THE HEGIRA.
CALLISTA roused that morning, to see Lance moving, light-footed,
a shadow between her and the first struggling blaze of the fire
he had kindled. With sleepy surprise she noted his activities.
When she observed that he was packing her canned fruit, with
quick, deft fingers, she inquired,
"What you doin' there. Lance? No use fixin' them up now. Sylvane
won't be here till in the morning."
Lance broke off the low whistling which had wakened her, and
turned to regard his wife for a moment before he spoke.
"I thought I'd get this packing done," he said non-committally.
"If we was to go home to-day I could tote whatever we needed,
and Buddy could fetch over the heaviest stuff to-morrow."
Callista dozed a little luxuriously, and woke to a smell of
boiling coffee and frying pork.
"You've got breakfast enough there for three people," she
commented, when she finally drew near the fire.
"Uh-huh," assented Lance. "I 'lowed Sylvane might come to-day,
place of Saturday. Anyhow, [267] we'll need something for a bite
on the way." And Callista realized that her husband was indeed
making the final preparations for their return.
As they sat down either side the frying pan, and Callista lifted
the lid from the Dutch oven to take the bread out, they became
aware of the sound of scrambling hoofs and parting branches.
Whenever there was high water in Caney, this little valley was
cut off, it was a retreat unknown, unvisited; the newcomer could
be nobody but Sylvane. A moment later the boy made his
appearance, clambering over the rocks, leading Satan by a long
line.
"I 'lowed you-all wouldn't mind coming back a day sooner," he
apologized, as he gratefully seated himself for an addition to
his hastily snatched breakfast eaten by candle-light. "They's a
feller that the Company has sent up to look over lands, and he's
a-buyin' mineral rights--or ruther, gettin' options--on
everybody's farms. They'll pay big prices, and Sis' Roxy said I
ought to come and tell Lance of it."
The man listened indifferently, but the woman was all aglow. The
touch of practical life had dissolved whatever of the gipsy mood
Lance's nature had been able to lend hers. She questioned the
boy minutely. Lance listening with ill-concealed impatience; and
when the subject was exhausted, began to ask him with great
particularity concerning her truck patch at home and [268] whether
Spotty, the young cow Lance had traded with Squire Ashe for, was
doing well in her milk.
In spite of Lance's packing, there was much to do before camp
could be struck, and on account of the canned fruit they moved
so slowly that noon saw them still in the wilderness, dropping
down by the stream's side to eat the snack they had brought with
them. They went around by Father Cleaverage's this time, and
stopped there, since Callista intended to present a few of her
cherished huckleberries to Roxy, and they reached the cabin at
the head of Lance's Laurel late in the afternoon.
For some reason which he could not himself have told you, Lance
felt strangely wearied and dissatisfied. He looked back to the
week past, and admitted that all had gone well; days of fishing
and dreaming, evenings under the open sky with the banjo
humming, the not unwelcome fire leaping up, and the baby asleep
on Callista's lap. Could a man have asked more?
The son of the house had thriven amazingly on it, and this
evening he was assuming airs so domineering that his father
professed fear of him.
"Look a here, young feller," Lance said, as the big eight-months-old
came creeping across the floor and hammered on his knee to be taken
up, "you're about to run me out o' the house." He lifted his son
on his arm, and, carrying the banjo in the other hand, beyond
reach of the clutching, [269] fat fingers, went to the doorstone
with them. "Oh, you're your mammy over again," he admonished the
baby. "You don't own up to me at all. I wisht I had me a nice
gal o' your size, that would admit I was her daddy."
Callista had her supper nearly ready. Growing now, with
motherhood, intensely material,--or, as Lance had more than once
jokingly declared, a trifle grasping,--the selling of the land
to the Company for a big price occupied all her thoughts.
"You'll go over to Squire Ashe's soon in the morning, won't you
Lance and see about the land?" she questioned. "Sylvane said the
man was stayin' at Ashe's."
"I don't know as I want to sell," the owner of Jesse Lance's Gap
hundred observed indifferently, running random little chords on
his banjo. "I ain't rightly studied about it."
"Well, I wish you would study about it," urged Callista. "I
think it's your duty to."
"I think it's your duty to, duty to, dute,"
hummed Lance to a twanging accompaniment from the strings.
"Looks like I've heard them words before somewheres. I'll be
blessed if that ain't Sis' Roxy's tune you've took up,
Callista!"
"Your sister does her duty in this world," asserted Callista
tartly. "It's nothing but the mineral rights, they'll want. All
that talk you had this mornin' about the land coming from your
[270] gran'pappy, and your not wanting to leave it, is just to--to
have your own way."
Lance raised his eyebrows.
"Would you say so?" he debated, his voice quiet, but the spark
shining deep in his hazel eye. "Well now, I'd have said--if
you'd axed me--that I've had my own way most generally without
resorting to such. I'm ruther expectin' to have my own way from
this time out, and take no curious methods of gettin' it."
"Well, what are you going to do about selling the land?" she
persisted.
Lance lifted the baby's fat hand and pretended to pick the banjo
strings with the pointed, inadequate fingers, to the young man's
serious enjoyment. Callista waited for what she considered a
reasonable time, and then prompted.
"Lance. Lance, did you hear me?"
"Oh, yes, I heared you well enough," Lance told her composedly.
"I was just a-studyin' on the matter."
Again silence, punctuated by the aimless twanging of the banjo
strings, the little sounds from the summer world without, the
quick, light tapping of Callista's feet and the little whisper
of her skirts as she moved about her task.
"Well--have you studied?" she inquired abruptly at length.
"Uh-huh," agreed Lance negligently, curling himself down on the
doorstone a little further, [271] "an' I'm studyin' yet. Ye see
that there feller they sent out for an agent met me on the big
road one day about a month ago and bantered me to trade. I told
him I'd let him know, time I got back."
"And you never named it to me!" Callista said sharply, pausing,
dish in hand by the table side, and staring at her husband with
reprehending eyes. "You never said a word to me about it; and
you went off on that foolish camping trip! For the good
gracious, I don't know what men are made of!"
"Some are made of one thing, and some of another," allowed Lance
easily, leaning his head back against the door jamb and half
closing his eyes.
"Before we went away," repeated Callista reproachfully. "Maybe
you've lost your chance."
The spur to Lance Cleaverage, the goad, was ever the hint to go
slower; applied recklessly, it was quite sufficient to make him
dig heels and toes into the track and refuse to go at all. At
Callista's suggestion that he had missed his chance, he balked
entirely.
"Well, I don't know as I want to sell," he reiterated. "That's
what I told the man--and that's the truth."
"Of course you want to sell," asserted Callista in exasperation,
"and you want to sell terrible bad--we all do. Nobody in the
Turkey Tracks [272] has got any money. We just live from hand to
mouth, and dig what we get out of the ground mighty hard. Oh, I
wish't I was a man. I'd go straight down to the Settlement and
sell this land before I came back."
A faint color showed itself in her husband's brown cheeks. His
lips parted slightly and remained so for a moment before he
spoke.
"Not unless the man you was chanced to be me, you wouldn't sell
my land," he said at length, speaking softly, almost dreamily.
Callista's temper was slow, but it was implacable. She eyed her
husband for a moment and turned to begin dishing up her supper.
Lance lifted his son back once more out of reach of the
instrument, set him comfortably against the propped open door,
took up the banjo and commenced to play a lively air for the
boy's diversion.
"Flenton Hands has sold," Callista flung out the words as she
bent over the hearth to a pot that stood there. She had the news
from Roxy Griever.
"Uh-huh," agreed Lance indefinitely, and offered no question as
to what the lands had brought or whether the deal was actually
closed.
"Sylvane said Gran'pappy met him in the big road, and he said that
them that didn't sell now, or that just give options, would be
sorry afterwards. He thinks the Company's mistaken [273] about the
coal being on this side o' the ridge, and that they'll soon find
it out and quit buying."
"That so?" laughed Lance. "Well, in that case, I sha'n't make no
efforts. I'd hate to get anything off the Company that wasn't
coming to me, and I reckon--"
He broke off suddenly. Callista had turned to face him, white,
angry as he had never seen her before. Her blue eyes rounded
meaningly to the downy poll of the baby sitting on the floor
between them. This was how much he cared for the up-bringing and
the future of the child.
"Lance Cleaverage," she said in a low, even tone, "a woman
that's married to a man, and lived with him for two years, and
got his child to raise, ought to quit him for such a speech as
that."
This was the ultimate challenge. Here was the gage thrown down.
She dared him. He leaned forward to lift back the boy, who was
clambering once more for the banjo. Then he straightened up and
looked his Callista full in the eye, breathing light and evenly,
half smiling, his face strangely luminous.
"All right," he said, and his voice rang keen-edged and vibrant.
"If them's your ruthers--walk out. What's a'keepin' you? Shain't
be said I ever hendered a woman that wanted to quit me."
Very softly, Callista set down the plate of bread she held.
Gazing straight ahead of her, she stood a [274] moment rigid, in
a waiting, listening attitude. Out of her mood of cold displeasure,
of nagging resentment, flamed, at her husband's words, that sudden
fire of relentless rage of which Callista was capable. Her sight
cleared, and she became aware of what she was staring at--the wall,
with its well-planned shelves of Lance's contriving; the beautifully
whittled utensils and small, dainty implements of cedar which he
had made for her use. Slowly her glance swept the circle of the
room. Evidences of Lance's skill and cleverness were everywhere;
proofs that he had persistently tamed both to the service of wife
and home. Yet, at this moment, these things made no appeal.
Mechanically she inspected her supper table, then turned and
moved swiftly across the open passage to the room beyond. Promptly,
unerringly, she gathered together a bundle of needments for herself
and the child, thrust them in a clean flour sack, and swung it
across her arm. Going back, she found her husband still sprawled
in the doorway, his side face held to the darkening interior of
the room behind him. Banjo on knee, he leaned against the lintel,
whistling beneath his breath, his eyes on the far primrose band of
light dying down in the west.
Callista gave no further glance at the home which had been much
to her. She averted her gaze stonily from the husband who had
once been all. Bending, with a single motion she swept [275] the
baby up in her arm, raised him to her shoulder and stepped to the
open doorway. Lance never turned his head or seemed to note her.
He made room for her passage without appearing to move a muscle.
Out she went and down to the gate--a real gate, that swung true
and did not drag; Lance's planning and handiwork. She unlatched
it, passed through, and drew it shut behind her, never looking
back.
And with scarcely a change of attitude and expression, except
that his fingers twitched a bit and the smile on his lean,
brown, young face became set and unnatural, he watched her
evenly swaying figure pass on down the road. Head defiantly
erect, eyes strangely bright. Lance stared meaninglessly, like a
man shot through but not yet crumpling to his fall. The baby
fluttered a fat, white, little starfish of a hand over his
mother's shoulder and called "Bye-by," the sum of all his
attainments in the matter of language.
The man did not look up. His head was bent now, his gaze had
forsaken the slender new moon swinging like a boat in the
greenish haze of the western sky, where some smoldering coals of
sunset yet sent up gray twilight smoke.
Callista vanished between the trees. It was dusk, and deeply still.
Down in the alders, beside the spring branch, the whippoorwills
were calling. In the intervals of their far, plaintive importunity,
the silence was punctuated lightly [276] by the tiny, summer-evening
chirpings in the grass.
The moon sank lower, the sunset coals burned into swart cinders;
the hosts of the dark marched in upon the still figure on the
doorstone where Lance crouched motionless, his face drooped
almost to the threshold, his arms flung forward till they
touched the nodding weeds by the path. So an hour counted itself
out, and there was no change in his posture, no lifting of the
head. The little moon finally dropped down behind the hills; dew
lay thick on the curls beside the great limestone slab. About
ten o'clock a cloud blew in through the Gap, bearing a tiny
shower of summer rain. Under the cool pattering that drenched
his hair and garments. Lance stirred not at all; but all the
noises of the July night were hushed by it, and in the chill
which followed, he shivered. Deep in the night's silent heart, a
bird cried out; Lance started and raised his face to the
darkness with a sort of groan.
"And this time she won't come back," he whispered. [277]