"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.
"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed. "And you musn't mention it to him. I just gathered it from something he let drop the other day. You know, Cal, he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly marvelous. He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can; and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he didn't talk as—as he read. He didn't know what I meant at first, but he understood the minute I tried to explain.
"'Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?' he asked.
"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little face began to go red.
"'Do—do they,' and he nodded over yonder, Cal, 'do they all talk—like books?'
"So you see! And he's been trying ever since to correct his quaint idioms and funny contractions, but it'll take a long time to correct a mental process which is habit with him." Sarah's face grew resentful. "I wish we'd never let him go over there, in the first place. We should have known! For there isn't a look or a whispered comment, which he doesn't catch. And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the depths of his sensitiveness."
"We'll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly. "We'll keep him away from them." And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never heard him say in her presence.
But it needed no word of Caleb's to keep Steve at home. Without some suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to the voices behind the high hedge. More and more often Garry Devereau came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost daily trips down to the mills. A quick intimacy had grown up between the two boys—an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb because of the very contrast between them.
Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in the matter of knowledge. Already, while still in knickerbockers, he was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father. For the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game." The skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile. And Caleb often felt that the boy's black eyes were looking through and beyond, rather than at him. The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for all that. It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.
Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter. It seemed to him then that he should have foreseen it from the very first. But as it was, when the denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.