Evered

by Ben Ames Williams

When he came up to where the brute was he saw that the bull was watching something in Evered’s woodlot, beyond the pasture; and Zeke tried to see what it was. At first he could not see; but after a moment a dog yapped there, and Zeke caught a glimpse of it; a half-bred terrier from some adjacent farm, roving the woods.

The dog yapped; and the bull roared; and the dog, its native impudence impelling it, came running toward the pasture, and began to dance up and down, just beyond the bull’s reach, barking in a particularly shrill and tantalizing way.

Zeke yelled to the dog to be off; but the dog took his yell for encouragement, and barked the harder; and then Zeke saw a thing which made him turn cold.

He saw the bull swing suddenly, with all its weight, against the high wire fence; and he saw one of the posts sag and give way, and another smashed off short. So, quicker than it takes to tell it, the bull was floundering across the barbed wires, roaring with the pain of them, and Zeke saw it top the wall, tail high and head down, and charge the little dog.

Zeke might have tried to drive the bull back into its pasture; but that was a task for a bold man, and Zeke was not bold. He whipped his horse and drove on to warn Evered; and when he looked back from the top of the hill the bull and the dog had disappeared into the scrub growth of alder and hardwood along a little run that led down to the swamp. He whipped his horse again, and turned into the road that led to Evered’s farmhouse.

When he got to the farmhouse there was no one at home; and after he had convinced himself of this Zeke drove away again, planning to stop at the first neighboring farm and leave word for Evered. But after a quarter of a mile or so he met the butcher, and stopped him and told him that the bull was loose in his woodlot.

Evered asked a question or two; but Zeke’s voluble answers made him impatient, and he left the other and hurried on. At home he stabled his horse, got his ash stave with the snap on the end, and as an afterthought went into the house for his revolver. He had no illusions about the bull; he knew the beast was dangerous.

While he was in the house he marked that his wife was not there, and wondered where she was, and called to her, but got no answer. He knew that John and Ruth MacLure, his wife’s sister, were in the orchard on the other side of the farm from the pasture and woodlot; and he decided that his wife must have gone to join them there. So with the revolver in his pocket and the stave in his hand, Evered went down past the barn and through the bars into the woodlot. Somewhere in the thickets below him he expected to find the bull. He could hear nothing, so he understood that the little dog which had caused the trouble had either fled or been killed by the beast. He hoped for the latter; for he was an impatient man, and angered at the whole incident. Also, the sultry heat of the day had irked him; irked him so that he had cursed to himself because his wife was not at home when he wished to speak to her.

In this impatient mood he began to work down through the woodlot. He went carefully, knowing the treacherous temper of the brute he was hunting. He passed through a growth of birches along a little run, and across a rocky knoll, and through more birches, and so came out upon the lower shelf of his farm, a quarter of a mile from the house, and halfway down to the borders of the swamp.

He remembered, when he had come thus far, that there was a spring in the hillside a little below him, with two or three old trees above it, and some clean grass beside it. His wife occasionally came here in the afternoon, when her work was done, to sit and read or rest or give herself to her thoughts. Evered knew of this habit of hers; but till this moment he had forgotten it. The spot was cool; it caught what air was stirring. He had a sudden conviction that she might be there now; and the idea angered him. He was angry with her because by coming down here she had put herself in a dangerous position. He was angry with her because he was worried about her safety. This was a familiar reaction of the man’s irascible temperament. Two years before, when Mary Evered took to her bed for some three weeks’ time with what was near being pneumonia, Evered had been irritable and morose and sullen until she was on her feet again. Unwilling to confess his concern for her, he expressed that concern by harsh words and scowls and bitter taunts, till his wife wept in silent misery. His wife whom he loved wept in misery because of him.