“So long. Watch yourself.”
Douglas tramped away. Ward and Bill looked at each other, slid back behind their trees, and resumed their silent waiting.
CHAPTER XIX
THE SUN BREAKS THROUGH
Three days of raw chill, leaden cloud, and numbing wind rolled past. No more rain fell, but, except by fitful gleams, no sun shone. Through each gray day the dying leaves fluttered limply down, carpeting the damp ground thicker and thicker with yellow and crimson and brown. Through each black night a few hardy survivors of the former myriad of katydids quacked despairingly, and here and there a cricket sounded a mournful call to comrades which no longer answered him. Bleak November was drawing near.
In those gray days Hammerless Hampton ranged the roads, the fields, and the forest, implacably hunting the man or men who had struck in the dark at the lay figure representing himself. Time and again he visited the Oaks house and the Sanders shack. But never did he find his quarry there. Time and again he was asked, with suspicion verging on anger, why he kept “a-pesterin’ round.” But he never told.
The manner of both Nigger Nat’s woman and Snake Sanders’ woman became sullenly hostile. Yet, though their attitude toward him was basically the same, there was a difference. In the shrewish face and the snappish answers of the former was revealed worriment for the missing man. In the lowering countenance and the dogged replies of the latter was clumsy untruth. The man who studied them both knew that Snake, though always absent when he came, was present at certain other times; while Nat had never come home.
Of Marion he saw little. When he did see her it was at her own door, and few words passed between them. He knew, though, that her active brain was surmising more or less accurately why he was hunting her father, and in her sober face he saw grave concern. But the rankling irritation of the other two women was never visible in her voice or manner. Whether her sympathies were with him or with her own kin he did not know.
He did not confine his questioning, however, to these three. Though he felt it to be useless—and, indeed, found it so—to ask any of the clansmen for information regarding the two whom he sought, he quizzed every man he met. The only result was to cause keen interest in his movements and to spread throughout the mountain bowl the word that he was “a-huntin’ Nat an’ Snake with blood into his eye.”
Even Uncle Eb gave him no aid. But this time it was not clannishness nor habitual taciturnity regarding his neighbors that made fruitless the younger man’s call on him. He really knew nothing of either of the rascally pair.
“Nor I don’t want to,” he added bluntly. “If ther’s anybody into the world I don’t want to know nawthin’ ’bout, it’s them fellers. No, I take that back, now I think onto it. Ther’s one thing I’d like awful well to know ’bout ’em—that they was both dead. But that’s too good to come true.”