THERE was a short cut by which, using a rough back road across the hill, and then a dimly-marked bridle path down the bed of the creek, one could get to Tallman’s ravine in less than an hour on foot. Seth saddled the black mare, and brought her up on the meadow plateau overlooking the gulf, panting and white on breast and barrel with foam, inside fifteen minutes. He had galloped furiously, unable to think save in impatient flashes, and reckless alike of his own neck and the beast’s wind and limbs. He reined up the plunging mare at the very edge of the ravine, where some score of farmers and boys were standing clustered under the trees, watching his excited approach.
As he threw himself from the saddle among them, and looked swiftly from face to face for the right one to speak to first, the attention of the elder bystanders concentrated itself upon the mare. They would have given their foremost thoughts to her anyway, for they were owners of livestock even before they were neighbors, and her splashed and heated condition appealed in protest to their deepest feeling—reverential care for good horseflesh. But there was something more: the mare was strangely, visibly agitated at the sight of the glen before her, and reared back with outstretched trembling forelegs, lifted ears, and distended, frightened eyes.
“By Cracky!” cried Zeke Tallman himself, “don’t it beat natur’! This ’ere mare knaows what’s happened! Look at her! She senses what’s layin’ down there at the bottom!”
“’N’ it they say dawgs has got more instinck than a hoss!” said a younger yokel. He kicked a mongrel pup which was lounging around among the men’s legs, with a fierce “Git aout! yeh whelp, yeh! What d’you knaow abaout it!” to illustrate his contempt for this canine theory.
A third farmer, more practically considerate, took the shivering, affrighted beast by the bridle, and led it away from the gulf’s edge, patting its wet neck compassionately as they went.
Meanwhile Seth had found his way through the group to his brother John, who stood with his back against a beech tree, springing from the very brink of the gulf, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the trampled grass at his feet. A half circle of boys, with one or two girls of the school age, stretched about him at some distance, like the outer line of an open fan, mutely eyeing him as the second most important figure in the tragedy. They separated for Seth to make his way, and made signs to each other that the interest was doubled by his arrival. The brothers shook hands silently and scarcely looked at each other.
There came the sound of a pistol shot from the glen below; somebody said: “There! they’ve killed th’ off-hoss. Ther’ goes th’ best matched team o’ grays in Dearborn Caounty!”
“Have you been down yet, John?” Seth asked softly, as the low buzz of conversation began about them once more.
“No, not yet. I suppose I could if I had insisted on it, but when I got here, twenty minutes or so ago, they told me here that Timms had got his jury together down there, and forbidden anybody coming down till they were through. So I’ve stayed here. Not that I care about Timms, but—I can wait.”
“Let’s go down!” As he spoke, Seth swung himself around the beech, and began the descent, letting himself swiftly down the steep, mossy declivity by saplings and roots. His brother followed. One or two boys started also, but were roughly restrained by their elders, with a whispered “Stay back, can’t yeh! H’ain’t yeh got no sense. Them’s the brothers!”
The scene at the bottom was not unlike what Seth’s fancy had painted it, adding the terrible novelties of the night to a spot he had known from boyhood. Half-shaded even in the noon sunlight by overhanging branches from the towering, perpendicular sides of the glen, the miniature valley lay, a narrow stretch of poor, close-cropped grass, with the spiral, faded mullein stalks, the soft brown clumps of brake, the straggling, bloomless thistles, and even some tufts of glowing golden-rod, which push their way into unfrequented pasture-lands and encompass their sterility. The stream, which once had been a piscatorial glory of the section, but now, robbed of its water and its life by distant clearings, mills and reservoirs, wandered sadly and shallowly on an unnoted course, divided itself here to skirt each side of the gulf with a contemptible rivulet—the two coming together abruptly at the mouth of the low stone culvert, and vanishing into its dark recesses, above which rose, sloping steeply, the high embankment of the road traversing the ravine.
It was over this embankment that horses, carriage and owner had precipitately pitched; it was at its base, on the swail and gravel of the stream’s edge, that the wreck lay, surrounded by a little knot of men. Vertical gashes in the earth down the bank, with broken branches and tom roots, marked the awful track of the descent; the waters of the brook to the right, dammed by the body of the horse killed in the fall, had overflowed the sands and made muddy rivulets across to the culvert.
The Coroner turned with obvious vexation at the sound of the brothers’ approach. “I thought I give word—” he began; then, recognizing the newcomers, added, without altering his peremptory, officious tone: “It’s all right; you can come now, if you want to. The gentlemen of the jury have completed their labors for the present. I was on the pint of adjourning the ink-west.”
The brothers joined the jurors, and dumbly surveyed the spectacle at their feet. One of the grays lay across the rivulet; the other, more recently dead, was piled awkwardly upon its mate’s neck and shoulders, in an unnatural heap. The front portions of the buggy, scratched but not smashed, were curiously reared in the air, by reason of the pole being driven deep into the soft earth, between the horses; the rear wheels and the seat, broken off and riven by the violence of the shock, were imbedded in the marsh underneath. On the higher ground, close in front of the brothers, lay something decorously covered with horse-blankets, which they comprehended with a sinking of the heart.
“He lay in theer, part under the hind wheels ’n’ part under the nigh hoss,” explained the Coroner, with dignity. “The fall was enough to brek his neck twenty times over, let alone the hosses may’ve kicked him on the way down. We hev viewed the remains, ’n’ we’ve decided—
“We ain’t decided nothin’!” broke in one of the jurors, a serious, almost grim-faced farmer, with a bushy collar of gray whiskers framing his brown square jaw. “How kin we decide till we’ve heerd some evidence, ’n’ before the ink-west is threw with?”
“There’s some men’d kick if they was goin’ to be hung. Did I say we’d arrived at a verdict? What I mean is we’ve agreed to adjourn the ink-west now till arter the funeral.”
“Well, why daon’t yeh say what yeh mean, then?” rejoined the objecting juror. “They can’t no cor’ner make up my verdict fur me, ’n’ you’ll fine it aout, tew.”
“The more fool me fur panelin’ yeh!” was the Coroner’s comment.
The brothers insensibly edged away from this painful altercation. A little elderly man, in shabby broadcloth which seemed strangely out of place among the rough tweeds and homespuns of the farmers, detached himself from the group of jurors, and came over to them, with a subdued halfsmile of recognition. It was the Thessaly undertaker.
“Tew bad, ain’t it?” he said glibly, “allus some such scrimmage as thet, on every one of Timms’ juries. He ain’t got no exec’tive ability, I say. I’d like to see him run a funer’l with eight bearers—all green han’s! I told him thet once, right to his face! But then of course yeh knaow I can’t say much. He’s techy, ’n’ ’twouldn’t do fur me to rile him. We hev a kind o’ ’rangement, you see. I hev to be on hand any-way, ’n’ he allus puts me on the jury; it helps him ’n’ it helps me. I kin always sort o’ smooth over things, if any o’ th’ jurors feels cranky, yeh knaow. They’ll listen to me, cuz they reelize I’ve hed experience, ’n’ then there’s a good deal in knaowin’ haow to manage men, in hevin’ what I call exec’tive ability. Of course, this case is peculiar. They ain’t no question abaout th’ death bein’ accidental. But this man you heerd kickin’, this Cyrus Ballou, he’s makin’ a dead set to hev’ Zeke Tallman condemned fur hevin’ his fence up there in bad repair. He ’n’ Tallman’s a lawin’ of it abaout some o’ his steers thet got into Tallman’s cabbages, ’n’ thet’s why——-”
“I suppose we can leave this to you!” John broke in, impatience mastering the solemnity of the scene. “Have you made any arrangements? You know what ought to be done.”
“Yes, my boy ought to be here by this time with my covered wagon, what I call my ambulance.”
The brothers turned away from him. The little man remembered something and hurrying after them laid his hand on John’s arm.
“When I spoke abaout allus bein’ on the jury, you knaow, p’raps I ought to’ve explained.” He proceeded with an uneasy, deprecating gesture. “You see, a juror gits a dollar a day, ’n’ sometimes friends of the remains think I ought to deduck thet f’m my bill, but ef you’ll jest consider——”
“Oh for God’s sake! leave us alone!”
It was Seth who spoke, and the undertaker joined his fellow-jurors at the foot of the hill forthwith. The brothers went back, and stood again in oppressed silence over the blanketed form.
Dr. William Henry Timms meanwhile conversed apart with his panel. He was a middle-aged, shrewdfaced man, who, like so many thousands of other Whig babes born in the forties, had been named after the hero of Tippecanoe. He was more politician than coroner, more coroner than doctor. He hung by a rather dubious diploma upon the outskirts of his profession, snubbed by the County Society, contemned by most sensible Thessaly families as “not fit to doctor a sick cat.” But he had a powerful “pull” in the politics of the county, and the office could not, apparently, be wrested from him, no matter how capable his opponent.
In the earlier years of his official service he had been over zealous in suspecting mysteries, and had twice been reprimanded by the Supreme Court Judge, and much oftener by the District Attorney, for enveloping in criminal suspicion cases which, when intelligently examined, were palpable and blameless casualties. These experiences had sensibly modified his zeal. He had put the detective habit of mind far away behind him, and, like a wise official, bent all his energies now to the more practical labor of dividing each inquest into as many sessions as possible. Had he been a Federal Deputy Marshal, he could not have been more skilled in this delicate art of getting eight days’ pay out of a three hours’ case. A bare suggestion of mystery at the start, to be almost cleared up, then revived, then exploited carefully, then finally dissipated, and all so deftly that the District Attorney, who lived at Octavius, would not be inspired to come over and interfere—this was Dr. Timms’ conception of a satisfactory inquest. Occasionally there would be the added zest of an opportunity to formally inflict censure upon somebody, and if this involved some wealthy or potential person, so much the better: to withhold the censure meant tangible profit, to sternly mete it (failing a fair arrangement) meant public credit as a bold, vigilant official.
Dr. Timms was still turning over in his mind the professional possibilities involved in Tallman’s bad fence-building, and casually sounding his jurors as to their private feelings toward the delinquent; the brothers had followed the jury up to the meadow plateau, and were standing aloof from yet among their neighbors, answering in monosyllables, and following mentally the work of the undertakers’ squad down in the bottom; the farmers were beginning to straggle off reluctantly, the demands of neglected work and long-waiting dinners conquering their inclination to remain—when a big carry-all from Tyre drove up on the road outside, and a score of men clambered out and over the fence to join the group. They had driven post-haste from the Convention, and among them were Ansdell, Beekman, and Milton Squires.
Mr. Ansdell came straight to the two brothers, giving a hand to each with a gesture full of tender comprehension. While they talked in low tones of the tragedy, they were joined by Abe Beekman; upon the normal eagerness and wistful solemnity of his gaunt face there was engrafted now a curious suggestion of consuming interest in some masked feature of the affair. He was so intent upon this, whatever it might be, that to the sensitive feelings of the other three he seemed to dash into the subject with wanton brusqueness.
“How air yeh, Fairchild?” he nodded to John, “I want somebody to tell me this hull thing, while it’s fresh. Who knaows th’ most ’baout it? Where’s th’ Cor’ner? What’s he done so far?”
Obedient to a word from John, the Coroner dignifiedly came over to the beech tree, where our little group stood, and listened coldly to a series of searching questions put by the Jay County magnate. When they were finished he made lofty answer:
“I ain’t institooted no inquiries yit. That’ll be arranged fur later, to convenience the family ’n’ the officers of the law. It ain’t customary, in cases of accident like this, to rush around like a hen with her head cut off, right at the start. The law takes these things ca’mly, sir—ca’mly ’n’ quietly.”
“But have you made an examination?—you are a doctor, I think,” interposed Ansdell. “Have you satisfied yourself when the death occurred? Have you learned any of the circumstances of it? Were there any witnesses?”
The Coroner looked at the questioner, then at the brothers, as if including them in his pained censure, then back again at Ansdell:
“I don’t know ez it’s any o’ your business,” he said. “Who air yeh, any way?”
Before anyone else could answer, Beekman spoke: “He’s the next Congressman from this deestrick—nominated by acclamation over at Tyre to-day—that’s who he is. But never mind that, what I want to knaow is—air yeh sure he died from an accident? Kin yeh swear to thet ez a doctor?”
“Toe be sure I kin!” responded the official, in a friendlier tone. “He was simply mashed out o’ shape by the fall. He come down forty feet, ef it was an inch, plum under the horses. They jest rolled over each other, all the way down.—And so this is Mr. Ansdell, I presewm. I’m proud to make yer acquaintance, sir. Only by the merest accident I wasn’t at the Convention to-day, sir.”
The undertaker came up now to announce that the first stage of his labors was completed and that the ambulance wagon was on the road outside, ready to start for the Fairchild homestead.
“We went up by t’other side, lower daown the gulf,” he explained; “’twas easier, ’n’ then there was no shock to yer feelin’s. Ef I might be ’lowed to s’jest, it ’ud look kine o’ respectful to hev all these friends of the remains walk two by two, behine the wagon, daown to the haouse. Yeh might let the carry-all come along arterwards, empty, yeh knaow, ez a sort o’ token of grief.”
The suggestion was passively accepted as the proper thing under the circumstances, and the little procession began to shape itself on the road outside. Seth was moving toward the fence with the others, when the thought of the black mare he had ridden to the scene occurred to him. A farm-boy was holding the animal a little way off, near some bars opening from the meadow to the road. Seth saw Milton getting over the rails—he had been busy on the outskirts of the assemblage gathering accounts from those earlier on the ground—and said to him: “Won’t you get the mare, and ride her home, along with the carry-all. I shall walk—with the rest.”
The cortege had formed just beyond the fateful narrowing of the road, where it crossed the gulf, and the men who were to follow Albert to the homestead, including all the late comers from Tyre and a few neighbors, had looked down the steep declivity, and noted the new breaking away of earth on the road’s edge, before they passed on to fall in line behind the black, shrouded vehicle. The procession had moved some rods when there came sounds of excitement from the rear; at these some of the walkers turned, then others, and even the driver of the ambulance drew up his horses and joined the retrospective gaze.
The black mare was balking again, on the road directly over the gulf, and was crowding back with her haunches tight against the fencing on the side opposite to that over which her late master had fallen. It was a moment of cruel tension to every eye, for the fence was visibly yielding under the animal’s weight, and another tragedy seemed a matter of seconds. Milton appeared to have lost all sense, and was simply clinging to the mare’s neck, in dumb affright. Luckily a farmer ran forward at this juncture, and contrived to lead the beast forward diagonally away from the spot. Milton sat up in the saddle again, turned the mare away from the gulf, and galloped off.
“Dummed cur’ous thet!” whispered Beekman to Seth; “does thet mare ack thet way often?”
“I never knew her to balk before to-day. She acted like that when I first brought her up to the ravine. It is curious, as you say. But animal instinct is a strange, unaccountable thing any way.”
“Hm-m!” answered the Boss of Jay County, knitting his brows in thought, as the procession moved again.
Annie found the living room of the Fairchild homestead unoccupied. She could hear Alvira talking with the Lawton girl out in the kitchen, and from the parlor on the other side there came a murmuring sound which she did not comprehend at once. As she laid her hand upon the stair door, with the purpose of ascending to Sabrina’s room, this sound rose to a distinguishable pitch. It was a woman’s weeping. Annie hesitated, listening for a moment; then she turned, rolled one of the parlor doors back, and entered.
Isabel lay buried in the blue easy-chair, her face, encircled by one arm, hidden against its back. The great braids of her yellow hair were dishevelled and loosened, without being in graceful disorder. Her whole form trembled with the force of her hysterical sobbing.
At Annie’s touch upon her shoulder she raised her face quickly. It was tear-stained, haggard, and looked soft with that flabbiness of outline which trouble may give to the fairest woman’s beauty when it is not built upon youth; over this face passed a quick look of disappointment at recognition of Annie.
“Oh, it is you!”
The almost petulant words escaped before Isabel could collect herself. She sat up now, wiping her eyes, and striving with all her might for control of her thoughts and tongue.
“Yes, Isabel. I was going up to Sabrina’s room, but I heard you sobbing here, and I felt that I must come to you. It is all so terrible—and I do so feel for you!”
“Terrible—yes, it is terrible! It was kind of you to come—very kind. I—I scarcely realize it all, yet. It was such a shock!”
“I know, poor dear.” Annie laid her hand caressingly on the other’s brow. She had not come with over-tenderness in her heart, but this unexpected depth of suffering, so palpably real, touched her keenly. “I know. Don’t try to talk to me—don’t feel that it is necessary. Only let me be of use to you. It will be a dreadful time for you all—and perhaps I can spare you some. I shan’t go to the school to-day. Oughtn’t you to go up to your room now, Isabel, and lie down, and leave me here to—to arrange things?”
“No, not yet! Perhaps soon I will. My impulse is to stay down, to spare myself nothing, to force myself to suffer everything that there is to be suffered. I’ll see; perhaps that may not be best. But not now! not now! No—don’t go! Stay with me. I dread to be left alone; my own thoughts murder me!” She rose to her feet, and began pacing to and from the piano. “Let me walk—and you talk to me—anything, it doesn’t matter what—it will help occupy my mind. Oh, yes—were you at Crump’s last night? I heard them come by, late, singing.”
“Oh, Isabel, how can we talk of such trivial things? Yes, I was there; I was in the singing party, too. It makes me shudder to think that at that very minute, perhaps——” The girl paused for a moment, with parted lips and troubled face, as if pondering some sudden thought; then exclaimed, “Oh-h! the horse! Could it have been!”
“Could what have been!” Isabel stopped in her caged-panther-like pacing, and looked deep inquiry.
“But no, of course not! What connection could there have been! You see, after I left the wagon, to cut across by the path at the end of the poplars, a horse came galloping like the wind up the road, with some figure lying low on its back. We were too far away to see distinctly, though the night was so light”—she had insensibly drifted into the use of the plural pronoun—“but the thing went by so like a flash that it seemed an apparition. And come to think of it, there was an effort to avoid noise. I know I wondered at there being such a muffled sound, and Seth explained——”
She stopped short, conscious of having said more than she intended.
“Seth was with you, then?”
“Yes—he met me, quite unexpectedly, by the thorns. He had been out walking, he said; the night was too fine to sleep.”
“Yes, I heard him go out, an hour and a half at least before the singers came by. Did he say anything to you about what had happened, here in the house, during the evening?” Isabel’s azure eyes took on their darkest hue now, in the intentness of her gaze into her companion’s face.
“Only that he had had words with Albert—poor boy! how like a knife the memory of them must be to him now!”
“Did he tell you what the words were about?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything else to you?”
Annie grew restive under this persistent interrogation. The habit of deference to the older, wiser, more beautiful woman was very strong with her, but this did seem like an undue strain upon it.
“Why yes, no doubt he did. We talked of a number of things.”
“What were they? What did he say?”
“Well, really, Isabel, I——”
The elder woman gave a little click with her teeth and, after a searching glance into the other’s face, resumed her walk up and down, her hands clenched rather than clasped before her, and her movement more feline than ever. “Well, really you—what?” she said with the faintest suggestion of a mocking snarl in the intonation.
The girl drew herself up. It was not in human nature to keep her tone from chilling. “Really, I think I would better go up to Sabrina. I fancied I might be of some service to you.”
“Annie! Are you going to speak like that to me?—now of all times!” The tone was outwardly appealing. Annie’s sense was not skilled enough to detect the vibration of menace in it.
“No, Isabel, not at all. But you make it hard for me. Can you wonder? I think to comfort a desolate, stricken woman in her hour of sorrow, and she responds by peremptory cross-examination as to what a young man may have said to me, in the moonlight. Is it strange that I am puzzled?”
“Strange! Is not everything strange around and about me! That I should have married as I did; that I, loathing farm life, should have come here to live; that I should be waiting here now for them to bring my husband’s corpse home to me—is it not all strange, unreal? The conversation ought to be to match, oughtn’t it?”—she spoke with an unnatural, tremulous vivacity which pained and frightened the girl—“and so, while we wait, I talk to you about young men, and the moonlight, and all that. Can’t you see that my mind is tearing itself to pieces, like a machine in motion with some big rod or other loose, pounding, crushing, right and left like a flail! We must talk! Tell me what he said, anything—everything.”
“Why, that isn’t so easy,” Annie replied dubiously, much mistrusting the sanity of all this conversation, but pushed along with it in spite of herself. “He said something about a misunderstanding with his poor brother, and then—then something that I didn’t at all understand about a temptation, a great temptation leading him to the gates of hell he called it—but you know how Seth is given to exaggerate everything—and then——”
“He told you all this, did he. How confiding! How sweet! Go on—what else did he say to you—in the moonlight.”
Annie felt vaguely that the tone was cruel and hostile. As she paused in bewildered self-inquiry, Isabel glided forward and confronted her, with gleaming eyes and a white, drawn face.
“Why do you stop there?” she demanded in a swift, bitter whisper.
“There are things which—a girl doesn’t like to—have dragged from her in this——”
Even as Annie was forming this halting halfsentence, a change came over the elder woman. She dropped the hand which had been raised as if to clutch Annie’s shoulder. The flashing light passed from her eyes, and something of color, or at least of calm, came back into her face.
“I understand!” she said, simply.
“You can see, Isabel, that this is not a time I should have chosen to speak of such things to you, if you had not insisted. It seems almost barbarous to bring my joy forward, at such a time, and appear to contrast it with your affliction. You won’t think I wanted to do it, will you?”
The widow of a day was looking contemplatively at her companion; she had effaced from both expression and voice every trace of her recent agitation. “Are you sure it is all joy?” she asked calmly.
“I wouldn’t admit it to him. And at first I was not altogether clear about it in my own mind. Indeed, with this other and terrible thing, I can scarcely think soberly about it, as it ought to be thought of. But still—you know, Isabel, we were little children together—and I have never so much as thought of anybody else.” Annie spoke more confidently, as she went on; the notion that there had been malevolence in Isabel’s tone had faded into a foolish fancy: there seemed almost encouragement, sympathy, in her present expression. “I should have lived and died an old maid if he had not come to me. And it comforts me, dear, too, to think that in your great trouble I shall have almost a sister’s right to be with you, and help you bear it.”
Isabel did not respond to this tender proffer of solace. She still stood eying her companion reflectively. “You are very certain of being happy, then?” she mused.
A sense of discordance touched the girl’s heart again—a something in the restrained, calm tone which seemed to sting. She looked more searchingly into the speaker’s eyes, and read in their blue depths a mystery of meaning which froze and silenced her. While Annie looked, in growing paralysis of thought, Isabel spoke again, slowly:
“Your married life at least won’t be deadly dull, as mine was. There must be great possibilities of excitement in living with a man who can propose marriage to a girl—in the moonlight—on his way home from having murdered his brother!”
Young Samantha Lawton, the member of the tribe who served as maid-of-all-work at the Warren homestead, had a mind at once imaginative and curious. From an upper window she had caught sight of the mournful procession from Tallman’s ravine, winding its way down the hill, in the distance. She stole out from the house, whose bedridden occupant could at best only yell herself hoarse in calling if she chanced to need anything during her absence, and walked up the path by the thorns to the main road, over which the cortege would presently pass. Inside the sharp angle of shade made at this corner, where the thorns aspiringly joined the poplars, there was an old board seat between two trees, the relic of some past and forgotten habit of rendezvous, perhaps whole generations old. Samantha knew of this seat, and stood on it now; from it, she had a clear view of the road in front and, through the tangled thorns, of the meadow-path to the left, while there were branches enough about her to render her practically invisible. From this coign of vantage Samantha saw some things which she had not expected to witness.
Annie Fairchild came suddenly across the line of vision, from the direction of the dead man’s house, and walked straight to the stile at the edge of the thorn row. There was something so curious in the expression of her face, as she advanced, that Samantha scented discovery, and prepared on the instant an exculpatory lie. But Annie passed the one place where discovery was probable, and the hidden girl saw now that the strange look had some other explanation. She crossed the stile, and clung to the fence post, as if for support; glanced up the road, where now the black front of the nearing procession could be discerned; then with a shudder turned her face in profile toward her unsuspected observer, and looked vacantly, piteously up into the afternoon sky.
Annie’s face, with its straight, firm outlines, was not one which lent itself to the small facial play of evanescent emotions. Its regular features habitually expressed an intelligent, self-reliant composure, not easily responsive to shades of feeling. To see this calm countenance transfixed now with a helpless stare of anguish was to comprehend that something terrible had happened.
She stood at the stile, desperately clinging to the rail at first, then edging into the thorns to be more out of sight, as the ambulance and the little file of friends moved slowly by. She noted nothing of the peculiarities of the procession—that most of the silent followers were strange men, in city dress—but only gazed at Seth, walking along gravely behind the vehicle, beside his brother John. She saw him with eyes distended, fixed—as of one following the unfolding of a hideous nightmare. So long as the party remained in sight, these set, affrighted eyes followed him. Then they closed, and the sufferer reeled as if in a swoon.
Samantha’s first and best impulse was to get down and go to the agonized woman’s aid; her second, and controlling, thought, was to stop where she was, and see and hear all that was going.
Annie seemed to recover her strength, if not her composure. She wrung her hands wildly and talked with strange incoherence aloud to herself. Once she started, as if to cross the stile again and return to the house of mourning, but drew back. At last, walking straight ahead, like one in a dream, she moved toward her home.
Samantha followed at a safe distance, marvelling deeply.
WELL, I don’ knaow ’s I go’s fur’s Sabriny, ’n’ say ther’s a cuss on th’ fam’ly, ’n’ thet M’tildy Warren put it there, fur after all, three deaths hand-runnin’ in tew years ain’t an onheerd-of thing, but I don’t blame her fur gittin’ daown-hearted over it. Poor ole creetur, she’s be’n a carryin’ the hull load o’ grief on her shoulders sence Sissly died. I shouldn’t wonder if it’d be tew much for her naow.”
Alvira sighed, and let her eyes wander compassionately from the kneading board and its batch of dough to the old, cushioned arm chair by the kitchen stove where Aunt Sabrina customarily sat. This last bereavement had rendered the hired-girl almost sentimental in her attitude toward the stricken old maid—so much so that when young Samantha Lawton dropped in, toward evening, and offered to sit down in this chair, Alvira had sharply warned her to take another.
The girl had brought a note over from Annie to Seth, and was not a little vexed that Alvira should have taken it from her, and gone upstairs to deliver it herself, instead of allowing the messenger to complete her errand. She declined, therefore, to display any interest in the subject of the aged aunt, and warmed her hands over the glowing stove-griddles in silence. The elder Lawton girl, Melissa, resting for a moment from her churning, turned the talk into a more personal channel.
“Fur my part, I think it’s a pesky shame, where there’s three big strappin’ men ’raoun’ th’ haouse, to make a girl wag this old chum-dash till her arms are ready to drop off. ’N’ I’ll tell ’em sao, tew.”
“I sh’d thought Dany’d done it fur yeh” said her younger sister, with a grin. “He allus seemed to me to be soft enough to do all yer work fur yeh, ef you’d let him.”
“Not he! Both he ’n’ Leander ain’t so much’s lifted a finger ’raoun’ th’ haouse to-day. They’re off daown to th’ corners, hangin’ raoun’ th’ store, ’n’ swoppin’ yarns ’baout th’ accident. They wouldn’t keer ’f I churned away here till I spit blood. In th’ mornin’ he’ll be awful sorry, of course, ’n’ swear he furgot all ’baout Wednesday’s bein’ churnin’ day. Thet’s th’ man of it!”
“’N’ I s’pose Milton never does nothin’ ’baout th’ haouse naowadays,” remarked Samantha, interrogatively.
“No, siree!” snapped Alvira. “You bet he daon’t! He’s tew high ’n’ mighty fur thet! Prob’ly he’s furgot so much as th’ name of a churn, even. He might git his broadcloth suit spotted, tew. I wouldn’t dream o’ askin’ him. I’d ruther ask Seth any day then I hed Milton. He don’t put on half so many airs, even if he does git thirty dollars a week in Tecumseh, ’n’ live ’mong ladies ’n’ gentlemen ev’ry day ’f his life.”
Melissa rested from her labors again, to say sneeringly: “Pritty ladies ’n’ gentlemen he use’t to travel with, there in Tecumsy, accordin’ to all accaounts!” Alvira paused in turn, with her arms to the elbow in the floury mixing, and an angry glitter in her little black eyes. “Ef I was some folks, ’n’ hed some folk’s relations in Tecumsy, ’pears to me I’d keep my maouth pritty blamed shut ’baout what goes on there!”
The retort was ample. There was no answering sound, save the muffled splash and thud of Melissa’s vigorously-resumed churning.
The lull in conversation was beginning to grow oppressive when the young visitor asked: “Haow does th’ fine lady take it?”
“She seems more opset than anyone’d given her credit fur,” Alvira answered, sententiously.
Melissa interposed to expand this comment, and rest her arms: “Yes, she seems opset enough. P’raps she is. But then agin, p’raps ef you was young ’n’ good lookin’, with blew eyes ’n’ a lot o’ yalleh hair thet was all yer own, ’n’ you hed a hus-ban’ twice as old as you was, ’n’ he sh’d fall daown ’n’ break his neck, ’n’ leave you a rich young widder, p’raps you’d cry yer eyes aout—when people was lookin’—speshly if thet husban’ o’ yours left a likely young brother who was soft on yeh. When you git as old ’s I be, S’manthy, you’ll learn ther’s a good deal in appear’nces.”
“When she gits as old as you air,” broke in Alvira, sharply, “I hope she’ll learn better ’n’ to blab everythin’ thet comes into her head! You’ll let that cream break, ef yeh don’t look aout!”
“I don’t b’lieve its within an ’aour o’ comin’” said Melissa, wearily resuming her task.
“No, but—reelly,” began Samantha, “is Seth——?”
“Never you mind whether Seth is or whether he isn’t,” answered Alvira. “A young tadpole of a girl like you’s got no business pryin’ ’raoun’ older folks’ affairs. You better go home! M’tildy may need yeh. Yer sister’s got her work to dew, ’n’ so ’ve I.”
This plain intimation produced no effect upon Samantha. She continued to warm her hands, which were already the hue of a red apple with the heat, and remarked: “No, she don’ want me. Annie said I might stay ’s long ’s I wanted to. She said she wanted to be left alone. She’s abaout the wuss broke up girl I ever sot eyes on. You ought to see the way she takes on, though. I bet the widder ain’t a succumstance to her. Ef you’d seen what I saw, ’n’ heern what I heerd this afternoon, I guess you’d think so tew.”
The girl spoke calmly, with a satisfied conviction that nobody would tell her to go home again in a hurry.
“What was it?” came simultaneously from the kneading-board and the churn.
“Oh, I dunnao,—I ain’t much of a han’ to blab everythin’. A young tadpole of a girl like me, yeh knaow, ain’t got no business——”
“Come naow! Don’t be a fool, S’manthy! Ef you’ve got anythin’ to say, spit it aout!”
Thus adjured by the commanding tones of Alvira, the girl trifled no more, but related what she had seen, while hidden behind the thorns. She had a talent for description, and made so much of Annie’s stony face and strange behavior, that she succeeded in producing an effect of mystification upon her listeners scarcely second to that under which she, as an involuntary spectator, had labored. The success of her recital was not lost upon Samantha, as she went on:
“Et was after th’ undertaker’s waggin ’n’ th’ men—some gallus lookin’ young fellers, f’m Tecumsey I guess, was amongst ’em—et was after these’d all gone by, thet I heerd her talk. She kind o’ hid herself in th’ bushes while they was a goin’ by, ’n’ stared at ’em like mad, ez fur’s she c’d folly ’em. Then she bust aout—not a-cryin’ mind yeh, fur she never shed a tear—but wringin’ her han’s ’n’ groanin’ ’n’ actin’ ’s ef she was goin’ to faint. I c’d see her jest ez plain ’s I kin see you stan’in’ there naow, ’n’ heer her, tew. All to onc’t she up ’n’ said——”
The young girl stopped here in the narrative abruptly, with a fine disregard for the consuming interest with which her companions were regarding her; she lifted her nose, and drew two or three leisured sniffs. Then she bent down at the side of the stove and repeated them.
“Ther’s somethin’ burnin’ in thet oven,” she said at last, confidently.
“Et’s th’ barley. I knowed S’briny’d traipse off ’n’ leave it. She allus does;” said Alvira, flinging open the oven door, and dragging out with her apron a smoking pan of scorched grain.
Through the dense, pungent smudge which temporarily filled the room, Samantha was heard to remark with offensive emphasis: “We allus drink genu-wine coffee over to M’tildy’s. She’s mean enough ’baout some things, but she wouldn’t make us swell ourselves aout with no barley-wash.”
“’N’ sao do we here, tew—all but S’briny!” retorted Alvira, indignantly. “She got use’ to drinkin’ it in war-times, when yeh couldn’t git reel coffee fur love n’r money, jes’ ez all th’ other farm-folks did. On’y she’s more contrary ’n’ th’ rest, ’n’ she wouldn’t drink nothin’ else naow, not ef yeh poured it into her maouth with a funnel. But go on ’th yer yarn!”
Samantha had to cough a little, on account of the smoke, and then it took her some moments to collect the thread of her narrative. But at last even the spirit of Tantalus could invent no further delay, and she proceeded:
“Well, she didn’t say much, fer a fact, but they was business in ev’ry word she did say. Fust she hollered aout—right aout, I tell yeh: ‘Et’s a wicked lie! She’s a bad, wicked woman! ’ Then she stopped fer awhile ’n’ put her han’s up to her for’id—like this. Then she shuk herself, ’n’ commenced to climb back over th’ stile, but she seemed to think better of it, ’n’ started fer her own haouse, like’s ef she was a walkin’ in her sleep, ’n’ a groanin’ to herself: ‘Seth a murd’rer! Seth a murd’rer!’ Thet’s what I heerd!”
The girl put both feet up on the stove hearth, and tilted her chair back in conscious triumph. “Got ’n’ apple handy?” she inquired of Alvira, carelessly, in the tone of one whose position in life was assured.
To this strange recital, involving such terrible suggestions, there succeeded a full minute of silence in the kitchen, broken only by the ponderous clucking of the high wooden clock. Alvira and Melissa looked at each other dumbly—each for once willing to forego the first word.
“Well, what d’yeh say to thet?” finally asked Melissa.
After some reflection, Alvira answered, “I sh’d say S’manthy was a lyin’.”
“S’elp me die, crisscross, I ain’t!” protested the girl at the stove: “I’ve told it all, jest’s it happened, straight’s a string. Where’s yer apples?”
Alvira meditated again for a moment. Then she said to her subordinate: “Go down ’n’ git that sister o’ yourn a Spitzenberg—’n’ bring up some cider, yeh might’s well, too.”
When Melissa had gone, Alvira went over to the ‘younger girl, and gripped her sharply by the shoulder: “Look here, you, is what you’ve be’n tellin’ us here honest? Don’t lie to me!”
“Honest Injun? Alviry! ev’ry word!”
Alvira returned to her dough, and slapped it savagely into a huge, unnatural pancake. She maintained silence until Melissa had returned, and not only supplied her sister’s wants, but poured out a cupful of the new cider for herself, as a proof of her appreciation of the Lawton family’s supremacy over the existing crisis. Then Alvira spoke:
“I don’t ’tach th’ least ’mportance in th’ world to what S’manthy heerd. Annie’s a school-teacher, ’n’ she’s be’n workin’ pritty hard, ’n’ this thing’s kind o’ opset her—what with tendin’ to her gran’mother, ’n’ then this teachin’, which is narvous, wearin’ kine o’ work. Thet’s th’ trewth o’ th’ matter. I kin un-derstan’ it. She was jest aout of her senses. But other folks won’t understan’ it as I dew. Once a hint gits flyin’ amongst outsiders, who knaows where it’ll stop? Naow, girl ’n’ woman, I’ve be’n in this haouse twenty year ’n’ more. I’m more a Fairchild than I’m anythin’ else. I remember th’ man in there—layin’ dead in th’ parlor—when he was a youngster, comin’ home f’m college; I remember Seth when he was a baby. I ain’t got no folks of my own thet I keer a thaousandth part ‘s much abaout, nur owe a thaousandth part ’s much tew, ez I dew this Fairchile fam’ly. Well! They’ve hed trouble enough, this las’ tew year, ‘thout havin’ any added onto it by th’ tattlin’, gossipin’ tongues of outsiders. I ain’t goin’ to hev it! D’yeh understan’! Ef I heer s’ much’s a whisper of this yere crazy school-teacher’s nonsense reported ‘raound, by th’ Lord above, I’ll skin yeh both alive!”
“Who’s b’en a gossipin’?” asked Samantha, reproachfully. “I shouldn’t never said a word, ef you hadn’t insisted, ’n’ called me a fool fur holdin’ my tongue.”
“I dunnao where you’ll gao to when you die, S’manthy,” said Alvira, reflectively. “But nao, girls, trewly naow, this mustn’t be mentioned. Yeh kin see with half ’n eye what a raow it’d stir up. Naow prommus me, both o’ yeh, thet not a word of it shell pass yer lips. Yeh can see fer yerself haow foolish it is! Ev’rybody knaows he driv off th’ raoad, ’n’ killed himself ’n’ th’ hosses by th’ fall. It’s ez plain ‘s th’ nose on yer face. Still it’s jest sech cases as this thet people git talkin’ abaout, once they’re sot goin’—so yeh will promise me, won’t yeh?”
They promised.
“Hon’r bright, ye’ll never say a word to nao livin’ soul?”
They asseverated solemnly, honor bright, and Samantha had a doughnut as well as another cup of cider.
The tiresome butter came at last, and the dough passed into a higher form of existence through the fiery ordeal of the oven; supper was laid and silently eaten; two neighbors, volunteers for the night-watch with the dead, came, and were ushered into the gloomy parlor; while apples, cheese, doughnuts and a pitcher of cider were placed on the table outside, for their refreshment in the small hours. Night fell upon the farm.
Melissa Lawton stole out-doors as soon as Alvira retired to her room, and made her way through the darkness to the barns. As Albert had done on the fatal previous evening, she opened the sliding door of the big stable, and called up the stairs to Milton. There was no response, and investigation showed that he was not in his room, although the lamp was burning dimly. The girl stopped long enough to look over the familiar coarse pictures on the walls and the shelf, and then crept down the steep stairs again.
As she groped her way through the blackness to the stable door she came suddenly in contact with a person entering, and felt herself rudely seized and pushed back at arms’ length.
“Who’s here? What d’yeh want?” demanded a harsh voice, which seemed despite its gruffness to betray great trepidation.
“It’s me—M’lissy!”
“Come along aout here into the light, so I kin see yeh. What a’ yeh doin’ here, praowlin’ ’raoun’ ’n th’ dark, skeerin’ people fur?”
The Lawton girl’s native assurance all came back to her as she confronted Milton in the dim starlight outside—which was radiance by contrast with the stable’s total darkness—and she grinned satirically at him.
“You’ve got a nerve on you like a maouse, I swaow! You trembled all over when yeh tuk holt o’ me, in there. What was yeh skeert abaout? I wouldn’t hurt yeh!”
“I wa’n’t skeert,” the man replied, sullenly. “What was yeh after in there?”
“I was lookin’ fur you.”
“What fur?” The tone was still uneasily suspicious.
“I got somethin’ to tell yeh.”
“Well?”
“D’yeh knaow, I more’n half b’lieve this thing wa’n’t an accident at all. What’d yeh say ’f it sh’d turn aout to be a murder?”
Even in this faint light Melissa could see that Milton was much taken aback by the suggestion. He thrust his hands into his pockets, pulled them out again, shuffled his feet, stammered, and betrayed by other signs general among rustics his surprise.
“Pshaw—git aout!” he said at last; “what nonsense! Of caourse ’t was ’n accident. Didn’t th’ Cor’ner say sao? Daon’t ev’rybody knaow it?”
“Annie Fairchile don’t say sao. She don’t knaow it.”
The girl went on to relate the substance of Samantha’s revelations, adding unconsciously sundry embellishments which tended to throw a clearer light upon Seth as the chief figure in the mystery.
Milton listened with deep attentiveness. His slow, inefficient brain worked hard to keep up with the recital, and assimilate its chief points. When the girl had finished he still thought steadily on this strange story, with its unforeseen, startling suggestions. Gradually two items took shape in his mind as most important: that Annie believed Seth to be the criminal, and hence would be estranged from him; and that if by any unexpected means people came to suspect foul play, here were the elements of a ready-made suspicion against Seth. The first of these was very welcome; it would be time enough to think of the other if a discovery were made.
“What dew I think?” he said at last, in response to the girl’s repeated inquiries. “I think thet sister o’ yourn lied, ’n’ I think yeh better keep yer maouth, ’n’ her’n tew, pritty dum shet, ef yeh don’t want to git into trouble.”