"Well, what are you going to do about it—even if there is any danger?" said Wilson. "Get a drink in him, and Langdon, like his father, will fight at the drop of a hat. Conscience? He hasn't any. I sometimes wonder why the Almighty made them like they are, and other men so different, for it is only the men who are not bothered by conscience that have any fun in this life. One of the Chesters could drive a light-hearted woman to suicide and sleep like a log the night she was buried. Haven't I heard the old man laugh about Ann Boyd, and all she's been through? Huh! But I'm not afraid of that little girl's fate. She will take care of herself, and don't you forget it."
"Well, I'm sorry for her," said Masters, "and I'm going to try to meet her. I'm tough, George—I'll play a game of cards and bet on a horse, and say light things to a pretty girl when she throws down the bars—but I draw the line at downright rascality. Once in a while I think of home and my own folks."
"Now you are a-talking." And Wilson hurried away to a woman who sat in a chair holding a bolt of calico in her arms, as if it were her first-born child and the other women were open kidnappers.
Masters stood motionless in the doorway, his eyes on the dusty road that stretched on towards Jane Hemingway's house.
"Yes, she's in bad, bad hands," he said; "and she is the first—I really believe she's the first that ever hit me this hard."
[VIII]
At dusk that day Ann Boyd went out to search for a missing cow. She crossed the greater part of her stretch of meadow-land in the foggy shadows, and finally found the animal mired to the knees in a black bog hidden from view by the high growth of bulrushes. Then came the task of releasing the patient creature, and Ann carried rails from the nearest fence, placing them in such a way that the cow finally secured a substantial footing and gladly sped homeward to her imprisoned calf. Then, to escape the labor of again passing through the clinging vines and high grass of the marsh, Ann took the nearest way to the main road leading from the store on to Jane Hemingway's cottage. She had just reached the little meeting-house, and a hot flush of anger at the memory of the insult passed upon her there was surging over her, when, happening to glance towards the graveyard in the rear of the building, she saw Virginia Hemingway and Langdon Chester, quite with the air of lovers, slowly walking homeward along a path which, if more rugged, led more directly towards the girl's home. Ann Boyd started and then stared; she could hardly credit the evidence of her sight—Virginia Hemingway and the scapegrace son of that man, of all men, together!
"Ah, ha!" she exclaimed, under her breath, and, falling back into the bushes which bordered the roadside, she stood tingling from head to foot with a new and unexpected sensation, her eager eyes on the loitering pair. "So that's it, is it? The young scamp has picked her out, devil that he is by blood and birth. Well, I might have known it. Who could know better than me what a new generation of that cursed stock would be up to? Right now he's the living image of what his father was at the same age. He's lying to her, too, with tongue, eyes, voice, and very bend of body. Great God, isn't she pretty? I never, in my best day, saw the minute that I could have held a candle to her, and yet they all said—but that makes no difference. I wonder why I never thought before that he'd pick her out. As much as I hate her mammy, and her, too, I must acknowledge she's sweet-looking. She's pure-minded, too—as pure of thought as I was away back there when I wore my hair in a plait. But that man will crush your purity, you little, blind kitten, crush it like a fresh violet under a horse's hoof; he'll teach you what life is. That's the business the Chesters are good at. But, look! I do believe she's holding off from him." Ann crept onward through the bushes to keep pace with the couple, now and then stretching her neck or rising to her full height on tiptoe.
"He hasn't been on her track very long," she mused, "but he has won the biggest part of his battle—he's got her to meet him privately. A sight of this would lay her old mammy out stiff as a board, but she'll be kept in the dark. That scamp will see to that part of the affair. But she'll know in the end. Somebody will tell her the truth. Maybe the girl will herself, when the awful, lonely pinch comes and there is no other friend in sight. Then, Jane Hemingway, it will all come home to you. Then you'll look back on the long, blood-hound hunt you've given another woman in the same plight. The Almighty is doing it. He's working it out for Jane Hemingway's life-portion. The girl is the very apple of her eye; she has often said she was the image of herself, and that, as her own marriage and life had come to nothing, she was going to see to it that her only child's path was strewn with roses. Well, Langdon Chester is strewing the roses thick enough. Ha, ha, ha!" the peering woman chuckled. "Jane can come along an' pick 'em up when they are withered and crumble like powder at the slightest touch. Now I really will have something to occupy me. I'll watch this thing take root, and bud, and leave, and bloom, and die. Maybe I'll be the first to carry the news to headquarters. I'd love it more than anything this life could give me. I'd like to shake the truth in Jane Hemingway's old, blinking eyes and see her unable to believe it. I'd like to stand shaking it in her teeth till she knew it was so, and then I honestly believe I'd fall right down in front of her and roll over and over laughing. To think that I, maybe I will be able to flaunt the very thing in her face that she has all these years held over me—the very thing, even to its being a son of the very scoundrel that actually bent over the cradle of my girlhood and blinded me with the lies that lit up his face."
A few yards away the pair had paused. Chester had taken the girl's hand and was gently stroking it as it lay restlessly in his big palm. For a moment Ann lost sight of them, for she was stealthily creeping behind the low, hanging boughs of the bushes to get nearer. She found herself presently behind a big bowlder. She no longer saw the couple, but could hear their voices quite distinctly.