The quare women

by Lucy S. Furman

Fult waited until they were safely inside their tent. Then he said, exultantly, to Isabel: "Did you actually think for one minute I'd ever let you go away and not marry me? That I wasn't no more of a man than to fold my hands and give you up? You never knowed me, if you did—I don't allow nothing to stand between me and my desire. All the time I aimed to have you; all the time, knowing you'd never go of your free will, on account of Lethie, I planned to take you same as the Elf Knight took Lady Isabel, or Earl Brand, or them other men of old, took their true loves; and ever sence that day on the hill, when I made you show you liked me a little, I've been just watching my chance. Three nights I've laid wait here by the kitchen tent. And now I've got you, we'll ride to Hazard and get our license, and be married by sun-up."

Again Isabel struggled and fought with desperation, bound as she was. Fult held her in a grip of iron. "Fight on till you tire," he laughed. "I'm able to stand hit. Hit may scare you and hurt your feelings a little grain to be took off like this, but hit's the onliest way for your happiness and mine, and some day you'll thank me."

When she was exhausted, he picked her up again, saying, "I've got to carry you down now a piece to where the nag is," and strode swiftly down to where, by the light of a moon almost hidden by clouds, they could see his mare tied to a bush.

Leaping into the saddle, and sitting far back himself, he pulled Isabel up, gagged and bound, placing her before him as one would hold a child. "I hain't taking no chances on letting you set behind," he said; "you might throw yourself off and get bad hurt."

The mare picked her way slowly at first down the steep hollow, till they came out behind the courthouse. Then Fult put spur to her, and she sprang ahead like a flash, past the courthouse, across the street, down the dark lane between Madison Lee's store and the schoolhouse, and into the creek. The only light they saw in the village was a dim one in Lethie's window.

Along the creek they went plunging, past the back yards of the village on one side, and Uncle Ephraim's steep slopes on the other. When they came to the end of the town, Fult turned the mare into the road again alongside the creek, and slowed the pace. "We got the night before us to make the twenty mile," he said; "we'll get there long before the county clerk is up, anyhow; no use to kill the mare."

And Isabel? First there had been in her mind fear—hideous, panic, choking fear; and when that was somewhat abated, she was held for a long time as in a nightmare, every faculty paralyzed by the shock of the situation in which she found herself. The thing that was being done was unthinkable, impossible; yet it was happening, and she was powerless as a baby to prevent it.

Then she began making desperate efforts to gather her wits together, to grasp the situation and in some way deal with it.

She saw that Fult must have taken her emotion that day on the hill for a sign she loved him; and indeed, for a moment, sympathy and pity had led her pretty near the danger-line. Always her romantic temperament had drawn her into difficulties; but none that could be compared with this. Never before had she come across a man who dared to deal with matters in Fult's masterful and high-handed fashion. And she could not blame him—what he was doing he believed to be for her happiness quite as much as his own, and he was merely carrying it out in the simple and time-honored fashion of the old ballads he was always singing. Had the consequences not been so dreadful all round, his daring might have appealed to her.

But with Lethie broken in heart and life by the treachery of the two she loved and trusted; with her parents stricken and horrified when this bolt from out the blue should fall upon them; with the community hating her forever as the destroyer of Lethie's happiness; with the reproach that would be brought upon the whole summer's work of the women through this mad act—for of course no one would ever believe that she had been taken against her will; with the misery that was sure to result for Fult as well as for herself, since she did not love him and was not at all fitted for the life he could give her; the whole affair was fraught with terrible danger and calamity, and something must be done at once,—before it was forever too late,—to prevent its further carrying out.