By that time men were beginning to gather again--middle-aged men
on horseback, stiff from years of toil, bearded great young men
with dogs at their heels, large-boned, ruddy, gaunt, rugged of face
like Lincoln, overgrown boys, and boys of the very smallest size
which fearful mothers could be persuaded to let go into possible
danger--they came walking or riding towards the Keiths’ for thirty
miles away. The younger ones were sent on horseback to spread the
news along all the roads towards town, even along obscure untraveled
paths that led to the cross-state coach road to the north. In the
morning council Wully had again ventured to suggest that Peter
had of his own accord gone back to the place from which he had so
mysteriously come. Again they all refused to consider his suggestion.
Was it likely a man should return without a glimpse of those he had
come so far to see? The whole thing was baffling. It seemed beyond
belief that no one had seen him come. That could have happened only
on such a day as the Fourth, when all the settlers were away from
home. Wully wondered to himself, grimly, however, why, if Peter had
managed to come once, unperceived, he would not be able to come
again as slyly. He didn’t see that to tell what he knew would ease
the situation. And he had no intention of telling it if he had proof
that it would have ended the search. He would tell that tale only to
justify his making Chirstie safe from violence. He felt strangely
distant from those whose eagerness to help increased with each
glimpse they got of Libby Keith. At his father’s bidding he went
again with a party to search the creek underbrush.
From morning till noon they went on fighting their way through the
impenetrable briary wall of green, stopping only for breath at the
water’s edge, scratched, mosquito-bitten, baffled, exhausted. Once
John and Wully happened to get to the bank at the same moment, and
John, stooping down to wash his face, said to his brother, carefully
lowering his voice;
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you are right, Wully. It would be
just like Peter to have to leave some place suddenly, in some scrape.
I think it probable, after all, that he had started on short notice
for the west, and passing O’Brien’s, was unable to resist the smell.
He wouldn’t even have had the decency to go to see his mother if he
had been within half a mile of the house!”
Wully said nothing to this, but it comforted him to know how low
John’s opinion of Peter was. He could work with new energy after
that. At noon the ten of them stopped at the nearest house for
dinner.
There was not a woman in the neighborhood who would not have been
glad to set dinner before a party of searchers. Not a woman who had
not been frightening her little ones more carefully about wandering
into the tall grass, such helpless slight persons, with that tall
menace always waiting at hand for them. Marget McDowell had all the
morning been looking from time to time down the road, hoping to see a
horseman coming with good news. But no news came. She served the men.
They ate in silence, hungrily. Having finished, they went out and lay
down in the shade of the house. Most of them slept. Davie McDowell
sat next to Wully, smoking vile home-grown tobacco in a stern old
pipe. Beyond him Geordie Sproul went on theorizing in a lullabying
voice. Wully was half asleep himself when he heard him saying;
“If we knew the girl to ask, we might learn something.” “Girl” when
he pronounced it, rhymed with peril. He was a canny man, Geordie, and
Wully was instantly awake.
“Hoots!” replied Davie. “He was never one to run after girils!”
“Was he not!” answered Geordie. His voice was so suggestive, so
leering, that Wully sat up.
“It’s one o’clock!” he hastened to announce. “We ought to be going
on!” He woke all the lads up. They started by twos and threes back
towards the creek.
Wully might easily have asked Geordie privately what he meant
by that comment of his. But he didn’t dare. Was it possible that
Geordie, that unconsidered man, knew anything about Chirstie?
Or about Wully McLaughlin’s private affairs? He must have meant
something, and Wully wanted intensely to know what it was. Doubtless
Davie McDowell would presently be inquiring, for gossip’s sake. But
Wully assured himself that if Geordie really knew anything about
the truth of the matter, he would never dare to tell it. Nor would
he have dared to hint before Wully that he knew it! Only--would
he not dare? Men dared strange things, nowadays, it seemed! Even
cowards like Peter Keith! They seemed to think Wully McLaughlin a
soft, easy-going man. They would speedily find out their mistake!
They would get rid of the idea that he was a man with whom one might
safely take unspeakable liberties. If only he might have the fortune,
the one chance in a thousand, or ten thousand, to come upon that
damned snake, lying somewhere hidden.... Exhausted, sore in muscles
and mind, he went on through the breathless thicket.
At four he came again to the water’s edge, and saw Chirstie’s brother
Dod just coming out from a swim. He threw himself down under a great
linden tree for a rest, and under his hand he saw Dod’s hat full of
choice blackberries. Dod was undoubtedly preparing to make himself as
comfortable as possible. He was weary enough to defy the world, and
relinquish his pretenses of being a man. He made his decision known
flatly.
“I’m not going back into that!” he announced. “I’m through!” It was
plain that his swim hadn’t cooled his temper much.
Wully repressed a smile. Dod was extremely thin. The ridges of his
ribs showed under his skin, which gleamed white and wet in places, in
vivid contrast to his tanned arms and neck, and he was stepping along
gingerly to avoid thorns, lifting his bony legs high. One of his
eyelids had been scratched so that his eye was swollen shut.
“You’ve done enough,” said Wully. “You’ve got a bad eye there!”
The boy struggled wet into his shirt and overalls and stretching out
near Wully, began dividing the berries. Wully had to notice, how
men’s zeal to help Libby Keith vanished as she grew distant. In her
presence, in the presence of Motherhood itself, so to speak, they
were shame-faced and eager, deploring their helplessness, as men are
while their wives labor in childbirth. But away from her agony, they
forgot ... as men do after labor is over ... and turned again to
their own comfort. Dod broke the silence surprisingly.
“Chirstie’d be glad if he _was_ dead!” he said, resentfully.
“Why, Dod!” exclaimed Wully.
“She would that! She hates him!”
“He’s your cousin, lad!”
“He’s as much your cousin as he is mine! She can’t endure the sight
of him!”
Wully sat up. He looked at Dod. He had thought of him always as a
child. He was a big, tall boy now. Fourteen years old he was, and
doubtless able to put two and two together. How much did he know? He
must have heard people talking. Wully suddenly wondered why he had
not always been afraid of Dod. To be sure, he had always been careful
to keep on the good side of his little brother-in-law.
“He never done us any good!” Dod spoke vindictively.
Now what could he mean by that? Wully was getting excited. Why had
the boy so great a resentment against Peter, instead of against him,
Wully, under the circumstances? Dod’s sudden and apparent preference
for Wully at once grew odious to him. Dod had chosen that morning to
work with Wully. He was always choosing to work with him. Why? It
seemed unaccountable to him that he had never been suspicious of the
lad before. Wully dared not say to him;
“Well, he never did you any special harm, did he?” Suppose Dod would
blurt out what he knew! He said, confusedly;
“Look here, Dod. You oughtn’t to talk that way! Not at this time, I
mean--you can’t speak ill of the dead, you know.”
“I ain’t said half the truth!”
“You know how Aunt Libby feels!” Wully urged stupidly. “And Chirstie
wouldn’t like you to say that--not now, you know----”
“Old fool!” commented Dod. Undoubtedly he was meaning his aunt. Wully
couldn’t approve of such sentiments in one so young.
“You ought to go home and get something put on your eye!” he began,
hastily. “And if you feel like working in the morning, you come back
with me again!”
Dod went away, unsolved and uncomforting. Hour by hour the seekers,
conquered by fatigue and the growing assurance of futility, stopped
more often for breath. They had time to gather more and more berries,
from bushes which obviously hid no dying man. They refreshed
themselves more and more frequently in waters wherein no drowned man
was floating. Most of them went home in time for their neglected
chores that night, discouraged, hopeless.
Isobel McLaughlin was still at the Keiths’, detained by Libby’s
need of her. Libby, though she used men easily for her purpose,
was not a woman to depend on them. Her mild old husband could give
her no sufficient support in her affliction. He had never been a
mother. He was just a man whom life and marriage had left blinking,
swallowing as best he might his realization of his own unimportance
in the universe. Libby would have Isobel with her. So Chirstie in
her mother-in-law’s house put the younger McLaughlins and Bonnie Wee
Johnnie to bed, and came out to sit on the doorstep with her weary
and outraged husband. Presently she asked him wistfully;
“Do you really think he’s dead, Wully?”
“It’s getting to look like it.”
She gave a great sigh. If only she could be _sure_ he was dead!
“You don’t think he’s just gone away now?” she continued.
“Nobody thinks that now.”
“Why don’t they?”
“It don’t look reasonable to them.”
“It looks reasonable enough to me.”
He longed to reassure her.
“If he had gone back to town, he would have had to stop in some place
to get something to eat. He didn’t stop anywhere.”
She slapped away a mosquito.
“But if he didn’t stop as he came, why should he stop going back?”
“He may have stopped at a dozen places coming, and found no one at
home. He may have gone to his mother’s when she was at the picnic.
That’s what she keeps wailing about--because she wasn’t there when he
came!”
In the silence of the starlight, she gave a great sigh.
“It’s all my fault!” she declared.
He was too tired to listen to that.
“Our fault, indeed!” he answered sharply. “We never told him to come
sneaking back and get lost, did we! We didn’t tell him never to write
to his mother.”
“I didn’t say it was your fault. I said mine! Really, all auntie’s
trouble seems to come from me. Sometimes I just seem to make
everybody miserable.” She had been wondering what she was to do if
Peter’s death made Wully’s lie permanent.
“Havers, Chirstie!” he remonstrated, “her trouble comes through her
own foolishness. She was never less than a fool about that--that----”
“She was always good to me, Wully, whatever you say. I mind how she
stayed with me after mother’s death. If she’s been foolish about
Peter, she’s paid well for it.”
“So’ve you!” said Wully. “He’s _dead_, I tell you!” And there was
another thing to be said. Wully might be bewildered, uncomfortable,
frustrated, cheated of any assurance of safety for Chirstie. But
there was one triumph, and not a small one. “He’s dead. And we never
speak ill of the dead, Chirstie!”
She understood his triumph. She would have been glad to have him
dead, and not putting Wully into danger. She would be relieved, too,
of that sense of terror, if she saw him dead. Then she thought of
that great sinful lie, and of Isobel McLaughlin.
“I can’t tell what to wish!” she sighed miserably. “It can’t end
well. I wish they’d find him dead. But if he’s dead, how can I
ever....” Her voice gave way to despair.
“Yes,” repeated Wully. “How can you ever....” They sat silent.
“You never can!” he said securely, at length.