Allen, on his return the following evening, immediately opened an
excited account of the new family, with no women, on the place by Elbow
Barren.
“I heard they were from down hellwards on the Clinch,” he repeated; “and
then that they'd come from Kentucky. Anyway, they're bad. Ed Arbogast
just stepped on their place for a pleasant howdy, and some one on the
stoop hollered for him to move. Ed, he saw the shine on a rifle barrel,
and went right along up to the store. Then they hired Simmons--the one
that ain't good in his head--to cut out bush; and Simmons trailed home
after a while with the side of his face all tore, where he'd been hit
with a piece of board. Simmons' brother went and asked them what was it
about; and one of the Hatburns--that's their name--said he'd busted the
loony just because!”
“What did Simmons answer back?” Hunter Kinemon demanded, his coffee cup
suspended.
“Nothing much; he'd law them, or something like that. The Simmonses
are right spindling; they don't belong in Greenstream either.” David
commented: “I wouldn't have et a thing till I'd got them!” In the ruddy
reflection of the lamp his pink-and-blue charm, his shy lips, resembled
a pastoral divinity of boyhood. Allen laughed.
“That family, the Hatburns----” He paused. “Why, they'd just mow you
down with the field daisies.”
David flushed with annoyance. He saw his mother studying him with the
attentive concern she had first shown the day before yesterday.
“You have no call to mix in with them,” Kinemon told his elder son.
“Drive stage and mind your business. I'd even step aside a little from
folks like that.”
A sense of surprised disappointment invaded David at his father's
statement. It seemed to him out of keeping with the elder's courage and
determination. It, too, appeared almost spindling. Perhaps he had said
it because his wife, a mere woman, was there. He was certain that Allen
would not agree with such mildness. The latter, lounging back from the
table, narrowed his eyes; his fingers played with the ears of his dog,
Rocket. Allen gave his father a cigar and lit one himself, a present
from a passenger on the stage. David could see a third in Allen's shirt
pocket, and he longed passionately for the day when he would be old
enough to have a cigar offered him. He longed for the time when he, like
Allen, would be swinging a whip over the horses of a stage, rambling
down a steep mountain, or walking up at the team's head to take off some
weight.
Where the stage line stopped in Beaulings the railroad began. Allen, he
knew, intended in the fall to give up the stage for the infinitely
wider world of freight cars; and David wondered whether Priest, the
storekeeper in Crabapple who had charge of the awarding of the position,
could be brought to see that he was as able a driver, almost, as Allen.
It was probable Priest would call him too young for the charge of the
Government mail. But he wasn't; Allen had to admit that he, David, was
the straighter shot. He wouldn't step aside for any Hatburn alive. And,
he decided, he would smoke nothing but cigars. He considered whether he
might light his small clay pipe, concealed under the stoop, before the
family; but reluctantly concluded that that day had not yet arrived.
Allen passed driving the next morning as usual, leaving a gray wreath
of dust to settle back into the tranquil yellow sunshine; the sun moved
from the east barrier to the west; a cool purple dusk filled the valley,
and the shrilling of the frogs rose to meet the night. The following day
was almost identical--the shadows swept out, shortened under the groves
of trees and drew out again over the sheep on the western slope. Before
Allen reached home he had to feed and bed his horses, and walk back the
two miles over the mountain from Crabapple; and a full hour before the
time for his brother's arrival, David was surprised to see the stage
itself making its way over the precarious turf road that led up to the
Kinemons' dwelling. He was standing by the portico, and immediately
his mother moved out to his side, as if subconsciously disturbed by
the unusual occurrence. David saw, while the stage was still diminutive
against the rolling pasture, that Allen was not driving; and there was
an odd confusion of figures in a rear seat. Mrs. Kinemon said at once,
in a shrill strange voice:
“Something has happened to Allen!” She pressed her hands against her
laboring breast; David ran forward and met the surrey as it came through
the fence opening by the stable shed. Ed Arbogast was driving; and a
stranger--a drummer evidently--in a white-and-black check suit, was
holding Allen, crumpled in a dreadful bloody faint.
“Where's Hunter?” Arbogast asked the boy.
“There he comes now,” David replied, his heart pounding wildly and dread
constricting his throat.
Hunter Kinemon and his wife reached the stage at the same moment. Both
were plaster-white; but the woman was shaking with frightened concern,
while her husband was deliberate and still.
“Help me carry him in to our bed,” he addressed Ed Arbogast.
They lifted Allen out and bore him toward the house, his limp fingers,
David saw, trailing through the grass. At first the latter involuntarily
turned away; but, objurgating such cowardice, he forced himself to gaze
at Allen. He recognized at once that his brother had not been shot; his
hip was too smeared and muddy for that. It was, he decided, an accident,
as Arbogast and the drummer lead Hunter Kinemon aside. David Kinemon
walked resolutely up to the little group. His father gestured for him
to go away, but he ignored the elder's command. He must know what
had happened to Allen. The stranger in the checked suit was speaking
excitedly, waving trembling hands--a sharp contrast to the grim
immobility of the Greenstream men:
“He'd been talking about that family, driving out of Beaulings and
saying how they had done this and that; and when we came to where
they lived he pointed out the house. A couple of dark-favored men were
working in a patch by the road, and he waved his whip at them, in a
way of speaking; but they never made a sign. The horses were going slow
then; and, for some reason or other, his little dog jumped to the road
and ran in on the patch. Sirs, one of those men spit, stepped up to the
dog, and kicked it into Kingdom Come.”
David's hands clenched; and he drew in a sharp sobbing breath.
“This Allen,” the other continued, “pulled in the team and drawed a
gun from under the seat before I could move a hand. You can hear me--I
wouldn't have kicked any dog of his for all the gold there is! He got
down from the stage and started forward, and his face was black; then
he stopped, undecided. He stood studying, with the two men watching
him, one leaning careless on a grub hoe. Then, by heaven, he turned and
rested the gun on the seat, and walked up to where laid the last of his
dog. He picked it up, and says he:
“'Hatburn, I got Government mail on that stage to get in under contract,
and there's a passenger too--paid to Crabapple; but when I get them
two things done I'm coming back to kill you two dead to hear the last
trumpet.'
“The one on the hoe laughed; but the other picked up a stone like my
two fists and let Allen have it in the back. It surprised him like; he
stumbled forward, and the other stepped out and laid the hoe over his
head. It missed him mostly, but enough landed to knock Allen over. He
rolled into the ditch, like, by the road; and then Hatburn jumped down
on him, deliberate, with lumbermen's irons in his shoes.”
David was conscious of an icy flood pouring through him; a revulsion of
grief and fury that blinded him. Tears welled over his fresh cheeks
in an audible crying. But he was silenced by the aspect of his father.
Hunter Kinemon's tender blue eyes had changed apparently into bits of
polished steel; his mouth was pinched until it was only a line among the
other lines and seaming of his worn face.
“I'd thank you to drive the stage into Crabapple, Ed,” he said; “and if
you see the doctor coming over the mountain--he's been rung up for--ask
him, please sir, will he hurry.” He turned and walked abruptly away,
followed by David.
Allen lay under the gay quilt in the Kinemons' big bed. His stained
clothes drooped from a chair where Mrs. Kinemon had flung them. Allen's
face was like white paper; suddenly it had grown as thin and sharp as
an old man's. Only a slight quiver of his eyelids showed that he was not
dead.
Hunter Kinemon sat on the couch, obviously waiting for the doctor. He,
too, looked queer, David thought. He wished his father would break
the dreadful silence gathering over them; but the only sound was the
stirring of the woman in the kitchen, boiling a pot of water. Allen
moved and cried out in a knifelike agony, and a flicker of suffering
passed over his father's face.
An intolerable hour dragged out before the doctor arrived; and then
David was driven from the room. He sat outside on the portico, listening
to the passage of feet about Allen in a high shuddering protest. David's
hands and feet were still cold, but he was conscious of an increasing
stillness within, an attitude not unlike his father's. He held out an
arm and saw that it was as steady as a beam of the stoop roof. He was
without definite plan or knowledge of what must occur; but he told
himself that any decision of Hunter Kinemon's must not exclude him.
There were four Hatburns; but two Kinemons were better; and he meant his
father and himself, for he knew instinctively that Allen was badly hurt.
Soon there would be no Hatburns at all. And then the law could do as
it pleased. It seemed to David a long way from the valley, from Allen
broken in bed, to the next term of court--September--in Crabapple. The
Kinemons could protect, revenge, their own.
The doctor passed out, and David entered where his mother was bent above
her elder son. Hunter Kinemon, with a blackened rag, was wiping the lock
of an old but efficient repeating rifle. His motions were unhurried,
careful. Mrs. Kinemon gazed at him with blanching lips, but she
interposed no word. There was another rifle, David knew, in the long
cupboard by the hearth; and he was moving to secure it when his father's
voice halted him in the middle of the floor. “You David,” he said, “I
want you to stop along here with your mother. It ain't fit for her to be
left alone with Allen, and there's a mess of little things for doing.
I want those cows milked dry, and catch in those little Dominicker
chickens before that old gander eats them up.”
David was about to protest, to sob out a passionate refusal, when a
glimpse of his father's expression silenced him. He realized that the
slightest argument would be worse than futile. There wasn't a particle
of familiar feeling in the elder's voice; suddenly David was afraid of
him. Hunter Kinemon slipped a number of heavily greased cartridges into
the rifle's magazine. Then he rose and said:
“Well, Mattie?”
His wife laid her hand on his shoulder.
“Hunter,” she told him, “you've been a mighty sweet and good husband.”
He drew his hand slowly and lovingly across her cheek.
“I'm sorry about this, Mattie,” he replied; “I've been powerful happy
along with you and all of us. David, be a likely boy.” He walked out of
the room, across the grass to the stable shed.
“He's going to drive to Elbow Barren,” David muttered; “and he hadn't
ought to have left me to tend the cows and chickens. That's for a woman
to do. I ought to be right along with him facing down those Hatburns. I
can shoot, and my hand is steady as his.”
He stood in the doorway, waiting for the reappearance of his father with
the roan horse to hitch to their old buggy. It didn't occur to David to
wonder at the fact that the other was going alone to confront four men.
The Kinemons had a mort of friends who would have gladly accompanied,
assisted Hunter; but this, the boy told himself, was their own
affair--their own pride.
From within came the sound of his mother, crying softly, and of Allen
murmuring in his pain. David was appalled by the swift change that had
fallen over them--the breaking up of his entire world, the shifting
of every hope and plan. He was appalled and confused; the thoughtless
unquestioning security of his boyhood had been utterly destroyed.
He looked about dazed at the surrounding scene, callous in its total
carelessness of Allen's injury, his haggard father with the rifle. The
valley was serenely beautiful; doves were calling from the eaves of the
barn; a hen clucked excitedly. The western sky was a single expanse of
primrose on which the mountains were jagged and blue.
He had never known the elder to be so long getting the bridle on the
roan; the buggy was drawn up outside. An uneasy tension increased within
him--a pressing necessity to see his father leading out their horse. He
didn't come, and finally David was forced to walk over to the shed.
The roan had been untied, and turned as the boy entered; but David,
at first, failed to find Hunter Kinemon; then he almost stepped on his
hand. His father lay across a corner of the earthen floor, with the
bridle tangled in stiff fingers, and his blue eyes staring blankly up.
David stifled an exclamation of dread, and forced himself to bend
forward and touch the gray face. Only then he realized that he was
looking at death. The pain in his father's back had got him at last! The
rifle had been carefully placed against the wall; and, without realizing
the significance of his act, David picked it up and laid the cold barrel
against his rigid young body.