Part 5

Then he heard a voice saying angrily to Rushy,—it was the doctor,—“I don’t care who he is or what he is, he has got to be laid on that bed, I tell you! Are you a woman, or a devil? Stand out of the way!” And then Zeph felt himself lifted and borne, and a buzz of murmuring voices, and sharp stinging pains in his cheek and throat; and then he sank away and knew no more until in the night, when he waked again to himself, and all was still, no sound except the loud ticking of a clock; and some man sitting by him, a stranger, said in a not unkind voice, “Hey! ’wake, are ye? Want anything?” and Zeph had said feebly, “Water,” and had tried to ask for Rushy, but the words would not form themselves; and while he was struggling to speak them, he floated off, he thought, on a big white cloud, and the air was full of the sound of bells ringing, and he remembered that it must be Sunday, and opened his eyes again, and saw the broad daylight streaming into the room, and the doctor standing in the doorway, and men’s heads rising one behind the other, and the doctor’s voice again, angry and indignant, reasoning with Rushy. Could those tones be Rushy’s, and those cruel words? Yes, it was Rushy, saying in a shrill voice, “I don’t care! I tell ye I won’t have him here. He’s brought me trouble enough a’ready; an’ now he’s got Nat into prison, ’n’ I don’t care what becomes of him. ’Twas all his fault. He begun the fight, aggravatin’ Nat. Nat never spoke the first word.”

And above all the confused and struggling sounds of the excited voices still pealed on the church-bells; and at the sound Zeph’s brain seemed suddenly to clear itself, and strength to come back to him; and half raising himself in the bed, he spoke aloud: “Say, doctor, let them carry me home; I’d rather go. ’T’won’t hurt me. I ain’t very bad hurt, am I?”

A hush fell on the group of excited talkers. They had thought him asleep.

“No, you’re not very bad hurt,” said the doctor, coming to the bedside and feeling his pulse. “I don’t suppose it’ll do you any hurt to be carried over to your house. But you’ve got an ugly cut in your face, came mighty near being your throat, and it’ll need watching for a few days, two weeks maybe. You’ve got to be tended pretty close. You can’t be left all alone in the house.” And the doctor glanced wrathfully at Rushy, who stood silent, sullen, looking down on the floor.

“I’ll manage that, doctor,” said Zeph, cheerfully, “if you’ll just get me home. My boy’ll go with me, I guess; he’s there ’most o’ the time. I’ll have to keep him out of school a few days, but after that I’ll do for myself. I’ve got good neighbors out there.”

All this time Rushy spoke no word, but her face grew harder and darker with every syllable that fell from her husband’s lips. She saw how his words were telling against her. Even her evil comrade, Sal Leeson, bent almost compassionately over the bed and wiped Zeph’s forehead as he spoke.

“I say, Rushy,” she muttered, “you might let him stay just a few days; I’ll look after him.”

Before Rushy could reply, Zeph cried out, “No, no! I tell you I won’t stay. Doctor, it ’ud kill me to stay,” he continued pleadingly. “Oh, get me out o’ here ’s quick ’s you can!”

They were all rough men who were standing there ready to give what help might be in their power, but there was not a man among them whose pulses did not beat quicker at this cry of Zeph’s. They lifted him in their arms tenderly, as if he had been a helpless woman, and many a resentful glance was shot back at the unfeeling wife, who neither moved nor spoke as her husband was borne out of the house.

“Good-by, Rushy,” he said. “I’m awful sorry to have got ye into this trouble. But ye know ’twan’t any o’ my doin’, Rushy. Ye know ’twan’t. Say good-by to me, Rushy. P’raps I’ll never see ye again.”

“Good-by,” she said sullenly, without looking up. In league and fast bound with malignant spirits, surely, must Rushy Riker’s heart have been, to have resisted the appeal of that moment. Even Sal Leeson was crying; but Rushy’s eyes glittered hard and dry with an evil light. Her guilty and passionate heart was full of terror for Nat. She had overheard one of the policemen say, as they dragged him off after the fray, “You’ll swing for this night’s work, Nat Leeson;” and Nat, frantic in his fury, had replied, “Swing and be damned! If you’d let me alone a minute longer, I’d have finished him!”

Rushy knew only too well that if Zeph was to die of his hurts, these reckless words of Nat’s would carry terrible weight against him in the trial for murder which must follow. Her whole nature was on fire with apprehensions, wild and bootless plottings and plannings, and over and above all raged an unreasoning anger against her husband for having been the occasion of such danger to Nat.

“If worst comes to worst, I’ll swear him out myself,” said the wretched woman. “I’ll swear Zeph set on him with the knife first. ’Twas just the same’s a knife, the words he used. They just made Nat crazy.”

The jail was in full sight from her door: a square, stone building with grated windows, at the back a high fence surrounding an enclosure in which a man had been hung only a few months previous,—hung for a murder committed in a sudden fray not unlike this one between her husband and Nat. As Rushy recalled the day of this hanging and the crowd of men and women she had seen outside the fence eagerly striving, like wild beasts athirst for blood, to look through cracks in the fence, to climb up and see over, her heart sickened within her; clenching her fist, she shook it toward the jail and muttered: “They sha’n’t ever hang Nat. I’ll burn the place down over their heads first. If ’tis stone I’ll fire it somehow, or I’ll get him poison! They sha’n’t hang him!”

The church in which Zeph had listened two weeks before to the sermon on forgiveness stood only a few rods from Rushy’s house. As the men were carrying him past the door the choir had just begun the singing of the first hymn.

“Stop a minute, can’t ye?” whispered Zeph. “It jars me awful, bein’ carried; just rest a minute here ’n this shade.” He would not confess that it was for sake of the singing that he wished to stop. With closed eyes he lay listening. He could not hear the words, but the tune was one of the sweet old-fashioned ones he had heard sung when he was a child; and there were words echoing in his thoughts which seemed to fit strangely into its rhythm,—words echoing yet in the air, though it was now fourteen days since their syllables had been spoken: “Yea, I say unto you, until seventy times seven.”

“I don’t know what’s got into me,” thought Zeph, “to be so haunted like by them words. I don’t lay no claim to bein’ a Christian, ’n’ I’d just as soon kill that Nat this minute ’s I would a pizen snake; but I can’t get free from them words.”

IV.

During these two weeks which had brought such tragedy into Zeph’s life the memory of him and his troubles had by no means died out of Miss Sophy’s mind. She found herself reverting with strange persistency to the trains of unwonted thought awakened within her by his inexplicable devotion to his unworthy wife. The more she thought, the surer she became that the man had done only what she herself would have done in similar circumstances. “‘For better, for worse,’” she repeated. “That doesn’t mean but one thing; there aren’t any two ways o’ readin’ or sayin’ such plain words as that! An’ it’s ‘worse’ he’s got, no mistake. But I’m as sure ’s I’m alive, that there ain’t many men would take it the way he does; it’s more the way a woman ’ud do. Strange, too; such a great strong man ’s he is! six foot if he’s an inch,—I’d have thought he’d made short work o’ any man that came foolin’ round his wife. I’ll go up ’n’ see how he’s gettin’ along to-morrow.”

But times were busy with Miss Sophy. Midsummer brought crowds of travellers to Pendar Basin, and the reputation of Miss Sophy’s good table was so wide that her doors were besieged with applicants for board. She had to turn them away by dozens, much to the distress of her thrifty soul; but, as she curtly remarked sometimes to those who wearied her by importunities, “Four walls is four walls, ’n’ ye can’t make ’em any bigger. It’s more for my interest to take ye than ’tis for yours to come, but I haven’t got so much as room for a shake-down left; that’s the truth.”

In addition to this inroad of boarders, Miss Sophy had other perplexities on her mind; one of her wise and long-seeing measures had been the purchase of a small ranch, a few miles from town, where she raised vegetables and kept poultry and cows. Until this summer the scheme had worked well; the ranch, in the hands of a faithful Swede and his wife, yielding her a profit on the investment, and contributing no small share to the fame of her house. She had called the ranch “Greenhills,” partly in affection for her old Vermont home, partly because the house stood in a little park-like open, surrounded by low hills which had springs in them, and were consequently green when the rest of the plains around were sere and brown. Greenhills butter and Greenhills poultry, whenever there was any surplus above Miss Sophy’s own needs, brought fancy prices in market; and the sole air-castle Miss Sophy had, was the vision of the time when she would have money enough put away in the bank and on loans to make it safe for her to give up keeping boarders and live at Greenhills. And it was Greenhills she had in her thoughts on that evening when Zeph knocked at her kitchen door, and she had with a hasty impulse, so unlike her usual circumspection, told him she could give him work. Something in Zeph’s eyes inspired her with sudden and entire confidence in him, and she would then and there have taken him into her employ, had he been so minded; she was near at her wits’ end with the miserable and dishonest fellows she had employed on the place since the Swede had gone away in the spring. Bitten by the mining craze, of which there had been a fresh outburst in the region, he had left her, with only a week’s warning, in the midst of the spring planting, and everything had seemed to be going from bad to worse ever since.

“If I could just get that Zeph up there to overlook things! I believe he’s as honest ’s a Newfoundland dog,” said Miss Sophy. And it was, after all, not wholly philanthropy which made her, on the very Sunday afternoon after Zeph’s fray with Nat, turn her steps once more towards his house. With her usual straightforwardness she was going directly to him to offer him the situation. “An’ if that wife o’ his is in the house,” said the resolute Miss Sophy, “I sha’n’t mince any words with her. I shall just tell her it’s her husband I want, an’ not her, ’n’ she won’t be allowed to set her foot on the place. If he’s fool enough to come home to her Sundays he can.” From which it is plain to be seen, that, spite of her tender meditations on the solemn words of the marriage service, and on the touching faithfulness of Zeph to his erring wife, Miss Sophy was not quite sound in the practical application of the doctrine.

But Providence intervened to save her the shock of being suddenly confronted by the spectacle of the wounded, helpless Zeph. As she crossed the open in front of his house, Gammer Stein’s sharp eyes spied her. Gammer was keeping the Sabbath in her wonted fashion, by taking in vigorous hand the bodies of her grandchildren. Cleanliness, in her creed, took place of all especial observance of conventional godliness on the seventh day; and a terrible day it made of it for Bud and Tim. No possible Sunday purgatory of hard benches and long sermons, as experienced by the children of more Orthodox parents, could have compared in terror with the Sunday scrubbings and combings to Gammer Stein’s grandchildren. The foreshadowing gloom of it fell on them of a Saturday, and the smart and tingle of it lasted all day Monday, and longer.

It was at a lucky crisis for Bud that Miss Sophy appeared on the scene. The six days’ tangle of his hair had proved too much both for his grandmother’s patience and his own, and he had just broken into loud crying, and she into something as near scolding as her placid nature ever reached, when, suddenly throwing combs, brushes, scissors, all to the floor, the old lady cried, “Thar she goes now! Wall, ef thet ain’t cur’us!” And without another word she ran out of the house, waving her arms and calling aloud: “Hyar! Miss Burr! Yeow hyar! Don’t yer go nigh ther house. Yeow wait tell I kin come up ter ye.”

Miss Sophy, surprised, and, if the truth were told, not wholly pleased, stood still, as admonished, till Gammer reached her, and then coolly waited for her to speak. Nothing daunted, Gammer gasped breathlessly, “I allowed ye wuz gwine ter Zeph’s, wan’t yer?”

“Yes,” replied Miss Sophy.

“Wall, I allowed ye wuz, ’n’ I jest dropped everythin’. I wuz er grapplin’ wi’ Bud’s hair; it’s somethin’ orful, Bud’s hair ez: ’n’ I jest throwed the combs daown ’n’ run ter tell yer not ter go nigh ther haouse.” And Gammer stopped for want of breath.

“Why not?” exclaimed Miss Sophy, curiosity getting the better of her reserve. “What’s happened? Who’s sick?”

“’Taint no sickness, it’s wuss!” replied Gammer, sententiously. “It’s wuss ’n any sickness. Thet Nat’s cut Zeph all ter pieces, ’n’ he’s layin’ thar; the doctor’s in thar naow,—the city doctor; pore folks hez ter hev him, yer know. I allow he don’t know much; Zeph wuz bleedin’ orful when they brung him over; I wuz thar. I never seed sech a sight, ’n’ I don’t never want ter. I allow he’ll die, sure.”

“Cut to pieces!” interrupted Miss Sophy. “What do you mean? He can’t be cut to pieces! Is she in there? Did he find her? Who’s takin’ care o’ him?”

“Well, it ez in his face ’n’ jaw, mostly,” replied Gammer; “he ain’t cut nowhar’s else; ’n’ ther doctor sez when his beard’s growed out agen full, ’twon’t show none. The doctor, he allowed ez he wouldn’t ha’ hed sech a cut’s thet not fur no woman livin’; he allowed he wouldn’t.”

It was of no use to attempt to direct courses and channels of narrative in Gammer Stein’s mouth; once launched, she was as unmanageable as a rudderless boat, and veered wildly from past to present, from actual to hypothetical, from descriptive to didactic, according to the quarter from which each sudden reminiscence and emotion struck her. After one or two vain attempts to interpolate questions or get some consecutive order of statement, Miss Sophy abandoned all such efforts and patiently listened, and in the course of half an hour was in possession of the substantial facts of the case.

Two scarlet spots glowed on her cheeks. “It is the most shameful thing I ever heard!” she cried, when at length Gammer paused.

“Ain’t it?” said Gammer. “Ain’t she jest a disgrace ter ther whole on us? I allow thar ain’t no hell, wharever ’tis ner whatsomeever it’s made outer, thet’s bad enough fur sech’s her.”

“I’m goin’ in to see him,” said Miss Sophy, firmly.

“Yer ain’t, though, be yer?” said Gammer. “Be yer reel steady headed? He looks orful.”

“I’m goin’ in,” repeated Miss Sophy. “He’s got to be looked after. I shall ask the doctor what he ought to have to eat.”

“I allow I’ll go ’long tew,” said Gammer. “Tew’s better ’n one.” And she accompanied Miss Sophy to the door. As they reached it, the doctor came out.

“Ah! Ah, Miss Burr,” he said, in a tone of relief, “I’m glad to see you here. How did you hear of it? The man is badly hurt, but he will pull through if he can be kept quiet. He wants nursing, though.”

Miss Sophy nodded. “Yes, I should think he did,” she said in a wrathful tone. “I suppose that good-for-nothing wife of his—”

“Don’t speak of her!” broke in the doctor. “She’s a regular she-devil! If she shows her face here, I’ll have her arrested. He’s better alone, than with her round. She won’t come, anyhow; she’s left him.”

“Humph!” said Miss Sophy, with something between a snort and a sob. “Good riddance! I should say.”

“The little chap’s very handy,” continued the doctor, “and he seems fond of his father. I’ve showed him how to keep the bandages wet; he mustn’t swallow anything but liquids for a good many days,—only milk at first. In a day or two, if you can give him some of your good soups, Miss Burr, that will be all he will need. He’ll pull through. It is a close shave; but the man’s got the constitution of an ox.”

“I’ll see he has the soups, doctor,” said Miss Sophy, turning away.

“Ain’t yer gwine in?” cried Gammer, disappointed. “Yer said ye wuz gwine in. I allow ’t w’ud be good fur him ter know he’d got some friends more’n he’d knowed on.”

Miss Sophy hesitated. A sudden repugnance had seized her.

“No,” she said, “not to-day. I’ll be up again to-morrow. You can tell him I was here, and that I’ll look after him. He needn’t give himself one mite of uneasiness about food. I’ll see that he ’n’ the boy have all they need. I’ll look after ’em.”

“Then I allaow they’ll be looked arter,” said Gammer. “Anybody’d know jest by ther way yer step aout yer hedn’t no slouch abaout yeow! Yer powerful active, yer air, fur a woman er yeour build. It’s cur’us naow what tuk Zeph ter yeour door thet night, ain’t it? He hain’t hed much luck, but thet wuz luck; I allow ter yeou, looks like ’twuz! Good day t’ ye, good day! I allaow thet Bud’s got hes hair inter a wuss snarl ’n ’twuz afore, while we’ve been talkin’. Ez soon’s I’ve got through cleanin’ him up I shell go inter Zeph’s ’n’ straighten aout things thar.”

Miss Sophy went home like one walking in a dream of horror. In the whole course of her placid thirty-five years no such glimpse as this of the dark side of human life and human nature had ever reached her. The currents of existence in her native village were always as smooth as they were dull; no crime had ever been committed there, neither did any of the great daily newspapers come into the place with its record of the wretched iniquities of the outside world. Vaguely Miss Sophy knew that such things were, as she knew that there were volcanic eruptions and cyclones; but to find herself thus face to face with, in fact almost involved in, one of the most dreadful of all human tragedies, stunned her.

“Right here in Pendar Basin, too,” she said to herself, “in this little village, and ’mongst workin’ folks, too; I declare it’s awful! I don’t like bein’ mixed up in it, anyhow. It don’t seem decent to even know about it. But somebody’s got to look after that man, that’s certain; ’n’ I’d rather do it myself without any help than go ’n’ tell anybody such a story’s that. I’d bite my tongue off first.”

And so with a grim repression which cost Miss Sophy a dear expenditure of nerve force in the self-restraint it involved, she went about her business and said not a word to any one of her ministrations to the wounded man. It was not till the fourth day that she nerved herself up to accompany Gammer to his bedside. The sight overcame her, and routed her last vestige of cowardly unwillingness to an open responsibility about the case.

“I don’t care what’s to be said,” she exclaimed, “nor who’s mixed up in it; that man ain’t goin’ to lie another day in that hole. I’m goin’ to have him moved right out to Greenhills and taken care of decent. I can drive out there every day ’n’ see to him. I do go out pretty near every day ’s ’tis; ’n’ the air out there’ll half cure him. Why, the flies ’n that room o’ his are enough to kill him,—just the flies alone! There ain’t a window nor a door out to Greenhills that hasn’t got mosquito net in it.”

“Yer don’t mean it, dew yer?” exclaimed Gammer Stein, taken all aback at the suggestion.

“I do, too!” cried Miss Sophy. “I’m going to the doctor this minute to ask him if he’s got anything to say against it.”

“I dunno ’s Zeph ud be willin’,” began Gammer, hesitatingly. “I allow—”

“He’ll go if I come for him,” interrupted Miss Sophy, impatiently. “He isn’t a fool,—that is, not in everything,” she added testily. “I want him out there to work’s soon ’s he’s able, ’n’ he’ll be right there to begin.” And Miss Sophy was off.

In an hour she was back again with the doctor, who was heartily in favor of her scheme. In fact, he said the man’s one chance for life lay in some such change; the wounds were not of themselves enough to kill him, but the solitary brooding over his troubles was keeping up a fever in which he grew daily weaker and daily worse.

When Miss Sophy’s plan was explained to Zeph, he lifted his eyes to her face in a long, scrutinizing gaze.

“I donno what reason ye’ve got, ma’am,” he said slowly, “for takin’ so much trouble for me. I ain’t worth it.”

“I dare say you ain’t,” replied Miss Sophy, “but you can’t be left to die here o’ these flies. If there was a hospital, that’s the place you ought to go to; but there ain’t any, ’n’ my house out to Greenhills ’s plenty o’ room in it, ’n’ there’s a man out there can see to all you want. You don’t want anythin’, the doctor says, but good food ’n’ to be quiet; ’n’ you can have that out there without its costin’ anybody anythin’, so we’ve decided to move you out there. The men’ll be here about four o’clock with the wagon.”

“Greenhills ranch?” said Zeph, inquiringly,—a faint gleam of interest lighting up the sadness in his eyes.

“Yes,” said Miss Sophy, “that’s my ranch; that’s where I was going to give you work, if you’d wanted it, that night you came to my house; ’n’ just ’s soon ’s you’re on your feet there’s plenty for you to do out there.”

Zeph made no reply. His eyes turned to Zephie, who stood at the foot of the bed, listening wide-mouthed to the startling proposition.

Miss Sophy misunderstood the expression of Zeph’s gaze.

“Yes, the boy can go too,” she said. “It’ll be handy to have him there. There’s plenty o’ room.”

“I was a thinkin’ that it would be hard to be where I couldn’t see him, ma’am,” said Zeph, slowly. “But I couldn’t take him out there. He’d have to stay with his mother.”

“Stay with his mother!” shrieked Miss Sophy; and, “His mother!” cried the doctor. “What d’ ye mean, man!”

Zeph’s face flushed. “I’ve been talkin’ a good many things over with the boy,” he said, “an’ he’d rather stay an’ help his mother,—a while, at any rate, till we see how things goes. He was goin’ to see her to-day. That’s all settled, sir,” he added, as the doctor opened his lips again with an impatient ejaculation. “There’s things that nobody knows anything about except folks themselves, an’ other folks can’t judge. I had been plannin’ to go away for a spell ’s soon ’s I was fit to work, ’n’ Zephie was to stay with his mother till I come back.”

There was a dignity in Zeph’s tone and bearing which lifted the homely language to the level of eloquence; and the earnest answering look on the child’s face, as he met his father’s eyes, completed the revelation. This was indeed no matter for “other folks” to judge of or to interfere with.

“I’ll go out to your place, ma’am,” continued Zeph, again fixing a bewildered and scrutinizing gaze on Miss Sophy’s face. “I’ll go out, an’ be thankful to ye for the kindness. I think it’s more ’n likely I’ll get on my feet quicker there ’n here. I ain’t so very bad hurt, ’n’ ’s soon ’s I’m able to be round, I’ll work out all I owe ye, ma’am, for the ’commodation.”

Miss Sophy laughed in spite of herself.

“I ain’t takin’ you’s a boarder,” she said. “As soon as you are able to be round, I’ll make a bargain with you, if you’re a mind to, to look after the ranch. I think you’re about the sort of man I want out there,—that is, if we can agree about terms,” added Miss Sophy, her shrewd business habit returning to her; “there will be time enough to talk about that when you’re up and out.”

Zeph smiled faintly. “We ain’t likely to disagree about terms, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t rate myself over ’n’ above high. I’ve got a good team, though, ’n’ wagon, if they’d be any use to ye.”