The continuous dry weather during the month of June had caused many springs and a few wells to become dry, and the women of that section found it difficult to get sufficient soft water for the washing of clothes. Mrs. Hemingway, whose own well was fed from a vein of limestone water too hard to be of much use in that way, remembered a certain rock-bottom pool in a shaded nook at the foot of the rugged hill back of her house where at all times of the year a quant.i.ty of soft, clear water was to be found; so thither, with a great bundle of household linen tied up in a sheet, she went one morning shortly after breakfast.

Her secret ailment had not seemed to improve under the constant application of the peddler's medicine, and, as her doubts of ultimate recovery increased correspondingly, her strength seemed to wane. Hence she paused many times on the way to the pool to rest. Finally arriving at the spot and lowering her burden, she met a great and irritating surprise, for, bending over a tub at the edge of the pool, and quite in command of the only desirable s.p.a.ce for the placing of tubs and the sunning of articles, was Ann Boyd. Their eyes met in a stare of indecision like that of two wild animals meeting in a forest, and there was a moment's preliminary silence. It was broken by an angry outburst from the new-comer. "Huh!" she grunted, "you here?"

It was quickly echoed by a satisfied laugh from the depths of Ann's sun-bonnet. "You bet, old lady, I've beat you to the tank. You've toted your load here for nothing. You might go down-stream a few miles and find a hole good enough for your few dirty rags. I've used about all this up. It's getting too muddy to do any good, but I've got about all I want."

"This land isn't yours," Jane Hemingway a.s.serted, almost frothing at the mouth. "It belongs to Jim Sansom."

"Jim may hold deeds to it," Ann laughed again, "but he's too poor to fence it in. I reckon it's public property, or you wouldn't have lugged that dirty load all the way through the broiling sun on that weak back of yours."

Jane Hemingway stood panting over her big s...o...b..ll. She had nothing to say. She could not find a use for her tongue. Through her long siege of underhand warfare against the woman at the tub she had wisely avoided a direct clash with Ann's eye, tongue, or muscle. She was more afraid of those things to-day than she had ever been. A chill of strange terror had gone through her, too, at the mention of her weak back. That the peddler had told Ann about the cancer she now felt was more likely than ever. Without a word, Jane bent to lift her bundle, but her enemy, dashing the water from her big, crinkled hands, had advanced towards her.

"You just wait a minute," Ann said, sharply, her great eyes flashing, her hands resting on her stocky hips. "I've got something to say to you, and I'm glad to get this chance. What I've got to hurl in your death-marked face, Jane Hemingway, isn't for other ears. It's for your own rotting soul. Now, you listen!"

Jane Hemingway gasped. "Death-marked face," the root of her paralyzed tongue seemed to articulate to the wolf-pack of fears within her. Her thin legs began to shake, and, to disguise the weakness from her antagonist's lynx eyes, she sank down upon her bundle. It yielded even to her slight weight, and her sharp knees rose to a level with her chin.

"I don't want to talk to you," she managed to say, almost in a tone of appeal.

"Oh, I know that, you trifling hussy, but I do to you, Jane Hemingway.

I'm going to tell you what you are. You are worse than a thief-than a negro thief that steals corn from a crib at night, or meat from a smoke-house. You are a low-lived, plotting liar. For years you have railed out against my character. I was a bad woman because I admitted my one fault of girlhood, but you married a man and went to bed with him that you didn't love a speck. You did that to try to hide a real love for another man who was another woman's legal husband. Are you listening?-I say, are you _listening_?"

"Yes, I'm listening," faltered Jane Hemingway, her face hidden under her bonnet.

"Well, you'd better. When I had my first great trouble, G.o.d is witness to the fact that I thought I loved the young scamp who brought it about.

I _thought_ I loved him, anyway. That's all the excuse I had for not listening to advice of older people. I wasn't old enough to know right from wrong, and, like lots of other young girls, I was bull-headed. My mother never was strict with me, and n.o.body else was interested in me enough to learn me self-protection. I've since then been through college in that line, and such low, snaky agents of h.e.l.l as you are were my professors. No wonder you have hounded me all these years. You loved Joe Boyd with all the soul you had away back there, and you happened to be the sort that couldn't stand refusal. So when you met him that day on the road, and he told you he was on the way to ask me the twentieth time to be his wife, you followed him a mile and fell on his neck and threatened suicide, and begged and cried and screamed so that the wheat-cutting gang at Judmore's wondered if somebody's house was afire.

But he told you a few things about what he thought of me, and they have rankled with you through your honeymoon with an unloved husband, through your period of childbirth, and now as you lean over your grave. Bad woman that you are, you married a man you had no respect for to hide your disappointment in another direction. You are decent in name only.

Thank G.o.d, my own conscience is clear. I've been wronged all my life more than I ever wronged beast or man. I had trouble; but I did no wrong according to my dim lights. But you-you with one man's baby on your breast went on hounding the wife of another who had won what you couldn't get. You, I reckon, love Joe Boyd to this day, and will the rest of your life. I reckon you thought when he left me that he would marry you, but no man cares for a woman that cries after him. You even went over there to Gilmer a month or so ago to try to attract his attention with new finery bought on a credit, and you even made up to the daughter that was stolen from me, but I have it from good authority that neither one of them wanted to have anything to do with you."

"There's not a bit of truth in that," said the weaker woman, in feeble self-defence. She would have said some of the things she was always saying to others but for fear that, driven further, the strong woman might actually resort to violence. No, there was nothing for Jane Hemingway to do but to listen.

"Oh, I don't care what you deny," Ann hurled at her. "I know what I'm talking about." Then Ann's rage led her to say something which, in calmer mood, she would, for reasons of her own, not have even hinted at.

"Look here, Jane," she went on, bending down and touching the shrinking shoulder of her enemy, "in all your life you never heard me accused of making false predictions. When I say a thing, folks know that I know what I'm talking about and look for it to happen. So now I say, positively, that I'm going to get even with you. h.e.l.l and all its inmates have been at your back for a score of years, but G.o.d-Providence, the law of nature, or whatever it is that rights wrong-is bound to prevail, and you are going to face a misfortune-a certain sort of misfortune-that I know all about. I reckon I'm making a fool of myself in preparing you for it, but I'm so glad it's coming that I've got to tell it to somebody. When the grim time comes I want you to remember that you brought it on yourself."

Ann ceased speaking and stood all of a quiver before the crouching creature. Jane Hemingway's blood, at best sluggish of action, turned cold. With her face hidden by her bonnet, she sat staring at the ground.

All her remaining strength seemed to have left her. She well knew what Ann meant. The peddler had told her secret-had even revealed more of the truth than he had to her. Discovering that Ann hated her, he had gone into grim and minute particulars over her affliction. He had told Ann the cancer was fatal, that the quack lotion he had sold would only keep the patient from using a better remedy or resorting to the surgeon's knife. In any case, her fate was sealed, else Ann would not be so positive about it.

"I see I hit you all right that pop, madam!" Ann chuckled. "Well, you will wait the day in fear and trembling that is to be my sunrise of joy.

Now, pick up your duds and go home. I want you out of my sight."

Like a subject under hypnotic suggestion, Jane Hemingway, afraid of Ann, and yet more afraid of impending fate, rose to her feet. Ann had turned back to her tub and bent over it. Jane felt a feeble impulse to make some defiant retort, but could not rouse her bound tongue to action. In her helplessness and fear she hated her enemy more than ever before, but could find no adequate way of showing it. The sun had risen higher and its rays beat fiercely down on her thin back, as she managed to shoulder her bundle and move homeward.

XII

She had scarcely turned the bend in the path, and was barely out of Ann's view, when she had to lower her bundle and rest. Seated on a moss-grown stone near the dry bed of the stream which had fed Ann's pool before the drought, she found herself taking the most morbid view of her condition. The delicate roots of the livid growth on her breast seemed to be insidiously burrowing more deeply towards her heart than ever before. Ah, what a fool she had been at such a crisis to listen to an idle tramp, who had not only given her a stone when she had paid for bread, but had revealed her secret to the one person she had wished to keep it from! But she essayed to convince herself that all hope was not gone, and the very warning Ann had angrily uttered might be turned to advantage. She would now be open about her trouble, since Ann knew it, anyway, and perhaps medical skill might help her, even yet, to triumph.

Under that faint inspiration she shouldered her burden and crept slowly homeward.

Reaching her cottage, she dropped the ball of clothes at the door and went into the sitting-room, where Virginia sat complacently sewing at a window on the shaded side of the house. The girl had only a few moments before washed her long, luxuriant hair, and it hung loose and beautiful in the warm air. She was merrily singing a song, and hardly looked at her mother as she paused near her.

"Hush, for G.o.d's sake, hush!" Jane groaned. "Don't you see I'm unable to stand?"

In sheer astonishment Virginia turned her head and noticed her mother's pale, long-drawn face. "What is it, mother, are you sick?"

By way of reply the old woman sank into one of the hide-bottomed chairs near the open doorway and groaned again. Quickly rising, and full of grave concern, the girl advanced to her. Standing over the bowed form, she looked out through the doorway and saw the bundle of clothes.

"You don't mean to tell me, mother, that you have carried that load all about looking for water to wash in!" she exclaimed, aghast.

"Yes, I took them to the rock-pool and back; but that ain't it," came from between Jane's scrawny hands, which were now spread over her face.

"I am strong enough bodily, still, but I met Ann Boyd down there. She had all the place there was, and had muddied up the water. Virginia, she knows about that spot on my breast that the medicine peddler said was a cancer. She wormed it out of him. He told her more than he did me. He told her it would soon drag me to the grave. It's a great deal worse than it was before I began to rub his stuff on it. He's a quack. I was a fool not to go to a regular doctor right at the start."

"You think, then, that it really _is_ a cancer?" gasped the girl, and she turned pale.

"Yes, I have no doubt of it now, from the way it looks and from the way that woman gloated over me. She declared she knew all about it, and that nothing on earth had made her so glad. I want to see Dr. Evans. I wish you'd run over to his house and have him come."

"But he's not a regular doctor," protested the girl, mildly. "They say he is not allowed to practise, and that he only uses remedies of his own making. The physicians at Darley were talking of having him arrested not long ago."

"Oh, I know all that," Jane said, petulantly, "but that's because he cured one or two after they had been given up by licensed doctors. He knows a lots, and he will tell me, anyway, whether I've got a cancer or not. He knows what they are. He told Mrs. Hiram Snodgra.s.s what her tumor was, and under his advice she went to Atlanta and had it cut out, and saved her life when two doctors was telling her it was nothing but a blood eruption that would pa.s.s off. You know he is good-hearted."

With a troubled nod, Virginia admitted that this was true. Her sweet mouth was drawn down in pained concern, a stare of horror lay in her big, gentle eyes. "I'll go bring him," she promised. "I saw him pa.s.s with a bag of meal from the mill just now."

"Well, tell him not to say anything about it," Jane cautioned her.

"Evidently Ann Boyd has not talked about it much, and I don't want it to be all over the neighborhood. I despise pity. I'm not used to it. If it gets out, the tongues of these busy-bodies would run me stark crazy.

They would roost here like a swarm of buzzards over a dying horse."

Virginia returned in about half an hour, accompanied by a gray-headed and full-whiskered man of about seventy years of age, who had any other than the look of even a country doctor. He wore no coat, and his rough shirt was without b.u.t.ton from his hairy neck to the waistband of his patched and baggy trousers. His fat hands were too much calloused by labor in the field and forest, and by digging for roots and herbs, to have felt the pulse of anything more delicate than an ox, and under less grave circ.u.mstances his a.s.sumed air of the regular visiting physician would have had its comic side.

"Virginia tells me you are a little upset to-day," he said, easily, after he had gone to the water-bucket and taken a long, slow drink from the gourd. He sat down in a chair near the widow, and laid his straw hat upon the floor, from which it was promptly removed by Virginia to one of the beds. "Let me take a look at your tongue."

"I'll do no such of a thing," retorted Jane, most flatly. "There is nothing wrong with my stomach. I am afraid I've got a cancer on my breast, and I want to make sure."

"You don't say!" Evans exclaimed. "Well, it wouldn't surprise me. I see 'em mighty often these days. Well, you'd better let me look at it. Stand thar in the door so I can get a good light. I'm wearing my wife's specks. I don't know whar I laid mine, but I hope I'll get 'em back. I only paid twenty-five cents for 'em in Darley, and yet three of my neighbors has taken such a liking to 'em that I've been offered as high as three dollars for 'em, and they are only steel rims and are sorter shackly at the hinges at that. Every time Gus Willard wants to write a letter he sends over for my specks and lays his aside. I reckon he thinks I'll get tired sendin' back for 'em and get me another pair. Now, that's right"-Mrs. Hemingway had taken a stand in one of the rear doors and unb.u.t.toned her dress. Despite her stoicism, she found herself holding her breath in fear and suspense as to what his opinion would be.

Virginia, pale and with a fainting sensation, sat on the edge of the nearest bed, her shapely hands tightly clasped in her lap. She saw Dr.

Evans bend close to her mother's breast and touch and press the livid spot.

"Do you feel that?" he asked.

"Yes, and it hurts some when you do that."

"How long have you had it thar?" he paused in his examination to ask, peering over the rims of his spectacles.

"I noticed it first about a year ago, but thought nothing much about it," she answered.

"And never showed it to n.o.body?" he said, reprovingly.

"I let a peddler, who had stuff to sell, see it awhile back." There was a touch of shame in Jane's face. "He said his medicine would make it slough off, but-"

"Slough nothing! That trifling skunk!" Evans cried. "Why, he's the biggest fake unhung! He sold that same stuff over the mountain to bald-headed men to make hair grow. Huh, I say! they talk about handling _me_ by law, and kicking _me_ out of the country on account of my knowledge and skill, and let chaps like him scour the country from end to end for its last cent. What the devil gets into you women? Here you've let this thing go on sinking its fangs deeper and deeper in your breast, and only fertilizing it by the treatment he was giving you. Are you hankering for a change of air? Thar was Mrs. Telworthy, that let her liver run on till she was as yaller as a pumpkin with jaundice before she'd come to me. I give 'er two bottles of my purifier, and she could eat a barbecued ox in a month."