"We can't go back.... Hoy, here's a thought! All that turkey blood on the snow--couldn't we make it seem----"

"Law you!" Reuben yelped and war-danced. Ben could not be ill, he thought, so long as he was able to produce such a dazzling conception.

"Ben, a marvelous b.l.o.o.d.y swindle--why, damme, they'll mumble it in chimney comers till the Devil's blind, and his eyes a'n't sore yet.

Think of it!--those poor lost boys!"

"Small red gobbets."

"What?"

"Hast thou forgotten? Thine own tales----"

"Oh, that. Nay then, behold how bravely they did stand before the beast--alas, all for nothing, though Benjamin Cory with his good right arm did--did make varsall sure to pick up the turkey feathers."

Eagerly Ben joined him in that undertaking. Reuben found and scuffed out the line of tracks where the gobbler had walked out from under the trees into calamity. As they viewed the shambles critically in devoted silence, it seemed to Reuben that there ought to be more blood. Beside the patch of snow where the stain was largest, Reuben dropped on his back with outflung arms to leave a tragic imprint. Ben grunted approval, but then spoke with a discouragement that was unlike him: "It'll never deceive a woodsman."

"Oh, Ben, they'll be townfolks that find it. Superst.i.tious too. If our own trail ends here, what can they think? We must go under the trees, where--where _he_ went."

"Oh, him!" Ben recovered, laughing again not quite naturally. "He's na'

but a spent fart, Ru. He'll travel as you said, and then I picture him climbing a tree to grieve all day tomorrow about what my little brother did to him. 's...o...b..a.l.l.s!' he'll say. '_Me_, to be whopped by a s...o...b..ll--why, b.u.g.g.e.r me blind, and all the time it was that Reuben Cory no bigger'n a boar's t.i.t!'"

"You're no Goliar neither, in fact I could whup you handy with my a.r.s.e tied under my chin. Now drag me, Ben, from here to the trees, along that line where he ran. That'll make a fine confusion and wipe out your own tracks. Then we'll follow his marks under the trees and smear our own till they can't tell which from nohow."

"That's the thing. What a catamount was he! Know what he did? Laid us out like a pair of sticks, he did, your ankle crossed on mine, took both feet in his mouth, poor wretch, and for his sins went a-blundering through the woods with a boy dangling on each side."

"I tell you, Ben, the superst.i.tious will believe madder things than that. La, some of the tales Jesse used to tell!"

"_Miaaow!_" Ben doubled over, laughing far too much. "Why, of course--by the time the tale is carried back to Springfield he won't be a catamount at all. He'll be taller'n a house, the Old Nick himself with a pa.s.sel of demons. It'll be a--a----" he stopped, watching Reuben blankly, all laughter spent.

Reuben said: "It will be a judgment of the Lord." Ben stared, and nodded, and looked away, searching the northern sky above the hemlocks.

Following his gaze, Reuben lost himself a while in the wonder of open night, seeing Ca.s.siopeia released from a last fringe of departing cloud, and the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. Reuben darkly felt the absence of some familiar thing, something his own mind ought to supply and would not. The night was serene, without complication beautiful, answering nothing.

Ben Cory followed his brother in slowly deepening weariness. The time must be not far from dawn. The moon rode high and lonely, dimmed by new cloud battalions from the west. Ben groped at the thought of sleep; but Reuben, who was wise about everything tonight, might tell him it was not yet time. Ben suffered a pa.s.sing resentment, that the boy could walk on ahead so untiringly, so unconcerned.

In this more open part of the woods they were not attempting to disguise their tracks. Reuben said it was no longer worth it, and Reuben knew best. Ben tried to step in his brother's prints, nowhere else. This seemed a clever thing to do--when he could remember to do it, and forget the pain in his knee, and ignore certain soft dark waves that now and then approached him from nowhere and flowed away independently of any shadow on the moon.

Back there under the crowded hemlocks, a very long time ago, it had not appeared necessary after all to search for the panther's prints and follow them. All the way down that slope, and far beyond it where the land rose again and the hemlocks continued, many patches of snowless ground allowed them to progress without leaving marks. For an hour, or two or three hours perhaps, they had worked their way along these areas.

Glimpses of the moon held them to a general easterly direction. In several places--Ben recalled this with solemn pride in Reuben's wisdom--Reuben had spread his jacket across a patch of snow too wide to jump, so that they might step on it and leave a vague blur nothing like a footprint, rather like the impress of some animal's body lying down.

At the least, their efforts would provide a most confusing trail unless the searchers brought dogs; they rea.s.sured each other of this from time to time. Advance by this method had been tormentingly slow, yet after a while Reuben, who knew everything, announced that they must have covered another mile.

The road and the sled-tracks were things forgotten. The eastward direction was still a certainty: the moon had said so, until it climbed too high to be a fair guide. The trees had thinned out, the snow lay continuous on the ground; Reuben who knew everything said they might as well walk naturally again, since there was no help for it anyway, and to blur the tracks here would be a waste of effort. Ben had a confused sense of walking on higher ground where a light wind was blowing.

Once, back in the darker woods, he had heard the wail of a mountain cat, so thin and far away that hills and hollows must have intervened. Their friend, maybe, lamenting at s...o...b..a.l.l.s. Reuben had laughed at it. Later Ben caught another sound, a remote tenor howling, lonely at first but answered by another and another. Reuben who knew everything had not laughed at that. Ben thought or imagined that he heard it still.

No wolves had come.

Or if they have come, he thought, I can't see them. They slip along fogfooted behind the larger trees--that tree or that one--maybe. If they are truly come, my brother Reuben will know and tell me. In time for me to draw my knife. Wolves do understand cold steel, they say....

"Ru----"

The boy turned quickly and came back to him. Ben saw his face fade and brighten; the eyes, improbably large, watched him from a mighty depth.

Now that, Ben thought, that is certainly an effect of the new cloud-wrack pa.s.sing over the moon. How warm it is! he thought--nay, d.a.m.n the thing, how cold! Nothing's truly warm since Mother died, therefore I was deluded.... "Ru, what's the time?"

"Can't be far from dawn."

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it.... Some kind of shack over there--see it? A hunter's lean-to, that's what it is."

"Looks more like a beast."

"Can't you see the poles? Come on--it's not far."

"Ru, listen!"

"Yes, I hear them. They're a long way off. Come!"

"Wait, Ru!" The waves of darkness, each time they advanced on him, were climbing higher, toward his eyes. "Listen to me, Reuben, and not to the wolves." Perhaps the next one would go over his head, and he could be quiet. "Listen to me--in my father's house are many mansions."

"Ben, save thy breath. Lean on me. It's not far."

Nothing came in search of them that night. For another hour Reuben heard the wolves, unable to guess in what region of the secret night they were crying. The shrill desolation of the noise wavered from every quarter of the dark, ceasing at times; then the mind could propose that it had never sounded, until it started up afresh, as pain will.

A flood of intense and soundless fire grew along the lower edge of a ma.s.s of winter clouds that had gathered and thickened in the latter part of the night. At some time before the kindling of that sullen splendid flame the howling of the wolves was ended.

Ben had fallen into sleep. When they reached the lean-to he appeared to have shaken off some of his confusion. He spoke reasonably; he stretched out on the heap of leaves and long-dead balsam boughs, insisting that Reuben lie down and rest also. Doing so mainly to humor him, Reuben heard his brother mutter something about Roxbury and then grunt in the plaintive way he always did when sleep had taken him.

When the clouds caught fire Ben still slept, his cheeks raging hot and his hands restless.

The lean-to had been shrewdly made, by some hunter looking to his own welfare. Heavy poles slanted against the base of a perpendicular bank some seven feet high, with others laid across them horizontally; on these brush was piled; snow had gathered, making a dense roof. The back was closed with tougher brush. Near the open end the hunter had thoughtfully heaped dead sticks so that the next comer need not immediately search for firewood. The shelter stood near a curve of the bank, the open end facing east and secure from any wind but the most violent. The s.p.a.ce under the roof, barely enough to allow a large man some elbow room, was almost warm, and became unmistakably so after the boys had lain there a few minutes. But Ben shivered continually in his fevered sleep.

Reuben wrapped his coat around Ben's legs. He dreaded lighting a fire: it seemed to him still that to be discovered by searchers from Springfield was a sharper peril than any other. They would do nothing for Ben's sickness, he thought--flog him and let him die. Reuben collected evergreen branches small enough to hack off with the kitchen knife, and piled them at Ben's sides and over him, to hold in the body warmth. This occupied him for half an hour. The sky flamed. It was the third day of March.

He found he could study the position with some practicality; he could weigh the odds for survival, and say: we have a pound or so of smoked ham, half a loaf, part of a raw turkey; we are at least ten miles from Springfield, and anyway I cannot leave him to search for help. Having done this once or twice, he found it unprofitable to toil through the summary again, yet the emptiness of the morning hour demanded action of the mind, if only to hold away a madness of panic.

He saw Springfield consumed like Deerfield by flame from heaven, then saw himself in the bleak honesty of morning as a foolish child for creating such an image: Springfield wasn't to blame. If he dared leave Ben and go back there, he might dodge the powers represented by Grandmother Cory and find help. But he could not leave Ben to retrace a journey of ten miles. Wolves hunted sometimes by daylight; wolves and Indians. They could find Ben sick and sleeping.

Ben shook in a chill; his tossing pushed away some of the cover. Reuben restored it and lay close against him to give what warmth he could until the shivering pa.s.sed. Panting, with some faint shine of sweat on his forehead, Ben said: "Right of the meeting-house--yes, I see it."

Reuben tried then, long and earnestly, to pray in the manner of his childhood, repeating familiar words aloud, since Ben was too far lost in sleep and sickness to be disturbed. During the act of supplication, some memory nagged. Something demoralizing, to be refused, but at last it sharpened into focus in spite of him. His mother had prayed: "Deliver us from evil ..." her clear voice completing the words, twice, three times perhaps in that reddened doorway until she received the answer, the blow, itself a completion which G.o.d had allowed. To Reuben the sound of his own voice became alien, then contemptible, a disgusting whine. A human being ought never to sound like that. Why should G.o.d listen to such a squeak?

In the abrupt silence the words of that question swelled to vast importance. They were not right. The question was not the right one.

Change it. Shorten it.