The elder's voice was light, steady. The boy gazed at him with intense admiration. He felt instinctively that nothing mortal could shake the other's courage. And, on top of his mother's complimentary surprise, his father had confided in him, made an admission that, David realized, must be kept from fretting women. He couldn't have revealed more to Allen himself.
He pictured the latter swinging magnificently into Beaulings, cracking the whip over the horses' ears, putting on the grinding brake before the post-office. No one, even in that town of reckless drinking, ever tried to down Allen; he was as ready as he was strong. He had charge of Government mail and of passengers; he carried a burnished revolver in a holster under the seat at his hand. Allen would kill anybody who interfered with him. So would he—David—if a man edged up on him or on his family; if any one hurt even a dog of his, his own dog, he'd shoot him.
An inextinguishable hot pride, a deep sullen intolerance, rose in him at the thought of an assault on his personal liberty, his rights, or on his connections and belongings. A deeper red burned in his fresh young cheeks; his smiling lips were steady; his candid blue eyes, ineffably gentle, gazed widely against the candlelit gloom where he was making his simple preparations for bed. The last feeling of which he was conscious was a wave of sharp admiration, of love, for everything and everybody that constituted his home.
III
Allen, on his return the following evening, immediately opened an excited account of the new family, with no women, on the place by Elbow Barren.
“I heard they were from down hellwards on the Clinch,” he repeated; “and then that they'd come from Kentucky. Anyway, they're bad. Ed Arbogast just stepped on their place for a pleasant howdy, and some one on the stoop hollered for him to move. Ed, he saw the shine on a rifle barrel, and went right along up to the store. Then they hired Simmons—the one that ain't good in his head—to cut out bush; and Simmons trailed home after a while with the side of his face all tore, where he'd been hit with a piece of board. Simmons' brother went and asked them what was it about; and one of the Hatburns—that's their name—said he'd busted the loony just because!”
“What did Simmons answer back?” Hunter Kinemon demanded, his coffee cup suspended.
“Nothing much; he'd law them, or something like that. The Simmonses are right spindling; they don't belong in Greenstream either.” David commented: “I wouldn't have et a thing till I'd got them!” In the ruddy reflection of the lamp his pink-and-blue charm, his shy lips, resembled a pastoral divinity of boyhood. Allen laughed.
“That family, the Hatburns——” He paused. “Why, they'd just mow you down with the field daisies.”
David flushed with annoyance. He saw his mother studying him with the attentive concern she had first shown the day before yesterday.