“Meanin’?” he cried anxiously.
Blanche shook her head.
“I’ve never seen such a change in anyone in so short a while, Lightning,” she said gravely. “And I can’t get her to say a thing. I just can’t get a word out of her about herself. She laughs. And her laugh’s the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard. Oh, she talked about anything but herself, and she laughed like—like a machine. Maybe she thought she was getting away with it. She wasn’t. I could see the trouble lying back of it all like reading an open book. It’s a bit dreadful. You see, I could see the trouble without being able to—recognise it. Tell me anything you can—all you know.”
Lightning felt that his hope and faith in this woman had not been misplaced. She had asked him to do the thing he had long since made up his mind to do. He intended to tell her the whole story, and began at once.
He told his story with all the close detail which his anxiety had impressed upon his mind. He told it from the very beginning, when they had first discovered Andy McFardell was their neighbour, down to his latest discovery that the man had abandoned his homestead and disappeared. He lost no opportunity of impressing on Blanche his own dislike and distrust of the man, and of how he had urged Molly to cut him out. He gave her frankly to understand that his urging of Molly was chiefly inspired by his dislike of the man, but was not unsupported by the things he had learned about him in Hartspool. And Blanche, listening to the harsh voice and harsher language, felt that she was being admitted to the innermost thoughts and feelings of a man who is completely at the end of his resources. There was something almost terrible in the savage passion of his final words.
“Ma’am,” he said, his body crouched on the binder saddle, his face raised to hers till the stringy flesh of his throat was drawn like tight-stretched parchment, his eyes alight and burning like coals of fire, “ther’s no dirt a boy ken do like settin’ a gal crazy with all the love in her, an’ quittin’ her cold, an’ lightin’ out to beat it from the thing he’s done. That feller ain’t a skunk, ma’am. He ain’t even a yellow cur. Ma’am, ther’s worse things than them. Ther’s things so mean, so low down, that the only way you ken fix ’em right is to crush ’em, smash ’em, beat ’em to small pieces, so you can’t rec’nise ’em for the muss they make under your feet. Do you get me? That feller just needs smashin’ to small meat.”
Blanche had never encountered such concentrated hate and merciless bitterness. It appalled her. But she was caught by it, and held by the sense of the primitive that inspired it.
“It’s awful!” she cried. “It’s—it’s just awful! The man’s a—a scoundrel! He’s—oh, it makes me crazy mad to think of it. It’s——”
She broke off. There was a start of alarm as a thought flashed into her mind. She turned away from the man who was waiting upon her words, and her gaze sought the distant hills to the south and west.
There had suddenly come to her a new interpretation of Andy McFardell’s going. And it was an interpretation that had nothing to do with Molly. The man had gone, cleared out, vanished. He had not shown up again in Hartspool. Then, where—where had he gone? Was his going the escape from Molly they had been thinking it was? She had suddenly remembered that Andy McFardell had encountered and recognised her brother, Jim. And Jim was the cause of his original downfall.