CHAPTER XXXI
Keeping to the water's edge, Professor Young walked rapidly toward Ithaca. He knew that further up the shore the fishermen were drawing their nets; he did not wish to advance upon them. Since knowing Tessibel Skinner, he had become more lenient toward the law-breakers.
He turned into the forest at the side of the Hoghole, but the sound of voices brought him to a standstill.
Ezra Longman was shouting out a threat.
"Ye be a-tryin' to get Tess, and I tells ye to look out."
"Shet up!" responded Ben Letts.
"If ye air a-wishin' to live," came the boy's voice again, "I says for ye to keep away from her."
"I lives 'cause I lives, and I ain't afraid of ye, nohow."
The Professor barely caught the words, for they were gurgled in the deep throat.
"I wants Tess for a woman," Ben broke out, "and for a woman I air a-goin' to have her. She'll care for Mammy and me. I gets her. See?"
The north reel stopped turning, but the south one went on silently. Ben Letts and Ezra Longman were turning over and over on the sand, at grips with each other.
Professor Young uttered no word. Then Ezra's voice came from under Ben's big body.
"I tells what I knows about Skinner if ye don't get up and let me be," said he. "I tells—"
Red fingers closed over his throat, and Ezra Longman spoke no more. As the south reel kept turning around and around, the rope slackened from the north reel in the water; and still Ben Letts held his deadly fingers pressed about the neck of his enemy.
Professor Young saw Ben sit up and bend his head to the heart of the other fisherman. Then, with a furtive glance about, he lifted the boy in his arms, and came toward Young, grunting under his burden. Young drew back into the overhanging branches.
The squatter stumbled up the rocks, dragging the boy after him, and with a mighty effort lifted him high in the air, and tumbled the body into the Hoghole.
In another instant, Ben was back upon the shore at the reel, turning swiftly until silently it caught up with the other, just as the net dragged in the shallow waters, with bushels of flopping fish inside.
Professor Young lowered himself into the Hoghole. It was necessary for him to use the greatest caution. The lad came to the surface directly below him, and the Professor saw him catch at a jagged end of a rock.
"Can you breathe?" asked Young, in a low voice. "And can you help yourself a little?"
"Yep," came back the faint answer.
"Then, when I put out my foot, take hold of it, and make no noise, for your enemy is but a short distance away, and he meant to kill you. Now, come up.... There! Don't lean too heavily upon me, for the rocks are slippery."
Without any more conversation, the two men, one wet and weak, with bleeding head, with a gash over his right brow, crossed the forest toward the tracks. By dint of persuasion, Young forced the boy to give his father's name. He had caught enough of the talk between the fishermen to know that Tess was the cause of their quarrel. But what Ezra had threatened to tell about Skinner he did not know. Two miles from Ithaca the boy became light-headed and feeble. His tongue was loosened in his delirium, and Young heard a story that made his heart beat faster and revived hopes he had considered almost dead. Through the moonbeams that slanted to the tracks he imagined he saw a little figure skirting the rays, with flying red hair. Not for anything in the world would he lose sight of the boy. He had the first clue in the case that so interested him. Acquittal for the father of Tessibel Skinner was within his grasp. It was late when he dragged Ezra, laughing and gibbering, into a private hospital. He installed a nurse beside the boy, bidding her keep a record of any delirious mutterings he might make, and to observe silence about them.
Ben Letts wondered what Satisfied Longman would ask about his son. He spoke to the father first, his thick brain trying to avoid trouble.
"Ye air both got a lot of nerve to keep three men at the south reel, when I air the only one here."
"Where's Ezy?" asked Longman.
There was no anxiety in his voice. He was tumbling the fish into the cars.
"I ain't no way a-knowin' where he air. He skipped away, and said how he wanted to speak to his pappy, and I ain't seed him since.... Ezy were a fool when he was born."
"Gone home, like a sneakin' kid," put in Jake Brewer. "He ain't no hankerin' for nettin'. He ain't been right since Orn Skinner shot the gamekeeper."
"He air my brat," replied Longman, "and he air good, if he does do what he oughtn't to sometimes. I air satisfied with him.... Let's go home."
And, silently, as a spectral fleet, the boats lapped their way back, edging the shore carefully.
Far into the night Satisfied Longman and the tired mother waited for their boy.
"He'll show up to break'us," soothed the father; but the mother trembled with terror. It was the first evening Ezra had missed the netting, and he had never been from home for a whole night.
As day after day passed, it was noised about the settlement that Ezra Longman had run away, some saying that he had been seen upon a line of canal boats going to Albany. The mother watched each hour for some word from him. Then, with a sorrowful expression in the faded eyes, she said to Myra:
"If Ezy had had any edication, he'd 'a' writ. He'll be a-comin' home some of these days."
After that, the fisherman's hut carried along its usual routine—while a boy in the city was wrestling with fever, and the head of the law school hung upon his muttered words with avidity.
"You think he is very ill, Tess?" Teola asked, early one evening in September, when she and Tessibel were alone in the Skinner hut. Tess came forward to the wooden box, holding in her hand the frying-pan filled with bacon fat, and gazed down upon the baby Dan, contemplating the wee old-man face thoughtfully.
"He air sick! He air a look on him what air on Myry's brat—kind of sickly. That air because he has so many lines in his face, and he air so little," she finished, wrinkling the sun-tanned cheeks and shrugging her shoulders almost disdainfully.
Teola knelt down, and slipped one slender arm under the dark head. These two girls had been drawn together during the past few weeks by a tie stronger than death. It had brought Frederick nearer to the squatter, and little did Teola realize that, had it not been for her handsome brother, her secret would have been discovered long before. It was of him she was thinking as she bent over the fire-scarred babe on this stormy September night in the fisherman's hut.
"I may not be able to come down to-morrow, Tessibel," she said, looking up into the serious face, "because my brother is coming home early in the morning."
The frying-pan fell to the floor; the fat spattered and ran across the broken, tilted boards until it congealed into rounded miniature mountains. Teola turned a puzzled face toward the fishermaid, but there was nothing about the girl to tell her why the accident had happened, for Tessibel, grappling with a huge cloth, was wiping the floor furiously.
"I was saying, Tess," repeated Teola, "that I may not come down to-morrow.... Oh! hear how it rains, and the thunder!... Tess, since he died, and the baby came, thunder-storms make me shiver."
"It ain't nothin' that'll hurt ye," grunted Tess from her position on the floor.
"I know it, unless one stands directly in the lightning's path. But I am such a coward, Tessibel! You have so much faith—that's why you're not afraid."
The pathetic face turned suddenly upon Tess with a questioning look.
"My brother, you know, thinks you are such a good girl—and—and—you are a good girl, aren't you, Tess?"
"Squatters ain't never good," answered Tess in a low tone, her eyes dropping under the steady gaze of the other girl. "But I—I love the student's God, I does."
She was standing with rag hanging from her right hand, her face illumined by a deep flush that disappeared only when it met the red hair.
"I believe that you do love Him, Tess," Teola breathed. "And Frederick told me that if he had your faith, he could do anything in the world. You know, the Bible says that if we had faith as large as a mustard seed, we could move a mountain."
Her voice faltered on the last words. Tess grunted significantly.
"Aw! a mustard seed ain't no bigger than a speck of dirt."
"I know it, Tess; I know it. But one only has to have a little faith in God to enable Him to answer every prayer we utter."
She grasped the thin baby to her breast frantically, kissed the crimson mark up and down, until where the frenzied lips had traveled the flesh turned purple. Oh! to have faith to believe that she might soon have her child with her always—always! Of late there had crept over Teola the shadow of the great beyond, into which her student lover had been so hastily summoned. The shrieking of the wind, and the mournful fluttering of the tiny hands made her shiver, and she coughed slightly.
"A mountain air bigger than that hill with the look-out on it," ruminated Tess, picking up a huge knot of wood from behind the stove.
"I know that, too," replied Teola.
For the space of many minutes only the smacking of the baby lips upon the sugar rag and the roaring of the turbulent wind were heard in the hut. Suddenly the vibrations of a great peal of thunder shook the shanty with violent effect; a streak of lightning shot zig-zaggedly through the room like some livid, malicious spirit. Teola screamed in terror.
"It hit some place near here," said Tess.
"Yes, and wasn't it awful? Oh, if the storm would only cease!"
"It air comin' nearer," answered Tess, with the keen instincts of a squatter. "It air got to turn sidewise through the window afore it goes over the hill. What air ye afraid of, if ye believes that ye can move a mountain if ye has the faith? God wouldn't hit the brat with lightnin', would He?"
"Oh, I haven't the faith, Tess!" moaned Teola, rocking to and fro in her keen agony of soul. "Long ago I stopped believing the way I did when I was a child. I prayed that night when Dan was killed, until my head ached and pounded for days. I wanted to see him once more, and God wouldn't let me; and then I prayed again—" Teola buried her face in the breast of the infant, and sobbed, "I prayed that the baby might die when he was born, but God didn't see fit to take him. Somehow, it doesn't do any good to pray any more."
Tess paused in her work, standing with her hands on her hips, a solemn expression in the long eyes.
"Yer faith wasn't as big as a speck of dirt, then, were it?" she queried. "And maybe mine ain't for Daddy. But the student air a-prayin' for him! It air a damn shame ye ain't got him a-prayin' for yerself and the kid.... Ye'd a seen yer man before now, and the brat would 'a' died, too."
With a start caused by the squatter's words, Teola laid the child down, crouching back upon her feet. She eyed the fisher-girl critically. What a strange mixture of good and bad—of the holy and the unholy—lived in the tawny, magnificent squatter! She answered hesitatingly:
"But if my brother should know about the baby, it would break my heart, Tessibel. It would kill me—and him, too! Nothing could ever make me tell him. You understand, don't you, Tess?"
"Yep."
It was as Tess had said. The storm was coming nearer, sending vivid shafts of lightning in splendid awfulness across the sky. Torrents of rain descended, thrashing the lake into uneven, towering crests of white foam. The weeping willow tree groaned over the shanty roof, jarring and tearing at the broken bits of tarred tin.
"Tess, Tess, how can you bear that awful noise, constantly through the night? It frightens me to death. It sounds like the spirits of people who are dead."
She shivered again, the cutting rasp from the chimney place stinging her with fright.
"It air spirits," replied Tess softly. "There air one kind of spirits for the sun when it air a-shinin', and the waves just a-ripplin' over the lake. They air good spirits. But on nights like this there air bad ones—the ghosts of Indians, squaws, and sometimes of the Letts' family—them dead 'uns."
She paused, her low voice trailing into silence on that one word "dead," the luminous eyes burning with superstitious fear. How many times had the squaw and her burnt brat, now long since called to the land of their fathers, moaned through the winter nights, making the shanty ring with their piteous plaints! How many times Tessibel had imagined that she had seen the headless man from Haytes' Corner flit from the shadows of the long lane and lose himself in the overhanging willows on the shore!
Suddenly a foreign sound pierced the storm. Tessibel drew near Teola. Both girls were standing over the wooden box. The violence of the storm impelled them to grasp each other's hands. In through the broken window the strange sound was borne again.
"A boat's a-beatin' agin the shore," said Tess quietly. "Some one air a-comin' in out of the rain."
The words were only formed on her lips when the door opened abruptly. Tessibel turned her head; Teola dropped her hand and uttered a cry. Frederick Graves, with his fingers upon the door, was closing it against the fury of the storm.