_Granny Mander’s curse is potent: the hawk comes down to feed in the
barnyard._
“BY gad, Glen,” the doctor shouted, “it’s our boy! And he’s hurt!” He
dropped to his knees and gently turned Luke Manders over so that he
rested upon his back. “Gimme some light!”
Glen, who had been forcing the door shut in the face of the storm, ran
to pull the light from the tiny bead which served at night to its full
force. “Oh, Dad,” she wailed, looking down at the inert figure, sensing
that her dismal fiction was visualized in fact before her, “he’s dead!”
“Dead, nothing!” her father snapped. “Go get my bag!” He was beginning
to unfasten the sodden rain and blood-soaked clothing. “But he’s hurt,
all right; hurt bad. ’S’matter with you? Don’t stand there gawping
at me! _Get my bag!_” He scowled up at her horror-stricken face and
swore under his breath as she stumbled away. This was the way the
soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie would have acted: was the girl, for all
his toughening processes, more her mother’s daughter than his?
She redeemed herself in the raw hour which followed. Her father saw,
presently, that there had been nothing craven in her shrinking. It had
been pure grief for the end of their golden legend, their golden lad.
“Ought to get him on the table,” the doctor fretted, “but--” he
regarded the gaunt length of the young mountaineer.
“I can help you carry him, Dad!” the girl interrupted eagerly. “You
take the hurt part of him and I’ll carry his feet! Wait--I’ll fix
the table!” She flew to spread a folded blanket and a sheet over the
glistening golden oak.
The removal was accomplished with comparative ease, the boy coming only
to partial consciousness and relapsing instantly into merciful stupor.
“He’ll wake up, fast enough, when I get busy after that bullet,” said
the man grimly. “You’ll have to hold him steady, Glen, if you can.”
“I can,” she answered palely. She worked quietly and capably, swiftly
and intelligently obedient to a curt word or even a gesture. It was
a strange, a grotesque scene, and the memory of it was to stay with
her as long as she lived--their splendid, wild young savage, bold and
fearless and free against his background of rocky hills and rushing
streams and dark forests, free no longer, and no longer wild and
splendid, lying limp on the dining table in the hideous room Effie
Darrow had hated, now slackly swept and dusted by the yellow slattern
Emma-_leen_.
The child, working wordlessly with her father, bringing hot water and
soft old linen, setting her teeth when he probed into the raw flesh,
putting all her young muscle into holding the twisting shoulders down,
tried vainly to make a reality of it all. The stark reversal was what
made it so crassly unbelievable. One day he had been leaping away into
his mountain fastnesses like a young stag, scorning them, and another
day he had come crawling down from his heights to their level, scorning
them still, no doubt, but begging their bounty. It hurt her conception
of him, her pride in him.
The doctor, panting, and glistening with sweat, and sharply impatient
with her, suddenly barked: “Well, how clean’d _you_ be, without a
bathtub or hot water, huh?” He had followed her gaze to the griminess
of hands and feet. “He’s cold water clean, brook clean, at that. How
much better’d _you_ be? Huh? Answer me that?” It was amazing how he
championed the wild lad from the first hour of their knowledge of him.
“I was thinking _that_,” said Glen flushing. “He’s tried to be clean,
and his clothes----”
“You go get some sheets and blankets and make up a bed here on the
couch,” her father snapped. “I’ll get his clothes off and wash him.
You throw a nightshirt of mine downstairs.” He had sensed, dimly, that
too much intimacy with the inelegancies of the young mountaineer’s
toilet would not enhance the golden legend, and she was not called in
again until the patient was made ready for his bed.
The girl made up the couch swiftly and capably and helped to carry him
to it. “Bring a hot-water bag, and then heat up some soup,” the doctor
directed. “He’ll come to for keeps any minute now, and I miss my guess
if he’s eaten to-day.”
When Glen came back with her bowl of steaming broth Luke Manders was,
quite as her father had predicted, wholly conscious. He dragged himself
up on the elbow on the uninjured side and fell upon the food with
wolfish hunger.
“Uh-huh,” Dr. Darrow wagged his head. “When’d you eat last, boy?”
“Yes’dy mawning,” he said thickly, without lifting his head.
The man handed the emptied bowl back to his daughter, and chuckled at
the hungry pleading in the boy’s eyes. “That’ll hold you for a while,
son. Can’t let you founder yourself. Now, then, how’d you pick up that
lead, and what brought you here?”
Glen, on her way to the kitchen, halted silently in the doorway to look
and listen.
The gaunt young face darkened and his words came hoarsely and jerkily.
“Reckon hit were Olivers.” (The Olivers were hereditary foes of his
house, the other side of the feud four generations long.) “And yet--”
his eyes widened--“hit’s ontelling _how_.... Farley Oliver, he’s abed
with a misery, and Jake’s down to the county seat, and Link has got
his right arm broke, and Eddie, which is the least one, is purely
too small....” He drew a quick breath and spent a moment in brooding
silence. “My gran’mammy, she named hit to me when she were a-dying ...
if I crossed her wish ... if I didn’t come down hyar to yo’all, she’d
ha’nt me, day and night, night and day, twel I did!”
“Well?” the doctor prodded him.
To Glen, flattening herself against the kitchen door, hardly breathing
in the tenseness of her interest, it seemed as if a chill and eerie
wind stole into the room which had no kinship with the gale outside.
The youth’s pallor deepened. “I know in reason hit were some Oliver,”
he insisted stubbornly, more to himself than to his interrogator. “Hit
were purely erbleeged to be! But my gran’mammy were a right quare
woman....” His lean young frame began to shake violently, so that the
old couch vibrated with it.
“All right,” said the doctor briskly. “Lie still, now, and keep covered
up warm! Got your feet on that hot-water bag? Well, your Grandma was a
wise old woman! Maybe you didn’t mind her as well as you might, but I
guess you will now!”
“Reckon so, suh,” he answered unsteadily, with the first note of
respect he had ever shown.
“You get to sleep now. Here--swallow this!” The doctor eased the dark
head back on the pillow and tucked the blankets about him, stirred up
the fire, and opened a window to admit a breath of snarling storm.
“I’ll leave my door open; you just shout if you need anything or if
you get to feeling bad. I’ll be down, two--three times before morning,
anyway.” He snapped off the light and herded Glen out of the kitchen.
“Glen, you get to bed fast as you make it! Nice time of night for
you--” he fumed as he always did, but halfway upstairs he gave her a
commendatory pat. “Good girl. Nerve. Kept your mouth shut and minded
me. ’Night.”
Help was summoned in the morning to move the young mountaineer to an
upper chamber where he spent three days in feverish pain, and when he
was able to sit up in a high-backed rocker he made his position plain.
The old woman had carried her point in death as she had not done in
life. He had come down, and he would stay down, and permit himself to
be “fotched on,” to the fulfilling of the old crone’s dream for him.
“But I am not aiming to be beholden,” he stated with his scant
civility. “If yo’all will get me work in the mill and a place to live,
and tote me, just once, to the night school, I will make out to do fo’
myself.”
“All right, son.” Dr. Darrow was carefully casual about it. “Guess I
can fix you up. Tollivers--know ’em?--come from up your way--they’ll
feed and sleep you for next to nothing, and there’ll be no trouble
about getting into the mill. But about school--I believe the best
thing’d be for Glen, here,” he nodded toward his daughter, waiting
silently for the patient’s tray, “to find out how much you know, and
maybe coach you a little. It’ll save you time.”
Young Manders turned his hawklike gaze upon her. He looked at her
rather often, but always with an impersonal scrutiny.
“Is she fotched on?” Patent disapproval in look and tone. “I was not
aiming to get me wimmin larning.”
His diction was curious, richly colored with accent and interlarded
with crudities, and yet giving an effect of dignity. Glen thought the
fact that he never slighted a final _g_ had something to do with it.
Dr. Darrow grinned. “You’ll find it’s all of a piece, down here,
Luke.” But he ceased to urge his daughter as a tutor and undertook the
examination himself, fitting it in between calls.
The lad had learned to read and write, in limited fashion, at the
moonlight school when he was several years younger, before he had
dedicated himself to a career of violence, and had retained a good
deal, but it was his figuring which amazed the physician.
“By _George_!” He sat back, beaming. “Quick as greased lightning! Got
me beat, boy! Have, for a fact!”
It was indeed a matter for marveling. Luke Manders knew little of means
or methods or rules, but he arrived at correct conclusions with a speed
and accuracy which stopped barely short of magic.
“You keep on like this,” the man blinked and chuckled, “and I’ll have
you keeping my books for me, before you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’” He
sobered. “Now listen here, Luke. What you want is business college.
Just get so you’re a little smoother on the reading and writing, and
then we’ll start you in right off the bat, figuring and----”
“I would be beholden to you,” the boy interrupted with a show of
eagerness. “I do not crave story-tale and song-ballad larning, suh. I
crave _numbers_!”
“And that,” said Dr. Darrow to his daughter, following her downstairs,
“is just what they do ‘crave’ generally, those mountaineers--stories
and songs. (People claim, you know, that the things they sing and the
yarns they spin have come straight down from the real old stuff in
Scotland and England--read all about it in a magazine, two--three
months ago!) But how he gets this bent for figures beats me! Goes to it
like a duck to water, and he’s a wiz at it. By gad, he’s a wiz! He is,
for a fact!”
Miss Ada Tenafee, requested to examine him and give a professional
opinion as to the point at which he should start in school, came
reluctantly, and only after considerable pleading on Glen’s part.
Her expression on entering the Darrow’s unpleasant sitting room and
encountering the young mountaineer was that of a well-bred lady
detecting an unclean odor and genteelly endeavoring to ignore it. She
was vague and non-committal, and said something under her breath about
the probable briefness of his stay in the lowlands, and Glen, watching
her, knew that she was mentally recalling “her own dear father’s rather
common but very apt simile of the silk purse and the sow’s ear.”
Luke Manders, for his part, regarded her with frank scorn. It was
clearly displeasing to him to find the font of learning guarded by this
faded vestal. He answered grudgingly and did himself small credit until
the doctor took charge of the quizzing and began to exhibit his prowess
with numbers. Then, like a dancer compelled by the lure of rhythm, he
performed.
“Well, now, Miss Tenafee,” the doctor demanded, “what do you think
about that? Pretty keen, huh? With no more chance-- Keen, huh?”
“Miz-_za_da” drew in her breath and a small quantity of dull color
seeped into her sallow cheeks. “He is indeed--very--very--” she paused,
visibly sorting her adjectives, choosing, rejecting.
“Well? _Well?_” the man prodded, impatiently.
The faded gentlewoman had found her word. “He is very _sharp_,” she
said definitely.
“You’ve said it!” Darrow was not subtle himself and rarely detected
subtlety in others. “Sharp as a lancet! Lemme tell you, this lad’s
going to get ahead in the world.”
“I daresay,” Miss Ada conceded, her upper lip spelling faint distaste.
“Glen, my dear--I have so many papers waiting for correction....” She
half rose, but seated herself again at the doctor’s peremptory gesture,
and discussed without enthusiasm the question of his grading.
It disappointed Glen to sense the dislike and distrust which her
friends felt for each other. She had wanted “Miz-_za_da” to thrill over
their golden legend, but the shabby teacher, pausing at the door, took
a long, measuring look at the bold and beautiful young mountaineer and
returned his frank scorn with a delicate, futile, birdlike antagonism
which the girl found pathetically amusing.