That he had not walked into the sheriff's office to give himself up made it look as if he himself felt the unjustifiability of his act, and it was predicted that when he was finally captured it would be to serve a life sentence at the very least. The friends of the late Hagan would hear of nothing less than hanging. It was a great pity (this was my father's attitude): Hagan was a bad lot and a good riddance; Braddish was an excellent young man, except for a bit of a temper, and here the law proposed to revenge the bad man upon the other forever and ever. And it was right and proper for the law so to do, more's the pity. But it was not Braddish that would be hit hardest, said my father, and here came in the inscrutable hand of Providence—it was Mary.
After the first outburst of feeling she had accepted her fate with a stanch reserve and went on with her duties much as usual. One ear was always close to the ground, you might say, to hear the first rumor of Braddish, either his capture or his whereabouts, that she might fly to him and comfort him, but the rest of her faculties remained in devoted attendance on my sister and me. Only there showed in them now and then a kind of tigerish passionateness, as when I fell off the sea-wall among the boulders and howled so dismally. She leaped down after and caught me to her in the wildest distress, and even when I stopped howling could not seem to put me down. Indeed, she held me so tight that if any of my bones had been cracked by the tumble she must have finished by breaking them. The pathos of her efforts to romp with us as in happier days was lost upon me, I am happy to say. Nor did I, recalling to her what Braddish had said of robbers being inevitably caught, realize that I was stabbing her most cruelly. For she was, or tried to be, firm in the belief that Braddish would succeed where all others had failed. She had asked my father what would happen if Braddish got clean out of the United States, and he, hoping, I suppose, to be of indirect use to the young couple for whom he was heartily sorry, made her out a list of countries, so far as he knew them, wherein there was no extradition. My father hoped, I fondly believe, that she would get the list to Braddish for his guidance, conjecturing rightly that if Braddish made his whereabouts known to anybody it would be to Mary. But as to that, ten days passed before Mary knew a jot more of it than another. And I must believe that it came to her then entirely by inspiration.
We were passing the Boole Dogge Farm, my sister and I, intent upon seeing which of us could take the most hops without putting the held-up foot to the ground, when suddenly Mary, who had been strolling along laughing at us, stopped short in her tracks and turned, and stood looking over the green treetops to where the gaunt, dead limb of the hollow oak thrust sharply up from among them. But we had hopped on for quite a piece before we noticed that she no longer went alongside. So we stopped that game and ran back to her. What was it? Had she seen a rabbit? She laughed and looked very wistful. She was just thinking, children, that she would like to see the hollow tree where Will had passed the night. She was not excited—I can swear to that. She guessed nothing as yet. Her desire was really to the tree—as she might have coveted one of Will's baby shoes, or anything that had been his. She had already, poor girl, begun to draw, here and there, upon the past for sustenance.
First, she charged Ellen and me to wait for her in the road. But we rebelled. We swore (most falsely) that we were afeard. Since the teeth of bulldogs no longer met, we desired passionately to explore the forbidden farm, and had, indeed, extracted a free commission from my father so to do, but my mother had procrastinated and put us off. We laid these facts before Mary, and she said, very well, if our father had said we might go on the farm, go we might. He would, could and must make it right with our mother. And so, Mary leading, we climbed the wall.
Bulldogs' teeth or no bulldogs' teeth, my ancient fear of the place descended upon me, and had a rabbit leaped or a cat scuttled among the bushes I must have been palsied. The going across to the woods was waist high with weeds and brambles, damp and rank under foot. Whole squadrons of mosquitoes arose and hung about us in clouds, with a humming sound as of sawmills far away. But this was long before you took your malaria of mosquitoes, and we minded them no more than little children mind them to-day. Indeed, I can keep peacefully still even now to watch a mosquito batten and fatten upon my hand, to see his ravenous, pale abdomen swell to a vast smug redness—that physiological, or psychological, moment for which you wait ere you burst him.
The forbidden farm had, of course, its thousand novelties. I saw prickly pears in blossom upon a ledge of rock; a great lunar-moth resting drowsily, almost drunkenly, in the parasol shade of a wild-carrot blossom; here was the half of a wagon wheel, the wood rotted away, and there in the tangle an ancient cistern mouth of brick, the cistern filled to the brim with alluring rubbish. My sister sprang with a gurgle of delight to catch a garter snake, which eluded her; and a last year's brier, tough and humorously inclined, seized upon Mary by the skirts and legs, so that it was a matter of five minutes and piercing screams of merriment to cast her loose again. But soon we drew out of the hot sunshine into the old orchard with its paltry display of deformed, green, runt apples, and its magnificent columns and canopies of poison ivy—that most beautiful and least amiable of our indigenous plants; and then we got among scale-bark hickories, and there was one that had been fluted from top to bottom by a stroke of lightning; and here the little red squirrels were most unusually abundant and indignant; and there was a catbird that miauled exactly like a cat; and there was a spring among the roots of one great tree, and a broken teacup half buried in the sand at the bottom.
We left the hickories and entered among the oaks, and here was the greatest to-do imaginable to find the one that was hollow. Ellen went to the left, I to the right, and Mary down the middle. Whenever I came to an unusually big tree I tiptoed around the trunk, goggle-eyed, expecting the vasty hollow to open before me. And I am sure that Ellen, whom I had presently lost sight of, behaved in the same way. Mary also had disappeared, and feeling lonely all of a sudden I called to her. She answered a moment later in a strange voice. I thought that she must have fallen and hurt herself; but when I found her she was cheerful and smiling. She was standing with her back to a snug hollow in the vast stem of the very oak we had been looking for.
"This is it," she said, and turned and pointed to the hollow. "Where's
Ellen?"
"Here, Ellen," I called, "here—we've found it!"
Then Ellen came scampering through the wood; and first I climbed into the hollow and curled up to see what sort of a night I might have of it, and then I climbed out and Ellen climbed in—and then both in at once, and we kept house for a while and gave a couple of dinners and tea parties. And then quarreled about the probable size of Friar Tuck, and Ellen drew the line at further imaginings and left me alone in the hollow.