It was known to Indian Spring, the next day, amid great excitement, that
a serious fracas had been prevented on the ill-fated boundary by the
dramatic appearance of Uncle Ben Dabney, not only as a peacemaker, but
as Mr. Daubigny the bona fide purchaser and owner of the land. It was
known and accepted with great hilarity that “old marm McKinstry” had
defended the barn alone and unaided, with--as variously stated--a
pitchfork, an old stable-broom, and a pail of dirty water, against
Harrison, his party, and the entire able posse of the Sheriff of
Tuolumne County, with no further damage than a scalp wound which the
head of Seth Davis received while falling from the loft of the barn from
which he had been dislodged by Mrs. McKinstry and the broom aforesaid.
It was known with unanimous approbation that the acquisition of the
land-title by a hitherto humble citizen of Indian Spring was a triumph
of the settlement over foreign interference. But it was not known that
the school-master was a participant in the fight, or even present on the
spot. At Mrs. McKinstry's suggestion he had remained concealed in
the loft until after the withdrawal of both parties and the still
unconscious Seth. When Ford had remonstrated, with the remark that Seth
would be sure to declare the truth when he recovered his senses, Mrs.
McKinstry smiled grimly: “I reckon when he comes to know I was with ye
all the time, he'd rather hev it allowed that I licked him than YOU. I
don't say he'll let it pass ez far ez you're concerned or won't try to
get even with ye, but he won't go round tellin' WHY. However,” she
added still more grimly, “if you think you're ekul to tellin' the hull
story--how ye kem to be yer and that Seth wasn't lyin' arter all when he
blurted it out afore 'em--why I sha'n't hinder ye.” The master said no
more. And indeed for a day or two nothing transpired to show that Seth
was not equally reticent.
Nevertheless Mr. Ford was far from being satisfied with the issue of
his adventure. His relations with Cressy were known to the mother, and
although she had not again alluded to them, she would probably inform
her husband. Yet he could not help noticing, with a mingling of
unreasoning relief and equally unreasoning distrust, that she exhibited
a scornful unconcern in the matter, apart from the singular use to which
she had put it. He could hardly count upon McKinstry, with his heavy,
blind devotion to Cressy, being as indifferent. On the contrary, he had
acquired the impression, without caring to examine it closely, that
her father would not be displeased at his marrying Cressy, for it would
really amount to that. But here again he was forced to contemplate
what he had always avoided, the possible meaning and result of their
intimacy. In the reckless, thoughtless, extravagant--yet thus far
innocent--indulgence of their mutual passion, he had never spoken of
marriage, nor--and it struck him now with the same incongruous mingling
of relief and uneasiness--had SHE! Perhaps this might have arisen from
some superstitious or sensitive recollection on her part of her previous
engagement to Seth, but he remembered now that they had not even
exchanged the usual vows of eternal constancy. It may seem strange that,
in the half-dozen stolen and rapturous interviews which had taken place
between these young lovers, there had been no suggestion of the future,
nor any of those glowing projects for a united destiny peculiar to their
years and inexperience. They had lived entirely in a blissful present,
with no plans beyond their next rendezvous. In that mysterious and
sudden absorption of each other, not only the past, but the future
seemed to have been forgotten.
These thoughts were passing through his mind the next afternoon to
the prejudice of that calm and studious repose which the deserted
school-house usually superinduced, and which had been so fondly noted
by McKinstry and Uncle Ben. The latter had not arrived for his usual
lesson; it was possible that undue attention had been attracted to his
movements now that his good fortune was known; and the master was alone
save for the occasional swooping incursion of a depredatory jay in
search of crumbs from the children's luncheons, who added apparently
querulous insult to the larcenous act. He regretted Uncle Ben's absence,
as he wanted to know more about his connection with the Harrison attack
and his eventual intentions. Ever since the master emerged from the barn
and regained his hotel under cover of the darkness, he had heard only
the vaguest rumors, and he purposely avoided direct inquiry.
He had been quite prepared for Cressy's absence from school that
morning--indeed in his present vacillating mood he had felt that her
presence would have been irksome and embarrassing; but it struck
him suddenly and unpleasantly that her easy desertion of him at that
critical moment in the barn had not since been followed by the least
sign of anxiety to know the result of her mother's interference. What
did she imagine had transpired between Mrs. McKinstry and himself? Had
she confidently expected her mother's prompt acceptance of the situation
and a reconciliation? Was that the reason why she had treated that
interruption as lightly as if she were already his recognized betrothed?
Had she even calculated upon it? had she--? He stopped, his cheek
glowing from irritation under the suspicion, and shame at the disloyalty
of entertaining it.
Opening his desk, he began to arrange his papers mechanically, when
he discovered, with a slight feeling of annoyance, that he had placed
Cressy's bouquet--now dried and withered--in the same pigeon-hole with
the mysterious letters with which he had so often communed in former
days. He at once separated them with a half bitter smile, yet after a
moment's hesitation, and with his old sense of attempting to revive a
forgotten association, he tried to re-peruse them. But they did not
even restrain his straying thoughts, nor prevent him from detecting a
singular occurrence. The nearly level sun was, after its old fashion,
already hanging the shadowed tassels of the pine boughs like a garland
on the wall. But the shadow seemed to have suddenly grown larger
and more compact, and he turned, with a quick consciousness of some
interposing figure at the pane. Nothing however was to be seen. Yet so
impressed had he been that he walked to the door and stepped from the
porch to discover the intruder. The clearing was deserted, there was a
slight rustling in the adjacent laurels, but no human being was visible.
Nevertheless the old feeling of security and isolation which had never
been quite the same since Mr. McKinstry's confession, seemed now to have
fled the sylvan school-house altogether, and he somewhat angrily closed
his desk, locked it, and determined to go home.
His way lay through the first belt of pines towards the mining-flat, but
to-day from some vague impulse he turned and followed the ridge. He had
not proceeded far when he perceived Rupert Filgee lounging before him
on the trail, and at a little distance further on his brother Johnny. At
the sight of these two favorite pupils Mr. Ford's heart smote him with
a consciousness that he had of late neglected them, possibly because
Rupert's lofty scorn of the “silly” sex was not as amusing to him as
formerly, and possibly because Johnny's curiosity had been at times
obtrusive. He however quickened his pace and joined Rupert, laying
his hand familiarly as of old on his shoulder. To his surprise the boy
received his advances with some constraint and awkwardness, glancing
uneasily in the direction of Johnny. A sudden idea crossed Mr. Ford's
mind.
“Were you looking for me at the schoolroom just now?”
“No, sir.”
“You didn't look in at the window to see if I was there?” continued the
master.
“No, sir.”
The master glanced at Rupert. Truth-telling was a part of Rupert's
truculent temper, although, as the boy had often bitterly remarked, it
had always “told agin' him.”
“All right,” said the master, perfectly convinced. “It must have been my
fancy; but I thought somebody looked in--or passed by the window.”
But here Johnny, who had overheard the dialogue and approached them,
suddenly threw himself upon his brother's unoffending legs and commenced
to beat and pull them about with unintelligible protests. Rupert,
without looking down, said quietly, “Quit that now--I won't, I tell ye,”
and went through certain automatic movements of dislodging Johnny as if
he were a mere impeding puppy.
“What's the matter, Johnny?” said the master, to whom these gyrations
were not unfamiliar.
Johnny only replied by a new grip of his brother's trousers.
“Well, sir,” said Rupert, slightly recovering his dimples and his
readiness, “Johnny, yer, wants me to tell ye something. Ef he wasn't
the most original self-cocking, God-forsaken liar in Injin Spring--ef
he didn't lie awake in his crib mornin's to invent lies fer the day, I
wouldn't mind tellin' ye, and would hev told you before. However, since
you ask, and since you think you saw somebody around the school-house,
Johnny yer allows that Seth Davis is spyin' round and followin' ye
wherever you go, and he dragged me down yer to see it. He says he saw
him doggin' ye.”
“With a knife and pithtolth,” added Johnny's boundless imagination, to
the detriment of his limited facts.
Mr. Ford looked keenly from the one to the other, but rather with a
suspicion that they were cognizant of his late fracas than belief in the
truth of Johnny's statement.
“And what do YOU think of it, Rupert?” he asked carelessly.
“I think, sir,” said Rupert, “that allowin'--for onct--that Johnny ain't
lying, mebbee it's Cressy McKinstry that Seth's huntin' round, and
knowin' that she's always runnin' after you”--he stopped, and reddening
with a newborn sense that his fatal truthfulness had led him into a
glaring indelicacy towards the master, hurriedly added: “I mean, sir,
that mebbee it's Uncle Ben he's jealous of, now that he's got rich
enough for Cressy to hev him, and knowin' he comes to school in the
afternoon perhaps”--
“'Tain't either!” broke in Johnny promptly. “Theth's over ther beyond
the thchool, and Crethy's eatin' ithecream at the bakerth with Uncle
Ben.”
“Well, suppose she is, Seth don't know it, silly!” answered Rupert,
sharply. Then more politely to the master: “That's it! Seth has seen
Uncle Ben gallivanting with Cressy and thinks he's bringing her over
yer. Don't you see?”
The master however did not see but one thing. The girl who had only two
days ago carelessly left it to him to explain a compromising situation
to her mother--this girl who had precipitated him into a frontier fight
to the peril of his position and her good name, was calmly eating ices
with an available suitor without the least concern of the past! The
connection was perhaps illogical, but it was unpleasant. It was the more
awkward from the fact that he fancied that not only Rupert's beautiful
eyes, but even the infant Johnny's round ones, were fixed upon him with
an embarrassed expression of hesitating and foreboding sympathy.
“I think Johnny believes what he says--don't you, Johnny?” he smiled
with an assumption of cheerful ease, “but I see no necessity just yet
for binding Seth Davis over to keep the peace. Tell me about yourself,
Rupe. I hope Uncle Ben doesn't think of changing his young tutor with
his good fortune?”
“No, sir,” returned Rupert brightening; “he promises to take me to
Sacramento with him as his private secretary or confidential clerk, you
know, ef--ef”--he hesitated again with very un-Rupert-like caution,
“ef things go as he wants 'em.” He stopped awkwardly and his brown
eyes became clouded. “Like ez not, Mr. Ford, he's only foolin'
me--and--HIMSELF.” The boy's eyes sought the master's curiously.
“I don't know about that,” returned Mr. Ford uneasily, with a certain
recollection of Uncle Ben's triumph over his own incredulity; “he
surely hasn't shown himself a fool or a boaster so far. I consider your
prospect a very fair one, and I wish you joy of it, my boy.” He ran his
fingers through Rupert's curls in his old caressing fashion, the more
tenderly perhaps that he fancied he still saw symptoms of stormy and wet
weather in the boy's brown eyes. “Run along home, both of you, and don't
worry yourselves about me.”
He turned away, but had scarcely proceeded half a dozen yards before
he felt a tug at his coat. Looking down he saw the diminutive Johnny.
“They'll be comin' home thith way,” he said, reaching up in a hoarse
confidential whisper.
“Who?”
“Crethy and 'im.”
But before the master could make any response to this presumably
gratifying information, Johnny had rejoined his brother. The two boys
waved their hands towards him with the same diffident and mysterious
sympathy that left him hesitating between a smile and a frown. Then he
proceeded on his way. Nevertheless, for no other reason than that he
felt a sudden distaste to meeting any one, when he reached the point
where the trail descended directly to the settlement, he turned into a
longer and more solitary detour by the woods.
The sun was already so low that its long rays pierced the forest from
beneath, and suffused the dim colonnade of straight pine shafts with a
golden haze, while it left the dense intercrossed branches fifty feet
above in deeper shadow. Walking in this yellow twilight, with his feet
noiselessly treading down the yielding carpet of pine needles, it seemed
to the master that he was passing through the woods in a dream. There
was no sound but the dull intermittent double knock of the wood-pecker,
or the drowsy croak of some early roosting bird; all suggestion of the
settlement, with all traces of human contiguity, were left far behind.
It was therefore with a strange and nervous sense of being softly hailed
by some woodland sprite that he seemed to hear his own name faintly
wafted upon the air. He turned quickly; it was Cressy, panting behind
him! Even then, in her white closely gathered skirts, her bared head
and graceful arching neck bent forward, her flying braids freed from
the straw hat which she had swung from her arm so as not to impede her
flight, there was so much of the following Maenad about her that he was
for an instant startled.
He stopped; she bounded to him, and throwing her arms around his neck
with a light laugh, let herself hang for a moment breathless on his
breast. Then recovering her speech she said slowly:--
“I started on an Injin trot after you, just as you turned off the trail,
but you'd got so far ahead while I was shaking myself clear of Uncle Ben
that I had to jist lope the whole way through the woods to catch up.”
She stopped, and looking up into his troubled face caught his cheeks
between her hands, and bringing his knit brows down to the level of her
humid blue eyes said, “You haven't kissed me yet. What's the matter?”
“Doesn't it strike you that I might ask that question, considering that
it's three days since I've seen you, and that you left me, in a rather
awkward position, to explain matters to your mother?” he said coldly.
He had formulated the sentence in his mind some moments before, but now
that it was uttered, it appeared singularly weak and impotent.
“That's so,” she said with a frank laugh, burying her face in his
waistcoat. “You see, dandy boy”--his pet name--“I reckoned for that
reason we'd better lie low for a day or two. Well,” she continued,
untying his cravat and retying it again, “how DID you crawl out of it?”
“Do you mean to say your mother did not tell you?” he asked indignantly.
“Why should she?” returned Cressy lazily. “She never talks to me of
these things, honey.”
“And you knew nothing about it?”
Cressy shook her head, and then winding one of her long braids around
the young man's neck, offered the end of it to his mouth, and on his
sternly declining it, took it in her own.
Yet even her ignorance of what had really happened did not account
to the master for the indifference of her long silence, and albeit
conscious of some inefficiency in his present unheroic attitude, he
continued sarcastically, “May I ask WHAT you imagined would happen when
you left me?”
“Well,” said Cressy confidently, “I reckoned, chile, you could lie as
well as the next man, and that, being gifted, you'd sling Maw something
new and purty. Why, I ain't got no fancy, but I fixed up something
against Paw's questioning ME. I made that conceited Masters promise to
swear that HE was in the barn with me. Then I calculated to tell Paw
that you came meandering along just before Maw popped in, and that I
skedaddled to join Masters. Of course,” she added quickly, tightening
her hold of the master as he made a sudden attempt at withdrawal, “I
didn't let on to Masters WHY I wanted him to promise, or that you were
there.”
“Cressy,” said Ford, irritated beyond measure, “are you mad, or do you
think I am?”
The girl's face changed. She cast a half frightened, half questioning
glance at his eyes and then around the darkening aisle. “If we're going
to quarrel, Jack,” she said hurriedly, “don't let's do it BEFORE FOLKS.”
“In the name of Heaven,” he said, following her eyes indignantly, “what
do you mean?”
“I mean,” she said, with a slight shiver of resignation and scorn,
“if you--oh dear! if IT'S ALL going to be like THEM, let's keep it to
ourselves.”
He gazed at her in hopeless bewilderment. Did she really mean that she
was more frightened at the possible revelation of their disagreement
than of their intimacy?
“Come,” she continued tenderly, still glancing, however, uneasily around
her, “come! We'll be more comfortable in the hollow. It's only a step.”
Still holding him by her braid she half led, half dragged him away. To
the right was one of those sudden depressions in the ground caused by
the subsidence of the earth from hidden springs and the uprooting of one
or two of the larger trees. When she had forced him down this declivity
below the level of the needle-strewn forest floor, she seated him upon
a mossy root, and shaking out her skirts in a half childlike, half
coquettish way, comfortably seated herself in his lap, with her arm
supplementing the clinging braid around his neck.
“Now hark to me, and don't holler so loud,” she said turning his face to
her questioning eyes. “What's gone of you anyway, nigger boy?” It
should be premised that Cressy's terms of endearment were mainly
negro-dialectical, reminiscences of her brief babyhood, her slave-nurse,
and the only playmates she had ever known.
Still implacable, the master coldly repeated the counts of his
indictment against the girl's strange indifference and still stranger
entanglements, winding up by setting forth the whole story of his
interview with her mother, his forced defence of the barn, Seth's
outspoken accusation, and their silent and furious struggle in the loft.
But if he had expected that this daughter of a Southwestern fighter
would betray any enthusiasm over her lover's participation in one of
their characteristic feuds--if he looked for any fond praise for his own
prowess, he was bitterly mistaken. She loosened her arm from his neck
of her own accord, unwound the braid, and putting her two little hands
clasped between her knees, crossed her small feet before her, and,
albeit still in his lap, looked the picture of languid dejection.
“Maw ought to have more sense, and you ought to have lit out of the
window after me,” she said with a lazy sigh. “Fightin' ain't in your
line--it's too much like THEM. That Seth's sure to get even with you.”
“I can protect myself,” he said haughtily. Nevertheless he had a
depressing consciousness that his lithe and graceful burden was somewhat
in the way of any heroic expression.
“Seth can lick you out of your boots, chile,” she said with naive
abstraction. Then, as he struggled to secure an upright position, “Don't
git riled, honey. Of course you'd let them kill you before YOU'D give
in. But that's their best holt--that's their trade! That's all they can
do--don't you see? That's where YOU'RE not like THEM--that's why you're
not their low down kind! That's why you're my boy--that's why I love
you!”
She had thrown her whole weight again upon his shoulders until she had
forced him back to his seat. Then, with her locked hands again around
his neck, she looked intently into his face. The varying color dropped
from her cheeks, her eyes seemed to grow larger, the same look of rapt
absorption and possession that had so transfigured her young face at
the ball was fixed upon it now. Her lips parted slightly, she seemed to
murmur rather than speak:--
“What are these people to us? What are Seth's jealousies, Uncle Ben's
and Masters's foolishness, Paw and Maw's quarr'ls and tantrums to you
and me, dear? What is it what THEY think, what they reckon, what they
plan out, and what they set themselves against--to us? We love each
other, we belong to each other, without their help or their hindrance.
From the time we first saw each other it was so, and from that time Paw
and Maw, and Seth and Masters, and even YOU and ME, dear, had nothing
else to do. That was love as I know it; not Seth's sneaking rages, and
Uncle Ben's sneaking fooleries, and Masters's sneaking conceit, but
only love. And knowing that, I let Seth rage, and Uncle Ben dawdle, and
Masters trifle--and for what? To keep them from me and my boy. They were
satisfied, and we were happy.”
Vague and unreasoning as he knew her speech to be, the rapt and perfect
conviction with which it was uttered staggered him.
“But how is this to end, Cressy?” he said passionately.
The abstracted look passed, and the slight color and delicate mobility
of her face returned. “To end, dandy boy?” she repeated lazily. “You
didn't think of marrying me--did you?”
He blushed, stammered, and said “Yes,” albeit with all his past
vacillation and his present distrust of her, transparent on his cheek
and audible in his voice.
“No, dear,” she said quietly, reaching down, untying her little shoe and
shaking the dust and pine needles from its recesses, “no! I don't know
enough to be a wife to you, just now, and you know it. And I couldn't
keep a house fit for you, and you couldn't afford to keep ME without it.
And then it would be all known, and it wouldn't be us two, dear, and our
lonely meetings any more. And we couldn't be engaged--that would be too
much like me and Seth over again. That's what you mean, dandy boy--for
you're only a dandy boy, you know, and they don't get married to
backwood Southern girls who haven't a nigger to bless themselves with
since the war! No,” she continued, lifting her proud little head so
promptly after Ford had recovered from his surprise as to make the ruse
of emptying her shoe perfectly palpable, “no, that's what we've both
allowed, dear, all along. And now, honey, it's near time for me to go.
Tell me something good--before I go. Tell me that you love me as you
used to--tell me how you felt that night at the ball when you first
knew we loved each other. But stop--kiss me first--there, once more--for
keeps.”