The Wishing Carpet

“BY gad, Glen,” the doctor shouted, “it’s our boy! And he’s hurt!” He dropped to his knees and gently turned Luke Manders over so that he rested upon his back. “Gimme some light!”

Glen, who had been forcing the door shut in the face of the storm, ran to pull the light from the tiny bead which served at night to its full force. “Oh, Dad,” she wailed, looking down at the inert figure, sensing that her dismal fiction was visualized in fact before her, “he’s dead!”

“Dead, nothing!” her father snapped. “Go get my bag!” He was beginning to unfasten the sodden rain and blood-soaked clothing. “But he’s hurt, all right; hurt bad. ’S’matter with you? Don’t stand there gawping at me! Get my bag!” He scowled up at her horror-stricken face and swore under his breath as she stumbled away. This was the way the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie would have acted: was the girl, for all his toughening processes, more her mother’s daughter than his?

She redeemed herself in the raw hour which followed. Her father saw, presently, that there had been nothing craven in her shrinking. It had been pure grief for the end of their golden legend, their golden lad.

“Ought to get him on the table,” the doctor fretted, “but—” he regarded the gaunt length of the young mountaineer.

“I can help you carry him, Dad!” the girl interrupted eagerly. “You take the hurt part of him and I’ll carry his feet! Wait—I’ll fix the table!” She flew to spread a folded blanket and a sheet over the glistening golden oak.

The removal was accomplished with comparative ease, the boy coming only to partial consciousness and relapsing instantly into merciful stupor. “He’ll wake up, fast enough, when I get busy after that bullet,” said the man grimly. “You’ll have to hold him steady, Glen, if you can.”

“I can,” she answered palely. She worked quietly and capably, swiftly and intelligently obedient to a curt word or even a gesture. It was a strange, a grotesque scene, and the memory of it was to stay with her as long as she lived—their splendid, wild young savage, bold and fearless and free against his background of rocky hills and rushing streams and dark forests, free no longer, and no longer wild and splendid, lying limp on the dining table in the hideous room Effie Darrow had hated, now slackly swept and dusted by the yellow slattern Emma-leen.

The child, working wordlessly with her father, bringing hot water and soft old linen, setting her teeth when he probed into the raw flesh, putting all her young muscle into holding the twisting shoulders down, tried vainly to make a reality of it all. The stark reversal was what made it so crassly unbelievable. One day he had been leaping away into his mountain fastnesses like a young stag, scorning them, and another day he had come crawling down from his heights to their level, scorning them still, no doubt, but begging their bounty. It hurt her conception of him, her pride in him.

The doctor, panting, and glistening with sweat, and sharply impatient with her, suddenly barked: “Well, how clean’d you be, without a bathtub or hot water, huh?” He had followed her gaze to the griminess of hands and feet. “He’s cold water clean, brook clean, at that. How much better’d you be? Huh? Answer me that?” It was amazing how he championed the wild lad from the first hour of their knowledge of him.

“I was thinking that,” said Glen flushing. “He’s tried to be clean, and his clothes——”

“You go get some sheets and blankets and make up a bed here on the couch,” her father snapped. “I’ll get his clothes off and wash him. You throw a nightshirt of mine downstairs.” He had sensed, dimly, that too much intimacy with the inelegancies of the young mountaineer’s toilet would not enhance the golden legend, and she was not called in again until the patient was made ready for his bed.

The girl made up the couch swiftly and capably and helped to carry him to it. “Bring a hot-water bag, and then heat up some soup,” the doctor directed. “He’ll come to for keeps any minute now, and I miss my guess if he’s eaten to-day.”

When Glen came back with her bowl of steaming broth Luke Manders was, quite as her father had predicted, wholly conscious. He dragged himself up on the elbow on the uninjured side and fell upon the food with wolfish hunger.

“Uh-huh,” Dr. Darrow wagged his head. “When’d you eat last, boy?”

“Yes’dy mawning,” he said thickly, without lifting his head.

The man handed the emptied bowl back to his daughter, and chuckled at the hungry pleading in the boy’s eyes. “That’ll hold you for a while, son. Can’t let you founder yourself. Now, then, how’d you pick up that lead, and what brought you here?”

Glen, on her way to the kitchen, halted silently in the doorway to look and listen.

The gaunt young face darkened and his words came hoarsely and jerkily. “Reckon hit were Olivers.” (The Olivers were hereditary foes of his house, the other side of the feud four generations long.) “And yet—” his eyes widened—“hit’s ontelling how.... Farley Oliver, he’s abed with a misery, and Jake’s down to the county seat, and Link has got his right arm broke, and Eddie, which is the least one, is purely too small....” He drew a quick breath and spent a moment in brooding silence. “My gran’mammy, she named hit to me when she were a-dying ... if I crossed her wish ... if I didn’t come down hyar to yo’all, she’d ha’nt me, day and night, night and day, twel I did!”

“Well?” the doctor prodded him.

To Glen, flattening herself against the kitchen door, hardly breathing in the tenseness of her interest, it seemed as if a chill and eerie wind stole into the room which had no kinship with the gale outside.

The youth’s pallor deepened. “I know in reason hit were some Oliver,” he insisted stubbornly, more to himself than to his interrogator. “Hit were purely erbleeged to be! But my gran’mammy were a right quare woman....” His lean young frame began to shake violently, so that the old couch vibrated with it.

“All right,” said the doctor briskly. “Lie still, now, and keep covered up warm! Got your feet on that hot-water bag? Well, your Grandma was a wise old woman! Maybe you didn’t mind her as well as you might, but I guess you will now!”

“Reckon so, suh,” he answered unsteadily, with the first note of respect he had ever shown.

“You get to sleep now. Here—swallow this!” The doctor eased the dark head back on the pillow and tucked the blankets about him, stirred up the fire, and opened a window to admit a breath of snarling storm. “I’ll leave my door open; you just shout if you need anything or if you get to feeling bad. I’ll be down, two—three times before morning, anyway.” He snapped off the light and herded Glen out of the kitchen.

“Glen, you get to bed fast as you make it! Nice time of night for you—” he fumed as he always did, but halfway upstairs he gave her a commendatory pat. “Good girl. Nerve. Kept your mouth shut and minded me. ’Night.”

Help was summoned in the morning to move the young mountaineer to an upper chamber where he spent three days in feverish pain, and when he was able to sit up in a high-backed rocker he made his position plain. The old woman had carried her point in death as she had not done in life. He had come down, and he would stay down, and permit himself to be “fotched on,” to the fulfilling of the old crone’s dream for him.

“But I am not aiming to be beholden,” he stated with his scant civility. “If yo’all will get me work in the mill and a place to live, and tote me, just once, to the night school, I will make out to do fo’ myself.”

“All right, son.” Dr. Darrow was carefully casual about it. “Guess I can fix you up. Tollivers—know ’em?—come from up your way—they’ll feed and sleep you for next to nothing, and there’ll be no trouble about getting into the mill. But about school—I believe the best thing’d be for Glen, here,” he nodded toward his daughter, waiting silently for the patient’s tray, “to find out how much you know, and maybe coach you a little. It’ll save you time.”

Young Manders turned his hawklike gaze upon her. He looked at her rather often, but always with an impersonal scrutiny.

“Is she fotched on?” Patent disapproval in look and tone. “I was not aiming to get me wimmin larning.”

His diction was curious, richly colored with accent and interlarded with crudities, and yet giving an effect of dignity. Glen thought the fact that he never slighted a final g had something to do with it.

Dr. Darrow grinned. “You’ll find it’s all of a piece, down here, Luke.” But he ceased to urge his daughter as a tutor and undertook the examination himself, fitting it in between calls.

The lad had learned to read and write, in limited fashion, at the moonlight school when he was several years younger, before he had dedicated himself to a career of violence, and had retained a good deal, but it was his figuring which amazed the physician.

“By George!” He sat back, beaming. “Quick as greased lightning! Got me beat, boy! Have, for a fact!”

It was indeed a matter for marveling. Luke Manders knew little of means or methods or rules, but he arrived at correct conclusions with a speed and accuracy which stopped barely short of magic.

“You keep on like this,” the man blinked and chuckled, “and I’ll have you keeping my books for me, before you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’” He sobered. “Now listen here, Luke. What you want is business college. Just get so you’re a little smoother on the reading and writing, and then we’ll start you in right off the bat, figuring and——”

“I would be beholden to you,” the boy interrupted with a show of eagerness. “I do not crave story-tale and song-ballad larning, suh. I crave numbers!”

“And that,” said Dr. Darrow to his daughter, following her downstairs, “is just what they do ‘crave’ generally, those mountaineers—stories and songs. (People claim, you know, that the things they sing and the yarns they spin have come straight down from the real old stuff in Scotland and England—read all about it in a magazine, two—three months ago!) But how he gets this bent for figures beats me! Goes to it like a duck to water, and he’s a wiz at it. By gad, he’s a wiz! He is, for a fact!”

Miss Ada Tenafee, requested to examine him and give a professional opinion as to the point at which he should start in school, came reluctantly, and only after considerable pleading on Glen’s part. Her expression on entering the Darrow’s unpleasant sitting room and encountering the young mountaineer was that of a well-bred lady detecting an unclean odor and genteelly endeavoring to ignore it. She was vague and non-committal, and said something under her breath about the probable briefness of his stay in the lowlands, and Glen, watching her, knew that she was mentally recalling “her own dear father’s rather common but very apt simile of the silk purse and the sow’s ear.”

Luke Manders, for his part, regarded her with frank scorn. It was clearly displeasing to him to find the font of learning guarded by this faded vestal. He answered grudgingly and did himself small credit until the doctor took charge of the quizzing and began to exhibit his prowess with numbers. Then, like a dancer compelled by the lure of rhythm, he performed.

“Well, now, Miss Tenafee,” the doctor demanded, “what do you think about that? Pretty keen, huh? With no more chance— Keen, huh?”

“Miz-zada” drew in her breath and a small quantity of dull color seeped into her sallow cheeks. “He is indeed—very—very—” she paused, visibly sorting her adjectives, choosing, rejecting.

“Well? Well?” the man prodded, impatiently.

The faded gentlewoman had found her word. “He is very sharp,” she said definitely.

“You’ve said it!” Darrow was not subtle himself and rarely detected subtlety in others. “Sharp as a lancet! Lemme tell you, this lad’s going to get ahead in the world.”

“I daresay,” Miss Ada conceded, her upper lip spelling faint distaste. “Glen, my dear—I have so many papers waiting for correction....” She half rose, but seated herself again at the doctor’s peremptory gesture, and discussed without enthusiasm the question of his grading.

It disappointed Glen to sense the dislike and distrust which her friends felt for each other. She had wanted “Miz-zada” to thrill over their golden legend, but the shabby teacher, pausing at the door, took a long, measuring look at the bold and beautiful young mountaineer and returned his frank scorn with a delicate, futile, birdlike antagonism which the girl found pathetically amusing.