“You ought to go home and get something put on your eye!” he began, hastily. “And if you feel like working in the morning, you come back with me again!”
Dod went away, unsolved and uncomforting. Hour by hour the seekers, conquered by fatigue and the growing assurance of futility, stopped more often for breath. They had time to gather more and more berries, from bushes which obviously hid no dying man. They refreshed themselves more and more frequently in waters wherein no drowned man was floating. Most of them went home in time for their neglected chores that night, discouraged, hopeless.
Isobel McLaughlin was still at the Keiths’, detained by Libby’s need of her. Libby, though she used men easily for her purpose, was not a woman to depend on them. Her mild old husband could give her no sufficient support in her affliction. He had never been a mother. He was just a man whom life and marriage had left blinking, swallowing as best he might his realization of his own unimportance in the universe. Libby would have Isobel with her. So Chirstie in her mother-in-law’s house put the younger McLaughlins and Bonnie Wee Johnnie to bed, and came out to sit on the doorstep with her weary and outraged husband. Presently she asked him wistfully;
“Do you really think he’s dead, Wully?”
“It’s getting to look like it.”
She gave a great sigh. If only she could be sure he was dead!
“You don’t think he’s just gone away now?” she continued.
“Nobody thinks that now.”
“Why don’t they?”
“It don’t look reasonable to them.”