Caleb turned a wry face toward Allison.
"In--that--outfit!" he groaned. "Down to the village, and it"s a lumber town! He"s gone, and if he doesn"t have to fight his way back then I----"
Sarah"s alarm changed to fear instantly. She stepped out upon the porch.
"I never thought of that," she whispered. "But you don"t really think----"
In her agitation she turned to Allison for contradiction. But Allison, after placing a chair for her, drew one up for himself and, with an expansive smile of antic.i.p.ation upon his face, propped his feet upon the rail.
"I think," he a.s.sured her, with no comfort in the a.s.surance, "that this will be well worth watching through to the finish!"
They sat and waited and in due course of time the boy returned. As he appeared at the gate Sarah, with a strange choking sound in her throat, half rose and then dropped weakly back into her chair. And even to Allison, who had fondly looked forward to the worst, the little suit with the pretty ruffed cuffs was an unbelievable wreck. The coat had been ripped from hem to collar and dangled loose upon either side as the boy advanced toward them; the knees of the trousers were split till the bare skin showed through beneath, and those portions of the fabric which were not encrusted with dirt were liberally o"er-spread with egg.
After one stricken glance at the spectacle Sarah tottered to her feet and retreated none too steadily into the house. But it wasn"t the condition of the boy"s clothes which held Caleb"s gaze. He was watching his face. For as Steve marched across the lawn the dangerous whiteness of the boy"s countenance half frightened the man. His lips were a thin streak across a jaw tight clamped and flecked with blood in one corner. And his eyes had the wide-open fixity of a sleep-walker.
Steve had reached the top of the steps in his mechanical approach before Caleb spoke. And even then, when he turned, he seemed only half to see the two men who were waiting his coming.
"Well?" faltered Caleb.
The boy stopped short and slowly turned his head. Both men heard that breath, short and harsh, in the moment of silence.
"Just what does this mean?" Caleb attempted again. "Where have you been?"
He hardly recognized the boy"s voice.
"I been daown to the city," Steve slurred the words. "I been daown to git Miss Sarah a dozen eggs--and I run into trouble--daown there--a-gittin" "em!"
"I--I should a.s.sume that you had," murmured Caleb. "But you"ve brought the eggs back with you, or most of them, I see, even though they aren"t in particularly edible condition."
That was as long as Allison could endure it; he burst into a fit of laughter which lasted until he was moaning for breath. And Steve, teeth set, waited without moving until the noisy outburst was over.
"You"d better go upstairs and get into your old clothes," Caleb advised him then. "And I"ll get you something less--less dangerous to wear before night."
But the boy stood rigid still.
"Will you," he asked, "will you give me another quarter now?"
Allison looked up quickly from wiping his eyes.
"A quarter," echoed Caleb slowly, even while he reached into his pocket and handed the coin to the boy. "Now what do you----Here, where are you going now?"
Steve had turned and was marching down the steps. He paused a minute to explain, however.
"Why, I"m goin" back daown to the city," he grated out. "I"m goin"
back after Miss Sarah"s eggs!"
And he went and when he returned the creases in the paper bag which held his purchase were as fresh as when it had left the grocer"s counter.
"Well I"m--I"m d.a.m.ned!" Allison murmured, after the boy had entered the house. "I _am_ d.a.m.ned! You"ll have to bring that youngster over, Cal, and introduce him to the children."
Caleb couldn"t help it.
"I told you so!" he said.
That was only a beginning. The next fortnight was filled with more new experiences than either Caleb or his sister would have believed could be crammed into twenty times that duration. And Caleb spent most of his waking hours boasting to the tolerant Allison of new and quite astonishing traits which he found in the boy.
Acting upon Dexter"s suggestion the man took Steve across the very next day and presented him to the children who were guests in the big stucco and timber house: Little, shy, transparent-skinned Mary Graves and Garret Devereau and Archibald Wickersham--the Right Honorable Archie.
But from the very first, Steve"s lack of enthusiasm for their company impressed itself upon Caleb. As a matter of fact, the boy did cross over and join in their games the first day or two, but it was only after Caleb himself had suggested it. And more often than not he would be back again, before an hour had pa.s.sed, to sit silent and moody, chin in hand, upon the steps, gazing north at the hills. It puzzled Caleb mightily; he laid it to homesickness at the beginning.
Toward Barbara Allison, throughout those days, Steve"s bearing was that of frank and undisguised wonder and worship. Whatever they did, no matter what they played at, his eyes rarely left the little girl"s bobbed head. For any feat which he performed he invariably turned to her for approbation. And in return for that worship Barbara"s treatment of him was truly feminine. He out-ran the other boys as a deer might outrun an ox; he out-leaped them without putting himself to an effort, but he won scant attention or visible admiration from the dark-eyed Barbara. She was far more likely to turn from his hungry eyes to compliment the Honorable Archie upon his clumsy performance with a sweetness that left Steve biting his lips in lack of understanding. More than once it made even Caleb grit his teeth--the little girl"s disdainfully tilted chin--and when Steve"s reluctance to leave his own yard became an unmistakable thing, he spoke to Sarah about it.
"Maybe I"m prejudiced, blindly," he growled, "but I do believe that there is nothing in the world to equal the absolute and refined cruelty of a woman-child of ten--unless it is that of a woman of twenty or thirty, and on up the scale--when she first finds out that a man cares enough for her so that she can really hurt him! If that Barbara was a boy I"d catch her and switch her--Allison or no Allison!"
At any other time Sarah would have defended her own s.e.x with much asperity; instead, there was something oddly wistful in her answer.
"If it were only the way she treats him," she mused, "I wouldn"t mind so much." The sudden outraged glint in her eyes startled Caleb. "That isn"t the reason he doesn"t want to play with them. They have been laughing at him, Cal; they have all been making fun of him, openly--mocking his speech and--and manners! All of them, that is, save Garry Devereau."
Caleb"s face hardened.
"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.
"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed. "And you musn"t mention it to him. I just gathered it from something he let drop the other day. You know, Cal, he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly marvelous. He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can; and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he didn"t talk as--as he read. He didn"t know what I meant at first, but he understood the minute I tried to explain.
""Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?" he asked.
"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little face began to go red.
""Do--do they," and he nodded over yonder, Cal, "do they all talk--like books?"
"So you see! And he"s been trying ever since to correct his quaint idioms and funny contractions, but it"ll take a long time to correct a mental process which is habit with him." Sarah"s face grew resentful.
"I wish we"d never let him go over there, in the first place. We should have known! For there isn"t a look or a whispered comment, which he doesn"t catch. And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the depths of his sensitiveness."
"We"ll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly. "We"ll keep him away from them." And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never heard him say in her presence.
But it needed no word of Caleb"s to keep Steve at home. Without some suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to the voices behind the high hedge. More and more often Garry Devereau came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost daily trips down to the mills. A quick intimacy had grown up between the two boys--an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb because of the very contrast between them.
Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in the matter of knowledge. Already, while still in knickerbockers, he was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father. For the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game." The skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau"s slow smile. And Caleb often felt that the boy"s black eyes were looking through and beyond, rather than at him. The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for all that. It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.
Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter. It seemed to him then that he should have foreseen it from the very first. But as it was, when the denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.
From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appet.i.te for books; he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands, and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases. But it was the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to the pages. And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand. After she had caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. His breathless interest in the subject thrilled and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had a.s.serted to her brother that his very bearing was that of a small and st.u.r.dy knight of old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.
Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the echo of childish trebles from the yard beyond the hedge. And after dinner Caleb was astonished when the boy explained, a little awkwardly, that he was going over to Allison"s grounds for a while. Allison himself pa.s.sed Steve in the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting, stopped to shake hands with him gravely. So it came about that they were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when Barbara Allison"s first wild scream came shrilling to their ears. They waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set them to running across the lawn. But the scene which met Caleb"s eyes when he burst through the shrubbery froze him into immobility.
There was a seething pack of children around two writhing figures upon the ground; they were all shrieking in soprano panic--all save Garry Devereau. He, standing a little to one side, was smiling his queer, crooked, handsome smile, while Stephen O"Mara mauled the Honorable Archibald Wickersham with true riverman thoroughness, which meant the infliction of the greatest possible damage in the least possible time.
An inscrutable sort of contempt curled his lips when Barbara Allison frantically begged him to rescue the small Britisher from the storm of fists--a man"s contempt for another man who does not take his punishment in silence. For the howls of the Honorable Archie were louder and more piercing than the loudest of the hysterical little girls who were watching.
Caleb felt as a man feels who tries to run in a nightmare and cannot make his feet obey the commands of his brain. It was only when Barbara Allison dropped desperately to her knees beside the huddle of arms and legs and straining bodies and began to beat with tight-clenched little hands upon Steve"s tousled head, that the power of action returned to him. He fairly leaped forward then, scattering the circle before his weighty rush and, leaning over to get a firm grip upon his collar, jerked Steve upright with one mighty heave. That effort raised the Honorable Archie to his feet, also, for Steve was clamped to his antagonist, or victim, with a bulldog grip.
It grew very quiet when Caleb whirled the boy around and stood peering sternly down into his battle-streaked features. Allison strode quietly up in that moment.