The Deliverance Part 9

"The half-grown girl with the bunch of flaxen curls tied with a blue ribbon?" returned Tucker, while Lila cut up his food as if he were a child. "Yes, that's Molly Peterkin, though it's hard to believe she's any kin to Sol. I shouldn't wonder if she turned into a bouncing beauty a few years further on."

"It was her father, then, that I walked over with from the cross-roads," said Carraway. "He struck me as a shrewd man of his sort."

"Oh, he's shrewd enough," rejoined Tucker, "and the proof of it is that he's outlived three wives and is likely to outlive a fourth. I met him in the road yesterday, and he told me that he had just been off again to get married. 'Good luck to you this time, Sol', said I. 'Wal, it ought to be, sir,' said he, 'seeing as marrying has got to be so costly in these days. Why, my first wife didn't come to more than ten dollars, counting the stovepipe hat and all, and this last one's mounted up to 'most a hundred.'

'Try and take good care of her, then,' I cautioned; "they come too high to throw away." "That's true, sir," he answered, with a sorrowful shake of his head. "But the trouble is that as the price goes up the quality gets poorer. My first one lasted near on to thirty years, and did all the ch.o.r.es about the house, to say nothing of the hog-pen; and if you'll believe me, sir, the one before this stuck at the hog-feeding on her wedding day, and then wore out before twelve months were up.'"

He finished with his humorous chuckle and lifted his fork skilfully in his left hand.

"I dare say he overvalues himself as a husband," remarked Carraway, joining in the laugh, "but he has at least the merit of being loyal to your family."

"Well, I believe he has; but then, he doesn't like new folks or new things, I reckon. There's a saying that his hatred of changes keeps him from ever changing his clothes."

Christopher came in at the moment, and with a slight bow to Carraway, slipped into his place.

"What's Jim Weatherby chopping up that log for?" he asked, glancing in the direction of the ringing strokes.

Cynthia looked at him almost grimly, and there was a contraction of the muscles about her determined mouth.

"Ask Lila," she responded quietly. As Christopher's questioning gaze turned to her, Lila flushed rose-pink and played nervously with the breadcrumbs on the table.

"He said he had nothing else to do," she answered, with an effort, "and he knew you were so busy--that was all."

"Well, he's a first rate fellow," commented Christopher, as he reached for the pitcher of b.u.t.termilk, "but I don't see what makes him so anxious to do my work."

"Oh, that's Jim's way, you know," put in Tucker with his offhand kindliness. "He's the sort of old maid who would undertake to straighten the wilderness if he could get the job. Why, I actually found him once chopping off dead boughs in the woods, and when I laughed he excused himself by saying that he couldn't bear to see trees look so scraggy."

As he talked, his pleasant pale blue eyes twinkled with humour, and his full double chin shook over his shirt of common calico.

He had grown very large from his long inaction, and it was with a perceptible effort that he moved himself upon his slender crutches. Yet despite his maimed and suffering body he was dressed with a scrupulous neatness which was almost like an air of elegance. As he chatted on easily, Carraway forgot, in listening to him, the harrowing details in the midst of which he sat--forgot the overheated, smoky kitchen, the common pine table with its broken china, and the sullen young savage whom he faced.

For Christopher was eating his dinner hurriedly, staring at his plate in a moodiness which he did not take the trouble to conceal. With all the youthful beauty of his face, there was a boorishness in his ill-humour which in a less commanding figure would have been repellent--an evident pride in the sincerity of the scowl upon his brow. When his meal was over he rose with a muttered excuse and went out into the yard, where a few minutes afterward Carraway was bold enough to follow him.

The afternoon was golden with sunshine, and every green leaf on the trees seemed to stand out clearly against the bright blue sky. In the rear of the house there was a lack of the careful cleanliness he had noticed at the front, and rotting chips from the woodpile strewed the short gra.s.s before the door, where a clump of riotous ailanthus shoots was waging a desperate battle for existence. Beside the sunken wooden step a bare brown patch showed where the daily splashes of hot soapsuds had stripped the ground of even the modest covering that it wore. Within a stone's throw of the threshold the half of a broken wheelbarrow, white with mould, was fast crumbling into earth, and a little farther off stood a disorderly group of chicken coops before which lay a couple of dead nestlings. On the soaking plank ledge around the well-brink, where fresh water was slopping from the overturned bucket, several bedraggled ducks were paddling with evident enjoyment. The one pleasant sight about the place was the st.u.r.dy figure of Jim Weatherby, still at work upon the giant body of a dead oak tree.

When Carraway came out, Christopher was feeding a pack of hounds from a tin pan of coa.r.s.e corn bread, and to the lawyer's surprise he was speaking to them in a tone that sounded almost jocular.

Though born of a cringing breed, the dogs looked contented and well fed, and among them Carraway recognised his friend Spy, who had followed at the heels of Uncle Boaz.

"Here, Miser, this is yours," the young man was saying. "There, you needn't turn up your nose; it's as big as Blister's. Down, Spy, I tell you; you've had twice your share; you think because you're the best looking you're to be the best fed, too."

As Carraway left the steps the dogs made an angry rush at him, to be promptly checked by Christopher.

"Back, you fools; back, I say. You'd better be careful how you walk about here, sir," he added; "they'd bite as soon as not--all of them except Spy.

"Good fellow, Spy," returned Carraway, a little nervously, and the hound came fawning to his feet. "I a.s.sure you I have no intention of treading upon their preserves," he hastened to explain; "but I should like a word with you, and this seems to be the only opportunity I'll have, as I return to town to-morrow."

Christopher threw the remaining pieces of corn bread into the wriggling pack, set the pan in the doorway, and wiped his hands carelessly upon his overalls.

"Well, I don't see what you've got to say to me," he replied, walking rapidly in the direction of the well, where he waited for the other to join him.

"It's about the place, of course," returned the lawyer, with an attempt to shatter the awkward rustic reserve. "I understand that it has pa.s.sed into your possession."

The young man nodded, and, drawing out his clasp-knife, fell to whittling a splinter which he had broken from the well-brink.

"In that case," pursued Carraway, feeling as if he were dashing his head against a wall, "I shall address myself to you in the briefest terms. The place, I suppose, as it stands, is not worth much to-day. Even good land is cheap, and this is poor."

Again Christopher nodded, intent upon his whittling. "I reckon it wouldn't bring more than nine hundred," he responded coolly.

"Then my position is easy, for I am sure you will consider favourably the chance to sell at treble its actual value. I am authorised to offer you three thousand dollars for the farm."

For a moment Christopher stared at him in silence, then, "What in the devil do you want with it?" he demanded.

"I am not acting for myself in the matter," returned the lawyer, after a short hesitation. "The offer is made through me by another. That it is to your advantage to accept it is my honest conviction."

Christopher tossed the bit of wood at a bedraggled drake that waddled off, quacking angrily.

"Then it's Fletcher behind you," he said in the same cool tones.

"It seems to me that is neither here nor there. Naturally Mr.

Fletcher is very anxious to secure the land. As it stands, it is a serious inconvenience to him, of course."

Laughing, Christopher snapped the blade of his knife.

"Well, you may tell him from me," he retorted, "that just as long as it is 'a serious inconvenience to him' it shall stand as it is. Why, man, if Fletcher wanted that broken wheelbarrow enough to offer me three thousand dollars for it, I wouldn't let him have it. The only thing I'd leave him free to take, if I could help it, is the straight road to d.a.m.nation!"

His voice, for all the laughter, sounded brutal, and Carraway, gazing at him in wonder, saw his face grow suddenly l.u.s.tful like that of an evil deity. The beauty was still there, blackened and distorted, a beauty that he felt to be more sinister than ugliness. The lawyer was in the presence of a great naked pa.s.sion, and involuntarily he lowered his eyes.

"I don't think he understands your att.i.tude," he said quietly; "it seems to him--and to me also, I honestly affirm--that you would reap an advantage as decided as his own."

"Nothing is to my advantage, I tell you, that isn't harm to him.

He knows it if he isn't as big a fool as he is a rascal."

"Then I may presume that you are entirely convinced in your own mind that you have a just cause for the stand you take?"

"Cause!" the word rapped out like an oath. "He stole my home, I tell you; he stole every inch of land I owned, and every penny.

Where did he get the money to buy the place--he a slave-overseer?

Where did he get it, I ask, unless he had been stealing for twenty years?"

"It looks ugly, I confess," admitted Carraway; "but were there no books--no accounts kept?"

"Oh, he settled that, of course. When my father died, and we asked for the books, where were they?

Burned, he said--burned in the old office that the Yankees fired.

He's a scoundrel, I tell you, sir, and I know him to the core.

He's a rotten scoundrel!"

Carraway caught his breath quickly and drew back as if he had touched unwittingly a throbbing canker. To his oversensitive nature these primal emotions had a crudeness that was vulgar in its unrestraint. He beheld it all--the old wrong and the new hatred--in a horrid glare of light, a disgraceful blaze of trumpets. Here there was no cultured evasion of the conspicuous vice--none of the refinements even of the Christian ethics--it was all raw and palpitating humanity.

"Then my mission is quite useless," he confessed. "I can only add that I am sorrier than I can say sorry for the whole thing, too.

If my services could be of any use to you I should not hesitate to offer them, but so far as I see there is absolutely nothing to be done. An old crime, as you know, very often conforms to an appearance of virtue."