He scanned the landscape, but nobody was to be seen except little Keith waiting in a daze.
He took the two children into the house and once more solemnly pledged them never to mention the name of Jud Lasher, or the efforts he had made to steal Immy.
When supper time came RoBards waited on the two children, but did not eat.
He put them early to bed, and heard their prayers, and waited till he was assured they were sound asleep. They felt his kisses upon their brows as they sank away into oblivion.
CHAPTER XXI
It was black when Keith woke suddenly. Some little sound had pierced the depths of his profound immersion in sleep. He imagined Indians or Cowboys or Skinners. His ears seemed to rise like a terrier’s; his skin bristled with attention. He wondered if thieves were about; or lions or tigers or any of the witches or hobgoblins that peopled the night.
It was the good old custom to invoke all manner of demons for the discipline of children. Good children never asked questions or never delayed to sleep. Bad children were watched not only by an unsleeping God of remarkable vindictiveness but by swarms of demons, child-eating animals, ogres that made ginger-bread of babies, or so-called saints who broiled them on live coals in a kitchen called hell. It was a hard world for children here and hereafter.
The nightmares that attended waking hours were horrifying, but at night alone upstairs, with the dark smothering and blinding the wide eyes that could see little and imagine much, and the room a very lair of shapeless monsters that could see without being seen, it was the supreme torment. Even to cry aloud to nurse for help or a bit of light was to incur an added punishment. To run wildly out of the cavern and seek shelter in parental arms was to incur ridicule and often to shock strange guests and bring shame upon father and mother.
Even grown-up people lost their senses when they were awake in the dark and made spooks and ghosts of dark chairs and tables, heard groans and clanking chains in the night-wind noises and the creaking of restless timbers.
RoBards as a child had run the gauntlet of such agonies. He tried to save his children from them, but in vain. The lonely babies concocted fiends of their own, and nurses, impatient to be free of their importunities, added traditional atrocities.