Part 7

He laughed aloud in sorry scorn. "We can't teach our chil'n nuthin'," he philosophized. "They hev got ter hurt tharse'fs with all the thorns an' the stings o' the yearth. Our sperience with the sharp things an' bitter ones don't do them no sarvice. Naw, leetle darter--naw! Ye mought ez well gin a message o' kindness ter a wolf, an' expec' him ter kerry it ter some lonesome, helpless thing a-wounded by the way-side, ez gin it ter a Kittredge."

"I never will speak ter one o' 'em agin ez long ez I live," she cried, with a fresh gust of tears.

"Waal," exclaimed the old man, reassuringly, and chirping high, "hyar we all be agin, jes' the same ez we war afore. Don't cry, Eveliny; it's jes' the same."

A sudden babbling intruded upon the conversation. The youthful Kittredge, as he sat upon the wide flat stones of the hearth, was as unwelcome here in the Cove as a Quimbey had been in the cabin on the mountain. The great hickory fire called for his unmixed approval, coming in, as he had done, from the gray wet day. He shuffled his bare pink feet--exceedingly elastic and agile members they seemed to be, and he had a remarkable "purchase" upon their use--and brought them smartly down upon their heels as if this were one of the accepted gestures of applause. Then he looked up at the dark frowning faces of his mother's brothers, and gurgled with laughter, showing the fascinating spectacle of his two front teeth. Perhaps it was the only Kittredge eye that they were not willing to meet. They solemnly gazed beyond him and into the fire, ignoring his very existence. He sustained the slight with an admirable cheerfulness, and babbled and sputtered and flounced about with his hands. He grew pinker in the generous firelight, and he looked very fat as he sat in a heap on the floor. He seemed to have threads tightly tied about his bolster-shaped limbs in places where elder people prefer joints--in his ankles and wrists and elbows--for his arms were bare, and although his frock of pink calico hung decorously high on one shoulder, it drooped quite off from the other, showing a sturdy chest.

His mother took slight notice of him; she was beginning to look about the room with a certain critical disfavor at the different arrangement of the household furniture adopted by her father's deaf and widowed old sister who presided here now, and who, it chanced, had been called away by the illness of a relative. Evelina got up presently, and shifted the position of the spinning-wheels, placing the flax-wheel where the large wheel had been. She then pushed out the table from the corner. "What ailed her ter sot it hyar?" she grumbled, in a disaffected undertone, and shoved it to the centre of the floor, where it had always stood during her own sway. She cast a discerning glance up among the strings of herbs and peppers hanging from above, and examined the shelves where the simple stores for table use were arranged in earthen-ware bowls or gourds--all with an air of vague dissatisfaction. She presently stepped into the shed-room, and there looked over the piles of quilts. They were in order, certainly, but placed in a different method from her own; another woman's hand had been at work, and she was jealous of its very touch among these familiar old things to which she seemed positively akin. "I wonder how I made out ter bide so long on the mounting," she said; and with the recollection of the long-haired Absalom there was another gush of tears and sobs, which she stifled as she could in one of the old quilts that held many of her own stitches and was soothing to touch.

The infantile Kittredge, who was evidently not born to blush unseen, seemed to realize that he had failed to attract the attention of the three absorbed Quimbeys who sat about the fire. He blithely addressed himself to another effort. He suddenly whisked himself over on all-fours, and with a certain ursine aspect went nimbly across the hearth, still holding up his downy yellow head, his pink face agrin, and alluringly displaying his two facetious teeth. He caught the rung of Tim's chair, and lifted himself tremulously to an upright posture. And then it became evident that he was about to give an exhibition of the thrilling feat of walking around a chair. With a truly Kittredge perversity he had selected the one that had the savage Timothy seated in it. For an instant the dark-browed face scowled down into his unaffrighted eyes: it seemed as if Tim might kick him into the fire. The next moment he had set out to circumnavigate, as it were. What a prodigious force he expended upon it! How he gurgled and grinned and twisted his head to observe the effect upon the men, all sedulously gazing into the fire! how he bounced, and anon how he sank with sudden genuflections! how limber his feet seemed, and what free agents! Surely he never intended to put them down at that extravagant angle. More than once one foot was placed on top of the other--an attitude that impeded locomotion and resulted in his sitting down in an involuntary manner and with some emphasis. With an appalling temerity he clutched Tim's great miry boots to help him up and on his way round. Occasionally he swayed to and fro, with his teeth on exhibition, laughing and babbling and shrilly exclaiming, inarticulately bragging of his agile prowess, as if he were able to defy all the Quimbeys, who would not notice him. And when it was all over he went in his wriggling ursine gait back to the hearth-stone, and there he was sitting, demurely enough, and as if he had never moved, when his mother returned and found him.

There was no indication that he had attracted a moment's attention. She looked gravely down at him; then took her chair. A pair of blue yarn socks was in her hand. "I never see sech darnin' ez Aunt Sairy Ann do fur ye, dad; I hev jes tuk my shears an' cut this heel smang out, an' I be goin' ter do it over."

She slipped a tiny gourd into the heel, and began to draw the slow threads to and fro across it.

The blaze, red and yellow, and with elusive purple gleams, leaped up the chimney. The sap was still in the wood; it sang a summer-tide song. But an autumn wind was blowing shrilly down the chimney; one could hear the sibilant rush of the dead leaves on the blast. The window and the door shook, and were still, and once more rattled as if a hand were on the latch.

Suddenly--"Ever weigh him?" her father asked.

She sat upright with a nervous start. It was a moment before she understood that it was of the Kittredge scion he spoke.

With his high cracked laugh the old man leaned over, his outspread hand hovering about the plump baby, uncertain where, in so much soft fatness, it might be practicable to clutch him. There were some large horn buttons on the back of his frock, a half-dozen of which, gathered together, afforded a grasp. He lifted the child by them, laughing in undisguised pleasure to feel the substantial strain upon the garment.

"Toler'ble survigrus," he declared, with his high chirp.

His daughter suddenly sprang up with a pallid face and a pointing hand.

"The winder!" she huskily cried--"suthin's at the winder!"

But when they looked they saw only the dark square of tiny panes, with the fireside scene genially reflected on it. And then she fell to declaring that she had been dreaming, and besought them not to take down their guns nor to search, and would not be still until they had all seemed to concede the point; it was she who fastened the doors and shutters, and she did not lie down to rest till they were all asleep and hours had passed. None of them doubted that it was Absalom's face that she had seen at the window, where the light had once lured him before, and she knew that she had dreamed no dream like this.

* * * * *

It soon became evident that whenever Joe Boyd was intrusted with a message he would find means to deliver it. For upon him presently devolved the difficult duties of ambassador. The first time that his honest square face appeared at the rail fence, and the sound of his voice roused Evelina as she stood feeding the poultry close by, she returned his question with a counter-question hard to answer.

"I hev been up the mounting," he said, smiling, as he hooked his arms over the rail fence. "Abs'lom he say he wanter know when ye'll git yer visit out an' kem home."

She leaned her elbow against the ash-hopper, balancing the wooden bowl of corn-meal batter on its edge and trembling a little; the geese and chickens and turkeys crowded, a noisy rout, about her feet.

"Joe," she said, irrelevantly, "ye air one o' the few men on this yearth ez ain't a liar."

He stared at her gravely for a moment, then burst into a forced laugh. "Ho! ho! I tell a bushel o' 'em a day, Eveliny!" He wagged his head in an anxious affectation of mirth.

"Why'n't ye gin dad them messages ez Abs'lom gin ye from me?"

Joe received this in blank amaze; then, with sudden comprehension, his lower jaw dropped. He looked at her with a plea for pity in his eyes. And yet his ready tact strove to reassert itself.

"I mus' hev furgot 'em," he faltered.

"Did Abs'lom ever gin 'em ter ye?" she persisted.

"_Ef he did_, I mus' hev furgot 'em," he repeated, crestfallen and hopeless.

She laughed and turned jauntily away, once more throwing the corn-meal batter to the greedily jostling poultry. "Tell Abs'lom I hev f'und him out," she said. "He can't sot me agin dad no sech way. This be my home, an' hyar I be goin' ter 'bide."

And so she left the good Joe Boyd hooked on by the elbows to the fence.

The Quimbeys, who had heard this conversation from within, derived from it no small elation. "She hev gin 'em the go-by fur good," Timothy said, confidently, to his father, who laughed in triumph, and pulled calmly at his pipe, and looked ten years younger.

But Steve was surlily anxious. "I'd place heap mo' dependence in Eveliny ef she didn't hev this hyar way o' cryin' all the time. She 'lows she's glad she kem--_so glad_ she hev lef' Abs'lom fur good an' all--an' then she busts out a-cryin' agin. I ain't able ter argufy on sech."

"Shucks! wimmen air always a-cryin', an' they don't mean _nuthin_' by it," exclaimed the old man, in the plenitude of his wisdom. "It air jes' one o' thar most contrarious ways. I hev seen 'em set down an' cry fur joy an' pleasure."

But Steve was doubtful. "It be a powerful low-sperited gift fur them ez hev ter 'bide along of 'em. Eveliny never useter be tearful in nowise. Now she cries a heap mo' 'n that thar shoat"--his lips curled in contempt as he glanced toward the door, through which was visible a small rotund figure in pink calico, seated upon the lowest log of the wood-pile--"ez she fotched down hyar with her. _He_ never hev hed a reg'lar blate but two or three times sence he hev been hyar, an' them war when that thar old tur-rkey gobbler teetered up ter him an' tuk his corn-dodger that he war a-eatin' on plumb out'n his hand. _He_ hed suthin' to holler fur--hed los' his breakfus."

"Don't he 'pear ter you-uns to be powerful peegeon-toed?" asked Tim, anxiously, turning to his father.

"The gawbbler?" faltered the amazed old man.

"Naw; him, _him_--_Kittredge_," said Tim, jerking his big thumb in the direction of the small boy.

"Law-dy Gawd A'mighty! _naw! naw!_" The grandfather indignantly repudiated the imputation of the infirmity. One would have imagined that he would deem it meet that a Kittredge should be pigeon-toed. "It's jes the way _all_ babies hev got a-walkin'; he ain't right handy yit with his feet--jes a-beginnin' ter walk, an' sech. Peegeon-toed! I say it, ye fool!" He cast a glance of contempt on his eldest-born, and arrogantly puffed his pipe.

Again Joe Boyd came, and yet again. He brought messages contrite and promissory from Absalom; he brought commands stern and insistent. He came into the house at last, and sat and talked at the fireside in the presence of the men of the family, who bore themselves in a manner calculated to impress the Kittredge emissary with their triumph and contempt for his mission, although they studiously kept silence, leaving it to Evelina to answer.

At last the old man, leaning forward, tapped Joe on the knee. "See hyar, Joe. Ye hev always been a good frien' o' mine. This hyar man he stole my darter from me, an' whenst she wanted ter be frien's, an' not let her old dad die unforgivin', he wouldn't let her send the word ter me. An' then he sot himself ter spite an' hector me, an' fairly run me out'n the town, an' harried me out'n my office, an' when she f'und out--she wouldn't take my word fur it--the deceivin' natur' o' the Kittredge tribe, she hed hed enough o' 'em. I hev let ye argufy 'bout'n it; ye hev hed yer fill of words. An' now I be tired out. Ye ain't 'lowin' she'll ever go back ter her husband, air ye?"

Joe dolorously shook his head.

"Waal, ef ever ye kem hyar talkin' 'bout'n it agin, I'll be 'bleeged ter take down my rifle ter ye."

Joe gazed, unmoved, into the fire.

"An' that would be mighty hard on me, Joe, 'kase ye be so pop'lar 'mongst all, I dunno _what_ the kentry-side would do ter me ef I war ter put a bullet inter ye. Ye air a young man, Joe. Ye oughter spare a old man sech a danger ez that."

And so it happened that Joe Boyd's offices as mediator ceased.

A week went by in silence and without result. Evelina's tears seemed to keep count of the minutes. The brothers indignantly noted it, and even the old man was roused from the placid securities of his theories concerning lachrymose womankind, and remonstrated sometimes, and sometimes grew angry and exhorted her to go back. What did it matter to her how her father was treated? He was a cumberer of the ground, and many people besides her husband had thought he had no right to sit in a justice's chair. And then she would burst into tears once more, and declare again that she would never go back.

The only thoroughly cheerful soul about the place was the intruding Kittredge. He sat continuously--for the weather was fine--on the lowest log of the wood-pile, and swung his bare pink feet among the chips and bark, and seemed to have given up all ambition to walk. Occasionally red and yellow leaves whisked past his astonished eyes, although these were few now, for November was on the wane. He babbled to the chickens, who pecked about him with as much indifference as if he were made of wood. His two teeth came glittering out whenever the rooster crowed, and his gleeful laugh--he rejoiced so in this handsomely endowed bird--could be heard to the barn. The dogs seemed never to have known that he was a Kittredge, and wagged their tails at the very sound of his voice, and seized surreptitious opportunities to lick his face. Of all his underfoot world only the gobbler awed him into gravity and silence; he would gaze in dismay as the marauding fowl irresolutely approached from around the wood-pile, with long neck out-stretched and undulating gait, applying first one eye and then the other to the pink hands, for the gobbler seemed to consider them a perpetual repository of corn-dodgers, which indeed they were. Then the head and the wabbling red wattles would dart forth with a sudden peck, and the shriek that ensued proved that nothing could be much amiss with the Kittredge lungs.

One fine day he sat thus in the red November sunset. The sky, seen through the interlacing black boughs above his head, was all amber and crimson, save for a wide space of pure and pallid green, against which the purplish-garnet wintry mountains darkly gloomed. Beyond the rail fence the avenues of the bare woods were carpeted with the sere yellowish leaves that gave back the sunlight with a responsive illuminating effect, and thus the sylvan vistas glowed. The long slanting beams elongated his squatty little shadow till it was hardly a caricature. He heard the cow lowing as she came to be milked, fording the river where the clouds were so splendidly reflected. The chickens were going to roost. The odor of the wood, the newly-hewn chips, imparted a fresh and fragrant aroma to the air. He had found among them a sweet-gum ball and a pine cone, and was applying them to the invariable test of taste. Suddenly he dropped them with a nervous start, his lips trembled, his lower jaw fell, he was aware of a stealthy approach. Something was creeping behind the wood-pile. He hardly had time to bethink himself of his enemy the gobbler when he was clutched under the arm, swung through the air with a swiftness that caused the scream to evaporate in his throat, and the next moment he looked quakingly up into his father's face with unrecognizing eyes; for he had forgotten Absalom in these few weeks. He squirmed and wriggled as he was held on the pommel of the saddle, winking and catching his breath and spluttering, as preliminary proceedings to an outcry. There was a sudden sound of heavily shod feet running across the puncheon floor within, a wild, incoherent exclamation smote the air, an interval of significant silence ensued.

"Get up!" cried Absalom, not waiting for Tim's rifle, but spurring the young horse, and putting him at the fence. The animal rose with the elasticity and lightness of an uprearing ocean wave. The baby once more twisted his soft neck, and looked anxiously into the rider's face. This was not the gobbler. The gobbler did not ride horseback. Then the affinity of the male infant for the noble equine animal suddenly overbore all else. In elation he smote with his soft pink hand the glossy arched neck before him. "Dul-lup!" he arrogantly echoed Absalom's words. And thus father and son at a single bound disappeared into woods, and so out of sight.

* * * * *

The savage Tim was leaning upon his rifle in the doorway, his eyes dilated, his breath short, his whole frame trembling with excitement, as the other men, alarmed by Evelina's screams, rushed down from the barn.

"What ails ye, Tim? Why'n't ye fire?" demanded his father.

Tim turned an agitated, baffled look upon him. "I--I mought hev hit the baby," he faltered.

"Hain't ye got no aim, ye durned sinner?" asked Stephen, furiously.

"Bullet mought hev gone through him and struck inter the baby," expostulated Tim.

"An' then agin it moughtn't!" cried Stephen. "Lawd, ef _I_ hed hed the chance!"

"Ye wouldn't hev done no differ," declared Tim.

"Hyar!" Steve caught his brother's gun and presented it to Tim's lips. "Suck the bar'l. It's 'bout all ye air good fur."

The horses had been turned out. By the time they were caught and saddled pursuit was evidently hopeless. The men strode in one by one, dashing the saddles and bridles on the floor, and finding in angry expletives a vent for their grief. And indeed it might have seemed that the Quimbeys must have long sought a choice Kittredge infant for adoption, so far did their bewailings discount Rachel's mourning.

"Don't cry, Eveliny," they said, ever and anon. "We-uns'll git him back fur ye."

But she had not shed a tear. She sat speechless, motionless, as if turned to stone.

"Laws-a-massy, child, ef ye would jes hev b'lieved _me_ 'bout'n them Kittredges--Abs'lom in partic'lar--ye'd be happy an' free now," said the old man, his imagination somewhat extending his experience, for he had had no knowledge of his son-in-law until their relationship began.

The evening wore drearily on. Now and then the men roused themselves, and with lowering faces discussed the opportunities of reprisal, and the best means of rescuing the child. And whether they schemed to burn the Kittredge cabin, or to arm themselves, burst in upon their enemies, shooting and killing all who resisted, Evelina said nothing, but stared into the fire with unnaturally dilated eyes, her white lined face all drawn and somehow unrecognizable.

"Never mind," her father said at intervals, taking her cold hand, "we-uns 'll git him back, Eveliny. The Lord hed a mother wunst, an' I'll be bound He keeps a special pity for a woman an' her child."

"Oh, great gosh! who'd hev dreamt we'd hev missed him so!" cried Tim, shifting his position, and slipping his left arm over the back of his chair. "Jes ter think o' the leetle size o' him, an' the great big gap he hev lef' roun' this hyar ha'th-stone!"

"An' yit he jes sot underfoot, 'mongst the cat an' the dogs, jes ez humble!" said Stephen.

"I'd git him back even ef he warn't no kin ter me, Eveliny," declared Tim, and he spoke advisedly, remembering that the youth was a Kittredge.

Still Evelina said not a word. All that night she silently walked the puncheon floor, while the rest of the household slept. The dogs, in vague disturbance, because of the unprecedented vigil and stir in the midnight, wheezed uneasily from time to time, and crept restlessly about under the cabin, now and again thumping their backs or heads against the floor; but at last they betook themselves to slumber. The hickory logs broke in twain as they burned, and fell on either side, and presently there was only the dull red glow of the embers on her pale face, and the room was full of brown shadows, motionless, now that the flames flared no more. Once when the red glow, growing ever dimmer, seemed almost submerged beneath the gray ashes, she paused and stirred the coals. The renewed glimmer showed a fixed expression in her eyes, becoming momently more resolute. At intervals she knelt at the window and placed her hands about her face to shut out the light from the hearth, and looked out upon the night. How the chill stars loitered! How the dawn delayed! The great mountain gloomed darkling above the Cove. The waning moon, all melancholy and mystic, swung in the purple sky. The bare, stark boughs of the trees gave out here and there a glimmer of hoar-frost. There was no wind; when she heard the dry leaves whisk she caught a sudden glimpse of a fox that, with his crafty shadow pursuing him, leaped upon the wood-pile, nimbly ran along its length, and so, noiselessly, away--while the dogs snored beneath the house. A cock crew from the chicken-roost; the mountain echoed the resonant strain. She saw a mist come stealing softly along a precipitous gorge; the gauzy web hung shimmering in the moon; presently the trees were invisible; anon they showed rigid among the soft enmeshment of the vapor, and again were lost to view.

She rose; there was a new energy in her step; she walked quickly across the floor and unbarred the door.

The little cabin on the mountain was lost among the clouds. It was not yet day, but the old woman, with that proclivity to early rising characteristic of advancing years, was already astir. It was in the principal room of the cabin that she slept, and it contained another bed, in which, placed crosswise, were five billet-shaped objects under the quilts, which when awake identified themselves as Peter Kittredge's children. She had dressed and uncovered the embers, and put on a few of the chips which had been spread out on the hearth to dry, and had sat down in the chimney corner. A timid blaze began to steal up, and again was quenched, and only the smoke ascended in its form; then the light flickered out once more, casting a gigantic shadow of her sun-bonnet--for she had donned it thus early--half upon the brown and yellow daubed wall, and half upon the dark ceiling, making a specious stir amidst the peltry and strings of pop-corn hanging motionless thence.