is in distress.”
“She ’as me worried, ’at she ’as,” the fellow said.
Lewis went to the hut and found her there with a woman of the village, midwife, arriving just in time for a terrible sight of her gray skin, and to feel of her icy hands and feet, and to hear her scream instead of making the healthful grunt and bearing down of a successfully labouring woman. Her throat seemed to rip, to be torn in two. She continued this way for another hour, and he left her and attempted to go about business elsewhere. But her cries awakened ev’ry nerve he had and worked them like an iron file on harp strings, like a hurricane in a dry field of rye. He found no refuge anywhere, and heard it when it wasn’t there, while the sergeants queried him on various things. He was helpless inside it, like a child at the hands of a fiend. At last, he stumbled into the hut for the medicine kit, found dried rings of rattlesnake tail, crushed them fine, mixed with water, and ran. And though the midwife viewed ’t suspiciously, he held it to her lips and she drank with a tender awful trust in her eye, and fiery hands grasping his.
Within ten minutes of his departure, from the suffocating confines of the maternity ward, she delivered a healthy boy, whose cry he perceived from where he had fallen, face foremost, in the snow.
Then, a few days later, she walked out for the first time, mother and child rivaling each other for radiance in the spring light. He did not dare go near her nor dare to stay away and so glanced only a moment at her prize.
The husband, standing some distance from her and appearing heedless, was in fact very carefully observing this visitation (Lewis knew), devouring each detail of his expression and hers with starved attention. Lewis felt the moment, like ev’ry moment since Creation, was formed of iron and bolted on ev’ry side. And knew he had a dog at heel now, and a shade by his side, which was the husband, who was waiting and watching for some particular sign, some telltale glimmer in her eye or his to give him cause to act, to pounce.
But how? When had he made the slip and put that bloodhound on his scent? No, it wasn’t possible. He’d not made the least error, never an imprudent glance. No—the fellow awaited evidence. Lewis was sure of it, or almost certain, moving carefully away from the little gathering, out of the fellow’s sight.
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