Whatever was leading him turned him out of the avenue at last and drifted him along a winding road that was as beautiful in its less conventional way. He did not reflect that all of this was familiar, shamefully familiar. It was the road to his grandmother's but he had not visited her for a year.
Her great wisdom and tact had gone to a study of the strange, unhappy child; she had been kind to him in every cautious, delicate fashion that she could devise; but he had ceased coming, and avoided her when she visited his home, and she had never known why. She was a patient woman and good; she knew prayer, and in her peaceful twilight she walked with God; yet no revelation had come at her appeals, for the times were not ready; and the boy went his way alone and silent, forever alone and silent, and unhappy, unhappy!
A white picket fence was presently marching with him alongside the shining road. He did not consciously recognize it, and it brought no rekindling of an old terror, an old shame; but soon, on the other side of it, a distance away, there broke on the stillness a challenge that he remembered, and its tone was contempt. He understood it, and woke with a start because of a sudden fluff of flame and a whiff of smoke from the grass fire of ten years ago, and the ache in his throat gave him a strangling wrench. His head rolled; the moon swung through an arc of alarming length. That call beyond the fence struck the dominant note of his life, and it was Fear. Yet it came from a mere animal,—his grandmother's old buckskin horse, the most docile of creatures.
Ray had never feared the wild things of the woods. The cry of the panther in the dead of night is dreadful but it had no terrors for the boy in the forest solitude. Other fierce pad-footed members of the cat tribe had come and sniffed him as he lay under the stars, and experience had taught him to feign sleep, for a suspicion of his wakefulness would send them bounding away, and he was lonely, always lonely. One night, roused from slumber, he sleepily put his hand on the shaggy head of a bear that was curiously rummaging him, and he was sorry that the beast took alarm and trotted away,—he would have been comfortable to hug. That was before the dog had come into his life. He could never understand why he was not afraid of anything whatever—not even of the terrific lightning and thunder that sometimes flamed and crashed and bellowed all about him,—except human beings and the forces that they controlled; and at times he wondered why Cap loved him and the buckskin horse would kill him from hate if he could.
Here, then, beyond the picket fence, was the proclamation of his shame,—coming from a gentle, superannuated horse with no more spirit than a snail's. By some means, perhaps instinctive,—for all the world, when it finds out, will hunt down and destroy whatsoever fears it (although the boy had not reasoned it out thus),—the beast had learned that the boy was afraid, and had then found an interest in life. Let him but have a glimpse of Ray, and, ears back, lips drawn from hideous yellow teeth, and head thrust horribly forward, he would snort, charge,—and the boy would run abjectly. The horse had never thus treated another living thing. So the boy had stayed away from his grandmother's, and she had never suspected, and her love and prayers had brought no revelation.
As the fence intervened, the horse knew that a charge would be useless; but when, with a neat leap the boy nimbly caught his feet on the ground within the pasture, the buckskin advanced in his minatory way. Ray did not know why he had leaped the fence, unless the wrench in his throat had hurled him over or the flame and smoke of the grass fire had driven him; nor did he know why he went steadily to meet the horse, nor why his nostrils stretched and his arms strained and his hands clenched, nor why there was a fierce eagerness in him; a rasping thirst for something dried his tongue. The horse came on, and the boy, perfectly calm, as fatally went to meet him. There was no calculation of results, yet the lad knew that a horse's teeth and hoofs may be deadly. He knew only that he was not going forward to end all his wretchedness, as, last year, the shoemaker who drank had done with a shotgun, and young Corson, the thieving clerk, with poison. It occurred to the boy that he cared nothing about the teeth and hoofs of any horse, and nothing about what they might do.
So ridiculous was the fiasco that he would have laughed had he not been sorry for the beast; for to see any rampant thing so suddenly stricken with fear, when there was not the least danger nor any intent of harm, was pitiful to see. He wished to assure the buckskin that he was only a boy, a frail boy at that, and not what the animal had apparently taken him to be,—a spawn of Darkness and Terror. He followed up the trembling beast, trying to reassure him and to get near and pet him; but the creature fled wildly at every advance, and when not pursued stood with head aloft, ears cocked, and nostrils vibrant, quivering in fear.
Seeing the uselessness of further pacific effort, the boy sprang over the fence, went back to the main highway, and by the unseen Hand was led into the short cut past Mr. Elderby's house, where the greatest terror of his life—human excepted—had months ago driven him to use the long way round. He did not know, nor for a moment consider, why he chose the short cut tonight. He turned into it, walking free and strong.
Girls had meant nothing in the boy's life. That was because they did not seem members of his species, but something fragile, mysterious, and ranking somewhere between flowers and angels. Thus his feeling for them was composed of a little awe, more reverence, and a sense of great remoteness. Never had he observed them thoughtfully without reflecting that they were, in a general way, much like his mother, or at least of her species; therefore they must be sweet and dainty and gentle and kind. His only large swellings of the heart had come from his thinking about them, particularly Grace Elderby, now twelve years old. Nothing could have been so grand, for instance, as an opportunity to rescue her single-handed, from wild savages that had her tied to a tree and were piling fagots about her; then to dance in fiendish glee about her as the flames rose. He would dash up on a splendid charger, his sword flashing in the sun; savage heads would roll in the dust, or fall open, cleaved in twain; there would be wild yells of fright and a wilder flight for life; he would leap from his horse, speak reassuring words while he severed her bonds, mount with her in his arms, and fly away, away, away.
Twice had Grace seen his shame. She had seen him pale, and run when her father's big, noisy dog had made a flamboyant show of rage, and she had seen him stand mute and white when Andy Carmichael, older and larger and much stronger than Ray, grossly insulted him in her presence. The Elderby dog was the terror that had closed the short cut,—closed it to Ray alone.