“No.” His eyes rested on her. There was much that he wanted to ask her, if only he could have found the words. She turned away unsatisfied. The next moment she fanned him with the cloth she was spreading for the meal, then she put a plate of fried bacon and a pan of corn bread on the table, went to the back door, and called the children from their work.
He studied them one by one with fresh horror as they filed in, wondering what this one or that one would think if they should learn that their father had been whipped for neglecting them and their mother. At the table, however, he studied his wife chiefly. The children were young and healthy, and devoured their food like famished animals, but she was only making feeble pretenses with the piece of bread she was daintily breaking and dipping into bacon-grease. The “Regulators,” as they called themselves, were right; he had allowed a sick wife to go into the hot sun to do work he ought to have done. He thought now of the lash again, but not with a shudder. It could never pain him more than the agony at his heart.
He spent that long afternoon under an apple-tree behind the cabin, mending a harrow that was broken, stealing glances at his wife, longing to open his heart to her, watching the progress of the sun in its slow descent to the mountain-top, and feeling the threatening chill of the lengthening shadows. All nature seemed mutely to announce the coming horror. At sundown he went to the shelf in the entry, filled a tin pan with fresh spring-water, and washed his face and hands. Then he went in to supper, but he did not eat heartily.
“Don’t you feel no better, Jim?” asked his wife, her manner softened by a vague uneasiness his actions had roused. A suggestion of his mute suppressed agony seemed to have reached her and drawn her nearer to him.
“No, I hain’t sick; I ’ll be all right in the mornin’.”
Through the open door he watched the darkness thicken and heard the insects of the night begin to chirp and shrill. He had the curse of introspective analysis, and resolved that they were happy. He used to whistle and sing himself when his youth rendered it excusable. How very long ago that seemed!
All at once he rose, pretended to yawn, and said something to his wife about going over to Rawlston’s a little while; he would be back by bedtime. She wondered in silence, and after he had passed through the gate she tiptoed to the door and looked after him uneasily.
The landscape darkened as he went along the road toward Carden’s store. It was quite dark in the wooded vale. When he reached the spring he stopped to await the coming of Wade Sims and his followers. He wondered if the spot was far enough from the cabin to prevent Martha from hearing the blows that were to fall. He hoped it was, and, more than anything else, that “the regulators” would not be drinking. They would be more apt to listen to his request if they were perfectly sober. The rising moon in the direction of the store now made the arched roadway look like a long tunnel.
It would soon be eight o’clock. He sat down on the root of a tree and tried to pray, but no prayer he had ever heard would come into the chaos of his mind, and he could not invent one to suit the occasion. By and by he heard voices down the road, then the tramp, tramp of footsteps. A dark blur appeared on the moonlit roadway at the mouth of the tunnel, and grew gradually into a body of men.
Jim Trundle stood up. They should find him ready.