Evered said, that wistful note in his voice plain for any man to hear, “I don’t want Ruth leaving us. So I let Darrin stay.”
XI
DARRIN came to the farm. He made his camp by the spring where Mary Evered had loved to sit, and where she had been killed. John knew this at the time, was on the spot when Darrin built his fireplace in a bank of earth, waist high, and watched the other shape hemlock boughs into a rain-shedding shelter.
He did not remonstrate; but he did say, “Shouldn’t think you’d want to sleep here.”
Darrin looked at him curiously; and he laughed a little.
“You mean—the red bull?” he asked. And when John nodded he said, “Oh, I’m not afraid of ghosts. The world’s full of ghosts.” There was a sudden hardness in his eye. “I’m a sort of a ghost myself, in a way.”
John wondered what he meant; but he was not given to much questioning, and did not ask. Nevertheless, Darrin’s word stayed hauntingly in his mind.
He told Ruth where Darrin was camping; and the girl listened thoughtfully, but made no comment. John knew that Ruth was accustomed to go to the spring now and then, as her sister had done. He wondered whether she would go there now. There was no jealousy in John; his heart was not built for it. Nevertheless, there was a deep concern for Ruth, deeper than he had any way of expressing. The matter worried him a little.
They did not speak of Darrin’s camping place to Evered, and Evered asked no questions. Darrin came to the house occasionally for supplies, but it happened that he did not encounter Evered at such times. He was always careful to ask for the man, to leave some word of greeting for him; and once he bade them tell Evered to come down and see his camp. They did not do so. Some instinct, unspoken and unacknowledged, impelled both Ruth and John to keep Evered and Darrin apart. Neither was conscious of this feeling, yet both were moved by it.
John, prompted to some extent by his father’s warning, had begun in an awkward fashion to seek to please Ruth and to win back favor in her eyes. He felt himself uneasy and at a loss in the presence of Darrin, felt himself at a disadvantage in any contest with the other. John was a man of the country, of the farm, and he had grace to know it. Darrin had the ease of one who has rubbed shoulders with many men in many places; he was not confused in Ruth’s presence; he was rather at his best when she was near, while John was ill at ease and words came hard to him. Darrin took care to be friendly with them both; and he and John on more than one night drove deep into the swamp together on Darrin’s quest. John, busy about the farm, was unable to join Darrin in the daytime; but the other scoured through the marsh for tracks and traces, and then enlisted John to help him move cameras into position, lay flash-powder traps, or stalk the moose at their feeding in desperate attempts at camera snap-shooting.