The Secret of the Storm Country Part 49

"What about it? Tell me," Young interrupted, as the gentle voice hesitated.

"See ... this!" she murmured, turning her head.

Young's eyes caught the red of the wound on her neck.

"He did that!... How?" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed fiercely.

"He hit me with a piece of--coal!" answered Tess, sinking back, very white.

"No, no; G.o.d, no!" he cried desperately. "He couldn't have done that!"

"He said I were ... bad," interrupted Tess, very low. She bowed her head, and the man, stunned, made no move toward her. His muscles seemed powerless, and he had no volition to comfort her. He could not erase from his mind that horrid picture her few direct words had brought before him. "But ... _you_ air trustin' me!" was the way Tess brought him back to himself.

"Then it's true what--what--"

His tongue grew parched.

"Yep, but trust me, please!" cried Tess.

Trust her! Believe in her with her confession ringing in his ears. G.o.d, if he did not love her, it wouldn't be so hard to believe, to trust, to help. But with this fierce jealousy stabbing at his heart, he felt he must know more--all. His mind went back to that time when she had come to him with a child in a basket, and her plea had been the same, "Oh, trust me! Please trust me!"

"If you could only ... tell me ... something," he groaned.

"It air true what Mr. Waldstricker hit me fer," bowed Tess, swallowing hard, "but I can't say nothin' 'bout it, I can't! I ain't able to tell nothin' more'n that!"

Young still stood several feet from her.

"I must do something to help you," he implored. "Won't you even tell me when it--it will be, Tessibel?"

Through her tense fingers the girl murmured a stifled "March."

March--scarce three months away! He would have given five years of his life to have had her tell him the truth about this thing that had crushed her. He made a nervous movement with his fingers to his hair.

"You are bound by a promise?" he demanded sharply.

A white, uplifted, pained face was his answer.

"You'll tell me some day, if you can," he said, going swiftly to her.

"Yes," whispered Tess.

And then for a long time nothing was heard in the hut but the winter without, the growls and mutterings of the bulldog in his sleep by the stove, and a sob now and then from the dwarf in the garret.

The healing silence of a common love in the presence of a common grief settled upon the strangely matched couple. The little squatter girl, with her shameful secret, and the great lawyer and teacher, kept solemn vigil over the body of Daddy Skinner.

Daddy Skinner was buried. All the arrangement in connection with the obsequies devolved upon Professor Young. It was he who brought the girl back to the shanty in her simple, clinging, black gown, and after the carriage had delivered them at the hut door, carried her, almost unconscious, into the house and laid her gently upon her bed. Then he closed the door and sat down beside her. It was perhaps an hour later when she lifted her eyes appealingly.

"I air awful glad ye stayed with me," she choked.

"Tess,"--Young's voice shook.... "Will you let me talk to you a little and not feel I'm intruding upon your sorrows or your secrets?"

"Ye wouldn't do anythin' what wasn't right," murmured the girl, under her breath.

For some moments he smoothed her burning forehead. Then he lifted her hand and held it in his.

"Tessibel," he began.

"What?"

"First, tell me about the little man in the garret."

"There ain't nothin' much to tell," she responded, shaking her head.

"When he got out of Auburn, he come here and asked me an' Daddy to take care of 'im, an' we done it, that air all."

"I see, dear--and--and you didn't think the law required you to give him up?"

Tess moved her head negatively on the pillow.

"Sure not, or I'd a done it long ago. The law--what do I care 'bout the law?... It air always puttin' innercent men in jail. That air all the law air fer."

"But this man is a murderer," Young tried to explain to her.

But Tessibel's gesture, both hands raised, palms outward, expressed her dissent.

"They said as how Daddy were a murderer, too," she retorted, "but you found out he weren't, didn't ye?"

Young, not able to gainsay this, nodded his head.

"How long are you going to keep him here?" he asked presently.

Tess sent him a glance pathetically sad and discouraged.

"I don't know. The poor little duffer hain't no friends. He ain't no other place to go where old Eb won't git 'im."

Young thought of his brother-in-law. He realized immediately with what joy that stern disciplinarian would s.n.a.t.c.h the little man back into Auburn prison. Doubtless, too, he would visit his rage on the girl who'd shielded him.

"Ye helped Daddy git out o' jail," Tess whispered. "Couldn't ye keep Andy out?"

Deforrest Young turned his face to the ceiling. A pair of gleaming eyes were staring down upon him from the square hole.

"Come down here, you," he said peremptorily.

Andy slid down the ladder and squatted himself beside the cot. Young considered the boyish face some time in silence.

"What made you kill Waldstricker?" he demanded.