"How could I be knowin" to it?" she asked, taking him seriously, or appearing to. "I nev" knowed school let out this time o" year."
"It"s let out for me, Nan," he said meaningly. "I came home--for good--nearly three weeks ago. My mother has been sick. Didn"t you hear of it?"
She shook her head gravely.
"I hain"t been as far as Paradise sence paw and me moved back from Pine k.n.o.b, two months ago. I don"t hear nothin" any more."
In times long past, Tom, valley-born and of superior clay, used to be scornful of the mountain dialect. Now, on Nan"s lips, it charmed him.
It was blessedly reminiscent of the care-free days of yore.
"Say, Nan; I hope you haven"t got to hurry home," he interposed, when she stooped to lift the overflowing bucket. "I want to talk to you--to tell you something."
She looked up quickly, and there were scrolls unreadable in the black eyes.
"Air you a man now, Tom-Jeff, or on"y a boy like you used to be?" she asked.
Tom squared his broad shoulders and laughed.
"I"m big enough to be in my own way a good deal of the time. I believe I could muddy Sim Cantrell"s back for him now, at arm-holts."
But there was still a question in the black eyes.
"Where"s your preacher"s coat, Tom-Jeff? I was allowin" you"d be wearin"
it nex" time we met up."
"I reckon there isn"t going to be any preacher"s coat for me, Nan; that"s one of the things I want to talk to you about. Let"s go over yonder and sit down in the sun."
The place he chose for her was a flat stone half embedded in the up-climbing slope beyond the great boulder. She sat facing the path and the spring, listening, while Tom, stretched luxuriously on a bed of dry leaves at her feet, told her what had befallen; how he had been turned out of Beersheba, and what for; how, all the former things having pa.s.sed away, he was torn and distracted in the struggle to find a footing in the new order.
In the midst of it he had a feeling that she was only dimly apprehending; that some of his keenest pains--most of them, perhaps--did not appeal to her. But there was comfort in her bodily presence, in the listening ear. It was a shifting of the burden in some sort, and there be times when the humblest pack animal may lighten a king"s load.
His fears touching her understanding, or her lack of it, were confirmed when he had reached a stopping-place.
"They-all up yonder in that school where you was at hain"t got much sense, it looks like to me," was her comment. "You"re a man growed now, Tom-Jeff, and if you want to play cards or drink whisky, what-all business is it o" their"n?"
He smiled at her elemental point of view; laughed outright when the significance of it struck him fairly. But it betokened allegiance of a kind to gladden the heart of the masculine tyrant, and he rolled the declaration of fealty as a sweet morsel under his tongue.
"You stand by your friends, right or wrong, don"t you, girl?" he said, in sheerest self-gratulation. "That"s what I like in you. You asked me a little while back if I was a man or a boy; I believe you could make a man of me, Nan, if you"d try."
He was looking up into her face as he said it and the change that came over her lighted a strange fire in his blood. The black eyes kindled it, and the red lips, half parted, blew it into a blaze. His face flushed and he broke the eye-hold and looked down. In their primal state, when Nature mothered the race, the man was less daring than the woman.
"If you"d said that two year ago," she began, in a half-whisper that melted the marrow in his bones. "But you was on"y a boy then; and now I reckon it"s too late."
"You mean that you don"t care for me any more, Nan? I know better than that. You"d back me if I had come up here to tell you that I"d killed somebody. Wouldn"t you, now?"
He waited overlong for his answer. There were sounds in the air: a metallic tapping like the intermittent drumming of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r mingled with a rustling as of some small animal scurrying back and forth over the dead leaves. The girl leaned forward, listening intently. Then three men appeared in the farther crooking of the spring path, and at the first glimpse of them she slipped from the flat stone to cower behind Tom, trembling, shaking with terror.
"Hide me, Tom-Jeff! Oh, for G.o.d"s sake, hide me, quick!" she panted.
"Lookee there!"
He looked and saw the three men walking slowly up the pipe-line which drained the barrel-spring. They were too far away to be recognizable to him, and since they were stopping momently to examine the pipe, there was good hope of an escape unseen.
Tom waited breathless for the propitious instant when the tapping of the pipe-men"s hammers should drown the noise of a dash for effacement. When it came, he flung himself backward, whipped Nan over his head and out of the line of sight as if she had been feather-light, and rolled swiftly after her.
Before she could rise he had picked her up and was dragging her to the climbing point under the lip of the boulder cave.
"Up with you!" he commanded, making a step of his hand. "Give me your foot and then climb to my shoulder--quick!" But she drew back.
"Oh, I can"t!" she gasped. "I--I"m too skeered!"
Tom"s brows went together in the Gordon frown. Bone-meltings and blood-firings apart, he was neither a fool nor a dastard, and he was older now than on that day when the storm had driven them to take refuge in the heart of the great rock. And since he had decided that the cavern was only big enough for one, he had meant to put Nan up, going himself to meet the intruders to make sure that they should not discover her.
But her trembling fit--a new and curious thing in the girl who used to make his flesh creep with her reckless daring--spoiled the plan.
"Can"t you climb up?" he demanded.
She shook her head despairingly, and he lost no time in trying to persuade her. Jumping to catch the lip of the cavern"s mouth, he ascended cat-like, and a moment later he had drawn her up after him.
"I"d like to know what got the matter with you all at once," he said severely, when they were crowded together in the narrow rock cell; and then, without waiting for her answer: "You stay here while I drop down and keep those fellows away from this side of things."
But it was too late. The men were already at the barrel-spring, as an indistinct murmur of voices testified. The girl had another trembling fit when she heard them, and Tom"s wonder was fast lapsing into contempt or something like it.
"Oh-h-h!" she shuddered. "Do you reckon they saw us, Tom-Jeff?"
"I shouldn"t wonder," he whispered back unfeelingly. "We could see them plain enough."
"He"ll kill me, for sh.o.r.e, Tom-Jeff! O G.o.d!"
Tom"s lip curled. The wolf does not mate with the jackal. Not all her beauty could atone for such spiritless cringing. Love would have pitied her, but pa.s.sion is not moved by qualities opposite to those which have evoked it.
"Then you know them--or one of them, at least," he said. "Who is he?"
She would not tell; and since the murmur of voices was still plainly audible, she begged in dumb-show for silence. Whereupon Tom shut his mouth and did not open it again until the sound of the voices had died away and the fainter tappings of the hammers on the pipe-line advertised the retreat of the inspection party.
"They"re gone now," he said shortly. "Let"s get out of here before we stifle."
But a second time ill chance intervened. Tom had a leg over the brink and was looking for a soft leaf bed to drop into, when the baying of a hound broke on the restored quiet of the mountain side. "Oh, dang it all!" said Tom heartily, and drew back into hiding.
The girl"s ague fit of fear had pa.s.sed, and she seemed less concerned about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is the way Tom"s thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in Nan"s place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to be hidden at the possible cost of her good name. And Nan"s word did not help matters.
"What makes you so cross to me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked, when he drew back with the impatient exclamation. "I hain"t done nothin" to make you let on like you hate me, have I?"
"I don"t hate you," said Tom, frowning. "If I did, I shouldn"t care."
Just then the hound burst out of the laurel thicket on the brow of the lower slope, running with its nose to the ground, and he added: "That"s j.a.phe Pettigra.s.s"s dog; I hope to goodness he isn"t anywhere behind it."
But the horse-trader was behind the dog; so close behind that he came out on the continuation of the pipe-line path while the hound was still nosing among the leaves where Tom had lain sunning himself and telling his tale of woe.
"Good dog--seek him! What is it, old boy?" Pettigra.s.s came up, patted the hound, and sat down on the flat stone to look on curiously while the dog coursed back and forth among the dead leaves. "Find him, Caesar; find him, boy!" encouraged j.a.pheth; and finally the hound pointed a sensitive nose toward the rift in the side of the great boulder and yelped conclusively.
"D"ye reckon he climm up thar", Caesar?" Pettigra.s.s unfolded his long legs and stood up on the flat stone to attain an eye-level with the interior of the little cavern. Tom crushed Nan into the farthest cranny, and flattened himself lizard-like against the nearer side wall. The horse-trader looked long and hard, and they could hear him still talking to the dog.