“I suppose I am violating their confidence,” Benson said, “but I believe their present plan is to start down the Ohio in the early spring.”
Mrs. Landray turned from him abruptly; her emotion mastered her; a sob rose in her throat.
“Thank you, Mr. Benson,” she faltered with a poor attempt at self-control; and then she passed swiftly down the lane toward the house.
Benson followed her retreating figure with his glance until she passed from sight among the trees; then he climbed slowly into the cart.
CHAPTER SIX
ROGERS had taken up his abode at the tavern. The Land-rays had arranged with Tucker that he should be their guest, and that he should want for nothing.
At first he had shown some interest in the town and in the changes that had taken place during the twenty years covered by his absence; but as the summer merged into fall, and fall into winter, he kept more and more within doors, establishing himself in the cheerful tavern bar, where Mr. Tucker presided with a benignity of bearing that had mellowed with the years and the passing of the human traffic of the stage road, whose straying feet had worn deep hollows in the brick pavement beyond his door.
During those first weeks of his stay in Benson, Rogers might have been a Columbus newly returned, or a Ponce de Leon with discovered fountains of perpetual youth; and in the spell of the wonders in which he dealt, and in which his hearers delighted, Tucker felt his reason reel and totter and all but collapse. As he came and went about the place, his eyes were always turned in the direction of the grim Californian. They sought him out over the rim of his glass, each time it was raised to his lips; and he watched him by the hour as he sat in his chair and sucked at the reed stem of his red-clay pipe, sucked and marvelled, or meditated investment in the company, a transaction of which he invariably thought better, however, before the day was ended. And when Rogers was not there to tell his own story, which sometimes chanced, he did it for him, but always with the nicest regard for accuracy. He had not been ten yards from his own front door in five years, indeed, not since he had courted the third and present Mrs. Tucker, so that such news as he usually had to disseminate was known to all Benson long before he was in possession of it; but the excitement of which Rogers was the centre, and in the reflected glory of which he now dwelt, recalled the days that had followed the knifing of Sheriff Cadwaller by Mr. Johnny Saul in that very room, and, considerately enough, with himself as the only witness.