CHAPTER XVII
BY that time men were beginning to gather again—middle-aged men on horseback, stiff from years of toil, bearded great young men with dogs at their heels, large-boned, ruddy, gaunt, rugged of face like Lincoln, overgrown boys, and boys of the very smallest size which fearful mothers could be persuaded to let go into possible danger—they came walking or riding towards the Keiths' for thirty miles away. The younger ones were sent on horseback to spread the news along all the roads towards town, even along obscure untraveled paths that led to the cross-state coach road to the north. In the morning council Wully had again ventured to suggest that Peter had of his own accord gone back to the place from which he had so mysteriously come. Again they all refused to consider his suggestion. Was it likely a man should return without a glimpse of those he had come so far to see? The whole thing was baffling. It seemed beyond belief that no one had seen him come. That could have happened only on such a day as the Fourth, when all the settlers were away from home. Wully wondered to himself, grimly, however, why, if Peter had managed to come once, unperceived, he would not be able to come again as slyly. He didn't see that to tell what he knew would ease the situation. And he had no intention of telling it if he had proof that it would have ended the search. He would tell that tale only to justify his making Chirstie safe from violence. He felt strangely distant from those whose eagerness to help increased with each glimpse they got of Libby Keith. At his father's bidding he went again with a party to search the creek underbrush.
From morning till noon they went on fighting their way through the impenetrable briary wall of green, stopping only for breath at the water's edge, scratched, mosquito-bitten, baffled, exhausted. Once John and Wully happened to get to the bank at the same moment, and John, stooping down to wash his face, said to his brother, carefully lowering his voice;
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if you are right, Wully. It would be just like Peter to have to leave some place suddenly, in some scrape. I think it probable, after all, that he had started on short notice for the west, and passing O'Brien's, was unable to resist the smell. He wouldn't even have had the decency to go to see his mother if he had been within half a mile of the house!"
Wully said nothing to this, but it comforted him to know how low John's opinion of Peter was. He could work with new energy after that. At noon the ten of them stopped at the nearest house for dinner.
There was not a woman in the neighborhood who would not have been glad to set dinner before a party of searchers. Not a woman who had not been frightening her little ones more carefully about wandering into the tall grass, such helpless slight persons, with that tall menace always waiting at hand for them. Marget McDowell had all the morning been looking from time to time down the road, hoping to see a horseman coming with good news. But no news came. She served the men. They ate in silence, hungrily. Having finished, they went out and lay down in the shade of the house. Most of them slept. Davie McDowell sat next to Wully, smoking vile homegrown tobacco in a stern old pipe. Beyond him Geordie Sproul went on theorizing in a lullabying voice. Wully was half asleep himself when he heard him saying;
"If we knew the girl to ask, we might learn something." "Girl" when he pronounced it, rhymed with peril. He was a canny man, Geordie, and Wully was instantly awake.
"Hoots!" replied Davie. "He was never one to run after girils!"
"Was he not!" answered Geordie. His voice was so suggestive, so leering, that Wully sat up.
"It's one o'clock!" he hastened to announce. "We ought to be going on!" He woke all the lads up. They started by twos and threes back towards the creek.
Wully might easily have asked Geordie privately what he meant by that comment of his. But he didn't dare. Was it possible that Geordie, that unconsidered man, knew anything about Chirstie? Or about Wully McLaughlin's private affairs? He must have meant something, and Wully wanted intensely to know what it was. Doubtless Davie McDowell would presently be inquiring, for gossip's sake. But Wully assured himself that if Geordie really knew anything about the truth of the matter, he would never dare to tell it. Nor would he have dared to hint before Wully that he knew it! Only—would he not dare? Men dared strange things, nowadays, it seemed! Even cowards like Peter Keith! They seemed to think Wully McLaughlin a soft, easy-going man. They would speedily find out their mistake! They would get rid of the idea that he was a man with whom one might safely take unspeakable liberties. If only he might have the fortune, the one chance in a thousand, or ten thousand, to come upon that damned snake, lying somewhere hidden. . . . Exhausted, sore in muscles and mind, he went on through the breathless thicket.
At four he came again to the water's edge, and saw Chirstie's brother Dod just coming out from a swim. He threw himself down under a great linden tree for a rest, and under his hand he saw Dod's hat full of choice blackberries. Dod was undoubtedly preparing to make himself as comfortable as possible. He was weary enough to defy the world, and relinquish his pretenses of being a man. He made his decision known flatly.
"I'm not going back into that!" he announced. "I'm through!" It was plain that his swim hadn't cooled his temper much.
Wully repressed a smile. Dod was extremely thin. The ridges of his ribs showed under his skin, which gleamed white and wet in places, in vivid contrast to his tanned arms and neck, and he was stepping along gingerly to avoid thorns, lifting his bony legs high. One of his eyelids had been scratched so that his eye was swollen shut.
"You've done enough," said Wully. "You've got a bad eye there!"
The boy struggled wet into his shirt and overalls and stretching out near Wully, began dividing the berries. Wully had to notice how men's zeal to help Libby Keith vanished as she grew distant. In her presence, in the presence of Motherhood itself, so to speak, they were shamefaced and eager, deploring their helplessness, as men are while their wives labor in childbirth. But away from her agony, they forgot . . . as men do after labor is over . . . and turned again to their own comfort. Dod broke the silence surprisingly.
"Chirstie'd be glad if he was dead!" he said, resentfully.
"Why, Dod!" exclaimed Wully.
"She would that! She hates him!"
"He's your cousin, lad!"
"He's as much your cousin as he is mine! She can't endure the sight of him!"
Wully sat up. He looked at Dod. He had thought of him always as a child. He was a big, tall boy now. Fourteen years old he was, and doubtless able to put two and two together. How much did he know? He must have heard people talking. Wully suddenly wondered why he had not always been afraid of Dod. To be sure, he had always been careful to keep on the good side of his little brother-in-law.
"He never done us any good!" Dod spoke vindictively.
Now what could he mean by that? Wully was getting excited. Why had the boy so great a resentment against Peter, instead of against him, Wully, under the circumstances? Dod's sudden and apparent preference for Wully at once grew odious to him. Dod had chosen that morning to work with Wully. He was always choosing to work with him. Why? It seemed unaccountable to him that he had never been suspicious of the lad before. Wully dared not say to him;
"Well, he never did you any special harm, did he?" Suppose Dod would blurt out what he knew! He said, confusedly;
"Look here, Dod. You oughtn't to talk that way! Not at this time, I mean—you can't speak ill of the dead, you know."
"I ain't said half the truth!"
"You know how Aunt Libby feels!" Wully urged stupidly. "And Chirstie wouldn't like you to say that—not now, you know———"
"Old fool!" commented Dod. Undoubtedly he was meaning his aunt. Wully couldn't approve of such sentiments in one so young.
"You ought to go home and get something put on your eye!" he began, hastily. "And if you feel like working in the morning, you come back with me again!"
Dod went away, unsolved and uncomforting. Hour by hour the seekers, conquered by fatigue and the growing assurance of futility, stopped more often for breath. They had time to gather more and more berries, from bushes which obviously hid no dying man. They refreshed themselves more and more frequently in waters wherein no drowned man was floating. Most of them went home in time for their neglected chores that night, discouraged, hopeless.
Isobel McLaughlin was still at the Keiths', detained by Libby's need of her. Libby, though she used men easily for her purpose, was not a woman to depend on them. Her mild old husband could give her no sufficient support in her affliction. He had never been a mother. He was just a man whom life and marriage had left blinking, swallowing as best he might his realization of his own unimportance in the universe. Libby would have Isobel with her. So Chirstie in her mother-in-law's house put the younger McLaughlins and Bonnie Wee Johnnie to bed, and came out to sit on the doorstep with her weary and outraged husband. Presently she asked him wistfully;
"Do you really think he's dead, Wully?"
"It's getting to look like it."
She gave a great sigh. If only she could be sure he was dead!
"You don't think he's just gone away now?" she continued.
"Nobody thinks that now."
"Why don't they?"
"It don't look reasonable to them."
"It looks reasonable enough to me."
He longed to reassure her.
"If he had gone back to town, he would have had to stop in some place to get something to eat. He didn't stop anywhere."
She slapped away a mosquito.
"But if he didn't stop as he came, why should he stop going back?"
"He may have stopped at a dozen places coming, and found no one at home. He may have gone to his mother's when she was at the picnic. That's what she keeps wailing about—because she wasn't there when he came!"
In the silence of the starlight, she gave a great sigh.
"It's all my fault!" she declared.
He was too tired to listen to that.
"Our fault, indeed!" he answered sharply. "We never told him to come sneaking back and get lost, did we! We didn't tell him never to write to his mother."
"I didn't say it was your fault. I said mine! Really, all auntie's trouble seems to come from me. Sometimes I just seem to make everybody miserable." She had been wondering what she was to do if Peter's death made Wully's lie permanent.
"Havers, Chirstie!" he remonstrated, "her trouble comes through her own foolishness. She was never less than a fool about that—that———"
"She was always good to me, Wully, whatever you say. I mind how she stayed with me after mother's death. If she's been foolish about Peter, she's paid well for it."
"So've you!" said Wully. "He's dead, I tell you!" And there was another thing to be said. Wully might be bewildered, uncomfortable, frustrated, cheated of any assurance of safety for Chirstie. But there was one triumph, and not a small one. "He's dead. And we never speak ill of the dead, Chirstie!"
She understood his triumph. She would have been glad to have him dead, and not putting Wully into danger. She would be relieved, too, of that sense of terror, if she saw him dead. Then she thought of that great sinful lie, and of Isobel McLaughlin.
"I can't tell what to wish!" she sighed miserably. "It can't end well. I wish they'd find him dead. But if he's dead, how can I ever. . ." Her voice gave way to despair.
"Yes," repeated Wully. "How can you ever . . ." They sat silent.
"You never can!" he said securely, at length.