II

The man killed was named Hagan. He was a red-faced, hard-drinking brute,

not without sharp wits and a following--or better, a heeling. There had

been bad blood between him and Braddish for some time over political

differences of opinion and advancement. But into these Hagan had carried

a circumstantial, if degenerate, imagination that had grown into and

worried Braddish's peace of mind like a cancer. Details of the actual

killing were kept from us children. But I gathered, since the only

witnesses of the shooting were heelers of Hagan's, that it could in no

wise be construed into an out-and-out act of self-defence, and so far as

the law lay things looked bad for Braddish.

That he had not walked into the sheriff's office to give himself up made

it look as if he himself felt the unjustifiability of his act, and it

was predicted that when he was finally captured it would be to serve a

life sentence at the very least. The friends of the late Hagan would

hear of nothing less than hanging. It was a great pity (this was my

father's attitude): Hagan was a bad lot and a good riddance; Braddish

was an excellent young man, except for a bit of a temper, and here the

law proposed to revenge the bad man upon the other forever and ever. And

it was right and proper for the law so to do, more's the pity. But it

was not Braddish that would be hit hardest, said my father, and here

came in the inscrutable hand of Providence--it was Mary.

After the first outburst of feeling she had accepted her fate with a

stanch reserve and went on with her duties much as usual. One ear was

always close to the ground, you might say, to hear the first rumor of

Braddish, either his capture or his whereabouts, that she might fly to

him and comfort him, but the rest of her faculties remained in devoted

attendance on my sister and me. Only there showed in them now and then a

kind of tigerish passionateness, as when I fell off the sea-wall among

the boulders and howled so dismally. She leaped down after and caught me

to her in the wildest distress, and even when I stopped howling could

not seem to put me down. Indeed, she held me so tight that if any of my

bones had been cracked by the tumble she must have finished by breaking

them. The pathos of her efforts to romp with us as in happier days was

lost upon me, I am happy to say. Nor did I, recalling to her what

Braddish had said of robbers being inevitably caught, realize that I was

stabbing her most cruelly. For she was, or tried to be, firm in the

belief that Braddish would succeed where all others had failed. She had

asked my father what would happen if Braddish got clean out of the

United States, and he, hoping, I suppose, to be of indirect use to the

young couple for whom he was heartily sorry, made her out a list of

countries, so far as he knew them, wherein there was no extradition. My

father hoped, I fondly believe, that she would get the list to Braddish

for his guidance, conjecturing rightly that if Braddish made his

whereabouts known to anybody it would be to Mary. But as to that, ten

days passed before Mary knew a jot more of it than another. And I must

believe that it came to her then entirely by inspiration.

We were passing the Boole Dogge Farm, my sister and I, intent upon

seeing which of us could take the most hops without putting the held-up

foot to the ground, when suddenly Mary, who had been strolling along

laughing at us, stopped short in her tracks and turned, and stood

looking over the green treetops to where the gaunt, dead limb of the

hollow oak thrust sharply up from among them. But we had hopped on for

quite a piece before we noticed that she no longer went alongside. So we

stopped that game and ran back to her. What was it? Had she seen a

rabbit? She laughed and looked very wistful. She was just thinking,

children, that she would like to see the hollow tree where Will had

passed the night. She was not excited--I can swear to that. She guessed

nothing as yet. Her desire was really to the tree--as she might have

coveted one of Will's baby shoes, or anything that had been his. She had

already, poor girl, begun to draw, here and there, upon the past for

sustenance.

First, she charged Ellen and me to wait for her in the road. But we

rebelled. We swore (most falsely) that we were afeard. Since the teeth

of bulldogs no longer met, we desired passionately to explore the

forbidden farm, and had, indeed, extracted a free commission from my

father so to do, but my mother had procrastinated and put us off. We

laid these facts before Mary, and she said, very well, if our father had

said we might go on the farm, go we might. He would, could and must make

it right with our mother. And so, Mary leading, we climbed the wall.

Bulldogs' teeth or no bulldogs' teeth, my ancient fear of the place

descended upon me, and had a rabbit leaped or a cat scuttled among the

bushes I must have been palsied. The going across to the woods was waist

high with weeds and brambles, damp and rank under foot. Whole squadrons

of mosquitoes arose and hung about us in clouds, with a humming sound as

of sawmills far away. But this was long before you took your malaria of

mosquitoes, and we minded them no more than little children mind them

to-day. Indeed, I can keep peacefully still even now to watch a mosquito

batten and fatten upon my hand, to see his ravenous, pale abdomen swell

to a vast smug redness--that physiological, or psychological, moment for

which you wait ere you burst him.

The forbidden farm had, of course, its thousand novelties. I saw prickly

pears in blossom upon a ledge of rock; a great lunar-moth resting

drowsily, almost drunkenly, in the parasol shade of a wild-carrot

blossom; here was the half of a wagon wheel, the wood rotted away, and

there in the tangle an ancient cistern mouth of brick, the cistern

filled to the brim with alluring rubbish. My sister sprang with a

gurgle of delight to catch a garter snake, which eluded her; and a last

year's brier, tough and humorously inclined, seized upon Mary by the

skirts and legs, so that it was a matter of five minutes and piercing

screams of merriment to cast her loose again. But soon we drew out of

the hot sunshine into the old orchard with its paltry display of

deformed, green, runt apples, and its magnificent columns and canopies

of poison ivy--that most beautiful and least amiable of our indigenous

plants; and then we got among scale-bark hickories, and there was one

that had been fluted from top to bottom by a stroke of lightning; and

here the little red squirrels were most unusually abundant and

indignant; and there was a catbird that miauled exactly like a cat; and

there was a spring among the roots of one great tree, and a broken

teacup half buried in the sand at the bottom.

We left the hickories and entered among the oaks, and here was the

greatest to-do imaginable to find the one that was hollow. Ellen went to

the left, I to the right, and Mary down the middle. Whenever I came to

an unusually big tree I tiptoed around the trunk, goggle-eyed, expecting

the vasty hollow to open before me. And I am sure that Ellen, whom I had

presently lost sight of, behaved in the same way. Mary also had

disappeared, and feeling lonely all of a sudden I called to her. She

answered a moment later in a strange voice. I thought that she must have

fallen and hurt herself; but when I found her she was cheerful and

smiling. She was standing with her back to a snug hollow in the vast

stem of the very oak we had been looking for.

"This is it," she said, and turned and pointed to the hollow. "Where's

Ellen?"

"Here, Ellen," I called, "here--_we've_ found it!"

Then Ellen came scampering through the wood; and first I climbed into

the hollow and curled up to see what sort of a night I might have of it,

and then I climbed out and Ellen climbed in--and then both in at once,

and we kept house for a while and gave a couple of dinners and tea

parties. And then quarreled about the probable size of Friar Tuck, and

Ellen drew the line at further imaginings and left me alone in

the hollow.

This extended all the way up the main trunk and all but out through the

top. Here and there it pierced through the outer bark, so that slants of

pale light served to carry the eye up and up until it became lost in

inky blackness. Now and then dust and little showers of dry rot

descended softly upon the upturned face; and if you put your ear close

to the wood you could hear, as through the receiver of a telephone,

things that were going on among the upper branches; as when the breeze

puffed up and they sighed and creaked together. I could hear a squirrel

scampering and a woodpecker at work--or so I guessed, though it sounded

more like a watch ticking. I made several essays to climb up the hollow,

but the knotholes and crevices, and odds and ends of support, were too

far removed from each other for the length of my limbs, and,

furthermore, my efforts seemed to shake the whole tree and bring down

whole smarting showers of dust and dry rot and even good-sized

fragments. I got up a few feet, lost my hold, and fell into the soft,

punky nest at the bottom.

"Can't you climb up?" said Ellen, who had recovered her temper by now.

"Because somebody has climbed up and stuck an ol' shoe out of a

knothole way up."

I climbed out of the hollow and followed her point. Sure enough--thirty

feet or so from the ground the toe of a much-used leather boot stuck out

through a knothole.

Mary refused to take an interest in the boot. It was high time we went

home. She herself had a headache. Our mother would be angry with her for

taking us on the forbidden farm. She was sorry she had done so. No, she

wasn't angry. We were good children; she loved us. Wouldn't we come?

"I'll tell you," said she, and her face, which looked sick and pale,

colored, "if you'll come now, and hurry, we'll just have time to stop on

the bridge and have some races."

And sure enough, when we got to the bridge Mary produced a stained sheet

of paper, and tore it quickly into little bits of pieces (we were

pressed for time) and launched pair after pair of sea-going racers upon

the swirling tide.

When the last pair were gone upon their merry career she drew a long

breath, and seemed as one relieved of a weight.

"Perhaps," she said, "you needn't tell your mother where you've

been--unless she asks you. Do you think that would be wrong?"