CHAPTER VII

In a cane-bottomed chair beside the threshold of the post-office--a flimsy board building owing all its distinction, like a dirty uniform, to the magic influence of those two letters U.S.--sat Daddie Ingram during that social hour preceding the arrival of the mail. He himself owed much of his prestige to his association, as postmaster, with the Federal Government--that vast power which makes its influence felt even to the most remote hamlets. He had acquired a certain dignity because of his affiliation with the Eagle Itself.

The hot sun had made the roads which centered here dusty. Even the droning insects became half-hearted. Flies moved listlessly and became lazily indifferent to the danger of hostile hands moving against them with no spirit. Men slouched up to the weather-worn porch and sank down with a grunt, drawing their knees up and tilting their hats down. Some of them whittled, but none of them were sufficiently inspired to attempt any creative effort, unless perhaps a long spindling toothpick sharpened with extreme care to a needle point.

Over his befogged spectacles, Daddie Ingram’s faded blue eyes brightened a trifle as they observed the approach of Mr. Howe down the road. He spat and shifted his quid in order to be in readiness for a conversation which he had anticipated for several hours. He introduced his subject without preliminaries as soon as Howe was safely within range.

“Hear that young man up at yo’ house had a sort of run-in with Bud Childers last night.”

Howe was surprised--unpleasantly surprised. He had rather hoped the affair might not become current gossip. The moment this became public property it complicated matters a good deal.

“What did you hear?” questioned Howe without committing himself.

“Wull, I heard on two or three sides. Yes, suh, on two or three sides.”

Pausing a moment he added, as though after mature reflection:

“I heard it on two or three sides.”

“Childers been talking?”

“Ain’t no one heard him doin’ it,” replied Daddie cautiously. “Fust pusson I seen who knowed anything ’bout it was little Tom Culley. Said old Widder Kester giv’ him the devil this mornin’ for carryin’ a lie ’bout her bein’ sick. Tom said he told her who give him the message. Tom he went to Bud an’ Bud was fightin’ mad--all riled up about it. Then Tom ’lowed he was gonter cut up thet young man up to yo’ house.”

“Well?”

“Bud’s bad,” drawled Daddie Ingram. “Yessuh, he’s bad. Yessuh, he’s bad medicine. That young man up to yo’ house might erve needed a gun and a good un.”

Howe spoke deliberately now.

“Mr. Allston is just out of the army. He has a gun and he knows how to use it.”

“Wull, he might erve needed a good un. Yessuh, he might erve.”

“He will use it--if it’s necessary. But he isn’t looking for any trouble which isn’t forced on him.”

“Looks like an awful nice feller,” admitted Daddie. “That clever an’ friendly. I’m powerful glad he’s got a gun. Better carry it, too.”

Turge Calhoun, a dwarfed, fleshless little man who looked as though he had been long hung upon a nail to dry, looked up with interest. Then he broke out into uncanny laughter--a piercing falsetto.

“Turge--he knows Bud,” nodded Ingram phlegmatically.

Howe attended to his business inside and went back home frankly disturbed. It was clear enough that this group, while not actually hostile to Allston, looked forward with considerable pleasant anticipation to a second run-in between him and Bud. They intended to go even further--as far as it was possible by innuendo and goading they would spur Bud on. There was both amusement and excitement in the situation--just as in a cock or a dog fight. They were no more apt to consider consequences than Bud was--less, in view of the fact that they themselves were not in danger.

Anxious as Howe was, he felt quite helpless. He knew there was no authority of the law he could invoke. Officers are powerless until after a crime is committed. Moreover, it is doubtful if he would find local officials sympathetic, anyway. It was even more doubtful if he himself was in sympathy with any such method of procedure. Difficulties of this nature could not be settled by law. Allston would be the last man in the world to listen to such a proposal.

Obviously the simplest way out, if it could be managed, would be to place the two men beyond reach of one another. But it was as much out of the question to think of shifting Bud Childers as it was Green Mountain or Big Laurel Cove or Caterpillar Ridge. As for moving Allston out of danger, it seemed equally impossible except by resorting to some ruse. This course was as distinctly against Howe’s own nature as he knew it would be against that of his guest.

Howe did not repeat his conversation with Daddie Ingram either to his daughter or to Allston. To do so would be only to frighten the former and rouse, possibly to aggressive action, the latter. But he did persuade Allston to keep his automatic always in his pocket and to make sure it was loaded.

“Don’t pop away at any more squirrels,” he warned. “If you do, reload. You’ll need a full hand the next time you call that man.”

Allston heeded the advice, although even now he was by no means convinced that any such precaution was necessary. However, he had toted a gun so much during the past two years that he found it no great burden and this was an easy way to please his host. And Allston was anxious, in every way, to please him. He felt, each day, under a greater obligation. He had prolonged his visit with these amiable people far beyond the limits the happy chance of his accidental introduction to them warranted. And yet he stayed on, for every time he suggested that he was straining his welcome he was met by such a genuine protest from both father and daughter that he found it easy to drift back into inaction.

This countryside was to his taste. He liked the contrast of rugged hills with fertile valley; of the primeval mountain growth of huge chestnut-oaks and laurel, with the luxuriant rhododendrons, tropical in their leafy richness; of the cold streams and rough roads with the formal orderliness of this well-kept summer place. He sensed something of this dramatic contrast in these people who had come so unexpectedly into his life. Bud and Roxie set against Howe and Wilmer heightened his interest in both. They stood for two different periods. And yet for all he knew the difference between them might not be as great as it seemed.

That was the striking fact against which he was continually bumping during the war; the amazing likeness of peoples he had always considered so essentially different, and the amazing differences between those he thought identical. This held true even of different civilizations. It held true of different historical epochs. The past and the present were all jumbled together over there just as the dead and the living were. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish one from the other. And they were easily interchangeable. He remembered with particular vividness an old French town in which he had been billeted--a town dating back, not years like towns at home, but centuries. If anything might be thought to be deep-rooted and fixed in its associations with the past, it was this stone village, gray and heavy with age. And yet in a night Allston had seen a rude interruption of its traditions. The inhabitants had been hurried away to escape heavy gunfire when he and a few other officers entered the silent streets. Only the empty shell of this ancient town remained. Yet doors were open, tables set, beds in order. Even the old town clock was going. It made him jump when it struck out with leisurely resonance and indifferent concern each passing hour. But the population, boasting kinship back to Cæsar, had vanished in a day to give place to a few sprightly young officers bred in a country which three hundred years before had been savage. These soldier cubs ate at the time-stained tables, slept in the hallowed beds, while the night stars looked down undisturbed.

It was not easy after this for Allston to believe that centuries counted for much towards stability. It was still more difficult when a little later he saw varying breeds of men tearing at each other’s throats like jungle beasts. He was one of them and tore as hard as any. And then--presto--this was over and the breeds became polite and civilized again, and the ancient townsfolk returned to their abodes and remade their beds and reset their tables and sent Allston and the others--such of them as were not buried with the dead centurions--back to their own young land.

An experience like this made a man cautious about fixing boundaries either of time or space. It drove a man back of history to a primitive brotherhood which discovered men and women, of whatever clime and of whatever period, to be much alike.

And yet he was inclined even now to make an exception of Wilmer. It was difficult for him to conceive any set of circumstances which could affect the cultivated poise of her calm nature or disturb to any extent her steady control based upon a fine intelligence. It amused him to imagine how she would have acted under the conditions existing in that little French town so suddenly shaken from its venerable security. He could not picture her then as any other than she was now. She would have remained had that been possible. If not she would have walked out calmly, looking upon the interruption as an ugly interlude, but quite unchanged by it. But she would be beautiful, with a sort of saintly beauty, both in going and returning.

In many ways this steadiness, this assurance, this complete confidence in herself, the product of a ripe development a little beyond her years, appealed strongly to him. She stood out in his lately troubled world like the North star over a stormy sea. He welcomed her because she seemed to guide him back to that snug harbor in which he had ridden so safely at anchor beneath a golden sun and an azure sky until the war bade him set sail. In her presence he was able to dream pleasantly and lazily again as he had in college. And rather sentimentally too. This was an agreeable surprise. He thought all that had been burned out of him. During those few days at home he had been astonished at how unresponsive he had been to the pretty young faces about him. But they had chattered about the war and his nerves had been more jumpy than they now were.

He had steadied down a lot since then. He could thank Wilmer’s deep brown eyes for that--and her soft, musical voice, never raised, but clear and distinct as a silver bell. He liked to listen to it in the evening as she read aloud to her father, though often he found himself hearing nothing but the voice. He was quite sure that if interested in the text he would do much better to read to himself. But he seldom was interested. He much preferred talking with her when she had no book in her hand.

He much preferred talking to her about--almost nothing at all. She was a good walker, and they used to start on long tramps through the woods for the neighboring hills. Always it was to some definite point like Caterpillar Ridge. Never on these hikes did they succeed in reaching their objective. Allston, at times, felt rather mean about that because it seemed to disturb her. And it obliged him to adopt the rather underhanded expedient of allowing her to believe that the bit of gas he had once inhaled was responsible for his weakness, when, as a matter of fact, it was nothing but the joy of sprawling out lazily at her feet. He had never felt better in his life and he knew it.

He used to pick out the sunny places--tiny coves lying like pockets or mountain nests at the foot of bold rocks. If he could find one near a brook, so much the better, for this gave him the excuse of fishing while the rippling tinkle of the falling water sang with her a duet. It is not on record that he brought home any fish, but this was of minor importance. Your true sportsman never fishes for the sake of fish.

But always he brought home something--if only the memory of a dimpling smile caught unexpectedly in response to some bit of fooling. He liked to make her smile unexpectedly. It was like angling in an untried brook. Her eyes were the pools--so deep that one could not see bottom. And like mountain pools continually filling with fresh water, her thoughts ran through them. One could never tell when a smile, like a quick trout, might flash into them from somewhere, and jump at his bait. That was worth waiting for.

So they sat one afternoon just off the road leading to Big Laurel Cove--not knowing except in a general way where they were. It would not have mattered greatly to Allston had he realized he was within a short distance of Bud Childers’s shack. As far as he was concerned at this time Bud Childers did not exist.