The Windy Hill Part 18

"You were afraid to go elsewhere. It was your doing, this flood; you took the land, you neglected the dikes, you sent John Ma.s.sey away who would have watched against such a disaster as this. You were afraid to face those men, below, and tell them what you had done."

The other nodded.

"I haven't a friend in Medford Valley to help me--except you. Yes, I was afraid to face them; the break is in just the place where it may flood the whole bottom land. I thought they wouldn't move to help me until it was too late. And, on my life, Tom Brighton, if we can stop the flood I do not care what becomes of me."

It was quite true, as they could all see, that the man's desperate terror was not all for himself, that the situation was far too bad for that. He was picturing how the whole torrent of Medford River might soon be sweeping across those fields of ripening grain, those comfortable barns with their cows and sheep and horses, those pleasant white farmhouses where a hundred people lay asleep. He was seeing how, little by little, he had built up the wrong that was to be his ruin, he had driven away his friends, he had seized the land, he had turned off its guardian, and now, in a wild whirlwind, the results of his misdoing were upon him. He did not look at Tom Brighton's set face but at Jasper Peyton, the one he had wronged most.

"A man can't live without friends," he said. "Will you stand by me, Jasper, not for what I deserve, but for what I need?"

"Yes," answered Jasper Peyton. He smiled suddenly, with all the old, tense misery quite gone from his face. "We're going to stand by you, Anthony, all of us. We are with you still."

CHAPTER XII

MEDFORD RIVER

Cousin Tom was giving rapid directions as they went out to the waiting automobiles. "I will go on with Jasper and we will pick up some men from the farms as we pa.s.s. Anthony, you had better come with Oliver, we shall want to crowd in all the farmers we can. What is it, Polly?

You want to come with me? I suspect you think you are going to keep your father out of danger and I think the same of you. There is room in front here, between us; jump in!"

The engine grumbled and roared and the first car slid away into the shadows.

"Get in," said Oliver curtly to Anthony Crawford, while Janet opened the door of the second motor and slipped to the far side to give him room. None of the three spoke as they went down the drive behind Cousin Tom. As they came through the gate they could hear, faintly, the wild clanging of the bell in the valley below.

Oliver was too much occupied with his driving to have any other thought, Janet was awed into silence by the alien presence at her side, but Anthony Crawford, in that same husky, broken voice, suddenly began to speak as though he were following his thoughts out loud.

"I don't know why I came back to Medford Valley," he said. "I had lived through every sort of thing since I went away, but I was making good at last. Martha--that's the girl I married, she was a miner's daughter--had helped me to go straight. I was working in a mine, harder work than I had ever dreamed of in my life. It was good for me, yet I kept telling myself that it was being in prison. Perhaps it was, but I had forgotten that prison was the place where I ought to be."

Oliver tilted back his head that he might hear better, but his only answer was an inarticulate sound like a mutter of agreement. To reach the valley as soon as possible and without mishap, was more important to him, at that moment, than explanations. But Janet looked up with round, wondering eyes, eager to hear the rest.

"I kept thinking how it was here at home, so green and clean and peaceful, not like that stark, bare mountain country where I seemed to be working my whole life away. I told myself that a certain portion of Medford Valley belonged to me, that I could come back and live a life of dignified idleness, if only I had my rights, if only Jasper would give me what was my own."

"But it wasn't true. You knew that he wouldn't keep what belonged to you," burst out Janet.

"I knew it wasn't true, but people love to deceive themselves, and I had to explain to Martha. She would never have come if she had known how things really stood; she was unwilling, even as it was. But I was so sure, I thought I knew Jasper so well, exactly how I could threaten him, just where I could hurt him most. Had I not learned, when I was a boy, how proud and sensitive and generous he could be? I was as successful as I had hoped to be, but I wanted more and more, and see where it has brought me in the end!"

It seemed a relief to him to confess the very whole of his wrong-doing, to leave hidden no single meanness or small-souled thought. It was as though, in the clean night air, in the face of two just and clear-seeing companions, he wished to cast aside all the wrong of the past before making a new beginning.

"I am going away," he said. "It isn't because I found that my plan didn't pay as I had hoped it would. It is because I was happier back there in the West, serving out a sentence at hard labor, learning to live by the work of my hands rather than by my dishonorable wits. I can look back over my life and see just where my honesty began to waver, just when I first compromised with my own conscience and persuaded myself that something was fair and honest when I knew it was not. We had all the same chance, Jasper and Tom and I; look at them and look at me. You may wonder why I say all this to you. Perhaps it is because you alone saw through me, dared to tell me that I had no confidence even in my own claims, called me a man of straw and a bogy.

Well, after to-night I am going back, to be a real man again."

For the first time Oliver slackened the speed of the car and nearly stopped in the road.

"Do you want to go now?" he inquired shortly. "We can take you to the station if you do. They don't need us down there, as they do the others."

"No, not now. I must know what my criminal bungling has amounted to, first. When I have seen the flood go down, then it will be time to go.

I want to see this thing through."

They had straightened out into the level road and were forced to drive more slowly, for the highway was no longer empty. A big tractor was lumbering ahead, farm wagons turned out for them to pa.s.s, and hastily dressed men were thronging alongside. Two of them jumped upon the running board, but, seeing who sat in the car, muttered some imprecation and dropped off again. Anthony Crawford stood up and opened the door.

"I'll walk," he announced briefly. "Load in all the men you can carry.

You will need every one."

Janet climbed over to the place beside her brother, and the tonneau filled up with men, who crowded the seats, clung to the step and the fenders, and sat in a row across the back of the car. They came to the end of the road at last where, in that place that had been so empty and quiet half an hour ago, there was now gathered a surging crowd of men, of horses, tractors, automobiles, and wagons. Oliver could see, on a knoll above the others, Polly standing with two farmers' wives, the only women there.

At first he could not see the water, but, as they pressed into the crowd, he caught sight of the broad pool, dark even in the moonlight.

It was over the road, now, through the fence, and had crept halfway across the stretch of gra.s.s before John Ma.s.sey's door. Tom Brighton's white-clad figure was going back and forth among the men, but it was Cousin Jasper, standing high above the others on the seat of a wagon, who was directing operations and getting this confused army of workers into rapid organization.

"Tom, take half the men to shovel dirt and pile up the sand sacks, and send the other half back to the sand pits to fill them. Clear the road so that the wagons can go back and forth. Henry Brook, take out your horses and join your team with Johnson's, the tractor can pull two wagons and we need four horses to each of the others. Now, go to it and bring the sandbags as fast as they can be filled. We can't save John Ma.s.sey's house, but we will build a dam to hold the water a hundred yards back, where the ground begins to rise. And remember, you can't be too quick if you want to save the valley."

Oliver took off his coat and jumped out of the car.

"Go over where Polly is," he told Janet "I am going into this game with the others."

He was in every portion of it, as the night wore by, never quite knowing how he pa.s.sed from one task to another, but following orders blindly, hour after hour. He helped to dig, but was not quite so quick as the others; he carried the sacks of sand that were brought up, loaded high upon the wagons, but he had not the quick swing of the more st.u.r.dy farmers. He found himself at last on the high, vibrating seat of the heavy tractor, rumbling down the road with a line of wagons behind him, stopping at the sand pits to have them filled, then turning laboriously to haul them back again. The owner sat beside him on the first trip, directing him how to manage the unfamiliar machine, but as they made ready for a second he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "You'll do," and jumped down to labor with the diggers. Oliver was left to drive his clumsy, powerful steed alone.

He saw the broad, semicircular wall of piled sandbags, banked with earth, rise slowly as the men worked with feverish haste, he saw the water come up to the foot of it, seem to hesitate, and then creep up the side. He saw, suddenly, just as they had all stopped to breathe, a long portion of the dike begin to tremble, then cave in with a hideous, sucking crash that shook the ground under them, he saw the flood of muddy water come roaring in and sweep against the painfully built rampart which swayed and crumbled to its fall.

In a wild turmoil of running, shouting men, backing wagons and rearing horses, he managed to extricate the clumsy monster that had been put under his care, brought it laboring and snorting out on higher ground and fell to work again. The barrier they had set up with so much toil was tumbling and collapsing in great gaps where the hungry current flung against it, but it held just long enough for them to raise another wall, longer, higher, firmer than the other and built with the frantic haste of desperate men.

The hours went by, it was long after midnight, with the sky growing pale for the morning. Once or twice Oliver had seen Anthony Crawford working among the rest, carrying sacks of sand, jostled and cursed by the men about him, but in spite of their abuse, toiling steadily onward. When the dike collapsed and the men ran for their lives, one wagon lurched off the road; its driver was flung from the seat and caught under the wheel, while the horses, having jammed the tongue against the bank, reared and plunged helplessly. Oliver saw Anthony Crawford run out, with the swift, muddy water flowing knee-deep around him, watched him extricate the man, drag him to the seat, and back the frantic horses away from the bank to bring them struggling through the water to safety. There was no time for words of commendation. Both men at once went back to their task of carrying sacks as the slow building of another wall began.

Some one had built a fire on the knoll, and here the farmers' wives, with Janet and Polly among them, were boiling coffee, frying bacon, and serving out food to the hungry, worn-out men. Oliver had munched a generous sandwich as he drove down the road. As he came back again he noticed a strange lull and observed that the men were leaning on their shovels and that the work had ceased. Tom Brighton, wet and muddy from head to foot, motioned him to come near.

"We've done all we can," the big farmer beside them was saying, "the sacks are nearly gone and the men are dead beat. If she breaks through now, the whole valley will have to go under."

The water was halfway up the side of the earth-banked wall and was still rising. Here and there a muddy trickle came oozing through, to be stopped by a clod of earth, but otherwise there was nothing to do.

To Oliver it seemed that they stood for hours, staring, waiting as the water lifted slowly, rose half an inch, paused and rose again. It was three-fourths of the way up; it was a foot below the lip of the wall.

The s.p.a.ce of a foot dwindled to six inches.

"If there should be a wind, now," said the man beside him hoa.r.s.ely.

Oliver looked back along the valley at the arch of sky showing blue instead of gray, at the trees moving gently in a morning breeze that touched the hilltop, but that did not stir the still air below. He heard Tom Brighton suddenly draw a sharp breath and he looked back quickly. Was that s.p.a.ce above the water a little wider, was there a wet black line that stretched all along the rough wall where the flood had touched and fallen again? He was not dreaming; it was true. The level of the muddy tide was dropping, the crest of the flood had pa.s.sed.

It was broad daylight now, with the morning sunlight moving slowly down the slope into the valley. For the first time Oliver could see clearly the sullen, yellow pool of water, the creva.s.se in the dike, and John Ma.s.sey's little house, submerged to its very eaves. He watched the shining streak of wet earth that marked the drop in the water, he saw it broaden into a ribbon and from a ribbon turn into a wide, glistening zone of safety that proved to all the danger had gone by.

"We can go now," said Cousin Tom at last. "There is work enough still to do, but it is time for us all to rest a little. We are certainly a wet and weary-looking crew."

They had breakfast, all of the cousins together, at Cousin Jasper's house, where Mrs. Brown, having spent half the night wringing her hands in helpless anxiety, had seemed to spend the other half superintending the preparation of a feast that should be truly worthy of the occasion. The guests were all cheerful and were still so keyed up by the struggle of the night that they did not yet feel weariness.

Anthony Crawford sat on one side of Cousin Jasper, Tom Brighton on the other, while the three younger members of the party watched them wonderingly from the other end of the table. Everything, for the moment, seemed forgotten except the old comradeship of their boyhood.

The only reminder of the unhappy days just pa.s.sed lay in the atmosphere of relief and peacefulness that seemed to pervade the whole house.

The windows stood wide open and the morning wind came in to lift the long curtains and to stir the great bowl of flowers on the table.

Oliver, hungrily devouring chicken and rolls and bacon and sausages and hot waffles with maple sirup, was saying little but was listening earnestly to the jokes and laughter of Cousin Jasper. After a day and night of anxiety, depression, struggle, and victory, he seemed suddenly to have become a new man. They were talking, the three elders, of their early adventures together, but Oliver noticed that the reminiscences never traveled beyond a certain year, that their stories would go forward to the time when they were nearly grown, and then would slip back to their younger days again. Some black memory was laid across the happy recollection of their friendship, cutting off all that came after; yet they talked and laughed easily of the bright, remote happiness that was common to them all. The boy noticed, also, as they sat together, that Anthony was like the others in certain ways, that his eyes could light with the same merriment as Cousin Jasper's, and that his chin was cut in the same determined line as Tom Brighton's. Yet--no--there was something about his face that never could be quite like theirs.

They had finished at last, and Anthony Crawford, pushing back his chair, came abruptly out of the past into the present. He thrust his hand into the inner pocket of his coat and brought out some legal-looking papers like those that Cousin Tom had locked away in the tin box.