The foremost soon reached Sayre. Some merely nodded to her, too self-conscious for speech. Some asked her for news without the least expectation of getting any. Others accosted her reassuringly with comments. “’Twon’t be long now till you hear, Sayre.” “Trust those two boys to fight their way out!” The tactless author of this latter speech reddened with confusion; plainly the pun had been unintentional.
But Sayre felt grateful. She was easily touched today, and it was only too evident that restless excitement and distress were in control of the whole high school group.
Presently she felt a thin, trembling arm slip itself through hers from behind. A cold hand closed on hers with a nervous grip, and she found herself being drawn petulantly toward a side street. “Sayre!” Rene Osgood’s voice was murmuring in her ear. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you. Let’s get out of all this. It’s driving me crazy!”
Sayre kept in step with the other girl until they had turned a corner. “I’m not going back into that school building today. I don’t care what anybody does to me about it. I simply can’t sit through another class. Come home to lunch with me, won’t you? There won’t be anybody else there. Dad’s gone with Mr. Hoskins, and Mother’s at some luncheon club or other.” To Sayre’s surprise Rene’s speech ended in a sort of laugh, such a queer laugh that it aroused in Sayre only pity.
“Are you really so dreadfully worried, Rene?” she added with undisguised searching.
Rene’s greenish gray eyes, which Sayre had always thought unfeeling in expression, filled suddenly with tears. Her answering voice trembled with the warmth and depth of complete sincerity. “Yes, I am, Sayre. Perhaps—I—I—shouldn’t say so to you—but—it’s—the truth. And I couldn’t lie to you now—not—if—if—” The words ended in a sob.
Sayre felt the clutch on her hand tighten, felt herself drawn very close to the other girl, and without a word the two moved on together until they had reached the Osgood house, the most pretentious one in town, and entered it.
Sayre, herself, did not feel in the least like crying. Instead, eyes and mouth and throat were as dry as dust. It seemed to her as if she would never cry again. Nothing she had heard so far affected her quite so much as this behavior of Rene’s.
A few moments later the two girls were sitting together at the kitchen table over a hastily assembled lunch. Sayre excused her lack of appetite by saying she had eaten with Dad and Hitty, they had brought some sandwiches to town with them. But Rene forced food upon her and tried to eat, herself.
“It’s such a comfort having you here, Sayre, because Charley means as much to you as Frank Hoskins does to me. And I can talk out to you as I can’t to anybody else. Frank and I grew up together, you know. We’re almost like brother and sister. Our people were in this country early, even our grandparents were range stockmen before anybody thought of big irrigation. And Frank was the only child in his family, and I in ours. You can see how it’s been all our lives with Frank and me.
“Other boys and girls have never liked me much. I suppose there’s something horrid in me that prevents them. But Frank’s always been my friend—the only real, true, stand-by-you-through-thick-and-thin kind of friend I’ve ever had in all my life. And now—” Rene’s nervous, rapid words were brought to an abrupt stop by the catch in her throat.
Sayre felt both moved and a little indignant. “You don’t mean you’ve given up hope, Rene? You talk as if—it couldn’t be anything but a tragedy.”
“I’m losing my nerve, I guess. It’s this awful uncertainty. Not knowing anything—just waiting and waiting. That’s why I wanted you so much. You’ve got so much grit, Sayre. Nothing downs you.
“But you don’t know this country the way I do. It’s so heartless, with its awful winds, and without any shelter or anything else in so many, many places. Every year of my life I’ve heard stories of awful tragedies about people lost in storms. Travelers and sheepherders and whole flocks of sheep, hundreds, even thousands of ’em, at a time. You’ve heard how Mr. Kitchell and the other boys had to fight, haven’t you? And that was at the first of the storm.”
Sayre shook her head at Rene in questioning, dread expectancy. “Not very much,” she murmured.
‘”You haven’t heard how Mr. Kitchell at the wheel couldn’t see one inch in front of him, much less anything of the road? And how the boys had to take turns standing on the running board, shouting in at him every turn and move he had to make so they could keep going at all? How it was so cold out there that no one could stand it long, with his face being pelted almost raw by the ice of the snowflakes? And with the gusts of wind so strong they threatened all the time to tear away his hold and whirl him from the running board? And how the snow kept piling up in drifts in front of them every little way? And how they had to keep shoveling like mad to get ahead of what the wind was doing, at all? And with only one real shovel to work with? And how Mr. Kitchell didn’t dare stop the engine once, no matter how long they were stalled, because if he had, it would have been sure to freeze solid? It even froze a little as it was, so that it kept getting stuck.
“And there wasn’t a bit of shelter anywhere until they got to that ramshackle Howells ranch fifty miles out on the south road. They had an awful time digging their way into that—and out of it later, to let people here in town know about them. They left Spens Trowbridge there, dreadfully sick—pneumonia. Mr. Kitchell said, no matter what, he had to get in touch with Spens’ parents, and with Mr. Hoskins, and your father, and the sheriff’s headquarters. And there were five of them, and Mr. Kitchell’s car is a sedan. But Frank and Charley were only two, with a broken-down roadster at that.
“I tell you, Sayre, I’ve gone over and over it all in my mind so much that all my thoughts are just a whirl of such things that I can’t seem to stop.”
“Well, that won’t do Frank and Charley any good.” Sayre’s words surprised herself. They seemed so matter-of-fact, so heartless. Yet she had listened almost motionless to Rene’s long outpouring, and her workworn hands, clutched tight in her lap, were as cold as Rene’s own. “Let’s get back to the ‘phone, Rene,” she added in a different tone.
“You call Central and ask for news, Sayre. I’ve done it so often, I just can’t any more.”
But Central had nothing to offer. And the voice of the telephone girl was so charged with sympathetic understanding that for a moment it was almost too much for Sayre’s self-control. The incessant flow of Rene’s nerve-wrought speech saved her.
“I can’t sit around here, doing nothing. We’ll get back to a ‘phone every ten minutes or so. In between, let’s you and me keep walking around town together, Sayre. If folks see that you and I are good friends, it may do something to stop the hateful tongues of those detestable people who haven’t heart enough to keep from raking up all the nasty talk they can, even at a time like this. Our being together will show them, at least, how both of us feel about all their dirty suggestions.”
“Rene Osgood—what are you talking about?”
The other girl stared at Sayre in amazement. “You don’t mean you haven’t heard!” She sank into a sitting position on a nearby davenport, more relaxed than she had been since meeting Sayre. “It’s part, of course, because there isn’t one bit of the snoop in you. But it’s part, too, I suppose, because nobody dared tell you. Well—I dare.”
Rene’s voice had lost its nervous stridency. Motioning Sayre to a place beside her, she added in a way that aroused Sayre’s confidence as no speech of Rene Osgood’s had ever done before, “Not because I’m horrid, though. They’re things you ought to know. It’s your right.”
In spite of that right, Rene plainly did not find explanation easy. She drew Sayre’s hand into her lap and held it there, half fondling it. Then words burst out suddenly with a flash of the old jealous flippancy. “If those stock-judging boys did keep their mouths shut all winter, they’ve talked enough the last few days to make up for it!”
“What about?”
“Frank.” Rene�
�s expression softened. “Sayre, I’ve got to tell you something, and I can’t bear to. But it’s what the boys are saying, and it’s true. Frank went to Laramie twice this spring with his father and studied the college farm stock—got pointers about it from the herdsmen. Some of the stock that he saw then, not all by any means, was part of what the boys had to judge later. They say that’s why he beat Charley, and they’re all mad about it.
“No, don’t say anything; it wasn’t crooked. We couldn’t have kept the cup if it had been. There wasn’t any rule against it. As for the schools near Laramie making it a point of honor not to do it, that doesn’t mean a thing ’cause not one of ’em had any show anyhow.
“Just the same, Sayre, I want you to know that Frank had to do it. His father made him. You can’t imagine how determined he was to have Frank beat. Not,” Rene added with sudden honesty, “that Frank himself wasn’t just dead set to beat Charley. Only he’d never have thought of doing that if his father hadn’t put him up to it.”
Sayre sat very still for a while. “So that,” she thought, “may be the last thing that Charley is going to have against Frank Hoskins. The end of everything, perhaps, for both of them.” The indignation in her was somehow a deeper emotion than anger. She did not withdraw her hand from Rene’s. She merely let it lie unresponsive between the other girl’s until she grew conscious of Rene’s long gaze upon her.
As plainly as words that gaze was saying, “You’re not going to fail me now, are you, Sayre?”
All Sayre’s answer was, “So that’s the gossip you meant?”
Rene nodded. “Part. There’s more though. Lots worse. And Sayre, the thing that’s driving me nearly wild is—that—I’m afraid—it all started from me.”
“You?”
“And I don’t really know a thing. I just guessed ’twas so, maybe—long ago. And I never, never hinted at it to a single soul—until the other day, w-when Mr. Hoskins got it out of me. I don’t know how he did it, either. He’s so slick, somehow. He just works you when you don’t know it. And I hate him for it—worse’n ever. Though I’ve hated him lots of times before for how he is with Frank.
“But you wouldn’t think he’d ever tell it, about his own boy. Yet I don’t see how it could have got out any other way. Of course, once it did, there’d be plenty of cats to spit it around and add a lot. But it’s Mr. Hoskins’ ever letting it get out in the first place that I can’t understand. Must have been he was so crazy with worrying and imagining what might have happened that he didn’t know what he was saying. That’s why Dad went with him. He said the man was in no fit condition to go alone. He’d about gone to pieces, I guess. Dad said he’d been under an awful strain, anyway, before all this.”
“Rene, I do wish—” Sayre interrupted the other’s incoherence.
“Oh, I’m coming to it. It—it’s about alfalfa, of course. Alfalfa always seems to get mixed up in every mess on this Pawaukee Project.”
“Whose alfalfa?” Plainly, without help, Rene never would bring herself to tell what she had to tell. “Frank’s?”
Rene gave a little jump, “Then you do know?”
“No. I’m just trying to guess.”
“That’s all I ever did, either—except—well, I did know (I was the only one who did) that Frank had bugs in his alfalfa field, a sort o’ little beetle, in his third cutting (it was an awful small cutting) and that he was simply scared green about it. For fear his father’d find out, I mean, after the way it had been between them about that field.
“You know all that, about how Mr. Hoskins did everything he could to boost that contest of his. And about his having his heart set on Frank’s being a big man in it. And about how Frank just wouldn’t really work at it no matter how his father kept at him. Of course all our old community said that it was because you and Charley weren’t in on the alfalfa contest, and that all Frank cared about was getting ahead of you. You’ll never make me believe that was the real reason. Sayre—” Rene tightened her hold on her companion’s hand, bent her head closer, and lowered her voice to a whisper as if in guilt. “It’s only another guess of mine. I never got a hint of it from Frank. He’s too loyal, and, in spite of everything, too proud of his father. But I’m a good guesser when it’s anything about Frank. And—the reason he wouldn’t work for that alfalfa contest was that deep down in his heart he knew his father was all wrong about the alfalfa business around here, and Mr. Kitchell was right.”
Sayre’s eyes opened wide as she took in this new idea. Then she asked, “What about the bugs?”
Rene’s body shrank back into the corner of the davenport. “Oh, Sayre, don’t you see?” The girl was pleading to be spared speech. “Those bugs—little beetles—they must have been w-w-weevil. Maybe—the weevil. Charley’s weevil.”
Sayre pulled her hand away from Rene’s. “Charley’s weevil? Charley never had any weevil. He never knew any more about the weevil in that hay than—than—”
“I—I think maybe he didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to say. Oh, Sayre—you’re not going to make me tell it all—right out—in words? You couldn’t be so mean.”
Moving farther away on the davenport, Sayre turned around and let her eyes rest on the shrinking figure in the corner. In reality she did not see that figure at all. Her vision was resting on scenes in her memory:
A close-packed knot of high school boys waiting in a corner of a crowded high school auditorium. Frank Hoskins’ low, angry tones cutting into Charley’s ear: “I’ll get even with you yet, Charles Morgan. More’n even—I’ll finish you.”
And a little later, a crisp Saturday morning during the baling season. Charley eating his breakfast very early. The Hoskins truck moving rapidly, with a sound not hollow enough for complete emptiness, down the Parsons driveway, and straight out to the far end of the big hay field to a place behind the second cutting stack, where loosened hay lay tumbled about soon to be baled.
“No, you needn’t tell.” Sayre did not shift her unseeing gaze. “I’ll tell. I’ve got to get this thing exactly straight, Rene. You mean,” her tone was peculiarly dispassionate, “that Frank had weevil in his alfalfa field, especially in his third cutting. And, so that his father wouldn’t find out about it, and for other reasons too, he carted his third cutting crop out to our place while our baling was going on, and mixed his weevilly hay in with ours?” She paused, but seemed to expect no answer. “That explains everything, doesn’t it? And Mr. Hoskins made you tell him about its being Frank, really, who was responsible for that weevil? And then Mr. Hoskins, himself, actually told other people? That last’s pretty hard to believe.”
“Oh, no, Sayre. No. Not all that. You haven’t any right either, to be sure any of it was the way you say.” Rene leaned forward, nearly doubled, her hands jerking spasmodically in her lap. “It was only that Frank had some w-w- —some little beetles in his hay. And that his third crop—kind of—disappeared. His father knew about its disappearing, and he was pumping me to find out why—or rather how. But I don’t know how. Frank may have burned it. Or he may—”
Sayre’s fixed gaze was not really attentive. She had begun to shiver with a queer kind of cold that wasn’t really cold at all. “I’ll finish you”—the phrase was repeating itself in her brain with fearful significance. “It’s just because I’m so dreadfully worked up,” she tried to tell herself.
Aloud she asked huskily, “And the rest of the gossip?”
Rene’s gaze had become as steadied upon Sayre as Sayre’s upon her, but much more discerningly. “You know—” she began after a moment; then went on with changed tone, “Oh, Sayre, isn’t it awful? How can they even think such things? There’re lots, though, who still believe Charley did the weevil stunt. But some folks say he suspects so strongly that Frank did it that he as good as knows Frank did, and is just waiting his chance to—to— And some say Frank’s so afraid Charley’ll find out and tell, he’s desperate. They say the boy who did that to the hay is a criminal. And one criminal act always leads to anot
her, that’s worse, that’s the very worst there is! Oh, Sayre, I can’t even hint at some of the awful things they—”
“Don’t hint at them then.” Across Sayre’s mind had flashed another recollection: “Leestening to ’em is yust as much no sense as vaggling is!” With a shake of self-scorn, she had sprung to her feet. “Come on, Rene. Let’s get out right away into this town, together.”
19
A Confession
The long afternoon of intermittent wandering through slush-covered streets wore away at last, bringing to an empty close another day of waiting. Rene clung more and more desperately to Sayre. “You’ve simply got to stay with me tonight,” she repeated.
“I can’t. There’s Dad and Hitty and the chores. You know what Dad said when we met him—that we’d stay in town till the last minute in hope of news.”
“That’s just it. My dad’ll ‘phone our house the minute there’s any news, even if it’s the middle of the night. You can get word to your father right away, in our car.”
In the end Rene’s argument won Sayre’s and her father’s consent.
The two girls, worn out with the strain of the day, went to bed in Rene’s pretty bedroom. Sayre felt shy in it. She had never slept in so lovely a room as this. At any other time she would have enjoyed the experience and felt not a little envy of the girl who possessed such dainty, luxurious quarters for her very own. But tonight she was too heavy-hearted and too utterly weary. Rene, too, was at last too spent to talk.
They lay down in silence in that wide, soft bed, drew up over them that thick, silky, blue comforter with its rose design, which harmonized so well with the tint of the walls and the gray-blue paint of the bedstead. Somehow, after a while, the thin, angular figure of the girl Sayre had always thought of as the “spiteful Rene Osgood” was lying, half-relaxed, in Sayre’s firm, work-strengthened arms. There was something restful to them both in the silence, and in each other’s understanding nearness. Perhaps, after all, each one thought she could sleep a little, and knew no more.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 119
