“Between us, we messed it up,” said the Master. “If the Owd Un had stayed with me, I would have had him.”
And—
“I tell ye I did have him, but James Moore pulled me off. Strange, too, his dog not bein’ with him!”
CHAPTER 19
Lad and Lass
THIS ENCOUNTER in the Scoop created a great sensation in the Daleland. It encouraged the Dalesmen to new activity. James Moore and McAdam were questioned and questioned again as to the smallest details of the incident. All around the countryside, huge notices were put up offering a reward of £100 for the capture of the criminal, dead or alive. And the watchers were so vigilant that in a single week they caught a donkey, an old woman, and two amateur detectives.
In Wastrel-dale, the near escape of the Killer, the collision between James Moore and McAdam, and the failure of Owd Bob, who was not used to failing, provoked intense excitement, along with a certain anxiety about their favorite dog.
For when the Master had reached home that night, he had found the old dog already there, and he must have wrenched his foot in the pursuit or run a thorn into it, for he was very lame. At which, when it was reported in the Sylvester Arms, McAdam winked at Red Wull and muttered, “Ah, forty feet down—that’s an ugly tumble.”
A week later, the little man stopped in at Kenmuir. As he entered the yard, David was standing outside the kitchen window, looking very glum and miserable. On seeing his father, however, the boy started forward, all alert.
“What d’you want here?” he cried roughly.
“Same as you, dear lad,” the little man laughed, advancing. “I come on a visit.”
“Your visits to Kenmuir are usually paid by night, so I’ve heard,” David sneered.
The little man pretended not to hear.
“So they don’t allow ye indoors with the Cup,” he laughed. “They know yer little ways then, David.”
“Nay, I’m not wanted in there,” David answered bitterly, but not so loud that his father could hear. Maggie, inside the kitchen, heard, however, but paid no attention; for she had hardened her heart against the boy, who, though he never spoke to her, had lately made himself as unpleasant in a thousand little ways as only David McAdam could.
At that moment, the Master came stalking into the yard, Owd Bob ahead of him; and when the old dog recognized the visitor, he bristled spontaneously.
At the sight of the Master, McAdam hurried forward.
“I came only to ask after the tyke,” he said. “Is he gettin’ over his lameness?”
James Moore looked surprised; then his stern face relaxed into a friendly smile. Such generous anxiety about the welfare of Red Wull’s rival was a completely new quality in the little man.
“It’s kind of you, McAdam,” he said, “to come and ask.”
“Is the thorn out?” asked the little man with eager interest, shooting his head forward to stare closely at the other.
“It came out last night after we put warm compresses on it,” the Master answered, returning the other’s gaze, calm and steady.
“I’m glad of that,” said the little man, still staring. But his yellow, grinning face said as plain as words, “What a liar ye are, James Moore.”
◆ ◆ ◆
The days passed on. His father’s scornful and provoking remarks, becoming more and more bitter, drove David almost mad.
He longed to make up with Maggie; he longed for that tender sympathy which she had always shown him when his troubles with his father were a heavy burden to him. Their quarrel had continued for months now, and he was quite tired of it, and utterly ashamed. For, at least, he had the good grace to admit that no one was to blame but himself; and that it had been nourished only by his ugly pride.
At last he could not stand it any longer, and resolved to go to Maggie and ask for her forgiveness. It would be a painful ordeal for him; always unwilling to admit he was wrong, even to himself, how much harder it would be to confess it to this little slip of a girl. For a while, he thought it was almost more than he could do. Yet, like his father, once he had decided upon a course of action, nothing could turn him aside from it. So, after a week of doubts and resolutions, of cowardice and courage, he pulled himself together and set off.
It took him an hour to go from the Grange to the bridge over the Wastrel—a distance that usually required only a quarter of an hour. Now, as he walked on up the slope from the stream, very slowly, encouraging himself in his repentance, he was aware of a strange disturbance in the yard above him: the noisy cackling of hens, the snorting of pigs disturbed, and above the rest the cry of a little child ringing out in shrill anxiety.
He began to run, and hurried up the slope as fast as his long legs would carry him. As he pulled himself up over the gate, he saw the figure of Wee Anne, dressed in white, running away with unsteady, toddling steps, her fair hair streaming out behind, and one bare arm striking wildly back at a great pursuing sow.
David shouted as he cleared the gate, but the animal paid no attention and was almost touching the little girl when Owd Bob came galloping around the corner and in a second had flashed between pursuer and pursued. So close were the two that as he swung round at the startled sow, his tail brushed the baby to the ground; and there she lay kicking her fat legs to heaven and calling on all her gods.
David, leaving the old dog to hold the warrior pig, ran around to her; but someone else had got there before him. The whole incident had barely taken a minute’s time; and Maggie, rushing from the kitchen, now had the child in her arms and was hurrying back with her to the house.
“Eh, my pet, are you hurted, dearie?” David could hear her asking with tears in her voice, as he crossed the yard and settled in the doorway.
“Well,” he said, in teasing tones, “you’re a fine one to be left in charge of our Annie!”
It was a sore subject with the girl, and well he knew it. Wee Anne, that mischievous golden-haired child, was forever avoiding her sister-mother’s eye and putting herself in danger. More than once she had been saved from serious harm only by the watchful devotion of Owd Bob, who always found time, despite his many labors, to keep a guardian eye on his well-loved lassie. In the previous winter, she had been lost on a bitter night on the Muir Pike; once she had climbed into a field with the Highland bull and barely escaped with her life, while the gray dog kept the great creature at a distance; only a little while before, she had been rescued from drowning by the Tailless Tyke; there had been many other mishaps; and now the present one. But the girl paid no attention to her tormentor in her joy at finding the child unhurt.
“There! You ain’t so much as scratched, my precious, are you?” she cried. “Run out again, then,” and the baby toddled joyfully away.
Maggie rose to her feet and stood with her face turned away. David’s eyes rested lovingly upon her, admiring the position of her neat head with its thick cap of pretty brown hair; her slim figure, and her slender ankles peeping modestly from below the hem of her print dress.
“My word! If your dad should hear tell how his Anne—” he broke off into a long-drawn-out whistle.
Maggie kept silent; but her lips trembled, and the flush deepened on her cheek.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to tell him,” the boy went on. “It’s my duty.”
“You may tell whoever you like whatever you like,” the girl replied coldly; but there was a tremor in her voice.
“First you throws her in the stream,” David went on pitilessly; “then you chucks her to the pig, and if it hadn’t been for me—”
“You, indeed!” she broke in scornfully. “You! ’Twas Owd Bob rescued her. You’d nothing to do with it, except to look on—which is about all you’re fit for.”
“I tell you,” David went on stubbornly, “if it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have no sister by now. She’d be lying still, she would, poor little lass, cold as ice, poor mite, with no breath in her. And when your dad come home, there’d be no Wee Anne to run to him, and c
limb on his knee, and yammer to him, and beat his face. And he’d say, ‘What’s gotten to our Annie, as I left with you?’ And then you’d have to tell him, ‘I never bothered about her, dad; soon as your back was turned, I—’”
The girl sat down, buried her face in her apron, and gave in, as she almost never did, to a fit of weeping.
“You’re the cruelest man as ever was, David McAdam,” she sobbed, rocking to and fro.
He was at her side in a moment, tenderly bending over her.
“Eh, Maggie, I’m sorry, lass—”
She wrenched away from under his hands.
“I hate you,” she cried fiercely.
He gently took her hands away from her tear-stained face.
“I was only teasing, Maggie,” he pleaded; “say you for- give me.”
“I don’t,” she cried, struggling. “I think you’re the most hateful lad as ever lived.”
The moment had come; it was a time for heroic measures.
“No, ye don’t, lass,” he protested; and, releasing her wrists, lifted the little drooping face, wet as it was, like the earth after a spring shower, and, holding it between his two big hands, kissed it twice.
“You coward!” she cried, a flood of warm red covering her cheeks; and she struggled uselessly to free herself.
“You used to let me,” he reminded her, sounding injured.
“I never did!” she cried, more indignant than truthful.
“Yes, you did, when we were little; that is, you was always in favor of kissing and I was always against it. And now,” with wholehearted bitterness, “I can’t so much as peek at you over a stone wall.”
However that might be, he was peeking at her from very close up now; and in that position—for he still held her firmly—she could not help but peek back. He looked so handsome—humble, for once; remorseful yet reproachful; his own eyes a little moist; and yet his usual bold self—that despite herself, her anger died down a little.
“Say you forgive me and I’ll let you go.”
“I don’t, and never shall,” she answered firmly; but in her heart she was less convinced.
“Yes you do, lass,” he pleaded, and kissed her again.
She struggled faintly.
“How can you?” she cried through her tears. But he was not going to be moved.
“Will you now?” he asked.
She remained silent, and he kissed her again.
“Impudence!” she cried.
“Ay,” he said, closing her mouth.
“I wonder at ye, Davie!” she said, surrendering.
◆ ◆ ◆
After that, Maggie had to give in; and it was understood, though nothing definite had been said, that the boy and girl were courting. And in the Dale the unanimous opinion was that the young couple would make “a fine pair, surely.”
McAdam was the last person to hear the news, long after it had been common knowledge in the village. It was in the Sylvester Arms that he first heard it, and right away he fell into one of those foaming fits of madness that often came over him.
“The daughter of Moore of Kenmuir, you say? Such a daughter of such a man! The daughter of the one man in the world that’s harmed me above all the rest! I wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t told me. Oh, David, David! I’d not have thought it even of you, ill son as you’ve always been to me. I think he might have waited till his old dad was gone, and he’d not have had to wait long now.” Then the little man sat down and burst into tears. Gradually, however, he resigned himself, and the more easily when he realized that David, by this act, had revealed a fresh wound into which he might plunge his sharp arrows. And he took full advantage of his new opportunities. Often and often David had the greatest trouble restraining himself.
“Is it true what they’re saying—that Maggie Moore’s not quite the decent lass she ought to be?” the little man asked one evening with anxious interest.
“They’re not saying so, and if they were, ’twould be a lie,” the boy answered angrily.
McAdam leaned back in his chair and nodded his head.
“Ay, they told me that if any man knew, it would be David McAdam.”
David walked across the room.
“No—no more of that,” he shouted. “You ought to be ashamed, an old man like you, to speak that way of a lass.” The little man edged close up to his son, and looked into the fair, flushed face towering above him.
“David,” he said in smooth, soft tones, “I’m astonished ye didn’t strike yer old dad.” He stood with his hands clasped behind his back as if daring the young giant to raise a finger against him. “You might now,” he went on smoothly. “Ye must be six inches taller, and a good four stone heavier. However, maybe you’re wise to wait. Another year or two and I’ll be an old man, as ye say, and weaker, and Wullie here’ll be getting on, while you’ll be in the prime of yer strength. Then I think ye might hit me with safety to yer own body and honor to yerself.”
He took a step back, smiling.
“Father,” said David, hoarsely, “one day you’ll drive me too far.”
CHAPTER 20
The Snapping of the String
THE SPRING was passing, marked throughout by the bloody trail of the Killer. The adventure in the Scoop scared him for a while into harmlessness; then he went back to his game with all the more energy. It seemed likely that he would torment the district till some lucky accident put an end to him, since there was no way to stop him.
Every night in the Sylvester Arms and elsewhere you could still hear the declaration, made with the same certainty as in earlier days, “It’s the Terror, I tell you!” and that irritating, predictable reply: “Ay; but where’s the proof?” While often, at the same moment, in a house not far away, a lonely little man was sitting before a fire that had burned down low, rocking to and fro, biting his nails, and muttering to the great dog whose head lay between his knees: “If only we had the proof, Wullie! If only we had the proof! I’d give my right hand off my arm if we had the proof tomorrow.”
Long Kirby, who was always in favor of war when someone else was to do the fighting, suggested that David be asked, in the name of the Dalesmen, to tell McAdam that he must make an end to Red Wull. But Jim Mason would reject the suggestion, remarking truly enough that there was too much bad feeling already between father and son; while Tammas proposed with a sneer that the blacksmith should do the deed himself.
Whether it was this remark of Tammas’s that stung the big man into action, or whether it was that the fierceness of his hatred gave him unusual courage, in any case, a few days later, McAdam caught him lurking in the granary of the Grange.
The little man may not have guessed his murderous intention; yet the smith’s white-faced terror, as he crouched away in the darkest corner, could hardly avoid being noticed; although—and Kirby may thank his stars for it—the treacherous gleam of a gun barrel, not very well hidden behind him, was not observed.
“Hullo, Kirby!” said McAdam in a friendly way, “ye’ll stay the night with me?” And the next thing the big man heard was a laugh on the far side of the door, lost in the clank of padlock and rattle of chain. Then—through a crack—“Goodnight to ye. Hope ye’ll be comfy.” And there he stayed that night, the following day, and the next night—thirty-six hours in all, with rutabaga roots to satisfy his hunger and the dew off the thatch for his thirst.
Meanwhile, the struggle between David and his father seemed to be coming to a climax. The little man’s tongue wagged more bitterly than ever; now it was never quiet—searching out sores, stinging, piercing.
Worst of all, he was continually dropping hints about Maggie, hints which seemed innocent enough, yet which contained a world of subtle meaning. When David came home from Kenmuir at night, the little man would greet him with a grin and a wink and ask the simple question, “And was she kind, David—eh, eh?”; and this would make the boy’s blood boil inside him.
And the more effective the little man saw that his shots were, the
more he continued to fire them off. And David paid him back with the same kind. It was a war in which injury was met with more injury, turn and turn about. There was no peace; there were no truces in which the opponents could bury their dead before beginning to kill again. And every day brought them closer to that final struggle, whose outcome neither of them wanted to imagine.
◆ ◆ ◆
There came a Saturday, toward the end of the spring, that would be remembered for a long time in the Dale by more people than David.
For that young man, the day started in a most dramatic way. Rising before the sun was up, and going to the window, the first thing he saw in the misty dawn was the gigantic bony figure of Red Wull, bounding up the hill from the Stony Bottom; and in an instant his faith was shaken to its foundation.
The dog was traveling up at a long, lolling trot; and as he drew rapidly near the house, David saw that his sides were all splashed with red mud, his tongue out, and the foam dripping from his jaws, as though he had come far and fast.
He crept up to the house, leapt onto the sill of the unused back-kitchen, some five feet from the ground, pushed with his paw at the rickety old hatch, which was its only covering; and, in a second, the boy, straining out of the window the better to see, heard the rattle of the boards as the dog dropped down inside the house.
For the moment, excited as he was, David said nothing. Even the Black Killer took only second place in his thoughts that morning. For this was to be an important day for him.
That afternoon James Moore and Andrew would, he knew, be over at Grammoch-town, and, his work finished for the day, he was determined to confront Maggie and decide his fate. If she would have him—well, he would go next morning and thank God for it, kneeling beside her in the tiny village church; if not, he would leave the Grange and all its unhappiness behind, and immediately plunge out into the world.
All through a week of steady work he had looked forward to this hard-earned half-holiday. But, as he was stopping work at noon, his father turned to him and said without warning:
Alfred Ollivant's Bob, Son of Battle Page 15
