Once again the words refused to come. The girl had risen now and stood slender in the silver light, her lashes wet with tears. With that picture in his eyes it became impossible to balance the other problems of his life. So he straightened himself stiffly and turned his gaze away from her. He was seeing instead a picture of the squat shanty where the copper worm was at work in the shadow, and for him it was a picture of bondage.
So she waited, feeling some hint of realization for the struggle his eyes mirrored.
There would be many other wet nights up there, he reflected as his jaw set itself grimly; many nights of chilled and aching bones with that wild thirst creeping seductively, everpoweringly upon him out of the darkness. There would be the clutch of longing, strangling his heart and gnawing at his stomach.
But if he did promise and failed, he could never again recover his self-respect. He would be doomed. With his face still averted, he spoke huskily and laboriously.
"I reckon thar hain't no way ter make ye understand, Blossom. I don't drink like some folks, jest ter carouse. I don't oftentimes want ter tech hit, but seems like sometimes I jest has ter hev hit. Hit's most gin'rally when I'm plumb sick of livin' on hyar withouten no chance ter better myself."
Even in the moonlight she could see that his face was drawn and pallid. Then abruptly he wheeled:
"Ther Stacys always keeps thar bonds. I reckons ye wants me ter give ye my hand thet I won't never tech another drop, Blossom, but I kain't do thet yit—I've got ter fight hit out fust an' be plumb dead sartain thet I could keep my word ef I pledged hit——"
Blossom heard her father calling her from the porch and as she seized the boy's arms she found them set as hard as rawhide.
"I understands, Turney," she declared hastily, "an'—an'—I'm a-goin' ter be prayin' fer ye afore I lays down ternight!"
As Turner watched the preacher mount and ride away, his daughter walking alongside, he did not return to the house. He meant to fight it out in his own way. Last night when the hills had rocked to the fury of the storm—he had surrendered. To-night when the moonlit slopes drowsed in the quiet of silver mists, the storm was in himself. Within a few feet of the gate he took his seat at the edge of a thick rhododendron bush, where the shadow blotted him into total invisibility. He sat there drawn of face and his hands clenched and unclenched themselves. He did not know it, but, in his silence and darkness, he was growing. There was for him a touch of Golgotha in those long moments of reflection and something of that anguished concentration which one sees in Rodin's figure of "The Thinker"—that bronze man bent in the melancholy travail of the birth of thought.