“I was worried,” the girl persisted timidly, not daring to say what was in her mind. “I was worried—worried about Mary.”
“The bull killed her,” said Evered; and passed her and went into the kitchen.
Ruth backed against the wall to let him go by; and she pressed her two hands to her lips in a desperate frightened way; and her eyes were wide and staring with horror. She stared at the man, and her hands held back the clamor of her grief. She stared at him as at a monstrous thing, while Evered washed his hands at the sink and dried them on the roller towel, and combed his hair before the clean mirror hanging on the wall. There was a dreadful deliberation about his movements.
After a moment the girl began to move; she went by little sidewise steps as far as the door, and then she leaped out into the barnyard, and the screams poured from her in a frenzy of grief that was half madness. Evered turned at the first sound and watched her run, still screaming, across the barnyard to the fence; and he saw her fumble fruitlessly with the topmost bars, and at last scramble awkwardly over the fence itself in her stricken haste. She was still crying out terribly as she disappeared from his sight in the direction of the woodlot and the spring.
Evered watching her said to himself bitterly: “She knew where Mary was; knew where to look for her.”
He flung out one hand in a weak gesture of despair that came strangely from so harshly strong a man; and he began to move aimlessly about the kitchen, not knowing what he did. He took a drink at the pump; he changed his shoes for barnyard boots; he cut tobacco from a plug and filled his pipe and forgot to light it; he stood in the door, the cold pipe in his teeth, and stared out across his farm; and his teeth set on the pipestem till it cracked and roused him from his own thoughts.
Then he heard someone running, and his son, John Evered, came from the direction of the orchard, and flung a quick glance at his father, and another into the kitchen at his father’s back.
Evered looked at him, and the young man, panting from his run, said, “I heard Ruth cry out. What’s happened, father?”
Evered’s tight lips did not stir for a moment; then he took the pipe in his hand, and he said stiffly, “The red bull killed Mary.”
They were accustomed to speak of Evered’s second wife as Mary when they spoke together. John, though he loved her, had never called her mother. He loved her well; but the blood tie was strong in him, and he loved his father more. At his father’s word now he stepped nearer the older man, watching, sensing something of the agony behind Evered’s simple statement; and their eyes met and held for a little.