The Lost Road | Page 8

he
took in the width and breadth of his personal relation to the great events
of the past twenty years. His vast scope of experiences and equally
wide acquaintanceship with the big figures of our time, were amazing,
and it was equally amazing that one of such a rich and interesting
history could tell his stories in such a simple way that the personal
element was never obtrusive.
When he left Salonika he endeavored to obtain permission from the
British staff to visit Moudros, but, failing in this, he booked his passage
on a crowded little Greek steamer, where the only obtainable
accommodation was a lounge in the dining saloon. We gave him a
farewell dinner, at which the American consul and his family, with all

the other Americans then in Salonika, were present, and after the dinner
we rowed out to his ship and saw him very uncomfortably installed for
his voyage.
He came down the sea ladder and waved his hand as we rowed away.
That was the last I saw of Richard Harding Davis.
JOHN T. MCCUTCHEON.

THE LOST ROAD

During the war with Spain, Colton Lee came into the service as a
volunteer. For a young man, he always had taken life almost too
seriously, and when, after the campaign in Cuba, he elected to make
soldiering his profession, the seriousness with which he attacked his
new work surprised no one. Finding they had lost him forever, his
former intimates were bored, but his colonel was enthusiastic, and the
men of his troop not only loved, but respected him.
From the start he determined in his new life women should have no
part--a determination that puzzled no one so much as the women, for to
Lee no woman, old or young, had found cause to be unfriendly. But he
had read that the army is a jealous mistress who brooks no rival, that
"red lips tarnish the scabbard steel," that "he travels the fastest who
travels alone."
So, when white hands beckoned and pretty eyes signalled, he did not
look. For five years, until just before he sailed for his three years of
duty in the Philippines, he succeeded not only in not looking, but in
building up for himself such a fine reputation as a woman-hater that all
women were crazy about him. Had he not been ordered to Agawamsett
that fact would not have affected him. But at the Officers' School he
had indulged in hard study rather than in hard riding, had overworked,
had brought back his Cuban fever, and was in poor shape to face the
tropics. So, for two months before the transport was to sail, they

ordered him to Cape Cod to fill his lungs with the bracing air of a New
England autumn.
He selected Agawamsett, because, when at Harvard, it was there he had
spent his summer vacations, and he knew he would find sailboats and
tennis and, through the pine woods back of the little whaling village,
many miles of untravelled roads. He promised himself that over these
he would gallop an imaginary troop in route marches, would
manoeuvre it against possible ambush, and, in combat patrols, ground
scouts, and cossack outposts, charge with it "as foragers." But he did
none of these things. For at Agawamsett he met Frances Gardner, and
his experience with her was so disastrous that, in his determination to
avoid all women, he was convinced he was right.
When later he reached Manila he vowed no other woman would ever
again find a place in his thoughts. No other woman did. Not because he
had the strength to keep his vow, but because he so continually thought
of Frances Gardner that no other woman had a chance.
Miss Gardner was a remarkable girl. Her charm appealed to all kinds of
men, and, unfortunately for Lee, several kinds of men appealed to her.
Her fortune and her relations were bound up in the person of a rich aunt
with whom she lived, and who, it was understood, some day would
leave her all the money in the world. But, in spite of her charm,
certainly in spite of the rich aunt, Lee, true to his determination, might
not have noticed the girl had not she ridden so extremely well.
It was to the captain of cavalry she first appealed. But even a cavalry
captain, whose duty in life is to instruct sixty men in the art of taking
the life of as many other men as possible, may turn his head in the
direction of a good-looking girl. And when for weeks a man rides at the
side of one through pine forests as dim and mysterious as the aisles of a
great cathedral, when he guides her across the wet marshes when