you to say that?” he demanded, holding my eye with a glance of such stern inquiry that I could only nod my head in confusion.
“An’ he knew that you’d find me here, did he?”
“He said either at the school-house or around here somewhere,” I admitted, weakly. ‘An’ there ain’t nothin’ the matter at the farm?’
“He don’t want me for nothin’ special?” pursued Jeff, still looking me through and through.
“He didn’t say,” I made hesitating answer, but for the life of me, I could not keep from throwing a tell-tale look in the direction of his companion in the blue gingham dress.
A wink could not have told Jeff more. He gave a little bitter laugh, and stared above my head at the willow-plumes fora minute’s meditation. Then he tossed his fish-pole over to me and laughed again.
“Keep that for yourself, if you want it,” he said, in a voice not quite his own, but robustly enough. “I sha’n’t need it any more. Tell pa I ain’t a-comin’!”
“Oh, Tom!” Esther broke in, anxiously, “would you do that?”
He held up his hand with a quiet, masterful gesture, as if she were the pupil and he the teacher. “Tell him,” he went on, the tone falling now strong and true, “tell him and ma that I’m goin’ to Tecumseh to-night to enlist. If they’re willin’ to say good-by, they can let me know there, and I’ll manage to slip back for the day. If they ain’t willin’—why, they—they needn’t send word; that’s all.”
Esther had come up to him, and held his arm now in hers.
“You’re wrong to leave them like that!” she pleaded, earnestly, but Jeff shook his head.
“You don’t know him!” was all he said.
In another minute I had shaken hands with Jeff, and had started on my homeward way, with his parting “Good-by, youngster!” benumbing my ears. When, after a while, I turned to look back, they were still standing where I had left them, gazing over the bank into the water.
Then, as I trudged onward once more, I began to quake at the thought of how Farmer Beech would take the news.
CHAPTER III—ABSALOM
Once, in the duck-season, as I lay hidden among the marsh-reeds with an older boy, a crow passed over us, flying low. Looking up at him, I realized for the first time how beautiful a creature was this common black thief of ours—how splendid his strength and the sheen of his coat, how proudly graceful the sweep and curves of his great slow wings. The boy beside me fired, and in a flash what I had been admiring changed—even as it stopped headlong in mid-air—into a hideous thing, an evil confusion of jumbled feathers. The awful swiftness of that transition from beauty and power to hateful carrion haunted me for a long time.
I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such distressing way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was in open rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible to the senses that any member of the household should set at defiance the patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform—these things staggered the imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen.
As it turned out, nothing happened at all. The farmer and his wife sat out on the veranda, as was their wont of a summer evening, rarely exchanging a word, but getting a restful sort of satisfaction in together surveying their barns and haystacks and the yellow-brown stretch of fields beyond.
“Jeff says he’s goin’ to-night to Tecumseh, an’ he’s goin’ to enlist, an’ if you want him to run over to say good-by you’re to let him know there.”
I leant upon my newly-acquired fish-pole for support, as I unburdened myself of these sinister tidings. The old pair looked at me in calm-eyed silence, as if I had related the most trivial of village occurrences. Neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound, but just gazed, till it felt as if their eyes were burning holes into me.
“That’s what he said,” I repeated, after a pause, to mitigate the embarrassment of that dumb steadfast stare.
The mother it was who spoke at last. “You’d better go round and get your supper,” she said, quietly.
The table was spread, as usual, in the big, low-ceilinged room which during the winter was used as a kitchen. What was unusual was to discover a strange man seated alone in his shirt-sleeves at this table, eating his supper. As I took my chair, however, I saw that he was not altogether a stranger. I recognized in him the little old Irishman who had farmed at Ezra Tracy’s beaver-meadow the previous year on shares, and done badly, and had since been hiring out for odd jobs at hoeing and haying. He had lately lost his wife, I recalled now, and lived alone in a tumble-down old shanty beyond Parker’s saw-mill. He had come to us in the spring, I remembered, when the brindled calf was born, to beg a pail of what he called “basteings,” and I speculated in my mind whether it was this repellent mess that had killed his wife. Above all these thoughts rose the impression that Abner must have decided to do a heap of ditching and wall-building, to have hired a new hand in this otherwise slack season—and at this my back began to ache prophetically.
“How are yeh!” the new-comer remarked, affably, as I sat down and reached for the bread. “An’ did yeh see the boys march away? An’ had they a drum wid ’em?”
“What boys?” I asked, in blank ignorance as to what he was at.
“I’m told there’s a baker’s dozen of’em gone, more or less,” he replied. “Well, glory be to the Lord, ’tis an ill wind blows nobody good. Here am I aitin’ butter on my bread, an’ cheese on top o’ that.”
I should still have been in the dark, had not one of the hired girls, Janey Wilcox, come in from the butter-room, to ask me in turn much the same thing, and to add the explanation that a whole lot of the young men of the neighborhood had privately arranged among themselves to enlist together as soon as the harvesting was over, and had this day gone off in a body. Among them, I learned now, were our two hired men, Warner Pitts and Ray Watkins. This, then, accounted for the presence of the Irishman.
As a matter of fact, there had been no secrecy about the thing save with the contingent which our household furnished, and that was only because of the fear which Abner Beech inspired. His son and his servants alike preferred to hook it, rather than explain their patriotic impulses to him. But naturally enough, our farm-girls took it for granted that all the others had gone in the same surreptitious fashion, and this threw an air of fascinating mystery about the whole occurrence. They were deeply surprised that I should have been down past the Corners, and even beyond the cheese-factory, and seen nothing of these extraordinary martial preparations; and I myself was ashamed of it.
Opinions differed, I remember, as to the behavior of our two hired men. “Till” Babcock and the Underwood girl defended them, but Janey took the other side, not without various unpleasant personal insinuations, and the Irishman and I were outspoken in their condemnation. But nobody said a word about Jeff, though it was plain enough that every one knew.
Dusk
