Kenny Part 9

Ordinarily Kenny would have found its music and its shadows infinitely poetic. Now, wretchedly out of sorts, he plunged his face and hands into a shady pool with a sigh of vast materialistic content, longed to linger and cursed the village posse he fancied at his heels. The first romance of his flight from justice was waning rapidly. With a groan he plunged on, horribly full of aches and hunger. Always now he would understand the Gaelic legend of Far Goila, the gaunt Man of Hunger who goes touring up and down the land in times of famine bringing luck to those who feed him. Even his taste for cheese was returning. The holocaust of the morning filled him with bitter regret. As for his feet, they felt shapeless and huge and fungus-like and full of burning needles. Oh, for the sandals of power of Fergus Mac Roigh!

At noon in utter desperation he bought a mule.

The mule brayed temptation at him from the fence of a forest shanty. A negress stood in the doorway. Kenny, in no mood for haggling, recklessly offered what he thought the mule was worth. It looked incredibly st.u.r.dy. His voice evoked a ragged husband who came up out of a cellar doorway eating a dwarfed banana. The sight of the banana made Kenny dizzy with emotion.

He demanded one at any price and bought six, ate them one after the other without the pretense of a halt and moodily s.h.i.+ed the last skin at a sparrow, realizing then with a shock that the negro had already untied the mule from the picket fence. The precipitancy of it all made him slightly uncomfortable. Either the negro was too lazy to bargain or the offer was out of all proportion to the mule's repute. Kenny asked.

"He's got a powahful sight of appet.i.te fo' a po' man," explained the darky fluently. "I's glad to see him go. Dat mule, sah, even eats de pickets on de fence."

Kenny felt sincerely that he could understand.

"Just give him his haid, sah," called the negro as he climbed aboard, "and he'll find de road outside fo' yoh."

Mule and rider disappeared with a sort of plunge. Kenny's spirits soared. Substance and speed here enough for any man. He remembered in the first moment of his uplift that Cuchullin, foremost champion of the Red Branch, had had a magic steed that rose from a lake. Its name was Leath Macha.

Very well, he would christen this amazing beast of sinews with the compa.s.s nose, Leath Macha, and make him a gift of his head as the darky advised. Leath Macha--Kenny later found less poetic names he liked better--developed a sylvan taste for roving and lost himself in no time, pursuing elusive glints of greenness. He seemed always seeking food. It came over his rider with a sickening wave of apprehension and disgust that the unscrupulous negro, taking advantage of his plight, had sold him what the southern darky calls an ornery mule, a mule that charged forward with fiery snorts and halted only when it pleased him, kicked backward when he did stop and plunged forward immediately afterward with a horrible air of purpose.

Kenny groaned. He was between the devil and the deep sea. The prospect of staying lost in a world of trees filled him with hungry foreboding. But he dreaded the open highway and pictured himself John Gilpining through town and village, a thing of ridicule and helpless progress. Puck in the guise of a hairbrained mule! He would pound onward into the night and throw his rider with the dawn.

At dusk the mule came out unexpectedly upon a turnpike and halted with a snort. Perfectly convinced that he was planning something or other spectacular and public, Kenny slid instantly from his back and grabbed his knapsack. He left Leath Macha in an att.i.tude of hairtrigger contemplation, apparently about to begin something at once. When Kenny looked back the dusk or the forest had engulfed him. Likely the latter. Trained for the purpose, he decided in a blaze of wrath, Leath Macha had returned to the negro and a diet of pickets.

Kenny, swinging down the turnpike in the vigor of desperation, felt no single pang of penance. His mood was primitive and pertinacious. He went forward with bee-like undeviation until he found an inn where he bathed and shaved and ate. He slept until midnight and ate again. He slept through the night and the morning and ate again, still with the mental monotony of a cave-dweller. Then he found a railroad and rode.

Not until he reached the town postmarked upon Brian's letter did he trouble himself with anything but the primitive needs of primitive man.

Here, however, he permitted himself the luxury of a brief but wholly satisfactory interval of summary. The fortunes of the road had forced him into the prodigal acquirement of a corncrib and a mule when he had meant to please Brian by his economy. He had burned the one and abandoned the other, wholly necessary irregularities. He had thrashed a farmer. A fugitive from justice he had suffered hunger and thirst and every form of bodily torment. And he had tramped through a day of rain with sodden shoes and steaming garments.

Glory be to G.o.d! he had infused enough penance into his four days upon the road to last an ancient martyr a lifetime. Happily he had always had a gift for concentration.

CHAPTER V

AT THE BLAST OF A HORN

The village was old and depressing. Kenny, a conspicuous guest at the one hotel, awoke at noon to less imaginative interest in the wood, the farmhouse and the river than he'd known for days. He had walked into his picture. Now with perspective gone, he felt uncertain and vaguely alarmed. Well, any quest that led to an inn like this, he felt, must in itself be preposterous.

The innkeeper proved to be a mine of general information. He knew nothing at all specific but evinced a candid willingness to overcome this by acquiring facts from Kenny. n.o.body he knew had run away from an uncle. Why was Kenny seeking uncles? . . . Hum . . . Joel Ashley's boy had run away but the uncle there had been a stepmother.

Was the runaway boy anybody's long lost heir? A pity! One read such things in the papers. Years back there had been a scandal about a girl who ran away to be an actress.

Kenny interrupted him long enough to order anything vehicular in the village that would go. The innkeeper shouted to a boy outside with a bucket and asked Kenny how far the "rig" would have to travel.

"I'm going," Kenny told him shortly, "to find a river. I'll keep going until I find it."

The innkeeper after an interval of blank astonishment identified the river at once. Kenny felt encouraged. Pressed to further detail, however, he admitted a confusing plent.i.tude of woods, hills and farmhouses. Dangerously near the state of mind Garry called "running in circles," Kenny fumed out to wait for the hotel phaeton and climbed into it with a shudder of disgust. It had a mustard colored fringe.

But the phaeton creaked away into a wind and world of lilacs. Kenny forgot the inn. He forgot the village. Another gust of warm, sweet wind, another shower of lilac stars beside a well, another lane and he would have to paint or go mad.

He neither painted nor lost his reason. He came instead to the river and began again to fret. The road that but a moment before had made a feint of stopping for good and all at a dark and hilly wall of cedars, swept around a rocky curve and revealed the glint of the river. After that by all the dictates of convenience it should have curved again and continued its course to Kenny's destination, pleasantly parallel with the bends of the river. Instead it crossed the river bridge and went off at a foolish tangent, disappearing over the crest of a hill. Wild and wooded country swept steeply down to the river edge. Kenny, who had made a vow of penitential speed, must continue his search on foot.

The prospect filled him with dismay.

He dismissed the phaeton at the bridge and stared up and down the river in gloomy indecision. Upstream or downstream? Heaven alone knew!

Whichever way he elected to go would be the wrong way. Fate, who had saddled him with Silas and the mule, would see to that.

Then, having resentfully put his mind to it, he evolved some logic.

Brian, leaving the wood by the river, would not go back the way he had come. He would travel upstream and mail his letter when he found the village. Kenny conversely had found the village first. Therefore he must travel downstream to find the wood; downstream through a disheartening tangle of bush and tree and brier and maybe snakes and marshes.

With a groan he plunged into the wood, keeping well up the slope to avoid the lower marshes. He must spur himself to the start or he'd never finish. But his mind was in ferment. What if the boy had written to his sister? Must he vagabond forth again with the morning into a world of bucolic dawns, alarm-clock farmers, roosters, corncribs and mules? By the powers of wildfire, no! He would buy a motorcycle.

On tires or toes he could wind Brian around his finger and he would!

In a flurry of bitter abstraction, he floundered into a marsh and emerged mud-spattered and indignant. Briers tore at him. Below the sun-mottled river glided endlessly on in sylvan peace. The other sh.o.r.e looked better. There the wind-bent s.h.a.g of trees was greener save when, with a hint of rain, the breeze turned up an under-leaf ripple of silver. He met no one; no one but a madman, he reflected, would explore the tangled banks of a hermit river.

At sunset, after seven slow weariful miles downstream in the brooding quiet of a hot afternoon murmurous with birds and the sound of the river, he came to the end of his journey--a wood, stretching steeply up a cliff to a farmhouse lost in trees and ivy. It was on the other side of the river and there was no bridge.

Kenny, who believed all things of Fate when the pet or victim was himself, refused absolutely to credit her crowning whimsy. In a fury of exasperation he clambered down to the water's edge and washed his face; moodily mopping it with his handkerchief he stared across the water.

The sun in a last blaze was going down behind the higher line of trees.

Roof peaks and chimney lay against a mat of gold. Crows winging toward the forest to the south speckled the sky behind the chimney. To Kenny's ardent fancy, the old house, built of gray and ancient stone, became a rugged cameo set in gold and trees. Whatever arable land belonged to the hill-farm lay away from the river. North and south loomed only a primitive maze of trees.

A path wound steeply down to the river's edge and to a boat. Kenny stared at it in some resentment.

Well, if he must hunt a bridge he would rest there first beneath the willow. The sun had made him drowsy. He might even camp on the river bank and if ever a foot came down the path and toward the boat, he would fire his revolver into the air and demand attention. The prospect pleased him. He went toward the willow.

Fate having toyed with Kenny tossed him a rose and smiled.

There was a battered horn upon the willow and below a wooden sign:

_Craig Farm Ferry Please blow the horn_

A battered horn of adventure! What might it not evoke? Woodland spirits perhaps, romance, a ferryman! Thank G.o.d the tree was old, the horn battered and the willow naiadic in its grace. A trio of blessing!

Kenny whistled softly in amazed delight and blew the horn. Its blast startled him and the wooded hills seemed to fling the echo back upon him. In better humor he flung himself down beneath a tree to wait for the ferryman--and went peacefully to sleep.

St. Kevin had once fallen asleep at a window with his arms outstretched in prayer; a swallow had made a nest in his hand and the saint had waited for the swallow's young to hatch. Kenny, with the legend dimly adrift in his brain, dreamed that he too must wait until a ferryman grew up. He grew up on the further sh.o.r.e to a youth in patches and then all at once the dream became a beautiful delight. The youth by a twist of woodland magic turned to a maid in a glory of old brocade.

Such a maid might have stepped from an ancient tapestry to come in search of a knight of old.

"Mr. O'Neill!"

Kenny did not stir. He must keep the dream to the end. If he moved now the maid would vanish.

"Mr. O'Neill!" A hand touched his shoulder.

A haze of old brocade golden in the sunlight retreated and then loomed persistently ahead. The dream if anything became a shade more clear.

Well, if a man must dream, let him dream thus, vividly, turning the clock back to maids unbelievably quaint and winsome in old brocade.

Sweet as an Irish smile, the face of this one, and as haunting. And beyond, an old flat-bottomed punt and a river, a real river--

Scarlet with confusion, Kenny sprang to his feet. Queen of Heaven! the girl was real. She had stepped from the page of an old romance into life and laughter, wearing for the mystification of chance beholders, an old-time gown of gold brocade! The mystery of her gown, the river setting, the laughing sweetness of her face, rooted him to the spot in wonder and delight. He knew every subtlety of her coloring in one glance. Her soft exquisite eyes were brown. Tragic, they might very well seem pools of ink. Her hair? In the sun there was bronze, deep and vivid, in the shadows brown. And the sun had deepened her skin to cream and tan and rose. Thank G.o.d he was a Celt, an artist and an aesthete!

He did not mean to keep on staring nor could he stop. He was horribly disturbed. For he knew the signs as the traveler knows the landmarks of an old, familiar road. Heaven help him, one of his periodic fits of madness was upon him! It could not be helped. He was falling in love again. And he was tragically sorry. Brian would get so far ahead.