He returned the iron to the stand and met her reproachful look with a gesture of annoyance. "Well, I'm going to sleep, if you aren't," he said, and treading as lightly as possible in his heavy boots, went along the little platform and upstairs to his garret room.
Once inside, he undressed hastily and flung himself upon the bed, but his thoughts spun like a top, and wild visions of Will, of Fletcher, and of Molly Peterkin whirled confusedly through his brain. When at last he lost consciousness for a time, it was to dream restlessly of the cry of a hare that the hounds had caught and mangled. The scream of the creature came to him from a thick wood, which was intersected by innumerable small green paths, and when he tried vainly to go to the rescue he lost himself again and again in the wilderness of trails. Back and forth he turned in the twilight, crushing down the underbrush and striking in a frenzy at the forked boughs the trees wrapped about him, while suddenly the piteous voice became that of a woman in distress. Then, with a great effort, he fought his way through the wood, to see the mangled hare change slowly into Maria Fletcher, who opened her eyes to ask him why he hunted her to death.
He awoke in a cold sweat, and, sitting up in bed, leaned for air toward the open window. A dull ache gnawed at his heart, and his lips were parched as if from fever. Again it seemed to him that Maria entreated him across the distance.
When he came down at sunrise he found Jerry Green awaiting him with the horses, and learned in answer to his questions that the lovers had taken a light wagon at the cross-roads and driven on to town.
"They were that bent on gittin' thar that they couldn't even wait for the stage, " the man told him. "Well, they're a merry pair, an' I hope good will come of it—seein' as 'tain't no harm to hope."
"Oh, they think so now, at any rate," Christopher replied, as he turned away to unharness the patient horses.
At breakfast, an hour or two later, he learned that his mother was in one of her high humours, and that, awaking early and prattling merrily of the past, she insisted that they should dress her immediately in her black brocade. When the meal was over he carried her from her bed to the old oak chair, in which she managed to keep upright among her pillows. Her gallant spirit was still youthful and undaunted, and the many infirmities of her body were powerless to distort the cheerful memories behind her sightless eyes.
Leaving her presently, after a careless chat about the foibles of Bolivar Blake, he took his hoe from an outhouse and went to "grub" the young weeds from the tobacco, which had now reached its luxuriant August height. By noon his day's work on the crop was over, and he was resting for a moment in the shadow of a locust tree by the fence, when he heard rapid footsteps approaching in the new road, and Bill Fletcher threw himself over the crumbling rails and came panting into the strip of shade. At sight of the man's face Christopher flung his hoe out into the field, where it bore down a giant plant, and bracing his body against the tree, prepared himself to withstand the shock of the first blow; but the other, after glaring at him for a breathless instant, fell back and rapped out a single thundering oath. "You hell-hound! This is all your doing!"
Throwing off the words with a gesture of his arm, Christopher stared coolly into the other's distorted face; then, yielding to the moment's vindictive impulse, he broke into a sneering laugh.
"So you have heard the good news?" he inquired lightly.