CHAPTER XVI
THE neighborhood gathered at the alarm. By noon Wully's father and mother were at the Keiths', and the heads of families for miles around. Up and down the road the boys and younger men were halloing and beating about, and in the kitchen the wise old heads were holding a consultation. Young John McLaughlin had been sent for—that is, Wully's brother John, not the Squire's John—and all the men who according to Gib McTaggert's story must have seen Peter the night before. As the elders waited their coming, they debated solemnly. What could have happened to a man between the McTaggerts' corner and his home? A drunken man. A man said always to be weak. A man known to be lazy. With a storm coming on. And sharp lightning. A dark road, with deep waters not far from it. Blinded by the lightning could he have turned from the path and been drowned? Could he have fallen and broken a leg? Men have broken bones as they walked. Was he now lying helpless somewhere about? If he was as weak as his mother always insisted, might he not have fallen down drunk, and lying in the way throughout the night, now be overcome by fever? Could he have been bitten by a rattler, and, asleep, died of the poison? Could the lightning have struck him? Men wondered, rather than dared to ask aloud, could there have been a drunken quarrel, and blows perhaps fatal. Wully suggested that he might be in hiding, but this was considered a simple suggestion to come from him, and no one gave it any attention. They all seemed to think that it was his mother Peter was trying to get to. . . . Wully dared not explain what reason he might have for hiding. He wished he had not suggested such a thing.
The young men came, and submitted to questionings. None of them knew exactly when Peter had arrived at O'Brien's. There had been a fight at the saloon. Young Sproul had still a black eye from it, and after Bob McWhee had knocked him down, there had been a few bad minutes when the onlookers wondered if he was ever to rise again. It had been exciting, to say the least. And men had been busy pacifying the two. After that, Peter was there . . . though no one remembered to have seen him coming in. He hadn't asked for anything to eat. He had drunken quietly, and been silent. Wully, who had been swallowing his wrath as best he might all the morning, as man after man came out of pity for Libby Keith, each man's kindness to her making Wully's purpose seem the greater sin against the mother— Wully couldn't understand this story about Peter's quietness. Peter gabbled, naturally. He went noisily on and on. And now, not a man who had seen his surprising return, could report definitely a thing he had said. He hadn't really said anything. Wully's brother John testified that when he first saw him, he asked him if he had come back to see his mother. Libby Keith, listening with her harrowed soul, saw no sarcasm in such a greeting. Peter had just mumbled something in reply. It had never occurred to John that Peter hadn't been home. He thought of course he had had supper there. It seemed strange to no one that John had desired no further intercourse with his cousin. His story agreed with that of all the others. He had tarried but a few minutes at the saloon, naturally, and besides, there was the storm coming on. He had cared enough for the family name to get Peter started on his way home with the McTaggerts. The young Jimmy McTaggart had sung Psalms obscenely all the way along, and Peter had sat on the side of the wagon. He hadn't been too drunk to hold on there over all the joltings. John had left him getting down at the corner. Then the great honest young McTaggert took up the story, and lucky indeed it was for his wildly drinking young brother that no one doubted what he had to say. Even O'Brien, the whisky-selling man whose name was anathema to mothers of rollicking sons and erring husbands, came volunteering his futile help.
They organized the search. They divided into parties. Some were to venture out into the deep waters of the more probable sloughs. Some were to bunt the woods towards O'Brien's, because Peter was always wanting another drink, and might have turned, befuddled, in that direction. Some were to hunt through the creek underbrush. Wully chose to go with one of the parties towards the creek, partly because that would take him past his father's, and he was anxious to warn Chirstie under no provocation to tell yet what she knew, and partly because in that way he would get farthest away from his aunt. He felt as if all the solid faithful earth under his feet had given way, and he was attempting to cling to—just nothing. That woman, his aunt, had harvested before him all the sympathy that should have been his. When now he had killed Peter, the community would think only of her sorrow. There would be no thought of the justification of the man constrained to his murder. There was an intense unfairness about it all, some way. Wully was consoled dumbly by the Squire's half-heartedness in the search. He grumbled as he went along about having to go. And Wully's heart warmed to him, not knowing that the Squire's sensualism, like all men's, had always to be at war with maternity, which was Libby Keith. Wully had time to question John privately, but he got no further information. Even Chirstie could explain nothing. "Did he look sick?" Wully demanded of her anxiously. "He was drunk, wasn't he?" She drew back from the question. "Oh, don't ask me!" she murmured. "He just looked—at me!"
The men spent all day in the more unfathomable menaces. The women searched back and forth about the Keiths' house. The two miles between that house and the corner, back and forth, up and down that road, they beat persistently and prayerfully, until the little path of the day before was a great river-bed of trodden muddy grass hiding nothing. They searched all impossible places; through the Keiths' and McCreaths' and McTaggerts' barns they went again and again. Peter hadn't disappeared out of existence. He was somewhere. Likely somewhere between the house and the corner. They went over that path continually till their children began to cry for supper.
The men stopped not even to eat. Let the women and the children do the chores. Let them go undone. Steaming and weary and excited, they went on with their hunt till the sun set, till the last glimmer of twilight was gone. Now none was as persevering as the Squire. The hunt had become for him the greatest game of his maturity. One by one in the darkness the men had at length to ride home to their waiting families, with no news. Strange things they had to think on, places in the swamps where they had not been able to touch bottom, places where the rushes grew rank and thick with scarcely space enough for nest of the crying waterbirds—stretches with no sign of a lost man, and no hope for one losing himself. . ..
At the Keiths' Isobel McLaughlin in Peter's bed in die kitchen was lying praying. Except his mother, no one prayed as fervently for Peter's safe return as Isobel. All that she asked of the Almighty was that Peter might be found alive and well enough to take the shame away from her good innocent Wully. If Peter was brought home dead—how then ever, in the face of Libby's grief, could she say that the beloved was a scoundrel! How could she ever endure not saying it? That would be too bitter a dose for her. Let God not give her that cup to drink! If fervency could have brought an answer to prayer, how quickly would Peter have appeared!
Her passionate hope had been some consolation to Libby, who so little understood the reason for it. Libby was lying down in her room, not because Isobel had besought her to, but because she was no longer able to stand up. Isobel wanted to get some rest, but she couldn't leave off her praying to God, the good Father. She hoped Libby might sleep till morning.
But the moon rose after midnight, and with the first flicker of its light, Libby came out of the bedroom, tying a skirt about her. Isobel sat up in bed.
"There's moonlight now," said Libby. Even from the doorway, where she stood in the darkness, Isobel could hear her breathing.
"Lie down, Libby!" she implored.
"I mind wee Jennie Price," said Libby.
"Ah, Libby!" protested Isobel, shrinking from the mention of such poignancy. Jennie Price was the six-year-old who had been lost in the grasses, wandering from her home some twenty miles down the creek, a year or two ago. What but that had all the women been thinking of all the day and shrinking from mentioning.
Libby was groping about for her shoes which she had left in the kitchen.
"Just near home, Isobel! Forty yards from her mother's door."
"You can't go out by night, Libby. You can't stand up!"
"Crawling towards home, it may be."
"Libby! Libby!" cried Isobel, getting up. Forty yards from home they had found the girlish skeleton the next spring, in a place a hundred men would swear in court they had sought through dozens of times. The mother herself had come upon it. Had the child been stolen away for some evil purpose, and flung back later to die? No one would ever know.
"The wee bones were all white, Isobel!"
"Spare us, Libby! Peter's a man grown!"
The women went out calling down the road together. At dawn, when John McCreath came out to milk, while yet the stars were shining, he heard Libby calling hoarsely, "Lammie! Lammie! Your mother's coming!"