The Able McLaughlins/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII
THE night after the second day's search Libby Keith had gone to bed for a while, because she was unable longer to stand up. Again she had risen when the moon rose, and Isobel McLaughlin, hearing her in the kitchen, had risen to find her washing out a shallow tin milk pan. Libby had managed to make her purpose known. Her voice was altogether gone now, after so much calling to her Lammie, and she was starting out with the pan and the poker, so that when her Peter heard the noise she was making, he would know that help was near. With Isobel following her as best she might, she beat back and forth up and down the roads again till morning, when she fell exhausted near the McCreaths' at dawn, so that they had to hitch up and take her home. And lying in the wagon, she muttered and moaned. Isobel understood that sometimes she was simply saying her son's name. Sometimes she was trying to tell what a good lad he had always been. And sometimes she said, "Only forty yards from home"; sometimes, "A wee'an's bones!" But some of the neighbors gathering had heard her pan's din and praying, and the hunt was on again, before the sun was well up.
Later that morning Isobel McLaughlin sat telling Wully about that night, in the Keiths' kitchen, whispering, looking carefully towards the door of the room where Libby was supposed to be resting. She was sitting by the breakfast table. On the red cloth three cold half-drunk cups of tea told how negligible a thing food was in that household. Suddenly she said passionately;
"Wully, you've got to bring him home alive today!" and with that, to her son's consternation, she burst into great weeping.
Wully, fearing the sight of his aunt's grief, hadn't wanted to come that morning to the accursed house. But his father had asked him to, looking at him, Wully thought, with an unusual sharpness, so that hurriedly, to avoid suspicion, he had said he would come. He had dreaded the errand. But he had never foreseen this. He never remembered seeing his mother cry before, not even at the time of his brother's death, though she must have wept then. And now—well, it was no wonder she was undone, after forty-eight hours of such nightmare. But he was beside himself at the sight. He got up and strode around the room, at his wits' end. Life was upside down. Chirstie at his mother's broken and nervous from her shock; his aunt raving mad; his mother crying noisily. . .
"You think he's alive, don't you, Wully?" she was asking him, between sobs and sniffles. "You don't think he's dead, do you?" He marveled to see how utterly she shared his aunt's grief. She could scarcely have wanted more Peter's return, if he had been her own son. He answered staunchly;
"No! Of course he's not dead, mother! A man don't die from sleeping outdoors a couple of nights in July!"
"You don't think—he's fallen into some slough—and drowned, do you?"
"No, mother! Of course not! He's around some place, drunk, likely! Don't cry, mother!"
"How could he be alive—some place—and let us all go on hunting him?"
Suddenly she added, with a greater sob, lifting her head;
"Wully, if Peter's alive, and just letting his mother think he's lost, we ought to whip him when he's found! Every man that's spent a day hunting him ought to give him a—beating! Wully, he'd never do that! I think he's—he's dead!"
"Mother, mother! Don't you cry so! It'll be all right. They'll find him soon!"
"If you don't find him soon, Auntie will go mad!"
Wully could have cried aloud the conviction that came flooding over him that minute: "If we do find him alive, and I get my hands on him, you will go mad!" He began, like a child begging;
"Mother, don't you stay here! You come home with me! It's enough to kill you, staying here with Auntie! Let someone else stay a while. Why can't Aunt Flora stay with her to-day? You come on home with me!"
"I can stay. She wants me. I can stand anything, if only he's found. Wully!" she cried, raising a face toward him distorted with tears, "don't you know where he is?"
If Chirstie had been there to see that face, she would have thought that now, at last, Isobel McLaughlin was betraying her secret, so visibly did forbidden questions tremble on her tongue. Wully only said, soothingly, indulgently;
"If I knew where he was, don't you think I would go there and find him? Mother, you need a rest. You haven't had enough sleep!"
His mother sat bending towards him, beseeching him with all her soul to tell her the truth. But not one of her passionate unspoken entreaties reached him. It never occurred to him that she might know. He sat looking at her sympathetically, troubled that she spoke words of such unusual foolishness, being overwrought by all that had befallen her.
"Won't you come home with me?" he said again.
"No, I won't!" she said, with some asperity, and put her head down on her arms on the table, and went on crying.
He rode away to his place in the hunt, and underneath all his greetings, his short and dry comments on the day's possibilities, there stayed with him a troubled sense of pity for his mother. She was getting old. And he had treated her badly. Sometimes he even thought that he had treated her very badly in that affair, even though it was over now. All those hours, those murderous hours of the last days, he had never given her a thought. He hadn't stopped in his hating long enough to imagine how deeply, how terribly, he was about to wound her. If he came upon Peter, and killed him—as he must—what would his mother do? How brokenly even now she grieved for Aunt Libby! What would her grief be like then? The thought sickened him. He said to himself bitterly that he was so tired, so confused, that if he came upon that damned snake alone, he'd likely shake hands with him and let him go! He scarcely knew what he was doing.
All the parties had changed places that day. It seemed impossible for men to hunt repeatedly through the same place with any heart. It was a fifteen-hour nightmare. Added to the growing sense of futility, of frustration, of physical exhaustion, and the burden of the heat, Wully had that uneasiness about his mother to harrow him. He had gone with the men who were searching through his own lands, that day, through the low land were he had so prayerfully hoped to bury his enemy. And he seldom was allowed even to hunt about alone. Someone or other was always near him, so that if he came upon that—that—he would have no chance to work his quick will upon him safely.
The fourth day they gathered again, going over routes that seemed hopeless. Peter, alive or dead, was simply in no place within miles. Not a little pebble, even, remained unturned now. The older men were sustaining themselves on strong drink more or less soberly, and the younger ones considerably less soberly. The first day of the alarm had been something of a picnic to thoughtless youngsters used to solitary hoeing, something of a diversion to men accustomed to plowing alone from dawn to darkness. But the excitement was dying away. Paths were beaten roads, and roads great wide highways. Miles of untrodden sloughs had become familiar ground, and acres of cryptic underbrush had become overworked monotony. What the slough had swallowed up, it would keep. If the tall grasses had treasures hidden, only the winter could bring low the tall grasses. The crowd dwindled.
First those from the farther and less concerned settlements went back to their work, protesting they would all be watching, that they would keep a wide and long lookout always, for any signs of news. They regretted that their harvests were urgent. They departed. Then day by day members of the clan returned to neglected fields. John McLaughlin kept his children hunting, and as for the Squire he vowed he would never stop. His sporting blood was up. For nine days more Wully and his father went again and again from impossible clue to foolish conjecture. Wully's belief grew constantly stronger that Peter had simply gone back to wherever he had come from. But how he had done it on a road where one passer-by made a day memorable, he couldn't imagine. It suggested a devilish cunning, a subtility not to be lightly reckoned with, a persistence that made an honest man's blood boil. To his praying mother he affirmed that Peter was alive. To his dreading wife, he proclaimed that certainly he was dead. The whole desire of his life was to know which statement was true.
Their wheat called them, at length. It was almost their year's income, and to its whitening invitation they must listen. They took down their cradles, and fell upon it. Then they together went and harvested poor old Uncle Keith's crop for him. He was no farmer at any time, and now too weakened by sorrow to save his wheat. Libby kept her bed for days together, and for many days Isobel McLaughlin hung over her, trying to save her sanity.
However much Chirstie shrank from it, she had to leave her mother-in-law's well-filled house and go hack-to the loneliness of her own. Her harvesters must have food cooked and ready for them. Sometimes one of Wully's little sisters stayed a few days with her, sometimes a little brother. Wully had told his mother simply that since the day Chirstie had fainted there alone on the Fourth of July, he wouldn't have her left without company. His mother had listened simply, searchingly, wondering unhappily about many suggestive circumstances.
And all the time Chirstie kept insisting she wasn't afraid. Not she! No indeed! But she never got Wully to believe her. He knew why she brought lunches so often to the field, and why she loitered about with him, forgetting her housework. He saw why she had suddenly become so keen about shooting, why day by day she potted away at worthless small birds, which formerly her pity would never have let her shoot. Let her say what she would, she was so much afraid that her very eyes had changed. Never before had they had that way of shifting instantly under her long lashes. Never before since she had been his wife had they had that haunted expression. She was bitterly afraid, and he was unable to reassure her. He could do nothing. It was as if some invisible unconquerable rattler crawled about in that little house where his wife and baby had been so happy. It seemed that all his safety lay in crushing down a great, uplifted club upon an intangible enemy.
The green months passed at length, and the golden ones were all but gone. John went back to Chicago, and the young children started back to school through goldenrod and wild sunflowers, down paths with fuchsia-colored wild asters, amethyst, blue, and pink. Chirstie was alone, perforce. Occasionally she had a visitor. Aunt Libby came oftener than anyone else. She was better again, able to spend day after day on horseback, going about from neighbor to neighbor, and calling, as she went, to ease her heart in the lonely places, "Lammie, Lammie!" She came often to Wully's to see Bonnie Wee Johnnie. She had taken a notion that he was like her Peter. He ran about now, and it seemed not strange to his mother that a woman should ride miles for the pleasure of watching him. She taught him carefully to tolerate Aunt Libby's extravagant caresses. Wully's sisters were entirely indignant when they heard that Aunt Libby thought the baby looked like her son. But as they afterwards remarked, it was just like Aunt Libby to say that the prettiest child in the neighborhood resembled her blessed Peter.