"You called me?"
A silence.
"You called me?"
The student repeated the words twice, so satisfied was he that his name
had been called out in tones of great insistence.
Tessibel was deaf to his words. His presence had filled her completely.
Leaning against the post of Daddy's bed, she glued her eyes upon the
student's face, the fringed lids sprung to their fullest capacity. The
extreme fascination in her gaze held the boy spellbound--then the
eyelids quivered and it was over.
Frederick glanced hurriedly about the room, the untidiness of it all
striking his sensitiveness. He noted the pungent smell of fried fish
mixed with inferior grease, the ant-covered bread, the confusion of
ragged bed-clothes, and lastly of all, the other Frederick. Tessibel
gasped as the newcomer looked longest upon her dead. She thought she saw
him shiver as he stepped back a little.
This brought her grief vividly back to her. The pain, as acute and sharp
as the knife which had ended the life of Frederick, entered her already
riven soul. The instant before a mingled sensation of shame and
embarrassment had swept over her because of the appearance of the hut,
and her own bare legs and feet; but the helpless dead sent even that
from her.
"He air gone," she said chokingly, coming forward with a totter.
Disgust rested paramount upon the student's face. Surprise followed this
as Tessibel threw herself in limp unconcern beside the other Frederick
and gathered the stiffened toad into her arms. She rocked to and fro as
a mother might who had suddenly discovered that the great White Mystery
had robbed her of her child. Tessibel's maternal instinct was being
strongly developed in her agony of the hour, and the identity of
Frederick the student, was lost in Frederick, the toad, her one little
friend, to whom she had told all her sorrows, and had been ruthlessly
torn from her. Already she could feel the short front legs growing
stiff, and the throat which had so often grunted for its supper, was
falling into a curve. The great mutilated back which had lifted and then
receded with every breath was still, and Frederick lay like the lump of
clay that he was, in the arms of his foster mother. Tessibel's child by
adoption would never again gather into his slit of a mouth the flies
which favored the sugar. Then Tess, still clasping her dead friend,
lifted her head. A stranger had intruded upon her grief. She gathered
her bruised, sore feet under the short, ragged girl's skirt, and lifted
a woman's soulful face toward the student.
"What do ye want?" she asked sullenly.
"You called me?"
"It were him I wanted," she said hysterically, hugging her little dead
burden.
"The toad?"
"Yep, he were all I had,--him and Daddy, and--Daddy Skinner air gone
too."
Then Tessibel forgot the student, and the forlorn red head with its
burden of curls lay relaxed upon the lifeless Frederick, while the
child-woman wept in abject loneliness.
Impetuously the second Frederick stepped forward, the movement closing
the door with a bang, and causing the candles to lift their smothered
flames and flicker smokily. The wind shrieked through the broken window
and the cracks between the shanty boards. A storm played with the water,
casting its grayness into white capped rollers which beat upon the shore
like the restless spirits of an ocean. Still the girl wept on,--wept for
Frederick, for Daddy, and once a shuddering thought went through her
mind of the Canadian Indian.
"He killed the gamekeeper, Ezy says,--Daddy Skinner," she whimpered.
Suddenly she sat up, her small round face puckered into such lines of
pain that the student turned his head away, feeling dangerously near
tears. He had always been taught, by his father and by his mother who
feared contagion, that of all people in the world, the squatters must be
most avoided; they had no hearts; they killed men and broke the laws
simply for their own gain. But here was a girl magnetically drawing him
toward her. Dirty? Yes, and barefooted, wild-eyed and untaught, but
suffering--and such suffering! Frederick Graves, like his father, would
teach the Gospel of Christ, of peace and good-will to all mankind,--but
the deep burnishing of the beautiful hair as it swept the floor in red
curls had much to do with Frederick's sympathy, for man-like, he looked
upon Eve in her beauty and pitied.
"Your father is Orn Skinner, who shot the gamekeeper to-night?" he
asked presently.
Tess nodded, still looking fearfully into his face.
"He was disobeying the law," replied Frederick gravely.
Again she nodded, for Tess had no spirit to thwart an argument at that
moment.
"People who disobey the law," went on the student in his youthful
righteousness, "take their life in their hands, and other people's too.
Don't you think that the woman left without her husband, the
gamekeeper's wife, is weeping for him?"
It was a new thought for Tess, but she would not harbor it. It didn't
seem quite just to Daddy. She drew down the red lips at the corners, and
helplessly clung closer and closer to the toad.
"What are you going to do?" asked the student. "You lived here with your
father, but you can't stay here alone."
"It air my home," she said distrustfully, "and I stays here and hangs to
this here shanty till Daddy comes back. Aw, he air comin' back, ain't
he? He won't go to that place--?"
She closed her lips, fearing to utter the thought.
Frederick shook his head.
"Poor child," he said, with a fatherly air. "It is a dangerous
position."
If the case had been placed before Frederick Graves to decide, yesterday
he would have hanged Orn Skinner for the murder of the gamekeeper. But
to-night--well, to-night his ideas of men and ... of women, too, had
changed.
"But he didn't mean it," went on Tess, casting back the unruly hair
which shrouded her face in its new state of cleanliness. "He wouldn't
have hurt a fly, Daddy Skinner wouldn't."
A whistle from the outside, heard plainly through the beating of the
wind, caused Frederick to fling open the door.
"Yes, father," he said loudly, "I'm here. I missed you on the way. Come
in a moment if you will."
Tessibel gathered herself more closely into a small human ball than
ever. She had feared the minister since the time she had talked off his
warts with the wizard words she had learned from a hag living on the
ragged rocks.
"What's this," demanded the Dominie, looking sternly at her, and she
dropped her eyes in confusion.
"It's Orn Skinner's girl," replied his son. "Skinner is the man who shot
Stebbins to-night. You heard Deacon Hall talking about it at the
cottage."
This explanation was superfluous, for the minister well knew the girl
and her father.
"It's a nice mess your father's got himself into," he said harshly.
Tessibel lifted her head.
"He didn't mean to do it, sir," she replied, not daring to rise, because
of her bare, long legs.
"Didn't, eh?" roared Graves in his wrath, placing his hand on his son's
shoulder. "He was right glad to have the chance to use his gun, or why
did he take it with him?"
Tessibel raised her eyes to the rafters, and her face flooded with
color. The rifle was gone--Daddy Skinner had taken it with him. She was
too young to argue with such a man and only wiped her face with her
sleeve and sobbed.
"God will see that justice is done, my girl. Your father will hang, do
you hear?" shouted Graves. "Hang by the neck till he's dead, and this
shanty will be burned with all its filth!"
Frederick clutched his father's arm, his face changing from red to white
as he watched Tessibel. She had clambered to her feet, ridiculously
tangled in the rags of her dress. The dead Frederick was forgotten,
falling with a great thud upon the floor. Her face was so mobile, so
glassily white that if the hand of death had smitten her, she could not
have looked ghastlier.
Standing before them, the tears drying over the hot blood which rushed
in torrents afresh from her heart to her face, Tessibel learned her
first lesson in suppressed emotion. She took two steps backward and
wound her hands behind the post of Daddy's old-fashioned bed.
Truly it was Tessibel's first day and first night!
"He air to be hanged dead?" she asked, the painful shiftiness of her
eyes settling questioningly upon the minister's face. "Aw, he air good,
Daddy Skinner air, gooder than ye be, with ye cross and ye crown that ye
sing about. Gooder than all ye whole church, if his gun did kill the
gamekeeper. We has our rights to live, to eat bread and beans, like ye
have, hain't we? If Daddy Skinner air hung, then Tessibel hangs too."
Here the tired young face drooped a little.
"Ye'll hang him will ye? Well! ye won't--cause--cause--"
Her red head flashed back upon the uncovered shoulders--the wild eyes
lifted a moment to the rocking rafters in the roof.
"If ye lives in the sky, Jesus, that cares for the dyin', take Daddy
Skinner and Tessibel--"
Her eyes dropped to the pan on the floor, against which the stiff body
of the toad lay, and she ended,--"And Frederick."
It was a prayer,--a rough prayer, from untaught lips, but through the
action which followed, it instantly lost its dignity. Tessibel forgot
her lesson--forgot all save the taunting face of the minister. She gave
her familiar leap in the air and came down with a cry upon the Dominie's
chest.
"Ye'll kill him, will ye? Then I--I air goin' to kill ye," and deep into
the face of the minister sunk the ten little toad-tainted fingers.
Frederick loosened her by extreme effort from his father's body and
thrust the gasping preacher outside the door. The student placed his
hand upon the panting girl's shoulder.
"You're wrong," he said gravely, "Your prayer was good and God heard.
There is in the sky a suffering Christ and His cross--and by your
prayers you may save your father, and also save--poor little Tessibel
Skinner." Then glancing about the filthy room he added, "and cleanliness
is next to godliness."
She opened the door proudly--his words had taught her a newer dignity.
"This air my shanty," she said. "I air sorry I hitted yer Daddy's face,
cause--cause he air yer Daddy. Scoot now!"