Judith stepped noiselessly into the porch; the old man did not turn his head. Her quick eye noted the paper Creed had dropped. She stooped and picked it up unobserved, slipped into the kitchen, studying its lines of figures which meant nothing to her, caught up her sunbonnet and, glancing warily about, made an exit through the back door. She ran through a long grape-arbour where great wreathing arms of Virgin’s Bower aided to shut the green tunnel in from sight, then took a path where tall bushes screened her, making for the short cut which she guessed Creed would take.
Down the little dell through which she herself had ridden that first day with what wonderful thoughts of him in her heart, she got sight of him, going slowly, the lagging gait of the old mule seeming to speak his own depression. The trees were all vigorous young second growth here, and curtained the slopes with billows of green. The drying ground sent up a spicy mingling of odours—decaying pine needles, heart leaf, wintergreen berries, and the very soil itself.
Bumblebees shouldered each other clumsily about the heads of milk-weed blossoms. Cicada droned in long, loud crescendo and diminuendo under the hot sun of mid forenoon. A sensitive plant, or as Judith herself would have said, a “shame briar,” caught at her skirts as she hastened. Dipping deeper into the hollow, the man ahead, riding with his gaze upon the ground, became aware of the sound of running feet behind him, and then a voice which made his pulses leap called his name in suppressed, cautious tones. He looked back to see Judith hurrying after him, her cheeks aflame from running, the sunbonnet carried in her hand, and her dark locks freeing themselves in little moist tendrils about her brow where the tiny beads of perspiration gathered.
“You dropped this,” she panted, offering the paper when she came abreast of him.
For a moment she stood by the old mule’s shoulder looking up into the eyes of his rider. It was the reversal of that first day when Creed had stood so looking up at her. Some memory of it struggled in her, and appealed for his life, anyhow, from that fierce primitive jealousy which would have sacrificed the lover of the other woman.
“I—I knowed the paper wasn’t likely anything you needed,” she told him. “I jest had to have speech with you alone. I want to warn you. The boys is out after you. They ain’t no hope, ef the Turrentines gits after you. Likely we’re both watched right now. You’ll have to leave the mountains.”
Creed got quickly from the mule and stood facing her, a little pale and very stern.
“Do you hold with them?” he asked. “I had no intention of killing Blatch. The quarrel was forced on me, as they would say if they told the truth.”
“Well, they won’t tell the truth,” said Judith impatiently. “What differ does it make how come it? They’re bound to run ye out. Hit’s a question of yo’ life ef ye don’t go. I—I don’t know what makes me come an’ warn ye—but you and Huldy had better git to the settlement as soon as ye can.”
Creed saw absolutely nothing in her coupling of his name with Huldah Spiller’s, but the fact that both were under the displeasure of the Turrentines. She searched his face with hungry gaze for some sign of denial of that which she imputed. Instead, she met a look of swift distress.