Part 9

Again he came shooting across over the bed of sand where she could see him clearly, and again, before she had time to do more than edge a little farther out over the bank in her excitement, he flew back across the line of her vision.

Now she was sure that he had seen the bait, for he came shooting past more swiftly, if it could be, and with shorter and shorter dashes, each time swimming closer to where the shadow fell upon the water. Swifter and shorter came his rushes, now almost underneath the shadow of the bait. Augusta trembled in her eagerness to drop the bait to the water. But a cunning instinct told her that he was not ready, that her prey was not yet worked up to the point of striking.

Hard as it was, she must still wait, fearing every instant that he would rise and miss the hook, but not yet daring to drop the bait upon the water.

Finally, when she was grinding her teeth to keep her hold upon her trembling muscles, she saw him coming; this time from a longer dash than he had been taking, and swifter, and straight at the shadow.

She plumped the bait down on the water.

In the little ripple of the surface she lost sight of him, thought that she had frightened him away, had lost him. And the reaction, the feeling of failure turned her weak and nerveless.

She had no time to be conscious of the violent yank upon the pole, for with it she was toppled over the edge of the bank and found herself rolling down into the water.

She was horribly, sickeningly frightened as she struck the water and she did cry out Jimmie's name. But when she felt the pole being drawn from the hand that still held it she gripped it fiercely with both hands and began to fight.

She was on her knees now and struggling to her feet in the water, while the fish shooting about in narrow circles drew the line through the water like a flashing knife. It was battle now, her strength against his strength and cunning. She did not know what to do, except to pull and try to lift him out of the water. And she found that she could do neither, for it was taking every ounce of her strength merely to keep from being jerked from her slippery footing down into the deeper water.

She must somehow get back upon the bank for she had no strength here where her feet had nothing to brace upon. Back and forth along the shifting bank she struggled, fighting for a foothold, falling and stumbling up again, but never loosening the death grip of her hands on the pole. Her knuckles were bruised and stinging and she knew that her knee was cut where she had fallen, but she had no thought of giving up or even of calling for Jimmie.

There was no joy of battle now, nor was it a game that she played. It was a desperate, racking struggle merely to hold her own, and she was fighting blindly, without plan and without cunning.

Once the pull on the line suddenly slackened and she almost fell over backwards, ready to cry, because she thought the line had broken.

Then straight out of the water and leaping towards her came the fish. Augusta leaped back up the bank, and it was her fright at this point--she actually thought that the fish was coming to attack her--that changed the luck of the battle.

Here, on her feet on the firm ground, she felt that she was the stronger, and while her strength was with her she was going to make one mighty try at lifting him out of the water.

She braced herself, craftily waiting until the fish in his rushes should give her a little slack in the line. Then she threw her whole body into a straining heave at the pole.

At that instant the fish struck downward desperately. The two forces met midway of the pole. Augusta heard a loud crack and found herself tumbling backward, still holding the useless end of the broken pole.

When she looked and saw the other half of the pole shooting across the pond she screamed for Jimmie and gave chase.

As she ran around the edge of the pond Augusta was fighting mad. She was angry now at herself for calling to Jimmie. And at the very first chance she was going right into the pond and put an end to that fish.

She came around to the side nearest the wagon and here, because it seemed like her own ground, and the sand shelved gently out into the water, she ran boldly in half way to the centre of the pond and grabbed at the pole as it went shooting by.

The first time she missed it in her eagerness and nearly fell into deep water. But she got her footing again and waited. Once the pole sailed by well out of her reach, but the next time as the fish circled he swerved sharply after he had passed Augusta and his quick turn slewed the broken end of the pole around almost to her hand. She grabbed it and ran, literally ran, out of the pond and up the bank, dragging after her by main strength the pole, the line and the fish.

It was a most unsportsmanlike and unfair procedure. The fish could have had her haled before any angler's court and condemned by all the laws and canons of the sport. But Augusta ruthlessly dragged him up through the sand and the dust to the grass.

When she thought that he was safely far enough from the water, she turned to look at her prize.

Donahue, too, sniffing interestedly came ambling along for a view of the happenings.

The sight of the fish did not please Augusta. He was black and dirty and he squirmed disgustingly. And he had covered himself with a loathesome coating of muddied dust.

Her idea of a fish in captivity was of one frozen restfully in colors into the middle of a block of ice in a butcher's window.

When she looked closer at the fish she saw that he was bleeding dirtily from the gills. She turned weakly sick and remorseful.

"I'm sorry!" she cried. "Oh, I'm so sorry! Please go back. Please! And I'll never fish again!" She dropped limply down to the ground and began to cry bitterly.

The fish was flopping his blind way back to the pond, when Donahue, with every appearance of studied intention, dropped a blundering foot upon the dragging line, and stood still contemplating affairs--thereby saving Jimmie's breakfast.

So Jimmie, getting sleepily down from the wagon to investigate the commotion, found his wife sitting disconsolate and soggy on the grass, her face streaked with muddy tears, the accomplished Donahue standing foolishly ruminative in the middle of the picture, and a very dirty fish fighting for liberty at the end of the line.

Jimmie hurried Augusta to the wagon for repairs, and took charge of the fish.

He cooked it and had to eat it all himself while Augusta sipped remorsefully at the milk and eggs which Jimmie hated.

Now if Augusta had known the reason why her bass had struck so quickly, and so viciously, at her baited hook she would have been much more disturbed and remorseful than she actually was.

The truth is that among river and brook fish the black bass is the only true and proper father of family. The males of the other brook tribes, once their young have been hatched, exhibit only the most casual and meandering attention toward their welfare. They seem to think that they have done enough when they have seen their offspring born in water. Let them swim, then, is their attitude.

The black bass is, on the extreme other hand, a most worried and fretsome pater familias. In the period while his young are dependent and helpless his responsibilities weigh upon him severely. He is worried by trifles, and even by non-existent things, and the business of being a new father is with him a matter of all-absorbing agitation.

Take a stout man, preferably somewhat bald, just under the line of forty, say, and consider him in the days when his first child has just come into the stages of breath holding and threatened spasms. Regard him as he tip-toes about the house in under-shirt and trousers and worried ferocity. Study him as he walks the floor through the hours of the night warding off imaginary dangers with agitated anger and gentle hearted ignorance. Cross this man at this time in anything that in the remotest way touches the future of his family and you will rouse a deadly enemy.

So your black bass. At all other times he is cautious, wary, worldly wise. But at this time of his family's helplessness he is rash, careless and blind in his hot anger at anything that threatens them. He will strike madly at anything that comes near the surface of his pond. He will snap rashly at a fly, at a twig dropped on the water, at a shadow, at a bare hook, even, if he can see it.

He lives in a constant ramp of shifting, hurrying, belligerent, aggressive defense. He is not hungry or greedy as he seems to act. He is whole-heartedly and defiantly defending his own and his home against what he is convinced is a jealous and a hostile world.

Augusta, mercifully, knew none of these things. She had blundered into tragedy as unknowingly as Donahue's wandering foot had chanced to rest upon the line and save Jimmie a welcome breakfast of fish.

VI

All through a long, drowsy, dreamy afternoon while Donahue had taken very much his own way and gait, Augusta had watched the unfolding of the hills before them. They had passed Old Forge and the Divide where the water-sheds drop off to north and west, and were deep in the bosom of the hills. At times, for a little while, they seemed to be on the very top of all the hills, for they could see north, east, south and west, a broken picture of jutting rocks and dipping green, and the blue haze of distance running like a ribbon around it all. Then, for hours, they would be plodding noiselessly along, shut securely in a pocket, with only a few rods of the winding road showing before them and the walls of the hills closed in about them on all sides.

Somehow Augusta knew that they were soon going to find the home for which they were both longing. She knew that Jimmie was weary of the road. He did not say so. He never complained, she had learned that. It was useless to try to know what he felt from what he said. But when he was too quiet she knew that he was either feeling worse again--and it was not that--or he was weary of what they were doing and wanted to be doing something else.

Augusta did not blame him. Indeed she would have been sorry if he had taken too easily to the useless, idle drifting of the road. His restlessness now proved that he was not content to drift towards whatever lay before them. It was the one thing of which she had been afraid when she had taken responsibility away from him and had bundled him off on the road as she had done.

Now she saw that the danger which she had imagined was not threatening. Jimmie was fretting to get back his grip on life. He wanted to be putting his hand to something, to be doing something, to be getting somewhere. With all his surface nonsense and his ways of an ungrown boy, Augusta knew the hot rage of ambition that had burned within him. And she knew that with returning strength it would come to flame again. It must not be allowed to eat hopelessly at him while they drifted aimlessly along a seemingly endless road.

In the late afternoon they came dropping down from a ridge into Smedley village. Augusta read the name on a white sign over the post office door. It seemed to be the end of the highway, for the road which they had been following appeared just to stumble on weakly, between the six houses on the one side and the four houses and little white school on the other, out into a rising field and to lose itself there.

Augusta went into the post office to buy bread, bacon, matches and soap. While the postmaster filled her order she inquired:

"Where does the road go from here?"

The stout old man beamed benignly on Augusta's happy, browned, open-eyed face. Then he squinted cautiously out through the door at the wagon which was unmistakably gypsy. He could not place her.

"Where was you calc'latin' to go, missy?" he evaded with the usual rural unwillingness to give any information until he had first received some.

"Oh, nowhere," Augusta confessed. "My husband--"

"Then you're right there. You don't need to go another step. This is nowhere. The last place you stopped at was next to nowhere, and Smedley, here, is it itself," he grumbled, without any ill humor. "I been waitin' here forty year for that road to go somewhere. But it aint gone and it aint goin', not so it appears. There aint no place for it to go to. That bacon's been around here a good while, too," he interpolated thoughtfully. "But the soap's prime--staple as old cheese. No sir, there aint no other place beyond this. This is nowhere. When you get here you have to stay or go back."

"But people do stay here," said Augusta a little thoughtfully, "and live and keep well," she added, eyeing the ruddy, well nourished, well preserved face of the old man.

"Of course they do," he admitted. "What else is there for 'em to do. There's no doctors here, so they can't get sick. And there's no preachers to make 'em think about dyin'. So they just hang 'round."

"But it seems a nice place to stay around in," said Augusta as she stood on the little porch of the post office and looked around at the comfort and security of the solid little houses with the strength of the hills behind them.

"Any place is nice, if you don't _have_ to stay there," the old man grumbled, following Augusta out to the wagon. He took a sharp look up at Jimmie, and seemed to like him instantly.

"If you folks," he remarked pleasantly as Augusta climbed lightly into the wagon, "didn't look so much like a pair of runaway children, I'd say you was looking for a place to make a nest."

Augusta and Jimmie looked quickly at each other and then they both laughed in sudden mutual understanding. They had each been thinking the same thought all day, but neither had said anything of it. Jimmie laughed.

"Do you do a little mind reading on the side?" he inquired, "besides holding up a wing of the United States government and supplying the countryside with dry goods and groceries."

"Well, you know," the old man winked genially, "or you soon will know, married men has to make a good many shifts in order to scrape 'round."

"You are profoundly right," said Jimmie solemnly, "Mr.--Gamblin? Is that the name I see on the window?"

"Jethniah Gamblin, that's me. Just like a post in the mud. Been here for forty year and sorry for it every minute."

"But you stay."

"It's a habit."

"Yes," said Jimmie thoughtfully, "it's an old habit that people have of staying in places. The fact is my wife and I are just now both tired of wandering, though we hadn't thought to tell each other about it until you mentioned it."

"You see," Augusta took up the explanations, while Mr. Gamblin settled a heavy foot on the hub of the wheel and went into conference with them, "Jimmie hasn't been well. Not really sick, you know, but just--he coughed a good deal. And we came out like gypsies, you know we're not really gypsies at all," she elucidated carefully. "And now I'm sure he's tired of it. It's so easy to tire of a thing that isn't after all quite natural."

"Well now," Mr. Gamblin began helpfully, "there's as much room right in sight here as you'll find most anywheres. And there's a balsam ridge right over that shoulder of hill there that when the wind is right is better for a cough than anything that ever came out of a doctor's shop."

Jimmie, whose eyes still had their trick of watching for the details of every picture, noticed an angry twitching of the vine that screened a window in the wing of the post office building, where, probably, Mr. Gamblin lived. He deduced that there was a woman behind that vine listening. And the woman was getting angry.

"Oh, that sounds so good!" Augusta enthused immediately. "You know, we've only got a little money. And it has to last. You know if we had a plenty we wouldn't have to think or worry at all. But then, if we had money it would be something else."

"Golly! You're right," the old man agreed with a hearty slap on his knee. "And the fryin' pan can't be quite so hot as the fire anyway. So if you can only just--"

"Jeth-_nye_-yah! You left the 'lasses runnin'!"

Mr. Gamblin jumped into the air as though at the crack of a whip.

He came down nimbly on his feet and started a bolt for the door of the post office. He took, however, only a few hurried steps. Then he stopped short with a thud and an angry grunt. He shook himself viciously like an enraged and baffled bull, and it seemed that he was about to roar.

Jimmie knew at once that the woman behind the screen of vines had played a ruse--probably an old one--upon the old gentleman, to make him break off an interesting conversation.

Augusta, not understanding at all, and wishing to go on with the discussion, said helpfully:

"But I'm sure you didn't touch the molasses at all."

Jimmie put his hand warningly upon her arm.

Mr. Gamblin did not appear to hear her. He was standing with his legs braced wide apart. His mild mannered spectacles which seemed to have no relations whatever with his eyes stood out at a truculent angle near the end of his nose. His face and neck were very red and he had the look of a man fighting for breath.

"Forty year!" he muttered belligerently, "just like a post in the mud! An' sorry every minute!"

Then he shook himself and strode stubbornly back to the wagon, placed his foot solidly where it had before rested on the hub of the wheel, and renewed his conversation in a loud and defiant tone.

"Yessum, there's as good air right 'round here as there is anywhere, and more of it than there is in most places."

Jimmie wondered sympathetically how many times in the forty years the old man had been called away from some interesting doing by that false alarm about the molasses.

"And what's a little cough anyway?" the old man boomed on resonantly. "Why I had a tarnation mean cough one time, my own self, long about twenty years ago, I figure it was, or twenty-five. Come on in hayin' time and hung 'round till the first frost. That's the cure. The first nip of the dry frost just picks it right out. And there you are, sound as a trivet. Just like a post in the mud!"

"I'm sure you are right," said Augusta. "And I know that Jimmie and I are both tired of drifting. I don't think we will go much farther."

"Well, just mosey 'round and see for yourselves. Maybe you'll find just the place you want. And if anybody asks, tell 'em Jeth--"

"Jethniah Gamblin," the voice from behind the vines rasped out spitefully, "don't you dare go bringin' no lung folks to stoppin' here. You know well enough what happened up at Fenton Lake. The sick folks come there and got well, and the well folks took it and got sick. And--"

They did not hear any more, for Augusta had grabbed the whip and brought it down wickedly on the unoffending back of Donahue. The astonished animal started with a leap that threw Jimmie and Augusta backwards in a huddle and nearly knocked Mr. Gamblin flat to the ground.

When Jimmie had recovered himself and gotten hold of the reins he looked back. The old man was standing almost where they had left him, and although Jimmie could see that he was now white with anger yet there was a droop of humiliation and shame on the kindly, sturdy old figure that made Wardwell genuinely sorry for him.

Augusta was now sobbing hysterically:

"Please, please, Donahue, forgive me! I didn't mean to hurt you! You know I didn't mean it!" She could see the line in the dusty hair of his back where she had struck him and to her eyes it seemed a livid welt. "Oh, how could she be so hard?" she wailed. "I could go back and tear her eyes out! I don't see why God doesn't choke people when they say things like that!"

"There, there, dear," said Jimmie soothingly, putting one arm around her while he steadied Donahue with the other, "we musn't mind that. People say things like that without thinking."

"But she hurt you! And she hadn't even seen you! And I hurt Donahue! And she doesn't get hurt at all! Oh, it isn't right, it isn't right!" she wailed.

"Of course not, dear. But see," Jimmie began, gathering himself to talk Augusta out of her feeling, for it always worried him to see her under a strong emotion, "you know she didn't really mean what she said at all. She wasn't thinking of that, not a minute. She meant something else, entirely different. Do you want to know what she really meant when she said that?"

Augusta stopped tentatively and looked up miserably through her tears.

"Well, what she meant was this," said Jimmie blandly. "She meant that friend Jethniah was philandering too much time over the affairs of a very attractive gypsy. _I_ did not matter, and Donahue was just like any ordinary horse so far as she was concerned. The point was that the bold Jethniah was dallying with a fair female.

"What know we," he declaimed, getting into his stride, while Donahue, comforted and reassured by the well known sound of the harangue, steadied himself down to a walk, "of the restless nights and the heavy days that yonder virtuous woman has suffered from the meanderings of Jethniah? He is a personable, plausible man with a roving eye. He has a gift for conversation and an eye for beauty. Even his references to a post in the mud show a discontented, restless disposition. You heard him mention the post in the mud? It is proof patent that his thoughts are wanderers.

"Then, too, he is a man of consequence and of travel. I saw the stage back of the house. It proves that he himself journeys daily down to the railroad to get the mail, to carry the passengers, if any there be--You notice that I stick to the bare facts, there may not be any passengers, but if any there be--and to mingle with the gay world that whirls by.

"Fifthly and sixthly; he is the postmaster. We can only vaguely appreciate what that means. He has the first read at every postal card that comes into these hills. He knows everybody's secrets. Do you realize the hold that gives him on the imaginations of the female portion of this high and wide community?

"He knows the ins and the outs. The devious ways of the female mind are to him an open book. He pats the shoulder of widowed sorrow. He consoles the lovelorn maiden and invents all too welcome excuses for the letter that does not come. He is even capable of writing letters himself to take the place of the missing ones. Given the man, the temptation, and the immunity of his position, and there are no heights of rascality that he might not scale."

"I don't care," said Augusta hotly. "I'm sure he is a good kind man."

And that's all right! thought Jimmie, pleased and proud to have drawn Augusta out to argue, and flushed for further triumphs.

"There you have it! He is kind," he echoed. "You have touched the very key spring of his villainy. What man was ever kind but to beguile? From our ancient friend Leander at the swimming bee down to young John W. Lothario himself they all had kind hearts and were willing to share them with any and every lady within the horizon line. And here is our Jethniah the very prize dandler of them all. For forty years he has gone up and down these hills and has ranged far and wide, even as far as the railroad, interesting himself in the trials of beauty in distress, while his own lawful wife and spouse languished behind the vines.

"Think of the tale of these doings that she could tell! And she _would_ tell them, too. In fact I'd wager that she _has_ told them, numerously, circumstantially, and in detail, for a good many hours out of the forty years," he concluded with a grin.

Augusta was quiet now. She had nestled in close under Jimmie's shoulder and seemed to have forgotten Jethniah and his wife.

"Jimmie."

"Yes, dear."

"Well--Oh--Do you think I hurt Donahue very much?"

Jimmie considered, squinting thoughtfully along Donahue's dusty back. He was sure that Augusta had intended, and had tried, to say something entirely different.