The continuous dry weather during the month of June had caused many
springs and a few wells to become dry, and the women of that section
found it difficult to get sufficient soft water for the washing of
clothes. Mrs. Hemingway, whose own well was fed from a vein of limestone
water too hard to be of much use in that way, remembered a certain
rock-bottom pool in a shaded nook at the foot of the rugged hill back of
her house where at all times of the year a quantity of soft, clear water
was to be found; so thither, with a great bundle of household linen tied
up in a sheet, she went one morning shortly after breakfast.
Her secret ailment had not seemed to improve under the constant
application of the peddler's medicine, and, as her doubts of ultimate
recovery increased correspondingly, her strength seemed to wane. Hence
she paused many times on the way to the pool to rest. Finally arriving
at the spot and lowering her burden, she met a great and irritating
surprise, for, bending over a tub at the edge of the pool, and quite in
command of the only desirable space for the placing of tubs and the
sunning of articles, was Ann Boyd. Their eyes met in a stare of
indecision like that of two wild animals meeting in a forest, and there
was a moment's preliminary silence. It was broken by an angry outburst
from the new-comer. "Huh!" she grunted, "you here?"
It was quickly echoed by a satisfied laugh from the depths of Ann's
sun-bonnet. "You bet, old lady, I've beat you to the tank. You've toted
your load here for nothing. You might go down-stream a few miles and
find a hole good enough for your few dirty rags. I've used about all
this up. It's getting too muddy to do any good, but I've got about all I
want."
"This land isn't yours," Jane Hemingway asserted, almost frothing at the
mouth. "It belongs to Jim Sansom."
"Jim may hold deeds to it," Ann laughed again, "but he's too poor to
fence it in. I reckon it's public property, or you wouldn't have lugged
that dirty load all the way through the broiling sun on that weak back
of yours."
Jane Hemingway stood panting over her big snowball. She had nothing to
say. She could not find a use for her tongue. Through her long siege of
underhand warfare against the woman at the tub she had wisely avoided a
direct clash with Ann's eye, tongue, or muscle. She was more afraid of
those things to-day than she had ever been. A chill of strange terror
had gone through her, too, at the mention of her weak back. That the
peddler had told Ann about the cancer she now felt was more likely than
ever. Without a word, Jane bent to lift her bundle, but her enemy,
dashing the water from her big, crinkled hands, had advanced towards
her.
"You just wait a minute," Ann said, sharply, her great eyes flashing,
her hands resting on her stocky hips. "I've got something to say to you,
and I'm glad to get this chance. What I've got to hurl in your
death-marked face, Jane Hemingway, isn't for other ears. It's for your
own rotting soul. Now, you listen!"
Jane Hemingway gasped. "Death-marked face," the root of her paralyzed
tongue seemed to articulate to the wolf-pack of fears within her. Her
thin legs began to shake, and, to disguise the weakness from her
antagonist's lynx eyes, she sank down upon her bundle. It yielded even
to her slight weight, and her sharp knees rose to a level with her chin.
"I don't want to talk to you," she managed to say, almost in a tone of
appeal.
"Oh, I know that, you trifling hussy, but I do to you, Jane Hemingway.
I'm going to tell you what you are. You are worse than a thief--than a
negro thief that steals corn from a crib at night, or meat from a
smoke-house. You are a low-lived, plotting liar. For years you have
railed out against my character. I was a bad woman because I admitted my
one fault of girlhood, but you married a man and went to bed with him
that you didn't love a speck. You did that to try to hide a real love
for another man who was another woman's legal husband. Are you
listening?--I say, are you _listening_?"
"Yes, I'm listening," faltered Jane Hemingway, her face hidden under her
bonnet.
"Well, you'd better. When I had my first great trouble, God is witness
to the fact that I thought I loved the young scamp who brought it about.
I _thought_ I loved him, anyway. That's all the excuse I had for not
listening to advice of older people. I wasn't old enough to know right
from wrong, and, like lots of other young girls, I was bull-headed. My
mother never was strict with me, and nobody else was interested in me
enough to learn me self-protection. I've since then been through college
in that line, and such low, snaky agents of hell as you are were my
professors. No wonder you have hounded me all these years. You loved Joe
Boyd with all the soul you had away back there, and you happened to be
the sort that couldn't stand refusal. So when you met him that day on
the road, and he told you he was on the way to ask me the twentieth time
to be his wife, you followed him a mile and fell on his neck and
threatened suicide, and begged and cried and screamed so that the
wheat-cutting gang at Judmore's wondered if somebody's house was afire.
But he told you a few things about what he thought of me, and they have
rankled with you through your honeymoon with an unloved husband, through
your period of childbirth, and now as you lean over your grave. Bad
woman that you are, you married a man you had no respect for to hide
your disappointment in another direction. You are decent in name only.
Thank God, my own conscience is clear. I've been wronged all my life
more than I ever wronged beast or man. I had trouble; but I did no wrong
according to my dim lights. But you--you with one man's baby on your
breast went on hounding the wife of another who had won what you
couldn't get. You, I reckon, love Joe Boyd to this day, and will the
rest of your life. I reckon you thought when he left me that he would
marry you, but no man cares for a woman that cries after him. You even
went over there to Gilmer a month or so ago to try to attract his
attention with new finery bought on a credit, and you even made up to
the daughter that was stolen from me, but I have it from good authority
that neither one of them wanted to have anything to do with you."
"There's not a bit of truth in that," said the weaker woman, in feeble
self-defence. She would have said some of the things she was always
saying to others but for fear that, driven further, the strong woman
might actually resort to violence. No, there was nothing for Jane
Hemingway to do but to listen.
"Oh, I don't care what you deny," Ann hurled at her. "I know what I'm
talking about." Then Ann's rage led her to say something which, in
calmer mood, she would, for reasons of her own, not have even hinted at.
"Look here, Jane," she went on, bending down and touching the shrinking
shoulder of her enemy, "in all your life you never heard me accused of
making false predictions. When I say a thing, folks know that I know
what I'm talking about and look for it to happen. So now I say,
positively, that I'm going to get even with you. Hell and all its
inmates have been at your back for a score of years, but
God--Providence, the law of nature, or whatever it is that rights
wrong--is bound to prevail, and you are going to face a misfortune--a
certain sort of misfortune--that I know all about. I reckon I'm making a
fool of myself in preparing you for it, but I'm so glad it's coming that
I've got to tell it to somebody. When the grim time comes I want you to
remember that you brought it on yourself."
Ann ceased speaking and stood all of a quiver before the crouching
creature. Jane Hemingway's blood, at best sluggish of action, turned
cold. With her face hidden by her bonnet, she sat staring at the ground.
All her remaining strength seemed to have left her. She well knew what
Ann meant. The peddler had told her secret--had even revealed more of
the truth than he had to her. Discovering that Ann hated her, he had
gone into grim and minute particulars over her affliction. He had told
Ann the cancer was fatal, that the quack lotion he had sold would only
keep the patient from using a better remedy or resorting to the
surgeon's knife. In any case, her fate was sealed, else Ann would not be
so positive about it.
"I see I hit you all right that pop, madam!" Ann chuckled. "Well, you
will wait the day in fear and trembling that is to be my sunrise of joy.
Now, pick up your duds and go home. I want you out of my sight."
Like a subject under hypnotic suggestion, Jane Hemingway, afraid of Ann,
and yet more afraid of impending fate, rose to her feet. Ann had turned
back to her tub and bent over it. Jane felt a feeble impulse to make
some defiant retort, but could not rouse her bound tongue to action. In
her helplessness and fear she hated her enemy more than ever before, but
could find no adequate way of showing it. The sun had risen higher and
its rays beat fiercely down on her thin back, as she managed to shoulder
her bundle and move homeward.