She was ready for some work in the garden apparently. She wore a kind of sunbonnet made by sewing a ruffle of old calico part way round a man’s old cap, to protect her neck from the sun. She saw Wully, and her face lightened with a greeting.
“Is it you, Wully!” she exclaimed. “And how’s Chirstie the day? We missed you yesterday. She had too much fever, I doubt”
“She’s better. She’s at mother’s. Where’s everybody?”
“Your uncle’s at the McNairs’.”
Trying to hide that skunk, was she!
“I want to see Peter!”
“What Peter?” she asked with a start.
“Your Peter!”
“My Peter!”
“Yes!” She needn’t think she could work that!
“Did you think he was here, Wully?” she asked, hurt.
“John saw him last night,” he cried accusingly.
“What John?”
“Our John! He saw him last night!”
“Saw who?”
“Saw your Peter!” Could it be——
“Saw my Peter!”
“He came home with him last night as far as the McTaggerts’!”
“Last night!”
“Yes!”
“With my Peter!”
“Yes!” stammered Wully.
Peter had never got home. There was no doubt about that.
Libby Keith was standing transfixed there. Her gray face began working.
Suddenly she put her hand up to her head, and gave a moan.
“He’s destroyed! He never got to me!”
She started and ran past Wully in the path, and had climbed into his wagon before he could stop her. She gave his hitched horses such a slap with the lines that they plunged strongly. He sprang to get them, before they broke away. He jumped to his place and seized the lines.
“You can’t go with me!” he shouted at her. He couldn’t throw her out of the wagon, and the horses were all he could manage, thanks to her excitement. As if in obedience to the thoughts of the humans behind them, they were racing down the path towards the McCreaths’, over which Wully had just come.
“You can’t come with me!” he cried again.
She never heeded him.
“He’ll have stopped at the McCreaths’!” she said, moaning. Moaning . . . and making little sounds of speed to his team, which couldn’t possibly have been tearing ahead more madly. She sat rocking back and forth, and making sounds which unmanned him, overwrought as he was by his own excitement and hatred. Through the steaming slough they plunged and splashed. He didn’t care now how quickly they came to their destination. He gave up trying to control the horses. Anything to get away from that noise she was making, that anguished crooning. Never was a man with murder in his heart so undone by the grief he intended augmenting.
The sandy-haired bewhiskered McCreath had stopped still in his dooryard to watch the runaway team coming up. When he saw who it was, he dropped the hoe in his hand, and came on out down the path to meet the evident crisis. Wully pulled up the panting horses, and before they had stopped, Libby Keith cried to the man approaching,
“Where is he? Where’s my Peter?”
At first he could not understand so impossible a question. She scrambled perilously down, and started on a run for the house, with him following.
“Where is he?” she cried again, turning on him. Then McCreath understood. She was mad, the poor body. He said gently;
“He isn’t here, you know, Libby. Peter isn’t here.”
“He is!” she cried. “He’s come! They seen him!”
Wully had followed them. McCreath turned to him, and got a nod in confirmation. They were at the door, now, and Mrs. McCreath had come that far to see what the disturbance was. McCreath cried heartily to his wife;
“Peter’s home, Aggie!”
Tears sprang quickly to Aggie’s eyes.
“Where is he!” Libby cried at the same moment.
“He’s not here, you know,” McCreath repeated kindly.
“Not here!” Libby repeated.
“John saw him last night,” Wully cried angrily.
“Where?” they all demanded.
John had seen him at O’Brien’s, and as far on the way home as the McTaggerts’ corner. And they had supposed he must have turned in at the McCreaths’ when the storm came up.
“He’s at the McTaggerts’, then!” McCreath seemed sure of it. But Libby Keith couldn’t wait till the words were out of his mouth. She was down the path again, and climbing up into the wagon, and the McCreaths were following her, breathing out their congratulations. They didn’t know when any news had pleased them as much as that. They were that glad for her. They were shouting after the galloping team in vain.
And again he had to sit by her, as she went on again, crooning and whimpering, making noises like a shot rabbit. He would drive his horses till they fell in their tracks to get away from that torture.
On the corner, where the little path from the Keiths’ joined the wider road, the McTaggerts were building a house. Three men were working on the roof of it, and from the vantage of the height they watched the team flying towards them, They speculated about it. They came down.
“Where’s my Peter?” she shouted to them before they could hear her. She kept shouting it as she climbed down.
They stared at her.
They hadn’t seen anything of her Peter.
They had to go all over that again. John McLaughlin had seen him at this corner last night. Where was he now?
Wully wouldn’t be balked. Libby Keith wouldn’t be cheated. The McTaggerts stood looking at the two blankly.
Where was Jimmy McTaggert, who had been drinking with Peter last night? He ought to know.
Jimmy McTaggert was wakened from the sleep that followed his holiday spree, and dragged to the light of the morning, half clothed.
He remembered nothing. Wully turned from him wrathfully. Where was his older brother? Let Gib be brought. Gib wouldn’t have been too drunk to remember. Gib was in a far field. A boy went for him horseback. They made Libby sit down. They stood around dazed. Wully went on explaining what he knew again and again. It seemed hours before Gib appeared.
There stood Gib before them, telling the truth, and making it believed. They had come with John from O’Brien’s to be sure, and at the corner John had ridden on home, and Peter had turned and gone walking down the path towards home. That was all that Gib knew about it. Peter had walked right along, not staggering, or seeming drunk.
The men stood looking blankly at one another, fumbling among possibilities, in quietness—for one second.
Then Libby cried out.
“He’s fallen! He’s destroyed!” She started down the path, towards the road calling him, making a more terrible sound than ever—a stronger sound.
“Lammie!” she cried. “Where are you? Mother’s coming!” Some place between that corner and her home she thought him lying helpless, dying maybe. Lying drunk, the men thought, and nodded significantly to each other. It flashed through Wully’s bewildered mind that he had probably started back towards Chirstie. Or maybe back to O’Brien’s, someone suggested. Mrs. McTaggert was running after Libby Keith. The men started to help her search. In decency they could do no less. They tried to soothe her. He would be sleeping somewhere. Had she looked in her own barn? Could it be, they wondered vaguely, thinking of her other children, that had happened . . . anything tragic?
Wully had to join them. After all, she was mad, stark mad and shrieking over the prairies, and she wasn’t a McTaggert that they should have to care for her. She was his father’s sister, and he must see what became of her. Down the road she ran, calling out to her son, and commanding them. They were to go for her husband. They were to get her brothers, her neighbors, to send men on horses to look for him. Some of them turned back to obey her. Wully ran along with her.
Beating along both sides of the road they went, tramping down the grasses, calling him—
calling till Wully felt tears running down his face. Not that he pitied her. He cursed her. He was saying to himself, “God damn you, stop that noise!” And to her, habit-bound as he was, and shrinking from the pain of her voice, “Let me do the shouting, Auntie! Let me call for you!” He didn’t know his voice when he lifted it. So how could Peter know who was begging him for an answer! Oh, if only he might come across him there, fallen, and make an end of this horror! Sometimes he stayed a distance from her in this wild hope. Sometimes he had to support her to keep her from falling. Down through the slough they went, splashing and bedraggled. Mrs. McTaggert, with a baby in her arms, followed as best she might. The slough was shallow where the path crossed it, but how deep the waters might be on either side, no one knew. Libby Keith stretched out her arms dramatically towards them.
“Lammie! Mother’s coming!” she implored.
Mrs. McTaggert sobbed. But she sobbed only like a woman. Not like a . . .
CHAPTER XVI
THE neighborhood gathered at the alarm. By noon Wully’s father and mother were at the Keiths’, and the heads of families for miles around. Up and down the road the boys and younger men were halloing and beating about, and in the kitchen the wise old heads were holding a consultation. Young John McLaughlin had been sent for—that is, Wully’s brother John, not the Squire’s John—and all the men who according to Gib McTaggert’s story must have seen Peter the night before. As the elders waited their coming, they debated solemnly. What could have happened to a man between the McTaggerts’ corner and his home? A drunken man. A man said always to be weak. A man known to be lazy. With a storm coming on. And sharp lightning. A dark road, with deep waters not far from it. Blinded by the lightning could he have turned from the path and been drowned? Could he have fallen and broken a leg? Men have broken bones as they walked. Was he now lying helpless somewhere about? If he was as weak as his mother always insisted, might he not have fallen down drunk, and lying in the way throughout the night, now be overcome by fever? Could he have been bitten by a rattler, and, asleep, died of the poison? Could the lightning have struck him? Men wondered, rather than dared to ask aloud, could there have been a drunken quarrel, and blows perhaps fatal. Wully suggested that he might be in hiding, but this was considered a simple suggestion to come from him, and no one gave it any attention. They all seemed to think that it was his mother Peter was trying to get to. . . . Wully dared not explain what reason he might have for hiding. He wished he had not suggested such a thing.
The young men came, and submitted to questionings. None of them knew exactly when Peter had arrived at O’Brien’s. There had been a fight at the saloon. Young Sproul had still a black eye from it, and after Bob McWhee had knocked him down, there had been a few bad minutes when the onlookers wondered if he was ever to rise again. It had been exciting, to say the least. And men had been busy pacifying the two. After that, Peter was there . . . though no one remembered to have seen him coming in. He hadn’t asked for anything to eat. He had drunken quietly, and been silent. Wully, who had been swallowing his wrath as best he might all the morning, as man after man came out of pity for Libby Keith, each man’s kindness to her making Wully’s purpose seem the greater sin against the mother—Wully couldn’t understand this story about Peter’s quietness. Peter gabbled, naturally. He went noisily on and on. And now, not a man who had seen his surprising return, could report definitely a thing he had said. He hadn’t really said anything. Wully’s brother John testified that when he first saw him, he asked him if he had come back to see his mother. Libby Keith, listening with her harrowed soul, saw no sarcasm in such a greeting. Peter had just mumbled something in reply. It had never occurred to John that Peter hadn’t been home. He thought of course he had had supper there. It seemed strange to no one that John had desired no further intercourse with his cousin. His story agreed with that of all the others. He had tarried but a few minutes at the saloon, naturally, and besides, there was the storm coming on. He had cared enough for the family name to get Peter started on his way home with the McTaggerts. The young Jimmy McTaggart had sung Psalms obscenely all the way along, and Peter had sat on the side of the wagon. He hadn’t been too drunk to hold on there over all the joltings. John had left him getting down at the corner. Then the great honest young McTaggert took up the story, and lucky indeed it was for his wildly drinking young brother that no one doubted what he had to say. Even O’Brien, the whisky-selling man whose name was anathema to mothers of rollicking sons and erring husbands, came volunteering his futile help.
They organized the search. They divided into parties. Some were to venture out into the deep waters of the more probable sloughs. Some were to hunt the woods towards O’Brien’s, because Peter was always wanting another drink, and might have turned, befuddled, in that direction. Some were to hunt through the creek underbrush. Wully chose to go with one of the parties towards the creek, partly because that would take him past his father’s, and he was anxious to warn Chirstie under no provocation to tell yet what she knew, and partly because in that way he would get farthest away from his aunt. He felt as if all the solid faithful earth under his feet had given way, and he was attempting to cling to—just nothing. That woman, his aunt, had harvested before him all the sympathy that should have been his. When now he had killed Peter, the community would think only of her sorrow. There would be no thought of the justification of the man constrained to his murder. There was an intense unfairness about it all, some way. Wully was consoled dumbly by the Squire’s half-heartedness in the search. He grumbled as he went along about having to go. And Wully’s heart warmed to him, not knowing that the Squire’s sensualism, like all men’s, had always to be at war with maternity, which was Libby Keith. Wully had time to question John privately, but he got no further information. Even Chirstie could explain nothing. “Did he look sick?” Wully demanded of her anxiously. “He was drunk, wasn’t he?” She drew back from the question. “Oh, don’t ask me!” she murmured. “He just looked—at me!”
The men spent all day in the more unfathomable menaces. The women searched back and forth about the Keiths’ house. The two miles between that house and the corner, back and forth, up and down that road, they beat persistently and prayerfully, until the little path of the day before was a great river-bed of trodden muddy grass hiding nothing. They searched all impossible places; through the Keiths’ and McCreaths’ and McTaggerts’ barns they went again and again. Peter hadn’t disappeared out of existence. He was somewhere. Likely somewhere between the house and the corner. They went over that path continually till their children began to cry for supper.
The men stopped not even to eat. Let the women and the children do the chores. Let them go undone. Steaming and weary and excited, they went on with their hunt till the sun set, till the last glimmer of twilight was gone. Now none was as persevering as the Squire. The hunt had become for him the greatest game of his maturity. One by one in the darkness the men had at length to ride home to their waiting families, with no news. Strange things they had to think on, places in the swamps where they had not been able to touch bottom, places where the rushes grew rank and thick with scarcely space enough for nest of the crying waterbirds—stretches with no sign of a lost man, and no hope for one losing himself. . . .
At the Keiths’ Isobel McLaughlin in Peter’s bed in the kitchen was lying praying. Except his mother, no one prayed as fervently for Peter’s safe return as Isobel. All that she asked of the Almighty was that Peter might be found alive and well enough to take the shame away from her good innocent Wully. If Peter was brought home dead—how then ever, in the face of Libby’s grief, could she say that the beloved was a scoundrel! How could she ever endure not saying it? That would be too bitter a dose for her. Let God not give her that cup to drink! If fervency could have brought an answer to prayer, how quickly would Peter have appeared!
Her passionate hope had been some consolation to Libby, who so little understood the reason for it. Libby was lying down in her room, not beca
use Isobel had besought her to, but because she was no longer able to stand up. Isobel wanted to get some rest, but she couldn’t leave off her praying to God, the good Father. She hoped Libby might sleep till morning.
But the moon rose after midnight, and with the first flicker of its light, Libby came out of the bedroom, tying a skirt about her. Isobel sat up in bed.
“There’s moonlight now,” said Libby. Even from the doorway, where she stood in the darkness, Isobel could hear her breathing.
“Lie down, Libby!” she implored.
“I mind wee Jennie Price,” said Libby.
“Ah, Libby!” protested Isobel, shrinking from the mention of such poignancy. Jennie Price was the six-year-old who had been lost in the grasses, wandering from her home some twenty miles down the creek, a year or two ago. What but that had all the women been thinking of all the day and shrinking from mentioning.
Libby was groping about for her shoes which she had left in the kitchen.
“Just near home, Isobel! Forty yards from her mother’s door.”
“You can’t go out by night, Libby. You can’t stand up!”
“Crawling towards home, it may be.”
“Libby! Libby!” cried Isobel, getting up. Forty yards from home they had found the girlish skeleton the next spring, in a place a hundred men would swear in court they had sought through dozens of times. The mother herself had come upon it. Had the child been stolen away for some evil purpose, and flung back later to die? No one would ever know.
“The wee bones were all white, Isobel!”
“Spare us, Libby! Peter’s a man grown!”
The women went out calling down the road together. At dawn, when John McCreath came out to milk, while yet the stars were shining, he heard Libby calling hoarsely, “Lammie! Lammie! Your mother’s coming!”
CHAPTER XVII
BY that time men were beginning to gather again—middle-aged men on horseback, stiff from years of toil, bearded great young men with dogs at their heels, large-boned, ruddy, gaunt, rugged of face like Lincoln, overgrown boys, and boys of the very smallest size which fearful mothers could be persuaded to let go into possible danger—they came walking or riding towards the Keiths’ for thirty miles away. The younger ones were sent on horseback to spread the news along all the roads towards town, even along obscure untraveled paths that led to the cross-state coach road to the north. In the morning council Wully had again ventured to suggest that Peter had of his own accord gone back to the place from which he had so mysteriously come. Again they all refused to consider his suggestion. Was it likely a man should return without a glimpse of those he had come so far to see? The whole thing was baffling. It seemed beyond belief that no one had seen him come. That could have happened only on such a day as the Fourth, when all the settlers were away from home. Wully wondered to himself, grimly, however, why, if Peter had managed to come once, unperceived, he would not be able to come again as slyly. He didn’t see that to tell what he knew would ease the situation. And he had no intention of telling it if he had proof that it would have ended the search. He would tell that tale only to justify his making Chirstie safe from violence. He felt strangely distant from those whose eagerness to help increased with each glimpse they got of Libby Keith. At his father’s bidding he went again with a party to search the creek underbrush.
The Able McLaughlins Page 15