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Updated: May 22, 2025
There appeared to be an unusual number of men on the street, not so hurried and business-like and merry as generally, and given to collecting in groups, low-voiced and excited. General Lodge drew McDermott inside. "Come. You need a bracer. Man, you look sick," he said. At the bar McDermott's brown and knotty hand shook as he lifted a glass and gulped a drink of whisky.
Giving the cabman the address of McDermott's down-town offices, she sat in the dark of the carriage with the paper Barney had given her clutched in her hand, with neither consideration of the coming interview nor formulated plans. In a vague way she knew that people stared after her, as she went through the corridor of the great building, the hood of her storm-cloak thrown back.
The town was then, as it is to-day, McDermott's town, but McDermott had fallen away when his riches came, and some terrible event, a quarrel with a former priest who had attended Alta from a distant point, had left McDermott bitter. He practically drove the pastor from his door. He closed his factory to the priest's people and one by one they left. Only eighteen families stayed.
But quick on the heels of his return to New York had followed the railroad business, to which Dermott McDermott's insolence had added new reason for making the enterprise a successful one. But underneath the several postponements of visiting Katrine, the real cause of them all, in fact, was a fear of the well-merited rebuff which he might receive from her.
McDermott's overheard misprisement of the South! His statement of his intentions toward Katrine! The cut of the words, "She is but eighteen, and one protects that age," came back to him. There had never come a time in his life before when he would have been in the mood to do the thing he now offered. "Phil," he said, "there is another bank to the Silver Fork River."
The dying priest counted them over in his dreams, and sobbed as he told of the others who had gone. Then the bigotry that McDermott's faith had kept concealed broke out under the encouragement of McDermott's infidelity. The boys of the town flung insults at the priest as he passed. The people gave little, and that grudgingly.
Unminding, she rapped at McDermott's private door. She had no misgiving about his being there. She knew in some way, before she left her apartment, that he would be there when she arrived. "Come in!" he called, curtly. She entered to find him alone, standing by the window looking absent-mindedly over the snowy chimney-tops, as though projecting a holiday.
Traveled thirty-seven miles over rich and elegant prairies. Passed but very few houses in this distance. Our poor horses and ourselves almost famished for water. Traveled eighteen miles without a drop, and then compelled to use it out of a stagnant pool, where thousands of insects considered the water private property. Arrived at McDermott's, on the Fox river.
"Say, McDermott," he cried, with a cheerful laugh, "Ravenel didn't do a thing to you, did he? He didn't do a thing to you!" he repeated, with a lively chuckle. McDermott's eyes were bland on the instant. He did not understand the little man's meaning. What he did understand, always understood, however, was that he must never be taken off guard in the game of life.
The old woman told me how it happened. He was twenty-five miles away attending one of his missions when the blizzard was at its height. McDermott fell sick and a telegram was sent for the priest the last message before the wires came down. Father Belmond started to drive through the storm back to Alta. He succeeded in reaching McDermott's bedside and gave him the last Sacraments.
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