Part 3

When he approached Evered’s farm he began to hear the bull muttering and roaring in some growing exasperation. But it was then too late to turn back without going far out of his way, so he pressed on until he came in sight of the pasture and saw the beast, head high, tramping up and down along the fence on the side away from the road. Zeke was glad the bull was on that side, and hurried his horse, in a furtive way, hoping the bull would not mark his passing.

When he came up to where the brute was he saw that the bull was watching something in Evered’s woodlot, beyond the pasture; and Zeke tried to see what it was. At first he could not see; but after a moment a dog yapped there, and Zeke caught a glimpse of it; a half-bred terrier from some adjacent farm, roving the woods.

The dog yapped; and the bull roared; and the dog, its native impudence impelling it, came running toward the pasture, and began to dance up and down, just beyond the bull’s reach, barking in a particularly shrill and tantalizing way.

Zeke yelled to the dog to be off; but the dog took his yell for encouragement, and barked the harder; and then Zeke saw a thing which made him turn cold.

He saw the bull swing suddenly, with all its weight, against the high wire fence; and he saw one of the posts sag and give way, and another smashed off short. So, quicker than it takes to tell it, the bull was floundering across the barbed wires, roaring with the pain of them, and Zeke saw it top the wall, tail high and head down, and charge the little dog.

Zeke might have tried to drive the bull back into its pasture; but that was a task for a bold man, and Zeke was not bold. He whipped his horse and drove on to warn Evered; and when he looked back from the top of the hill the bull and the dog had disappeared into the scrub growth of alder and hardwood along a little run that led down to the swamp. He whipped his horse again, and turned into the road that led to Evered’s farmhouse.

When he got to the farmhouse there was no one at home; and after he had convinced himself of this Zeke drove away again, planning to stop at the first neighboring farm and leave word for Evered. But after a quarter of a mile or so he met the butcher, and stopped him and told him that the bull was loose in his woodlot.

Evered asked a question or two; but Zeke’s voluble answers made him impatient, and he left the other and hurried on. At home he stabled his horse, got his ash stave with the snap on the end, and as an afterthought went into the house for his revolver. He had no illusions about the bull; he knew the beast was dangerous.

While he was in the house he marked that his wife was not there, and wondered where she was, and called to her, but got no answer. He knew that John and Ruth MacLure, his wife’s sister, were in the orchard on the other side of the farm from the pasture and woodlot; and he decided that his wife must have gone to join them there. So with the revolver in his pocket and the stave in his hand, Evered went down past the barn and through the bars into the woodlot. Somewhere in the thickets below him he expected to find the bull. He could hear nothing, so he understood that the little dog which had caused the trouble had either fled or been killed by the beast. He hoped for the latter; for he was an impatient man, and angered at the whole incident. Also, the sultry heat of the day had irked him; irked him so that he had cursed to himself because his wife was not at home when he wished to speak to her.

In this impatient mood he began to work down through the woodlot. He went carefully, knowing the treacherous temper of the brute he was hunting. He passed through a growth of birches along a little run, and across a rocky knoll, and through more birches, and so came out upon the lower shelf of his farm, a quarter of a mile from the house, and halfway down to the borders of the swamp.

He remembered, when he had come thus far, that there was a spring in the hillside a little below him, with two or three old trees above it, and some clean grass beside it. His wife occasionally came here in the afternoon, when her work was done, to sit and read or rest or give herself to her thoughts. Evered knew of this habit of hers; but till this moment he had forgotten it. The spot was cool; it caught what air was stirring. He had a sudden conviction that she might be there now; and the idea angered him. He was angry with her because by coming down here she had put herself in a dangerous position. He was angry with her because he was worried about her safety. This was a familiar reaction of the man’s irascible temperament. Two years before, when Mary Evered took to her bed for some three weeks’ time with what was near being pneumonia, Evered had been irritable and morose and sullen until she was on her feet again. Unwilling to confess his concern for her, he expressed that concern by harsh words and scowls and bitter taunts, till his wife wept in silent misery. His wife whom he loved wept in misery because of him.

Thus it was now with him. He was afraid she had come to the spring; he was afraid the bull would come upon her there; and because he was afraid for her he was angry with her for coming.

He went forward across the level rocky ground, eyes and ears alert; and so came presently atop a little rise from which he could look down to the spring. And at what he saw the man stopped stock-still, and all the fires of hell flared up in his heart till he felt his whole body burn like a flaming ember.

His wife was there; she was sitting on a low smooth rock a little at one side of the spring. But that was not all; she was not alone. A man sat below her, a little at one side, looking up at her and talking earnestly; and Mary Evered’s head was drooping in thought as she listened.

Evered knew the man. The man was Dane Semler. Dane Semler and his wife, together here, talking so quietly.

They did not see him. Their backs were toward him, and they were oblivious and absorbed. Evered stood still for a moment; then he was so shaken by the fury of his own anger that he could not stand, and he dropped on one knee and knelt there, watching them. And the blood boiled in him, and the pulse pounded in his throat, and the breath choked in his lungs. His veins swelled, his face became purple. One watching him would have been appalled.

Evered was in that moment a terrible and dreadful spectacle, a man completely given over to the ugliest of angers, to the black and tempestuous fury of jealousy.

He did not stop to wonder, to guess the meaning of the scene before him. He did not wish to know its explanation. If he had thought soberly he must have known there was no wrong in Mary Evered. But he did not think soberly; he did not think at all. He gave himself to fury. Accustomed to yield to anger as a man yields to alcohol, accustomed to debauches of rage, Evered in this moment loosed all bounds on himself. He hated his wife as it is possible to hate only those whom we love; he hated Dane Semler consumingly, appallingly. He was drunk with it, shaking with it; his lips were so hot it was as though they smoked with rage.

The man and the woman below him did not move. He could catch, through the pounding in his own ears, the murmur of their voices. Semler spoke quickly, rapidly, lifting a hand now and then in an appealing gesture; the woman, when she spoke at all, raised her head a little to look at the man, and her voice was very low. Evered did not hear their words; he did not wish to. The very confidence and ease and intimacy of their bearing damned them unutterably in his eyes.

He was like a figure of stone, there on the knoll just above them. It seemed impossible that they could remain unconscious of his presence there. The unleashed demons in the man seemed to cry out, they were almost audible.

But the two were absorbed; they saw nothing and heard nothing; nothing save each other. And Evered above them, a concentrated fury, was as absorbed and oblivious as they. His whole being was so focused in attention on these two that he did not see the great red bull until it came ponderously round a shoulder of the hill, not thirty paces from where the man and woman sat together. He did not see it then until they turned their heads that way, until they came swiftly to their feet, the man with a cry, the woman in a proud and courageous silence.

The bull stood still, watching them. And in the black soul of Evered an awful triumph leaped and screamed. His ash stave was beside him, his revolver was beneath his hand. There was time and to spare.

He flung one fist high and brought it smashing down. It struck a rock before him and crushed skin and knuckles till the blood burst forth. But Evered did not even know. There was a dreadful exultation in him.

He saw the bull’s head drop, saw the vast red bulk lunge forward, quick as light; saw Semler dodge like a rabbit, and run, shrieking, screaming like a woman; saw Mary Evered stand proudly still as still.

In the last moment Evered flung himself on the ground; he hid his face in his arms. And the world rocked and reeled round him so that his very soul was shaken.

Face in his arms there, the man began presently to weep like a little child.

VI

After an interval, which seemed like a very long time, but was really only a matter of seconds, Evered got to his feet, and with eyes half averted started down the knoll toward the spring.

Yet even with averted eyes he was able to see what lay before him; and a certain awed wonder fell upon the man, so that he was shaken, and stopped for a moment still. And there were tremorous movements about his mouth when he went on.

His wife’s body lay where it had been flung by the first blunt blow of the red bull’s awful head. But--this was the wonder of it--the red bull had not trampled her. The beast stood above the woman’s body now, still and steady; and Evered was able to see that there was no more murder in him. He had charged the woman blindly; but it was now as though, having struck her, he knew who she was and was sorrowing. It was easy to imagine an almost human dejection in the posture of the huge beast.

And it was this which startled and awed Evered; for the bull had always been, to his eyes, an evil and a murderous force.

A few feet from where the woman’s body lay Evered stopped and looked at the bull; and the bull stood quite still, watching Evered without hostility. Evered found it hard to understand.

He turned to one side and knelt beside his wife’s body; but this was only for an instant. He saw at once that she was dead, beyond chance or question. There was no blood upon her, no agony of torn flesh; her garments were a little rumpled, and that was all. The mighty blow of the bull had been swift enough, and merciful. She lay a little on her side, and her lips were twisted in a little smile, not unhappily.

Evered at this time was not conscious of feeling anything at all. His mind was clear enough; his perceptions were never more acute. But his emotions seemed to be in abeyance. He looked upon his wife’s body and felt for her neither the awful hate of the last minutes nor the torturing love of the years that were gone. He looked simply to see if she were dead; and she was dead. So he took off his coat and made of it a pillow for her, and laid her head upon it, and composed her where she lay. And the great red bull stood by, with that unbelievable hint of sorrow and regret in its bearing; stood still as stone, and watched so quietly.

Evered did not think of Semler; he had scarce thought of the man at all, from the beginning. When he was done with his wife he went to where the bull stood, and snapped his ash stave fast to the creature’s nose. The bull made no move, neither backed away nor snorted nor jerked aside its vast head. And Evered, his face like a stone, led the beast to one side and up the slope and through the woodlot toward the farm.

As he approached the barn he turned to one side and came to the boarded pen outside the bull’s stall. He led the beast inside this pen, loosed the stave from the nose ring, and stepped back outside the gate. Watching for a moment he saw the red bull walk slowly across the pen and go into its stall; and once inside it turned round and stood with its head in the doorway of the stall, watching him.

He made fast the gate, then passed through the barn and approached the kitchen door. Ruth, his wife’s sister, came to the door to meet him. His face was steady as a rock; there was no emotion in the man. Yet there was something about him which appalled the girl.

She asked huskily, “Did you get the bull in? I heard him, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” said Evered. “He’s in.”

“I heard him bellowing,” she explained. “And then I saw a man run up across the side field to the road.”

“That was Semler,” Evered explained coldly. “Dane Semler. He was afraid of the bull.”

“I was worried,” the girl persisted timidly, not daring to say what was in her mind. “I was worried--worried about Mary.”

“The bull killed her,” said Evered; and passed her and went into the kitchen.

Ruth backed against the wall to let him go by; and she pressed her two hands to her lips in a desperate frightened way; and her eyes were wide and staring with horror. She stared at the man, and her hands held back the clamor of her grief. She stared at him as at a monstrous thing, while Evered washed his hands at the sink and dried them on the roller towel, and combed his hair before the clean mirror hanging on the wall. There was a dreadful deliberation about his movements.

After a moment the girl began to move; she went by little sidewise steps as far as the door, and then she leaped out into the barnyard, and the screams poured from her in a frenzy of grief that was half madness. Evered turned at the first sound and watched her run, still screaming, across the barnyard to the fence; and he saw her fumble fruitlessly with the topmost bars, and at last scramble awkwardly over the fence itself in her stricken haste. She was still crying out terribly as she disappeared from his sight in the direction of the woodlot and the spring.

Evered watching her said to himself bitterly: “She knew where Mary was; knew where to look for her.”

He flung out one hand in a weak gesture of despair that came strangely from so harshly strong a man; and he began to move aimlessly about the kitchen, not knowing what he did. He took a drink at the pump; he changed his shoes for barnyard boots; he cut tobacco from a plug and filled his pipe and forgot to light it; he stood in the door, the cold pipe in his teeth, and stared out across his farm; and his teeth set on the pipestem till it cracked and roused him from his own thoughts.

Then he heard someone running, and his son, John Evered, came from the direction of the orchard, and flung a quick glance at his father, and another into the kitchen at his father’s back.

Evered looked at him, and the young man, panting from his run, said, “I heard Ruth cry out. What’s happened, father?”

Evered’s tight lips did not stir for a moment; then he took the pipe in his hand, and he said stiffly, “The red bull killed Mary.”

They were accustomed to speak of Evered’s second wife as Mary when they spoke together. John, though he loved her, had never called her mother. He loved her well; but the blood tie was strong in him, and he loved his father more. At his father’s word now he stepped nearer the older man, watching, sensing something of the agony behind Evered’s simple statement; and their eyes met and held for a little.

Then Evered said, “She was with Dane Semler at the spring.”

The gentler lines of his son’s face slowly hardened into a likeness of his own. The young man asked, “Where’s Semler?”

“Ran away,” said Evered.

“I had wanted a word with him.”

Evered laughed shortly; and it was almost the first time that John had ever seen him laugh, so that the sight was shocking and terrible. Then the older man turned back into the house.

John followed him and asked quickly, “It was at the spring?”

“Yes. The bull broke down his fence to get at a dog.”

“We must bring her home,” the son suggested quietly. “Where is Ruth?”

“Down there,” Evered told him.

John turned to the door again. “We’ll bring her home,” he said; and Evered saw the young man go swiftly across the farmyard and vault the fence and start at an easy run in the direction Ruth had gone.

Evered stayed in the house alone for a moment; and when he could bear to be alone no longer he went out into the farmyard. As he did so Zeke Pitkin drove in, on his way back from that errand in North Fraternity.

The bleak face of Evered appalled the timid man and frightened him; and he stammered apologetically: “W-wondered if you got the b-bull in.”

“Yes,” said Evered. “After he had killed Mary.”

Zeke stared at Evered with a face that was a mask of terror for a moment, and Evered stood still, watching him. Then Pitkin gathered his reins clumsily, and clumsily turned his horse, so sharply that his wagon was well-nigh overthrown by the cramped wheel. When it was headed for the road he lashed out with the whip, and the horse leaped forward. Evered could hear it galloping out to the main road, and then to the left, toward Fraternity.

“Town’ll know in half an hour,” he said half to himself.

The man was still in a stupor, his emotions numb. But he did not want to be alone. After a moment he went out into the stable and harnessed the horse to his light wagon and started down a wood road toward the spring. The wagon would serve to bring his wife’s body home.

The vehicles on a Fraternity farm are there for utility, almost without exception. Evered had a mowing machine, a rake, a harrow, a sledge, a single-seated buggy and this light wagon. He was accustomed to take the wagon when he went butchering; and it had served to haul the carcasses of any number of sheep or calves or pigs or steers from farm to market. He had no thought that he was piling horror on horror in taking this wagon to bring home his wife’s body.

He laid a double armful of hay in the bed of the wagon before he started; and he himself walked by the horse’s head, easing it over the rough places. The wood road which he followed would take him within two or three rods of the spring.

John Evered, going before his father, had found Ruth MacLure passionately sobbing above the body of her sister. And at first he could not bring himself to draw near to her; he was held by some feeling that to approach her would be sacrilege. There had been such a love between the sisters as is not often seen; there was a spiritual intimacy between them, a sympathy of mind and heart akin to that sometimes marked between twins. John knew this; he knew all that Ruth’s grief must be. And so he stood still, a little ways off from her, and waited till the tempest of her grief should pass.

When she was quieter he spoke to her; and at the sound of his voice the girl whirled to face him, still kneeling; and there were no more tears in her. He was frightened at the stare of challenge in her eyes. He said quickly, “It’s me.”

She shook her head as though something blurred her sight. “I thought it was your father,” she told him, and there was a bitter condemnation in her tone.

John said, “You mustn’t blame him.”

“He’s not even sorry,” she explained softly, thoughtfully.

“He is,” John insisted. “You never understood him. He loved her so.”

She flung her head to one side impatiently and got to her feet, brushing at her eyes with her sleeve, fumbling with her hair, composing her countenance. “It’s growing dark,” she said. “We must take her home.”

He nodded. “I’ll carry her,” he said; and he crossed and bent above the dead woman, and looked at her for a moment silently. The girl, watching him, saw in the still strength of his features a likeness to his father that was suddenly terrible and appalling.

She shuddered; and when he would have lifted her sister’s body she cried out in passionate hysterical protest, “Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! You shan’t touch her, John Evered!”

John looked at her slowly; and with that rare understanding which was the birthright of the man he said, “You’re blaming father.”

“Yes, yes,” she cried, “I am.”

“It was never his fault,” he said.

“He kept that red, killing brute about,” she protested. “Oh, he killed her, he killed Mary, he killed my sister, John.”

“That is not fair,” he told her.

Before she could answer they both hushed to the sound of the approaching wagon; and Evered came toward them, leading the horse, and he turned it and backed the wagon in below the spring.

They did not speak to him, nor he to them. But when he was ready he went toward the dead woman to lift her into the wagon bed; and Ruth pushed between them and cried: “You shan’t touch her! You shan’t touch her, ever!”

Evered looked at her steadily; and after a moment he said, “Stand to one side.”

The girl wished to oppose him; but it was a tribute to his strength that even in this moment the sheer will of the man overpowered her. She moved aside; and Evered lifted his wife’s body with infinite gentleness and disposed it upon the fragrant hay in the wagon bed. He put the folded coat again beneath his wife’s head as a pillow, as though she were only sleeping.

Still with no word to them he took the horse’s rein and started to lead it toward the road and up the hill. And Ruth and John, after a moment, followed a little behind.

When they came up into the open, out of the scattering trees, a homing crow flying overhead toward its roost saw them. It may have been that the wagon roused some memory in the bird, offered it some promise. At any rate, the black thing circled on silent wing, and lighted in the road along which they had come, and hopped and flopped behind them as they went slowly up the hill toward the farm.

Ruth saw the bird and shuddered; and John went back and drove it into flight; but it took earth again, farther behind them.

It followed them insistently up the hill; and it was still there, a dozen rods away, as they brought Mary Evered home.

VII

When they came into the farmyard night was falling. In the west the sky still showed bright and warm; and against this brilliant sky the hills were purple and deeper purple in the distance. In the valleys mists were rising and black pools of night were forming beneath these mists; and while Evered bore his wife’s body into the house and laid it on the bed in the spare room, these pools rose and rose until they topped the hills and overflowed the world with darkness. The air was still hot and heavy, as it had been all day; and the sultry sky which had intensified the heat of the sun served now to hide the stars. When it grew dark it was as dark as pitch. The blackness seemed tangible, as though a man might catch it in his hand.

Ruth stayed beside her sister; but John built a fire in the stove while Evered sat by in stony calm, and he made coffee and fried salt pork and boiled potatoes. There were cold biscuits which Mary Evered had made that morning, and doughnuts from the crock in the cellar. When the supper was ready he called Ruth; and she came. The most tragic thing about death is that it accomplishes so little. The dropping of man or woman into the pool of the infinite is no more than the dropping of a pebble into a brook. The surface of the pool is as calm, a little after, as it was before. Thus, now, save that Mary was not at the table, their supping together was as it had always been.

And after they had eaten they must go with the familiarity of long habit about their evening chores. Ruth washed the dishes; John and his father fed the beasts and milked the cows; and when they came in John turned the separator while Ruth attended to the milk and put away, afterward, the skim milk and the cream.