The Deliverance Part 23

The disgust he felt was so evenly mingled with compa.s.sion that, as he stood there, he could not divide the one emotion from the other. He hated the boy's touch, and yet, almost in spite of himself, he suffered it.

"Well, I'm not going, so you needn't let that worry you," he replied. "I'll stretch myself alongside of you in the straw, and if you happen to want me, just yell out, you know."

The weak fingers closed tightly about his wrist.

"You promise?" asked the boy.

"Oh, I promise," answered the other, raising the lantern for a last look before he blew it out.

By early daybreak Will's condition was still more alarming, and leaving him in a feverish stupor upon the pallet, Christopher set out hurriedly shortly after sunrise to carry news of the boy's whereabouts to Fletcher.

It was a clear, cold morning, and the old brick house, set midway of the autumn fields, appeared, as he approached it, to reflect the golden light that filled the east. Never had the place seemed to him more desirable than it did as he went slowly toward it along the desolate November roads. The somber colours of the landscape, the bared majesty of the old oaks where a few leaves still clung to the topmost boughs, the deserted garden filled with wan specters of summer flowers, were all in peculiar harmony with his own mood as with the stern gray walls wrapped in naked creepers. That peculiar sense of owners.h.i.+p was strongly with him as he ascended the broad steps and lifted the old bra.s.s knocker, which still bore the Blake coat of arms.

To his astonishment the door opened instantly and Fletcher himself appeared upon the threshold. At sight of Christopher he fell back as if from a blow in the chest, ripping out an oath with a big downward gesture of his closed fist.

"So you are mixed up in it, are you! Whar's the boy?" From the dusk of the hall his face shone dead white about the eyes.

"If you want to get anything out of me you'd better curb your tongue, Bill Fletcher," replied Christopher coolly, feeling an animal instinct to prolong the torture. "If you think it's any satisfaction to me to have your young idiot thrown on my hands you were never more mistaken in your life. I've been up half the night with him, and the sooner you take him away the better I'll like it."

"Oh, you leave him to me and I'll settle him," responded Fletcher, reaching for his hat. "Jest show me whar he is and I'll git even with him befo' sundown. As for you, young man, I'll have the sheriff after you yit."

"In the meantime, you'd better have the doctor. The boy's ill, I tell you. He came to me last evening, run to death and with a high fever. He slept in the barn, and this morning he is decidedly worse. If you come, bring Doctor Cairn with you, and I warn you now you've got to use a lot of caution. Your grandson is mortally afraid of you, and he threatens to run away if I let you know where he is. He wants me to sit at the door with a shotgun and keep you off."

He delivered his blows straight out from the shoulder, lingering over each separate word that he might enjoy to the full its stupendous effect.

"This is your doing," repeated Fletcher hoa.r.s.ely; "it's your doing, every blamed bit of it."

Christopher laughed shortly. "Well, I'm through with my errand,"

he said, moving toward the steps and pausing with one hand on a great white column. "The sooner you get him out of my barn the better riddance it will be. There's one thing certain, though, and that is that you don't lay eyes on him without the doctor.

He's downright ill, on my oath."

"Oh, it's the same old trick, and I see through it," exclaimed Fletcher furiously. "It's pure shamming."

"All the same, I've got my gun on hand, and you don't go into that barn alone." He hung for an instant upon the topmost step, then descended hurriedly and walked rapidly back along the broad white walk. It would be an hour, at least, before Fletcher could follow him with Doctor Cairn, and after he had returned to the barn and given Will a gla.s.s of new milk he fed and watered the horses and did the numberless small tasks about the house. He was at the woodpile, chopping some light wood splinters for Cynthia, when the sound of wheels reached him, and in a little while more the head of Fletcher's mare appeared around the porch. Doctor Cairn, a frousy, white-bearded old man, crippled from rheumatism, held out his hand to Christopher as he descended with some difficulty between the wheels of the buggy.

Christopher motioned to the barn, and then, taking the reins, fastened the horse to the branch of a young ailanthus tree which grew near the woodpile. As he watched the figures of the two men pa.s.s along the little path between the fringes of dead yarrow he drew an uneasy breath and dug his boot into the rotting mould upon the ground. The barn door opened and closed; there was a short silence, and then a sudden despairing cry as of a rabbit caught in the jaws of a hound. When he heard it he turned impulsively from the horse's head and went quickly along the path the men had taken. There was no definite intention in his mind, but as he reached the barn door it shot open and Fletcher put out a white face.

"The Doctor wants you, Mr. Christopher," he cried; "Will has gone clean mad!"

Without a word, Christopher pushed by him and went into the great dusky room, where the boy was struggling like a madman to loosen the doctor's grasp. He was conscious at the moment that the air was filled with fine chaff and that he sucked it in when he breathed.

At his entrance Will lay quiet for a moment and looked at him with dazed, questioning eyes.

"Keep them out, Christopher!" he cried, in anguish.

Christopher crossed the room and laid his hand with a protecting gesture on the boy's head.

"Why, to be sure I will," he said heartily; "the devil himself won't dare to touch you when I am by, "

BOOK III

THE REVENGE

CHAPTER I. In Which Tobacco is Hero

On an October afternoon some four years later, at the season of the year when the whole county was fragrant with the curing tobacco, Christopher Blake pa.s.sed along the stretch of old road which divided his farm from the Weatherbys', and, without entering the porch, called for Jim from the little walk before the flat whitewashed steps. In response to his voice, Mrs.

Weatherby, a large, motherly looking woman, appeared upon the threshold, and after chatting a moment, directed him to the log tobacco barn, where the recently cut crop was "drying out."

"Jim and Jacob are both over thar," she said; " an' a few others, for the matter of that, who have been helpin' us press new cider an' drinkin' the old. I'm sure I don't see why they want to lounge out thar in all that smoke, but thar's no accountin' for the taste of a man that ever I heard tell of an' I reckon they kin fancy pretty easy that they are settin' plum in the bowl of a pipe. It beats me, though, that it do. Why, one mouthful of it is enough to start me coughin' for a week, an' those men thar jest swallow it down for pure pleasure." Clean, kindly, hospitable, she wandered garrulously on, remembering at intervals to press the young man to "come inside an' try the cakes an' cider."

"No, I'll look them up out there," said Christopher, resisting the invitation to enter. "I want to get a pair of horseshoes from Jim; the gray mare cast hers yesterday, and d.i.c.k Boxley is laid up with a sprained arm. Oh, no, thanks; I must be going back."

With a friendly nod he turned from the steps and went rapidly along the path which led to the distant barn.

As Mrs. Weatherby had said, the place was like the bowl of a pipe, and it was a moment before Christopher discovered the little group gathered about the doorway, where a shutter hung loosely on wooden hinges.

The ancient custom of curing tobacco with open fires, which had persisted in Virginia since the days of the early settlers, was still commonly in use; and it is possible that had one of Christopher's colonial ancestors appeared at the moment in Jacob Weatherby's log barn it would have been difficult to convince him that between his death and his resurrection there was a lapse of more than two hundred years. He would have found the same square, pen-like structure, built of straight logs carefully notched at the corners; the same tier-poles rising at intervals of three feet to the roof; the same hewn plates to support the rafters; the same "daubing" of the c.h.i.n.ks with red clay; and the same crude door cut in the south wall. From the roof the tobacco hung in a fantastic decoration, shading from dull green to deep bronze, and appearing, when viewed from the ground below, to resemble a numberless array of small furled flags. On the hard earth floor there were three parallel rows of "unseasoned" logs which burned slowly day and night, filling the barn with gray smoke and the pungent odour of the curing tobacco.

"It takes a heap of lookin' arter, an' no mistake," old Jacob was remarking, as he surveyed the fine crop with the bland and easy gaze of owners.h.i.+p. "Why, in a little while them top leaves thar will be like tinder, an' the first floatin' spark will set it all afire. That's the way Sol Peterkin lost half a crop last year, an' it's the way d.i.c.k Moss lost his whole one the year before."

At Christopher's entrance he paused and turned his pleasant, ruddy face from the fresh logs which he had been watching. "So you want to have a look at my tobaccy, too?" he added, with the healthful zest of a child. "Well, it's worth seein', if I do say so; thar hasn't been sech leaves raised in this county within the memory of man."

"That's so," said Christopher, with an appreciative glance. "I'm looking for Jim, but he's keeping up the fires, isn't he?" Then he turned quickly, for Tom Spade, who with young Matthew Field had been critically weighing the promise of Jacob's crop, broke out suddenly into a boisterous laugh.

"Why, I declar', Mr. Christopher, if you ain't lost yo' shadow!"

he exclaimed.

Christopher regarded him blankly for a moment, and then joined lightly in the general mirth. "Oh, you mean Will Fletcher," he returned. "There was a pretty girl in the road as we came up, and I couldn't get him a step beyond her. Heaven knows what's become of him by now!"

"I bet my right hand that was Molly Peterkin," said Tom. "If anybody in these parts begins to talk about 'a pretty gal,' you may be sartain he's meanin' that yaller-headed limb of Satan.

Why, I stopped my Jinnie goin' with her a year ago. Sech women, I said to her, are fit for n.o.body but men to keep company with."

"That's so; that's so," agreed old Jacob, in a charitable tone; "seein' as men have most likely made 'em what they are, an'

oughtn't to be ashamed of thar own handiwork."

"Now, when it comes to yaller hair an' blue eyes," put in Matthew Field, "she kin hold her own agin any wedded wife that ever made a man regret the day of his birth. Many's the time of late I've gone a good half-mile to git out of that gal's way, jest as I used to cut round old Fletcher's pasture when I was a boy to keep from pa.s.sin' by his redheart cherry-tree that overhung the road.

Well, well, they do say that her young man, Fred Turner, went back on her, an' threw her on her father's hands two days befo'

the weddin'."

"It was hard on Sol, now you come to think of it," said Tom. "He told me himself that he tried to git the three who ought to marry her to draw straws for the one who was to be the happy man, but they all backed out an' left her high an' dry an' as pretty as a peach. Fred Turner would have taken his chance, he said, like an honest man, an' he was terrible down in the mouth when I saw him, for he was near daft over the gal."

"Well, he was right," admitted Matthew, after reflection. "Why, the gal sins so free an' easy you might almost fancy her a man."

He drew back, coughing, for Jim came in with a long green log and laid it on the smouldering fire, which glowed crimson under the heavy smoke.

"Here's Sol," said the young man, settling the log with his foot.

"I told him you were on your way to the house, pa, but he said he had only a minute, so he came out here."