of the dying sun. It was not to save anything of hers that she went through her comedy, but only to save a little merciful blindness for Saxe himself. He undoubtedly made it as hard as possible for her. I am inclined to think that if he had gone away at once, she would be living still— mothering her half-breed child, teaching it secretly the fear of God. When she saw that all Saxe's bewilderment still left him with the firm determination to buy her-to take her away and study her at his leisure -she conceived her magnificent chute de rideau. When she went into the hut, she had decided, for Saxe's sake, to die. Mary Bradford grovelling at the feet of the drunken chief will always seem to me one of the most remarkable figures in history: I should never have mentioned Jocasta in the same breath with her. Only Christianity can. give us tragedy like that. How must she not have longed, at Saxe's offer of a kindly shot through the heart, to turn, to fling herself at his

feet, to cry out his name, once. She "redoubled her caresses," Saxe said! Has any man ever been so loved, do you think? For the sake of bestowing upon him that healing doubt, she let him go, she put off death, she spent her last night on earth not fifty yards from him, in the hut of a savage, that she might have, before dawn, the means of committing the unpardonable sin. Note that she did not commit suicide until she had made it perfectly plausible-from the point of view of the Arab-Mandingo woman. She proved to him that it was not she. She gauged Saxe perfectly. Nothing but some such evidence as later we received-perhaps not even that-would ever have made Saxe believe that Mary Bradford, with him by her side, had clung to that vile savage. Even Mary Bradford-whose soul must have been, by that time, far away from her body—a mere voice in her own ears, a remote counsellor to hands and feet-could not have done that, had she not intended to die. But remember that up to that day she had lived rather than rank herself with the "violenti contro se stessi." We can simply say that Mary Bradford chose the chance of Hell for the sake of sparing Saxe pain. The fact that you or I-I pass over the lady who thinks her indelicate; does she think, I wonder, that it would have been delicate for Mary Bradford to accompany Saxe back to civilization?—may believe her to be one of the saints, has nothing to do with what she thought. Mary Bradford came of a race that for many generations believed in predestination; but she herself believed in free will. Dreadful as it is to be foredamned, it is worse to have damned yourself. She had not even the cold comfort of Calvinism. I said that I understood Mary Bradford. I am not sure that it would not have taken a Spanish saint of the sixteenth century really to understand her. Sixteenth-century Spain is the only thing I know of that is in the least like New England.

I am not trying to make out a "case" for Mary Bradford; and I sincerely hope that the lady who thinks her indelicate will never read these pages. For most people, the facts will suffice, and I have no desire to interpret them for the others. You have only to meditate for a little on the ironic and tragic reflections of a hundred kinds that must have surged through Mary Bradford's brain, to be swept away, yourself, on the horrid current. Do I need, for example, to point out the difficulty to use a word that I think the lady I have cited would approve of merely meeting the man she adored, face to face? For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement. No, you have only to explore Mary Bradford's tragedy for yourself. It will take you three years, perhaps, as

it has taken me, to penetrate the last recesses. And if you are tempted for a moment to think of her as mad, or exaltée, reflect on how completely she understood Saxe. I am only half a New Englander; and I confess that, though I reverence her heroism, I am even more humble before her intelligence. It is no blame to Saxe that he stumbled out of the chief's hut, completely her dupe. Poor Saxe! But the vivid vision of that scene leaves Phèdre tasteless to me. As I say, I am only half a New Englander. . . .

RING W. LARDNER

Champion

MIDGE KELLY scored his first knockout when he was seventeen. The knockee was his brother Connie, three years his junior and a cripple. The purse was a half dollar given to the younger Kelly by a lady whose electric had just missed bumping his soul from his frail little body.

Connie did not know Midge was in the house, else he never would have risked laying the prize on the arm of the least comfortable chair in the room, the better to observe its shining beauty. As Midge entered from the kitchen, the crippled boy covered the coin with his hand, but the movement lacked the speed requisite to escape his brother's quick eye. "Watcha got there?" demanded Midge.

"Nothin'," said Connie.

"You're a one-legged liar!" said Midge.

He strode over to his brother's chair and grasped the hand that concealed the coin.

"Let loose!" he ordered.

Connie began to cry.

"Let loose and shut up your noise," said the elder, and jerked his brother's hand from the chair arm.

The coin fell onto the bare floor. Midge pounced on it. His weak mouth widened into a triumphant smile.

"Nothin', huh?" he said. "All right, if it's nothin' you don't want it."

"Give that back," sobbed the younger.

"I'll give you a red nose, you little sneak! Where'd you steal it?” "I didn't steal it. It's mine. A lady give it to me after she pretty near hit me with a car."

"It's a crime she missed you," said Midge.

Midge started for the front door. The cripple picked up his crutch,