CHAPTER XXI.—THE NIGHT: MASTER AND MAN.
ALBERT walked across the yard toward the larger of the new stable buildings. It was a dry, warm, luminous night, radiant overhead with the glory of a whole studded heaven of stars. The moon, the full, shining-faced moon of October, would rise in an hour or so, and then would come pale mists along the valley bottom-lands, and perhaps clouds in the eastern sky. But one could walk bareheaded in this soft starlight now, without a fear of cold.
The lawyer paid no sort of attention to the night, but strode across the grass, swung himself over the stile, and pulled back the great stable door, creaking shrilly on its rollers, with angry energy. He stopped upon the threshold of the darkness, through which the shapes of carriages covered with white sheets vaguely loomed, and called out:
“Milton!”
There was the answering sound of footsteps overhead. A door at the top of the stairs was opened, and a flood of light illumined the staircase.
“Oh, you’ve got back, ay?” said a voice from the top.
It had been Milton’s idea, when the new buildings were erected, to achieve complete domestic autonomy by arranging for himself a residential room above the carriage place. The chamber was high and commodious. It had been lathed and plastered, and, in lieu of wall-paper, the sides were decorated with coarsely-colored circus bills, or pictures from sporting weeklies, all depicting women in tights. There was a good corded bed in one corner. Two chairs, a stained pine table on which, beside the lamp, were some newspapers, a little wood stove, and a mantel-shelf covered with tin-types and cheap photographs, completed the scene. Milton enjoyed living here greatly. It comported with his budding ideas of his own personal dignity, and it freed him from the disagreeable supervision which the elder Miss Fairchild was so prone to exercise over all who lived in the house. Only the Lawton girl, Melissa, came across the yard each forenoon, to tidy up the room, and chuckle over the pictures and the tastes which these, and the few books Milton from time to time brought home from a sporting-library at Thessaly, indicated.
“It’s lucky you hadn’t gone to bed,” said the lawyer, curtly, pulling his hat over his eyes to shade them from the flaring light, and sitting down. “I was going to wake you up. What’s your news?”
“I’ve been over to Tyre twice to see Beekman, ’n’ no use. Once he wouldn’t talk at all—jis’ kep his ole lantern-jaws tight shet, ’n’ said ’Ef Albert Fairchild wants to see me, he knaows where I kin be faound.’ Th’ other time he was more talkative—tried his best to fine aout what I was drivin’ at, but I couldn’t git no satisfaction aout o’ him. He wouldn’t bine himself to nothin’. He jis’ stood off et arm’s lenth, ’n’ sized up what I was a sayin’ in that dum sly way o’ his. I couldn’t make head nor tail of him. He wouldn’t say he would take money, ’n’ he wouldn’t say he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t say yes or nao to th’ post office scheme, or anythin’ else. He jis’ kep’ his big eyes on me, as much as to say, ‘You ketch a weasel asleep!’ ’n’ listened. Naow yeh knaow th’ hull of it. If yeh want anythin’ more done, yeh better do it yerself.”
The lawyer looked attentively at his hired man, and drummed with his fingers on the-table. “So that’s all, is it? You are no further ahead with Beek-man than when the Convention adjourned? You’ve got no proposition from him—no statement as to how he takes my proposals?”
“That’s it, Albert—jest it!”
Something in Milton’s tone seemed to annoy Albert even more than his confession of failure had done. He rose to his feet abruptly. “Don’t ‘Albert’ me!” he said, raising his voice out of its accustomed calm; “I don’t like it! You take too much upon yourself. But—I am to blame for it myself. I’ve let you run things with too free a hand, and trusted affairs to you that I ought to have kept to myself. It is always my way,” he went on, in petulant selfcriticism. “I never did trust anybody who was worth the powder to blow him up. I ought to be used to it by this time. But to encounter two such fools in one evening—and this evening of all others, too—by George! it’s enough to make a man strike his mother!”
“I ain’t no fool, Mister Fairchild”—the hired man was standing up too, and his harsh tones gave the title an elaborate, almost ridiculous emphasis—“’n’ I’ll thank yeh to keep yer tongue civil, tew! Ef yeh don’t like my style, yeh kin git sum’un else to do yer dirty work for yeh. I’ve no hankerin’ fer it. I’m hired to manage this farm, I am. Nothin’ was said ’baout my hevin’ to run a Congresshn’l campaign into th’ bargain. I ain’t sayin’ but what I kin do it’s well’s some other folks. I ain’t sayin’ that it’s beyon’ me. P’raps I’ve got my pull ’n’ this caounty, ’s well ’s some other people. P’raps ’f I was amine to, I could knock somebuddy’s game skyhigh, jis’ by liftin’ my little finger tomorrer. I ain’t sayin’ I’m goin’ to dew it. I ain’t findin’ no fault with yeh. All I say is I ain’t goin’ to take one ioty o’ slack from you, or anybody else, about this thing. You hear me!”
The hired man had spoken aggressively and loudly, with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, and his shaggy head well up in the air. He knew his employer pretty well, and had estimated with some precision the amount of impudence he would bear. This full measure he was not disposed to abate one atom. He had failed to buy the Jay County boss, or even to satisfactorily gauge his intentions, it was true, but that was no reason why he should submit to being called a fool by Albert Fairchild, who couldn’t run his farm, let alone his Congressional campaign, without him. So the mean-figured, slouching countryman, with his cheap, ill-fitting clothes, frowzy beard, and rough, red hands truculently spread palm outward on his breast, stood his ground before the city lawyer and grinned defiance at him.
The lawyer did not immediately reply. He was not ordinarily at a loss for words or decisions in his dealings with men, but this rude, uncouth rustic, with his confident air and his fund of primordial cunning, puzzled him. There was some uneasiness in the feeling, too, for he could not remember the exact limits of his confidences with Milton. Moreover he could not afford, at any price, to quarrel with him now on the eve of the Convention. “After the election we’ll clip your wings, my fine fellow,” he thought to himself, but he gave the words upon which he finally decided a kindlier turn.
“Yes, I hear you. Almost anybody on the side-hill could, the way you are talking. There is no reason why you should lose your temper. If you couldn’t fix Beekman, why that’s all there is to it. We must go at it in a different way. I can see through him. He’s standing out for a cash payment. The old fox wants money down.”
“Well, you’ve got it fur him, hain’t yeh? Go ’n’ give it to him, straight aout!”
“But that’s it—I wanted you to bring back an idea of his figure.”
“His figger. How much hev yeh got?”
“Never mind that—it’s a d——d sight more than the office is worth; but when a man gets into a fight of this sort, he’s got to force his way through, cost or no cost.”
“Air yeh sure it can’t be traced? Wuz yeh careful to raise it so nobuddy cud spot yeh, and give aout that yeh got so much money together for purposes o’ bribery?”
“Yes, it is perfectly safe. There is no record.”
“’N’ nobuddy on airth knaows yeh’ve got th’ money?”
“Not a living soul!”
The two men communed together as to the importance of immediate action. The Convention was to reassemble at Tyre, fifteen miles away, at eleven the following forenoon. The political master of Jay County, Abe Beekman, who held in his hands the deciding power, lived near Tyre, but in the valley some miles further on. The first train from Thessaly in the morning would be too late, for Beekman would have already arrived on the ground at Tyre, coming from the opposite direction, and would have begun work on his own hook. He must be seen at his home, early in the morning. The question was—how to encompass this.
“You might drive across to-night,” Albert suggested; “it can’t be more than twenty miles. It’s a bad, up-hill road, but four or five hours ought to do it, easily enough. By George—I believe I’ll go myself—start at once, see Beekman about daybreak, and then come back to Tyre by breakfast time; as if I had just driven over from here. No one will suspect a thing.”
“Yes, thet’s a fust-rate idee,” assented Milton; “only be keerful ’n’ put yer money in a safe place.”
The lawyer again slapped his breast with a confident “Never fear about that,” and went to the house to get some wraps for the night ride, leaving Milton to harness the grays, and drag out the sidebar buggy with the pole. The hired-man hummed to himself as he moved quietly, dextrously in the semi-darkness in the performance of this task.
Albert returned, just as the hame straps were being buckled.
“Everybody seems to be asleep in the house,” he said. “If they ask any questions in the morning, mind you know nothing whatever. That brother of mine is no friend. Be careful what you say to him. Let him walk to the depot in the morning. It’ll do him good. Oh yes, by the way, better let me have one of those revolvers of yours—you have ’em upstairs, haven’t you—give me the one that strikes fire every time.”
Milton came down and out presently, saying that he just remembered having lent the weapon. “’Tother’s no good,” he added; “yeh don’t need no pistol anyway. Th’ moon’ll be up direc’ly.”
Albert gathered up the lines, and drove out slowly toward the road.
“Yeh better save th’ beasts till after yeh git over Tallman’s hill, ’n’ rest ’em there by th’ gulf!” Milton called after him, as a last injunction.
The hired man stood at the stable door, and watched the buggy pass the darkened, silent house, turn out on the high-road, and disappear beneath the poplars. The moon was just coming up, beyond this line of trees, and it made the gloom of their shadow deeper. His eyes, from following the vehicle ranged back to the house, which reared itself black against the whitening sky. There was there no sound, nor any sign of life. He took a revolver out of his pocket, and examined it in the starlight, cocking it again and again to make sure that there had been no mistake. Satisfied with the inspection, he put it back in his side coat-pocket. He went upstairs, changed his hat, took a drink out of a flat brown bottle in his cupboard, and spent a minute or two looking at one of the tin-type portraits on the mantel-shelf. He held the picture to the light, and grinned as he gazed—then put it in his breast pocket, blew out the lamp, and felt his way softly down stairs.
A few minutes later he came out from the stable, leading the swift black mare. She was saddled and bridled, and seemed to understand, as he led her over the grass, that he wanted no noise made. The man and beast, throwing long, grotesque shadows on the lawn, in the light of the low moon, stole past the house, and out upon the road. Milton here climbed into the saddle, and with an exultant little cluck, started in the direction his master had gone, still keeping the black mare on the grass. They, too, disappeared under the poplars.
The moon mounted into the heavens, pushing aside the aspiring clouds which sought to dispute her passage, then clothing them in her own livery of light, and drawing them upward after her, in a glittering train of attendance. All over the hill-side the calm radiance rested. The gay hues with which autumn’s day brush painted the woods, the hedge rows, the long stretches of orchard, stubble, and field, sought now to only hint at their beauty, as they yielded new outlines, mystic suggestions of form and color, in the soft gray picture of mezzotint. Thin films of vapor rose to enwrap the feet of the dark firs, nearer to the sky, and in the valley below the silver of the moonlight lost itself on the frost-like whiteness of the gathering mist. It was a night for the young to walk together, and read love’s purest, happiest thoughts in each other’s eyes—for the old to drink in with thankful confession the faith that the world was still gracious and good.
Milton was walking the mare now, still on the grass. He could hear the sound of wheels, just ahead.