Part 14 (1/2)
At her side now rode Uncle Jason, the man of diverse parts who was justice of the peace, adviser in dissension, and self-taught pract.i.tioner of medicine.
He had been roused out of his sleep and had required no urging. He had listened, saddled, and come, and now, when behind them lay the harder part of the journey, they heard other hoofs on the road and made out a shadowy horseman who wheeled his mount to ride beside them.
Then for the first time in a long while the girl opened her tight-pressed lips to shape the gasping question which she was almost terrified to ask.
”How is he, Bas? Air he still alive?”
When at last they stood by the bedside, the volunteer doctor pressed his head to the hardly stirring chest and took the inert wrist between his fingers. Then he straightened up and shook a dubious head.
”Thar hain't but jist only a flicker of pulse-beat left,” he declared.
”Mebby he mout live through hit--but ef he does. .h.i.t'll p'int-blank astonish me.”
CHAPTER X
Through the rest of that night Old Jase lay on a pallet spread before the fire, rising at intervals out of a deathlike slumber to slip his single suspender strap over his bent shoulder, turn up the lantern, and inspect his patient's condition.
On none of these occasions did he find the girl, who spent that night in a straight-backed chair at the bedside, asleep. Always she was sitting there with eyes wide and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with suffering and fear, and a wakeful, troubled heart into which love had flashed like a meteor and which it threatened, now, to sear like a lightning bolt. It seemed to her that life had gone aimlessly, uneventfully on until without warning or preparation it had burst into a glory of discovery and in the same breath into a chaos of destruction.
”Kain't ye give me no encouragement yit, Uncle Jase?” she whispered once when he came to the bedside, with a convulsive catching at her throat, though her eyes were dry and hot, and the old man, too ruggedly honest to soften the edge of fact with evasion, shook his head.
”I hain't got no power ter say yit--afore I sees how he wakes up termorrer,” he admitted. ”Why don't ye lay down, leetle gal? I'll summons ye ef airy need arises.”
But the girl shook her head and later the old man, stirring on his pallet, heard her praying in an almost argumentative tone of supplication:
”Ye sees, Almighty G.o.d, hit don't call for no master _big_ miracle ter save him ... an' Ye've done fotched ther dead back ter life afore now.”
That night Dorothy Harper grew up. For the first time she recognized the call of her adult womanhood which centred about one man and made its own universe. She would not be a child again.
The town of Lake Erie was no town at all, but a scant cl.u.s.ter of shack-like buildings at the crossing of two roads, which were hardly roads at all, either.
The place had been called Lake Erie when the veterans who had gone to the ”War of Twelve” came home from service with Perry--for in no war that the nation has waged has this hermit people failed of response and representation.
This morning it stood as an unsightly detail against a background of impressive beauty. Back of it rose wooded steeps, running the whole lovely gamut of greenery and blossoming colour to a sun-filled sky which was flawless.
The store of Jake Crabbott was open and already possessed of its quorum for the discussion of the day's news.
And to-day there _was_ news! A dozen hickory-s.h.i.+rted and slouch-hatted men lounged against the wall or on empty boxes and broken chairs about its porch and door.
The talk was all of the stranger who had come so recently from Virginia and who had found such a hostile welcome awaiting him. Spice was added to the debate by a realization in the mind of every man who joined in it that the mysterious firer of those shots might be--and probably was--a member of the present conclave.
Jake Crabbott who ran the store maintained, in all neighbourhood differences, the studious att.i.tude of an incorruptible neutral. Old Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling in inconsequential talk.
Old Grandsire was querulous and hazy in his mind but his memory went back almost a century, and it clarified when near events were discarded and he spoke of remoter times.
Now he sat mumbling away into his long beard, and in the door stood his son-in-law, a st.u.r.dy man, himself well past middle-age, with a face that was an index of hardihood, shrewdness, and the gift for knowing when and how to hold his tongue.
On the steps of the porch, smiling like a good-humoured leviathan and listening to the talk, sat ”Peanuts” Causey, but he was not to be allowed to sit long silent, because of all those gathered there he alone had met and talked with the stranger.