He would not let John reply, silenced him with a fierce oath and flung away. It might have been guessed that his belief in his wife’s treachery was like an anchor to which Evered’s racked soul clung; as though he found comfort and solace in the ugly thought, a justifying consolation.
X
JOHN went no more to the brooks that summer; but what he had told Ruth led her that way more than once. Westley, the game warden, stopped at the house one day, and found her alone, and asked her whether John was fishing. She told him of John’s one catch.
“Swamp Brook is full of trout,” she said; “penned in the holes and the shallows.”
Westley nodded. “It’s so everywhere,” he agreed. “I’m dipping and shifting them. Tell John to do that down in the swamp if he can find the time.”
She asked how it should be done; and when Westley had gone she decided that she would herself go down and try the trick of it if the drought still held.
The drought held. No rain came; and once in early August she spent an afternoon along the stream, and transported scores of tiny trout to feeding grounds more deep and more secure. Again a week later; and still again as the month drew to a close.
It was on this third occasion that the girl came upon Darrin. Working along the brook with dip net and pail she had marked the footprints of a man in the soft earth here and there. The swamp was still, no air stirring, the humming of insects ringing in her ears. A certain gloom dwelt in these woods even on the brightest day; and the black mold bore countless traces and tracks of the animals and the small vermin which haunted the place at night. Ruth might have been forgiven for feeling a certain disquietude at sight of those man tracks in the wild; but she had no such thought. She had never learned to be afraid.
She came upon Darrin at last with an abruptness that startled her. The soft earth muffled her footsteps; she was within two or three rods of him before she saw him, and even then the man had not heard her. He was kneeling by the brook and at first she thought he had been drinking the water. Then she saw that he was studying something there upon the ground; and a moment later he got up and turned and saw her standing there. At first he was so surprised that he could not speak, and they were still, looking at each other. The girl, bareheaded, in simple waist and heavy short skirt, with rubber boots upon her feet so that she might wade at will, was worth looking at. The man himself was no mean figure—khaki flannel shirt, knickerbockers, leather putties over stout waterproof shoes. She carried pail in one hand, dip net in the other; and she saw that he had a revolver slung in one hip, a camera looped over his shoulder.
He said at last, “Hello, there!” And Ruth nodded in the sober fashion that was become her habit. The man asked, “What have you got? Milk, in that pail? Is this your pasture land?”