CHAPTER XVI
Why did He Go?
There was a stirring of wind in the willows at the side of the creek. Some wreckage swung gently against a box laden with tinware that was taking a hurried voyage down-stream, and the collision brought a chiming protest from the tinware that made Pam think of church bells in England. She struggled for strength to speak, and tried to lift her hands to clutch at something that would hold her back from that awful gulf into which she had so nearly slipped. What was it the boy had to tell her? and why, oh why, had he made grimaces at her on that day when the inquiry was held on the remains found in the forest?
“Better, old girl?” Jack’s voice sounded so waggly and anxious that Pam could have laughed for sheer joy because he cared so much; the love in it warmed her like sunshine, and she strove with all her might to keep from slipping down, down, down!
The noisy crying broke out again. Then she heard a voice that was fierce and passionate demanding:
“Can’t you do something to bring her round? Dab water in her face or something like that!”
“It seems to me that she has had too much water already,” replied Jack’s troubled voice. “If I could leave her I would run back to Mrs. Buckle’s. Don Grierson is there, and he would go and fetch his father for me quick!”
“That he would, you bet! They say he just about worships the ground she walks on, and he has always been a regular stand-offish sort.” A hot feeling like a blush surged over Pam, and she made another effort to open her eyes, to speak and let them know how she was, but before she could achieve so much, the boy had burst out again: “I say, do fan her or something! Burnt feathers is good for swooning folks, Miss Gittins says, but we ain’t got no burnt feathers here!”
“What is it you have got to tell me? Say it, quick!” The authority in Pam’s voice was not to be set aside. She struggled to rise, then felt Jack’s arms under her, holding her up to a sitting posture. A broad stream of sunshine smote her eyes, making her blink; then she opened her eyes again, and saw the boy whom she had tried to save sitting on the ground at a little distance, his small thin face all wrinkled and drawn with pain, his eyes pathetic with distress.
“What is it that you ought to have told me?” she asked with hurry in her voice, some instinct telling her that this thing, whatever it was, mattered a great deal to her, and she must know without delay.
The boy hesitated, a gleam of fear came into his eyes, then he blurted out in a great hurry:
“The old man couldn’t have done Sam Buckle in; I know he couldn’t, there wouldn’t have been time.”
It was as if a rush of new life swept through the veins of Pam. Pushing aside the supporting arms of Jack, she crawled across to where the boy was lying. It seemed to her that she could not trust herself on her feet just yet, for there was no strength in her limbs.
“Tell me what you mean,” she said with sharp insistence. “How do you know that Grandfather did not hurt Sam Buckle?”
“Because I went to Ripple to warn the old man they were going to have a surprise party at his place that night. It is hateful having a surprise party come to your house when you don’t know that they are coming,” said the boy, looking at Pam with a wistful, hungry gaze that made her feel she wanted to cry out of sheer pity for all the limitations and deprivations that the poor child’s life had plainly known.
“Who are you, and where do you come from?” she asked gently. The sunshine was streaming down on her now, and she was feeling the stronger for the genial warmth that took away the deadly chill of her immersion in the creek.
“I am Reggie Furness, Mose Paget’s half-brother; I thought you knowed!” he said. There was surprise in his tone, and Pam was at once conscious that his feelings were hurt because he was of so little importance in the place that she had lived in the district so many months without making his acquaintance.
“Reggie Furness, then, why did you make grimaces at me that day when I came from the inquiry in the Doctor’s wagon-house?” There was blank bewilderment in Pam’s tone. She wanted to ask at least half a dozen questions in a breath, and yet she was so weak and stupid that she could scarcely collect her faculties for coherent speech.
The boy’s eyes fell, and when he answered there was a shamed note in his tone.
“It was pure spite. I knew I could put some things right, but I wasn’t going to then, because it might have hurt Mose. I’ve always stuck by Mose ever since Ma died. Powerful set on Mose she was, though she knowed his weak places better than most. She told me to take care of him for her, and she said it would be good for his character to have me to provide for, but it seems to me I’ve mostly had to provide for myself or to go without. I could do it all right enough if it was not for the time wasted every day in going to school; that is where the trouble comes in.”
“Why would it have hurt Mose for you to tell?” asked Pam, and then was swift to discover that her question had embarrassed the boy so sorely that she was quick to cover her blunder by another query. “Never mind that now. Tell me what Grandfather said to you when you came to warn him, and how it is that you can be so positive he did not hurt Mrs. Buckle’s husband?”
Reggie gave a wriggle, then winced as if he had hurt himself.
“The old man was downright nasty. It wouldn’t have hurt him to have given me a quarter for my trouble, or if he hadn’t the cash to spare, he might have given me a chunk of food; I can mostly do with a bit of something to eat,” he said, with a wan smile that made Pam feel she wanted to cry more than ever. She thrust out a wet and dirty hand to give the boy a reassuring pat on the arm, then signed for him to go on. She was too anxious to know what he had to tell to have any notice to spare for the supreme discomfort of her condition.
“He didn’t give me nothing,” went on Reggie. “He only growled out that if the surprise party came there they might find that they would get a surprise themselves that they had not bargained for. Then when I asked him out straight what I was to have for my trouble, he just said he would set the dog at me if I did not clear out sharp. He called to the dog, but I did not wait to have the thing come at me; it didn’t seem worth while bringing the creature into the business, especially as I had no stick nor anything to help me in putting up a fight. I just pelted back to the schoolhouse as hard as I could go, and when I got there, it was fifteen minutes past two o’clock.”
“Are you quite, quite positive about the time?” demanded Pam with devouring eagerness.
Reggie gave a weak gurgle of laughter.
“Sure and certain!” he declared. “Schoolmarm she lays on a stroke a minute when we are late at noon spell. We can’t help being late in the mornings, you see, so she says she will take good care that we ain’t encouraged in wasting time in the middle of the day. She is uncommon smart with the stick, and I went sore for days after that.”
“Why did you not tell this before?” cried Pam with anger in her tone. “Just think of the misery I might have been saved!”
“Why should I tell?” cried the boy bitterly. “The old man was not even ordinarily civil to me, yet I had taken all that trouble for him. Then I was afraid, and reckoned that the less said the better.”
“What were you afraid of?” asked Pam.
Reggie gave another wriggle.
“My leg hurts something awful, do you expect that I have broken it?” he demanded; and now there was a whine in his voice as if he was purposely calling attention to his sufferings in order to draw Pam’s notice from things he did not want to have discussed just then.
“Are you hurt?” she asked in quick sympathy. She had not noticed his position before.
“It is either a sprain or a break,” put in Jack. “The poor kid was hurt when he came sailing down-stream on the table. Amanda saw him slipping along past Mrs. Buckle’s house, and she came screaming to warn me, for he shouted to her that he was hurt and could not help himself. I came as fast as I could, and it was lucky I did, for I was only just in time to pull you out.”
“There is the truck!” exclaimed Pam, waving her arm towards the truck, which had been left to carry the rugs back to the house. “We can put him on that and wheel him to the house. Then you must go for the Doctor, Jack. Perhaps Mrs. Buckle will lend you the horse; you can stick on its back if you try hard enough.”
“Don is at Mrs. Buckle’s, helping to make a dam to keep the water out; he will go for the Doctor,” said Jack. Then Pam suddenly remembered what she had heard Reggie saying when she lay in her half-swoon, and she blushed right up to the roots of her hair. It was so absurd for people to put sentimental constructions on every little appearance of friendship between Don and herself; he was her very good friend, just as Sophy was, and that was all. It was stupid to blush like a little schoolgirl! Pam was painfully conscious of a quizzical look from Jack as he brought the truck to the place where Reggie was sitting, and then of course she blushed harder than ever.
Reggie was lifted on to the truck with considerable difficulty. He might be thin and small to look at, but it took all the strength of Pam and Jack to lift him, while his moans and groans when they touched him made Pam feel so bad that she did not know how to bear it. The task of pulling the truck across the sodden field was heavy, too. She and Jack pressed forward shoulder to shoulder, and she had a queer spent feeling as if she would give up the next moment and slip to the ground.
“What makes the kid so certain that Grandfather had no hand in hurting Sam Buckle?” asked Jack. His head was close to hers as they drew the heavy truck, and they could talk in low tones without any danger of Reggie hearing what they had to say.
“It is the time that settles it,” replied Pam. “It would take Reggie nearly an hour to go from Ripple to the schoolhouse, though he might do it in three-quarters if he ran all the way. That would make it half-past one when he left Ripple in a hurry, because Grandfather set the dog at him. It was just one when Sam Buckle left his home that day, and he had not been gone ten minutes by the clock when Mrs. Buckle remembered he had taken the keys with him, and that she would want them when the man from the stores came with the week’s groceries. It would take her from twenty minutes to half an hour to walk to our boundary from her house, which would bring her to the place about the time that Reggie was starting away from Ripple. When she got to the fence she found her husband lying on the ground unconscious, and so fearfully battered that at first she thought he must be dead. Grandfather’s axe lay on the ground near to him, and it was not wonderful, knowing as she did of the feud between them, that she believed Grandfather had done it. Ripple was the nearest place to run for help, but she would not be likely to come here under the circumstances. Indeed, she could not leave her husband to go anywhere for help at first; she found he was just alive, and so she set to work to keep him from slipping away. It was five o’clock before she was able to get any help of any kind. Even then it was only little Amanda Higgins, who had happened that way round on going home from school, because Mrs. Buckle had promised her some cookies. It was nearly seven before the neighbours arrived to carry the poor man to his home, and then the police and the Doctor had to be sent for.”
Jack drew a long breath. “It is something to know that Grandfather did not do a thing like that! But why did he go away? It looks as if he had had something to be ashamed of anyhow. The puzzle seems to grow rather than decrease. Don’t you think so?”
Pam nodded. She was so fearfully out of breath, and she was feeling so exhausted, that she had no strength left for any more speculation just then. She could not even feel properly glad over the lifting of one cloud, so afraid was she that another was going to brood close over her. There must have been some strong reason for her grandfather going away and remaining absent, and she quailed lest the reason might be one to be ashamed of. It is not easy to take rosy views of things when one is drenched to the skin with muddy water and aching from head to foot. Hope and courage would spring again presently, but just now they were low down, and nothing would have been easier than for Pam to collapse in a miserable heap and burst into crying.
Her pride saved her. Talk of the sin of pride! A few sermons on the virtues of the proper sort would not be out of place in some phases of life and living, for certain it is that many a man and woman would give up the struggle to present a brave face to the world but for this same proper pride. Pam took her share of dragging the truck, and when the house was reached she helped Jack to carry Reggie to the bedroom that had been her grandfather’s. Then she left her brother to the task of getting the boy to bed while she ran upstairs and slipped into clean, dry clothing. Oh, the comfort of having a clean face and feeling dry! Pam suddenly felt pounds better; half her aches and pains vanished, and she hurried down to help Jack, and to insist that he, too, should stay for dry clothes before he went off to Mrs. Buckle’s to send Don to bring the Doctor.
It was easy to see that Reggie was in a rather bad way, and Pam, having had but little experience of sickness, would have been thankful to shift the burden of caring for him on to someone else. When Jack had gone, and she was left alone with him, his moans and cries were incessant. His mind was not clear; very often when she bent over him trying to make him more comfortable he thought she was Mose, and he would look up at her with a face full of reproach, crying out that he should not have stolen the money, that stolen goods were of no use to anyone.
The waiting for the Doctor was about the hardest thing Pam had had to bear for some time. The boy’s face was flushed with fever, and he talked in a high-pitched tone that sounded weird and unnatural. His revelations about his home life were to the last degree pathetic, and always he was reminding himself that he had promised his dying mother to do what he could to keep his brother straight.
Jack came back, and set to work on the evening “chores”, leaving Pam free to remain in the house. It was necessary that someone should be with the boy every minute now, for he thought himself afloat on the table again, and he was all the time trying to throw himself out of bed in the hope of reaching the bank. His horror of water was very great, and he felt himself drowning every minute.
“Here comes Dr. Grierson, and Sophy is with him!” shouted Jack, putting his head in at the door of the best sitting-room, and Pam uttered a little cry of thankfulness, for she had wanted Sophy that afternoon more than words could express. It was dreadful to feel so helpless and to be able to do so little.
“Broken leg!” said the Doctor. “You will have your work cut out, Miss Walsh, but there is no help for it; he can’t be moved. Sophy will stay, though, and the neighbours will do what they can. The trouble is that the boy has no reserve strength, poor child. He has been so nearly starved, too, that a shock of this kind will certainly make things go hard with him.”
“You don’t think that he will die, do you?” demanded Pam with blank dismay on her face. If Reggie died her grandfather’s name could not be cleared. Such an issue to the boy’s present condition was too dreadful to be thought of; his life must be saved somehow.
“Doctors never think their patients are going to die,” replied Dr. Grierson curtly. “I said that the boy had no reserve of strength, so that he would be more ill than an ordinary case of fracture would warrant; that is to say, he will be very feverish, and he will wander in his mind a great deal. He will need a great deal of nursing, too, and I expect he will be very bad-tempered and difficult to manage. As I said before, you are going to have your hands full.”
“Anything more?” she asked with a comical gesture of pretended despair. “But you have not frightened me yet, and he is going to be nursed back to strength if care and painstaking can accomplish it. He told me to-day he could prove that Grandfather was here at Ripple at the time when Sam Buckle was so knocked about. If he can clear the name of the poor old man, neither Jack nor myself will grudge the work of nursing him.”
“If he can do that, why has he not done it already?” asked the Doctor. He was in the kitchen now, sitting by the stove, and drinking a cup of tea that Jack had made for him while he was busy with Reggie.
“He was angry with Grandfather, who had not treated him well,” explained Pam; and then she plunged into the story which the boy had told her of how he came to Ripple to warn Wrack Peveril of the surprise party that was coming, and did not get even thanks for his trouble. It hurt her considerably to have to tell of that part, but she must be just, and the old man’s treatment of the boy had not been fair, or kind either.
“Told on the surprise party, did he?” chuckled the Doctor. “I am not so very much surprised at his keeping quiet about it, for Galena would certainly have been very wrathful if she had known; she was the head and front of the affair, and she is spirited, too. But, Miss Walsh, that does but deepen the mystery, because if your grandfather had done nothing to be ashamed of, why did he disappear in such a strange fashion? He must have dropped everything and gone.”
“The only explanation that I can think of is that something happened to him in the forest, and we have never found his body,” said Pam.
“Not likely,” objected the Doctor. “Supposing that he had dropped dead from unsuspected heart disease or anything of that sort, he would have fallen on the open trail, and his body would have been found. Then, if he did not do the damage to Sam Buckle, why did the poor chap keep muttering that it was his right, always that it was his right? Then remember the rumour of the old man having been seen in the lumber camp. How can it be explained?”
“I don’t know. It is as mysterious to me as it is to you,” said Pam, drawing a long breath. Then she looked into the face of the Doctor, and the steadfast light in her eyes was a sight to see, as she continued: “I am quite sure that Reggie has told the truth. He had nothing to gain by telling me, but perhaps a good deal to lose, for Galena can be hard sometimes, and he works there, you see. It has given me hope. I can hold up my head and look people in the face again, now I know Grandfather did not do that shameful thing. Oh, you cannot think how I have suffered in my pride because of it!”
“Yes, I can, because I know how proud you are!” The Doctor rose to go, and stood looking at Pam with a good deal of kindliness in his gaze; he liked her very much, and he guessed that his son liked her still more.
It was just at this moment that there came a swift run of feet across the best sitting-room, the door was flung hastily open, and Sophy appeared on the threshold crying urgently:
“Oh, Father, do come back again before you go, for the boy is saying such dreadful things!”