“He’s fallen! He’s destroyed!” She started down the path, towards the road calling him, making a more terrible sound than ever—a stronger sound.
“Lammie!” she cried. “Where are you? Mother’s coming!” Some place between that corner and her home she thought him lying helpless, dying maybe. Lying drunk, the men thought, and nodded significantly to each other. It flashed through Wully’s bewildered mind that he had probably started back towards Chirstie. Or maybe back to O’Brien’s, someone suggested. Mrs. McTaggert was running after Libby Keith. The men started to help her search. In decency they could do no less. They tried to soothe her. He would be sleeping somewhere. Had she looked in her own barn? Could it be, they wondered vaguely, thinking of her other children, that had happened ... anything tragic?
Wully had to join them. After all, she was mad, stark mad and shrieking over the prairies, and she wasn’t a McTaggert that they should have to care for her. She was his father’s sister, and he must see what became of her. Down the road she ran, calling out to her son, and commanding them. They were to go for her husband. They were to get her brothers, her neighbors, to send men on horses to look for him. Some of them turned back to obey her. Wully ran along with her.
Beating along both sides of the road they went, tramping down the grasses, calling him—calling till Wully felt tears running down his face. Not that he pitied her. He cursed her. He was saying to himself, “God damn you, stop that noise!” And to her, habit-bound as he was, and shrinking from the pain of her voice, “Let me do the shouting, Auntie! Let me call for you!” He didn’t know his voice when he lifted it. So how could Peter know who was begging him for an answer! Oh, if only he might come across him there, fallen, and make an end of this horror! Sometimes he stayed a distance from her in this wild hope. Sometimes he had to support her to keep her from falling. Down through the slough they went, splashing and bedraggled. Mrs. McTaggert, with a baby in her arms, followed as best she might. The slough was shallow where the path crossed it, but how deep the waters might be on either side, no one knew. Libby Keith stretched out her arms dramatically towards them.
“Lammie! Mother’s coming!” she implored.
Mrs. McTaggert sobbed. But she sobbed only like a woman. Not like a ....
CHAPTER XVI
THE neighborhood gathered at the alarm. By noon Wully’s father and mother were at the Keiths’, and the heads of families for miles around. Up and down the road the boys and younger men were halloing and beating about, and in the kitchen the wise old heads were holding a consultation. Young John McLaughlin had been sent for—that is, Wully’s brother John, not the Squire’s John—and all the men who according to Gib McTaggert’s story must have seen Peter the night before. As the elders waited their coming, they debated solemnly. What could have happened to a man between the McTaggerts’ corner and his home? A drunken man. A man said always to be weak. A man known to be lazy. With a storm coming on. And sharp lightning. A dark road, with deep waters not far from it. Blinded by the lightning could he have turned from the path and been drowned? Could he have fallen and broken a leg? Men have broken bones as they walked. Was he now lying helpless somewhere about? If he was as weak as his mother always insisted, might he not have fallen down drunk, and lying in the way throughout the night, now be overcome by fever? Could he have been bitten by a rattler, and, asleep, died of the poison? Could the lightning have struck him? Men wondered, rather than dared to ask aloud, could there have been a drunken quarrel, and blows perhaps fatal. Wully suggested that he might be in hiding, but this was considered a simple suggestion to come from him, and no one gave it any attention. They all seemed to think that it was his mother Peter was trying to get to.... Wully dared not explain what reason he might have for hiding. He wished he had not suggested such a thing.