"She balks, you know."
James laughed. "Oh, I'll risk the balking," he said.
He hurried out to the stable and put the gray in the buggy. It was a very short time before James was on the road, and the gray went as well as could be desired, but just before she reached Westover she stopped short, and James might as well have tried to move a mountain as that animal with her legs planted at four angles of relentless obstinacy.
CHAPTER V
James had considerable experience with, horses. He knew at once that it was probably a hopeless undertaking to change the mare's mind, or rather her obstinacy. However, he tried the usual methods, touching with the whip, getting out and attempting to lead, but they were all, as he had supposed from the first, in vain. A terrible sense of being up against fate itself seized him: an animal's will unreasoning, unrelenting, bears, in fact, the aspect of fate itself. It is at once sensate and insensate. James thought of Clemency, and decided to waste no more time.
The gray mare was near enough to a tree to tie her, and he tied her and set out on foot. It was a very dark night, cloudy and chilly and threatening snow. He walked on, as it were, through softly enveloping shadows, which seemed to his excited fancy to be coming forward to meet him. He began to be very much alarmed. He had wasted most of his young sentiment upon Clemency's [pg 095] mother, but, after all, he suddenly discovered that he had a feeling for the girl herself. He thought that it was only the natural anxiety of any man of honor for the safety of a helpless young girl out alone at night, and beset by possible dangers, but he realized himself in a panic. His plan was of course to go directly to Annie Lipton's home, some two miles farther on, then it occurred to him that Clemency must inevitably have left there. If she were lying dead or injured on the road, how in the world was he to see? He felt in his pocket for matches, and found just one. He lit that and peered around. While it burned he saw nothing except the frozen road with its desolate borders of woods and brush, a fit scene for countless tragedies. When the match burned out he thought of something else. Supposing that Clemency were lying half-dead anywhere near the road, how was she to know that a friend was near? Immediately he began to whistle. Whistling was a trick of his, and he had a remarkably sweet, clear pipe. He knew that Clemency, if she were to hear his whistle, would know who was near. He whistled "Way down upon the Suwanee River" through, then he began on [pg 096] the "Flower Song" from Faust, walking all the time quite rapidly but with alert ears. He was half through the "Flower Song" when he stopped short. He thought he heard something. He listened, and did hear quite distinctly an exceedingly soft little voice, which might have been the voice of shadows—"Is that you?"
"Clemency," he cried out, and rushed toward the wood, and directly the girl was clinging to him. She was panting with sobs, but she kept her voice down to a whisper. "Speak low, speak low," she said in his ear. "I don't know where he is. Oh, speak low." She clung to him with almost a spasmodic grip of her slender arms. "If you had been ten minutes longer I think I should have died," she whispered. "Don't make a sound. I don't know where he is."
"Was it—" began James. He felt himself trembling at the thought of what the girl might be going to reveal to him.