“How can I let those skunks set their hell on us?” he demanded
passionately. “Why, all Greenstream will think I'm afraid, that I let
the Hatburns bust Allen and kill my father. I couldn't stand up in
Priest's store; I couldn't bear to look at anybody. Don't you understand
how men are about those things?”
She nodded.
“I can see, right enough--with Hunter in the graveyard and Allen with
both hips broke. What I can't see is what we'll do next winter; how
we'll keep Allen warm and fed. I suppose we can go to the County Home.”
But that, David knew, was as disgraceful as the other--his own mother,
Allen, objects of public charity! His face was clouded, his hands
clenched. It was only a chance that he would be killed; there were four
Hatburns though. His heart, he thought, would burst with misery;
every instinct fought for the expression, the upholding of the family
prestige, honor. A hatred for the Hatburns was like a strangling hand at
his throat.
“I got to!” he said; but his voice was wavering; the dull conviction
seized him that his mother was right.
All the mountains would think of him as a coward--that Kinemon who
wouldn't stand up to the men who had destroyed Allen and his father!
A sob heaved in his chest; rebellious tears streamed over his thin
cheeks. He was crying like a baby. He threw an arm up across his eyes
and stumbled from the room.
V
However, he had no intention of clerking back of a counter, of getting
down rolls of muslin, papers of buttons, for women, if it could be
avoided. Priest's store was a long wooden structure with a painted
façade and a high platform before it where the mountain wagons unloaded
their various merchandise teamed from the railroad, fifty miles distant.
The owner had a small glass-enclosed office on the left as you entered
the store; and there David found him. He turned, gazing over his
glasses, as the other entered.
“How's Allen?” he asked pleasantly. “I heard he was bad; but we
certainly look to have him back driving stage.”
“I came to see you about that,” David replied. “Allen can't never drive
again; but, Mr. Priest, sir, I can. Will you give me a try?”
The elder ignored the question in the concern he exhibited for Allen's
injury.
“It is a cursed outrage!” he declared. “Those Hatburns will be got up,
or my name's not Priest! We'd have them now, but the jail wouldn't keep
them overnight, and court three months off.”
David preserved a stony silence--the only attitude possible, he had
decided, in the face of his patent dereliction.
“Will you try me on the Beaulings stage?” he repeated. “I've been round
horses all my life; and I can hold a gun straighter than Allen.”
Priest shook his head negatively.
“You are too light--too young,” he explained; “you have to be above a
certain age for the responsibility of the mail. There are some rough
customers to handle. If you only had five years more now--We are having
a hard time finding a suitable man. A damned shame about Allen! Splendid
man!”
“Can't you give it to me for a week,” David persisted, “and see how I
do?”
They would have awarded him the position immediately, he felt, if he had
properly attended to the Hatburns. He wanted desperately to explain his
failure to Priest, but a dogged pride prevented. The storekeeper was
tapping on an open ledger with a pen, gazing doubtfully at David.
“You couldn't be worse than the drunken object we have now,” he
admitted. “You couldn't hold the job permanent yet, but I might let
you drive extra--a day or so--till we find a man. I'd like to do what I
could for Mrs. Kinemon. Your father was a good man, a good customer....
Come and see me again--say, day after to-morrow.”
This half promise partly rehabilitated his fallen pride. There was no
sign in the men he passed that they held him in contempt for neglecting
to kill the Hatburns; and his mother wisely avoided the subject. She
wondered a little at Priest's considering him, even temporarily, for
the stage; but confined her wonder to a species of compliment. David
sat beside Allen, while the latter, between silent spaces of suffering,
advised him of the individual characters and attributes of the horses
that might come under his guiding reins.
It seemed incredible that he should actually be seated in the driver's
place on the stage, swinging the heavy whip out over a team trotting
briskly into the early morning; but there he was. There were no
passengers, and the stage rode roughly over a small bridge of loose
boards beyond the village. He pulled the horses into a walk on the
mountain beyond, and was soon skirting the Gait farm, with its broad
fields, where he had lived as a mere boy.
David slipped his hand under the leather seat and felt the smooth handle
of the revolver. Then, on an even reach, he wrapped the reins about
the whipstock and publicly filled and lighted his clay pipe. The smoke
drifted back in a fragrant cloud; the stage moved forward steadily and
easily; folded in momentary forgetfulness, lifted by a feeling of mature
responsibility, he was almost happy. But he swung down the mountain
beyond his familiar valley, crossed a smaller ridge, and turned into a
stony sweep rising on the left.
It was Elbow Barren. In an instant a tide of bitterness, of passionate
regret, swept over him. He saw the Hatburns' house, a rectangular bleak
structure crowning a gray prominence, with the tender green of young
pole beans on one hand and a disorderly barn on the other, and a blue
plume of smoke rising from an unsteady stone chimney against an end of
the dwelling. No one was visible.
Hot tears filled his eyes as the stage rolled along past the moldy ditch
into which Allen had fallen. The mangy curs! His grip tightened on the
reins and the team broke into a clattering trot, speedily leaving the
Barren behind. But the day had been robbed of its sparkle, his position
of its pleasurable pride. He saw again his father's body on the earthen
floor of the stable, the bridle in his stiff fingers; Allen carried into
the house. And he, David Kinemon, had had to step back, like a coward or
a woman, and let the Hatburns triumph.
The stage drew up before the Beaulings post-office in the middle of the
afternoon. David delivered the mail bags, and then led the team back
to a stable on the grassy verge of the houses clustered at the end
of tracks laid precariously over a green plain to a boxlike station.
Beaulings had a short row of unpainted two-story structures, the single
street cut into deep muddy scars; stores with small dusty windows;
eating houses elevated on piles; an insignificant mission chapel with
a tar-papered roof; and a number of obviously masked depots for the
illicit sale of liquor.
A hotel, neatly painted white and green, stood detached from the main
activity. There, washing his face in a tin basin on a back porch, David
had his fried supper, sat for a while outside in the gathering dusk,
gazing at the crude-oil flares, the passing dark figures beyond, the
still obscured immensity of mountain and forest. And then he went up to
a pine sealed room, like the heated interior of a packing box, where he
partly undressed for bed.