AFTER an interval, which seemed like a very long time, but was really only a matter of seconds, Evered got to his feet, and with eyes half averted started down the knoll toward the spring.
Yet even with averted eyes he was able to see what lay before him; and a certain awed wonder fell upon the man, so that he was shaken, and stopped for a moment still. And there were tremorous movements about his mouth when he went on.
His wife’s body lay where it had been flung by the first blunt blow of the red bull’s awful head. But—this was the wonder of it—the red bull had not trampled her. The beast stood above the woman’s body now, still and steady; and Evered was able to see that there was no more murder in him. He had charged the woman blindly; but it was now as though, having struck her, he knew who she was and was sorrowing. It was easy to imagine an almosthuman dejection in the posture of the huge beast.
And it was this which startled and awed Evered; for the bull had always been, to his eyes, an evil and a murderous force.
A few feet from where the woman’s body lay Evered stopped and looked at the bull; and the bull stood quite still, watching Evered without hostility. Evered found it hard to understand.
He turned to one side and knelt beside his wife’s body; but this was only for an instant. He saw at once that she was dead, beyond chance or question. There was no blood upon her, no agony of torn flesh; her garments were a little rumpled, and that was all. The mighty blow of the bull had been swift enough, and merciful. She lay a little on her side, and her lips were twisted in a little smile, not unhappily.
Evered at this time was not conscious of feeling anything at all. His mind was clear enough; his perceptions were never more acute. But his emotions seemed to be in abeyance. He looked upon his wife’s body and felt for her neither the awful hate of the last minutes nor the torturing love of the yearsthat were gone. He looked simply to see if she were dead; and she was dead. So he took off his coat and made of it a pillow for her, and laid her head upon it, and composed her where she lay. And the great red bull stood by, with that unbelievable hint of sorrow and regret in its bearing; stood still as stone, and watched so quietly.
Evered did not think of Semler; he had scarce thought of the man at all, from the beginning. When he was done with his wife he went to where the bull stood, and snapped his ash stave fast to the creature’s nose. The bull made no move, neither backed away nor snorted nor jerked aside its vast head. And Evered, his face like a stone, led the beast to one side and up the slope and through the woodlot toward the farm.
As he approached the barn he turned to one side and came to the boarded pen outside the bull’s stall. He led the beast inside this pen, loosed the stave from the nose ring, and stepped back outside the gate. Watching for a moment he saw the red bull walk slowly across the pen and go into its stall; and once inside it turned round and stood with its head in the doorway of the stall, watching him.
He made fast the gate, then passed through the barn and approached the kitchen door. Ruth, his wife’s sister, came to the door to meet him. His face was steady as a rock; there was no emotion in the man. Yet there was something about him which appalled the girl.
She asked huskily, “Did you get the bull in? I heard him, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” said Evered. “He’s in.”
“I heard him bellowing,” she explained. “And then I saw a man run up across the side field to the road.”
“That was Semler,” Evered explained coldly. “Dane Semler. He was afraid of the bull.”
“I was worried,” the girl persisted timidly, not daring to say what was in her mind. “I was worried—worried about Mary.”
“The bull killed her,” said Evered; and passed her and went into the kitchen.
Ruth backed against the wall to let him go by; and she pressed her two hands to her lips in a desperate frightened way; and her eyes were wide and staring with horror. She stared at the man, and her hands held back the clamor of her grief. She stared at him as ata monstrous thing, while Evered washed his hands at the sink and dried them on the roller towel, and combed his hair before the clean mirror hanging on the wall. There was a dreadful deliberation about his movements.
After a moment the girl began to move; she went by little sidewise steps as far as the door, and then she leaped out into the barnyard, and the screams poured from her in a frenzy of grief that was half madness. Evered turned at the first sound and watched her run, still screaming, across the barnyard to the fence; and he saw her fumble fruitlessly with the topmost bars, and at last scramble awkwardly over the fence itself in her stricken haste. She was still crying out terribly as she disappeared from his sight in the direction of the woodlot and the spring.
Evered watching her said to himself bitterly: “She knew where Mary was; knew where to look for her.”
He flung out one hand in a weak gesture of despair that came strangely from so harshly strong a man; and he began to move aimlessly about the kitchen, not knowing what he did. He took a drink at the pump; he changed his shoes for barnyard boots; he cut tobacco froma plug and filled his pipe and forgot to light it; he stood in the door, the cold pipe in his teeth, and stared out across his farm; and his teeth set on the pipestem till it cracked and roused him from his own thoughts.
Then he heard someone running, and his son, John Evered, came from the direction of the orchard, and flung a quick glance at his father, and another into the kitchen at his father’s back.
Evered looked at him, and the young man, panting from his run, said, “I heard Ruth cry out. What’s happened, father?”
Evered’s tight lips did not stir for a moment; then he took the pipe in his hand, and he said stiffly, “The red bull killed Mary.”
They were accustomed to speak of Evered’s second wife as Mary when they spoke together. John, though he loved her, had never called her mother. He loved her well; but the blood tie was strong in him, and he loved his father more. At his father’s word now he stepped nearer the older man, watching, sensing something of the agony behind Evered’s simple statement; and their eyes met and held for a little.
Then Evered said, “She was with Dane Semler at the spring.”
The gentler lines of his son’s face slowly hardened into a likeness of his own. The young man asked, “Where’s Semler?”
“Ran away,” said Evered.
“I had wanted a word with him.”
Evered laughed shortly; and it was almost the first time that John had ever seen him laugh, so that the sight was shocking and terrible. Then the older man turned back into the house.
John followed him and asked quickly, “It was at the spring?”
“Yes. The bull broke down his fence to get at a dog.”
“We must bring her home,” the son suggested quietly. “Where is Ruth?”
“Down there,” Evered told him.
John turned to the door again. “We’ll bring her home,” he said; and Evered saw the young man go swiftly across the farmyard and vault the fence and start at an easy run in the direction Ruth had gone.
Evered stayed in the house alone for a moment; and when he could bear to be alone no longer he went out into the farmyard. Ashe did so Zeke Pitkin drove in, on his way back from that errand in North Fraternity.
The bleak face of Evered appalled the timid man and frightened him; and he stammered apologetically: “W-wondered if you got the b-bull in.”
“Yes,” said Evered. “After he had killed Mary.”
Zeke stared at Evered with a face that was a mask of terror for a moment, and Evered stood still, watching him. Then Pitkin gathered his reins clumsily, and clumsily turned his horse, so sharply that his wagon was well-nigh overthrown by the cramped wheel. When it was headed for the road he lashed out with the whip, and the horse leaped forward. Evered could hear it galloping out to the main road, and then to the left, toward Fraternity.
“Town’ll know in half an hour,” he said half to himself.
The man was still in a stupor, his emotions numb. But he did not want to be alone. After a moment he went out into the stable and harnessed the horse to his light wagon and started down a wood road toward the spring. The wagon would serve to bring his wife’s body home.
The vehicles on a Fraternity farm are there for utility, almost without exception. Evered had a mowing machine, a rake, a harrow, a sledge, a single-seated buggy and this light wagon. He was accustomed to take the wagon when he went butchering; and it had served to haul the carcasses of any number of sheep or calves or pigs or steers from farm to market. He had no thought that he was piling horror on horror in taking this wagon to bring home his wife’s body.
He laid a double armful of hay in the bed of the wagon before he started; and he himself walked by the horse’s head, easing it over the rough places. The wood road which he followed would take him within two or three rods of the spring.
John Evered, going before his father, had found Ruth MacLure passionately sobbing above the body of her sister. And at first he could not bring himself to draw near to her; he was held by some feeling that to approach her would be sacrilege. There had been such a love between the sisters as is not often seen; there was a spiritual intimacy between them, a sympathy of mind and heart akin to that sometimes marked between twins. Johnknew this; he knew all that Ruth’s grief must be. And so he stood still, a little ways off from her, and waited till the tempest of her grief should pass.
When she was quieter he spoke to her; and at the sound of his voice the girl whirled to face him, still kneeling; and there were no more tears in her. He was frightened at the stare of challenge in her eyes. He said quickly, “It’s me.”
She shook her head as though something blurred her sight. “I thought it was your father,” she told him, and there was a bitter condemnation in her tone.
John said, “You mustn’t blame him.”
“He’s not even sorry,” she explained softly, thoughtfully.
“He is,” John insisted. “You never understood him. He loved her so.”
She flung her head to one side impatiently and got to her feet, brushing at her eyes with her sleeve, fumbling with her hair, composing her countenance. “It’s growing dark,” she said. “We must take her home.”
He nodded. “I’ll carry her,” he said; and he crossed and bent above the dead woman, and looked at her for a moment silently. Thegirl, watching him, saw in the still strength of his features a likeness to his father that was suddenly terrible and appalling.
She shuddered; and when he would have lifted her sister’s body she cried out in passionate hysterical protest, “Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! You shan’t touch her, John Evered!”
John looked at her slowly; and with that rare understanding which was the birthright of the man he said, “You’re blaming father.”
“Yes, yes,” she cried, “I am.”
“It was never his fault,” he said.
“He kept that red, killing brute about,” she protested. “Oh, he killed her, he killed Mary, he killed my sister, John.”
“That is not fair,” he told her.
Before she could answer they both hushed to the sound of the approaching wagon; and Evered came toward them, leading the horse, and he turned it and backed the wagon in below the spring.
They did not speak to him, nor he to them. But when he was ready he went toward the dead woman to lift her into the wagon bed; and Ruth pushed between them and cried:“You shan’t touch her! You shan’t touch her, ever!”
Evered looked at her steadily; and after a moment he said, “Stand to one side.”
The girl wished to oppose him; but it was a tribute to his strength that even in this moment the sheer will of the man overpowered her. She moved aside; and Evered lifted his wife’s body with infinite gentleness and disposed it upon the fragrant hay in the wagon bed. He put the folded coat again beneath his wife’s head as a pillow, as though she were only sleeping.
Still with no word to them he took the horse’s rein and started to lead it toward the road and up the hill. And Ruth and John, after a moment, followed a little behind.
When they came up into the open, out of the scattering trees, a homing crow flying overhead toward its roost saw them. It may have been that the wagon roused some memory in the bird, offered it some promise. At any rate, the black thing circled on silent wing, and lighted in the road along which they had come, and hopped and flopped behind them as they went slowly up the hill toward the farm.
Ruth saw the bird and shuddered; and Johnwent back and drove it into flight; but it took earth again, farther behind them.
It followed them insistently up the hill; and it was still there, a dozen rods away, as they brought Mary Evered home.
WHEN they came into the farmyard night was falling. In the west the sky still showed bright and warm; and against this brilliant sky the hills were purple and deeper purple in the distance. In the valleys mists were rising and black pools of night were forming beneath these mists; and while Evered bore his wife’s body into the house and laid it on the bed in the spare room, these pools rose and rose until they topped the hills and overflowed the world with darkness. The air was still hot and heavy, as it had been all day; and the sultry sky which had intensified the heat of the sun served now to hide the stars. When it grew dark it was as dark as pitch. The blackness seemed tangible, as though a man might catch it in his hand.
Ruth stayed beside her sister; but John built a fire in the stove while Evered sat by in stony calm, and he made coffee and fried salt porkand boiled potatoes. There were cold biscuits which Mary Evered had made that morning, and doughnuts from the crock in the cellar. When the supper was ready he called Ruth; and she came. The most tragic thing about death is that it accomplishes so little. The dropping of man or woman into the pool of the infinite is no more than the dropping of a pebble into a brook. The surface of the pool is as calm, a little after, as it was before. Thus, now, save that Mary was not at the table, their supping together was as it had always been.
And after they had eaten they must go with the familiarity of long habit about their evening chores. Ruth washed the dishes; John and his father fed the beasts and milked the cows; and when they came in John turned the separator while Ruth attended to the milk and put away, afterward, the skim milk and the cream.
By that time two or three neighbors had come in, having heard of that which had come to pass. There was genuine sorrow in them, for Mary Evered had been a woman to be loved; but there was also the ugly curiosity native to the human mind; and there was speculation in each eye as they watched Everedand John and Ruth. They would discuss, for days to come, the bearing of each one of the three on that black night.
For Evered, the man was starkly silent, saying no word. He sat by the table, eyes before him, puffing his pipe. Ruth stayed by her sister as though some instinct of protection kept her there. John talked with those who came, told them a little. He did not mention Semler’s part in the tragedy. He said simply that the bull had broken loose; that Mary Evered was by the spring, where she liked to go; that the bull came upon her there.
They asked morbidly whether she was trampled and torn; and they seemed disappointed when he told them that she was not, that even the terrible red bull had seemed appalled at the thing which he had done. And through the evening others came and went, so that he had to say the same things over and over; and always Evered sat silently by the table, giving no heed when any man spoke to him; and Ruth, in the other room, kept guard above the body. The women went in there, some of them; but no men went in.
John had telephoned to Isaac Gorfinkle, whose business it was to prepare poor humanclay for its return to earth again; and Gorfinkle came about midnight and put all save Ruth out of the room where the dead woman lay. Gorfinkle was a little, fussy man; a man who knew his doleful trade. Before day he and Ruth had done what needed doing; and Mary Evered lay in the varnished coffin he had brought. Her white hair and the sweet nobility of her countenance, serenely lying there, made those who looked forget the ugly splendor of Gorfinkle’s wares.
It was decided that she should be buried on the second day. On the day after her death many people came to the farm; and some came from curiosity, and some from sympathy, and some with an uncertain purpose in their minds.
These were the selectmen of the town—Lee Motley, chairman; and Enoch Thomas, of North Fraternity; and Old Man Varney. Motley, a sober man and a man of wisdom, was of Evered’s own generation; Enoch Thomas and Varney were years older. Old Varney had a son past thirty, whom to this day he thrashed with an ax stave when the spirit moved him, his big son good-naturedly accepting the outrage.
Thomas and Varney came to demand thatEvered kill his red bull; and Motley put the case for them.
“We’ve talked it over,” he said. “Seem’s like the bull’s dangerous; like he ought to be killed. That’s what we’ve—what we’ve voted.”
Evered turned his heavy eyes from man to man; and Old Varney brandished his cane and called the bull a murdering beast, and bade Evered take his rifle and do the thing before their eyes. Evered’s countenance changed no whit; he looked from Varney to Thomas, who was silent, and from Thomas to Lee Motley.
“I’ll not kill the bull,” he said.
Before Motley could speak, Varney burst into abuse and insistent demand; and Evered let him talk. When the old man simmered to silence they waited for Evered to answer, but Evered held his tongue till Lee Motley asked, “Come, Evered, what do you say?”
“What I have said,” Evered told them.
“The town’ll see,” Old Varney shrilled, and shook his fist in Evered’s face. “The town’ll see whether a murdering brute like that is to range abroad. If you’ve not shame enough—your own wife, man—your own——” he wagged his head. “The town’ll see.”
Said Evered: “I’ll not take rifle to the bull; but if any man comes here to kill the beast, I’ll have use for that rifle of mine.”
Which fanned Varney to a fresh outbreak, till Evered flung abruptly toward him, and abruptly said, “Be still.”
So were they still; and Evered looked them in the eye, man by man, till he came to Motley; and then he said, “Motley, I thought there was more wisdom in you.”
“Aye,” cried Varney. “He’s as big a fool as you.”
And Motley said, “I voted against this, Evered. The bull’s yours, if you’re a mind to kill him. I’m not for making you. It’s your own affair, you mind. And—the ways of a bull are the ways of a bull. The brute’s not overmuch to be blamed.”
Evered nodded and turned his back on them; and after a time they went away. But when Evered went into the house he met Ruth, and the girl stopped him and asked him huskily, “You’re not going to kill that red beast?”
Evered hesitated; then he said, with something like apology in his tones, “No, Ruth.”
She began to tremble, and he saw that words were hot on her lips; and he lifted onehand in a placating gesture. She turned into the other room, and the door shut harshly at her back. Evered’s eyes rested on the door for a space, a curious questioning in them, a wistful light that was strange to see.
All that day Ruth was still, saying little. No word passed between her and Evered, and few words between her and John. But that night, when they were alone, John spoke to her in awkward comfort and endearment.
“Please, Ruthie,” he begged. “You’re breaking yourself. You’ll be sick. You must not be so hard.”
He put an arm about her, as though he would have kissed her; but the girl’s hands came up against his chest, and the girl’s eyes met his in a fury of horror and loathing, and she flung him away.
“Don’t! Don’t!” she cried in a voice that was like a scream. “Don’t ever! You—his son!”
John, inexpressibly hurt, yet understanding, left her alone; he told himself she was not to be blamed, with the agony of grief still scourging her.
One of the neighbor women came in that night to sit with Ruth; and Ruth slept a littlethrough the night. John was early abed; he had had no sleep the night before, and he was tired. He sank fathoms deep in slumber; a slumber broken by fitful, unhappy dreams. His own grief for the woman who had been mother to him had been stifled, given no chance for expression, because he had fought to comfort Ruth and to ease his father. The reaction swept over him while he slept; he rested little.
Evered, about nine o’clock, went to the room he and his wife had shared for so many years. He had not, before this, been in the room since she was killed. Some reluctance had held him; he had shunned the spot. But now he was glad to be alone, and when he had shut the door he stood for a moment, looking all about, studying each familiar object, his nerves reacting to faint flicks of pain at the memories that were evoked.
He began to think of what the selectmen had said, of their urgency that he should kill the bull. And he sat down on the edge of the bed and remained there, not moving, for a long time. Once his eye fell on his belt hanging against the wall, with the heavy knife that he used in his butchering in its sheath.He reached out and took down the belt and drew the knife forth and held it in his hands, the same knife that had killed drunken Dave Riggs long ago. A powerful weapon, it would strike a blow like an ax; the handle of bone, the blade heavy and keen and strong. He balanced it between his fingers, and thought of how he had struck it into the neck of Zeke Pitkin’s bull, and how the bull had dropped in midlife and never stirred more. The knife fascinated him; he could not for a long time take his eyes away from it. At the last he reached out and thrust it into its sheath with something like a shudder, strange to see in so strong a man.
Then he undressed and got into bed, the bed he had shared with Mary Evered. He had blown out the lamp; the room was dark. There was a little current of air from the open window. And after a little Evered began to be as lonely as a boy for the first time away from home.
There is in every man, no matter how stern his exterior, a softer side. Sometimes he hides it from all the world; more often his wife gets now and then a glimpse of it. There was a side of Evered which only Mary Everedhad known. And she had loved it. When they had come to bed together it always seemed to her that Evered was somehow gentler, kinder. He put away his harshness, as though it were a part he had felt called upon to play before men. The child in him, strong in most men, came to the surface. He was never a man overgiven to caresses, but when they were alone at night together, and he was weary, he would sometimes draw her arm beneath his head as a pillow or take her hand and lift it to rest upon his forehead, while she twined her fingers gently through his hair.
They used to talk together, sometimes far into the night; and though he might have used her bitterly through the day, with caustic tongue and hard, condemning eye, he was never unkind in these moments before they slept. A man the world outside had never seen. It was these nights together which had made life bearable for Mary Evered; and they had been dear to Evered too. How dreadful and appalling, then, was this, his first night alone.
Her shoulder was not there to cradle his sick and weary head; her gentle hand wasnot there to cool his brow. When he flung an arm across her pillow, where she used to lie, it embraced a gulf of emptiness that seemed immeasurably deep and terrible. After a little, faint perspiration came out upon the man’s forehead. He turned on his right side, in the posture that invited sleep; but at first sleep would not come. His limbs jerked and twitched; his eyelids would not close. He stared sightlessly into the dark. Outside in the night there were faint stirrings and scratchings and movings to and fro; and each one brought him more wide awake than the last. He got up and closed the window to shut them out, and it seemed to him the closed room was filled with her presence. When he lay down again he half fancied he felt her hand upon his hair, and he reached his own hand up to clasp and hold hers, as he had sometimes used to do; but his groping fingers found nothing, and came sickly away again.
How long he lay awake he could not know. When at last he dropped asleep the very act of surrender to sleep seemed to fetch him wide awake again. Waking thus he thought that he held his wife in his arms; he had often wakened in the past to find her there. But ashis senses cleared he found that the thing which he held so tenderly against his side was only the pillow on which her head was used to lie.
The man’s nerves jangled and clashed; and he threw the pillow desperately away from him as though he were afraid of it. He sat up in bed; and his pulses pounded and beat till they hurt him like the blows of a hammer. There was no sleep in Evered.
He was still sitting thus, bolt upright, sick and torn and weary, when the gray dawn crept in at last through the window panes.
THE day of Mary Evered’s burial was such a day as comes most often immediately after a storm, when the green of the trees is washed to such a tropical brightness that the very leaves radiate color and the air is filled with glancing rays of light. There were white clouds in the blue sky; clouds not dense and thick, but lightly frayed and torn by the winds of the upper reaches, and scudding this way and that according to the current which had grip of them. Now and then these gliding clouds obscured the sun; and the sudden gloom made men look skyward, half expecting a burst of rain. But for the most part the sun shone steadily enough; and there was an indescribable brilliance in the light with which it bathed the earth. Along the borders of the trees, round the gray hulks of the bowlders, and fringing the white blurs of the houses there seemed to shimmer a halo of colors so faint and fine they could be sensed but not seen by the eye. The trees and the fields were an unearthlygaudy green; the shadows deep amid the branches were trembling, changing pools of color. A day fit to bewitch the eye, with a soft cool wind stirring everywhere.
Evered himself was early about, attending to the morning chores. Ruth MacLure had fallen asleep toward morning, and the woman with her let the girl rest. John woke when he heard his father stirring; and it was he who made breakfast ready, when he had done his work about the barn. He and his father ate together, and Ruth did not join them.
Evered, John saw, was more silent than his usual silent custom; and the young man was not surprised, expecting this. John himself, concerned for Ruth, and wishing he might ease the agony of her grief, had few words to say. When they were done eating he cleared away the dishes and washed them and put them away; and then he swept the floor, not because it needed sweeping, but because he could not bear to sit idle, doing nothing at all. He could hear the women stirring in the other room; and once he heard Ruth’s voice.
John’s grief was more for the living than for the dead; he had loved Mary Evered truly enough, but there was a full measure of philosophy in the young man. She was dead; and according to the simple trust which was a part of him she was happy. But Ruth was unhappy, and his father was unhappy. He wished he might comfort them.
Evered at this time was soberly miserable; his mind was still numb, his emotions were just beginning to assert themselves. He could not think clearly, could scarce think at all. What passed for thought with him was merely a jumble of exclamations, passionate outcries, curses and laments. Mary was dead; and he knew that dimly, without full comprehension of the knowledge. More clearly he remembered Mary and Dane Semler, sitting so intimately side by side; and the memory was compounded of anguish and of satisfaction—anguish because she was false, satisfaction because her frailty in some small measure justified the monstrous thing he had permitted, and in permitting had done. Evered did not seek to deceive himself; he knew that he had killed Mary Evered as truly as he had killed Dave Riggs many a year ago. He did not put the knowledge into words; nevertheless, it was there, in the recesses of his mind, concrete and ever insistent. And when sorrow and remorse began to prick at him with little pins of fire he told himself, over and over, that she had been frail, and so got eased of the worst edge of pain.
A little after breakfast people began to come to the house. Isaac Gorfinkle was first of them all, and he busied himself with his last ugly preparations. Later the minister came—a boy, or little more; fresh from theological school. His name was Mattice, and he was as prim and meticulous as the traditional maiden lady who is so seldom found in life. He tried to speak unctuous comfort to Evered, but the man’s scowl withered him; he turned to John, and John had to listen to him with what patience could be mustered. And more men came, and stood in groups about the farmyard, smoking, spitting, shaving tiny curls of wood from splinters of pine; and their women went indoors and herded in the front room together, and whispered and sobbed in a hissing chorus indescribably horrible. There is no creation of mankind so hideous as a funeral; there is nothing that should be more beautiful. The hushed voices, the damp scent of flowers, the stifling closeness of tight-windowed rooms, the shuffling of feet, the rawsnuffles of those who wept—these sounds filled the house and came out through the open doors to the men, whispering in little groups outside.
Ruth MacLure was not weeping; nor Evered; nor John. And the mourning, sobbing women kissed Ruth and called her brave; and they whispered to each other that Evered was hard, and that John was like his father. And the lugubrious debauch of tears went on interminably, as though Gorfinkle—whose duty it would be to give the word when the time should come—thought these preliminaries were requisites to a successful funeral.
But at last it was impossible to wait longer without going home for dinner, and Gorfinkle, who was accustomed to act as organist on such occasions, took his seat, pumped the treadles and began to play. Then everyone crowded into the front room or stood in the hall; and a woman sang, and young Mattice spoke for a little while, dragging forth verse after verse of sounding phrase which rang nobly even in his shrill and uncertain tones. More singing, more tears. A blur of pictures photographed themselves on Ruth’s eyes; words that she would never forget struck herears in broken phrases. She sat still, steady and quiet. But her nerves were jangling; and it seemed to the girl she must have screamed aloud if the thing had not ended when it did.
Then the mile-long drive to the hilltop above Fraternity, with its iron fence round about, and the white stones within; and there the brief and solemn words, gentle with grief and glorious with triumphant hope, were spoken above the open grave. And the first clod fell. And by and by the last; and those who had come began to drift away to their homes, to their dinners, to the round of their daily lives.
Evered and John and Ruth drove home together in their light buggy, and Ruth sat on John’s knee. But there was no yielding in her, there was no softness about the girl. And no word was spoken by any one of them upon the way.
At home, alighting, she went forthwith into the house; and John put the horse up, while his father fed the pigs and the red bull in his stall. When they were done Ruth called them to dinner, appearing for an instant at the kitchen door. John reached the kitchen beforehis father; and the pain in him made him speak to the girl before Evered came.
“Ruthie,” he said softly. “Please don’t be too unhappy.”
She looked at him with steady eyes, a little sorrowful. “I’m not unhappy, John,” she said. “Because Mary is not unhappy, now. Don’t think about me.”
“I can’t help thinking about you,” he told her; and she knew what was behind his words, and shook her head.
“You’ll have to help it,” she said.
“Why, Ruthie,” he protested, “you know how I feel about you.”
Her eyes shone somberly. “It’s no good, John,” she answered. “You’re too much Evered. I can see clearer now.”
They had not, till then, marked Evered himself in the doorway. Ruth saw him and fell silent; and Evered asked her in a low steady voice, “You’re blaming me?”
“I’m cursing you,” said the girl.
Evered held still for a little, as though it were hard for him to muster words. Then he asked huskily, “What was my fault?”
She flung up her hand. “Everything!” she cried. “I’ve lived here with you. I’ve seenyou—breaking Mary by inches, and nagging and teasing and pestering her. Till she was sick with it. And she kept loving you, so you could hurt her more. And you did. You loved to hurt her. Hard and cruel and mean and small—you’d have beat her as you do your beasts, if you’d dared. Coward too. Oh!”
She flung away, began to move dishes aimlessly about upon the table. Evered was gripped by a desire to placate her, to appease her; he thought of Dane Semler, wished to cry out that accusation against his wife. But he held his tongue. He had seen Semler with Mary; he had told John; Ruth knew that Semler had been upon the farm. But neither of them spoke of the man, then or thereafter. They told no one; and though Fraternity might wonder and conjecture, might guess at the meaning of Semler’s swift flight on the day of the tragedy, the town would never know.
Evered did not name Semler now; and it was not any sense of shame that held his tongue. He believed wholly in that which his eyes had seen, and all that it implied. Himself scarce knew why he did not speak; andhe would never have acknowledged that it was desire to shield his wife, even from her own sister, which kept him silent. After a moment he sat down and they began to eat.
Toward the end of the meal he said to Ruth uneasily: “Feeling so, you’ll not be like to stay here with John and me.”
Ruth looked at him with a quick flash of eyes; she was silent, thoughtfully. She had not considered this; had not considered what she was to do. But instantly she knew.
“Yes, I’m going to stay,” she told Evered. “This thing isn’t done. There’s more to come. It must be so. For all you did there’s something that will come to you. I want to be here, to see.” Her hands clenched on the table edge. “I want to see you when it comes—see you squirm and crawl.”
There was such certainty in her tone that Evered, spite of himself, was shaken. He answered nothing; and the girl said again, “Yes; I am going to stay.”
The red bull in his stall bellowed aloud; a long, rumbling, terrible blare of challenge. It set the dishes dancing on the table before them; and when they listened they could hear the monstrous beast snorting in his stall.
AFTER the death of Mary Evered the days slipped away, and June passed to July, and July to August. Gardens prospered; the hay ripened in the fields; summer was busy with the land. But winter is never far away in these northern hills; and once in July and twice in August the men of the farms awoke in early morning to find frost faintly lying, so that there were blackened leaves in the gardens, and the beans had once to be replanted. Customary hazards of their arduous life.
The trout left quick water and moved into the deep pools; and a careful fisherman, not scorning the humble worm, might strip a pool if he were murderously inclined. The summer was dry; and as the brooks fell low and lower little fingerlings were left gasping and flopping upon the gravel of the shallows here and there. Nick Westley, the game warden for the district, and a Fraternity man, went about with dip net and pail, bailing pennedtrout from tiny shallows and carrying them to the larger pools where they might have a chance for life. Some of the more ardent fishermen imitated him; and some took advantage of the trout’s extremity to bring home catches they could never have made in normal times.
John Evered loved fishing; and he knew the little brook along the hither border of Whitcher Swamp, below the farm, as well as he knew his own hand. But this year had been busy; he found no opportunity to try the stream until the first week of July. One morning then, with steel rod and tiny hooks, and a can of bait at his belt, he struck down through the woodlot, past the spring where Mary had been killed, into the timber below, and so came to the wall that was the border of his father’s farm, and crossed into the swamp.
Whitcher Swamp is on the whole no pleasant place for a stroll; yet it has its charms for the wild things, and for this reason John loved it. Where he struck the marshy ground it was relatively easy going; and he took a way he knew and came to the brook and moved along it a little ways to a certain broad and open pool.
He thought the brook was lower than he had ever seen it at this season; and once he knelt and felt the water, and found it warm. He smiled at this with a certain gratification for the pool he sought was a spring hole, water bubbling up through pin gravel in the brook’s very bed, and the trout would be there to dwell in that cooler stream. When he came near the place, screened behind alders so that he could not be seen, he uttered an exclamation, and became as still as the trees about him while he watched.
There were trout in the pool, a very swarm of them, lying close on the yellow gravel bottom. The water, clear as crystal, was no more than three feet deep; and he could see them ever so plainly. Big fat fish, monsters, if one considered the brook in which he found them. He judged them all to be over nine inches, several above a foot, one perhaps fourteen inches long; and his eyes were shining. They were so utterly beautiful, every line of their graceful bodies, and every dappled spot upon their backs and sides as clear as though he held them in his hands.
He rigged line and hook, nicked a long worm upon the point, and without so muchas shaking an alder branch thrust his rod through and swung the baited hook and dropped it lightly in the very center of the pool, full fifteen feet from shore. Then he swung upward with a strong steady movement, for he had seen a great trout strike as the worm touched the water, had seen the chewing jaws of the fish mouthing its titbit. And as he swung, the gleaming body came into the air, through an arc above his head, into the brush behind him, where he dropped on his knees beside it and gave it merciful death with the haft of his heavy knife, and dropped it into his basket.
Fly fishermen will laugh with a certain scorn; or they will call John Evered a murderer. Nevertheless, it is none so easy to take trout even in this crude fashion of his. A shadow on the water, a stirring of the bushes, a too-heavy tread along the bank—and they are gone. Nor must they be hurried. The capture of one fish alarms the rest; the capture of two disturbs them; the taking of three too quickly will send them flying every whither.
John, after his first fish, filled and lighted his pipe, then caught a second; and afteranother interval, a third—fat, heavy trout, all of them; as much as three people would care to eat; and John was not minded to kill more than he could use. He covered the three with wet moss in his basket, and then he crept back through the alders and lay for a long time watching the trout in the pool, absorbing the beauty of their lines, watching how they held themselves motionless with faintest quivers of fin, watching how they fed.
A twelve-inch trout rose and struck at a leaf upon the pool’s surface, and John told himself, “They’re hungry.” He laughed a little, and got an inch-long twig and tied it to the end of his line in place of hook. This he cast out upon the pool, moving it to and fro erratically. Presently a trout swirled up and took it under, and spat it out before John could twitch the fish to the surface. John laughed aloud, and cast again. He stayed there for a long hour at this sport, and when the trout sulked he teased them with bits of leaf or grass. Once he caught a cricket and noosed it lightly and dropped it on the water. When the fish took it down John waited for an instant, then tugged and swung the trouthalf a dozen feet into the air before he could disgorge the bait.
“Hungry as sin,” John told himself at last; and his eyes became sober as he considered thoughtfully. There were other men about, as good fishermen as he, and not half so scrupulous. If they should come upon this pool on such a day——
He did a thing that might seem profanation to the fisherman who likes a goodly bag. He gathered brush and threw it into the pool; he piled it end to end and over and over; he found two small pines; dead in their places among their older brethren; and he pushed them from their rotting roots and dragged them to the brook and threw them in. When he was done the pool was a jungle, a wilderness of stubs and branches; a sure haven for trout, a spot almost impossible to fish successfully. While he watched, when his task was finished, he saw brown darting shadows in the stream as the trout shot back into the covert he had made; and he smiled with a certain satisfaction.
“They’ll have to fish for them now,” he told himself.
He decided to try and see whether a manmight take a trout from the pool in its ambushed state. It meant an hour of waiting, a snagged hook or two, a temper-trying ordeal with mosquitoes and flies. But in the end he landed another fish, and was content. He went back through the swamp and up to the farm, well pleased.
Moving along the brook he saw other pools where smaller fish were lying; and that night he told Ruth what he had seen. “You can see all the trout you’re minded to, down there now,” he said.
The girl nodded unsmilingly. She had not yet learned to laugh again, since her sister’s death. They were a somber household, these three—Evered steadily silent, the girl sober and stern, John striving in his awkward fashion to win mirth from her and speech from Evered.
The early summer was to pass thus. And what was in Evered’s mind as the weeks dragged by no man could surely know. His eye was as hard as ever, his voice as harsh; yet to Ruth it seemed that new lines were forming in his cheeks, and his hair, that had been black as coal, she saw one afternoon was streaked with gray. Watching, thereafter,she marked how the white hairs increased in number. Once she spoke of it to John, constrainedly, for there was no such pleasant confidence between these two as there had been.
John nodded. “Yes,” he said, “he’s aging. He loved her, Ruth; loved her hard.”
Ruth made no comment, but there was no yielding in her eyes. She was in these days implacable; and Evered watched her now and then with something almost pleading in his gaze. He began to pay her small attentions, which came absurdly from the man. She tried to hate him for them.
Once John sought to comfort his father, spoke to him gently of the dead woman; and Evered cried out, as though to assure himself as well as silence John: “She was tricking me, John! Leaving me. With Semler, that very day.”
He would not let John reply, silenced him with a fierce oath and flung away. It might have been guessed that his belief in his wife’s treachery was like an anchor to which Evered’s racked soul clung; as though he found comfort and solace in the ugly thought, a justifying consolation.
JOHN went no more to the brooks that summer; but what he had told Ruth led her that way more than once. Westley, the game warden, stopped at the house one day, and found her alone, and asked her whether John was fishing. She told him of John’s one catch.
“Swamp Brook is full of trout,” she said; “penned in the holes and the shallows.”
Westley nodded. “It’s so everywhere,” he agreed. “I’m dipping and shifting them. Tell John to do that down in the swamp if he can find the time.”
She asked how it should be done; and when Westley had gone she decided that she would herself go down and try the trick of it if the drought still held.
The drought held. No rain came; and once in early August she spent an afternoon along the stream, and transported scores of tiny trout to feeding grounds more deep and more secure.Again a week later; and still again as the month drew to a close.
It was on this third occasion that the girl came upon Darrin. Working along the brook with dip net and pail she had marked the footprints of a man in the soft earth here and there. The swamp was still, no air stirring, the humming of insects ringing in her ears. A certain gloom dwelt in these woods even on the brightest day; and the black mold bore countless traces and tracks of the animals and the small vermin which haunted the place at night. Ruth might have been forgiven for feeling a certain disquietude at sight of those man tracks in the wild; but she had no such thought. She had never learned to be afraid.
She came upon Darrin at last with an abruptness that startled her. The soft earth muffled her footsteps; she was within two or three rods of him before she saw him, and even then the man had not heard her. He was kneeling by the brook and at first she thought he had been drinking the water. Then she saw that he was studying something there upon the ground; and a moment later he got up and turned and saw her standing there. At first he was so surprised that he could notspeak, and they were still, looking at each other. The girl, bareheaded, in simple waist and heavy short skirt, with rubber boots upon her feet so that she might wade at will, was worth looking at. The man himself was no mean figure—khaki flannel shirt, knickerbockers, leather putties over stout waterproof shoes. She carried pail in one hand, dip net in the other; and she saw that he had a revolver slung in one hip, a camera looped over his shoulder.
He said at last, “Hello, there!” And Ruth nodded in the sober fashion that was become her habit. The man asked, “What have you got? Milk, in that pail? Is this your pasture land?”
“Trout,” she told him; and he came to see the fish in a close-packed mass; and he exclaimed at them, and watched while she put them into the stream below where he had been kneeling. He asked her why she did it, and she told him. At the same time she looked toward where he had knelt, wondering what he saw there. She could see only some deep-imprinted moose tracks; and moose tracks were so common in the swamp that it was not worth while to kneel to study them.
He saw her glance, and said, “I was looking at those tracks. Moose, aren’t they?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“They told me there were moose in here,” he said. “I doubted it, though. So far south as this.”
“There are many moose in the swamp,” she declared.
He asked, “Have you ever seen them?”
She smiled a little. “Once in a while. A cow moose wintered in our barn two years ago.”
He slapped his thigh lightly. “Then this is the place I’m looking for,” he exclaimed.
She asked softly, “Why?” She was interested in the man. He was not like John, not like anyone whom she had known; except, perhaps, Dane Semler. A man of the city, obviously. “Why?” she asked.
“I want to get some pictures of them,” he explained. “Photographs. In their natural surroundings. Wild. In the swamp.”
“John took a snapshot of the cow that wintered with us,” she said. “I guess he’d give you one.”
The man laughed. “I’d like it,” he toldher; “but I want to get a great many.” He hesitated. “Where is your farm?”
She pointed out of the swamp toward the hill.
“Near?” he asked.
And she said, “It’s right over the swamp.”
“Listen,” he said eagerly. “My name’s Darrin—Fred Darrin. What’s yours?”
“Ruth MacLure.”
“Why you’re Evered’s sister-in-law, aren’t you?”
She nodded, her cheeks paling a little. “Yes.”
“I was coming to see Evered to-night,” he said. “I want to board at the farm while I work on these pictures—that is, I want permission to camp down here by the swamp somewhere, and get milk and eggs and things from you. Do you think I can?”
“Camp?” she echoed.
“Yes.”
She looked round curiously, as though she expected to see his equipment there. “Haven’t you a tent?”
He laughed. “No. I’ve a tarp for a shelter; and I can cut some hemlock boughs and build a shack; if you’ll let me trespass.”
“You could sleep in the barn I guess,” she said. “Or maybe in the house.”
He shook his head. “No roof for mine. This is my vacation, you understand. I can sleep under a roof at home.”
“You’ll be getting wet all the time.”
“I’ll dry when the sun comes out.”
She asked, “Who’s going to cook for you?”
“I’m a famous cook,” he told her.
She had the rooted distrust of the open air which is common among the people of the farms. She could not see why a man should sleep on the ground when he might have hay or a bed; and she could not believe in the practicality of cooking over an open fire; especially when there was a stove at hand.
“You’ll have to see Mr. Evered,” she said uneasily.
So it happened that they two went back through the swamp together and up the hill; and they came side by side to meet Evered and John in the barnyard by the kitchen door.
They had their colloquy there in the open barnyard, while the slanting rays of the sun drew lengthening shadows from where they stood. Darrin spoke to Evered. John went into the house after a moment and built a firefor Ruth; and then he came out again while the girl went about the business of supper.
Darrin was a good talker; and Evered’s silence made him seem like a good listener. When John came out he was able to tell Darrin something of the moose in the swamp, their haunts and their habits. Darrin listened as eagerly as he had talked. He told them at last what he had come to do; he explained how by trigger strings and hidden cameras and flash-light powders he hoped to capture the images of the shy giants of the forest. John listened with shining eyes. The project was of a sort to appeal to him. As for Evered, he had little to say, smoked stolidly, stared out across his fields. The sunlight on his hair accentuated the white streaks in it, and John looking toward him once thought he had never seen his father look so old.
When Darrin put forward his request for permission to camp in the woodlot near the swamp, Evered swung his heavy head round and gave the other man his whole attention for a space. It was John’s turn for silence now. He expected Evered to refuse, perhaps abusively. Evered had never liked trespassers. He said they scared his cows, trampled hishay, stole his garden stuff or his apples. But Evered listened now with a certain patience, watching Darrin; and Darrin with a nimble tongue talked on and made explanations and promises.
In the end Evered asked, “Where is it your mind to camp?”
“I’ve picked no place. I’ll find a likely spot.”
“You could sleep in the barn,” said Evered, as Ruth had said before him; and Darrin laughed.
“As a matter of fact,” he explained, “half the sport of this for me is in sleeping out of doors on the ground. I’m on vacation, you know. Other men like hunting, and so do I; but mine is a somewhat different kind, that’s all. I won’t bother you; you’ll not see much of me, for I’ll be about the swamp at all hours of the night, and I’ll sleep a good deal in the day. You’ll hardly know I’m there. Of course, I don’t want to urge you against your will.”
Evered’s lips flickered into what might have passed for a smile. “I’m not often moved against my will,” he said. “But I’ve no objection to your sleeping in my ground. If you keep out of the uncut hay.”
“I will.”
“And put out your fires. I don’t want to be burned up.”
Darrin laughed. “I’m not a novice at this, Mr. Evered,” he said. “You’ll not have to kick me off.”
Evered nodded; and John said, “You want to keep out of the bull’s pasture too. You’ll know it. There’s a high wire fence round.”
Darrin said soberly, “I’ve heard of the red bull.”
“He killed my wife,” said Evered; and there was something so stark in the bald statement that it shocked and silenced them. Evered himself flushed when he had spoken, as though his utterance had been unconsidered, had burst from his overfull heart.
“I know,” Darrin told him.
John said after a moment’s silence, “If there’s any way I can help—I know the swamp. As much as any man. And I’ve seen the moose in there.”
There was a certain eagerness in his voice; and Darrin said readily, “Of course. I’d like it.”
He said he would tramp to town and come with his gear next morning. John offered to drive him over, but he shook his head. As he started away Ruth came to the kitchen door, and he looked toward her, and she said hesitantly, “Don’t you want to stay to supper?”
He thanked her, shook his head. Evered and John in the barnyard watched him go; and Evered saw Ruth leave the kitchen door and move to a window from which she could see him go up the lane toward the main road.
Evered asked John: “What do you make of him?”
“I like him,” said John. “I’m—glad you let him stay.”
“Know why I let him stay?”
“Why—no.”
“See him and Ruth together? See her watching him?”
“I didn’t notice.”
Evered’s lips twitched in the nearest approach to mirth he ever permitted himself. “Ought to have better eyes, John; if you’re minded to keep hold o’ Ruth. She likes him. If I’d swore at him, shipped him off, she’d have been all on his side from the start.”
John, a little troubled, shook his head. “Ruth’s all right,” he said. “Give her time.”
Evered said, that wistful note in his voice plain for any man to hear, “I don’t want Ruth leaving us. So I let Darrin stay.”
DARRIN came to the farm. He made his camp by the spring where Mary Evered had loved to sit, and where she had been killed. John knew this at the time, was on the spot when Darrin built his fireplace in a bank of earth, waist high, and watched the other shape hemlock boughs into a rain-shedding shelter.
He did not remonstrate; but he did say, “Shouldn’t think you’d want to sleep here.”
Darrin looked at him curiously; and he laughed a little.
“You mean—the red bull?” he asked. And when John nodded he said, “Oh, I’m not afraid of ghosts. The world’s full of ghosts.” There was a sudden hardness in his eye. “I’m a sort of a ghost myself, in a way.”
John wondered what he meant; but he was not given to much questioning, and did not ask. Nevertheless, Darrin’s word stayed hauntingly in his mind.
He told Ruth where Darrin was camping; and the girl listened thoughtfully, but made no comment. John knew that Ruth was accustomed to go to the spring now and then, as her sister had done. He wondered whether she would go there now. There was no jealousy in John; his heart was not built for it. Nevertheless, there was a deep concern for Ruth, deeper than he had any way of expressing. The matter worried him a little.
They did not speak of Darrin’s camping place to Evered, and Evered asked no questions. Darrin came to the house occasionally for supplies, but it happened that he did not encounter Evered at such times. He was always careful to ask for the man, to leave some word of greeting for him; and once he bade them tell Evered to come down and see his camp. They did not do so. Some instinct, unspoken and unacknowledged, impelled both Ruth and John to keep Evered and Darrin apart. Neither was conscious of this feeling, yet both were moved by it.
John, prompted to some extent by his father’s warning, had begun in an awkward fashion to seek to please Ruth and to win back favor in her eyes. He felt himself uneasy and at a loss in the presence of Darrin, felt himself at a disadvantage in any contest with the other. John was a man of the country, of the farm, and he had grace to know it. Darrin had the ease of one who has rubbed shoulders with many men in many places; he was not confused in Ruth’s presence; he was rather at his best when she was near, while John was ill at ease and words came hard to him. Darrin took care to be friendly with them both; and he and John on more than one night drove deep into the swamp together on Darrin’s quest. John, busy about the farm, was unable to join Darrin in the daytime; but the other scoured through the marsh for tracks and traces, and then enlisted John to help him move cameras into position, lay flash-powder traps, or stalk the moose at their feeding in desperate attempts at camera snap-shooting.
Sometimes, in the afternoons, John knew that Ruth went down to the spring and talked with Darrin. Darrin told her of his ventures in the swamp; and she told Darrin in her turn the story of the tragedy that had been enacted here by the spring where he was camping. John, crossing the woodlot on some errand,came upon them there one afternoon, and passed by on the knoll above them without having been seen. The picture they made remained with him and troubled him.
When Darrin had been some ten days on the farm and September was coming in with a full moon in the skies it happened one night that Evered drove to Fraternity for the mail and left John and Ruth alone together. When she had done with the dishes she came out to find him on the door-step, smoking in the moonlight; and she stood above him for a moment, till he looked up at her with some question in his eyes.
She asked then, “Are you going into the swamp with Mr. Darrin to-night?”
He said, “No. He’s out of plates. There’s some due to-morrow; and he’s waiting.”
She was silent a moment longer, then said swiftly, as though anxious to be rid of the words, “Let’s go down and see him.”
If John was hurt or sorry he made no sign. He got to his feet. “Why, all right,” he said. “It’s bright. We’ll not need a lantern.”
As they moved across the barnyard to the bars and entered the woodlot the girl began to talk, in a swift low voice, as though tocover some unadmitted embarrassment. A wiser man might have been disturbed; but John was not analytical, and so he enjoyed it. It was the first time they had talked together at any length since Mary died. It was, he thought, like the old happy times. He felt warmed and comforted and happier than he had been for many weeks past. She was like the old Ruth again, he told himself.
Darrin was glad to see them. He built up his fire and made a place for Ruth to sit upon his blankets, leaning against a bowlder, and offered John cigars. The man knew how to play host, knew how to be interesting. John saw Ruth laugh wholeheartedly for the first time in months. He thought she was never so lovely as laughing.
When they went back up the hill together she fell silent and sober again; and he looked down and saw her eyes, clear in the moonlight. Abruptly, without knowing what he did, he put his arm round her; and for an instant she seemed to yield to him, so that he drew her toward him as he was used to do. He would have kissed her.
She broke away and cried out: “No, no, no! I told you no, John.”
He said gently, “I think a lot of you, Ruth.”
She shook her head, backing away from him; and he heard the angry note creep back into her voice. “You mustn’t, ever,” she told him. “Oh, can’t you understand?”
Some hot strain in the man came to the surface; he cried with an eloquence that was strange on his slow lips, “I love you. That’s all I understand. I always will. You’ve got to know that too. You——”
She said, “Hush! I won’t listen. You—you’re your father over. He’s not content but he master everyone and every thing; master everyone about him. Break them. Master his beasts and his wife. You’re his own son. You’re an Evered.” Her hands were tightening into fists at her side. “Oh, you would want to boss me the way he—— I won’t, I won’t! You shan’t—shan’t ever do it.”
“I’ll be kind to you,” he said.
There was a softer note in her voice. “John, John,” she told him. “I’m sorry. I did love you. I tried to shut my eyes. I tried to pretend that Mary was happy with him. You’re like him. I thought I’d be happy with you. She told me one day how he used be. It frightened me, because he was like you. ButI did love you, John. Till Mary died. Then I knew. He’d killed her. He made her want to die. And he had driven that great bull into a killing thing—by the way he treated it.
“Oh, I’ve seen your father clear, John. I know what he is. You’re like him. I couldn’t ever love you.”
He said in a hot quick tone—because she was very lovely—that she would love him, must, some day; and she shook her head.
“Don’t you see?” she told him. “You’re trying already to make me do what you want. Oh, John, can’t you Evereds see any living thing without crushing it? Mr. Darrin——” She caught herself, went on. “See how different he is. He goes into the swamp, and he has to be a thousand times more careful, more crafty than you when you hunt. But you come home with a bloody ugly thing across your shoulders; and he comes with a lovely picture, that will always be beautiful, and that so many people will see. He outwits the animals; he proves himself against them. But he doesn’t kill them to do it, John. You—your father—— Oh, can’t you ever see?”
His thoughts were not quick enough to cope with her; but he said awkwardly, “I’m not—always killing things. I’ve left many a trout go that I might have killed. And deer too.”
“Because it’s the law,” she said harshly. “But it’s in you to kill—crush and bruise and destroy. Don’t you see the difference? You don’t have to beat a thing, a beast, to make it yield to you. You Evereds.”
“I’m not a horse beater,” he said.
“It’s the blood of you,” she told him. “You will be.”
“There’s some times,” he suggested, “when you’ve got to be hard.”
“I’ve heard your father say that very thing.”
They were moving slowly homeward now, speaking brokenly, with longer silences between. The night was almost as bright as day, the moon in midheavens above them. Ahead the barn and the house bulked large, casting dark shadows narrowly along their foundation walls. There was a fragrance of the hayfields in the air. The rake itself lay a little at one side as they came into the barnyard, its spindling curved tines making it look not unlike a spider crouching there. The bars rattled when John lowered them for her to pass through; and the red bull in the barnheard the sound and snorted sullenly at them.