“The scholars also, they have run away?” suggested the leisurely Franca politely.
“Yes, but—”
“But I will bring them back to you.”
Brennan said that what followed was like a nasty sort of adjectived miracle. Franca idled to the door—he was always idling about, peering in cracks, feeling walls, gazing into holes with a hunger of insatiable eyes—and called. The leaves of the forest shook, here and there, as if Fear moved them. He called again. And Fear crawled on its belly from the leaves to his feet, the boy with the slate, the girl who wore the remnants of the print wrapper. They did not even tremble; they waited, like ducks for the food to scatter.
“These are all that are left, I think.”
Franca stooped forward and took something from the girl’s neck. It was a dirty little bag on a string. He looked about, smiling; then hung it on the corner of the blackboard. “They will not run far now,” he nodded to Buck. The two crept away.
Buck Brennan was a bit taken in the wind, as he would have said. And that night he woke to a low moaning like the wind, a voice of grief so faint, so uncomprehending, it was not human. He took a light and went to the schoolroom. The girl was there, a bare thing of the night, her eyes luminous as its stars. She was squatting at the foot of the blackboard, making this sound of uncomplaining loss. Brennan knew what she wanted. She wanted her little lucky-bag, and was afraid to touch it. He took it down, looked into it; his clue was not there: unless a little bone collar stud with two or three hairs wrapped around the shank was a clue? The hairs gleamed in the light, reddish—fair. . . . He closed the little smelly thing, and gave it to the girl. Felt, the next instant, her hands, her tears, on his great bare feet! So she was a human being, not unattractive, and wildly grateful. He laid a hand like a lion’s paw on her: but she melted from him, and he did not follow. She was not his; like the house, she belonged. . . To what, to whom? To a ghost, a shadow, bringing bright hair and a halo of lilac print, that looked at Buck with the eyes of a fate he might never learn. He went back to the bedroom, looked long at Franca, asleep and smiling. And began to feel that here, perhaps, was all the clue he needed.
He spent a long time next day sitting over the little books, like a jury over so many little corpses; smoking heavily, and very uncomfortable in the mildewy coat, the stiff collar, and the parson’s shoes so much too tight for him. They were all part of position into which he had been drifted, to which he so strangely yielded himself; but he preferred to leave a certain veil of doubt and obscurity over it. Into that puddle of circumstances he would never look too closely, lest he should see reflected there a bad Buck Brennan he did not know and couldn’t have lived with—an avenger, a judge, grimly appointed by some vast mockery or vaster justice.
And there, as he sat, suddenly he had his clue in his hand.
It was the half-sheet of an unfinished letter, rolled into a little spill and thrust into the rounded back of the book. He unrolled it carefully, and the hand-writing, clear and rather childish, sprang out at him in the fading grayish ink.