"Boone, I'm mighty glad you felt that you could talk to me this way,"

she said. "I want to be a _real_ friend. But I've been working hard today--and if it won't hurt your feelings, I wish you'd go home now. I'm dog-tired, and I'd like to go to bed."

He had started away, but the evening had brought such surprises--and such a lifting of heavy anxiety--that he wanted to mull matters over out there in the soothing moonlight and the clean sweetness of the air.

So he sat down on a boulder where the shadow blotted him into the night, and when he had been there for a while he looked up in a fresh astonishment. Happy had not gone to bed. She was coming now across the stile, with movements like those of a sleep-walker. Outside on the road she stood for a while, pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight, looking in the direction she supposed he had taken, while her fingers plucked at her dress with distressed little gestures. Then with unsteady steps she went on to the edge of the highway and leaned against the boll of a tall poplar. He could see that her eyes were wide and her lips moving. Then she wheeled and threw her hands, with outspread fingers, against the cool bark above her head, leaning there as a child might lean on a mother's bosom, and the sobs that shook her slender body came to him across the short interval of distance.

Boone went over to her with hurried strides, and when she felt his hands on her shoulders she wheeled. Then only did her brave disguise fail her, and she demanded almost angrily, forgetting her school-taught diction, "Why didn't ye go home like I told ye? Why does ye hev ter dog me this fashion, atter I'd done sent ye away?"

"What's the matter, Happy?" he demanded; but he knew now, well enough, and he was too honest to dissimulate. "I didn't know, Happy," he pleaded. "I thought you meant it all."

"I did mean hit all--I means thet I wants thet ye should be happy--only--" Her voice broke there as she added, "--only I've done always thought of myself as yore gal."

She broke away from him with those words and fled back into the house, and most of that night Boone tramped the woods.

On the morning after Happy had fled from him, under the spurring of her discovered secret, she had not been able with all her bravery of effort to hide from the family about the daybreak breakfast table the traces of a sleepless and tearful night. To Happy, this morning the murky room which was both kitchen and dining hall seemed the epitome of sordidness, with its newspaper-plastered walls and creaking puncheon floor.

Yesterday each depressing detail had been alleviated by the thought that the future held a promise of release. Contemplating delivery, one can laugh gaily in a cell, but now the dungeon doors seemed to have been permanently closed and the key thrown away.

"Happy's done been cryin'," shrilled one of the youngest of the brother and sister brood--for that was a typical mountain family to which, for years, each spring had brought its fresh item of humanity. As Cyrus pithily expressed it, "Thar hain't but only fo'teen of us settin' down ter eat when everybody's home."

Old Cyrus put a stern quietus on the chorus of questioning elicited by the proclaiming of his daughter's grief.

"Ef she's been cryin', thet's her own business," he announced. "I reckon she don't need ter name what hit's erbout every time she laughs or weeps."

And, such is the value of the patriarchal edict, the tumult was promptly stilled.

Yet the head of the house, himself, could not so readily dismiss a realization of the unwonted pallor on cheeks normally soft and rosily colourful. The eyes were undeniably wretched and deeply ringed. To himself Cyrus said, "They've jest only done had a lovers' quarrel. Young folks is bound ter foller fallin' out as well as fallin' in, I reckon."

Neither that day nor the next, however, did the girl "live right up to her name," and on the following night Boone did not come over to sue for peace, as a lover should, under such April conditions of sun and storm.

"What does ye reckon's done come over 'em, Maw?" the father eventually inquired, and the mother shook her perplexed head.

The two of them were alone on the porch just then, save for one of the youngest children, who was deeply absorbed with the feeding of a small and crippled lamb from a nursing bottle improvised out of a whiskey flask.

Slowly the old man's face clouded, until it wore so forebodingly sombre a look as the wife had not seen upon it since years before when life had run black. Then, despite all his efforts to "consort peaceful with mankind," he had been drawn into an enmity with a fatal termination.

Cyrus had on that occasion been warned that he was to be "lay-wayed"

and, as he had taken down his rifle from the wall, his eyes had held just the same hard and obdurate glint that lingered in them now. The woman, remembering that time long gone, when her husband had refused to turn a step aside from his contemplated journey, shuddered a little. She could not forget how he had been shot out of his saddle and how he had, while lying wounded in the creek-bed road, punished his a.s.sailant with death. He was wounded now, though not with a bullet this time, and his scowl said that he would hit back.

"What air hit, Paw?" she demanded, and his reply came in slow but implacable evenness:

"I've done set a heap of store by Boone Wellver. I've done thought of him like a son of my own--but ef he's broke my gal's heart--an's she's got ther look of hit in her eyes--him an' me kain't both go on dwellin'

along ther same creek." He paused a moment there, and in his final words sounded an even more inflexible ring: "We kain't both go on livin'

hyar--an' I don't aim ter move."

"Paw"--the plea came solicitously from a fear-burdened heart--"we've just got ter wait an' see."

"I don't aim ter be over-hasty," he rea.s.sured her, with a rude sort of gentleness, "but nuther does I aim ter endure hit--ef so be hit's true."

But that evening at twilight when Boone crossed the stile, if the nod which greeted him was less cordial than custom had led him to expect, at least Cyrus spoke no hostile word. The old man was "biding his time,"

and as he rose and knocked the nub of ash out of his pipe-bowl, he announced curtly, "I'll tell Happy ye're hyar."

CHAPTER XXIII

Boone had stood for a moment in the lighted door, and in that interval the shrewd old eyes of Cyrus Spradling had told him that the boy too had known sleeplessness and that the clear-chiselled features bore unaccustomed lines of misery.

If they had both suffered equally, reasoned the rude philosopher, it augured a quarrel not wholly or guiltily one-sided.

So a few minutes later he watched them walking away together toward the creek bed, where the voice of the water trickled and the moonlight lay in a dreamy lake of silver.

"I reckon," he rea.s.sured himself, "they'll fix matters up ternight.

Hit's a right happy moon for lovers ter mend th'ar quarrels by."

"Happy," began Boone, with moisture-beaded temples, when they had reached a spot remote enough to a.s.sure their being undisturbed, "I reckon I don't need to tell you that I haven't slept much since I saw you. I haven't been able to do anything at all except--just think about it."

"I've thought about it--a good deal--too," was her simple response, and Boone forced himself on, rowelling his lagging speech with a determined will power.

"I see now--that I didn't act like a man. I ought to have told you long ago--that I--that my heart was just burning up--about Anne."

"I reckon I ought to have guessed it.... I'd heard hints."

"It seemed a slavish hard thing to write," he confessed heavily. "I tried it--more than once--but when I read it over it sounded so different from what I meant to say that--" There he paused, and even had she been inclined to visit upon him the maximum instead of the minimum of blame, there was no escaping his sincerity or the depth of his contrition. "That, until I saw you--night before last--I didn't have any true idea--how much you cared."

"I didn't aim that you ever should--have any idea."

"Happy," he rose and with the blood receding from his skin looked down at her, as she sat there in the moonlight, "Happy, it seems like I never knew you--really--until now."

She was, in her quietly borne distress, an appealing picture, and the hands that lay in her lap had the unmoving stillness of wax--or death.

It had to be said, so he went on. "I never realized before now how fine you are--or how much too good you are for me. I've come over here tonight to ask you to marry me--if it ain't too late."

The girl flinched as if she had been struck. Not even for a moment did her eagerness betray her into the delusion that this proposal was anything other than a merciful effort to soothe a hurt for which he felt himself blamable.

Just as she had meant to keep from him the extent of her heart's bruising, so he was seeking now to make amends at the cost of all his future happiness. Having blundered, he was tendering what payment lay in possibility.

"No, Boone," she said firmly. "We'd both live in h.e.l.l for always--unless we loved each other--so much that nothin' else counted."

"I've got to be honest," he miserably admitted. "It wouldn't be fair to you not to be. I've got to go on loving her--while there's life in me, I reckon--loving her above all the world. But she's young--and there'll be lots of men of her own kind courtin' her. I reckon"--those were hard words to say, but he said them--"I reckon you had the right of it when you said I was fixin' to break my heart anyhow. They won't ever let her marry me."

It did not seem to him that it would help matters to explain that even now he felt disloyal to his whole religion of love, and that he had asked her only because he realized that no other man here could bring Happy's life to fulfilment, while Anne could only step down to him in condescension.

The decision which he had reached after tossing in a fevered delirium of spirit lacked sanity. From no point of view would it conform to the gauge of soundness. In giving up Anne, when Anne had told him he might hope, he had construed all the sacrifice as his own. As to Anne's rights in the matter, he was blinded by the over-modest conviction that she was giving all and he taking all and that she could never _need_ him.

He would in later years have reasoned differently--but he had been absorbing too fast to digest thoroughly, and the concepts of his new-found chivalry had become a distorted quixoticism. He meant it only for self-effacing fairness--and it was of course unfairness to himself, to Anne, and even to Happy. But she divined his unconfessed thought with the cert.i.tude of intuition.

"Boone," she told him, as she rose and laid a tremulous hand on his arm, "you've done tried as hard as a man can to make the best of a bad business. It wasn't anybody's fault that things fell out this way. It just came to pa.s.s. I'm going to try to teach some of the right young children over at the school next autumn--so what little I've learned won't be wasted, after all. I want that we shall go on being good friends--but just for a little while we'd better not see very much of each other. It hurts too bad."