He told her and, under the sudden scorn in her eyes, he flinched.
"Ye went down thar ter town with him," she accused in the high falsetto of wrath, "an' ye come back scot free an' abandoned him ter ther penitenshery an' ye didn't raise a hand ter save him! Ef hit hed of been me I'd hev brought him home safe or I wouldn't of been hyar myself ter tell of hit!"
Bear Cat Stacy went over and took the woman's wasted hands in both of his own. As he looked down on her from his six feet of height there came into his eyes a gentleness so winning that his expression was one of surprising and tender sweetness.
"Does ye 'low," he asked softly, "that I'd hev done thet ef he hadn't p'intedly an' severely bid me do hit?"
He told her the story in all its detail and as she listened no tears came into her eyes to relieve the hard misery of her face. But when he had drawn a chair for her to the hearth and she had seated herself stolidly there, he realized that he must go and remove the evidence which still remained back there in the laurel thickets. He left her tearless and haggard of expression, gazing dully ahead of her at the ashes of the burned-out fire; the gaunt figure of a mountain woman to whom life is a serial of apprehension.
When he came back at sunset she still sat there, bending tearlessly forward, and it was not until he had crossed the threshold that he saw another figure rise from its knees. Blossom Fulkerson had been kneeling with her arms about the shrunken shoulders—but how long, he did not know.
"Blossom," he said that evening as he was starting away into banishment across the Virginia boundary, "I don't know how long I'm a-goin' ter be gone, but I reckon you knows how I feels. I've done asked Mr. Henderson ter look atter ye, when he comes back from Louisville. He aims ter see ter hit that paw gits ther best lawyers ter defend him while he's thar."
"I reckon then," replied the girl with a faith of hero-worship which sent a sharp paroxysm of pain into Bear Cat's heart, "thet yore paw will mighty sartain come cl'ar."
They were standing by the gate of the Stacy house, for Blossom meant to spend that night with the lone woman who sat staring dully into the blackened fireplace. To the lips of the departing lover rose a question, inspired by that note of admiration which had lent a thrill to her voice at mention of Jerry Henderson, but he sternly repressed it.
To catechize her love would be disloyal and ungenerous. It would be a wrong alike to her whom he trusted and to the man who was his loyal friend—and hers. But in his heart, already sore with the prospect of exile, with the thought of that dejectedly rocking figure inside and the other figure he had left in the neutral grayness of the jail cell, awakened a new ache. He was thinking how untutored and raw he must seem now that his life had been thrown into the parallel of contrast with the man who knew the broad world of "down below" and even of over-seas. If to Blossom's thinking he himself had shrunken in stature, it was not a surprising thing—but that did not rob the realization of its cutting edge or its barb.