CHAPTER XV
One day McCalloway received a paper, several days old, that contained a piece of news which he was anxious for Boone to see at once, and he straightway set out to find the boy.
Araminta greeted him at the door of the Gregory cabin with apathetic eyes. "Booney's done gone out with his rifle-gun atter squirrels," she said. "I heered him shoot up on ther mountainside thar, not five minutes back."
Before he followed the boy, McCalloway read to her and construed the item in the paper, and for the first time in many weeks the hard wretchedness of her heart softened to tears and a faint ray of hope stole through her misery.
McCalloway began climbing the hillside, searching the thickets for the boy, and at last he saw him while he himself remained unseen. Boone was standing with his gaze turned toward Louisville—and its jail—two hundred and more miles distant. His face was like that of a fanatic in a religious trance, and his right hand gripped his rifle so tightly that the knuckles showed out white splotched against the tanned flesh.
"I failed ye, Asa," came the self-accusing voice in a tight-throated strain. "I bust out and got sent outen ther co'te room, when ye needed me in thar ter give ye countenance, but God knows I hain't fergot ye." He paused there, and his chest heaved convulsively. "An' God, He knows, too, I aims ter avenge ye," he ended up, with a dedication of savage sincerity, while his gaze still seemed to be piercing the hills toward the city where his kinsman lay condemned.
McCalloway came forward then, and while he talked, Boone listened with attentive patience, but an obdurate face.
The man sought to exact a promise that until he was twenty-one, Boone should "hold his hand" so far as Saul Fulton was concerned. Given those plastic years, he could hope to wean the lad gradually away from the tigerish and unforgiving ferocity of his blood, but Boone could only shake his head, unable either to argue or to yield.
Then McCalloway sketched the seemingly irrelevant narrative of what had occurred in China; of the peril of the legations. He talked of an emperor, captive to court intrigue, and slowly the lad's eyes, which had been until now too preoccupied with his own wormwood to think of other matters, began to liven into interest.
"But thet's all plumb acrost ther world from hyar, though," he asserted in a pause, as though he begrudged the arresting of his attention. "What's hit got ter do with me—an' Asa?"