The Able McLaughlins

by Margaret Wilson

  Wully was wide awake, waiting for the last prayer. There was no time to be lost, when the petitions were so short. He turned his head, and there—oh, Chirstie was looking at him! With head bowed, but eyes wide open, she was looking at him! Hungrily, tenderly, pitifully, just as he wanted her to look! Their eyes met, and her face blossomed red. She turned her head hastily away. Let her turn away! Let her pray! He knew, now! That was enough! For some reason she didn’t mean him to understand. But he had found out! It was all right. He could wait. He could wait any length of time, if only she would look at him again in that way! The congregation had risen, and had begun the Psalm. He would tell her, then and there, how glad he was, how he understood! He lifted up his voice and sang, sang louder than anyone else. That was what Allen used to do, when the service particularly bored him. He would sing the last Psalm louder and clearer than the whole congregation, with the face of an earnest, humble angel, while his elders admired, and his contemporaries hid their amusement as best they might. Chirstie would know Wully was sending her a joyous, patient answer. What did it matter that in going out she never once would turn towards him? Perhaps that was the way of women. They don’t just tell you all that is in their hearts. It was all very well. He knew what she was thinking.

  After dinner, he said he was going down to the swimming hole, where the assembly of cousins proved week by week that the heat had prevailed over the shorter catechism. But instead he rushed eagerly and cautiously over to Chirstie. He knew there might be someone with her on Sunday, and he left his horse some distance away, intending, if he saw others there, to come back and wait. There was not a sound to be heard as he crept up, though he stopped, listening. He hesitated, and drew nearer. Then he saw her. She was sitting in the little plot of shade the cabin made, on the doorstep, and her head was bowed on her arms. On a bit of rag carpet on the ground, her little sister was sleeping. Chirstie didn’t hear him. He went cautiously nearer, not wanting to startle her. He stood still, scarcely knowing how to be the least unwelcome. What was this he saw? What was this? She was crying! He stood still, watching her carefully. She was shaken with sobbing.

  CHAPTER V

  HIS impulse was to run and take her in his arms, but he knew now that he must be careful. You can’t be impetuous, it seems, with women, at least not with that one. He had tried that once, and learned his lesson. He slipped behind the barn, and stood wondering what to do. After a few seconds he peered around cautiously. There she sat, crying shakenly. He tried vainly to imagine a reason. Perhaps her uncle was complaining of having the responsibility of her and the children alone there. Perhaps she was actually in want, perhaps in want of food. Perhaps the other girls had been talking about going away to school, and she was heartbroken because her mother’s plans for her education were not to be carried out. Maybe she had just seen a snake. He remembered his mother saying that after Jeannie McNair had had to kill a snake, she used to sit down and cry. Some women did things like that, he knew, not his mother and sisters, but some. He peered around at her again, most uncomfortable. Her sobbing was terrible to see. He felt like a spy. He refrained from going to her, because something warned him that if she had not welcomed him before, she was less likely to do so now, when her face would be distorted with tears. But he remembered that prayer look with hot longing.

  He stood hesitating. Presently he looked again. She was just lifting her head to wipe her nose, and she saw him. She gave a little cry and, jumping up, ran into the cabin, and slammed the door behind her. As if he were a robber! Then she came out, even more insultingly, more afraid, and caught up the sleeping baby, and carried her away to safety. She needn’t barricade the house against him, need she? Wully thought, angrily. Then he remembered her face in church. He would sit down and wait a while. He would wait till Dod came home, and see what he could learn from the lad. But when he looked again towards the house, there she was, sitting inside the door, and in her hands she had her father’s old gun!

  How preposterous! How outrageous! If she didn’t want him as a lover, she might at least remember he was Wully McLaughlin, a decent, harmless man! Waiting for him with a gun! Could it be that the girl was losing her mind? Her mother had never recovered from that shock of hers. Could Chirstie have been unbalanced by her mother’s death! He wouldn’t think it! That would be disloyalty. But somebody, his mother, their aunt, somebody ought to go to her by force, and get her away from this lonely place. Who could tell what a girl might do with a gun One thing he knew, he wasn’t going away and leave her there alone, so madly armed, and weeping.

  After a while Dod came home, a red-faced, sweating little lad, and sat down contentedly with the soldier in the shade of the barn. He was, of course, barefooted and clothed in jeans, and his fitful haircut did no great honor to Chirstie’s skill as a barber. Surely he must know what she was crying about. And he would know that Wully would not be one to make light of her grief.

  “What’s happened, Dod?” he began at once. “When I came up, Chirstie was sitting on the doorstep crying. What’s the matter? Don’t you mind her?”

  Dod was instantly resentful.

  “It’s nothing I done.” He was decided and scornful. “She won’t even let me go swimming a minute. She wants me to stay here all the time. She cries all the time, no matter what I do!”

  This was worse than Wully had expected.

  “Was she crying before now?” he asked.

  “She cries all the time, I tell you.” He spoke carelessly. Girls’ tears were nothing to him. “She cries when she’s eating. She gets up in the morning crying. She’s daft!”

  “You mustn’t say that, Dod!” said Wully sharply, “Can’t a girl grieve for her mother without being called daft? That’s no way for a man to speak!”

  Dod was abashed, but unconvinced.

  “She’s not grieving for mother,” he answered, defending himself. “She’s grieving for herself.”

  This sounded good to Wully. He hoped she was unhappy for the same reason he was.

  “How do you know?” he demanded.

  “She says so. I says for her not to cry about mother, and she says she wasn’t. ‘I’m crying for myself,’ she says.”

  Wully had no longer any scruples about finding out everything he could from the boy.

  “What’s she sitting with that gun in her hands for, Dod? Does she shoot many chickens?”

  “Her? She couldn’t hit a barn. She’s afraid. That’s what’s the matter with her.”

  “What’s she afraid of?”

  “Nothing. What’s there to be afraid of here? I don’t know what’s got into her!”

  “Tell me now, Dod!” begged Wully. “My mother would want to know. Does Uncle John see that you have everything you need?”

  “That’s not it!” exclaimed the boy, proudly. “We have enough. Some of them would come here and stay all the time, but she don’t want them. She won’t have anybody here. And we’re not going to church again.” This last he undoubtedly considered a decision worthy of the most tearless girl. Wully, who seized upon trifling straws, saw promise in this. She wasn’t going to church again, and she had wanted a good look at him! But what was it—why should she be so silly? Why wouldn’t she let him make her happy? She wouldn’t need to be afraid if he was with her. He saw that Dod knew not much more than he did about the explanation of his difficulties. But Dod at any time might find something enlightening. Wully coveted his help.

  “It really beats all the way you run this farm with your father gone,” he affirmed. “When he gets back, I’d like to hire you myself.” He saw the boy relishing his praise. “You must treat Chirstie like a man, Dod. You mustn’t blame her for crying. It’s the way women do, sometimes. You say to her when you go in that my mother is always waiting to do for her. She’s the one that can help her. She don’t need to cry any more. We can fix things right. You say that to her, Dod, and to-morrow I’ll ride over and see what it is. You tell her we’ll fix everything for her.”

  He went awa
y in uncertainty and distress. He ought to tell his mother how things were. The idea of that girl sitting there with a gun, as if she didn’t recognize him! Or maybe it would be better to go to his Aunt Libby Keith. She ought to know. He didn’t like going to anybody. It was his affair. He couldn’t think of insinuating to anyone that the girl was—well, not quite right in her mind. He must be very careful.

  And then her face came before him, loving him. After all, it was just his affair and hers. There was some reason why she must wait. But she loved him! His mind dwelt on that, rather than on his inexplicable rejecting. He decided that in the morning he would ride over to the Keiths’ and ask in a roundabout way, what the trouble was with Chirstie.

  But in the morning he felt so certain that she loved him, in spite of everything, that he announced to his father that he was going over to cut slough grass on his eighty, to use in thatching his new barn, having decided to go to Keiths’, less conspicuously, in the evening. This was the first time he had as much as mentioned his own farm all summer. His father was pleased, but his mother protested. Why should he begin such work on the hottest morning of the summer, when he hadn’t really been able to help in the haying at all? He might easily be overcome with the heat, in his condition. But Wully, it seemed, was at last feeling as well as he had ever felt. He had been loafing too long. He must begin to get something done on his own place.

  So down in his slough he worked away with all his might, and now that his heart was light, and his fever broken, it was no contemptible strength he could exert. About the time he was so hot, so soaked through with sweat that he must sit down for a rest, he saw a horseman coming towards him. And upon that meeting there depended the destiny of generations.

  He smiled when he saw who it was. Peter Keith was a cousin of both Chirstie’s and his, the only remaining child of their Aunt Libby’s and Uncle John Keith’s, the smallest adult of Wully’s seventy-one cousins, being not more than five feet seven. And he was by far the most worthless of them. Of course Peter would be riding leisurely over after the mail in the middle of the morning, while the haying was to be finished, and the wheat was white and heavy for harvest. His excuse this summer for not working was that he had a disabled foot. He said that he had accidentally discharged his gun into it. Peter Keith was such a man that when he told that story, his hearers’ faces grew shrewd and thoughtful, trying to decide whether or not he really was lazy enough to hurt his own foot in order to get out of work. There was no place for laziness in a world where men existed only by toil. It was like chronic cowardice in the face of the enemy. Peter’s mother, to be sure, said he wasn’t strong. Libby Keith’s way of hanging over him, of listening to his rather ordinary cough, her constant babying of him, was what was spoiling Peter, many said. Wully had always been more tolerant of him than some of the cousins were, because he could never imagine a man feigning so shameful a thing as physical weakness. If Peter didn’t want to farm, why insist, he argued. If he wanted to go west, to get into something else, let him go. He might be good for something somewhere. But his doting mother would never listen to such hard-heartedness.

  The two of them made themselves a shade in the grass, and talked away intimately. Wully was more affable than usual, having resolved upon first sight of Peter to learn something from him. Peter was always full of neighborhood news. Tam McWhee had bought ten acres more of timber, and the Sprouls were beginning to break their further forty, and so on, and so on. Wully was screwing up his courage to introduce the subject that was interesting him, in some casual way. Peter was the last man with whom he cared to discuss Chirstie. But he was exactly the one who might know something valuable. He delayed, the question at the tip of his tongue, till even the lazy Peter thought it was time to be riding on, and rose to go. His foot wasn’t really much hurt, but he hadn’t renounced his limp. It was then or never with Wully, so he said, trying to appear uninterested:

  “I was riding by McNairs’ yesterday, and I saw Chirstie sitting there crying. What do you suppose she would be crying about, Peter?”

  Peter gave him a sharp look, and grew red in one moment.

  “How the devil should I know what girls cry about?” he asked angrily. “It’s none of my business! Nor yours, either!”

  A cry of frightened anger like that sent an excitement through Wully.

  “You know very well what it is!” he cried. “You’ve got to tell me! It’s some of your doings!”

  Peter was jumping into his saddle.

  “I’ll tell you like hell!” he shouted.

  “You’ll tell me before you go!”

  “Let go my bridle! Let go, I tell you! It’s none of your business!”

  His face told terrible secrets that Wully had never till that moment imagined suspecting. Now he was pulling him down from his horse.

  “Let me alone! It’s not my fault! Take your hands off me! I never meant to hurt her!” Peter was fighting desperately for his freedom. Wully was trying to control his insane rage.

  “Stand still and tell me what it is! I’m not going to hurt you!” he cried scornfully. “What are you afraid of? Don’t be a baby!” But his grasp never relaxed. The boy was afraid he would be shaken to death.

  “Let me alone! Take your hands off me! Let me go, and I’ll tell you! It’s none of your business, anyway!” He was free now, and trembling. “I didn’t mean to get her into trouble. I wish I’d never seen her! I offered to marry her once——”

  He dodged Wully’s blinded blow.

  “You marry her!” he cried murderously. “You marry her!” The first realization of his meaning had filled Wully with a lust to kill. Peter had sprung away. He gained his horse. Wully ran after him. All the oaths he had ever heard came back to him in his need. He ran furiously after the fleeing seducer. He called after him ragingly.

  He threw himself down, too shocked to think plainly. So that was Chirstie’s sickening secret! That was why she was afraid of him! That was why she was defending herself with that poor old gun! This was why she had left her uncle’s house, and avoided others! Chirstie, betrayed and desolate. Oh, it was well he was trained in killing! He would go after Peter Keith, and make short work of him. He would break every bone in his body. There was no death long enough, large enough, bitter enough, for Peter Keith. Wully lay there weak with rage, crying out curses. Anger, what little he knew of it, had always been to him an exhausting disease. He gave himself up to it.

  He was so dazed by this revelation that he never thought how time was passing till he heard the voice of a little brother calling him. It was long after dinner time. Why didn’t he come home? His mother was anxious about him. Was he ill? He rose, and stumbled along home.

  The sight of that kitchen was a blow to him, so innocent, so habitual it looked, so remote from violence and revenge. The dishes had been gathered from the table. The girls were beginning to wash them. His mother came forward solicitously. What was the matter, she wanted to know. Wully stood blinking. Murder? Had he thought of murder in a place of peace? Instantly he had come far back on that road to his habitual self, when with a shock he came against the criminal fact of Peter. He was ill, he cried. He wanted to rest. He couldn’t eat.

  He shut the door of his room and sat down bewildered on the edge of his bed. Thoughts of the old security and of the new violence clashed in his mind. His gun stood in the corner. He reached out and took it, and sat fingering it, like a man in a baffling dream.

  At length from the kitchen there came a burst of happy laughter. That was his sister laughing. His sister Mary. Laughing. Yes, Mary was laughing, and Chirstie sat there sobbing, sobbing and shaking!

  In that unbetrayed kitchen one of the children had said something absurd, that had delighted Mary. He knew that outburst. Mary was a girl safe, and Chirstie was undone. A girl people would scoff at! Not while he was alive! He threw himself down on the bed. He began thinking only of the girl. If he killed that snake, who would Chirstie turn to—who, if she no longer had him? She was alone. Defendin
g herself, fighting for herself. That was what she thought of men! She didn’t know any better! He would kill Peter, certainly. But what was to become of her then?

  After a while, lying there, he began to see a way out. He saw it dimly at first—it grew persuasive. Peter had been always talking about running away west, had he? Well, he would run away that very night. Either that, or Wully would destroy him. Wully would have that girl, as she was, if he had to fight the whole country for her. His terrible anger still shook him. But there was Chirstie to save, for himself—and for herself. If he killed Peter, what good would that do her? It would make her notorious. The way he saw was better than that. It was an ugly way. But it was safe for her. A situation hideous forced upon them, a thing which had to be faced out, like the war, from which there was no escape but victory. If he got rid of Peter, why should he not have her? Possession of her was worth letting the betrayer go scot free for, wasn’t it? She had no one but himself now. And yesterday, in her straits, in her despair, she had turned her face towards him!

  By supper time his mind was perfectly clear about the course he would take. He rose, and ate something, excitedly, reassuring his mother that the sun had not prostrated him. He felt all right. He had only to settle with Peter, and then——!

  Peter was sitting securely between his father and mother in front of the house when Wully rode up, that evening, and demanded a word with him in private. Peter hesitated. He did not dare to fear his cousin before them. He went cautiously out through the dusk towards him. Daylight was almost gone, but Wully turned his back deliberately towards those who sat casually watching. He didn’t want them to see the hate he felt mounting over his face. He didn’t want anyone ever to suspect what he was going to do. He spoke to his cousin only a few sentences. Then he turned, and rode swiftly away.