"Now then, Parson, we"ve got Jacob down and out. Nickols has got his foot on his neck and I"ve got his pistol. What do you want done with him?" Billy interrupted me pantingly to demand.
"Let him up," answered Mr. Goodloe, as he gently extricated himself from my clinging hand and went over to the scene of the conflict. "Had enough, Jacob?" he asked just as gently as he had unhanded himself from me.
"I"ll have had enough when I put you where you can"t entice my girl again," answered Jacob as he rose slowly to his feet. As he spoke Billy went and stood beside the parson and Nickols stepped behind them into the shadow in which Martha crouched.
"You know that is not true, Jacob. I helped Martha to go away to a place of safety to earn her living and keep her honesty. Isn"t that so, Martha?" the rich voice softly asked the woman crouching in the dark.
"I told him that but he wouldn"t believe me and the others don"t," she answered with a sob that was almost a shudder of fear.
"What did she come back fer then?" demanded Jacob. "Answer me that. And didn"t she go straight to your preaching and praying joint like all the other women, fine and s.l.u.ts, do?" The liquor was still burning in Jacob"s head but at those words he got a response from the impact of Billy"s fist that again laid him low.
"Oh, I dasn"t say nothing. I dasn"t," moaned Martha, as she clutched at my skirts just as Nell and Hampton began to arrive on the scene of action, followed by Harriet and Mark and the others. They were all panting and wild with anxiety. They had taken the wrong turning at the end of the square and had gone around the block, thus giving the little tragedy time to enact itself before a mercifully small audience.
"Go away quickly, Martha, in the shadow," I bent and whispered to the trembling woman, and I didn"t know where the sympathy in my voice came from as I stood between her and the rest while she slipped behind an old horse block before the court house gate and off in the darkness towards the Settlement before they had noticed her presence.
"Anybody hurt? What"s the matter?" gasped Mark as he seized hold of the Reverend Mr. Goodloe"s arm.
"Nothing serious," answered the parson in a voice that calmed the others like oil on choppy water. "Jacob Ensley is out on a drunk and Billy had to knock him down to quiet him. All of you go back to dinner quickly, for I don"t see why Sergeant Rogers should get Jacob this time. Billy will help me get him home and I"ll remonstrate with him when he is sober. I"d rather do it at the Last Chance than at the jail. Jacob is a leading citizen and I don"t want a jail smirch on him. I intend to use him later. Now all of you go. Go!" His voice was as gently positive as if he had been speaking to a lot of children and n.o.body seemed even to think of rebelling but we all began to fade away into the starlight as rapidly as we had a.s.sembled and more quietly.
"Thank you, and bless you," he said to me, as I went past him in the darkness, and for just a second I suspected that his hand was laid on my black braids but I was not sure. I knew the grat.i.tude was for my getting Martha off the scene of action so quietly and swiftly.
"A bit of raw life for you, Charlotte," Nickols remarked as he went with me through the fragrant night back to Mark"s and Nell"s feast. "The eternal girl, two-men melee."
"In this case it was girl--three men, the third skunking it," I answered in words as coa.r.s.e and as forcible as the scene I had just witnessed.
"I"d like to get my bare hands around the throat of the man who is hiding behind Martha and that little child."
"That remark from you, my dear Charlotte, just goes to show that when women get even the smell of bloodshed they become fiercer than the male," said Nickols with a cool laugh that further infuriated me.
"Yes, I do feel like a female jaguar," I answered hotly and then collapsed inside at the use of that name for myself in conjunction with my secret t.i.tle for the Reverend Mr. Goodloe.
"It would be better if you felt yourself in the character of a ferret if you intend to go out on a still hunt for all unacknowledged paternity, even in dear, simple, little old Goodloets," Nickols further jeered as we came up the steps of the Morgan house from where the others were just going into the dining room to resume their eating and drinking and being merry.
"I"ll find that one man," I answered as I swept into the dining room, seated myself in my place and drained my gla.s.s of flat wine.
"Heaven help him!" laughed Nickols wickedly, and he raised Mr. Goodloe"s full gla.s.s as he slipped into his place beside me.
For a week after the shooting fray my soul sulked darkly in its tent and meditated while I went on my usual gay rounds of self-enjoyment. The garden was being brought to a most glorious mid-August triumph and the inhabitants for miles around were coming to see it. All of father"s old friends, from whom he had shrunk in the last years, hung around him in the old way. He sat with them under the old graybeard poplars around which had been planted a plantation of slim young larches by the wizard of White Plains. From discussions about gardening and Americanisms all the old Solons of the local bar, and even of the towns around, gradually led their fallen leader back into his place and were battling with him over politics and jurisprudence as they had in past days. The day I went into his library to ask father about employing another likely black garden boy that Dabney had discovered, and found him, Judge Monfort from over at Hillcrest in the third district, Mr. c.o.c.krell and Mr. Sproul around his table deep in huge volumes from the shelves, buried in a cloud of tobacco smoke and argument in which Latin words flew back and forth, I went up to my room and stood helpless before my window looking out towards Paradise Ridge.
"I want to thank somebody and there is n.o.body to thank," I whispered, with a great emptiness within me. That was the bitterest cry of need my heart had ever given forth, and I went swiftly down to Nickols in the garden and told him what I had seen and heard.
"It really is a remarkable come-back, sweetheart," he said, with the most exquisite sympathy in his voice and face. "Mark Morgan told me just an hour ago that they want to have him appointed back to his old place on the bench and Mr. c.o.c.krell answered the President"s inquiry for a man from this section for the Commerce Commission with the judge"s name.
It"ll be great to see the old boy on one of the seats of the mighty again, thanks to the sweat of his brow and mind in this village manifestation of American nationalism which has grown out of our little old garden plan."
"What can a man or woman do to render grat.i.tude if there seems to be n.o.body to take it, Nickols?" I asked him, not expecting, as usual, that he would understand me. For once he did.
"The philosophies all teach "hand it on" in that case," he answered me.
"I"ll hand it on to Martha Ensley and help her and her child to their place under the sun," I said slowly, thus by having a reason and an obligation back of it, ratifying the vow I had already taken.
"That is an impossibility," answered Nickols with easy coolness. "The one "come-back" that is impossible is the woman in that kind of a situation."
"I"ll never admit such an injustice as that," I said, and I had a queer premonition that I would be held to that declaration.
The very next morning after my declaration of purpose to "hand on" my father"s "come-back" I went down into the Settlement to hunt for Martha Ensley, not that I was really suffering about her, but because I felt a kind of obligation to begin at once a thing that it appealed to my sense of justice to accomplish.
Sometimes in mid-August there comes down a night over the hot, lush, maturing Harpeth Valley which is like a benediction that sprinkles cool dew on a thirsting heart. And now the morning was cool and brilliant, with the sun evaporating the heavy dew in soft clouds of perfume from the grain fields, the meadows and the upturned soil out where the farmers were breaking ground after the first harvests. I felt strong and calm and full of an electric energy, which I found I needed before I had more than started my quest.
I put on my tennis clothes, snowy from collar to shoe tips, like the trappings of the White Knight, and started to walk down into the Settlement to find Martha. I intended to stop at Mother Spurlock"s "Little House Beside the Road," and some vague idea was in my mind of having her dispatch a messenger to summons Martha to the interview I was about to bestow upon her. That is not the way it all happened and I was hot and dusty and sweat-drenched before I had been on my quest more than a few hours.
Mother Elsie was not at home. The door to the Little House was wide open, as it always is when cold or rain does not close it, and huge old Tabby with one eye purred on the doorstep in the sun. A bird was nesting in the wisteria vine above the door and her soft whirring bespoke an interesting domestic event as near at hand. It did not in the least disturb Tab, and I wondered at the harmony between traditional enemies that I met on Mother Spurlock"s very doorstep. I went in and drew myself a drink of fresh cool water from the cistern at the back door, looked in a tin box over the kitchen table and took three crisp tea cakes therefrom. I picked up a half knitted sock from beside the huge split rocker in the shade of the gnarled old apple tree, which was a rooftree in every sense of the word, for it crowded close against the door and hovered in the whole tiny house. Just before I left I put all the loose change I had in my white linen skirt pocket in an old lacquered tea canister which had a slit in it cut with a can opener, and that stood on the shelf of the old rock chimney in the low living room. I had never heard that canister mentioned by Mother Spurlock and I don"t know how I knew that out of it came the emergency funds for many a crisis in the Settlement. Then last I picked a blush rose from the monthly bloomer trailing up and over the window and laid it on the empty, worn old Bible on the wide arm of the rocker beside a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
Then I hesitated. I had been so sure of finding Mother Spurlock at home and having her hunt up Martha for me that I found it difficult to adjust myself to my first complexity of plans. And while I hesitated a resolve came into my mind with the completeness of a spoken direction.
"She lives at the Last Chance and I"ll go right down there and find her," I said to myself, as I started along the peony-bordered path to the front gate of the Little House, over which a huge late s...o...b..ll was drooping, loaded down with snowy b.a.l.l.s that would hold their own until almost the time for frost. At my own decision I had a delicious little feeling of fear, which was at least justifiable when I thought of that huge drunken figure wrestling with Billy in the darkness and whom I knew to be the proprietor of the resort into which I had determined to penetrate. Also, from my early youth I had heard Jacob Ensley and the Last Chance spoken of in tones of dread disapproval. Before I should become really frightened I hurried down the hill, past the squalid and tumble-down mill cottages which I had never really seen before, where it seemed to me millions of children swarmed in and around and about, and at last arrived at the infamous social center of the Settlement.
And my astonishment was profound to find that the Last Chance sign hung over a very prosperous grocery with boxes and barrels of provender out on the pavement under an awning and with huge, newly-painted screen doors guarding the wide entrance, at which I hesitated.
"Come right in, lady, come right in," called a cheerful, booming man"s voice, and the door was swung open by a large man in a white ap.r.o.n, with blue eyes that crinkled at the corners, a wide smile and white hair.
"What can we do for you to-day? We"ve a nice lot of late dewberries just in from over on Paradise Ridge."
"I"m--I"m looking for the--the Last Chance Saloon," I faltered, because I was too astonished to utter anything but the truth to the delightful and tenderly solicitous man standing before me in his huge, clean white ap.r.o.n over his blue shirt that matched his eyes.
"Well, lady," the nice Irish voice faltered a trifle, about as mine had, though plainly with controlled astonishment tinged with amus.e.m.e.nt, "could I get you anything to--to cool you off and bring it out here in the grocery? It is cooler than it is back at the bar. I said to myself jest last week, so I did, I said to myself, "Jacob, you ought to get a sody-water fountain for the ladies what has the same right to thirst as a man." And I will, too, if my bad luck just leaves me. How about a nice cool bottle of beer sitting comfortable here before the counter?"
"Are you--_you_--Jacob--I mean--Mr. Jacob Ensley?" I further gasped.
This daylight materialization of the grewsome beast of the night was too much for me.
"Jacob Ensley at your service, Miss," he answered with easy dignity.
"Now, will it be the bottle of beer I shall bring you? Or there"s a new drink I might mix fer you that a young gentleman friend of mine from New York has taught me, and with a good Irish name of Thomas Collins--the drink, not the young gentleman." Nickols had been living on Tom Collins for the last month and I instantly knew that I recognized the young friend from New York. Also my wits were at a branching of the road and I didn"t know just what to do or say as Jacob waited with easy courtesy for my decision. And again I was too much perturbed for invention and had to speak out the truth.
"I"m Charlotte Powers, Mr. Ensley, and I came down to see your daughter, Martha," I said, looking directly into his clear friendly eyes which I saw instantly darken with a storm as the smile left his nice mouth and it hardened into a straight line.
"I"m sorry, Miss Powers, but my Martha ain"t at home right now to you, and I don"t know when she will be. Is that all I can do for you? These berries now, from over at Paradise Ridge?" And with the ease of a man of the great upper world Jacob Ensley of the lower walks of life put me out of the door of his private life into the ranks of the meddler and shut it in my face. I acknowledged to myself that my rebuff was justifiable and I was about to make an exit from the scene as gracefully as possible with a box of the really delicious berries under my arm when a cry of terror in a child"s voice came from somewhere at the back of the grocery and together the grocer and I ran to see what the matter could be. And at the heels of the proprietor I then penetrated the blind of the grocery and entered the Last Chance.
CHAPTER XII
THE TENACIOUS TURTLE
"It"s Martha"s Stray," the big man gasped in a kind of impatient alarm.
"I just left him here a minute ago to go front." Together he and I started around the long room with its bar on the one side backed up by a mirror whose gilt frame was swathed in mosquito netting and on either side of which were shelves bearing pyramids of bottles. On the bar at one end were piled oranges and at the other lemons and limes whose sophistication seemed out of place somehow in the Settlement in the Harpeth Valley. All the trappings that I judge would go with the dispensing of liquor were present, but our eyes could discover no small child and we stood together and waited anxiously.
"He"s got me toe, me toe, and won"t let go. He"s chewing it off!" at last came a l.u.s.ty yell from just outside a back door that led out into a side yard from behind the bar, and with one accord the proprietor of the Last Chance and I ran to the scene of the devouring. And as we ran I heard a door slam in the rooms back of the bar and we met Martha face to face on the scene of action. I shall never forget the picture that confronted me there in that little back yard upon which the bar of the Last Chance opened, and I somehow never want to.
On a little gra.s.s plot a small boy danced and yelled and firmly to one of the capering feet was hung a large mud turtle which was flapped this way and that by the strenuous young leg, but which held on with apparently every intention of letting only the traditional thunder loosen its grasp on the pink prize.