Part 6

“Twelve hundred dollars!” repeated the auctioneer, impressively, and there was something vaguely respectful in the way he pushed Rastus back into his chair. “Twelve hundred! Mr. Staley, don’t back out; you need ‘im wuss than anybody else. Is it twelve-twenty-five?”

Staley hesitated; his eyes fell before the concentrated stare of the silent crowd, and then he nodded. A murmur passed through the assembly, and Colonel Putnam grew white with anger. “Some one has put him up to this,” he said in a low tone to his agent. “Make it thirteen hundred.” And the next instant the auctioneer was flaunting the bid in the face of old Staley.

Herbert Putnam, unnoticed by any one, elbowed his way through the crowd to his brother and touched him on the arm. Their eyes met. “Pardon me,” said Herbert, “but I must speak to you.”

And George Putnam was drawn beyond the outskirts of the crowd. “I cannot keep quiet and see you cheated,” faltered Herbert, with his eyes averted. “A long time ago, when you and I were boys, you stood up for me, and I cannot forget that we are brothers. Don’t bid any more on Rastus; he is shamming; he is as sick as he can be, and is only pretending to be well to bring a high price.”

The two men gazed into each other’s eyes. George Putnam was quivering all over, and his face was softening. Impulsively he put out his hand, as if to apologize for his lack of words. “Let’s not be enemies any longer,” went on Herbert, as he pressed the extended hand. “I am sick and tired of this estrangement. I am going away, and I may never come back. I can’t keep up the old place as father thought I would, and you are welcome to it. Take it and care for it; mother’s and father’s graves are on it.”

George Putnam’s face was working; he strove to reply, but his voice clogged. He looked toward his son and wife in his carriage, and then back into his brother’s face. “God forgive me, Herb,” he said; “I’ve treated you like a dog. Old Rastus has been truer to you than your own brother. You shall not give up the old place; you must keep it. Wait!” And with those words he hurried to the platform.

The auctioneer had been proclaiming Staley’s reckless bid of thirteen-twenty-five, and the crowd was eagerly taking in the unusual sight of the two Putnam brothers in close conversation. Colonel Putnam reached the platform and signed the auctioneer to be quiet. Standing on the lower step, he was in the view of all.

“I want Rastus, and I am going to have him,” he said to the upturned faces. “I want him to give him back to my brother, who has been forced by my neglect to offer him for sale. Twenty thousand dollars is my bid--and Rastus is worth every cent of it.”

No one spoke as Colonel Putnam stepped back into the crowd. Old Rastus seemed the only one to thoroughly grasp the situation. “Bress de Lawd!” he exclaimed, and he slapped Aunt Milly on the back. “Dem boys done made up, en I fotch twenty thousand dollars! Whooee!”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” said the auctioneer, awkwardly. “Twenty thousand--do I hear--and sold to Colonel Putnam. I reckon the’ ain’t no use puttin’ up the others.”

There was great activity in the crowd. Everybody was trying to see the two brothers as they went arm in arm to Colonel Putnam’s carriage, and a moment later, when the vehicle with four occupants turned into the road leading toward George Putnam’s plantation, a unanimous cheer rose from the crowd.

THE CONVICT’S RETURN

|The pedestrian trudged down the tortuous declivitous road of the mountain amidst the splendor of autumn-tinted leafage and occasional dashes of rhododendron flowers. Now and then he would stop and deeply breathe in the crisp air, as if it were a palpable substance which was pleasing to his palate. At such moments, when the interstices of trunks and bowlders would permit, his eyes, large with weariness, would rest on a certain farmhouse in the valley below.

“It’s identical the same,” he said, when he had completed the descent of the mountain and was drawing near to it. “As fer as I can make out, it hain’t altered one bit sence the day they tuk me away. Ef ever’thing seems purtier now, it may be beca’se it’s in the fall of the year an’ the maple-trees an’ the laurel look so fancy.”

Approaching the barn, the only appurtenance to the four-roomed house, farther on by a hundred yards, he leaned on the rail fence and looked over into the barnyard at the screw of blue smoke which was rising from a fire under a huge iron boiler.

“Marty’s killin’ hogs,” he said, reflectively. “I mought ‘a’ picked a better day fer gittin’ back; she never was knowed to be in a good humor durin’ hog-killin’.”

He half climbed, half vaulted over the fence, and approached the woman, who was bowed over an improvised table of undressed planks on which were heaped the dismembered sides, shoulders, and hams of pork. His heart was in his mouth, owing to the carking doubt as to his welcome which had been oozing into the joy of freedom ever since he began his homeward journey. But it was not his wife who looked up as his step rustled the corn-husks near her, but her unmarried sister, Lucinda Dykes.

“Well, I never!” she ejaculated. “It’s Dick Wakeman, as I am alive!” She wiped her hand on her apron and gave it to him, limp and cold. “We all heerd you was pardoned out, but none of us ‘lowed you’d make so straight fer home.”

His features shrank, as if battered by the blow she had unwittingly dealt him.

“I say!” he grunted. “Whar else in the name o’ common sense would a feller go? A body that’s been penned up in the penitentiary fer four years don’t keer to be losin’ time monkeyin’ round amongst plumb strangers, when his own folks--when he hain’t laid eyes on his--”

But, after all, good reasons for his haste in returning could not be found outside of a certain sentimentality which lay deep beneath Wakeman’s rugged exterior, and to which no one had ever heard him refer.

“Shorely,” said the old maid, taking a wrong grasp of the situation--“shorely you knowed, Dick, that Marty has got ’er divorce?”

“Oh, yes. Bad news takes a bee-line shoot fer its mark. I heerd the court had granted ’er a release, but that don’t matter. A lawyer down thar told me that it all could be fixed up now I’m out. Ef I’d ‘a’ been at home, Marty never would ‘a’ made sech a goose of ‘erse’f. How much did the divorce set ’er back?”

“About a hundred dollars,” answered Lucinda.

“Money liter’ly throwed away,” said the convict, with irrepressible indignation. “Marty never did quite sech a silly thing while I was at home.”

The old maid stared at him, a half-amused smile playing over her thin face.

“But it was her money,” she said, argumentatively. “She owned the farm an’ every stick an’ head o’ stock on it when you an’ ’er got married.”

“You needn’t tell me that,” said Wakeman, sharply. “I know that; but that ain’t no reason fer ’er to throw ’er money away gittin’ a divorce.”

Lucinda filled her hand with salt and began to sprinkle it on a side of meat. “Law me,” she tittered, “I ’ll bet you hain’t heerd about Marty an’ Jeff Goardley.”

“Yes, I have. Meddlin’ busybodies has writ me about that, too,” said Wakeman, sitting down on the hopper of a corn-sheller and idly swinging his foot.

“He’s a-courtin’ of ’er like a broom-sedge field afire,” added the sister, tentatively.

“She’s got too much sense to marry ’im after ’er promises to me,” said the convict, firmly.

“She lets ’im come reg’lar ev’ry Tuesday night.”

Wakeman was not ready with a reply, and Lucinda began to salt another piece of pork.

“Ev’ry Tuesday night, rain or shine,” she said.

The words released Wakeman’s tongue.

“Huh, he’s the most triflin’ fop in the county.”

“Looks like some o’ the neighbors is powerful bent on the match,” continued Lucinda, her tone betraying her own lack of sympathy for the thing in question. “Marty was a-standin’ over thar at the fence jest ‘fore you come an’ whirled all of a sudden an’ went up to the house. She said she was afeered her cracklin’s would burn, but I ’ll bet she seed you down the road. I never have been able to make ’er out. She ain’t once mentioned yore name sence you went off. Dick, I’m one that don’t, nur never did, believe you meant to steal Williams’s hoss, kase you was too drunk to know what you was a-doin’, but Marty never says whether she does ur doesn’t. The day the news come back that you was sentenced I ketched ’er in the back room a-cryin’ as’ ef ’er heart would break, but that night ‘Lonzo Spann come in an’ said that you had let it out in the court-room that you’d be glad even to go to the penitentiary to git a rest from Marty’s tongue, an’--”

“Lucinda, as thar’s a God on high, them words never passed my lips,” the convict interrupted.

“I ‘lowed not,” the old maid returned. “But it has got to be a sort of standin’ joke ag’in Marty, an’ she heers it ev’ry now an’ then. But I’m yore friend, Dick. I’ve had respect fer you ever sence I noticed how you suffered when Annie got sick an’ died. Thar ain’t many men that has sech feelin’ fer their dead children.”

Wakeman’s face softened.

“I was jest a-wonderin’, comin’ on, ef--ef anybody has been a-lookin’ after the grave sence I went off. The boys in the penitentiary used to mention the’r dead once in a while, an’ I’d always tell ’em about my grave. Pris ‘ners, Lucinda, git to relyin’ on the company o’ the’r dead about as much as the’r livin’ folks. In the four years that I was in confinement not one friend o’ mine ever come to ax how I was gittin’ on.”

“Marty has been a-lookin’ after the grave,” said Lucinda, in the suppressed tone peculiar to people who desire to disown deep emotion. She turned her face toward the house. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about yore bein’ neglected down thar, Dick. The Lord knows I’ve laid awake many an’ many a cold night a-wonderin’ ef they give you-uns enough cover, an’ ef they tuk them cold chains off ’n you at night. An’ I reckon Marty did, too, fer she used to roll an’ tumble as ef ’er mind wasn’t at ease.”

Wakeman took off his coat and rolled up his shirt-sleeves.

“I’m itchin’ to set in to farm-work ag’in,” he said. “Let me salt fer you, an’ you run up thar an’ tell ’er I’m back. Maybe she ’ll come down heer.”

Lucinda gave him her place at the table, a troubled expression taking hold of her features.

“The great drawback is Jeff Goardley,” she said. “It really does look like him an’ Marty will come to a understandin’. I don’t know railly but what she may have promised him; he has seemed mighty confident heer lately.”

Wakeman shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. He filled his hands with the salt from a pail and began to rub it on the pork.

Lingeringly the woman left him and turned up the slight incline toward the house. His eyes did not follow her. He was scrutinizing the pile of pork she had salted.

“Goodness gracious!” he grunted. “Lu-cindy has wasted fifteen pound o’ salt. Ef I’d ‘a’ done that Marty’d ‘a’ tuk the top o’ my head off. I wonder ef Marty could ‘a’ got careless sence she’s had all the work to look after.”

He had salted the last piece of meat when, looking up, he saw Lucinda standing near him.

“She wouldn’t come a step,” she announced, with some awkwardness of delivery. “When I told ’er you wuz down heer she jest come to the door an’ looked down at you a-workin’ an’ grunted an’ went back to ‘er cracklin’s. But that’s Marty.”

The convict dipped his hands into a tub of hot water and wiped them on an empty salt-bag.

“I wonder,” he began, “ef I’d better--” But he proceeded no further.

“I think I would,” said the angular mind-reader, sympathetically.

“Well, you come on up thar, too,” Wake-man proposed. “I’ve always noticed that when you are about handy she never has as much to say as she does commonly.”

“I ’ll have to go,” said Lucinda. “Ef Marty gits to talkin’ to you she ‘ll let the cracklin’s burn, an’ then--then she’d marry Goardley out o’ pure spite.”

As the pair reached the steps of the back porch the convict caught a glimpse of a gingham skirt within, and its stiff flounce as it vanished behind the half-closed door-shutter suddenly flung an aspect of seriousness into his countenance. He paused, his foot on the lowest step, and peered into the sitting-room. Seeing it empty, he smiled.

“I ’ll go in thar an’ take a cheer. Tell ’er I want to see ‘er.”

His air of returning self-confidence provoked a faint laugh from his well-wisher.

“Yo’ ‘re a case,” she said, nodding her consent to his request. “You are different frum ‘most anybody else. Somehow I can’t think about you ever havin’ been jailed fer hoss-stealin’.”

“It all depends on a body’s feelin’s,” the convict returned. “Down thar in the penitentiary we had a little gang of us that knowed we wuz innocent of wrong intentions, an’ we kinder flocked together. All the rest sorter looked up to us an’ believed we wuz all right. It was a comfort. I ’ll step in an’ git it over.”

He walked as erectly as an Indian up the steps and into the sitting-room. To his surprise Mrs. Wakeman started to enter the room from the adjoining kitchen, and seeing him, turned and began to beat a hasty retreat.

“Hold on thar, Marty,” he called out, in the old tone which had formerly made strangers suppose that the farm and all pertaining to it had been his when he married her.

She paused in the doorway, white and sullen.

“Ain’t you a-goin’ to tell a feller howdy an’ shake hands?” he asked, with considerable self-possession.

“What ’ud I do that fur?”

“Beca’se I’m home ag’in,” he said.

“Huh, nobody hain’t missed you.” The words followed a forced shrug.

“I know a sight better ’n that, Marty,” he said. “I know a woman that ‘ud take a duck fit jest when I was gone to drive the cows home an’ got delayed a little, would fret consider’ble durin’ four years of sech a--a trip as I’ve had. Set down here an’ let’s have a talk.”

“I’ve got my work to do,” she returned, after half a minute of speechlessness, her helpless anger standing between her and satisfactory expression.

“Oh, all right!” he exclaimed. “I ain’t no hand to waste time durin’ work hours with dillydallyin’. Any other time ’ll do me jest as well. I ‘lowed maybe it would suit you better to have it over with. I must git out the hoss an’ wagon an’ haul that hog-meat up to the smokehouse. Whar’s Cato? I ’ll bet that triflin’ nigger has give you the slip ag’in this hog-killin’, like he always did.”

Mrs. Wakeman stared at the speaker in a sort of thwarted, defiant way without deigning to reply; her sneer was the only thing about her bearing which seemed at all expressive of the vast contempt for him that she really did not feel. She felt that her silence was cowardly, her failure to assert her rights as a divorced woman an admission that she was glad of his return.

At this critical juncture Lucinda Dykes sauntered into the room and leaned against the dingy, once sky-blue wall. Her air of interested amusement over the matrimonial predicament had left her. It had dawned upon her, now that her sister had taken refuge in obstinate silence, that a vast responsibility rested on her as intermediary.

“Cato went with some more niggers to a shindig over at Squire Camp’s yesterday an’ hain’t showed up sence,” she explained. “Ef I was you-uns--ef I was Marty, I mean--I’d turn ’im off fer good an’ all. Dick, sence you went off me nur Marty hain’t been able to do a thing with ‘im.”

The convict grunted. It was as if he had succeeded in rolling the last four years from his memory as completely as if they had never passed.

“Jest wait till I see the black scamp,” he growled. “I reckon I ’ll have to do every lick of the work myself.” With that Wakeman turned into the entry and thence went to the stable-yard near by.

“He hain’t altered a smidgin’,” Lucinda commented. “It may be kase he has on the identical same clothes; he’s been a-wearin’ striped ones down thar, you know, an’ they laid away his old ones. To save me I can’t realize that he’s been off even a week.” The old maid snickered softly. “He’s the only one that could ever manage you, Marty. Now Jeff Goardley would let you have yore own way, but Dick’s a caution! It’s always been a question with me as to whether a woman would ruther lead a man ur be led.”

There was a white stare in Mrs Wakeman’s eyes which indicated that she was pondering the man’s chief aggression rather than heeding her sister’s nagging remarks. The sudden appearance of the convict’s head and shoulders above a near-at-hand window-sill rendered a reply unnecessary. His face was flushed.

“Can you-uns tell me whar under the sun the halter is?” he broke forth, in a turbulent tone. “I tuk the trouble to put a iron hook up in the shed-room jest fer that halter, an’ now somebody has tore down the hook an’ I can’t find hair nur hide o’ the halter.”

Mrs. Wakeman tried to sneer again as she turned aside, and the gaunt intermediary, spurred on to her duty, approached the window.

“The blacksmith tuk that hook to mend the harrow with,” she said, with a warning glance at Marty. “You ’ll find the halter on the joist above the hoss-trough. Ef I was you, on this fust day, I’d try to--” But Wakeman had dropped out of sight, and muttering unintelligible sounds indicative of discomfiture, was striding toward the stable.

All the rest of that afternoon the convict toiled in the smoke-house, hanging the meat on hooks along the joists over a slow, partly smothered fire of chips and pieces of bark. When the work was finished his eyes were red from smoke and brine. He stabled the horse and fed him, and then, realizing that he had nothing more to do, he felt hungry. He wanted to go into the sitting-room and sit down in his old place in the chimney-corner, but a growing appreciation of the extreme delicacy of the situation had taken hold of him. He wandered about the stable-yard in a desultory way, going to the pig-pen, now empty and blood-stained, and to the well-filled corn-crib, but these objects had little claim on his interest. The evening shadows had begun to stalk like dank amphibious monsters over the carpet of turf along the creek-banks, and pencils of light were streaming out of the windows of the family-room. Suddenly his eyes took in the woodpile; he went to it, and picking up the ax, began to cut wood. He was tired, but he felt that he would rather be seen occupied than remaining outside without a visible excuse for so doing. In a few minutes he was joined by Lucinda.

“Dick,” she intoned, “you’ve worked enough, the Lord Almighty knows. Come in the house an’ rest ‘fore supper; it’s mighty nigh ready.”

He avoided her glance, and shamefacedly touched a big log he had just cut into the proper length for the fireplace.

“Cato, the triflin’ scamp, hain’t cut you-uns a single backlog,” he said, in a tone that she had never heard from him.

“We hain’t had a decent one sence you went off, Brother Richard,” she returned. “An’ a fire’s no fire without a backlog.”

Their eyes met. She saw that he was deeply stirred by her tenderness, and that opened the floodgates of her sympathy. She began to rub her eyes.

“Oh, Dick, I’m so miser’ble; ef you an’ Marty don’t quit actin’ like you are I don’t know what I will do.”

She saw him make a motion as if he had swallowed something; then he stooped and shouldered the heavy backlog and some smaller sticks.

“I ’ll give you-uns one more backlog to set by, anyhow,” he said, huskily.

She preceded him into the sitting-room and stood over him while he raked out the hot coals and deposited the log against the back part of the fireplace. Then she turned into the kitchen and approached her sister, who was frying meat in an iron pan on the coals.

“Marty,” she said, unsteadily, “ef you begin on Dick I ’ll go off fer good. I can’t stand that.”

Mrs. Wakeman folded her stern lips, as if to keep them under check, and shrugged her shoulders. That was all the response she made.

Lucinda turned back into the sitting-room, where the dining-table stood. To-night she put three plates on the white cloth; one of them had been Dick’s for years. She put it at the end of the table where he had sat when he was the head of the house. As she did so she caught his shifting glance and smiled.

“I want to make you feel as ef nothin’ in the world had happened, Dick,” she said. “I’ve been a-fixin’ you a bed in the company-room, but you jest must be sensible about that.”

“Law! anything will suit me,” he began. But the entrance of Marty interrupted his remark.

She put the bread, the coffee, the meat, and the gravy on the table, and sat down in her place without a word. Lucinda glanced at Wakeman.

“Come on, Dick,” she called out. “I ’ll bet yo’ ‘re hungry as a bear.”

He drew out the chair that had been placed for him and sat down. Now an awkward situation presented itself. In the absence of a man Marty always asked the blessing. Lucinda wondered what would take place; one thing she knew well, and that was that Marty was too punctilious in religious matters to touch a bite of food before grace had been said by some one. But just then she noticed something about Wakeman that sent a little thrill of horror through her. Evidently his long life in prison had caused him to retrograde into utter forgetfulness of the existence of table etiquette, for he had drawn the great dish of fried meat toward him and was critically eying the various parts as he slowly turned it round.

“What a fool I am,” he said, the delightful savor of the meat rendering him momentarily oblivious of his former wife’s forbidding aspect. “I laid aside the lights o’ that littlest shote an’ firmly intended to ax you to fry ’em fer me, but--”

Lucinda’s stare convinced him that something had gone wrong.

“Marty’s waitin’ fer somebody to ax the blessin’,” she explained.

“Blessin’? Good gracious!” he grunted, his effusiveness dried up. “That went clean out ’n my mind. But a body that’s tuk his meals on a tin plate in a row o’ fellers waitin’ fer the’r turn four years hand-runnin’, ain’t expected to--”

He went no further, seeming to realize that the picture he was drawing was tending to widen the distance between him and the uncompromising figure opposite him. He folded his hands so that his arms formed a frame for his plate, and said in a mellow bass voice: “Good Lord, make us duly thankful fer the bounteous repast that Thy angels has seed fit to spread before us to-night. Cause each of us to inculcate sech a frame of mind as will not let us harbor ill will ag’in our neighbors, an’ finally, when this shadowy abode is dispersed by the light of Thy glory, receive us all into Thy grace. This we beg in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”

He ended in some confusion. A red spot hovered over each of his cheek-bones. “I clean forgot that part about good crops an’ fair weather,” he said to Lucinda. “But you see it’s been four yeer sence I said it over, an’ a man o’ my age oughtn’t to be expected to know a thing like a younger person.”

“Help yorese’f to the meat an’ pass the dish to Marty.” replied Miss Dykes. “Ef I was you, I’d not be continually a-bringin’ up things about the last four yeer.”

He made a hurried but bounteous choice of the parts of meat on the dish, and then gave it over into the outstretched hands of Lucinda. Marty was pouring out the coffee. She passed the old-fashioned mustache-cup to her sister, and that lady transferred it to Wakeman. He sipped from it lingeringly.

“My Lord!” he cried, impulsively. “I tell you the God’s truth; sech good coffee as this hain’t been in a mile o’ my lips sence I went--sence I was heer,” he corrected, as Lucinda’s warning stare bore down on him.