CHAPTER II
THE PETTICOAT AND THE PRETENDER
NOT least among the things which the devil's imps ought to know from watching the world is this: that hatred is always big when one is young. Then, if the heart is bitter, it is bitter through and through. It is terribly just, and terribly vindictive against the stranger who hurts us with a cruel word, against our brother when we have misunderstood his heart, against the traitor who owes us love because we loaned him love. It is strange, too, how that hatred becomes a great force, pressing out the empty places of the heart, and making the weak, strong, and the simple, crafty.
El Mahdi ran with his jaws set on the bit, jumping high and striking the earth with his legs half stiff, the meanest of all the mean whims of this eccentric horse. On the level it was a hard enough gait; and on the hill road none could have stood the intolerable jamming but one long schooled in the ugly ways of the False Prophet. Along the skirts of the saddle, running almost up to the horn, were round, quilted pads of leather prepared against this dangerous habit. I rode with my knees doubled and wedged in against the pads, catching the terrible jar where there was bone and tendon and leather to meet and break it, and from long custom I rode easily, unconscious of my extraordinary precautions against the half-bucking jump.
The fence rushed past. The trees, as they always do, seemed to wait until we were almost upon them, and then jump by. Still the horse was not running fast. He wasted the value of his legs by jumping high in the air like a goat, instead of running with his belly against the earth like every other sensible horse whose business is to shorten distance.
He swept around the bare curves with the most reckless, headlong plunges, and I caught the force of the great swing, now with the right, and now with the left knee, throwing the whole weight of my body against the horse's shoulder next to the hill. Once in a while the red nose of the Cardinal showed by my stirrup and dropped back, but Jud was holding his horse well and riding with his whole weight in the stirrups and the strain on the back-webbed girth of his saddle where it ought to be. It was a dangerous road if the horse fell, only El Mahdi never fell, although he sometimes blundered like a cow; and the Cardinal never fell when he ran, and the Bay Eagle, who knew all that a horse ever learned in the world,—we would as soon have expected to see her fly up in the air as to fall in the road.
We were a mile down the long hill, thundering like a drove of mad steers, when I caught through the tree-tops a glimpse of Cynthia's cart, and wrenched the bit out of El Mahdi's teeth. He was not inclined to stop, and plunged, ploughing long furrows in the clay road. But a stiff steel bit is an unpleasant thing with which to take issue, and he finally stopped, sliding on his front feet.
We turned the corner in a slow, deliberate trot, and there, as calmly as though it were the most natural thing in the world, was Cynthia, sitting as straight as a sapling on the high seat, with the reins held close in her left hand, and beside her Woodford, and jogging along before the cart was the bald-faced cattle-horse.
A pretty picture in the cool shade of the golden autumn woods. Of course, Cynthia was the most beautiful woman in the world. My brother thought so, and that was enough for us. It was true that Ward observed her from a point of view wonderfully subject to a powerful bias, but that was no business of ours. Ward said it, and there the matter ended. If Ward had said that Cynthia was ugly, a trim, splendid figure, brown hair, and a manner irresistible would not have saved Cynthia from being eternally ugly so far as we were concerned; and although Cynthia had lands and Polled-Angus cattle and spent her winters in France, she must have remained eternally ugly.
So, when we knew Ward's opinion, from that day Cynthia was moved up to the head of the line of all the women we had ever heard of, and there she remained.
Our opinion of Woodford was equally clear. In every way he was our rival. His lands joined ours, stretching from the black Stone Coal south to the Valley River. His renters and drivers were as numerous and as ugly a set as ours.
Besides, he was Ward's rival among the powerful men of the Hills, ten years older, shrewd, clear-headed, and in his business a daring gambler. Sometimes he would cross the Stone Coal and buy every beef steer in the Hills, and sometimes Ward bought. It was a stupendous gamble, big with gain, or big with loss, and at such times the Berrys of Upshur, the Alkires of Rock Ford, the Arnolds of Lewis, the Coopmans of Lost Creek, and even the Queens of the great Valley took the wall, leaving the road to Woodford and my brother Ward. And when they put their forces in the field and manœuvred in the open, there were mighty times and someone was terribly hurt.
I think Woodford lacked the inspiration and something of the swift judgment of my brother, but he stopped at nothing, and was misled by no illusions. Woodford and my brother never joined their forces. Ward did not trust him, and Woodford trusted no man on the face of the earth. There is an old saying that "the father's rival is the son's enemy"; and we hated Woodford with the healthy, illimitable hatred of a child.
I was young, and the arrogance of pride was very great as I pulled up by the tall cart. I had Cynthia red-handed, and wanted to gloat over the stammer and the crimson flush of the traitor. I assumed the attitude of the very terrible. Sharp and jarring and without premonition are the surprises of youth. This straight young woman turned, for a moment her grey eyes rested on the False Prophet and me, then a smile travelled from her red mouth out through the land of dimples, and she laughed like a blackbird.
"Of all the funny little boys! Dear me!" And she laughed again.
I know that the bracing influence of a holy cause has been tremendously overrated, for under the laugh I felt myself pass into a status of universal shrinking until I feared that I might entirely disappear, leaving a wonder about the empty saddle. And the blush and the stammer,—will men be pleased never to write in books any more, how these things are marks of the guilty? For here was Cynthia, as composed as the October afternoon, and here was I stammering and red.
"Quiller!" she pealed, "what a little savage! Do look!" And she put her grey glove on her companion's arm.
Woodford clapped his hand on his knee, and broke out into a jeering chuckle. "Why!" he said, "it's little Quiller. I thought it must be some bold, bad robber."
The jeer of the enemy helped me a little, but not enough. The reply went in a stammer. "You are all out of breath," said Cynthia; "a hill is no place to run. The horse might have fallen."
I gathered my jarred wits and answered. "Our horses don't fall." It was the justification of the horse first. Woodford stroked his clean-cut jaw, tanned like leather. "Your brother," he said, "tumbled out of the saddle some days ago. It is said his horse fell."
My courage flared. "Do you know how the Black Abbot came to fall?" I answered.
"An awkward rider, little Quiller," he said. "Is it a good guess?"
"You know all about it," I began, breaking out in my childish anger. "You know how that furrow as long as a man's finger got on the Black Abbot's right knee. You know—" I stopped suddenly. Cynthia's eyes were resting on me, and there was something in their grey depths that made me stop.
But Woodford went on. "My great aunt," he said, "was thrown day before yesterday, but she did not take to her bed over it. How is your brother?"
"Able to take care of himself," I said.
"Perhaps," he responded slowly, "to take care of himself." And he glanced suggestively at Cynthia.
The innuendo was intolerable. I gaped at the slim, brown-haired girl. Surely she would resent this. Traitor if she pleased, she was still a woman. But she only looked up wistfully into Woodford's face and smiled as artless, winning, merry a smile as ever was born on a woman's mouth.
In that instant the picture of Ward came up before me. His pale face with its black hair framed in pillows; his hand, always so suggestive of unlimited resource, lying on the white coverlid, so helpless that old Liza moved it in her great black palm as though it were a little child's; and across on the mantle shelf, where he could see it when his eyes were open, was that old picture of Cynthia with the funny little curls.
I felt a great flood rising up from the springs of life, a hot, rebellious flood of tears. A moment I held them back at the gateway of the eyepits, then they gushed through, and I struck the False Prophet over his iron grey withers, and we passed in a gallop.