Keeping to the water's edge, Professor Young walked rapidly toward
Ithaca. He knew that further up the shore the fishermen were drawing
their nets; he did not wish to advance upon them. Since knowing Tessibel
Skinner, he had become more lenient toward the law-breakers.
He turned into the forest at the side of the Hoghole, but the sound of
voices brought him to a standstill.
Ezra Longman was shouting out a threat.
"Ye be a-tryin' to get Tess, and I tells ye to look out."
"Shet up!" responded Ben Letts.
"If ye air a-wishin' to live," came the boy's voice again, "I says for
ye to keep away from her."
"I lives 'cause I lives, and I ain't afraid of ye, nohow."
The Professor barely caught the words, for they were gurgled in the deep
throat.
"I wants Tess for a woman," Ben broke out, "and for a woman I air
a-goin' to have her. She'll care for Mammy and me. I gets her. See?"
The north reel stopped turning, but the south one went on silently. Ben
Letts and Ezra Longman were turning over and over on the sand, at grips
with each other.
Professor Young uttered no word. Then Ezra's voice came from under Ben's
big body.
"I tells what I knows about Skinner if ye don't get up and let me be,"
said he. "I tells--"
Red fingers closed over his throat, and Ezra Longman spoke no more. As
the south reel kept turning around and around, the rope slackened from
the north reel in the water; and still Ben Letts held his deadly fingers
pressed about the neck of his enemy.
Professor Young saw Ben sit up and bend his head to the heart of the
other fisherman. Then, with a furtive glance about, he lifted the boy in
his arms, and came toward Young, grunting under his burden. Young drew
back into the overhanging branches.
The squatter stumbled up the rocks, dragging the boy after him, and with
a mighty effort lifted him high in the air, and tumbled the body into
the Hoghole.
In another instant, Ben was back upon the shore at the reel, turning
swiftly until silently it caught up with the other, just as the net
dragged in the shallow waters, with bushels of flopping fish inside.
* * * * *
Professor Young lowered himself into the Hoghole. It was necessary for
him to use the greatest caution. The lad came to the surface directly
below him, and the Professor saw him catch at a jagged end of a rock.
"Can you breathe?" asked Young, in a low voice. "And can you help
yourself a little?"
"Yep," came back the faint answer.
"Then, when I put out my foot, take hold of it, and make no noise, for
your enemy is but a short distance away, and he meant to kill you. Now,
come up.... There! Don't lean too heavily upon me, for the rocks are
slippery."
Without any more conversation, the two men, one wet and weak, with
bleeding head, with a gash over his right brow, crossed the forest
toward the tracks. By dint of persuasion, Young forced the boy to give
his father's name. He had caught enough of the talk between the
fishermen to know that Tess was the cause of their quarrel. But what
Ezra had threatened to tell about Skinner he did not know. Two miles
from Ithaca the boy became light-headed and feeble. His tongue was
loosened in his delirium, and Young heard a story that made his heart
beat faster and revived hopes he had considered almost dead. Through the
moonbeams that slanted to the tracks he imagined he saw a little figure
skirting the rays, with flying red hair. Not for anything in the world
would he lose sight of the boy. He had the first clue in the case that
so interested him. Acquittal for the father of Tessibel Skinner was
within his grasp. It was late when he dragged Ezra, laughing and
gibbering, into a private hospital. He installed a nurse beside the boy,
bidding her keep a record of any delirious mutterings he might make, and
to observe silence about them.
* * * * *
Ben Letts wondered what Satisfied Longman would ask about his son. He
spoke to the father first, his thick brain trying to avoid trouble.
"Ye air both got a lot of nerve to keep three men at the south reel,
when I air the only one here."
"Where's Ezy?" asked Longman.
There was no anxiety in his voice. He was tumbling the fish into the
cars.
"I ain't no way a-knowin' where he air. He skipped away, and said how
he wanted to speak to his pappy, and I ain't seed him since.... Ezy were
a fool when he was born."
"Gone home, like a sneakin' kid," put in Jake Brewer. "He ain't no
hankerin' for nettin'. He ain't been right since Orn Skinner shot the
gamekeeper."
"He air my brat," replied Longman, "and he air good, if he does do what
he oughtn't to sometimes. I air satisfied with him.... Let's go home."
And, silently, as a spectral fleet, the boats lapped their way back,
edging the shore carefully.
* * * * *
Far into the night Satisfied Longman and the tired mother waited for
their boy.
"He'll show up to break'us," soothed the father; but the mother trembled
with terror. It was the first evening Ezra had missed the netting, and
he had never been from home for a whole night.
As day after day passed, it was noised about the settlement that Ezra
Longman had run away, some saying that he had been seen upon a line of
canal boats going to Albany. The mother watched each hour for some word
from him. Then, with a sorrowful expression in the faded eyes, she said
to Myra:
"If Ezy had had any edication, he'd 'a' writ. He'll be a-comin' home
some of these days."
After that, the fisherman's hut carried along its usual routine--while a
boy in the city was wrestling with fever, and the head of the law school
hung upon his muttered words with avidity.
* * * * *
"You think he is very ill, Tess?" Teola asked, early one evening in
September, when she and Tessibel were alone in the Skinner hut. Tess
came forward to the wooden box, holding in her hand the frying-pan
filled with bacon fat, and gazed down upon the baby Dan, contemplating
the wee old-man face thoughtfully.
"He air sick! He air a look on him what air on Myry's brat--kind of
sickly. That air because he has so many lines in his face, and he air so
little," she finished, wrinkling the sun-tanned cheeks and shrugging her
shoulders almost disdainfully.
Teola knelt down, and slipped one slender arm under the dark head. These
two girls had been drawn together during the past few weeks by a tie
stronger than death. It had brought Frederick nearer to the squatter,
and little did Teola realize that, had it not been for her handsome
brother, her secret would have been discovered long before. It was of
him she was thinking as she bent over the fire-scarred babe on this
stormy September night in the fisherman's hut.
"I may not be able to come down to-morrow, Tessibel," she said, looking
up into the serious face, "because my brother is coming home early in
the morning."
The frying-pan fell to the floor; the fat spattered and ran across the
broken, tilted boards until it congealed into rounded miniature
mountains. Teola turned a puzzled face toward the fishermaid, but there
was nothing about the girl to tell her why the accident had happened,
for Tessibel, grappling with a huge cloth, was wiping the floor
furiously.
"I was saying, Tess," repeated Teola, "that I may not come down
to-morrow.... Oh! hear how it rains, and the thunder!... Tess, since he
died, and the baby came, thunder-storms make me shiver."
"It ain't nothin' that'll hurt ye," grunted Tess from her position on
the floor.
"I know it, unless one stands directly in the lightning's path. But I am
such a coward, Tessibel! You have so much faith--that's why you're not
afraid."
The pathetic face turned suddenly upon Tess with a questioning look.
"My brother, you know, thinks you are such a good girl--and--and--you
are a good girl, aren't you, Tess?"
"Squatters ain't never good," answered Tess in a low tone, her eyes
dropping under the steady gaze of the other girl. "But I--I love the
student's God, I does."
She was standing with rag hanging from her right hand, her face
illumined by a deep flush that disappeared only when it met the red
hair.
"I believe that you do love Him, Tess," Teola breathed. "And Frederick
told me that if he had your faith, he could do anything in the world.
You know, the Bible says that if we had faith as large as a mustard
seed, we could move a mountain."
Her voice faltered on the last words. Tess grunted significantly.
"Aw! a mustard seed ain't no bigger than a speck of dirt."
"I know it, Tess; I know it. But one only has to have a little faith in
God to enable Him to answer every prayer we utter."
She grasped the thin baby to her breast frantically, kissed the crimson
mark up and down, until where the frenzied lips had traveled the flesh
turned purple. Oh! to have faith to believe that she might soon have
her child with her always--always! Of late there had crept over Teola
the shadow of the great beyond, into which her student lover had been so
hastily summoned. The shrieking of the wind, and the mournful fluttering
of the tiny hands made her shiver, and she coughed slightly.
"A mountain air bigger than that hill with the look-out on it,"
ruminated Tess, picking up a huge knot of wood from behind the stove.
"I know that, too," replied Teola.
For the space of many minutes only the smacking of the baby lips upon
the sugar rag and the roaring of the turbulent wind were heard in the
hut. Suddenly the vibrations of a great peal of thunder shook the shanty
with violent effect; a streak of lightning shot zig-zaggedly through the
room like some livid, malicious spirit. Teola screamed in terror.
"It hit some place near here," said Tess.
"Yes, and wasn't it awful? Oh, if the storm would only cease!"
"It air comin' nearer," answered Tess, with the keen instincts of a
squatter. "It air got to turn sidewise through the window afore it goes
over the hill. What air ye afraid of, if ye believes that ye can move a
mountain if ye has the faith? God wouldn't hit the brat with lightnin',
would He?"
"Oh, I haven't the faith, Tess!" moaned Teola, rocking to and fro in her
keen agony of soul. "Long ago I stopped believing the way I did when I
was a child. I prayed that night when Dan was killed, until my head
ached and pounded for days. I wanted to see him once more, and God
wouldn't let me; and then I prayed again--" Teola buried her face in the
breast of the infant, and sobbed, "I prayed that the baby might die
when he was born, but God didn't see fit to take him. Somehow, it
doesn't do any good to pray any more."
Tess paused in her work, standing with her hands on her hips, a solemn
expression in the long eyes.
"Yer faith wasn't as big as a speck of dirt, then, were it?" she
queried. "And maybe mine ain't for Daddy. But the student air a-prayin'
for him! It air a damn shame ye ain't got him a-prayin' for yerself and
the kid.... Ye'd a seen yer man before now, and the brat would 'a' died,
too."
With a start caused by the squatter's words, Teola laid the child down,
crouching back upon her feet. She eyed the fisher-girl critically. What
a strange mixture of good and bad--of the holy and the unholy--lived in
the tawny, magnificent squatter! She answered hesitatingly:
"But if my brother should know about the baby, it would break my heart,
Tessibel. It would kill me--and him, too! Nothing could ever make me
tell him. You understand, don't you, Tess?"
"Yep."
It was as Tess had said. The storm was coming nearer, sending vivid
shafts of lightning in splendid awfulness across the sky. Torrents of
rain descended, thrashing the lake into uneven, towering crests of white
foam. The weeping willow tree groaned over the shanty roof, jarring and
tearing at the broken bits of tarred tin.
"Tess, Tess, how can you bear that awful noise, constantly through the
night? It frightens me to death. It sounds like the spirits of people
who are dead."
She shivered again, the cutting rasp from the chimney place stinging her
with fright.
"It air spirits," replied Tess softly. "There air one kind of spirits
for the sun when it air a-shinin', and the waves just a-ripplin' over
the lake. They air good spirits. But on nights like this there air bad
ones--the ghosts of Indians, squaws, and sometimes of the Letts'
family--them dead 'uns."
She paused, her low voice trailing into silence on that one word "dead,"
the luminous eyes burning with superstitious fear. How many times had
the squaw and her burnt brat, now long since called to the land of their
fathers, moaned through the winter nights, making the shanty ring with
their piteous plaints! How many times Tessibel had imagined that she had
seen the headless man from Haytes' Corner flit from the shadows of the
long lane and lose himself in the overhanging willows on the shore!
Suddenly a foreign sound pierced the storm. Tessibel drew near Teola.
Both girls were standing over the wooden box. The violence of the storm
impelled them to grasp each other's hands. In through the broken window
the strange sound was borne again.
"A boat's a-beatin' agin the shore," said Tess quietly. "Some one air
a-comin' in out of the rain."
The words were only formed on her lips when the door opened abruptly.
Tessibel turned her head; Teola dropped her hand and uttered a cry.
Frederick Graves, with his fingers upon the door, was closing it against
the fury of the storm.