The Burial of the Guns

by Thomas Nelson Page

He was not an apt scholar; perhaps he had begun too late; perhaps there was some other cause; but though he could swim better, climb better, and run faster than any boy in the school, or, for that matter, in the county, and knew the habits of every bird that flitted through the woods and of every animal that lived in the district, he was not good at his books. His mind was on other things. When he had spent a week over the alphabet, he did know a letter as such, but only by the places on the page they were on, and gave up when “big A” was shown him on another page, only asking how in the dickens “big A” got over there. He pulled off his coat silently whenever ordered and took his whippings like a lamb, without a murmur and almost without flinching, but every boy in the school learned that it was dangerous to laugh at him; and though he could not learn to read fluently or to train his fingers to guide a pen, he could climb the tallest pine in the district to get a young crow for Vashti, and could fashion all sorts of curious whistles, snares, and other contrivances with his long fingers.

He did not court popularity, was rather cold and unapproachable, and Vashti Mills was about the only other scholar with whom he seemed to be on warm terms. Many a time when the tall boy stood up before the thin teacher, helpless and dumb over some question which almost anyone in the school could answer, the little girl, twisting her fingers in an ecstacy of anxiety, whispered to him the answer in the face of almost certain detection and of absolutely certain punishment. In return, he worshipped the ground she walked on, and whichever side Vashti was on, Darby was sure to be on it too. He climbed the tallest trees to get her nuts; waded into the miriest swamps to find her more brilliant nosegays of flowers than the other girls had; spent hours to gather rarer birds’ eggs than they had, and was everywhere and always her silent worshipper and faithful champion. They soon learned that the way to secure his help in anything was to get Vashti Mills to ask it, and the little girl quickly discovered her power and used it as remorselessly over her tall slave as any other despot ever did. They were to be seen any day trailing along the plantation paths which the school-children took from the district, the others in a clump, and the tall boy and little calico-clad girl, who seemed in summer mainly sun-bonnet and bare legs, either following or going before the others at some distance.

The death of Darby—of old Darby, as he had begun to be called—cut off Little Darby from his “schoolin’”, in the middle of his third year, and before he had learned more than to read and cipher a little and to write in a scrawly fashion; for he had been rather irregular in his attendance at all times. He now stopped altogether, giving the teacher as his reason, with characteristic brevity: “Got to work.”

Perhaps no one at the school mourned the long-legged boy’s departure except his little friend Vashti, now a well-grown girl of twelve, very straight and slim and with big dark eyes. She gave him when he went away the little Testament she had gotten as a prize, and which was one of her most cherished possessions. Other boys found the first honor as climber, runner, rock-flinger, wrestler, swimmer, and fighter open once more to them, and were free from the silent and somewhat contemptuous gaze of him who, however they looked down on him, was a sort of silent power among them. Vashti alone felt a void and found by its sudden absence how great a force was the steady backing of one who could always be counted on to take one’s side without question. She had to bear the gibes of the school as “Miss Darby”, and though her two brothers were ready enough to fight for her if boys pushed her too hardly, they could do nothing against girls, and the girls were her worst tormentors.

The name was fastened on her, and it clung to her until, as time went on, she came to almost hate the poor innocent cause of it.

Meantime Darby, beginning to fill out and take on the shoulders and form of a man, began to fill also the place of the man in his little home. This among other things meant opposition, if not hostility, to everything on Cove Mills’s side. When old Darby died the Millses all went to the funeral, of course; but that did not prevent their having the same feeling toward Little Darby afterward, and the breach continued.

At first he used to go over occasionally to see Vashti and carry her little presents, as he had done at school; but he soon found that it was not the same thing. He was always received coolly, and shortly he was given to understand that he was not wanted there, and in time Vashti herself showed that she was not the same she had been to him before. Thus the young fellow was thrown back on himself, and the hostility between the two cabins was as great as ever.

He spent much of his time in the woods, for the Stanley place was small at best, only a score or so of acres, and mostly covered with pines, and Little Darby was but a poor hand at working with a hoe—their only farm implement. He was, however, an unerring shot, with an eye like a hawk to find a squirrel flat on top of the grayest limb of the tallest hickory in the woods, or a hare in her bed among the brownest broomsedge in the county, and he knew the habits of fish and bird and animal as if he had created them; and though he could not or would not handle a hoe, he was the best hand at an axe “in the stump”, in the district, and Mrs. Stanley was kept in game if not in meal.

The Millses dilated on his worthlessness, and Vashti, grown to be a slender slip of a girl with very bright eyes and a little nose, was loudest against him in public; though rumor said she had fallen afoul of her youngest brother and boxed his jaws for seconding something she had said of him.

The Mills’s enmity was well understood, and there were not wanting those to take Darby’s side. He had grown to be the likeliest young man in the district, tall, and straight as a sapling, and though Vashti flaunted her hate of him and turned up her little nose more than it was already turned up at his name, there were many other girls in the pines who looked at him languishingly from under their long sun-bonnets, and thought he was worth both the Mills boys and Vashti to boot. So when at a fish-fry the two Mills boys attacked him and he whipped them both together, some said it served them right, while others declared they did just what they ought to have done, and intimated that Darby was less anxious to meet their father than he was them, who were nothing more than boys to him. These asked in proof of their view, why he had declined to fight when Old Cove had abused him so to his face. This was met by the fact that he “could not have been so mighty afeared,” for he had jumped in and saved Chris Mills’s life ten minutes afterward, when he got beyond his depth in the pond and had already sunk twice. But, then, to be sure, it had to be admitted that he was the best swimmer on the ground, and that any man there would have gone in to save his worst enemy if he had been drowning. This must have been the view that Vashti Mills took of the case; for one day not long afterward, having met Darby at the cross-roads store where she was looking at some pink calico, and where he had come to get some duck-shot and waterproof caps, she turned on him publicly, and with flashing eyes and mantling cheeks, gave him to understand that if she were a man he “would not have had to fight two boys,” and he would not have come off so well either. If anything, this attack brought Darby friends, for he not only had whipped the Mills boys fairly, and had fought only when they had pressed him, but had, as has been said, declined to fight old man Mills under gross provocation; and besides, though they were younger than he, the Mills boys were seventeen and eighteen, and “not such babies either; if they insisted on fighting they had to take what they got and not send their sister to talk and abuse a man about it afterward.” And the weight of opinion was that, “that Vashti Mills was gettin’ too airified and set up anyways.”