Meanwhile, unaware of her husband's sudden relapse to her old border
principles and of the visit that had induced it, Mrs. McKinstry was
slowly returning from a lugubrious recital of her moods and feelings
at the parson's. As she crossed the barren flat and reached the wooded
upland midway between the school-house and the ranch, she saw before
her the old familiar figure of Seth Davis lounging on the trail. In her
habitual loyalty to her husband's feuds she would probably have stalked
defiantly past him, notwithstanding her late regrets of the broken
engagement, but Seth began to advance awkwardly towards her. In fact, he
had noticed the tall, gaunt, plaid-shawled and holland-bonneted figure
approaching, and had waited for it.
As he seemed intent upon getting in her way she stopped and raised
her right hand warningly before her. In spite of the shawl and the
sun-bonnet, suffering had implanted a rude Runic dignity to her
attitude. “Words that hev to be took back, Seth Davis,” she said
hastily, “hev passed between you and my man. Out of my way, then, that I
may pass, too.”
“Not much betwixt you and me, Aunt Rachel,” he said with slouching
deprecation, using the old household title by which he had familiarly
known her. “I've nothin agin you--and I kin prove it by wot I'm yer
to say. And I ain't trucklin' to yer for myself, for ez far ez me and
your'n ez concerned,” he continued, with a malevolent glance, “thar
ain't gold enough in Caleforny to mak the weddin' ring that could hitch
me and Cress together. I want to tell you that you're bein' played; that
you're bein' befooled and bamboozled and honey-fogled. Thet while
you're groanin' at class-meetin' and Hiram's quo'llin' with Dad, and
Joe Masters waitin' round to pick up any bone that's throwed him, that
sneakin', hypocritical Yankee school-master is draggin' your daughter to
h-ll with him on the sly.”
“Quit that, Seth Davis,” said Mrs. McKinstry sternly, “or be man enough
to tell it to a man. That's Hiram's business to know.”
“And what if he knows it well enough and winks at it? What if he's
willin' enough to truckle to it, to curry favor with them sneakin'
Yanks?” said Seth malignantly.
A spasm of savage conviction seized Mrs. McKinstry. But it was more
from her jealous fears of her husband's disloyalty than concern for her
daughter's transgression. Nevertheless, she said desperately, “It's a
lie. Where are your proofs?”
“Proofs?” returned Seth. “Who is it sneaks around the school-house to
have private talks with the school-master, and edges him on with Cressy
afore folks? Your husband. Who goes sneakin' off every arternoon with
that same cantin' hound of a school-master? Your daughter. Who's been
carryin' on together, and hidin' thick enough to be ridden out on a rail
together? Your daughter and the school-master. Proofs?--ask anybody. Ask
the children. Look yar--you, Johnny--come here.”
He had suddenly directed his voice to a blackberry bush near the trail,
from which the curly head of Johnny Filgee had just appeared. That
home-returning infant painfully disengaged himself, his slate, his
books, and his small dinner-pail half filled with fruit as immature as
himself, and came towards them sideways.
“Yer's a dime, Johnny, to git some candy,” said Seth, endeavoring to
distort his passion-set face into a smile.
Johnny Filgee's small, berry-stained palm promptly closed over the coin.
“Now, don't lie. Where's Cressy?”
“Kithin' her bo.”
“Good boy. What bo?”
Johnny hesitated. He had once seen the school-master and Cressy
together; he had heard it whispered by the other children that they
loved each other. But looking at Seth and Mrs. McKinstry he felt that
something more tremendous than this stupid fact was required of him for
grown-up people, and being honest and imaginative, he determined that it
should be worth the money.
“Speak up, Johnny, don't be afeard to tell.”
Johnny was not “afeard”--he was only thinking. He had it! He remembered
that he had just seen his paragon, the brilliant Stacey, coming from
the boundary woods. What more poetical and startlingly effective than to
connect him with Cressy? He replied promptly:--
“Mithter Thtathy. He gived her a watch and ring of truly gold. Goin' to
be married at Thacramento.”
“You lyin' limb,” said Seth, seizing him roughly. But Mrs. McKinstry
interposed.
“Let that brat go,” she said with gleaming eyes. “I want to talk to
you.” Seth released Johnny. “It's a trick,” he said, “he's bin put up to
it by that Ford.”
But Johnny, after securing a safe vantage behind the blackberry bush,
determined to give them another trial--with facts.
“I know mor'n that,” he called out.
“Git--you measly pup,” said Seth savagely.
“I know Theriff Briggth, he rid over the boundary with a lot o' men and
horthes,” said Johnny, with that hurried delivery with which he was able
to estop interruption. “Theed 'em go by. Maur Harrithon theth his dad's
goin' to chuck out ole McKinthtry. Hooray!”
Mrs. McKinstry turned her dark face sharply on Seth. “What's that he
sez?”
“Nothin' but children's gassin',” he answered, meeting her eyes with an
evil consciousness half loutish, half defiant, “and ef it war true, it
would only sarve Hiram McKinstry right.”
She laid her hand upon his shoulder with swift suspicion. “Out o' my
way, Seth Davis,” she said suddenly, pushing him aside. “Ef this ez any
underhanded work of yours, you'll pay for it.”
She strode past him in the direction of Johnny, but at the approach
of the tall woman with the angry eyes, the boy flew. She hesitated a
moment, turned again with a threatening wave of the hand to Seth, and
started off rapidly in the direction of the boundary.
She had not placed so much faith in the boy's story as in the vague
revelation of evil in Davis's manner. If there was any “cussedness”
afoot, Seth, convinced of Cressy's unfaithfulness, and with no further
hope of any mediation from the parents, would know it. Unless Hiram had
been warned, he was still lulled in his fatuous dream of civilization.
At that time he and his men were in the tules with the stock; to be
satisfied, she herself must go to the boundary.
She reached the ridge of the cottonwoods and sycamores, and a few
hundred yards further brought her to the edge of that gentle southern
slope which at last sank into the broad meadow of the debatable ground.
In spite of Stacey's invidious criticism of its intrinsic value, this
theatre of savage dissension, violence, and bloodshed was by some irony
of nature a pastoral landscape of singular and peaceful repose. The soft
glacis stretching before her was in spring cerulean with lupins, and
later starred with mariposas. The meadow was transversely crossed by a
curving line of alders that indicated a rare water-course, of which in
the dry season only a single pool remained to flash back the unvarying
sky. There had been no attempt at cultivation of this broad expanse;
wild oats, mustard, and rank grasses left it a tossing sea of turbulent
and variegated color whose waves rode high enough to engulf horse and
rider in their choking depths. Even the traces of human struggle,
the uprooted stakes, scattered fence-rails, and empty post-holes were
forever hidden under these billows of verdure. Midway of the field
and near the water-course arose McKinstry's barn--the solitary human
structure whose rude, misshapen, bulging sides and swallow-haunted eaves
bursting with hay from the neighboring pasture, seemed however only
an extravagant growth of the prolific soil. Mrs. McKinstry gazed at it
anxiously. There was no sign of life or movement near or around it; it
stood as it had always stood, deserted and solitary. But turning her
eyes to the right, beyond the water-course, she could see a slight
regular undulation of the grassy sea and what appeared to be the
drifting on its surface of half a dozen slouched hats in the direction
of the alders. There was no longer any doubt; a party from the other
side was approaching the border.
A shout and the quick galloping of hoofs behind her sent a thrill of
relief to her heart. She had barely time to draw aside as her husband
and his followers swept past her down the slope. But it needed not
his furious cry, “The Harrisons hev sold us out,” to tell her that the
crisis had come.
She held her breath as the cavalcade diverged, and in open order
furiously approached the water-course, and she could see a sudden check
and hesitation in the movement in the meadow at that unlooked-for onset.
Then she thought of the barn. It would be a rallying-point for them if
driven back--a tower of defence if besieged. There were arms secreted
beneath the hay for such an emergency. She would run there, swing-to its
open doors, and get ready to barricade them.
She ran crouchingly, seeking the higher grasses and brambles of the
ridge to escape observation from the meadow until she could descend upon
the barn from the rear. She threw aside her impeding shawl; her brown
holland sun-bonnet, torn off her head and hanging by its strings from
her shoulders, let her coarse silver-threaded hair stream like a mane
over her back; her face and hands were bleeding from thorns and whitened
by dust. But she struggled on fiercely like some hunted animal until
she reached the descending trail, when, letting herself go blindly, only
withheld by the long grasses she clutched at wildly on either side, she
half fell, half stumbled down the slope and emerged beside the barn,
breathless and exhausted.
But what a contrast was there! For an instant she could scarcely believe
that she had left the ridge with her husband's savage outcry in her
ears, and in her eyes the swift vision of his furious cavalcade. The
boundary meadow was hidden by the soft lines of graceful willows in
whose dim recesses the figures of the passionate horsemen seemed to have
melted forever. There was nothing now to interrupt the long vista of
peaceful beauty that stretched before her through this lonely hollow to
the distant sleeping hills. The bursting barn in the foreground, heaped
with grain that fringed its eaves and bristled from its windows and
doors until its unlovely bulk was hidden in trailing feathery outlines;
the gentle flutter of wings and soothing twitter of swallows and jays
around its open rafters, and the drifting shadows of a few circling
crows above it; the drowsy song of bees on the wild mustard that half
hid its walls with yellow bloom; the sound of faintly-trickling water in
one of those old Indian-haunted springs that had given its name to the
locality; all these for an instant touched the senses of this hard,
fierce woman as she had not been touched since she was a girl. For one
brief moment the joys of peace and that matured repose that never had
been hers flashed upon her; but with it came the savage consciousness
that even now it was being wrested away, and the thought fired her blood
again. She listened eagerly for a second in the direction of the meadow;
there was no report of fire-arms--there was yet time to prepare the barn
for defence. She ran to the front of the building and seized the latch
of the half-closed door. A little feminine cry that was half a laugh
came from within, with the rapid rustle of a skirt and as the door
swung open a light figure vanished through the rear window. The slanting
sunlight falling in the shadowed interior disclosed only the single
erect figure of the school-master John Ford.
The first confusion and embarrassment of an interrupted rendezvous that
had colored Ford's cheeks, gave way to a look of alarm as he caught
sight of the bleeding face and dishevelled figure of Mrs. McKinstry. She
saw it. To her distorted fancy it seemed only a proof of deeper guilt.
Without a word she closed the heavy door behind her and swung the huge
cross-bar unaided to its place. She then turned and confronted him,
wiping the dust from her face and arms with her torn and dangling
sun-bonnet in a way that recalled her attitude on the first day he had
met her.
“That was Cress with ye?” she said.
He hesitated, still gazing at her in wonder.
“Don't lie.”
He started. “I don't propose to,” he retorted indignantly. “It was”--
“I don't ask ye how long this yer's bin goin' on,” she said, pointing
to Cressy's sun-bonnet, a few books, and a scattered nosegay of wild
flowers lying on the hay; “and I don't want to know. In five minutes
either her father will be here, or them hell-hounds of Harrison's who've
sold him out will swarm round this barn to git possesshun. Ef
this yer”--she again pointed contemptuously to the objects just
indicated--“means that you've cast your lot with US and kalkilate to
take our bitter with our sweet, ye'll lift up that stack of hay and
bring out a gun to help defend it. Ef you're meanin' anythin' else,
Ford, you'll hide yourself in that hay till Hiram comes and has time
enough to attend to ye.”
“And if I choose to do neither?” he said haughtily.
She looked at him in unutterable scorn. “There's the winder--take it
while there's time, afore I bar it. Ef you see Hiram, tell him ye left
an old woman behind ye to defend the place whar you uster hide with her
darter.”
Before he could reply there was a distant report, followed almost
directly by another. With a movement of irritation he walked to the
window, turned and looked at her--bolted it, and came back.
“Where's that gun?” he said almost rudely.
“I reckon's that would fetch ye,” she said, dragging away the hay and
disclosing a long trough-like box covered with tarpaulin. It proved to
contain powder, shot, and two guns. He took one.
“I suppose I may know what I am fighting for?” he said dryly.
“Ye might say 'Cress' ef they”--indicating the direction of the
reports--“happen to ask ye,” she returned with equal sobriety. “Jess now
ye kin take your stand up thar in the loft and see what's comin'.”
He did not linger, but climbed to the place assigned him, glad to escape
the company of the woman who at that moment he almost hated. In his
unreflecting passion for Cressy he had always evaded the thought of this
relationship or propinquity; the mother had recalled it to him in a way
that imperilled even his passion for the daughter; his mind was wholly
preoccupied with the idiotic, exasperating, and utterly hopeless
position that had been forced upon him. In the bitterness of his spirit
his sense of personal danger was so far absorbed that he speculated on
the chance bullet in the melee that might end his folly and relieve him
of responsibility. Shut up in a barn with a furious woman, in a lawless
defence of questionable rights--with the added consciousness that an
equally questionable passion had drawn him into it, and that SHE knew
it--death seemed to offer the only escape from the explanation he could
never give. If another sting could have been added it was the absurd
conviction that Cressy would not appreciate his sacrifice, but was
perhaps even at that moment calmly congratulating herself on the
felicitousness of the complication in which she had left him.
Suddenly he heard a shout and the tramping of horse. The sides of the
loft were scantily boarded to allow the extension of the pent-up grain,
and between the interstices Ford, without being himself seen, had an
uninterrupted view of the plain between him and the line of willows.
As he gazed, five men hurriedly issued from the extreme left and ran
towards the barn. McKinstry and his followers simultaneously broke from
the same covert further to the right and galloped forward to intercept
them. But although mounted, the greater distance they had to traverse
brought them to the rear of the building only as the Harrison party came
to a sudden halt before the closed and barricaded doors of the usually
defenceless barn. The discomfiture of the latter was greeted by a
derisive shout from the McKinstry party--albeit, equally astonished. But
in that brief moment Ford recognized in the leader of the Harrisons the
well-known figure of the Sheriff of Tuolumne. It needed only this to cap
the climax of the fatality that seemed to pursue him. He was no longer a
lawless opposer of equally lawless forces, but he was actually resisting
the law itself. He understood the situation now. It was some idiotic
blunder of Uncle Ben's that had precipitated this attack.
The belligerents had already cocked their weapons, although the barn
was still a rampart between the parties. But an adroit flanker of
McKinstry's, creeping through the tall mustard, managed to take up an
enfilading position as the Harrisons advanced to break in the door. A
threatening shout from the ambuscaded partisans caused them to hurriedly
fall back towards the rear of the barn. There was a pause, and then
began the usual Homeric chaff,--with this Western difference that it was
cunningly intended to draw the other's fire.
“Why don't you blaze away at the door, you ---- ----! It won't hurt ye!”
“He's afraid the bolt will shoot back!” Laughter from the McKinstrys.
“Come outer the tall grass and show yourself, you black, mud-eating
gopher.”
“He can't. He's dropped his grit and is sarchin' for it.” Goading
laughter from the Harrisons.
Each man waited for that single shot which would precipitate the fight.
Even in their lawlessness the rude instinct of the duello swayed them.
The officer of the law recognized the principle as well as its practical
advantage in a collision, but he hesitated to sacrifice one of his men
in an attack on the barn, which would draw the fire of McKinstry at that
necessarily fatal range. As a brave man he would have taken the risk
himself, but as a prudent one, he reflected that his hurriedly collected
posse were all partisans, and if he fell the conflict would resolve
itself into a purely partisan struggle without a single unprejudiced
witness to justify his conduct in the popular eye. The master also knew
this; it had checked his first impulse to come forward as a mediator;
his only reliance now was on Mrs. McKinstry's restraint and the
sheriff's forbearance. The next instant both seemed to be imperilled.
“Well, why don't you wade in?” sneered Dick McKinstry; “who do you
reckon's hidden in the barn?”
“I'll tell ye,” said a harsh, passionate voice from the hill-side. “It's
Cressy McKinstry and the school-master hidin' in the hay.”
Both parties turned quickly towards the intruder who had approached them
unperceived. But the speech was followed by a more startling revulsion
of sentiment as Mrs. McKinstry's voice rang out from the barn, “You lie,
Seth Davis!”
The brief advantage offered to the sheriff in Davis's advent as a
neutral witness, was utterly lost by this unlooked-for revelation of
Mrs. McKinstry's presence in the barn! The fates were clearly against
him! A woman in the fight, and an old one at that! A white woman to be
forcibly ejected! In the whole unwritten code of Southwestern chivalry
there was no such precedent.
“Stand back,” he said disgustedly to his followers, “stand back and
let the d----d barn slide. But you, Hiram McKinstry, I'll give YOU five
minutes to shake yourself clear of your wife's petticoats and git!” His
blood was up now--the quicker from his momentary weakness and the trick
of which he thought himself a dupe.
Again the fatal signal seemed imminent, again it was delayed. For Hiram
McKinstry, with clanking spurs and rifle in hand stepped from behind the
barn, full in the presence of his antagonists.
“Ez to my gitten in five minits,” he began in his laziest, drowsiest
manner, “we'll see when the time's up. But jest now words hev passed
betwixt my wife and Seth Davis. Afore anythin' else goes on yer, he's
got to take HIS back. My wife allows he lies; I allow he lies too, and I
stan' here to say it.”
The right of personal insult to precedence of redress was too old a
frontier principle to be gainsaid now. Both parties held back and
every eye was turned to where Seth Davis had been standing. But he had
disappeared.
Where?
When Mrs. McKinstry hurled her denial from the barn, he had taken
advantage of the greater surprise to leap to one of the trusses of
hay that projected beyond the loft, and secure a footing from which he
quickly scrambled through the open scantling to the interior. The master
who, startled by his voice, had made his way through the loose grain to
the rear, reached it as Seth half crawled, half tumbled through. Their
eyes met in a single flash of rage, but before Seth could utter an
outcry, the master had dropped his gun, seized him around the neck and
crammed a thick handful of the soft hay he had hurriedly snatched up
into his face and gasping mouth. A furious but silent struggle ensued;
the yielding hay on which they both fell deadened all sound of a scuffle
and concealed them from view; masses of it, already loosened by the
intruder's entrance, and dislodged in their contortions began to slip
through the opening to the ground. The master, still uppermost and
holding Seth firmly down, allowed himself to slip with them, shoving
his adversary before him; the maddened Missourian detecting his purpose,
made a desperate attempt to change his position, and succeeded in
raising his knee against the master's chest. Ford, guarding against what
seemed to be only a wrestler's strategy, contented himself by locking
the bent knee firmly in that position, and thus unwittingly gave Seth
the looked-for opportunity of drawing the bowie-knife concealed in his
boot leg. He knew his mistake only as Seth violently freed his arm, and
threw it upward for the blow. He heard the steel slither like a scythe
through the hay, and unlocking his hold desperately threw himself on
the uplifted arm. The movement saved him. For the released body of Seth
slipped rapidly through the opening, upheld for a single instant on the
verge by the grasp of the master's two hands on the arm that still held
the knife, and then dropped heavily downward. Even then, the hay that
had slipped before him would have broken his fall, but his head came in
violent contact with some farming implements standing against the wall,
and without a cry he was stretched senseless on the ground. The whole
occurrence passed so rapidly and so noiselessly that not only did
McKinstry's challenge fall upon his already unconscious ears, but the
loosened hay which in the master's struggles to recover himself still
continued to slide gently from the loft, actually hid him from the eyes
of the spectators who sought him a moment afterwards. A mass of hay
and wild oats, dislodged apparently by Mrs. McKinstry in securing
her defences, was all that met their eyes; even the woman herself was
unconscious of the deadly struggle that had taken place above her.
The master staggered to an upright position half choked and half blinded
with dust, turgid and bursting with the rush of blood to his head, but
clear and collected in mind, and unremorsefully triumphant. Unconscious
of the real extent of Seth's catastrophe he groped for and seized his
gun, examined the cap and eagerly waited for a renewed attack. “He tried
to kill me; he would have killed me; if he comes again I must kill him,”
he kept repeating to himself. It never occurred to him that this was
inconsistent with his previous thought--indeed with the whole tenor of
his belief. Perhaps the most peaceful man who has been once put in peril
of life by an adversary, who has recognized death threatening him in the
eye of his antagonist, is by some strange paradox not likely to hold his
own life or the life of his adversary as dearly as before. Everything
was silent now. The suspense irritated him, he no longer dreaded but
even longed for the shot that would precipitate hostilities. What were
they doing? Guided by Seth, were they concerting a fresh attack?
Listening more intently he became aware of a distant shouting, and even
more distinctly, of the dull, heavy trampling of hoofs. A sudden angry
fear that the McKinstrys had been beaten off and were flying--a fear and
anger that now for the first time identified him with their cause--came
over him, and he scrambled quickly towards the opening below. But the
sound was approaching and with it came a voice.
“Hold on there, sheriff!”
It was the voice of the agent Stacey.
There was a pause of reluctant murmuring. But the warning was enforced
by a command from another voice--weak, unheroic, but familiar, “I order
this yer to stop--right yer!”
A burst of ironical laughter followed. The voice was Uncle Ben's.
“Stand back! This is no time for foolin',” said the sheriff roughly.
“He's right, Sheriff Briggs,” said Stacey's voice hurriedly; “you're
acting for HIM; he's the owner of the land.”
“What? That Ben Dabney?”
“Yes; he's Daubigny, who bought the title from us.”
There was a momentary hush, and then a hurried murmur.
“Which means, gents,” rose Uncle Ben's voice persuasively, “that this
yer young man, though fair-minded and well-intended, hez bin a leetle
too chipper and previous in orderin' out the law. This yer ain't no
law matter with ME, boys. It ain't to be settled by law-papers, nor
shot-guns and deringers. It's suthin' to be chawed over sociable-like,
between drinks. Ef any harm hez bin done, ef anythin's happened, I'm yer
to 'demnify the sheriff, and make it comf'ble all round. Yer know me,
boys. I'm talkin'. It's me--Dabney, or Daubigny, which ever way you like
it.”
But in the silence that followed, the passions had not yet evidently
cooled. It was broken by the sarcastic drawl of Dick McKinstry: “If
them Harrisons don't mind heven had their medders trampled over by a few
white men, why”--
“The sheriff ez 'demnified for that,” interrupted Uncle Ben hastily.
“'N ef Dick McKinstry don't mind the damage to his pants in crawlin' out
o' gunshot in the tall grass”--retorted Joe Harrison.
“I'm yer to settle that, boys,” said Uncle Ben cheerfully.
“But who'll settle THIS?” clamored the voice of the older Harrison from
behind the barn where he had stumbled in crossing the fallen hay. “Yer's
Seth Davis lyin' in the hay with the top of his head busted. Who's to
pay for that?”
There was a rush to the spot, and a quick cry of reaction.
“Whose work is this?” demanded the sheriff's voice, with official
severity.
The master uttered an instinctive exclamation of defiance, and dropping
quickly to the barn floor, would the next moment have opened the door
and declared himself, but Mrs. McKinstry, after a single glance at his
determined face, suddenly threw herself before him with an imperious
gesture of silence. Then her voice rang clearly from the barn:--
“Well, if it's the hound that tried to force his way in yer, I reckon ye
kin put that down to ME!”