party to lead the rescuers to him if he
was on the right trail and did not return.

And then as Barclay's mind went back to the long Tuesday, when he
should have been at the Ridge to sign the tax levy, the headlight
flashed out of the tunnel. But these were fading pictures. The one
image that was in his mind--clear through all the years--was of a
wood and a tree,--a great, spreading, low-boughed elm, near Carnine's
house where the young people were held prisoners, and Jane Mason
sitting with her back against the tree, and lying on the dry grass at
her feet his own slight figure; sometimes he was looking up at her
over his brow, and sometimes his head rested on the roots of the tree
beside her, and she looked down at him and they talked, and no one was
near. For through youth into middle life, and into the dawn of old
age, That Day was marked in his life. The day of the month--he forgot
which it was. The day of the week--that also left him, and there came
a time when he had to figure back to recall the year; but for all
that, there was a radiance in his life, an hour of calm joy that never
left him, and he called it only--That Day. That Day is in every
heart; in yours, my dear fat Mr. Jones, and in yours, my good dried-up
Mrs. Smith; and in yours, Mrs. Goodman, and in yours, Mr. Badman;
maybe it is upon the sea, or in the woods, or among the noises of some
great city--but it is That Day. And no other day of all the thousands
that have come to you is like it.

Why should he remember the ugly farm-yard, the hard faces of the men,
the straw-covered frame they called a barn, and the unpainted house?
All these things passed by him unrecorded, as did the miserable fare
of the table, the hard bed at night, and the worry that must have
gnawed at his nerves to know that perhaps the town was thinking him
false to it, or that his mother, guessing the truth, was in pain with
terror, or to feel that a rescuing party coming at the wrong time
would bring on a fight in which the girls would be killed. Only the
picture of Jane Mason, fine and lithe and strong, with the pink cheeks
of twenty, and the soft curves of childhood still playing about her
chin and throat as he saw it from the ground at her feet,--that
picture was etched into his heart, and with it the recollection of her
eyes when she said, "John,--you don't think I--I knew of
this--beforehand, do you?" Just that sentence--those were the only
words left in his memory of a day