It was a pretty enough sight, and innocent, except for what had gone before. Roxy Griever had retired in some disarray, upon Lance's sarcastic coupling of her name with that of Flenton Hands. Now, coming into the room with the supposition in her mind that everything was settled in a proper way, she caught sight of the two and stiffened into rigidity. For a moment she stared; then, as the full meaning of the scene burst upon her, she made three long steps to where the youthful Polly stood, taking in everything with big, enjoying eyes, seized her by the scant, soiled homespun frock, and hauled her backward from the room, Polly clawing, scrabbling, hanging to the door frame as she was snatched through.
"Poppy," shrilled the widow, in the direction of peaceful old Kimbro, using the tone of one who cries fire, "you kin stay ef yo're a mind—an' Sylvane can do the same. The best men I ever knowed—'ceptin' preachers—has a hankerin' for sin. Ma'y-Ann-Marth', she's asleep, an' what she don't see cain't hurt her. But as for me, I'm a-goin' to take this here child home where151she won't have the likes of that to look at. I feel jest as if it was some ketchin' disease, and the fu'ther you git away from it, the safer you air."
The last of these words trailed back from the dark, into which the Widow Griever and her small, reluctant charge were rapidly receding.
Kimbro and his son remained, intending to remonstrate with Lance when he should have finished his dancing. Octavia Gentry came and made hasty farewells, hoping thus to stop the performance. Callista stood looking quietly past the dancers to some air-drawn point on the wall, and her expression of quiet composure was held by all observers to be remarkable.
"Oh, no, Mother," she said quietly. "You and Gran'pappy are never goin' out of my house before you have eat. Come taste the coffee for me and see have I got it about right. When I was gettin' my supper for to-night, I found out that there was many a thing you hadn't learned me at home; so you'll have to show me now."
With a dignity irreproachable, apparently quite oblivious to the dancers, the patting, the laughing, shouting onlookers, Callista smilingly marshalled her forces and put forward her really excellent supper. Here her pride matched Lance's—and overmatched it. He might dance, he might fling the doing of it in her face and the faces of her kindred; she would show herself152unmoved, and mistress of any situation which he could contrive.
And the supper was a strong argument. People in all walks of life love to eat; those who danced and those who held dancing sinful, were alike in their appreciation of good victual. It was only a few moments before this counter movement broke up the saltations in the front room and the infare appeared, from an observer's point of view, a great success, as the happy, laughing crowd circled about the long tables, those who had joined to forward the dance coming out looking half sheepish, altogether apologetic and conciliatory.
"I'm mighty sorry Sis' Roxy had to go home," Callista said composedly, as she served her father-in-law with a steaming cup of coffee. "I'm goin' to make a little packet of this here cake and the preserves Mammy brought over, and send them by you. I want her to taste them."
The host was the gayest of the gay. But unobserved, his eye often followed the movements of the bride, and dwelt with a warm glow upon the graceful form in its womanly attitude of serving her guests. She had fairly beaten him on his own ground. A secret pride in her, that she could do it, swelled his breast and ran tingling along his veins.
So much for the company at large, for what Callista would have called "the speech of people." When the last guest was gone the153bride faced the bridegroom alone in the house which had seemed to her so fine. Cold, expectant of some apology, offended, bewildered, yet ready to be placated.
Lance offered no excuses, but plenty of kisses, praise, and an ardor that, while it did not convince, melted and subdued her. The breach was covered temporarily, rather than healed.
154
IT was inevitable that Callista should find promptly how impossible is the attitude of scornful miss to the married wife, particularly when her husband's daily labor must provide the house whose keeping depends upon herself. Lance, too, though he continued to give no evidence whatever of penitence, was full of the masterful tenderness whose touch had brought his bride to his arms. The girl was not of a jealous temper; she was not deeply offended at the reckless behavior which had disturbed the infare, any more than she had been at his conduct on the wedding evening. Indeed, there was that in Callista Cleaverage which could take pride in being wife to the man who, challenged, would fling a laughing defiance in the face of all his world. It remained for a very practical question—what might almost be termed an economic one—to wear hard on the bond between them.
They had married all in haste while September was still green over the land. The commodious new cabin at the head of Lance's Laurel was well plenished and its food supplies sufficient during the first few weeks of life there; in fact. Lance gave without question whatever Callista asked of him—a thing unheard155of in their world—and Callista's ideas of asking were not small nor was she timid about putting them into practice. The pair of haggards might have seemed, to the casual onlooker, safely settled to calm domestic happiness.
Day by day the gold and blue of September inclined toward the October purple and scarlet. The air was invigorated by frost. The forest green, reflected in creek-pools, was full of russet and olive, against whose shadowy background here and there a gum or sourwood, earliest to turn of all the trees, blazed like a deep red plume. Occasional banners of crimson began to show in the maples and plum colored boughs in sweet-gums. The perfect days of all the year were come.
Mid-October was wonderfully clear arid sweet up at the head of Lance's Laurel; the color key became richer, more royal; the sunset rays along the hill-tops a more opulent yellow.
It was not till the leaves were sifting down red and yellow over her dooryard, that Callista got from Lance the full story concerning their resources, and the havoc he had made of them to get ready money from Derf. He had been hauling tanbark all this time to pay the unjust debt. When she knew, even her inexperience was staggered—dismayed. So far, she had not gone home, and she shut her lips tight over the resolution not now to do so with a156request for that aid which her grandfather had refused in advance.
"We'll make out, I reckon," she said to her husband dubiously.
"Oh, we'll get along all right," returned that hardy adventurer, easily. "We'll scrabble through the winter somehow. In the summer I can always make a-plenty at haulin' or at my trade. I'm goin' to put in the prettiest truck-patch anybody ever saw for you; and then we'll live fat, Callista." He added suddenly, "Come summer we'll go camping over on the East Fork of Caney. There's a place over on that East Fork that I believe in my soul nobody's been since the Indians, till I found it. There's a little rock house and a spring—I'm not going to tell you too much about it till you see it."
Callista hearkened with vague alarm, and a sort of impatience.
"But you'll clear enough ground for a good truck-patch before we go," she put in jealously.
"Uh-huh," agreed Lance without apparently noting what her words were. "I never in my life did see as fine huckleberries as grows down in that little holler," he pursued. "We'll go in huckleberry time."
"And maybe I can put some up," said Callista, the practical, beginning to take interest in the scheme.
"Shore," was Lance's prompt assent. "I can put up fruit myself—157I'll help you."
He laughed as he said it; those changeful hazel eyes of his glowed, and he dropped an arm around her in that caressing fashion not common in the mountains, and which ever touched Callista's cooler nature like a finger of fire, so that now, almost against her will, she smiled back at him, and returned his kiss fondly. Yet she thought he took the situation too lightly. It was not he that would suffer. He was used to living hard and going without. She would be willing to do the same for his sake; but she wanted to have him know it—to have him speak of it and praise her for it.
The season wore on with thinning boughs and a thickening carpet beneath. The grass was gone. Men riding after valley stock, sent up to fatten on the highlands, searched the mountains all day with dogs and resonant calls. They stopped outside Callista's fence to make careful inquiries concerning the welfare or whereabouts of shoats and heifers.
"Yes, and they've run so much stock up here this year," Lance said resentfully when she mentioned it to him, "that there ain't scarcely an acorn or a blade of grass left to help out our'n through the winter. I'm afraid I'm goin' to have to let Dan Bayliss down in the Settlement take Sate and Sin in his livery158stable for their keep. The time's about over for haulin'. I can't afford to have them come up to spring all ga'nted and poorly."
Days born in rose drifts, buried themselves in gold; groundhogs and all wild creatures of the woods were happy with a plentitude of fare; partridges were calling, "wifey—wifey!" under wayside bushes; the last leaves had their own song of renunuciation as they let go the boughs and floated softly down to join their companions on the earth. One evening, gray and white cirri swirled as if dashed in by a great, careless brush, and the next morning, a dawn strewn with flamingo feathers foretold a rainy time. All that day the weather thickened slowly, the sky became deeply overspread. At first this minor-color key was a relief, a rest, after the blaze of foliage and sun. A rain set in at nightfall, and a wind sprang up in whooping gusts; and on every hearth in the Turkey Tracks a blaze leaped gloriously, roaring in the chimney's throat, licking lovingly around the kettle. These fires are the courage of the mountain soldier and hunter. Only Callista, warming her feet by the blaze in the chimney Lance had built, thought apprehensively of the time when she should have no horse to ride, so that when she went to meeting, or to her own home, she must foot it through the mud.
It was an austere region's brief season of plenty. Not yet cold enough to kill hogs, all crops were garnered and stored;159there was new sorghum, there were new sweet potatoes, plenty of whippoor-will peas—but Callista's cupboard was getting very bare indeed. She looked with dismay toward the months ahead of her.
It was in this mood that she welcomed one morning the sight of Ellen Hands and Little Liza going past on the road below.
"Howdy," called Ellen, as the bride showed a disposition to come down and talk to them. Each woman carried a big, heavy basket woven of white oak splints. Little Liza held up hers and shook it. "We're on our way to pick peas," she shouted. "Don't you want to come and go 'long? Bring yo' basket. They' mighty good eating when they' fresh this-a-way."
Callista would have said no, but she remembered the empty cupboard, and turned back seeking a proper receptacle. At home, they considered field-peas poor food, but beggars must not be choosers. She joined the two at the gate in a moment with a sack tucked under her arm. It was a delightful morning after the rain. She was glad she could come. The peas were better than nothing, and she would get one of the girls to show her about cooking them.
"Whose field are you going to?" she asked them, carelessly.
"Why, yo' gran'-pappy's. Didn't you know it, Callisty?" asked Little Liza in surprise. "He said he was going to plow under160next week, and we was welcome to pick what we could."
Callista drew back with a burning face.
"I—I cain't—" she began faintly. "You-all girls go on. I cain't leave this morning. They's something back home that I have obliged to tend to."
She turned and fairly ran from the astonished women. But when her own door was shut behind her, she broke down in tears. A vast, unformulated resentment surged in her heart against her young husband. She would not have forgone anything of that charm in Lance which had tamed her proud heart and fired her cold fancy; but she bitterly resented the lack of any practical virtue a more phlegmatic man might have possessed.
She shut herself in her own house, half sullenly. Not from her should anyone know the poor provider her man was. She had said that she would not go home without a gift in her hand, she had bidden mother and grandfather to take dinner with her—and it appeared horrifyingly likely that there might hardly be dinner for themselves, much less that to offer a guest. Well, Lance was to blame; let him look to it. It was a man's place to provide; a woman could only serve what was provided. With that she would set to work and clean all the cabin over in furious zeal—forgetting to cook the scanty supper till it was so late that161Lance, coming home, had to help her with it.
Things looked their worst when, one morning, little Polly Griever came running up from the gulch, panting out her good news.
"Oh, Callisty, don't you-all want to come over to our house? The sawgrum-makers is thar, an' Poppy Cleaverage has got the furnace all finished up, and Sylvane and him was a-haulin' in sawgrum from the field yiste'dy all day."
Sorghum-making is a frolic in the southern mountains, somewhat as the making of cider is further north.
"Sure we'll come, Polly," Callista agreed promptly, with visions of the jug of "long sweetening" which she should bring home with her from Father Cleaverage's and the good dinner they should get that day.
"Whose outfit did Pappy hire?" asked Lance from the doorstep where he was working over a bit of rude carpentry.
"Flenton Hands's," returned the child. "A' Roxy says Flenton drove a awful hard bargain with Poppy Cleaverage. She says Flenton Hands is a hard man if he is a perfesser."
Callista laid down the sunbonnet she had taken up.
"I reckon we cain't go," she said in a voice of keen disappointment. Anger swelled within, her at Kimbro for having dealings with the man against whom Lance's challenge was out.
"I couldn't 'a' gone anyhow, Callista," Lance told her. "I have162obliged to take Sate and Sin down to the Settlement and see what kind of a trade I can make to winter 'em; but there's no need of your staying home on my accounts."
Callista looked down at his tousled head and intent face as he worked skilfully. Was he so willing to send her where she would meet Flenton Hands? For a moment she was hurt—then angry.
"Come on, Polly," she said, catching up sunbonnet and basket, and stepping past Lance, sweeping his tools all into a heap with her skirts.
"I don't know what Father Cleaverage was thinking of to have Flenton on the place after all that's been," Callista said more to herself than the child, when they had passed through the gate. Her breakfast had been a failure, and she was reflecting with great satisfaction on how good a cook Roxy Griever was; yet she would have been glad to forbear going to any place where the man her husband had threatened was to be met.
Polly came close and thrust a brown claw into Callista's hand, galloping unevenly and making rather a difficult walking partner, but showing her good will.
"Hit don't make no differ so long as Cousin Lance won't be thar," she announced wisely. "Cousin Lance always did make game of Flent. He said that when Flent took up a collection in163church, he hollered 'amen' awful loud to keep folks from noticin' that he didn't put nothin' in the hat hisse'f. I wish't Lance was comin' 'long of us."
With this the two of them dipped into the gay, rustling gloom of the autumn-tinted gulch, with Lance's Laurel reduced to a tiny trickle between clear little pools, gurgling faintly in the bottom.
Before they came to the Cleaverage place they heard the noise of the sorghum making. A team was coming in from the field with a belated load of the stalks, which should have been piled in place yesterday; Ellen Hands and Little Liza appeared down the lane carrying between them a jug swung from a stick—everybody that comes to help takes toll.
When Callista arrived, half-a-dozen were busy over the work; Hands feeding the crusher, Sylvane waiting on him with bundles of the heavy, rich green stalks, and Buck Fuson driving the solemn old horse his jogging round, followed by fat little Mary Ann Martha, capering along with a stick in her hand, imitating his every movement and shout.
The rollers set on end which crushed the jade-green stalks were simply two peeled hardwood logs. Flenton had threatened for years to bring in a steel crusher; but, up to the present, the machine his grandfather made had been found profitable. The absinthe-colored juice ran down its little trough into a barrel,164whence it was dipped to the evaporating pan, about which centered the hottest of the fray. In the stone furnace under this great, shallow pan—as long and broad, almost, as a wagon-bed—old Kimbro himself was keeping a judgmatic fire going. Roxy Griever, qualified by experience with soap and apple-butter, circled the fire and kept up a continual skimming of froth from the bubbling juice, while she did not lack for advice to her father concerning his management of the fire.
Flenton handed over to Fuson his work at the crusher, calling Polly to mind the horse, and came straight to Callista.
"I'm mighty proud to see that you don't feel obliged to stay away from a place becaze I'm thar," he said in a lowered tone, and she fancied a flicker of fear in his eyes, as though he questioned whether her husband might be expected to follow.
"Lance was a-goin' down to the Settlement to-day," she said bluntly, "and I'd have been all alone anyhow; so I 'lowed I might as well come over."
Hands looked relieved.
"I hope you ain't a-goin' to hold it against me, Callisty," he went on in a hurried half whisper, "that Lance is namin' it all around that this here scope o' country ain't big enough to hold him and me."
Callista shook her fair head in a proud negative.
"I've got my doubts of Lance ever having said any such," she165returned quietly. "Yo' name has never been mentioned between us, Flent; but if Lance has a quarrel, he's mighty apt to go to the person he quarrels with, and not make threats behind they' back. I think little of them that brought you such word as that."
"That's just what I say," Hands pursued eagerly. "Why can't we-all be friends, like we used to be. Here's Mr. Cleaverage that don't hold with no sech," and he turned to include Kimbro, who now came up to greet his daughter-in-law. Again Callista shook her head.
"You men'll have to settle them things betwixt yourselves," she said, sure of her ground as a mountain woman. "But, Flent, I reckon you'll have to keep in mind that a man and his wife are one."
"Oh," said Hands dropping back a step, "so if Lance won't be friendly with me, you won't neither—is that it?"
"I should think yo' good sense would show you that that would have to be it," said Callista doggedly. She had no wish to appear as one submitting to authority, and yet Flenton's evident intention of seeking to find some breach between herself and Lance was too offensive to be borne with.
"Now then, why need we talk of such this morning?" pacified Kimbro. "My son Lance is a good boy when you take him right.166He's got a tender heart. If he ever quarrels too easy, he gets over it easy, as well. Flenton, you'll have to tend to the crusher; I got to keep the fire goin' for Roxy.
"Hit 'minds me of that thar lake that it names in the Bible, Callisty," the Widow Griever said meditatively, looking at the seething surface as she wielded her long-handled spoon. "And then sometimes I study about that thar fiery furnace and Ham, ShamandAbednego. Poppy, looks like to me you ain't got fire enough under this eend."
"I've just made it up there," said Kimbro mildly. "I go from one end to the other, steady, and that keeps it as near even as human hands air able to."
"Flenton, he was mighty overreachin' with Poppy," the widow lamented. "He's a mighty hard-hearted somebody to deal with, if he is a perfesser, and one that walks the straight an' narrer way. Poppy has to furnish all the labor, 'ceptin' Flent and Buck Fuson, and we've got to feed them men and their team, and then they git one third of the molasses. With three meals a day, an' snacks between times to keep up they' stren'th, looks like I never see nobody eat what them two can."
The gray little cabin crouched in a corner of the big yard; a shed roof, running down at one side of it, looking comically167like a hand raised to shut out the clamor. Everybody shouted his opinion at the top of his voice. Nobody thought anybody else was doing just what he ought. Roxana hurried from group to group of the workers, advising, admonishing, trying to bring some order out of the confusion. And in the midst of it, Callista watched the bubbling juice enviously. It seemed everybody had something to harvest, care for and put away, except herself.
168
MARY ANN MARTHA GRIEVER was notorious all over the Big and Little Turkey Track neighborhoods, as "the worst chap the Lord A'mighty ever made and the old davil himself wouldn't have." The mildest dictum pronounced upon her was "Spiled rotten." Her energy, her unsleeping industry, would have been things to admire and wonder at, had they not been always applied to the futherance of iniquitous ends. To-day she pervaded the sorghum-making, not like a gnat, but like a whole swarm of gnats. Providing herself with a weak-backed switch, she followed the movements of Fuson, or Polly, or Sylvane, whichever chanced to be told off to tend the old horse. She pursued the beast with a falsetto screech of peculiar malignance, and tickled his heels with her switch whenever the exigencies of the work forced his stoppage. To the infinite surprise of everybody, notably his owner, the gaunt sorrel, after looking around and twitching his ears and hide as though a particularly troublesome flock of flies were on him, finally heaved up the whole after portion of his anatomy in one elephantine kick, which very nearly cost his169small tormentor the entire top of her head.
Chased away from the horse and the crusher, Mary Ann Martha turned her attention to the furnace, with its more seductive and saccharine activities. The skimming hole on this occasion was not the small, ordinary excavation made for the purpose, but a sizable pit, dug at some previous time for a forgotten use. Brush had been thrown into it, vines had grown and tangled over the brush, till it was a miniature jungle or bear-pit. Tin cans hid among the leafage, and the steady drip-drip of the skimmings pattered on one of these hollowly. This spot had a peculiar fascination for the child. Perched on its edge she thrust forward her face and attempted to lick a branch over which the skimmings had trickled deliciously. The distance was considerable. Mary Ann Martha's tongue was limber and amazingly extensible; her balance excellent; but also she was in unseemly haste for the syrup that stood in great drops just beyond reach. In her contortions, she overbalanced herself and fell shrieking in, going promptly to the bottom, where quite a pool of sticky sour-sweetness had already collected.
"The good land!" shouted Roxy, passing the ladle of office to Callista and reaching down to grab for her offspring. "If they's anything you ort not to be in, of course you're in it. Now look at you!" she ejaculated, as she hauled the squalling child out170dripping. "You ain't got another frock to yo' name', an' what am I a-goin' to do with you?"
Mary Ann Martha showed a blissful indifference to what might be done with her. Her howls ceased abruptly. She found her state that agreeable one wherein she was able to lick almost any portion of her anatomy or her costume with satisfaction.
"Don't want no other frock," she announced briefly, as she sat down in the dust to begin clearing her hands of skimmings, very like a puppy or a kitten.
"Well, I'm a-goin' to put boy clothes on you," declared the mother. "You act as bad as a boy." And she hustled the protesting delinquent away to execute her threat.
Five minutes after, burning with wrongs, Mary Ann Martha came stormily forth to rejoin her kind, pent in a tight little jeans suit which had belonged to the babyhood of Sylvane, and from which her solid limbs and fat, tubby body seemed fairly exploding. Humiliated, alienated, and with her hand against every man, she lowered upon them all from under flaxen brows, with Lance's own hazel eyes, darkened almost to black.
"You Ma'y-Ann-Marth'," admonished Fuson, as the small marauder raided the cooling pans and licked the spoons and testing sticks so soon as they were laid down, "you got to walk mighty keerful171around where I'm at, at least in sawgrum-makin' time."
Mary Ann Martha held down her head, and muttered. She was ashamed of her trousers as only a mountain-born girl child could be ashamed.
"You let them spoons alone, or I'll fling you plumb into the bilin'-pan, whar you'll git a-plenty o' sawgrum," Fuson threatened. "You hear now? The last man I he'ped Hands make sawgrum for had ten chillen when we begun. They set in to pester me an' old Baldy jest like yo' adoin', and when we got done thar was ten kaigs of sawgrum and nary chap on the place. Yes, that's right. Ef thar wasn't a chap bar'lled up in every kaig we turned out, I don't know sawgrum from good red liquor."
Inside the house, Ellen Hands and Little Liza were delaying over an errand. They had brought a piece of turkey red calico as an offering for the gospel quilt.
"Don't you trouble to git it out," Little Liza said, rather wistfully. "I know in reason you've got all on yo' hands you want this mornin'; but when you come to workin' it in, Ellen an' me we talked considerable consarning of it, and mebbe we could he'p ye."
"Callisty's a-skimmin'," announced the widow, running for a hasty glance toward the sorghum-making activities. "Hit won't take me mo'n a minute to spread the thing here on the bed, and172try this agin it. Land! ain't that pretty? Red—I always did love red."
The cherished square was lifted from its chest, unrolled, and spread upon the four-poster bed in the corner of the living room.
"You been a-workin' on it some sence last I seed it," Ellen Hands remarked with interest. "This here thing with birds a-roostin' on it—I ain't never seed this before."
"That thar's Jacob's Ladder, Ellen—don't you see the postes, and the pieces a-goin' acrost?" Roxy explained rather hastily. "Lord, the trouble I had with them angels. I don't wonder you took 'em for birds. Time and again I had a mind to turn 'em into birds. I done fine with Noey's dove; see, here 'tis; an' a ark—well, hit ain't no more than a house with a boat un'neath."
She pulled the folds about, to get at the period of the deluge.
"'Course I see now jest what it was intentioned for," Ellen professed eagerly. "If I'd looked right good I could 'a' made out the angels goin' up an' down. How"—she hesitated, but the resolve to retrieve herself overcame all timidity—"how nateral them loaves an' fishes does look!"
"That thar's the ark," explained the widow, putting her finger on the supposed loaf. There was a moment of depressed silence; then Roxy, willing to let bygones be bygones, observed,
"Over here is the whale and Joney." These twin objects were173undoubtedly what Ellen had taken for the fishes.
"Ye see I had to make the whale some littler than life," the artist deprecated. "I sort o' drawed him in, as a body may say, 'caze 'course I couldn't git him all on my quilt without. I didn't aim to git Joney quite so big, but that thar sprigged percale that he's made outen was so pretty, and the piece I had was just that length, an' I hated to throw away what wouldn't be good for anything, an' I'd already got my whale, so I sort o' len'thened the beast's tail with a few stitches. Would you call a whale a beast or a fish?"
"Well, I should sure call anything that could swaller a man a beast," opined Little Liza.
"An' yit he's sorter built like a fish," suggested Ellen.
"That's true; an' he lives in the water," admitted her sister.
"Here's a right good big open place," observed Ellen. "Ef you was a-goin' to make—whatever—out of that turkey red, hit could come in here."
"It could that," said the widow thoughtfully. "Did you-all have any idee as to what it would suit best for?"
The two looked at each other in embarrassment. As unmarried women, the subject that they had discussed was in some degree questionable.
"Well, hit's in the Bible," Ellen began defensively. "An' yit—174Sis' an' me didn't know whether you'd care to—to give room to sech as the Scarlet Woman."
It was out. The idea evidently fascinated Roxy.
"That turkey red shore fits the case," she agreed with gusto. "As you say, hit's in the Bible. An' yit, anything that's what a body might call ondecent that-a-way—don't ye reckon a person'd be sort o' 'shamed to—I vow! I'll do it."
"Oh, Miz. Griever!" exclaimed Little Liza of comical dismay at the prompt acceptance in their idea. "I believe I wouldn't. There's the crossin' o' the Red Sea; you could use the turkey red for that jest as easy."
But the widow shook her head.
"Good lands!" she cried, "what you studyin' about, Liza? I say, the crossin' o' the Red Sea! I ain't a-goin' to do no sech a thing. Hit'd take me forever to cut out all them Chillen of Is'rul. And I never in the world would git done makin' Egyptians! No, that turkey red goes into a scarlet woman—to reprove sin."
"Laws, Miz. Griever," began Ellen Hands, solemnly, "looks like yo' family ort to be perfectly happy with that thar quilt in the house. I'm mighty shore I would be. I tell you, sech a work as that is worth a woman's while."
"There's them that thinks different," responded Roxy, with a175sort of gloomy yet relishing resentment. "There has been folks lived in this house from the time I started work on it, an' made game of my gospel quilt—made game of it!"
"I reckon I know who you mean," nodded Ellen. And Little Liza added, "She'shere to-day, ain't she?—God love her sweet soul! But yo' pappy wouldn't bid Lance, with Buddy here an' all—we know that. They'd be shore to fuss. Man persons is that-a-way."
"Well," Ellen Hands summed the case up, "ef anybody made game o' that quilt to my face, I'd never forgive 'em."
"I never will," agreed Roxy. "Them that would make game of sech is blasphemious. Mebbe hit ain't adzactly the Bible, but hit's—"
"Hit's mo' so," put in Ellen swiftly. "The Bible is pertected like, but yo' gospel quilt is standin' up alone, as a body may say, and you've got to speak for it. No, ef I was you, and anybody made game of that thar quilt, I never would forgive 'em."
Outside, Callista stood and skimmed and skimmed, from time to time emptying her pan into the skimming-hole, the bland October breeze lifting her fair hair. Everything was sour-sweet and sticky from the juice. Heaps of pomace were already beginning to pile tall beside the crusher, reeking, odorous, tempting to the old cow, who went protestingly past, and had the bars put up176after her. Kimbro looked up from his task and spoke to his daughter-in-law.
"You look sort o' peaked, Callista," he said gently. "Air you right well?"
"Oh yes, Father Cleaverage," she returned, absently, her eyes on Mrs. Griever and the Hands girls approaching from the house.
The unsexed and hostile Mary Ann Martha turned upon the world at large a look of mute defiance, and completed an enterprise which she had set up of laying fresh sorghum stalks side-by-side, pavement-wise, over the skimming-hole.
Women and children were settling like flies about the pan and its attendant bowls, ladles and testing plates, hoping for a taste of the finished product. The Hands girls greeted Callista and joined the others. Fuson's poor little seventeen-year-old sister-in-law was there with her six months baby, and a child of two. Roxy took the skimmer from Callista and set to work. Sylvane relieved his father at the firing. Mary Ann Martha sidled into the house, whence, a moment later, came a shrill cry in Polly's thin little pipe.
"Aunt Roxy! Mary Ann Marthy's in here puttin' molasses alloveryo' gospel quilt!"
"Good land!" snorted Roxy, straightening up from her task of skimming. "Take the spoon, Sylvane." She cast the ladle toward him without much care as to whether the handle or the bowl went177first. "Looks like I do have the hardest time o' anybody I know," she ejaculated.
"You better git here quick, A' Roxy," Polly urged. "She's just awipin'her spoon on em'."
"Ain't," protested the infant, appearing suddenly in the doorway, a "trying spoon" in her hand, over which she was running her tongue with gusto. "I thest give a lick o' long-sweetnin' to Eads," thus she named the first of womankind. "Po' old Eads looked so-o-o hongry."
"She's done a heap more'n that," Polly maintained. Mary Ann Martha's mouth began to work piteously.
"Give Eads some," she pursued in a husky, explanatory voice. "An'—th'—ol' snake licked out his tongue, and I must put a teenchy-weenchy bit on it. 'Nen Adams, he's mad 'caze he don't git none; an'—Mammy," with a burst of tears, "is I thest like my uncle Lance?"
She had heard this formula of reproof so often; she knew so well that it befitted the gravest crimes.
"You air that!" said Roxy wrathfully. "You little dickens! I don't know of anybody in this world that would have done sech a trick—but you or Lance Cleaverage."
She wheeled from the furnace toward the house, and set a swift foot in the middle of the sorghum-stalk pavement Mary Ann Martha had laid over the skimming pit. The stalks gave. She attempted178to recover herself and have back the foot, but her momentum was too great. On she plunged, pitching and rolling, descending by degrees and with ejaculatory whoops among the sticky sweetness, part of which was still uncomfortably warm.
There was a treble chorus of dismay from the women. Sylvane leaped to his feet, and ran to the pit's edge. Buck Fuson held his sides and roared with mirth, and Flenton Hands stopped the crusher by tying up his horse so that he too, might go to their assistance.
"Oh land!" gasped the widow, coming to the surface, yellow and gummy of countenance, smudged and smeared, crowned with a tipsy wreath of greenery, like a sorghumnal bacchante. "I believe in my soul that little sinner aimed to do this. She's jest adzactly like her Uncle Lance—that's what she is! I mind—ow!" The rotten branch under her foot had snapped, letting her down into a squelching pool of skimmings.
"Take hold of my hand, Sis' Roxy," cried Sylvane. "No, I don't reckon the baby aimed to make trouble; chaps is always doin' things like this, an' meanin' no harm. There—now I've got you."
But Roxy was a big woman, and the first pull nearly dragged him in.
"Let me ketch ye round the waist, Sylvane!" roared Little Liza in her fog-horn bass. "Ellen, you hold to my coats, and let the179others hang on to you, if they have to. Thar, now, pull, Sylvane; try it agin—now, all of you—pull!" And with a tremendous scrabbling and scrambling, the Widow Griever "came," hurtling up from her sweet retreat and spattering molasses on her rescuers.
Over went Sylvane and Little Liza; Ellen and slim Lula Fuson were nearly dragged down by their fall. Roxy Griever landed on top of the first two, and liberally besmeared them all with sorghum juice before they could be got to their feet.
"You let me lay hand on that young 'un," she panted, "and I'll not leave her fitten to do such as this."
"Never mind, Ma'y-Ann-Marth'," Little Liza admonished. "You git in and git yo'se'f washed up. For the good land's sake—ef thar don't come Miz. Gentry an' her pa down the road! Mak' 'as'e!" And the sorghum bespattered women hurried toward the house, the widow still fulminating threats, the Hands girls giggling a bit. Callista, trying to carry forward their part of the work, saw that a team stopped out in front. She was aware of her grandfather on the driver's seat, and her mother climbing down over the wheel.
"Well, Callista," complained the matron, making straight for the side yard and her daughter, "I reckon if I want to see my own180child, I can go to the neighbors and see her there. Why ain't you been home, honey? Pappy axes every morning air you comin', and every night I have to tell him, 'Well, mebbe to-morrow.'"
Callista looked over her mother's shoulder, and fancied that she caught a gleam of grim amusement in old Ajax's eye.
"I've been mighty busy," she said evasively. "Looks like I don't finish one thing before another needs doing. I'm a-comin' one of these days."
"So's Christmas," jeered her grandfather from the wagon.
Callista remembered the last time her homecoming had been discussed with him. Her color deepened and her eye brightened.
"Yes, and I'm comin' same as Christmas with both hands full of gifts," she called out to him gaily. How dared he look like that—as though he knew all her straits—the shifts to which she was now reduced?
There had sounded from the house, on Roxy's arrival there, wails of lamentation in Mary Ann Martha's voice—wails so strident and so offensively prolonged as to convince the least discriminating hearer that their author was not being hurt, but was only incensed. Now, Roxy Griever, hastily washed, made her appearance.
"I'm mighty proud to have you here to-day, Miz. Gentry," she said hospitably. "Won't you come into the house? Have you-all fixed for pumpkin cutting? I just as soon as not come over and181he'p you, oncet I git this mis'able sawgrum out of the way."
"Thank you, Miz. Griever, I won't go in for a spell yet," Octavia said, seating herself on a bench. "No, we ain't had a chance to think o' pumpkin cuttin'. I been dryin' fruit. And Pappy's had everybody on the place busy pickin' field peas."
Callista harkened restively to this talk of the harvest activities, the season's plenty—she who had nothing to garner, nothing to prepare and put away. She heard her mother's voice running plaintively on.
"Looks like I got to have somebody with me, since Sis is gone. I've been aimin' to git over to the Far Cove neighborhood where my cousin Filson Luster lives. I know in reason Fil could spare one of his gals, an' I'd do well by her."
The words were softly, drawlingly, spoken, yet Callista, mechanically working still about the furnace, heard in them the slam of a door. Her girlhood home was closed to her. The daughter's place there, which she had held so lightly, would be filled.
182
WINTER was upon the cabin in the Gap. Through the long months much bitter knowledge had come to Callista. She found that she knew nothing a mountain wife ought to know. Finically clean about her housekeeping, she spent days scouring, rubbing, putting to rights and rearranging that which none used, nobody came to see; but she could not cook acceptably, and their scant fare suffered in her inept hands till she nearly starved them both.
Here, with some show of reason, she blamed her mother. Having never seen the time when she could go back to the Gentry place with a gift in her hand, she had not been there at all since her marriage. And here she blamed Lance. Between her incapacity and his earlier recklessness, they were desperately pinched. The season for hauling closed even sooner than he had feared. After it was past, he got a bit of work now and again, often walking long distances to it, since he had been obliged, as he had foreseen, to leave Satan and Cindy in the Settlement; and when the black horses came no more to the log stable behind the183cabin, Callista accepted it as the first open confession of defeat.
Lance was one who sought a medicine for his spiritual hurts with as sure an instinct as that by which the animals medicate their bodies, creeping away like them to have the pain and wounding out alone. With the first cold weather he was afoot, his long brown rifle in the hollow of his arm, tramping the ridges for game. The wide, silent spaces spoke restfully to his spirit. Half the time he left the cabin ill provided with firewood and other necessities, but he brought back rabbits, quail, an occasional possum—which latter Callista despised and refused to cook, even when Lance had carefully prepared it, so that the dogs got it for their share. The undercurrent of the material struggle to make a living was always the pitiful duel between these two, who really loved well, and who were striving as much each for the mastery of self, as for the mastery of the other, could they but have realized it.
In late November, the days began to break with a thin, piercing sleet in the air, under an even gray sky. On the brown sedge, dry as paper, it whispered, whispered through the clinging white-oak leaves, with a sharp sibilance, as of one who draws breath at the end of a pageant; for the last flickerings of the gold and glory of Autumn were gone; the radiance and warmth and beauty of life all circled now around a hearth-stone.
"If we get much more weather like this, I'll go out and bring ye184in a deer," Lance told his Callista; "then we'll have fresh meat a-plenty."
"Well, see that there's firewood enough to cook your deer after you've killed it," Callista retorted, resentfully mindful of Lance's having forgotten to provide her with sufficient fuel the last time he went on an unsuccessful hunting trip.
"You don't roast a deer whole," Lance told her tolerantly. "We'll dry some of the meat, and some we'll salt."
To Callista's exacting, practical nature, this figuring on the disposal of a deer one had not yet killed was exasperating. She wanted Lance to know that she lacked many things which she should have had. She wished him plainly to admit that he ought to furnish those things, and that he was sorry he could not. She had a blind feeling that, if he did so, it would in a measure atone.
"Well, it wouldn't take much wood to cook all the deer you brought home last time," she said with a little bitter half-smile.
Taunt of taunts—to reproach the unsuccessful hunter with his empty bag! Lance was not one to give reasons for his failure, to tell of the long, hard miles he had tramped on an unsuccessful quest. He merely picked up his gun and walked out of the house without looking to right or left, leaving his young wife breathing a little short, but sure of herself.
So far as he was concerned, he could find good counsel in the185wild to which, he fled. This morning there was come over everything a blind fog, which was gradually thinning a little with the dawn, showing to his eyes, where it lifted, hundreds of little ripples fleeing across the pond from icy verge to verge, with a mist smoking to leeward. The forest swam about him in a milky haze; the trees stood, huge silver feathers, soft gray against the paler sky, their coating not glassy, like real sleet, but a white fringe, a narrow strip of wool, composed of the finest pointed crystals, along every twig. The yard grass, as he crossed it, was a fleece; the weeds by the garden fence, where he vaulted over, a cloud.
Dulling one sense, the obscuring fog seemed to muffle all others. Lance was shut in a little white world of his own, that moved and shifted about him as he went forward. In his heart was the beginning of self-distrust; a very small beginning, which he cried down and would none of; yet the mood sent him seeking a spot he had not seen for months. Straight as an arrow he went through the forest, guiding himself by his sense of direction alone, since he could neither see far nor recognize any familiar landmark in its changed guise.
An hour after he and Callista had parted in the kitchen of his own home, he was before that outside cabin of the Gentry place, at whose casement he had first held her in his arms, looking up186at the blank square of closed panes. It was so early that none of the household was yet astir. The dogs knew him, and made no clamorous outcry. Shut in by the wavering walls of mist which clung and chilled, he stood long beneath her window, staring fixedly up at it. Something ominous and symbolic in the change which had come upon the spot since he last stood there, checked the beating of his heart, strive as he might to reject its message. The yard grass, green and lush on that September night, stood stark, dry, white wool; the bullace vine, whose trunk had borne his eager love up to her kiss, gleamed steel-like along its twisted stems; the sill itself was a bar of humid ice. All looked bleak, inhospitable, forbidding; the place was winter-smitten, like—like—
Some blind rage at the power which makes us other than we would be, which gives us stones for bread, stirred within him. He shivered. She was not there now—she was at home in his house—his wife. What had he come here for? This was a gun in the hollow of his arm—not a banjo; he was out trying to find some wild meat to keep them alive. She was waiting at home to—no, not in the gropings of his own mind, would he complain too bitterly of his bride. Heaven knows what the disillusioning was when Lance found for the first time that he and Callista could seriously quarrel—their old days of what might be termed histrionic bickerings for the amusement of an audience, he had187put aside, as of no portent. When he discovered that Callista could look at him with actually alien eyes, and say stinging things in an even tone, the boundaries of his island drew in till there was barely room for his own feet amid the wash of estranging waters. But he turned resolutely from the thought. His concern should be all with his own conduct, his own failings. Callista must do what she would do—and he would play up to the situation as best he might.
Somebody moved in the house and called one of the hounds. He laughed at himself a bit drearily, and struck off across the hill, assured in his own mind that he had merely taken this as a short cut to the glen at the head of the gulch, where he hoped to find his deer. The clean winds of Heaven soothed the pain that throbbed under his careless bearing. He had not been five hours afoot, he was but just preparing to make his noon halt and eat the bit of cold pone in his pocket, when he was ready to smile whimsically at the ill-made, ill-flavored thing and decide that it would be "just as fillin'," even though Callista had not yet learned the bread-maker's art.
He must needs consider it rare good luck that he found a deer at all; but it was five miles from home, in the breaks of Chestnut Creek, that he finally made his kill. He had no horse to carry the bulk of wild meat; and, in his pride refusing to leave a188part swung up out of harm's way, he undertook to pack the whole deer home on his shoulder—a piece of exhausting, heart-breaking toil, though the buck was but a half-grown one. He was not willing to risk the loss of a pound. There were no antlers; but he would make Callista a pair of moccasins out of the soft-tanned skin. Sunday he was due at old man Fuson's for a couple of days, to repair a chimney; but, come Tuesday or Wednesday, he would return and be ready to look after the venison. It ought to keep so long in this cold.
Callista, pent indoors all day, chained to distasteful tasks for which she was incompetent, had not won to as serene a temper as her mate. She saw him approaching, laden, through the grove, and hurried into the cold, closed far room to be busy about some task so that she need not meet him as he entered. When she emerged, he had skinned the deer and hung up the meat safely between two trees, and was already washed and sitting in the chimney-corner. His clear eyes went swiftly to her face with its coldly down-dropped lids. The man who can bring home a deer and not boast of it has self-control; but when Lance noted the line of his wife's lips, he reached for his banjo without a word, and began to hold his communications with it.
She knelt at the hearth to continue her supper preparations. For the first time since they had quarreled, she wished that she189could make some advance toward a reconciliation. Yet there was Lance; look at him! Head thrown back a little, chin atilt, his eyes almost closed, showing a bright line under the shadowing lash, the firelight played on her husband's face and painted the ghost of a flickering smile about his mouth as he strummed lightly on the strings. Was that a countenance asking sympathy, begging for quarter? And listen to the banjo; it was no wistful, questing melody of "How many miles, how many years?" now; a light, jigging dance-tune rippled under his finger ends. Callista wondered angrily if he wished he were at Derf's. No doubt they would be dancing there to-night, as commonly on Saturday.
Lance, the man who wouldn't take a dare from the Lord A'mighty Himself, answered her silence with silence, and her unconcern with a forgetfulness so vast as to make her attitude seem actually resentful.
By and by she called him to supper, and when he came she refused to eat, dwelling angrily on the thought that he should have regarded her bidding as an overture to peace, and have made some answering movement himself.
In short, she was not yet done interrogating this nature, fascinating, complex, inscrutable, to know what was the ultimate point, the place where he would cry "Enough!"
The next morning saw him leaving early for Fuson's, and he went190before Callista was out of bed. When she rose, she looked remorsefully at the tidy, small preparations for breakfast which he had made. It suddenly came home to her that, for a man in Lance's situation, the marrying of a wholly inept wife was daily tragedy. She decided that she would learn, that she would try to do better; and, as a first peace-offering, she hurried out to the grove and possessed herself of Lance's venison, that she might cure and prepare it.
After she had dragged the big, raw, bloody thing into her immaculate kitchen, she felt a little sense of repulsion at it, yet her good intentions held while she hacked and hewed and salted and pickled, on some vague remembrance of what she had heard her grandfather say concerning the curing of wild meat. It was noon when she went into the other room, leaving the outer door open so that the hound carried away the only portion of the meat which she had left fresh for immediate use. Tired, ready to cry, she consoled herself with the reflection that there was plenty remaining; she could freshen a piece of that which she had salted, for Lance's supper when he should return. For herself, she felt that she should never want to taste venison again.
Under her handling the meat deteriorated rapidly, and was in danger of becoming an uneatable mess. At last she turned a weary and disgusted back upon it, and left it soaking in weak brine.191Ever since Saturday night the weather had been softening; it was almost warm when Lance came hurrying home Tuesday evening, meaning to take care of his prize at once. He arrived at supper time, ate some of Callista's bread and drank his coffee eagerly, turning in mute distaste from the hunk of ill-prepared meat upon the table. Supper over he hastened out to where he had hung the deer. His wife had a wild impulse to stop him; he might have guessed from the venison she had cooked that the meat was attended to. She resented the dismay in his face when he came back asking:
"Do you know what's come of that deer? I got Jasper Fuson to let me off sooner, so's I could make haste and tend to it."
The sense of failure closed in on Callista intolerably.
"I fixed it," she returned without looking up.
"All of it?" inquired Lance sharply. "Fixed it like that, do you mean?" indicating the untouched piece on the platter.
"Yes," returned Callista with secret despair; "all but what the dogs got."
"The dogs!" echoed Lance.
"Yes," repeated Callista with a sort of stubborn composure. "I left about a third of it fresh whilst I was putting the rest in the brine, and that old hound of yours came in and stole the fresh piece." She looked at his face and then at the meat. "I192reckon you think that even a dog wouldn't eat this—the way I've got it."
The two young people confronted each other across the ruined food which his skill and labor had provided, her bungling destroyed. The subject for quarrel was a very real one, terrifyingly concrete and pressing. They were afraid of it; nor did they at that moment fail to realize the mighty bond of love which still was strong between them. Both would have been glad to make some advance toward peace, some movement of reconciliation; neither knew how to do it. In Lance, the torture of the thing expressed itself only in a fiery glance turned upon his wife's handiwork. To Callista, this was so intolerable that she laid about her for an adequate retort.
"Well," she said, affecting a judicial coolness, "it's true I don't know much about taking care of wild meat. We never had such in my home. There was always plenty of chickens and turkeys; and if we put up meat, it was our own shoats and beef."
Deer are growing scarce in the Cumberlands; not in half a dozen cabins throughout the Turkey Tracks would venison be eaten that season. But Lance adduced nothing of this.
"I think you might as well let the dogs have the rest of it," he said finally, with a singular gentleness in his tone. Then he added with a sudden upswelling of resentment, "Give it to 'em if they'll eat it—which I misdoubt they'll never do."
193
AFTER the episode of the ruined venison, Callista tried sulking—refusing to speak. But she found in Lance a power of silence that so far overmatched her own as to leave her daunted. He returned now from his long expeditions, to hang up his wild meat in the grove, and thereafter to sit bright-eyed and silent across the hearth from her, whistling, under his breath, or strumming lightly on his banjo.
Callista was a concrete, objective individual, yet she grew to recognize the resources of one who had for his familiars dreams that he could bid to stand at his knee and beguile his leisure or his loneliness. But dreams, so treated, have a trick of strengthening themselves against times of depression, changing their nature, and wringing with cruel fingers the heart which entertains them; so that those who feed the imagination must be willing to endure the strength of its chastisements.
Yet if Lance Cleaverage suffered, he kept always a brave front, and took his suffering away from under the eye of his young wife. To do him justice, he had little understanding of his own offences. An ardent huntsman, he had by choice lived hard much194of his life, sleeping in the open in all weathers, eating what came to hand. Callista's needs he was unfitted to gauge, and she maintained a haughty silence concerning them. Since she would not inquire, he told her nothing of having been offered money to play at dances, but began to be sometimes from home at nights, taking his banjo, leaving her alone.
An equable tempered, practical woman might have trained him readily to the duties of masculine provider in the primitive household. But beautiful, spoiled Callista, burning with wrongs which she was too proud and too angry to voice, eaten with jealousy of those thoughts which comforted him when she refused to speak, always in terror that people would find out how at hap-hazard they lived, how poor and ill-provided they were, and laugh at her choice—Callista had her own ideas of discipline. If Lance went away and left no firewood cut, she considered it proper to retort by getting no supper and letting him come into a house stone cold. This was a serious matter where a chunk of fire may be sent from neighbor to neighbor to take the place of matches.
In this sort the winter wore away. In April there came one of the spring storms that southern mountaineers call "blackberry winter." All the little growing things were checked or killed. A fine, cold rain beat throughout the day around the eaves of the195cabin. The wind laid wet, sobbing lips to chink and cranny, and cried to her that she was alone—alone—alone; she, Callista, was neglected, deserted, shunned! For Lance had a day's work at re-lining fireplaces at Squire Ashe's place. Busy with the truck-patch he had at this late day set about, and which he must both clear and fence, he had somewhat overlooked the wood-pile; and before noon the fuel was exhausted. Instead of gathering chips and trash, or raiding the dry spaces under the great pines for cones and crackling twigs,—as any one of her hardy mountain sisters would have done, and then greeted her man at night with a laugh, and a hot supper—Callista let the fire go out, and sat brooding. Without fire she could cook herself no dinner, and she ate a bit of cold corn-pone, fancying Lance at somebody's table—he never told her now where he was going, nor for how long—eating the warm, appetizing food that would be provided.
As evening drew on the rain slacked, and a cloud drove down on the mountain-top, forcing an icy, penetrating chill through the very substance of the walls, sending Callista to bed to get warm. She wrapped herself in quilts and shivered. It was dark when she heard Lance come stumbling in, cross the room, and, without a word, search on the fire-board for matches.
"There ain't any," she told him, not moving to get up. "It196wouldn't do you any good if there was—there's no wood."
He did not answer, but, feeling his way, passed on into the little lean-to kitchen, and Callista harkened eagerly, believing that sight of the bowl of meal and the pan of uncooked turnips on the table by the window would bring home to her husband the enormity of her wrongs and his offences. Leaning forward she could discern a vaguely illuminated silhouette of him against this window. He appeared to be eating. She guessed that he had peeled a turnip and was making a lunch of that.
"Would you rather have your victuals raw?" she demanded finally, desperate at his silence. "I reckon I'd better learn your ruthers in the matter."
"I'd rather have 'em raw as to have 'em cooked the way you mostly get 'em," came the swift reply in a perfectly colorless tone. "I ain't particularly petted on having my victuals burnt on one side and raw on the other, and I'd rather do my own seasoning—some folks salt things till the devil himself couldn't eat 'em, or leave the salt out, and then wonder that there's complaints."
Her day of brooding had come to a crisis of choking rage. Callista sat up on the edge of the bed and put her thick hair back from her face.
"I cook what I'm provided," she said in a cold, even voice.197"That is, I cook it when I'm supplied with wood. And I fix your meals the best I know how; but it would take one of the sort you named just then to cook without fire."
She had expected that he would go out in the dark and cut firewood for her. As for the matches, starting a flame without them was an easy trick for a hunter like Lance. She remembered with a sudden strange pang his once showing her how he could prepare his pile of shredded tinder, fire a blank charge into it, and have a blaze promptly. She heard him fumbling for something on the wall—his gun, of course. But the next instant there came the whine of the banjo; it hummed softly as it struck against the lintel. That was what he was getting—not the gun to light a fire—he was leaving her alone in the cabin! She guessed that he was going over to Derf's to play for a dance; and for a strenuous moment she was near to springing after him and begging him to stay with her.
But habit prevailed. She huddled, shivering, under her covers and went back to the sullen canker of her own wrongs. She might have had the pick of the countryside, and she had taken up with Lance Cleaverage. She had married him when and how he said—that was where she made her mistake. She should have told him then—she should have—but, in the midst of all this rush of198accusation, she knew well that she took Lance when and how she could get him, and at this moment her heart was clamoring to know where he was and what doing.
So she lay shivering, cold to the knees, her hands like ice, her teeth locked in a rigor that was as much spiritual as physical, till she could bear it no longer. Then she got hesitatingly up from the bed and stood long in the middle of the darkened room, turning her head about as though she could see. She knew where each article of furniture stood. It was her room, her home, hers and Lance's. Lance had built it; she had somehow failed pitiably, utterly, to make it hers; and she was well aware that she had failed to make it home for him—yet it was all either of them had. Back over her mind came memory of their wedding morning, when, his arm about her waist, her head half the time on his shoulder, they had visited every nook of the place and discussed between tender words and kisses all its scant furnishings. Then suddenly, without having come to any decision whatever, she found herself out in the cold rain, running through the woods toward the big road and the Derf place.
Down the long slope from the Gap she fled, then past the old quarry, past Spellman's clearing, and around the Spring hollow. She had never set foot on Derf land before. Through the fine rain Callista—spent, gasping, wet and disheveled—at last saw199the windows, a luminous haze; caught the sound of stamping, thudding feet, and heard the twang of Lance's banjo. She had approached through the grove, and stood at the side fence. The place was so public that its dogs paid little attention to comers and goers. When Callista came to herself fully, she realized that it was the bars of the milking place she leaned upon. Slowly she withdrew the upper one from its socket, stepped over, then turned and replaced it. With ever-increasing hesitation she faltered toward the house, avoiding the front and approaching the light at the side, where she hoped to be unobserved.
Shivering, shrinking, her loosened wet hair dragging in against her neck, she stared through the window into the lighted room. They were dancing in there. The sounds she had heard were from Lance's banjo indeed, but held in other hands, while Lance himself sat at a little table near the hearth, a steaming supper before him, Ola Derf waiting on him hand and foot, stooping to the coals for fresh supplies of good hot coffee, or smoking, crisp pones.
"Now you just hush!" she shrilled in response to somebody's importunities, as Callista hung listening. "Lance cain't play for no dancin' till he gits through his supper. And he's a-goin' to have time to eat, too. You Jim, put that banjo down—you cain't play hit. Pat for 'em if they're in such a hurry to dance."
The Aleshine girls from Big Buck Gap, a young widow who lived200half way down the Side, two cousins of the Derf's themselves—these were the women in the room. Callista was desperately afraid lest one of the loud-talking, half-intoxicated men in there should come out and discover her; yet she could not drag herself away from sight of Lance sitting housed, warm, comforted and fed—a home made for him. Something knocked at the door of her heart with a message that this scene carried; but fiercely she barred that door, and set herself to defend her own position.
Grasping a trunk of muscadine vine, which, when she shivered, shook down icy drops upon her, Callista rested long, regarding the scene before her. What should she do? To return to her home and leave her husband there seemed a physical impossibility. To go in and play the high-and-mighty, as she had been wont to do in her free girlhood, to glance over her shoulder with dropped eyelids and inform Lance Cleaverage that she cared not at all what he did or where he went—this were mere farce; her time for that sort of mumming was past.
Lance had finished his supper now, and turned from the board. It seemed to Callista that he looked well pleased with himself, satisfied, even gay. The sight set her teeth rattling in fresh shivers. Still he did not play for the dancers, who continued to make what headway they might to the time of Jim's patting.
Callista saw Ola bring the banjo and lay it in Lance's lap. Then201the little brown girl seated herself close beside him. He bent and placed the instrument properly in Ola's grasp, disposing the short, stubbed fingers on the strings. In the positive throe of jealousy that this sight brought, Callista must needs, for her own self-respect, recall that Lance had offered more than once to teach her to play, and that she had refused—and pretty shortly, too—to learn, or to touch the banjo, which she had come to hate with an unreasoning hatred. Now the dancers grew tired of Jim and his patting, and the call was for music.
"See here, Lance Cleaverage," said Buck Fuson, "we-all throwed in to get you to play; but we ain't a-goin' to pay the money and have you fool away yo' time with Ola."
This was the first that Callista knew of Lance earning money by his banjo-playing.
"All right," said Cleaverage laconically, not looking up from his instructions. "I've had me a good supper, and I've got a warm place to stay, and that's all I want. Go on and dance."
He addressed himself singly to Ola and her chords, moving her fingers patiently, taking the banjo himself to show her just how the thing was done. She was a dull pupil, but a humbly grateful one; and after a while it seemed to Callista that she could no longer bear the sight. She was debating starkly between the desperate course of returning home alone and the yet more202desperate enterprise of going in, when a deeper shadow crossed the darkness behind her, and she turned with a smothered scream to find Iley Derf's Indian husband moving impassively through the glow from the window and making his way to the back door.
At the sight she wheeled and fled across the yard toward the front gate and the road. She gained that doubtful refuge just as a man on a horse came splattering up out of the muddy little hollow below the Derf place. With another cry she flung about and ran from him, stepped on a round stone, and fell.