“I didn’t see her around as we came along back,” he said, “an’ I didn’t wait to chase her up. I guessed I best come along an’ tell you first.”
The mother nodded and wrung and rinsed a flannel garment as though nothing else in the world mattered. She was thinking as hard as a mind concentrated upon her manual effort would permit. And somehow the result was sufficiently negative to leave her without any inspiration beyond that the Kid should be told at once so that there should be no delay in the responsibility of the newly developed position finding the proper person to deal with it.
“Beat it right up to the corrals,” she said at last, “an’ locate the Kid, and hand her your yarn, son.” Then the working of her simple mind eased to its normal condition. “An’ when you done that come right back to home, an’ don’t get running around pecking at them folks. We don’t know who they are. Maybe they’re a bum outfit o’ low down whites chasing after no good. You’re mostly a grown feller, Alg, an’ you got women-folk around. I guess it’s right up to you, an’ me, an’ the Kid, with Usak away, an’ with strangers around. Now you get right along an’ beat it. Food’ll be about ready against you get along back. An’ I’ll finish the wash after. Ho, Mary, here’s another bunch to set out dryin’.”
But Hesther was infinitely disturbed. Her perturbation on the Kid’s account had been something very much less disturbing than this sudden and totally unlooked for development. Strangers! White strangers! Strangers on their river! What had they come for? And, more than all, what manner of white folk were they? The woman in her had taken alarm, for all she gave no sign. There was the Kid and Mary. They were alone, without any sort of help except Alg and the two or three half-breed Eskimo working about the farm. At that moment she would have given all she possessed to have had Usak on hand to look to for the protection she desired.
It was curious. For years she had lived under the threat of the Euralian marauders who had passed through the country like a devastating pestilence. They were foreigners. They were savages. Their crimes were wanton in their cruelty. Yet the dread of them failed to quicken her sturdy pulse by a single beat. Now, however, at the coming of these men of her own race, it was utterly different. A sort of stupefied panic suddenly descended upon her, and her wash day had ceased to interest her. She removed the boiler from her cook-stove, and prepared for the mid-day meal.
Mary Justicia had abandoned her post at the doorway. She had cleared the table of the litter of washing and was setting the meal ready while her mother gave herself up to the work at the cookstove, when a small head was thrust in at the doorway.
“Mum!”
There was a note of suppressed excitement in Perse’s eager summons.
Hesther turned from the stove on the instant.
“You be off with you!” she cried. “Food won’t be—”