Jeff nodded. “Sure. And I can tell anything I heard; and I guess—not sure, but it don’t matter much, anyhow—I guess you can tell it, too, if I heard what he said.”
He was looking down at her, had for the moment forgotten her husband. But Lucia had not forgotten, and it was Lucia’s cry that warned Jeff. Viles was tugging a pistol from his pocket.
Jeff swung his right leg upward, kicked cunningly at the big man’s hand. The pistol flew across the room; and Viles, roaring with pain, swung in at Jeff to grapple him. They came breast to breast, stood thus for an instant, each straining terribly, exerting utmost strength.
Then Viles’ big head drooped with a little snapping jerk as all his body let go; and he slid limply through Jeff’s arms to the floor. Jeff’s one great hour was done.
An hour later Jeff drove Lucia back to town. He would send a man who made such matters his profession, to care for what was left of Leander Viles.
VI
A day or two later Mrs. Ranney came home from Augusta. By that time Jeff had settled into the old routine once more. His life had become again as uneventful as any life can be. Save for one or two echoes of his great adventure—when Lucia wrote that she and Gardner were to wed, and when their first baby was born—his existence continued in its old accustomed way. He lived some dozen years or so on his farm eight miles out of East Harbor. Last winter, while working in his woodlot, he became overheated and then chilled with the coming of night; and a few days later he died.
MINE ENEMY’S DOG
I
FRATERNITY has not changed in a hundred years; yet is there always some new thing in Fraternity. It may be only that Lee Motley’s sow has killed her pigs, or that choleric Old Man Varney has larruped his thirty-year-old son with an ax helve, or that Jean Bubier has bought six yearling steers. But there is always some word of news, for the nightly interchange in Will Bissell’s store, before the stage comes in with the mail. You may see the men gather there, a little after milking time, coming from the clean, white houses that are strung like beads along the five roads which lead into the village. A muscular, competent lot of men in their comfortable, homely garments. And they sit about the stove, and talk, and smoke, and spit, and laugh at the tales that are told.