In the Valley Part 35

"You can see for yourself, can't ye?" he said. "What do people mostly do when there's shooting going on, and they've got a gun?"

"But how came you here at all? I thought you were to stay at--at the place where I put you."

"That was likely, wasn't it! Me loafing around the house like a tame cat among the n.i.g.g.e.rs while good fighting was going on up here!"

"If you wanted to come, why not have marched with us? I asked you."

"I don't march much myself. It suits me to get around on my own legs in my own way. I told you I wouldn't go into any ranks, or tote my gun on my shoulder when it was handier to carry it on my arm. But I didn't tell you I wouldn't come up and see this thing on my own hook."

"Have you been here all day?"

"If you come to that, it's none of your business, young man. I got here about the right time of day to save _your_ bacon, anyway. That's enough for _you_, ain't it?"

The rebuke was just, and I put no further questions.

A great stillness had fallen upon the forest behind us. In the distance, from the scrub-oak thickets on the lowlands by the river, there sounded from time to time the echo of a stray shot, and faint Mohawk cries of "Oonah! Oonah!" The battle was over.

"They were beginning to run away before I came down," said Enoch, in comment upon some of these dying-away yells of defeat which came to us.

"They got handled too rough. If their white officers had showed themselves more, and took bigger risks, they'd have stood their ground. But these Tory fine gentlemen are a pack of cowards. They let the Injuns get killed, but they kept darned well hid themselves."

The man on the ground broke silence here.

"You lie!" he said, fiercely.

"Oh! you can talk, can you?" said Enoch. "No, I don't lie, Mr. Cross. I'm talking gospel truth. Herkimer's officers came out like men, and fought like men, and got shot by dozens; but till we struck you, I never laid eyes on one of you fellows all day long, and my eyesight's pretty good, too. Don't you think it is? I nailed you right under the nipple, there, within a hair of the b.u.t.ton I sighted on. I leave it to you if that ain't pretty fair shooting."

The cool brutality of this talk revolted me. I had it on my tongue to interpose, when the wounded man spoke again, with a new accent of gloom in his tone.

"What have I ever done to you?" he said, with his hand upon his breast.

"Why, nothing at all, Mr. Cross," answered Enoch, amiably. "There wasn't any feeling about it, at least on my part. I'd have potted you just as carefully if we'd been perfect strangers."

"Will you leave us here together for a little while, Enoch?" I broke in.

"Come back in a few minutes; find out what the news is in the gulf--how the fight has gone. I desire some words with this--this gentleman."

The trapper nodded at this, and started off with his cat-like, springing walk, loading his rifle as he went. "I'll turn up in about a quarter of an hour," he said.

I watched his lithe, leather-clad figure disappear among the trees, and then wheeled around to my prostrate foe.

"I do not know what to say to you," I said, hesitatingly, looking down upon him.

He had taken his hand away from his breast, and was fumbling with it on the gra.s.s behind him. Suddenly he raised it, with a sharp cry of--

"I know what to say to you!"

There was a pistol in the air confronting me, and I, taken all aback, looked full into the black circle of its barrel as he pulled the trigger.

The flint struck out a spark of flame, but it fell upon priming dampened by the wet gra.s.s.

The momentary gleam of eagerness in the pallid face before me died piteously away when no report came. If he had had the strength he would have thrown the useless weapon at me. As it was, it dropped from his nerveless fingers. He closed his eyes under the knit brows, upon which cold sweat stood out, and groaned aloud.

"I do not know what to say to you," I went on, the episode of the pistol seeming, strangely enough, to have cleared my thoughts. "For two years--yes, for five years--I have been picturing to myself some such scene as this, where you should lie overthrown before me, and I should crush the life out of your hateful body with my heel, as one does with snakes. But now that it has come about, I am at a strange loss for words."

"That you were not formerly," said the wounded man. "Since I have known you, you have fought always exceedingly well with your mouth. It was only in deeds that you were slow."

He made this retort with a contemptuous coolness of tone which was belied by his white face and drawn brows, and by the troubled, clinging gaze in his eyes. I found myself looking with a curious impersonal interest upon this heavy, large-featured countenance, always heretofore so deeply flushed with color, and now coa.r.s.ely blotched with varying depths of pallor.

"Doubtless it would be best to leave you here. None of your party will straggle this way. They have all fled. You can lie here and think of your misdeeds until-----"

"Until the wolves come, you mean. Yes, go away. I prefer them to you."

The sky to the west was one great lurid, bra.s.sy glare, overhung with banks of sinister clouds, a leaden purple above, fiery crimson below. The unnatural light fell strongly upon us both. A big shadow pa.s.sed for an instant across the sunset, and we, looking instinctively up, saw the circling bulk of some huge bird of prey. I shuddered at the sight.

"Yes, leave me to _them_!" he said, bitterly. "Go back and seize my lands, my house. While the beasts and the birds tear me to bits here in the forest, do you fatten upon my substance at home. You and they are of a kidney."

"You know I would touch nothing of yours."

"No--not even my wife!"

The thrust went home. There was a world of sardonic disdain in his voice as he spoke, but in truth I thought little of his tone. The words themselves seemed to open a gulf before my feet. Was it indeed true, in welcoming this man's death, that I was thinking of the woman it would set free--for me?

It seemed a long, long time before I found tongue again. I walked up and down among the small cedars, fighting out in my own mind the issue of honor which had been with such brutal frankness raised. I could not make it seem wholly untrue--this charge he so contemptuously flung at me. There was no softening of my heart toward him: he was still the repellent, evil ruffian I had for years held him to be. I felt that I hated him the more because he had put me in the wrong. I went back to him, ashamed for the source of the increase of temper I trembled under, yet powerless to dissemble it.

"Why should I not kill you where you lie?" I shouted at him.

He made an effort at shrugging his shoulders, but vouchsafed no other reply.

"You"--I went on, in a whirl of rage at myself, at him, at the entire universe--"you have made my whole manhood bitter. I fought you the first time I saw you, when we were little boys. Even then you insulted, injured me. I have always hated you. You have always given me reason to hate you.

It was you who poisoned Mr. Stewart's mind against me. It was you who stole my sweet sister away from me. Did this content you? No. You must drive the good old gentleman into paralysis and illness unto death--out of his mind--and you must overwhelm the poor, gentle girl with drunken brutality and cruelty, and to cap all, with desertion. And this is not enough--my G.o.d! think of it! _this_ is not enough!--but you must come with the others to force Indian war upon our Valley, upon your old neighbors!

There are hundreds lying dead here to-day in these woods--honest men whose wives, parents, little children, are waiting for them at home. They will never lay eyes on them again. Why? Because of you and your scoundrel friends. You have done too much mischief already. It is high time to put an end to you."

The wounded man had listened to me wearily, with his free hand clutched tight over his wound, and the other tearing spasmodically at the gra.s.s beside him.

"I am bleeding to death," he said, with a voice obviously weakened since his last preceding words. "So much the better for you. You would like it so. You are not bold enough to knock me on the head, or merciful enough to go about your business and leave me in peace. I ought to be above bandying words with you; nor would I if it did not take my mind from my hurt. You are right--you have always been my enemy. You were jealous of me as a little boy. You had an ap.r.o.n, and you envied me my coat. When, like a fool, I came again to this cursed wilderness, your sour face rose up in front of me like an ugly dream. It was my first disagreeable thing. Still you were jealous of me, for I was a gentleman; you were a skin-pedler. I married a maiden who had beauty and wit enough to grace my station, even though she had not been born to it. It was you who turned her mind against me, and incited her to unhappiness in the home I had given her. It was you who made a d.a.m.ned rebel out of her, and drove me into going to Canada. She has ever been more your friend than mine. You are of her sort. An English gentleman could rightly have had no part or lot with either of you. Go back to her now--tell her you left me here waiting for the wolves--and that my dying message was--"

He followed with some painfully bitter and malignant words which I have not the heart to set down here in cold blood against him.

"Let me see your wound," I said, when he had finished and sank back, exhausted.

I knelt beside him and opened his green coat, and the fine, ruffled shirt beneath it. Both were soaked with blood on the whole right side, but the soft cambric had, in a measure, checked the flow. He made no resistance, and I spread over the ugly aperture some of the plaster with which my mother had fitted me out, and bound it fast, with some difficulty, by pa.s.sing my sash under his body and winding it about his chest.

He kept his eyes closed while I was doing this. I could not tell whether he was conscious or not. Nor could I explain to myself why I was concerning myself with his wound. Was it to save, if possible, his life?

Was it to lengthen out his term of torture here in the great final solitude, helplessly facing the end, with snarling wolves and screaming kites for his death-watch? I scarcely knew which.

I try now to retrace the courses by which my thoughts, in the confused searchings of those few moments, reached finally a good conclusion; but the effort is beyond my powers. I know only that all at once it became quite clear to my mind that I must not leave my enemy to die. How much of this was due to purely physical compa.s.sion for suffering, how much to the higher pleadings of humanity, how much to the feeling that his taunts of baseness must be proved untrue, I cannot say.

I was still kneeling beside him, I know, when Enoch suddenly stood in front of me. His practised footsteps had made no sound. He glanced gravely at me and at the white, inanimate face of Cross. Emotions did not play lightly upon Enoch's leather-like visage; there was nothing in his look to tell whether he was surprised or not.

"Well, what news? How has the day gone?" I asked him.