How long did she sit there in the darkness? That was something she never knew and her father was like her about it too. Later he couldn’t have said, for the life of him, how long he ran about in the darkness, trying to strike something with the axe. Once he ran against a tree. Well, he drew back and sank the axe into the tree. Sometime—in the daytime—May would show Maud the tree with the great gash in it. Her father sank the axe so deeply into the body of the tree that he had work getting it out again and even in the midst of his excitement he had to laugh to think of what a silly fool he had been.
And there was May sitting with her feet in the puddle, the hair clinging to her bare shoulders, her head in her hands, trying to think, trying perhaps to catch some meaningful word in the strange roar of voices. Well, what was she thinking about? She didn’t know.
And then a hand touched her, a white strong firm hand. It just crept up out of the darkness, seemed to come out of the very ground under her. There was one thing sure—although she lived to be a thousand years old, May would never know why she didn’t scream, faint away, get up and run madly, butting her head against things.
“Love is a strange thing,” she told Maud Welliver, as the two sat in the field that warm clear starlit evening. Her voice trembled. “I knew a man had come to whom I would be faithful unto death,” she explained.
That was the beginning of the strangest and most exciting time in May’s whole life. Never had she thought she would tell anyone in the world about it, at least not until the time came for her marriage, and when all the dangers that still faced the man she loved had passed like a cloud.
On that terrible night, and while the storm still raged, the hand that had crept so strangely and unexpectedly into hers had at once quieted and reassured her. It was too dark to see the face and the body of the man’s back of the hand, but for some reason she knew at once that he was beautiful and good. She loved the man at once and completely, that was the truth. Later he had told her that his own experience was the same. For him also there came a great peace of the spirit, after his hand found hers in the midst of that roaring darkness.
They got out of that field and into the Edgley house somehow, crawled along together and when they got to the house they did not light a lamp or anything but sat on the floor of May’s room hand in hand, talking in low quiet tones. After a long time, perhaps an hour, May’s father came home. He had got out of the field and had wandered on a country road and as he went along he heard stealthy footsteps behind him. That was the black following the wrong man and it’s a wonder he didn’t kill John Edgley. What happened was that the drayman began to run and got into a grove of trees and there lost his pursuer. Then he took off his shoes and managed to find his way home barefooted. The black having followed the wrong man turned out to be a good thing. The man up in May’s room was free, for the first time in more than two years, he was free.
It had turned out that the man was quite badly injured, the black having, in his excitement, aimed a blow at his head that would have done for him had it struck fair. However, the blow glanced off and only bruised his head and made it bleed and as he sat in the darkness on the floor in May’s room with his hand in hers, telling her his story, the blood kept dropping thump, thump, on the floor. May had thought, at the time, it was water falling from her hair. It just went to show what a man he was, afraid of nothing, enduring everything without a murmur. Later he was sick with a fever for weeks and May never left his room, but gradually nursed him back to health and strength, and no one in Bidwell had ever known of his presence in the house. Later he left town at night, on a dark night when, to save yourself, you couldn’t see your hand before your face.
As to the man’s story—it had never been told to anyone and if May told it to Maud Welliver it was because she had to have at least one friend who knew all. Even her father, who had risked his life, did not know.
May put her hands over her face and leaned forward and for a long time she was silent. In the grass the insects kept singing and on a distant street Maud could hear the footsteps of people walking. What a world she had come into when she left Fort Wayne and came to Bidwell! Indiana was not like Ohio! The very air was different. She breathed deeply and looked about into the soft darkness. Had she been alone she could not have stood being in a place where such wonderful things as had just been described to her could happen. How quiet it was in the field now. She put out a hand softly and touched May’s dress and tried to think but her own thoughts were vague, they swam away into a strange world. To go to a theatre, to read books, to hear of the commonplace adventures of other people—how dull and uneventful her life had been before she knew May. Once her father had been in a wreck on the railroad and by a miracle had escaped uninjured and, when company came to the Welliver house, he always told of the wreck, how the cars were piled up and how he, walking over the tops of cars in the darkness of a rainy night was pitched off and went flying, head over heels, only by a pure miracle to land on his feet in dense bushes, uninjured, only badly shaken up. May had thought the tale exciting, she had been stupid enough to think it exciting. What contempt she now had for such weak commonplace adventures. What a vast change knowing May Edgley had made in her life!