He was going to her when the side-door of the Black Bull—the door of McNab's parlour, as he knew—opened. Donald Cameron stood in it for a moment. Davey saw McNab behind him, his crooked figure and twisted face with the withered fringe of hair about it.
Cameron staggered across the stretch of gravel to the buggy in which his wife sat waiting. He climbed into it.
"Will you not let me drive, Donald?"
The clear sweetness of his mother's voice came to the boy's ears.
"No," Donald Cameron said unsteadily. "There's no woman living will drive me while I can lay hands on the reins."
The four-wheeler moved away over the long winding road to the hills.
Davey was stupefied.
"So McNab's got him," he muttered, glancing at the ramshackle shanty. The sign-board of the Black Bull, with red eyes on its dingy white ground, was just visible. The glare from the bar lighted it.
"That's why she goes to church alone. The old man's drinking," he thought.
He turned to look after the buggy. It was bumping and jolting over the ruts and barking the roadside. Davey held his breath; he saw the mare buck and then take the log culvert over the creek two or three hundred yards from McNab's.