Alice MacGowan

“ If she only had her shoes and stockings out of Aunt Roxy's house, the joys of the infare were as good as hers—let come after what must.
Gaily Lance and Callista went forward with their preparations. To their minds, they were the first who had ever felt that pristine rapture of anticipation when two make ready a home. Dear children! Did not Adam, when Eve called him to help her with fresh roses for the bower she was decking, know the same? It is as old as Paradise, that joy, and as legitimate an asset of happiness to humanity as any left us. ”

“ Ebless Frazee sat back with an expansive smile upon his face. Miss Pendrilla fluttered wildly about Virgil, torn with apprehension as to what he might reveal, anxiety to placate one so influential, and anger at his intrusion. But she told herself that she had not lived hard, faced humiliation and failure for thirty years, to be beaten by a fool boy and an infatuated old gump of a widower. Once let her be Mis' Frazee, and if the sassy boy—sp'ilt till he's rotten—won't come down,—w'y the old man must. Virgil could behave himself, admit her sway, or he could leave. ”

“ When Judith stole noiselessly into the house and up to her room, she could hear the boys preparing for bed in their own quarters, with unwonted jesting and laughter, and even some occasional stamping about which suggested horse-play; and her lip curled angrily as she recalled Blatch’s jug of corn whiskey.
She lay thinking, thinking; and at length there evolved itself in her mind a plan for getting Creed safely out of the mountains by way of an ancient Cherokee trail that ran down the gulch through a distant corner of the old Turrentine place. ”

“ At the sound of Sylvane's voice, the heritage of Cain came home to Lance Cleaverage. A great upwelling black horror of himself flowed in on the fugitive. To what had he sunk! A murderer fleeing for his life, in his panic terror of pursuit menacing his own brother who came to help and succor!
"Oh, Buddy—Buddy—Buddy!" he cried, doubling forward over the pommel of his saddle, clutching Sylvane's shoulder, and closing his eyes to shut out the face of the dead man which swam before them in that quivering blue light. ”

“ Through the open window had followed a half dozen more of the Blossom Festival crowd, Barbara and Bronson Vandeman among them. Ina paid no attention to any one, standing there, her height increased by the long, straight lines of the costume, her bisque doll features given a strange, pallid dignity by the raw magnificence of its crusted purple and crimson and green and gold embroidery and the dead black wig.
"Isn't it an exquisite thing, Worth?" displaying herself before him. "Bronse has a complete Mandarin costume; we lead the grand march as the emperor and empress of Mongolia. ”

“ Ebless Frazee was that most shrewd of Yankees a Southern Yankee. A bit of a wiseacre, he loved to say enigmatic things that made people come back for explanation. Keen he was, a reader of human nature and its motives; shrewd at a bargain—as shrewd as a good man could well be,—and with a touch of the antic in his disposition; rather below medium size, light and active, with close-curled dark hair and beard, which from the time little Virgil could remember had been grizzled with white, and when the boy was sixteen had come to be almost an even silver. ”

“ If she, Judith Barrier, had dealt fairly and humbly by her world, she might have had the lover of her choice in peace as other girls had—even as Cliantha and Pendrilla had. But no, such enterprises as contented these, such stir as they made among their kind, would not do her. She must seek to cast her spells upon every eligible man within her reach. She must try her hand at subjugating those who were difficult, pride herself on the skill with which she retained half a dozen in anxious doubt as to her ultimate intentions concerning them. ”

“ Summer spread upon it each year a carpet of the finest ferns; now the delicate fronds 358 lay shriveled and yellow on the inky mold; only a few tiny bladderworts remained in the shelter of the remote crevices. In spite of the raw cold he lingered by the little basin, his lifted eye encountering the bird's nest he and Callista had found there in July, full then of warmth and young life and faithful love. It was beneath a breadth never penetrated by the drip. He studied the little abandoned home of the phoebe, built there of moss and leaves plastered together against the rock with clay. ”

“ The fight was up to Worth; nothing else for it. Capehart came rolling from the hedge where I had seen the pistols flash; Eddie Hughes, inconceivable in pink puffings, bounded after; Jim Edwards chased up from [Pg 323] his car; but all any of us could do was to run up and down as the struggle whirled about, and grunt when the blows landed. These sounded like a pile-driver hitting a redwood butt. Out of the mêlée an arm would jerk, the fist at the end of it come back to land with a thud—on somebody's meat. ”

“ Thus it was that Judith found herself on Selim, moving, free from suspicion or espionage, toward the point below Foeman’s Bluff where she had sent word to Creed to meet her.
The big oaks shouldered themselves in black umbels against the horizon; pointed conifers shot up inky spires between them. The sky was only greyish black, lit by many stars, and Judith trembled to note that their dim illumination might almost permit one to recognise an individual at a few paces distance. ”

“ The dome of that stone skull at once became a round, cozy cup of sheltered warmth and kindly human cheer; as much a home, there in the heart of the wilderness, as the phoebe's nest had ever been. For the first time the grim fact that had sent him into hiding, the horrid tragedy, seemed to blur a bit in its outlines. Callista made a trip down the bank to the floor of the valley, and brought up from where she had left them a small kettle and a frying pan.
"I'll cook you a fine dinner," she said in a cheery, practical tone, speaking as though she were in her own kitchen. ”

“ Cummings was a little ahead of me, when he checked a moment to bow to some one over at a desk. I followed his glance. The girl he had spoken to turned her back almost instantly after she had returned his greeting; but I couldn't be mistaken. There might be more than one figure with that slim, half girlish grace about it, and other hair as lustrously blue-black, but none could be wound around a small head quite so shapely, carried with so blossomlike a toss. It was Barbara Wallace. ”

“ The small-paned eastern window of the sick-room let in a flood of morning light. Gone was the bird choir that used to welcome his earliest rays, swept south by the great tide of migration. Those that remained, snowbird, cardinal, and downy woodpecker—the “checkerbacker” of the mountaineer,—harboured all night and much of the day in the barn loft and in Judith’s cedar tree. Their twittering sounded cheerily about the eaves.
Back and forth in the puncheon-floored kitchen trudged old Dilsey Rust’s heavy-shod foot, carrying her upon the appointed tasks of the day. ”

“ And the child was Callista over again; big blue eyes, a fuzz of pale gold down, and an air of great wisdom and dignity. As he grew able to sit up alone on the floor and manage his own playthings, one saw laughably enough his mother's slant glance of scorn, that which had been considered her affectation of 252 indifference, reproduced in the baby's manner. Between mother and son, Lance sometimes felt himself reduced to his lowest terms.
Yet they thrived, for the welfare of a primitive; household still depends more upon the woman than on the man. ”

“ I listened in wonder; sidelong, in the dimness, I studied the carriage of head and shoulders: no diminution of power; but a new use of it. This was not the crude boy who would knock everybody's plans to bits for a whim; Worth had found himself; and what a man!
"How does it look for recovering the money, Boyne?" Edwards questioned as we drove along.
I plunged into the hottest of that stuff Clayte-Vandeman had spilled, talked fascinatingly, as I thought, for three minutes, and paused to hear Worth say,
"Who's with Barbara at my house?"
"Mrs. Bowman," I said in despair, and quit right there. ”

“ The Lusk girls were Judith’s nearest neighbours—if you excepted Huldah Spiller at Jim Cal’s cabin, and at the present Judith certainly was in the mind to make an exception of her. The sisters were seldom seen apart; narrow shouldered, short waisted, thin limbed young creatures, they were even at seventeen bowing to a deprecating stoop. Their little faces were alike, short-chinned with pink mouths inclined to be tremulous, the eyes big, blue, and half-frightened in expression, and the drab hair drawn away from the small foreheads so tightly that it looked almost grey. ”

“ Callista looked after her baby and explored their new domain, moving about, girlish, light-footed, singing to herself, so that the eyes of the man bending over his task followed her eagerly. Two great boulders leaning together made them a rock house. Lance soon had a chimney up, of loose stones to be sure, but drawing sufficiently to keep the smoke out of your eyes unless the wind was more perverse than a summer breeze is apt to be. ”

“ Ten chances to one I'd have this man to silence; but it must be done right. Not much room for murder in so full a career as mine—holding down a teller's job, running for the vice presidency of the country club, getting married in style—but every time I'd look up from behind my teller's grille, and see any one near the size of old Gilbert walk in the front door, it gave me the shivers. I'd put more than eight years of planning and hard work into this scheme, and you'll admit, Boyne, that what I had was some alibi. A wedding like that in a town of this size makes a big noise. ”

“ The mornings were vocal with the notes of yellow hammer, cuckoos; the cooing of doves, the squawk of the jay, and the drum of the big red-headed woodpecker sounded through the summer woods; while always in the cool of the day came the thrush’s song. The early corn was in by mid April. About the first full moon of May the main crop was planted.
Early in June Judith, walking in the wood, brought home the splendid red wood lily, and a cluster too of “ratsbane,” with its flowers like a little crown of white wax. ”

“ There was a babble of tongues and laughter, a hubbub of mirth, a crossfiring and confusion of sound and movement which wrought upon the nerves like broken chords, subtle dissonances, in music. Buck was trying to play again, some of the boys were patting and stamping, others remonstrating, jeering, making ironic suggestions, when Lance, a bit flushed and bright of eye, dropped his arm around the brown girl's waist to take his forfeit. ”

“ Wednesday evening I pulled into a different Santa Ysobel: lanterns strung across between the buildings, bunting and branches of bloom everywhere, streets alive with people milling around, and cars piled high with decorative material, crowded with the decorators. The carnival of blossoms was only three days ahead.
At Bill Capehart's garage they told me Barbara was out somewhere with the crowd; and a few minutes later on Main Street, I met her in a Ford truck. ”

“ When Blatchley Turrentine had asserted this thing to her at Garyville, she found somewhere—after her first gust of unreasoning resentment 293 was past—strength to disbelieve it utterly. But now it came again in more plausible guise. It gained likeliness from mere repetition. And hardest of all to bear, she was totally unsupported in her trust. She knew Creed, knew his love for her; yet to cling to it was to fly in the face of probabilities, and of everything and everybody about her. The lover who is silent, absent from her who loves him, at such a time, runs tremendous risks. ”