The RoBards trio was glad of the snow, for it gave concealment. Immy was silent, morose, and with reason enough. If ever a soul had the right to cry out against the unfairness, the malice of heaven, it was Immy. She could have used the bitter words of Job:
“He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.... He will laugh at the trial of the innocent.”
She did not feel innocent. She felt worse than wicked; she felt a fool. But other people had been fools and vicious fools and no one learned of it. She had been wicked and foolish before without punishment; with reward rather, laughter, rapture, escape. Now for a flash of insane weakness this sudden, awful, eternal penalty.
To her father and mother speech was impossible, thought almost forbidden. If they had been taking Immy’s dead body up to a Westchester burial, they could hardly have felt more benumbed. Only, if she had been dead, the problem of her future would have been God’s. Now it was theirs.
The gamble of it was that they could not foreknow the result of this journey; whether it would mean one more life, or one death, or two.
In any case, RoBards must hasten back to his legal duties as soon as he had placed Immy on the farm. Patty must stay and share the jail sentence with her for—how long, who could tell?
At the railroad station they met friends, but satisfied them with a word about the charm of the country in the winter. The train ploughed bravely through snow that made a white tunnel of the whole distance. The black smoke writhing in the vortex of writhing white seemed to RoBards to express something of his own thoughts.
Travelers by rail usually expected death. Not long since, a train on the Baltimore and Ohio had turned four somersaults in a hundred-foot fall with frightful loss of life, and at Norwalk, Connecticut, a while ago, forty-four people had been slaughtered and a hundred and thirty mangled. But RoBards felt that such a solution of his own riddles would be almost welcome.
Suddenly Patty leaned close to him and brought him down to realities. She muttered:
“You must get the Albesons off the farm, somehow.”