Jeanne Sattory, following a road beside the stream, was coming down the hollow. The mail-carrier cantered below her toward Kampsville, riding a nervous pony, and having the letter pouch strapped behind him. Twice a week he thus carried news through Calhoun County, where there are neither railroads nor telegraph lines, neither banks nor thieves. But such a courier feels his freedom and importance; he impudently kissed his merry finger-tips to the pretty girl up the slope. She hid behind a rock until he was out of sight. The mail-carrier had seen this girl before, and desired to have a closer look at her. The usual type in Calhoun County was the broad Dutch maid, whose stock had superseded the French. But Jeanne Sattory felt a dread rising to terror of all men. Her first recollection was of a stepfather who had made her take to trees like a cat, every time he approached the dwelling. Her next was of his son, who finished the small rites of her mother’s funeral by taking the orphan’s ear in his grip, leading her to the limit of the garden patch, and dismissing her, with the threat of a kick if she ever came back there again. He kept her mother’s own household goods and the few belongings left by her father, and nobody took it in hand to interfere with him. She came back across the Illinois River to her native county, but even yet shrank from old Henry Roundcounter, whose family afforded her a home.
The Rencontres had held land under the first Dejarnet. As Roundcounters, and farmers of their own small holding, they now kept up hereditary interest in that last De Zhirley who, since his mother’s death, had lived solitary in the great square cabin. Mrs. Roundcounter baked bread for him; and once a week she went down the bluff to tidy his bachelor hall, except when rheumatism detained her. This afternoon Jeanne Sattory was sent reluctantly to the task.
The last De Zhirley was a ferryman; and it must be owned that voices calling him from the other side of the river were often drowned in the music of his fiddle. In clear summer nights he walked a sandy strip in front of his cabin, hugging the fiddle beneath his chin and playing tunes which had come down from his forefathers.
The ferryboat could now be seen at the farther bank of the Illinois. Jeanne knew she might do her work before it could again cross the current. The cabin door is always left unfastened in that primitive county. She noticed a fresh coon skin nailed on the logs beside the door, as with shrinking she entered this haunt of man.
The imposing old dancing-hall of the De Zhirleys gave her a welcome from its ruddy fireplace hooded with a penthouse. Jeanne’s first care was to push the embers together, heap on more of the wood which lay ready, and clean the stone hearth. She then hung a pot on the crane, and filled it with spring water. Before the water was scalding hot there was time to sweep the floor and beat up a feather-bed which had grown as hard as a mat on its corner bedstead.
An unrailed stairway mounted beside the front wall. Jeanne had heard Mrs. Roundcounter tell how many little rooms were overhead, and what stores of family goods were piled there, disregarded by a young man who cared for no wife but his fiddle.
No attention could be given to the upper rooms. Amid all her services, the girl was full of starts and panics, turning her head and widening her eyes at any stir without. She mopped the broad boards worn by foot-marks of dead dancers; she washed log imbedded windows and an accumulation of yellow bowls and pewter; and drew the only easy chair to the hearth. Something in a green bag hung on the wall farthest from the fire, which Jeanne knew to be the De Zhirley fiddle. She touched it carefully with a turkey-wing duster, recoiling from its faint ting as if some charm had been ignorantly worked.
Dried meat and scarlet peppers, a gun and powderhorn hung on the richly smoked hewn joists. She felt keen, quiet delight in the place, and reluctance to leave it. The jollity of former times, perhaps, lingered, making a fit atmosphere for girlhood.
But she was standing with her shawl over her head, casting back a last look, when some hand blundered at the latch outside. She sprang upstairs and put the first door between her and the intruder on the lightning of impulse. Some person entered and seemed to pause and listen suspiciously. Her heart labored like the beating of a steamer, and she expected to hear feet following her up the stairs. But after uncertain shuffling the comer dragged a chair, and, with a suggestion of effort, sat down.
Jeanne knew it could not be young De Zhirley, whom she had just seen through a window fighting the current in midriver. He had a loaded wagon and a pair of restless mules on board; and he ran back and forth outside the railing of his boat, now poling, now steering, and now pulling with a wing-like oar. Jeanne could have been at the top of the bluff before his return. And here she was, trapped in an upper room, vaguely ashamed; unable to come down and face eyes which might insult her, yet terrified by the prospect of indefinite hiding.