The cracked but loving voice struck across the void of the failing sense. For a last time the major opened his misting eyes.
“Jerry, you—black scoundrel!” he whispered, and Shirley felt his head grow heavier on her arm, “I reckon it’s—about time—to be going—home!”
CHAPTER XLV
RENUNCIATION
The grim posse that gathered in haste that afternoon did not ride far. Its work had been singularly well done. It brought back to Damory Court, however, a white bulldog whose broken leg made his would-be joyful bark trail into a sad whimper as his owner took him into welcoming arms.
Next day the major was carried to his final rest in the myrtled shadow of St. Andrew’s. At the service the old church was crowded to its doors. Valiant occupied a humble place at one side—the others, he knew, were older friends than he. The light of the late afternoon came dimly in through the stained-glass windows and seemed to clothe with subtle colors the voice of the rector as he read the solemn service. The responses came brokenly, and there were tears on many faces.
Valiant could see the side-face of the doctor, its saturnine grimness strangely moved, and beyond him, Shirley and her mother. Many glanced at them, for the major’s will had been opened that morning and few there had been surprised to learn that, save for a life-annuity for old Jereboam, he had left everything he possessed to Shirley. Miss Mattie Sue was beside them, and between, wan with weeping, sat Rickey Snyder. Shirley’s arm lay shelteringly about the small shoulders as if it would stay the passion of grief that from time to time shook them.
The evening before had been further darkened by the child’s disappearance and Miss Mattie Sue had sat through half the night in tearful anxiety. It was Valiant who had solved the riddle. In her first wild compunction, Rickey had gasped out the story of her meeting with Greef King, his threat and her own terrorized silence, and when he heard of this he had guessed her whereabouts. He had found her at the Dome, in the deserted cabin from which on a snowy night six years ago, Shirley had rescued her. She had fled there in her shabbiest dress, her toys and trinkets left behind, taking with her only a string of blue glass beads that had been Shirley’s last Christmas present.