On the evening after Hunter Kinemon's burial in the rocky steep
graveyard above Crabapple, David and his mother sat, one on the couch,
the other in her creaking rocking-chair, lost in heavy silence. Allen
moved in a perpetual uneasy pain on the bed, his face drawn and fretful,
and shadowed by a soft young beard. The wardrobe doors stood open,
revealing a stripped interior; wooden chairs were tied back to back; and
two trunks--one of mottled paper, the other of ancient leather--stood
by the side of a willow basket filled with a miscellany of housekeeping
objects.
What were left of the Kinemons were moving into a small house on the
edge of Crabapple; Senator Galt had already secured another tenant for
the care of his bottom acres and fat herds. The night swept into the
room, fragrant and blue, powdered with stars; the sheep bells sounded in
a faintly distant clashing; a whippoorwill beat its throat out against
the piny dark.
An overpowering melancholy surged through David; though his youth
responded to the dramatic, the tragic change that had enveloped them,
at the same time he was reluctant to leave the farm, the valley with its
trout and ground hogs, its fox holes and sap boilings. These feelings
mingled in the back of his consciousness; his active thoughts were all
directed toward the time when, with the rifle, the obligation that he
had picked up practically from his dead father's hand, he would walk up
to the Hatburn place and take full payment for Allen's injury and their
paternal loss.
He felt uneasily that he should have gone before this--at once; but
there had been a multitude of small duties connected with the funeral,
intimate things that could not be turned over to the kindest neighbors;
and the ceremony itself, it seemed to him, should be attended by dignity
and repose.
Now, however, it was over; and only his great duty remained, filling the
entire threshold of his existence. He had no plan; only a necessity to
perform. It was possible that he would fail--there were four Hatburns;
and that chance depressed him. If he were killed there was no one else,
for Allen could never take another step. That had been disclosed by the
most casual examination of his injury. Only himself, David, remained to
uphold the pride of the Kinemons.
He gazed covertly at his mother; she must not, certainly, be warned of
his course; she was a woman, to be spared the responsibility borne by
men. A feeling of her being under his protection, even advice, had grown
within him since he had discovered the death in the stable shed. This
had not changed his aspect of blossoming youth, the intense blue candor
of his gaze; he sat with his knees bent boyishly, his immature hands
locked behind his head.
An open wagon, piled with blankets, carried Allen to Crabapple, and Mrs.
Kinemon and David followed in the buggy, a great bundle, folded in the
bright quilt, roped behind. They soon crossed the range and dropped into
a broader valley. Crabapple lay on a road leading from mountain wall to
wall, the houses quickly thinning out into meadow at each end.
A cross-roads was occupied by three stores and the courthouse, a square
red-brick edifice with a classic white portico and high lantern; and
it was out from that, where the highway had degenerated into a sod-cut
trail, that the future home of the Kinemons lay. It was a small somber
frame dwelling, immediately on the road, with a rain-washed patch rising
abruptly at the back. A dilapidated shed on the left provided a meager
shelter for the roan; and there was an aged and twisted apple tree over
the broken pump.
“You'll have to get at that shed, David,” his mother told him; “the
first rain would drown anything inside.”
She was settling Allen on the couch with the ragged sheepskin. So he
would; but there was something else to attend to first. He would walk
over to Elbow Barren, to-morrow. He involuntarily laid his hand on the
barrel of the rifle, temporarily leaned against a table, when his mother
spoke sharply from an inner doorway.
“You David,” she said; “come right out into the kitchen.”
There he stood before her, with his gaze stubbornly fixed on the bare
floor, his mouth tight shut.
“David,” she continued, her voice now lowered, fluctuating with anxiety,
“you weren't reckoning on paying off them Hatburns? You never?” She
halted, gazing at him intently. “Why, they'd shoot you up in no time!
You are nothing but a--”
“You can call me a boy if you've a mind to,” he interrupted; “and maybe
the Hatburns'll kill me--and maybe they won't. But there's no one can
hurt Allen like that and go plumb, sniggering free; not while I can move
and hold a gun.”
“I saw a look to you that was right manlike a week or two back,” she
replied; “and I said to myself: 'There's David growing up overnight.' I
favored it, too, though I didn't want to lose you that way so soon. And
only last night I said again: 'Thank God, David's a man in his heart,
for all his pretty cheeks!' I thought I could build on you, with me
getting old and Allen never taking a mortal step. Priest would give you
a place, and glad, in the store--the Kinemons are mighty good people. I
had it all fixed up like that, how we'd live here and pay regular.
“Oh, I didn't say nothing to your father when he started out--he was
too old to change; but I hoped you would be different. I hoped you would
forget your own feeling, and see Allen there on his back, and me ...
getting along. You're all we got, David. It's no use, I reckon; you'll
go like Allen and Hunter, full up with your own pride and never----” She
broke off, gazing bitterly at her hands folded in her calico lap.
A new trouble filled David's heart. Through the open doorway he could
see Allen, twisting on the couch; his mother was older, more worn, than
he had realized. She had failed a great deal in the past few days. She
was suddenly stripped of her aspect of authority, force; suddenly she
appeared negative, dependent. A sharp pity for her arose through his
other contending emotions.
“I don't know how you figure you will be helping Allen by stepping off
to be shot instead of putting food in his mouth,” she spoke again. “He's
got nobody at all but you, David.”