Thus saying, the old man seized his crab-stick, a knotty club, that had been seasoned in a thousand smokes, and toughened by the use of twenty years. His wife caught up her bonnet and hurried with the widow Hinkley in his train. Meanwhile, by cross-examining the child, Mr. Calvert formed some plausible conjectures of what was on foot, and by the time that the formidable procession had reached his neighborhood he was prepared to join it. Events thickened with the increasing numbers. New facts came in to the aid of old ones partially understood. The widow Thackeray, looking from her window, as young and handsome widows are very much in the habit of doing, had seen William Hinkley going by toward the hill, with a very rapid stride and a countenance very much agitated; and an hour afterward she had seen Brother Stevens following on the same route—good young man!—with the most heavenly and benignant smile upon his countenance—the very personification of the cherub and the seraph, commissioned to subdue the fiend.
“Here is some of your treachery, Mr. Calvert. You have spoiled this boy of mine; turning his head with law studies; and making him disobedient—giving him counsel and encouragement against his father—and filling his mind with evil things. It is all your doing, and your books. And now he's turned out a bloody murderer, a papist murderer, with your Roman catholic doctrines.”
“I am no Roman catholic, Mr. Hinkley,” was the mild reply—“and as for William becoming a murderer, I think that improbable. I have a better opinion of your son than you have.”
“He's an ungrateful cub—a varmint of the wilderness—to strike the good young man in my own presence—to strike him with a cowskin—what do you think of that, sir? answer me that, if you please.”
“Did William Hinkley do this?” demanded the old teacher earnestly.
“Ay, that he did, did he!”
“I can hardly understand it. There must have been some grievous provocation?”
“Yes; it was a grievous provocation, indeed, to have to wait for grace before meat.”
“Was that all? can it be possible!”
The mother of the offender supplied the hiatus in the story—and Calvert was somewhat relieved. Though he did not pretend to justify the assault of the youth, he readily saw how he had been maddened by the treatment of his father. He saw that the latter was in a high pitch of religious fury—his prodigious self-esteem taking part with it, naturally enough, against a son, who, until this instance, had never risen in defiance against either. Expostulation and argument were equally vain with him; and ceasing the attempt at persuasion, Calvert hurried on with the rest, being equally anxious to arrest the meditated violence, whether that contemplated the murderous assassination which the father declared, or the less heinous proceeding of the duel which he suspected.