Gordon rose. "I'll see the railroad people myself," he observed; "and find out what I can do there."

"Hold on," Simmons waved him back to his chair. "If there's too much talk the thing will get out. You know these thick skulls around here--at the whisper of transportation you couldn't cut a sapling with a gold axe. It took managing to interest the Tennessee and Northern; they are going through to Buffalo; a Greenstream branch is only a side issue to them." He paused, thinking. "There's no good," he resumed, "in you and me getting into each other. The best thing we can do is to control all the good stuff, agree on a price, and divide the take."

Gordon carefully considered this new proposal. It seemed to him palpably fair. "All the papers would have to be made together," he added; "what's for one's for the other."

Now that the deal was fully exposed Valentine Simmons was impatient of small precautions. "Can't you see how the plan lays?" he demanded irritably. "We'll draw up a partnership. Don't get full and talk," he added discontentedly. It was evident that he keenly resented the absence of Pompey Hollidew from the transaction.

"A thing like this," he informed the other, "ain't put through in a week.

It will be two or three years yet before the company will be ready for construction."

Minor details were rehea.r.s.ed, concluded. Two weeks later Gordon signed an agreement of partnership with Valentine Simmons to purchase collectively such timber options as were deemed desirable, and to merchandise their interests at a uniform price to the railroad company concerned.

XIII

When Gordon returned to his dwelling he found Sim Caley and his sister's husband taking the horse from the shafts of a dusty, two-seated carriage.

Rutherford Berry was a slightly-built man with high, narrow shoulders, and a smooth, pasty-white face. He was clerk in a store at the farther end of Greenstream valley, and had flat, fragile wrists and a constant, irritating cough.

"H'y, Gord!" he shouted; "your sister wanted to visit with you over night, and see Lettice. We only brought two--the oldest and Barnwell K."

The "oldest," Gordon recalled, was the girl who had worn Clare's silk waist and "run the colors"; Barnwell K. Berry was, approximately, ten.

"That's right," he returned cordially. He a.s.sisted in running the carriage back by the shed. Lettice and his sister were stiffly facing each other in the sitting room. The latter had a fine, thin countenance with pale hair drawn tightly back and fastened under a small hat pinned precariously aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her waist, her sole adornment a bra.s.sy wedding ring, that almost covered an entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible kitchen stove, or a child temporarily unaccounted for.

"Lettice looks right good," she declared, "and, dear me, why shouldn't she, with nothing on her mind at all but what comes to every woman? When I had my last Rutherford was down with the influenza, the youngest was taken with green-sickness, and we had worked out all our pay at the store in supplies. You're fixed nice here," she added without a trace of envy in her tired voice. "I suppose that's Mrs. Hollidew in her shroud. We have one of James--he died at three--sitting just as natural as life in the rocker."

"Where's Rose?" he asked.

"In the kitchen, helping Mrs. Caley. I wanted to ask that nothing be said before Rose of Lettice's expecting. We've brought her up very delicate; and besides there's a young man paying her attention, it's not a fitting time--she might take a scare. I had promised to bring Barnwell K. the next time."

They could hear from without the boy and the hysterical yelping of General Jackson. "That dog won't bite?" Mrs. Berry worried. Gordon, patently indignant, replied that the General never bit. "Barnwell might cross him," she answered; and, moving to the door, summoned her offspring. It was the st.u.r.dy individual who had burst into a wail at Clare's funeral, his hair still bristling against a formal application of soap.

"C'm on in, doggy," he called; "c'm in, Ginral. I wisht I had a doggy like that," he hung on his mother's knees lamenting the absence from their household of a General Jackson. "Our ol' houn' dog's nothing," he a.s.serted.

Lettice, worn by her visitor's rapid monotone, the stir and clatter of young shoes, remarked petulantly, "Gordon paid two hundred dollars for that single dog; there ought to be something extra to him."

Mrs. Berry received this item without signal amazement; it was evident that she was prepared to credit any vagaries to the possessors of Pompey Hollidew's fabulous legacy.

"Just think of that!" she exclaimed mildly; "I'll chance that dog gets a piece of liver every day."

Rose, from the door, announced supper. She was an awkward girl of seventeen, with the pallid face and blank brown eyes of her father, and diffident speech. Gordon faced Lettice over her figured red cloth; on one side Barnwell K. sat flanked by his mother and Simeon Caley, on the other Rose sat by an empty chair, the place of the now energetically employed Mrs. Caley. The great, tin pot of coffee rested at Lettice's hand, and, before Gordon, a portentous platter held three gaunt, brown chickens with brilliant yellow legs stiffly in air. Between these two gastronomic poles was a dish of heaped, quivering poached eggs, the inevitable gravy boat, steaming potatoes and a choice of pies. Gordon dismembered the chickens, and, as the plates circled the table, they acc.u.mulated potatoes and gravy and eggs. Barnwell K., through an oversight, was defrauded of the last item, and proceeded to remedy the omission. He thrust his knife into the slippery, poached ma.s.s. At best a delicate operation, he erred, eggs slipped, and a thick yellow stream flowed sluggishly to the rim of the plate. His mother met this fault of manner with profuse, disconcerted apologies. She shook him so vigorously that his chair rattled. Simeon Caley lifted the heavy coffee pot for Lettice.

Mrs. Caley's service was abrupt, efficient; she set down plates of hot bread with a clatter; she rattled the stove lids from without, and complained of General Jackson, faithfully following her every movement.

Sim Caley wielded an adroit knife; but, under the extraordinary pressure of this bountiful repast, Rutherford Berry easily outdistanced him. He consumed such unlimited amounts that he gained the audible displeasure of his wife.

"You're not a camel," she truthfully observed, "you don't have to fill up for a week; you get something home. What Lettice'll think of you I can't make out."

Substantial sections of pie were dispatched. Barnwell K., valiantly endeavoring to emulate his father, struggled manfully; he poked the last piece of crust into his mouth with his fingers. Then, in a shrill aside, he inquired, "Will Aunt Lettice have the baby while we're here." His mother's hand rang like a shot on his face, and he responded instantly with a yell of appalling volume.

Lettice's cup struck sharply upon its saucer. The delicate Rose flushed appropriately, painfully. The culprit was hauled, incontinently, dolefully wailing, to bed. The three men preserved an embarra.s.sed silence. Finally Gordon said, "Have a cigar." His brother-in-law responded with alacrity, but Sim preferred his plug tobacco, and Gordon Makimmon twisted a cigarette. Sim and Rutherford were patently uncomfortable amid the formality of the dining room; and, at Gordon's suggestion, trooped with relief out to the shedlike stable. There they examined critically the two horses. Facing the stalls was an open s.p.a.ce, and on boxes and the remnant of a chair they found places and smoked and spat informally.

"You could study a life on women," Rutherford Berry p.r.o.nounced, "and never come to any satisfaction. It seems to me the better they be the more sharp-like they get. There's your sister, Gord--the way she does about the house, and with all the children to tend, is a caution to Dunkards. She does all you could ask and again. But it just seems she can't be pleasant with it. Now there's Nickles, next place to me, his old woman's not worth a pinch of powder, but she is the nicest, easiest spoken body you'd meet in a day on a horse. You mind Effie when she was young, Gord--she just trailed song all over the house, but it wasn't hardly a year before she got penetrating as a musket. Rose is just like her--she's all taffy now on that young man, but in a little spell she'll clamp down on him."

Gordon had a swift vision of Lettice sharpening with the years; there sounded in prospect on his ear an endless roll of acidulous remarks, accompanied by the fretful whine of children, intensified by Mrs. Caley's lowering silence. He thought of the change that had overtaken his sister Effie, remarked by her husband, the change from a trim, upright figure to the present stooped form, the turning of that voice br.i.m.m.i.n.g with song to a continuous, shrill troubling.

The cool, disdainful countenance of Meta Beggs returned to him: time, he divined, would not mark her in so sorry a fashion; to the last she would remain slimly rounded, graceful; her hands, like magnolia flowers, would never thicken and grow rough. He thought of Paris, of that life which, she said, would civilize him; he tried in vain to form an image of the cafes and little carriages, the bare-necked women drinking champagne. He recalled a burlesque show he had once seen in Stenton, called "The French Widows"; the revealed amplitude of the "widows" had been clad in vivid, stained pink tights; the scene in which they disported with a comic Irishman, a lugubrious Jew, was set with gilded palms, a saloon bar on one side and a tank on the other from which "Venus" rose flatly from a cotton sea. He dismissed that possibility of resemblance--it was too palpably at variance with what Meta Beggs would consider desirable; but, somehow, pink tights and Paris were synonymous in his thoughts. At any rate it was certain to be gay; the women would resemble Nickles' wife rather than his sister ... than Lettice as she would be in a few years.

He recalled suddenly a neglected rite of hospitality, and from an obscure angle of the shed, produced a gallon jug. Drinking vessels were procured, and a pale, pungent whiskey poured out. Rutherford Berry sputtered and gasped over his gla.s.s; Sim Caley absorbed a br.i.m.m.i.n.g measure between breaths, without a wink of the eye; Gordon drank inattentively. The ceremony was repeated; a flare of color rose in Berry's pallid countenance, Sim's portion apparently evaporated from the gla.s.s. The whiskey made no visible impression on Gordon Makimmon. The jug was circulated again, and again. All at once Rutherford became drunk. He rose swaying, attempted to articulate, and fell, half in a stall. Simeon Caley pulled him out, slapped his back with a hard, gnarled palm, but was unable to arouse him from a profound stupor.

"He ain't right strong," Sim observed with a trace of contempt, propping the figure in a limp angle against the wall. It was dark now, and he lit the hand lantern, cautiously closing the door. Outside the whippoorwills had begun to call. A determined rattling of pots and pans sounded from the kitchen.

"How much is in her, Gord?" Sim asked.

Gordon Makimmon investigated the jug. "She's near three quarters full," he announced.

An expression of profound content settled upon Simeon Caley. The jug went round and round. Gordon grew a shade more punctilious than customary, he wiped the jug's mouth before pa.s.sing it to Sim--at the premature retirement of Rutherford the gla.s.ses had been discarded as effete; but not a degree of the other's manner betrayed the influence of his Gargantuan draughts of liquor. The lantern flickered on the sloping, cobwebby roof, on the s.h.a.ggy horses as they lay clumsily down to rest, on the crumpled figure of Gordon's sister's husband.

The potations were suddenly interrupted by a sharp knocking from without.

An expression of concern instantly banished Sim's content; he gazed doubtfully at the jug, then, as Gordon made no move, rose and with marked diffidence proceeded to open the door. The lantern light fell on the gaunt, bitter countenance of his wife framed in imponderable night. Her eyes made liquid gleams in the wavering radiance which, directed at Gordon, seemed to be visible points of hatred.

"It's ten o'clock," she said to her husband, "and if you hain't got enough sense to go to bed I'll put you."

"I'm coming right along," he a.s.sured her pacifically; "we were just having a drink around."

"Mrs. Berry's asking for her husband," she added, gazing at that insensate form.

"He must be kind of bad to his stomach," Sim remarked; "he dropped with nothing 'tall on him." He bent and picked the other up. Rutherford Berry's arms hung limply over Sim's grasp, his feet dragged heavily, in unexpected angles, over the floor. "Coming, Gord?"

Gordon made no reply. He sat intent upon the jug before him. Simeon considerately shut the door. At regular intervals Gordon Makimmon took a long drink. He drank mechanically, without any evidence of desire or pleasure; he resembled a man blindly performing a fatiguing operation in his sleep; he had the fixed, open eyes of a sleep-walker, the precise, unnatural movements. The lantern burned steadily, the horses slept with an audible breathing. Finally the jug was empty; he endeavored to drink twice after that was a fact before discovering it.

He rose stiffly and threw open the door. Dawn was flushing behind the eastern range; the tops of the mountains were thinly visible on the brightening sky. His dwelling, with every window closed, was silvery with dew. He walked slowly, but without faltering, to the porch, and mounted the steps from the sod; the ascent seemed surprisingly steep, long. The door to the dining room was unlocked and he entered; in the thinning gloom he could distinguish the table set as usual, the coffee pot at Lettice's place glimmering faintly. He turned to the left and pa.s.sed into their bedroom. The details of the chamber were growing clear: the bed was placed against the farther wall, projecting into the room, its low footboard held between posts that rose slimly dark against the white counterpane beyond; on the right were a window and high chest of drawers, on the left a stand with a china toilet service and a couch covered with sheep skins, roughly tanned and untrimmed. A chair by the bed bore Lettice's clothes, another at the foot awaited his own. By his side a curtain hung out from the wall, forming a wardrobe.

He vaguely made out the form of Lettice sitting upright in the bed, her hands clasped about her knees.

"Your brother-in-law," he observed, "is a powerful spindling man." She made no rejoinder to this, and, after a short pause, he further remarked, "How he gets on sociable I don't see."

His wife's eyes were opened wide, gazing intently into the greying room; not by a sound, a motion, did she show any consciousness of his presence.

He was deliberate in his movements, very deliberate, laboriously exact in his mental processes, but they were ordered, logical. It began to annoy him that his wife had made no reply to his pleasantries; it was out of reason; he wasn't drunk like Rutherford Berry.

"I said," he p.r.o.nounced, "that Berry is a nubbin. Didn't you hear me?

haven't you got an answer to you?"

She sat gazing into nothingness, ignoring him completely.