The Choiring Of The Trees Part 21

"Well, thanks for warning me!" Viridis said aloud.

"I wasn't warning you," her father protested. "That story has already done it."

"I was talking to the story," Viridis said. She resumed listening to it; it told her that Ernest Bodenhammer was in St. Vincent's Infirmary, where doctors had been required to place most of his body in a plaster cast. It was feared that he might be permanently paralyzed, although his neck was not broken. Apparently, he had sustained his injuries in an attempt to imitate Chism's successful leap from the top of the prison wall to a power pole. While Chism had evidently slid down the pole to freedom, the youth, only sixteen, had missed the jump and fallen to the ground.

"Oh, d.a.m.n!" Viridis said.

"Where are you meeting him?" her father asked.

"St. Vincent's Infirmary," Viridis answered.

"Not him," her father said. "Not the boy. Aren't you meeting the man somewhere today? Or is it the boy you're really interested in?"

"Daddy, listen, I've got to-" she started to tell her father, but they were interrupted. Two autos pulled to a stop in front of the Monday house. The first one contained two men she recognized, Sheriff Bill Hutton and Warden T.D. Yeager, and the second one carried one man she recognized, a reporter from the Gazette.

These men, followed by several others, climbed the high front yard and the high porch of the Monday mansion. The sheriff spoke first: "Good morning, ma'am, and Mr. Monday. I see y'all have done already read the paper." Neither of them responded, although her father nodded when the sheriff said to him, "We've got to ask the young lady a few questions, if it's okay with you."

They asked her more than a few questions. But she maintained, truthfully, that she had not expected Nail Chism's escape. Of course she felt that his conviction and incarceration were wrongful, and he certainly deserved to be out of prison, but she knew nothing about his escape other than what she had just this moment read in the newspaper. She was aware that he had been imprisoned and tormented by the threat of death as long as he could stand it, so she could certainly understand how he might be desperate for freedom on the eve of an unprecedented fourth attempt at executing him; but still, his escape came as a total surprise to her.

"You have no idea where he might of could gone?" the sheriff asked.

"Your guess is as good as mine," she said.

"Ma'am, my guess," the sheriff said, "is that you just might be hiding him up in your house somewheres. Mind if we look?" He addressed this question to her father, not to her.

And her father, bless his heart, said, "No, but you will have to get yourselves a search warrant to go into my house."

"We done already thought of that, sir," the sheriff said, pulling the search warrant out of his hip pocket and showing it to her father and then to her. She felt some panic. Would they find the canvas bag? Or, for all she knew, maybe they would find Nail: maybe he had reconsidered her offer to hide him in her attic and had already hidden himself up there. She did not want these men to go into her house. The sheriff looked at her again and said, "If you'll just lead the way, ma'am."

Her mother and Cyrilla and Dorinda were having breakfast in the kitchen, and the servants, Ruby and Sam, were also there, and the lawmen just said, "Excuse us," and went in and out of the kitchen quickly, and spent little time on the first floor of the house before heading for the stairs. They gave only a perfunctory search to the bedrooms and closets of the second floor before the sheriff asked her father, "Where do those doors go?" Her father explained that one door led to the attic storeroom, and the other two led to the south turret playroom and the north turret, where Viridis had her studio. The sheriff instructed his deputies to split up and try all three doors. He himself would accompany her up the north turret stairs, to her studio.

There were no closets or cubbies or hiding-places in her studio. Just her easels and her supplies and the cabinet in which she kept her drawings, its flat drawers much too narrow to conceal anybody, but the sheriff pulled them out anyway, one by one, and asked, "What's all this stuff?"

"Do you mind?" she said, not answering him. "You won't find Nail Chism in there."

The sheriff moved around the room, looking at its contents; he studied her most recent painting on its easel, a winter landscape of Stay More done from her sketches. She expected him to ask her if that was the village of Stay More, but apparently he did not recognize it as a village or as a landscape. His glance moved onward and came to rest upon the canvas bag, loosely closed atop her table. He picked it up, hefted it, asked, "Mind if I look in this?" and started to open it.

She did not have to lose her temper; it lost itself. "Sheriff Hutton! You have a warrant to search for a man, not to pry into my personal effects!" She lowered her voice: "Especially not items of...of feminine hygiene."

"Of which? Oh." The sheriff blushed and gingerly replaced the bag. "Sorry," he said. He moved on around the room. "Never can tell," he said. He headed for the stairs and went back down.

As the men were leaving the house, having satisfied themselves that she was not hiding Nail Chism, Warden Yeager said to her, "You'll let us know hee hee if you run acrost his pawmarks hee hee, won't you?"

"Don't count on it hee hee," she said.

The warden gave her a wounded look as if she had failed to return a favor. Come to think of it, she realized after the men were gone, she had.

They would not let her see Ernest at St. Vincent's. She had to wait at the hospital and speak with the mother superior to request permission and explain that, while not related to Ernest Bodenhammer, she was the only person who had visited him regularly in the penitentiary. The mother superior was kind and considerate but had to inform Viridis that Ernest was under guard and also under heavy sedation. Possibly, Viridis could see him tomorrow, but she would need written permission from Warden T.D. Yeager.

All the rest of that day she stayed in the newsrooms of the Gazette. If any word came in of Nail's having been spotted or recaptured, or anything at all, she could learn it faster in the newspaper office. Tom Fletcher did not mind her being there, but he advised her that several days might pa.s.s before any news developed.

And he was right. Many days would pa.s.s before she heard the first rumor that any trace of Nail had been seen, and even that would turn out to be a false lead. She was impatient to get on to Newton County and wait for him there. She had antic.i.p.ated, when she planned to leave the canvas bag for him, departing Little Rock herself within a few days to go back to Stay More. She had been in correspondence with both me and the old woman in the Jacob Ingledew house who had been her friend and hostess during her previous visit to Stay More.

I had kept her informed of the swelling local sentiment against Judge Sewell Jerram and his gang. Strangely, his crony Judge Lincoln Villines remained popular enough to be touted as a possible candidate for governor (only in the event his friend George Hays chose not to seek reelection), but Sull himself was so unwelcome that a joke went the rounds about his having to pay Duster Snow time-and-a-half overtime wages to serve as his personal bodyguard. The good sheriff we'd had before Snow, W.J. Pruitt, had let everybody know that he intended to oppose Snow in the November election, and almost everybody planned to vote for him.

Viridis had written me to ask if I thought it was safe for Dorinda to return home. The school term in Little Rock had already come to a close when Nail escaped, and Dorinda was honestly homesick, or that's what Viridis said; I had sort of been hoping that Rindy herself might write and tell me how much she missed us, but I suppose her penmans.h.i.+p lessons hadn't got that far. I had told Viridis, after asking the advice of my parents, Rindy's parents, and even John Ingledew, that Sull would have killed Rindy by now to silence her if he was ever going to do it; besides, the man was smart enough to realize that the point had long since pa.s.sed beyond which her silence meant anything at all. He probably wished she did not exist and wished even more that she had never existed, but there wasn't much likelihood he would be any further threat to her. Bring her home, I said.

Now Viridis was ready to do just that. She had taken Rindy out and bought her a fancy suitcase to take all of her nice new clothes and belongings back home with her. She did not intend to return Rindy to Stay More by the same means she had taken her out: riding double on Rosabone. No, she was going to arrange for a wagon in Pettigrew to meet their train and take them and their luggage (she was bringing more than one trunk herself, and hatboxes), with Rosabone tied behind, the miles across the mountains to Stay More.

I knew she was coming. But I did not know that Nail had escaped. That news didn't reach us at all until the following Thursday, when we read it in the local newspaper. On the second page of the Jasper Disaster, under a small headline, nail chism makes his escape, was a brief condensation of the same story that had appeared in the Gazette five days before, now stale and unstirring. Remember, we had no telephones in Newton County, no electricity; all we had was the U.S. Mail, which wasn't even the Pony Express. Later Viridis would apologize for not having written us a letter, which would have arrived several days before the newspaper. She had been too busy to think of it.

She was busy trying to get in to see Ernest without written permission from T.D. Yeager, who at that point wouldn't have given her permission to breathe. On the third day after Nail's escape, Tom Fletcher "smuggled" her into Ernest's room as a Gazette reporter, and she was permitted to "interview" the boy for half an hour. He was awake and fairly cheerful, all things considered: all things such as having nearly every bone in his body broken: compound fractures of both arms and one leg, eight broken ribs, six broken fingers, a cracked pelvis, and a dislocated hip. Miraculously, his whole spinal column from neck to tailbone remained undamaged, and he would not be permanently paralyzed, as had been feared at first, although at the moment, and for the next six weeks, he wouldn't be going anywhere, not even back to the penitentiary.

He enjoyed pretending it was a real interview. "Yeah, quote me as sayin these yere nuns feed me real good; I aint et like this in my whole life."

"Mr. Bodenhammer," asked the lady reporter, Viridis, "did Mr. Chism say anything to you about your intended destination?"

"Nome, he never. Tell ye the truth, I never even give it no thought whereabouts I was goin myself. I didn't aim to light out for Newton County, whar he was a-fixin to go, but I never thought none about goin back home to Stone County neither. I aint got no friends up in them parts."

"Did he say anything at all to you about his intended route to Newton County? Where and how did he plan to cross the Arkansas River?"

"Ma'am, he never hardly said a thing to me about nothin. I didn't even know we was breakin out until you-until that there other lady who is his ladyfriend, she told me to be ready. But from the time he come down to git me out of my cell, until we said our good-byes, we never said nothin much atall."

"I can't imagine Nail Chism abandoning you like that," she said.

"Aw, h.e.l.l, Viridis, I mean, Miss Ma'am, he never abandoned me! I made him do it. I tole him to. It was hopeless, the way I'd done botched up my chance and fell forty feet, a-hittin that pole, and there wasn't nothin he could do for me. h.e.l.l, I had to baig him to save his own skin and leave me alone."

She put her hand on his cheek, which reporters don't do. She left it there as she said, "I'm so sorry you didn't get to go with him."

"Look at the good side of it," he said. "I was sposed to die Sat-tidy night, and I'm still alive. People are takin real good keer of me, and I don't hurt too bad."

"You won't be able to draw again for a while," she observed.

He wiggled the four fingers of his left hand that were not bound in splints or casts. "Didn't you know I was left-handed?" he said. "I still got some fingers I can draw with."

"I'll see to it you get some materials," she said. "I'll arrange for you to get all you need to keep on drawing." She paused. "I'd bring them to you myself, but I..."

He finished it for her, nodding his head to say yes, he knew. "You're takin off for Newton County," he said quietly.

She raised her chin into a modest nod. And then she did something that reporters don't even think of doing: she bent down and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

"You'uns live happy ever after," he said.

"You too" was all she could say.

Taking leave of her father was not quite as easy: he insisted on going with them to the train station. When she protested, he observed that from the looks of all the luggage she was taking with her, she intended to stay for quite some time.

"I'll be back," she said.

"But I doubt she will," he said, indicating Dorinda. "I'd just appreciate the honor of seeing you two ladies off."

So he went with them to the station. Viridis had made arrangements to have Rosabone transported on the same train, which would involve two transfers: one at Van Buren, from the Iron Mountain to the Frisco, and another, at Fayetteville, to the Frisco's spur toward Pettigrew. Cyril Monday took the morning off from his job at the bank to see them catch their train.

At the station he drew her apart from Dorinda for a moment to ask, "You got all the money you need?"

What kind of question was that? For several years now, since her return from Europe, she had not been required to depend upon her father for any a.s.sistance beyond a place to live. "Enough," she said.

"Never can tell what emergencies might come up," he said. "My daddy always told me, you never know when you might meet some fellow selling two elephants for a nickel."

She remembered Tom Fletcher's old jokes about elephants in the Ozarks. This time Tom Fletcher hadn't made any jokes, except one, of sorts: if she ever wanted to write a column called "An Arkansawyer in Stay More," he had told her, he would pay their usual rate for it. When she had only smiled, not laughed, he had prompted, "It's nearly as remote as Yokohama to me." She had told him he ought to visit her there sometime.

She told her father, "Thank you, Daddy, I've got all I need."

"Just never can tell," he said. "Here," and he thrust a roll of bills into her hand. "Put this in your purse and forget about it until you need it." She tried to protest, but he touched his finger to her lips. "Better take it now instead of having to ask me for it later, when I might be in a bad mood."

He had a point there. She put the thick roll of bills into her purse. "You're sweet," she said.

"I hope you'll remember me that way," he requested. And he had one other request: "Cyrilla wanted me to ask you, she said she couldn't ask you herself, but if it's okay with you and you don't think you'll need it anymore, can she have that studio of yours up in the north tower?"

Viridis raised her eyebrows. "Does she want to take up art?"

"Sewing. She wants me to buy her a sewing machine."

Viridis smiled. "None of y'all expect me to come back, do you?"

"From the looks of it, no," her father said, and then he moved back to where Dorinda stood, to tell the girl that he had enjoyed having her stay at his house and was sorry they hadn't got better acquainted. He wished her a pleasant trip and good luck and a long and happy life.

"BOART!" hollered the conductor, and the three said their good-byes and exchanged hugs.

Viridis Monday left Little Rock.

Take any day in June in Stay More. School's been out awhile, Mr. Perry the schoolteacher has left town to find a summer job in Harrison, the crops have been planted and are growing, nothing is ready to harvest yet except the snap beans and first spinach, n.o.body is really busy except the men cutting the hay and the timberjacks who keep on logging into ever more remote stands of the white oak forests.

My father never lost a chance to tell us girls that when school let out he expected us to help more on the farm, but every year school let out and he couldn't seem to find enough to keep us busy. He complained to Ma and anybody else who would listen that if he'd only had him just one boy to help around the place, instead of all three of us worthless girls, he might be able to turn the farm into a cash proposition. As it was, he could only raise enough to feed us. We weren't starving, not by any means, but we never had any cash money.

As the youngest of the three unwanted girls, I felt least wanted, so I tried hardest to help out around the place. While Barb and Mandy wouldn't have been caught dead doing a lick of work outside the walls of the house itself, I got myself the job of tending the garden patch. I wouldn't let a weed grow loose in that garden patch, and I spent a good bit of my summer out there in the broiling sun, underneath my sunbonnet but my dress all soaked through with sweat. I was pretty young when I discovered something important about the way the brain works: your thoughts are always better, more interesting, more lively, while you're working than while you're just sitting. I knew that the worst part of Nail Chism's experience in the penitentiary was all the hours he had to do his thinking just sitting or lying around: the thoughts he had in those times must have been drab shades of gray.

Take any day in late June in Stay More and it's apt to be real hot. Generally, I'd try to get my garden work done right after sunup, without even waiting for breakfast. There would still be dew glistening on the vines and sogging the greens. The dog Rouser would trot behind me out to the garden, which wasn't but as far as from here to there the other side of what pa.s.sed for Paw's barn, and Rouser would just sit and watch me, or the morning birds, while I chopped weeds out of the garden. Then he would go with me afterward up in the holler behind our house, just a quarter-mile or so, to the falls. It wasn't really a waterfall; it didn't fall more than maybe five feet from the ledge to the pool; it was more of a cascade than a waterfall, but I called it the falls, and I was the only one in the family who used it. Barb and Mandy drew just enough water from the well to fill an oaken sitz tub about once a week, Sat.u.r.day evening usually before they stepped out, and they'd share that water, Barb first because she was oldest and because she'd drawn the water, and stand, not sitz, in the tub and splash enough to get off the worst dirt and smells. But me, take an early morning in June in Stay More and you'd find me getting wet all over beneath my little waterfall up the holler. No, you'd not; because neither you nor anybody knew where I was, and I was stark naked and only a little bit uncomfortable that Rouser, who was watching me, was a male.

If anybody or anything had come along and spied on me, Rouser would've barked. He never did. And also, I took my .22 rifle with me, just in case. Not that I was afraid, being back up in that dark, mossy, woodsy holler. It was real cool after a couple hours of chopping weeds out of the garden patch, and the water that trickled over that ledge was almost cold.

Of course I never stood under that waterfall when I was having my monthlies. Everybody knew that would be a terrible thing to do, almost suicide. Anybody could tell you of a fool girl or two who had got tuberculosis or a stroke of paralysis from taking a bath at the wrong time of her month.

I have been called superst.i.tious, but I know some things which have never been known to fail. This is not boasting but observation. There are plants that work wonders and always have for thousands of years. I never got chiggerbit, because I knew where the penny-royal grew, and I rubbed it on my legs, and when the chiggers were chewing my sisters alive, they didn't bother me at all. Now, is that superst.i.tion?

Take the common mullein, which some folks call the velvet plant because of its velvety leaves, a shade of green so pale you'd think the plant was worthless. And it is, for most things; cows won't eat it, and although I've heard of some outlandish remedies concocted from the seeds, I've never known one that honestly works. The mullein stalk grows straight up, sometimes as tall as eight or nine feet. The yellow flowers are small and moderately ornamental, and I've known a few folks' yards where they let the mullein grow just for decoration.

In late June the mullein hasn't even started to flower, and at most it's just a few feet high, and inconspicuous, and totally worthless...except for this: if somebody, or something, is lost, you can name a mullein plant after him, her, or it, and then bend the stalk down to the ground. Likely, it will stay bent down. It will surely stay bent down and keep on growing that way if the lost person or the lost thing remains lost. But if that mullein stalk straightens back up, the lost will be found.

This never fails. At least, I have never known it to fail, and I have lost a lot of things: recovered some and never found the others.

Because somebody who has left Stay More is, in a way, "lost," the mullein is also good for letting you know if they are ever coming back. When I saw the first mullein of June that was tall enough to bend down, on my hike back up into the holler to my bathing-place, I named it Viridis and bent it down. Not too long after that, another mullein started growing tall right near it. I bent that one down too, after naming it Nail.

Each morning, after two or three sweaty hours in the garden, I would hike up to the waterfall to clean up, and I would pause to notice that both mullein stalks were still bent down. I would greet them and tell them I hoped they would straighten up.

When I had bathed and put on a fresh dress, I would mosey on down into the village and hang around Ingledew's store at the time of morning when everybody was there to get their mail. I never got any mail, except from Viridis. But she never wrote to tell me exactly when she was coming.

The men would sit on the furniture of Ingledew's storeporch like it belonged to them. The women and girls would have to stand around, not on the porch but off to one side, or out in the road, or sometimes inside the store around the dry goods, which was an exciting place to be, especially after Willis Ingledew received a new s.h.i.+pment of bolts of cloth, clean and bright and smooth. Nothing smells better than fresh cloth. But while I enjoyed hanging around the dry-goods department, more often I stood outside off the edge of the porch near enough to the men to listen to their stories or their talk about current events. The main current event now was Nail's escape. How long would it take him to get home? There was no doubt in any man's mind that he was coming home; there were only two questions: how long did it take a feller to walk from Little Rock to Stay More if he was careful not to let himself get seen? and how soon after coming back to Stay More would Nail do something to Sull Jerram?

Every man was of the opinion that Nail would do something to Sull Jerram. If he didn't kill him, he'd mutilate him beyond recognition or something equally terrible, and Sull knew it, and the men who'd been to Jasper lately reported that Sull was...I thought they said "scared spitless" and figured they meant he was so frightened he couldn't work up enough saliva inside his mouth to take a decent spit, because a man in that predicament was practically unmanned. From my observation, every male human being above the age of twelve or thirteen had to be able to spit at least once every fifteen minutes or he risked being mistaken for a female.

I had to watch where I was standing when I eavesdropped on the porch loungers; I had to be ready to jump to one side quickly.

I told n.o.body about my mullein stalks. You don't ever tell, which would break the magic. n.o.body in Stay More except me, and I suppose the old woman who lived at Jacob Ingledew's (although her house was directly across the road from Willis' store, she hardly ever crossed the road; I never saw her), knew that Viridis might return to Stay More any day now.

One morning in late June on my way to the waterfall after working in the garden, I paused to observe the two mullein stalks and noticed that one of them, the one I'd named Viridis, was behaving like a p.e.c.k.e.r ready for love. I was so excited I could scarcely take time to go on to the falls and take off all my clothes and get real wet. Later, on my way to the store, and at the store itself, I couldn't understand why all the rest of the world, except that mullein stalk, remained so normal and unexcited. It was a typical dull, slow morning in Stay More. The mail wagon came out from Jasper, and Willis Ingledew sorted the mail, and folks saw what they got and read it, or read it for those who couldn't read, and I didn't get anything, but I didn't need anything, because I knew she was coming!

And sure enough, she came! Mullein stalks are never wrong. That very morning, while we were all still there, in or on or around the Ingledew store, the twenty-odd porch regulars loafing in their chairs or on their kegs and keeping the dust of the road down with their spitting, ankle-deep in the shavings from their pocketknives, the children playing in the road without fear of traffic, for there was none, the women mostly inside around the dry goods, and myself leaning up against one of the posts that held up the corner of the porch roof, a slow-moving wagon came into view, coming not from Jasper but from the schoolhouse road that goes westward up the mountain toward Sidehill, Eden, and places beyond. There was an additional horse tied behind the wagon, trotting briskly. I think I recognized that horse, or mare, before I recognized the pa.s.sengers in the wagon. I could tell by her gait. It was Rosabone.

I let out a yell. Everybody turned to stare at me briefly before returning their gazes toward the distantly approaching wagon. To the few who continued staring at me, I explained my outburst: "It's Viridis. She's here." Then I started running toward the wagon. I was barefoot, as I always am when the weather's warm, and the gravels of the road bit into my pounding feet, but I scarcely noticed. Rouser chased after me and commenced barking. Other dogs picked up his cry.

So there was a great hubbub as Viridis returned to Stay More. As soon as I started running, others followed me, not all of them running but moving as fast as they could to keep up with me. We didn't give the wagon a chance to arrive and stop at its destination, whatever its destination was: I still don't know whether Viridis had told the driver she wanted to go to Ingledew's store, the old woman's house, my house, or the Chisms', or the Whitters', or where. We stopped her right there in the road. Rindy jumped down from the wagon like she expected a big hug from all of us at once, but it was Viridis I hugged first, and then I hugged Rindy, and the way other people were hugging Viridis, she might have been kinfolks and long lost...or at least the heroine that all of us knew her to be.

Women were exclaiming, "Did ye ever!" and "I swan!" and "Lawsy sakes!" and men were saying, "I'll be a son of a gun!" and "Wal, dog my cats!" and "What d'ye know about that!"

Then all the commotion ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and it was absolutely silent for a time, so quiet you could hear the trees behind Willis' store whispering. Waymon Chism broke the silence by declaring, "He aint showed up yit." We all knew who "he" was.

Viridis had been smiling that great smile that made her mouth look so pretty, but now she frowned and bit her lip. Then she said, "Well." That's all that was said for a while by anybody, although they were all looking at one another and exchanging expressions. Then Viridis declared, "We'll just have to wait for him, won't we?" In response there was a chorus of men's and women's declarations: "He'll turn up" and "Give him time" and "Any day now" and "Sh.o.r.e as shootin" and "You bet ye" and "Sh.o.r.e thang."

Then came a dozen different offers from a dozen different women, my mother included, for Viridis to stay with them. They were all disappointed that she had already promised to stay, for the time being, at least tonight, with the old woman who lived in the Jacob Ingledew house right yonder. Men fought each other for the privilege of carrying her luggage to that house. Viridis paid the driver, a young man, or just a teenager actually, and thanked him for bringing them all that distance from Pettigrew.

As it turned out, the young driver, whose name was Virgil Tuttle, did not intend to turn around and head back to Pettigrew, not right away. It had taken them a night on the road to cover the distance (they had put up at a sort of hotel in Sidehill), and during the long trip and that night Dorinda had become real friendly with Virgil, or just Virge as she called him, and now he accepted her invitation to stay at least tonight, and maybe longer, at the Whitter cabin, where, before sleeping with two or more of Rindy's brothers, he might be permitted to "sit up" with her. She was sweet on him, and I could see why: he was sightly and strong, and he could talk the hind foot off a mule.

He drove Rindy and her new suitcase on toward her house, with her mother riding in the back of the wagon to chaperone them, and I hung back to watch Viridis and the old woman at Jacob Ingledew's house greet each other and then disappear inside. One by one the other citizens of Stay More returned to their accustomed places in, on, or around Willis Ingledew's store, or they drifted on home for dinner. I was alone except for Rouser at the foot of the steps leading up to the porch of the big fine house where Viridis was staying with the old woman. I looked at it sadly, disappointed I'd scarcely had a chance to say more than h.e.l.lo to Viridis. But I figured she was tired and also wanted to visit with the old woman, who was her friend, after all, and had just as much claim to her as I did, or more.

But while I was standing there looking at the house, the door opened and Viridis reappeared, coming out on the porch and smiling at me. "I didn't mean to walk off from you like that," she said. "My hostess wants me to ask you if you would have a bite of dinner with us. Will you?"

"Gosh, sure!" was all I could say, and I joined them for dinner in the kitchen of the Jacob Ingledew house. I had never been inside of that house, and I was thrilled. Oh, in the years since then I've seen some finer houses in other places, and looking back I have to think that my world was awfully small that I would consider that house such a palace, when, by comparison with any good city house, it was just a country shack. But to me, then, going inside that house was like stepping into another world.

And both women treated me not as some child eavesdropping on their grown-up conversation but as an equal, almost. I was drawn into their talk as if I really was grown up and had something worth saying and worth listening to. The only times I felt a little left out were when the old woman and Viridis would refer to what had apparently been a lengthy correspondence between them, longer and more continuous than mine with Viridis, One of them would say, "As I mentioned in my last letter..." or "You'll recall when I wrote to you in early April..." or "But you said to me in your letter of May 15th..." and I couldn't help feeling a little jealous. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt I ought to consider myself privileged that such an intelligent and beautiful and heroic woman as Viridis would have bothered to write to me at all, let alone as often and as lengthily as she had. And I got a chance, too, to throw in a couple of expressions like "Remember what you said to me in that letter about...?"

We talked for most of the afternoon, and I suppose Rouser got tired of waiting for me to come back out of the house, and he went on home by himself. Finally Viridis looked back and forth between the old woman and me and asked the question that she had been putting off. "You don't suppose he might actually have come back but is hiding and doesn't want anybody to know he's here?"

I thought it was a kind of desperate question, as if she couldn't quite face the possibility that something had happened to keep him from coming home. After all, terrible as it was to contemplate, he could have drowned in the Arkansas River. Or he could have been recaptured, and we wouldn't know about it until the next week's issue of the Jasper newspaper. Or he could have changed his mind about coming home and gone to Colorado.

"Aw," I said. "If he was home, he'd of told his folks he was here."

"But what if," she asked, "what if he'd made them promise not to tell anyone else?"