“He said,” the woman answered, “that he lost it—in your office; lost the money there.”
After a little the old money-lender leaned far back like a man wrenched with agony. His body was contorted, his face was terrible. His dry mouth opened wide.
He screamed!
IV
Halfway up the hill to my house I stopped to look back and all round. The vast hills in their snowy garments looked down upon the land, upon the house of Hazen Kinch. Still and silent and inscrutable.
I knew now that a just and brooding God dwelt among these hills.
OLD TANTRYBOGUS
I
TO this day, when Chet McAusland tells the tale his voice becomes husky and his eyes are likely to fill—and, “It was murder,” he will say when he is done. “I felt like a murderer and that’s what I was. But it was too late then.” Sometimes his listeners are silent, appearing to agree with him. More often, those to whom he speaks seek to reassure him, for it is plain to any man that there is no murder in Chet, nor any malice nor anything but a very human large-heartedness toward every man and beast.
In Tantry’s time Chet was a bachelor living alone at his farm above Fraternity, cooking and caring for himself, managing well enough. He had been a granite cutter, a fisherman upon the Banks, a keeper of bees. Now he farmed his rocky hillside farm. He was a man of middle age—a small man with a firm jaw and a pair of bushy eyebrows and deep-set piercing eyes. When he laughed he had a way of setting his head firmly back upon his neck, his chin pressed down, and his laughter was robust and free and fine. I have spoken of his occupations; he had also avocations. All his life he had fished, had hunted, had traversed the forests far and wide. A man who loved the open, loved the woods, loved the very imprint of a deer’s hoof in the mud along the river. A good companion, open-hearted, with never an evil word for any man.