Then I'll Come Back to You Part 12

"Yes?" Allison temporized.

It was very quiet for a moment. Steve sat, a little red of face himself, gazing across into the girl's starry eyes.

"Go ahead!" she prompted him with a gasp.

Then his lips began to curl until a smile overspread his face and half-closed his eyes. He leaned back and raised obediently a quaintly solemn, quaintly boyish treble.

"I wa'n't guessin'," he averred soberly, "ner I wa'n't thinkin' it will. It'll jest be rainin', come sunup, and it'll be good fer till Wednesday, for sure!"

At the beginning of that quavering statement Dexter Allison's lips fell apart. They remained open long after Steve had finished. Once he started to rise, and then dropped back into his chair, dumfounded.

There was no doubt concerning the success of his daughter's query. At last he got to his feet and padded around the table. With a hand on either of the boy's shoulders, he turned that browned face up to his own.

"You," he murmured, weakly. "You! And Elliott said that you could outguess dear old Mother Nature herself! Well, I--I'm d.a.m.ned!"

They talked no more business at table that morning, and Allison found scant opportunity to make himself heard at all. Even the reticence which seemed a part of Steve's grave face and big body was swept aside before the tumult of questions that tumbled from Barbara's lips, promptly to be supplemented by Caleb whenever her breath gave out.

"And to think that you didn't recognize him, even when you met him face to face," she rallied her father. "It was dense enough of me not to have known instantly who it must be, the first day you began your endless reiteration of 'my man, O'Mara.' I, at least, should have known, because--because"--she faltered a little--"well, they always do, in books!"

It raised another storm of laughter--that faltering, ingenuous reason of hers--and Barbara hastened to explain that the phrase was a relic of her own childhood, which she had once coined in extenuation of conduct to which her mother had objected. She still employed it, she explained, in particularly irresponsible moments.

It was minutes before Allison could wedge in a single remark, longer than that before he stopped frowning to himself in a fas.h.i.+on which made Caleb remember that moment of inexplicable vehemence, outside on the veranda. They had retrogressed as far as the "injine"--the "steam injine"--when Allison finally made himself heard.

"What I can't remember is just why you left us so suddenly. I know it was some sort of a rumpus, with Barbara in it--there's always a woman, of course--but I can't recall----"

He paused to ponder--paused and became aware immediately of Barbara's swift silence and Steve's hint of self-consciousness. Then it all returned to him with a rush. He had his turn.

"Oh, but I do remember," he drawled. "Why, of course--_of course_! It was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair! But who was it whose choice conflicted with your own?"

He c.o.c.ked his head on one side, mock thoughtful; then he fell to pounding his knee and roared with laughter.

"Archie Wickersham!" he shouted. "Archie Wickersham--oh, Lord! I never really appreciated that _melee_ until this minute. And you promised that you'd be back, didn't you, and--well, b'gad, here you are! And now don't suffer any longer, Barbara, though I must state that this is the first time I ever knew you to search so diligently beneath the table for renewed composure. I am not going to expound Mr.

O'Mara's reasons for going, any more than I could dilate upon those which have brought him back. But please shake hands again--Steve.

And, if I may be pardoned the idiom, allow me to a.s.sure you that it was some battle!"

If it did nothing else, Allison's ponderous raillery served one end.

It removed any sentimental awkwardness which might have attached to the episode, and yet the girl rather resented its being so completely reduced to terms of farce-comedy. When the men rose, after breakfast, to go down into the town, she, too, declared her intention of accompanying them, as though it were the expected thing. She crossed the lawn at Steve's side, ahead of her father and Caleb, with Miss Sarah watching from the door. Both men walked for a time in silence, their eyes upon the slender figure in short skirt and woolly sweater beside the taller one in blue flannel before them. And, as usual, Allison was the first to speak.

"Now I know what you meant when you referred to that trip up the west branch, Cal," he said. "And you were right. It does take stuff to make that sort of a gentleman. Isn't there anything more to tell me?

I am truly interested, Cal."

So Caleb told him then of "Old Tom's" tin box. And while he was explaining the man and girl ahead, all in one breath, skipped back to that day-before-yesterday now many years gone. There was a quality of camaraderie in the girl's half-parted lips and eager impulsiveness of tongue that morning that was entirely boyish. Her very unconsciousness of self intensified and emphasized it for the man whose steady gaze rarely left her warm face. And more than once she caught herself watching for his slow smile to spread and crinkle the corners of his eyelids; once or twice, in a little lull, she found time to wonder at that new and quite frivolous mood of hers. But when Steve finally asked for Devereau--Garry Devereau, who had followed him to the hedge-gap that day and laid one hand upon his bowed, shamed shoulder--the light went from Barbara's eyes. And Stephen O'Mara, who did not understand at first the quick hurt which entered them, stopped smiling, too.

"I liked him," Steve said simply. "I've always remembered and liked him. Thinking of him and--and--has often kept me from being too lonely nights when I was lonely enough."

That statement concerning his friend contained the first personal note which had come from his lips. Barbara did not answer immediately, and Steve thought that she was phrasing her own reply. He could not know that she wanted a moment in which to contemplate the little hint of diffidence in his voice and to wonder at herself for not having wondered before if he had not, many, many times, been very lonely indeed.

"Do you remember a little girl who was at our place the summer you were here?" she asked finally. "A pale, red-lipped, very shy little thing named Mary Graves?"

Stephen nodded.

"And do you remember how, even then, Garry seemed to care for her? He was always supercilious with the rest of us; he tormented us or ignored us entirely, but never her."

Again the inclination of the head.

"Well, he grew up just that way," Barbara went on, thoughtfully. "One never could tell what was behind his indifference or--or flippancies.

He mocked at things . . . customs and courses of action, which we have come to accept and . . . and recognize. But he was always gentle with her, and kind, and--oh, I think reverend is the right word! Now, knowing Garry as I do--as you will, when you see him again--the phrase may seem a strange one to apply to him. And yet it describes best his bearing toward Mary Graves, two years ago."

She was walking more slowly now, without knowing it.

"I doubt if Garry ever revered anything on earth, or above it, except just little, white, shy Mary Graves, who never grew much bigger than she was when you knew her. I don't know whether you know it--of course you don't!--but his father cared that way for a woman, cared just as utterly. And everybody thought this match was an a.s.sured thing; they even wondered at it a little, she was so . . . so mouselike, and Garry so brilliant and hard and--I don't like the word sophisticated. It seemed to me that Garry's wisdom was not a thing which he had acquired himself. It seemed more the acc.u.mulated wisdom of ages and ages which was his just by--by instinct.

"He cared for her that way, Mr. O'Mara, and she married another man, almost without a word of explanation to him. n.o.body ever cited Garry as a s.h.i.+ning example, but he--that man whom Mary Graves married--had an unspeakable record! Her family made the match--the newspapers call it a union of America's fairest youth and powerful millions, don't they?

Well, he had them--and she married him. And Garret Devereau dropped out of the world for a long time.

"It was a year before he came back. People had already begun to talk about the way his father had gone before him--he shot himself, Mr.

O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to return--and when Garry reappeared they talked more. I never knew before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a man as I know Garry to be. It's not just his face and his rather dreadful silence. It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and shows it, pitifully. It's--oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen could so deliberately commit suicide.

"They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means.

But I'll always care for him deeply. That's why I have asked him up this fall. Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you have to go back into the woods before then? I'm going to have a party for some week-end guests--a masque dance. Garry needs his friends now, more than he ever did, and--and when you meet him will you--will you, please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?"

Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and clear-eyed boy. He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the finenesses of him whom they had known together. Steve nodded his comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then. But they found conversation somehow less easy after that. It was not until they had traversed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the girl regained in part her former vivacity.

Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years. A railroad station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty odd miles below. And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of the town was different. The men still swarmed in on the drives, brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty wide streets. Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish. The dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely the change which had taken place. Even the vices of the older Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more complicated, too. It was no longer a river village. Morrison was a city now.

Once, when a squatly huge, red-headed, red-s.h.i.+rted riverman with a week's red stubble upon his cheeks, lurched out of a doorway ahead of them and stood snarling malevolently at O'Mara, the girl shrank against her companion and clutched his arm. The red-s.h.i.+rted one fell to singing after they had pa.s.sed. A maudlin rendition of "Harrigan, That's Me," followed them long after they had rounded a corner. Steve looked down and smiled casually into Barbara's wide and startled eyes.

"That's a river-boss," he explained, "enjoying what he considers a roaring good time. His name is Harrigan. He works on the Reserve Company's cut, which we are to move in the spring, and whenever he has had a trifle more than enough he always sings that song. He's willing to fight, too, to prove that it was written especially for him!"

The girl continued to gaze up at him. His short laugh failed entirely to clear her face of apprehension.

"He's not exactly a friend of yours, is he?" she said.

"Well, not exactly," Steve admitted. "Not when he is in that frame of mind!"

"Nor in any other," the girl persisted, and she glanced down at her hand, still lying upon the blue-flannel sleeve. "Did you know that your arm grew as hard as iron for an instant? I never knew that anyone's arm could grow as hard as that. And is that the way you always prepare to receive your--friends?"

Steve colored a little.

"Perhaps I'm overcautious," he replied. "But it has to be hard. It const.i.tutes what one of my men, Joe Morgan, calls 'accident insurance.'"

Then her face lighted up again. The delighted bob of her head with which she greeted that name astonished the man.

"Do you--why, you must have heard of Joe," he exclaimed.

Mischief danced again in the dark eyes.

"Joe Morgan," she laughed. "'Fat Joe,' isn't it? And of course I have heard of him. You don't realize it, but I know more about this East Coast work and--and the men who are doing it, than I had any idea myself. Why, I'll wager that you never knew, yourself, that he once wrote in to the officials insisting that the entry of his name on the files be changed from 'Joe Morgan, cook,' to 'Joseph Morgan, a.s.sistant to Chief O'Mara'!"