John March, Southerner Part 38

Ravenel handed from a desk-drawer, that stood open close to his hand, a six-shooter. Champion ran down-stairs. Ravenel stepped, smiling, to a window.

March had turned his back and was putting up the sign, pressing the nails into their former places with his thumb. Men all about were peeping from windows and doors. Champion ran to the nearest tree in the square and from behind it peered here and there to catch sight of the dismounted horseman, who was stealing back to his gun.

"Keep me well covered, you lean devil," growled John to Enos, "or I'll shoot you without warning!" Working left-handed, he dropped the thumb-tack. With a curse between his teeth he stooped and picked it up, but could not press it firmly into place. He leaned his rifle against the door-post, drew the revolver and used its b.u.t.t as a hammer. Champion saw an elbow bend back from behind a tree. The mountaineer's brother had recovered his gun and was aiming it. The captain fired and hit the tree.

March whirled upon Enos with the revolver in his face, the drunkard flinched violently when not to have flinched would have saved both lives, and from the tree-trunk that Champion had struck a rifle puffed and cracked. March heard the spat of a bullet, and with a sudden horrid widening of the eyes Enos fell into his bosom.

"Great G.o.d! Enos, your brother didn't mean to----"

The only reply was a fixing of the eyes, and Enos slid through his arms and sank to the pavement dead.

Champion had tripped on a root and got a cruel fall, losing his weapon in a drift of leaves; but as the brother of Enos was just capping his swiftly reloaded gun--

"Throw up your hands!" cried Parson Tombs, laying his aged eye along the sights of March's rifle; the hands went up and in a moment were in the clutch of the town marshal, while a growing crowd ran from the prisoner and from Champion to John March, who knelt with Parson Tombs beside the dead man, moaning,

"O good Lord! good Lord! this needn't 'a' been! O Enos, I'd better 'a'

killed you myself! O great G.o.d, why didn't I keep this from happening, when I----"

Someone close to him, stooping over the dead under pretence of feeling for signs of life, murmured, "Stop talking." Then to the Parson, "Take him away with you," and then rising spoke across to Garnet, "Howdy, Major," with the old smile that could be no one's but Ravenel's. He and Garnet walked away together.

"Died of a gunshot wound received by accident," the coroner came and found. John March and the minister had gone into March's office, but Captain Champion's word was quite enough. It was nearly tea-time when John and the Parson came out again. The sidewalk was empty. As John locked the door he felt a nail under his boot, picked it up, and seeming not to realize his own action at all, stepped to the sidewalk's edge, found a loose stone and went back to the door, all the time saying,

"No, sir, I've made it perfectly terrible to think of G.o.d and a hereafter, but somehow I've never got so low down as to wish there wa'n't any. I--" his thumb pressed the nail into its hole in the corner of his sign--

"I do lots of things that are wrong, awfully wrong, though sometimes I feel--" he hammered it home with the stone--"as if I'd rather"--he did the same for the other two and the thumb-tack--"die trying to do right than live,--well,--this way. But--" tossing away the stone and wiping his hands--"that's only sometimes, and that's the very best I can say."

They walked slowly. The wind had ceased. By the _Courier_ office John halted.

"Supper! O excuse me, Mr. Tombs really! I--I can't sir!--I--I'll eat at the hotel. I've got to see a gentleman on business. But I pledge you my word, sir, I'll come to the meeting." They shook hands. "You're mighty kind to me, sir."

The gentleman he saw on business was Ravenel. They supped together in a secluded corner of the Swanee Hotel dining-room, talking of Widewood and colonization, and by the time their cigars were brought--by an obsequious black waiter with soiled cuffs--March felt that he had never despatched so much business at one sitting in his life before.

"John," said Ravenel as they took the first puff, "there's one thing you can do for me if you will: I want you to stand up with me at my wedding."

March stiffened and clenched his chair. "Jeff-Jack, you oughtn't to've asked me that, sir! And least of all in connection with this Widewood business, in which I'm so indebted to you! It's not fair, sir!"

Ravenel scarcely roused himself from reverie to reply, "You mustn't make any connection. I don't."

"Well, then, I'll not," said March. "I'll even thank you for the honor.

But I don't deserve either the honor or the punishment, and I simply can't do it!"

"Can't you 'hide in your breast every selfish care and flush your pale cheek with wine'? Every man has got to eat a good deal of crow. It's not so bad, from the hand of a friend. It shan't compromise you."

With head up and eyes widened John gazed at the friendly-cynical face before him. "It would compromise me; you know it would! Yes, sir, you may laugh, but you knew it when you asked me. You knew it would be unconditional surrender. I don't say you hadn't a right to ask, but--I'm a last ditcher, you know."

"Well," drawled Ravenel, pleasantly, when they rose, "if that's what you prefer----"

"No, I don't prefer it, Jeff-Jack; but if you were me could you help it?"

"I shouldn't try," said Ravenel.

XLII.

JOHN HEADS A PROCESSION

By the afternoon train on this last day of the year there had come into Suez a missionary returning from China on leave of absence, ill from scant fare and overwork.

General Halliday, Fannie, and Barbara were at tea when Parson Tombs brought in the returned wanderer. The General sprang to his feet with an energy that overturned his chair. "Why, Sammie Messenger, confound your young hide! Well, upon my soul! I'm outrageous proud to see you!

Fan--Barb--come here! This is one of my old boys! Sam, this is the daughter of your old Major; Miss Garnet. Why, confound your young hide!"

Parson Tombs giggled with joy. "Brother Messenger is going to add a word of exhortation to Brother Garnet's discourse," he said with grave elation, and when the General execrated such cruelty to a weary traveler, he laughed again. But being called to the front door for a moment's consultation with the pastor of the other church, he presently returned, much embarra.s.sed, with word that the missionary need not take part, a prior invitation having been accepted by Uncle Jimmie Rankin, of Wildcat Ridge. Fannie, in turn, cried out against this subst.i.tution, but the gentle shepherd explained that what mercy could not obtain official etiquette compelled.

"Tell us about John March," interposed the General. "They say you saved his life."

"I reckon I did, sir, humanly speakin'." The Parson told the lurid story, Fannie holding Barbara's hand as they listened. The church's first bell began to ring and the Parson started up.

"If only the right man could talk to John! He's very persuadable to-night and he'd take fum a stranger what he wouldn't take fum us." He looked fondly to the missionary, who had risen with him. "I wish you'd try him. You knew him when he was a toddler. He asks about you, freck-wently."

"You'd almost certainly see him down-town somewhere now," said Fannie.

Barbara gave the missionary her most daring smile of persuasion.

March was found only a step or two from Fannie's gate.

"Well, if this ain't a plumb Provi_dence_!" laughed the Parson. The three men stopped and talked, and then walked, chatted, and returned.

The starlight was cool and still. At the Parson's gate, March, refusing to go in, said, yes, he would be glad of the missionary's company on a longer stroll. The two moved on and were quite out of sight when Fannie and Barbara, with Johanna close behind them, came out on their way to church.

"It would be funny," whispered Fannie, "if such a day as this should end in John March's getting religion, wouldn't it?"

But Barbara could come no nearer to the subject than to say, "I don't like revivals. I can't. I never could." She dropped her voice significantly--"Fannie."

"What, dear?"

"What were you going to say when Johanna rang the tea-bell and your father came in?"

"Was I going to say something? What'd you think it was?"

"I think it was something about Mr. Ravenel."

"O well, then, I reckon it wasn't anything much, was it?"

"I don't know, but--Johanna, you can go on into church." They loitered among the dim, lamp-lit shadows of the church-yard trees. "You said you were not like most engaged girls."