"Well?" Caleb didn"t know just how to begin, but his voice was cold.
"Well, young man, can you explain just what this means?"
The Honorable Archie limped away a pace or two and, whimpering, fell to rearranging his crumpled raiment--fell to dabbling at a bruised and swollen nose. When he found that there was blood upon his handkerchief he howled again, but the rest of the children waited, appalled, for Steve"s answer.
Had the boy burst into bitter expletive at that instant Caleb would not have been so surprised as he was at Steve"s reception of his question.
The latter looked up, just pushed his long hair back from his forehead with one quick hand; and then smiled, very, very slowly.
"Nuthin"--nuthin" much," he qualified the statement. "Only we was goin" to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table! He wanted to be her knight"--an uncomplimentary thumb indicated the Honorable Archie--"and--and so did I." This time his eyes went to Barbara, who was listening, her teeth sunk in her lip. "He wanted to be her knight--an"--an" he ain"t got no call to be, because in case of trouble, or anything, he couldn"t purtect her! He couldn"t fight good enough to take good keer o" her, because I kin fight better. I--I just licked him to prove it!"
And there the matter-of-fact explanation halted.
Caleb never knew just what he had meant to do when he first dragged the boy away from his shrieking rival. But while he stood there, looking down into that glowing face, he realized that he had walked into a situation bigger than any with which he was prepared to cope. Already it had become veritable comedy to the broadly grinning Allison--but it seemed symbolic to Caleb. He sensed how close it lay to tragedy itself; he found himself arguing kindly, in place of the rebuke which he had thought to deliver.
"But in the days when knighthood was in flower, Steve," he explained ponderously, "the--the fair ladies always chose their own knights, didn"t they?"
But the question had an entirely unexpected effect upon the boy. For, instead of wiping the smile from the small and wistfully earnest face, it only softened it. Shyly Steve fell to kicking the turf with the toe of his new boot; then his head came up and, flaming red, he squared his shoulders and faced Barbara full. The move was unmistakable--he was just waiting for her to name him the knight of her choice. And, instead, the little girl, her eyes twin shafts of searing scorn, curled her lips at him and fairly spat out the words in her shaking rage.
"You--you--_my_ knight?" she half whispered, "_You_!" And she turned her back and went, solicitously, toward Archie and his rumpled clothes.
Even Allison stopped smiling, even Devereau forgot his curious amus.e.m.e.nt, at the livid change which came over Steve"s face with that answer which she flung at him. The boy fell away a step before her fierce little visage; he crooked one arm, over the cheek where her fists had beaten the skin pink a moment before. And then her meaning struck him like a blow between the eyes.
Shoulders slumped forward, head hanging low, he wheeled on heel and started for the gap in the hedge. Caleb could not move, nor did Allison, whose wits were quick enough in most things. But Garry Devereau followed and overtook his friend. He did not speak to him; he merely dropped one hand upon his drooping shoulders. And yet the men, had they talked for an hour, could not have conveyed all that there was in that second of contact. For it proved electrical in its effect.
Steve whirled again and came marching back, head up now--back to the group which had not moved. Straight up to Barbara he went and faced her once again.
"I wa"n"t good enough to be your knight, was I?" he accused her in a hushed and vibrant voice. "I--I don"t know enough, ner I can"t talk good enough, to be your knight. I ain"t good enough fer you! But I"m a-goin" to be--do you hear? I"m a-goin" to be--an" when I am . . .
when I am . . . then I"ll come back to you!"
This time, rigid as a lance, he disappeared from sight. Caleb stood staring at the ground. Allison stood and stared at the horizon.
And when Barbara finally started, white of face and silent, toward the stucco house, Caleb, too, turned and followed his boy home. It was the first time in his memory that he and Dexter Allison had parted in anger, and at that moment Caleb believed that he hated the man and all that was his!
Steve had gone straight to his room, but one glimpse of his bloodless face had told Sarah too much and too little. After her brother had explained she would not let him go upstairs to the boy.
"It will be better to leave him alone for a while," she said. "It has been coming for days, this thing. I think I knew it would come--but how could we have stopped it, Cal? And you won"t believe me, but it"s because Barbara Allison cares more for our boy"s little finger than she could for a hundred Archie Wickershams that she--she said what she did.
Women do those things, and even I, who am a woman, can"t tell you why!"
Steve did not come downstairs for supper that night, and when he failed to appear at the breakfast hour, both Caleb and Sarah mounted to his room, fear in their hearts. The bed had not been slept in; the sheets were not even disarranged, but there was a sc.r.a.p of paper pinned to one pillow-slip. It wasn"t written in "book language"--that short message--for it was not his brain, but his heart, which had phrased it:
I"m a-comin" back--I"m comin" back to you, someday when they won"t be no need fer you to be ashamed fer me. I"m takin" my new clothes with me because I knowed you would a-wanted me to--and the shoes, too. I"m askin" you to take keer of Ole Samanthy til I come fer her--and Miss Sarah ain"t got no call to worry, fer I could always take keer o"
myself.
It was signed "Stephen O"Mara."
Sarah"s face went white when she had read it through. Her knees weakened under her and she had to sit down.
"Why, Cal--why, Cal, he"s--he"s gone," she quavered.
And Caleb nodded down into her stricken face.
"Yes--he--he"s gone," he breathed.
Sarah swallowed hard. Then two bright tears crept out from under her eyelids and went coursing down her cheeks. She rose and groped her way to her own room.
Caleb found Barbara Allison waiting in the living-room when he, still numb from the shock, went back downstairs. She came up to him and stood a moment, twisting the fingers of one hand within those of the other.
"I want to see Stephen, please, Uncle Cal," she faltered.
Caleb drew a deep and unsteady breath.
"Steve isn"t here, Barbara," he said as gently as he could.
The child didn"t understand.
"Father sent me over to apologize," she explained slowly. "I"m to tell him that I"m sorry. But I--I want to tell him, too, that if I couldn"t have him for my knight--I--I wouldn"t ever have any knight at all!"
Caleb felt a tightening at his throat which made speech difficult.
"But Steve has gone away," he managed to gulp.
A shadow came into the big dark eyes lifted to his.
"He"ll be back for breakfast, won"t he?" she asked, hopefully.
"I"m afraid not, Barbara. I"m afraid now that he may never come back--again."
She didn"t understand what he meant at first, so Caleb tried to explain. But when his voice broke and trailed off into a husky whisper there was no further need of explanation. She ran then and threw herself in a pa.s.sion of tears upon a window-seat in the corner. Caleb found his chair. And after a time he felt a small hand touch his sleeve; he felt a wet cheek pressed tight to his own.
"Oh, don"t you feel so badly, too, Uncle Cal," Barbara sobbed.
"Please--please! Because he _is_ coming back! He told me he would--he told me he would, himself!"
CHAPTER VI
MY MAN O"MARA
For a week and more Caleb Hunter scoured the surrounding country. He whipped over the hills in every direction, half hopeful that he might overtake the boy who had gone in the night. But none of the farmers on the outlying roads had seen pa.s.s their way a little foot traveler such as he described, and after a time even that small hope died.
When Dexter Allison came over the next day, his face far more perturbed than Caleb had ever before seen it by the news which Barbara, in tears, had carried to him, Caleb found that his anger had somehow oozed away during the night. Allison"s concern was too genuine to be feigned; and Caleb learned too, that morning, that beneath his neighbor"s amus.e.m.e.nt at the boy there had always been a strain of admiration for his st.u.r.dy gravity and more than a bit of wonder at his uncanny knowledge of things which were as sealed books to Dexter.
Together the two men searched for Steve, driving in silence through the country, until they both realized that the search was useless. And at last one day in early fall, Caleb started alone upon his errand into that stretch of timber to the north which the boy himself had vaguely designated as "up-river."
He spent a week in the saddle before he located the cabin of the "Jenkinses" in an isolated clearing upon the main branch of the river.
If the journey could have been made cross-country, straight through the wilderness itself, it would have been no more than a ten-mile ride from that cabin to the same huge valley at the headwaters of the east branch, where he and Dexter and the boy had camped only a few days before. But it was a two days" journey around the backbone of that ridge alone, by trail. And even then, when he did locate the "Jenkinses," it took hours of quiet argument before Caleb could convince those shy and suspicious people that his errand was an honest one. Eventually they did come to believe him; they led him, a-foot, another half mile up the timber-fringed stream, to a log cabin set back in the balsams upon a needle carpeted knoll. And they stood and stared in stolid wonder at this portly man in riding breeches and leather puttees, when he finally emerged from that small shack, "Old Tom"s" tin box under his arm, and, with lips working strangely, pinned the door shut behind him.