“Well,” he sighed, “I s’pose that’s right, if you’re so stubborn to it. I’ll go see him.”
He slouched away, and plunged among the bushes. Miles, climbing toward the house, paused halfway on the slope, to look down thoughtfully at the shore. Seldom had he encountered so many persons there in one day; never so many problems. Life, like the fiddle-heads, seemed to unfold into complexities. The river sparkled through chinks in the grove, and dazzled broadly across a distant gap, where the path swung bare to the headland. It was the one pass to Alward’s. But the stranger did not darken it, either going or coming.
“He’ll wait down there,” thought Miles, “then come lying back, and say he can’t find Tony. Spying! And I couldn’t tell him!”
He could not, the fact was adamant—not even to save the hostage in the other camp.
CHAPTER IX
THE RUNNING BROOK
Some weeks later, at dusk on a calm evening, Miles and his sole companion sat outdoors for the first time that year. A little bench—Tony’s handiwork—girdled the hackmatack, so that while leaning against the same trunk, each saw a different quarter of the valley, and talked over the shoulder lazily, facing two cardinal points, with thoughts as far asunder. The time was neither spring nor summer, but that rare Arcadian interval, too brief for a season, too elusive for even a transition, and yet in the calendar of sense marked off as plain as a festival. The night fell neither warm nor cool; a tempered fragrance of blossoms drew down, without stir of air, from the orchard over the hill; lower field and shore, river and farthest ridge, lay confounded in blackness under the stars, land and water parted only by faint zigzag margins, where the last edge of daylight lined some inlet or hooked about a promontory.
“Them days,” continued Ella in a distant monotone, “the Injuns camped in back of ar house at Sweet Water. Old Lewie Neptune, he was chieft. An’ nights he got drunk, he’d pitch ’em outdoor, so’s all hands would come beg for in. Midnight an’ bitter cold, sometimes, women-fo’ks an’ youngsters, they rout us out o’ bed. Big Mary, Æneas Moon an’ his brother Peter, an’ Lolas an’ Francises an’ Socabasins,—whol’ slews of ’em, all wropped an’ huddledt up in blankets, scairt, an’ sayin’ they’d be killed. I see the kitchen floor covered with ’em, many the time, sleepin’ curled round the stove—Who’s that?”