“But you won’t tell me what your business is?”
“I’ll tell you this much,” she whispered, hastily. “There is going to be a mob at the Minster house to-night. A girl who knows one of the men told—”
The old ’squire cut short the revelation by grasping her arm with fierce energy.
“Come on—come on!” he said, hoarsely. “Don’t waste a minute. By God! We’ll gallop the horses both ways.” He muttered to himself with excitement as he dragged her along.
Jessica waited outside the livery stable for what seemed an interminable period, while old “Cal” was getting the horses—walking up and down the path in a state of mental torment which precluded all sense of bodily suffering. When she conjured up before her frightened mind the terrible consequences which delay might entail, every minute became an intolerable hour of torture. There was even the evil chance that the old man had been refused the horses because he had been drinking.
Finally, however, there came the welcome sound of mailed hoofs on the plank roadway inside, and the reverberating jingle of bells; and then the ’squire, with a spacious double-seated sleigh containing plenty of robes, drew up in front of a cutting in the snow.
She took the front seat without hesitation, and gathered the lines into her own hands. “Let me drive,” she said, clucking the horses into a rapid trot. “I should be home in bed. I’m too ill to sit up, unless I’m doing something that keeps me from giving up.”
Reuben Tracy felt the evening in the sitting-room of the old farmhouse to be the most trying ordeal of his adult life.
Ordinarily he rather enjoyed than otherwise the company of his brother Ezra—a large, powerfully built, heavily bearded man, who sat now beside him in a rocking-chair in front of the wood stove, his stockinged feet on the hearth, and a last week’s agricultural paper on his knee. Ezra was a worthy and hard-working citizen, with an original way of looking at things, and considerable powers of expression. As a rule, the lawyer liked to talk with him, and felt that he profited in ideas and suggestions from the talk.