She did not, and he saw it and was satisfied. She did not know what he had been saying, and she did not care. She only remembered the reason she had come here; she only saw before her the father of the man she loved; and a wave of emotion rose up in her chest.
She moved timidly toward him, holding out her hands.
“Eh, Mr. McAdam,” she begged, “I come to ask ye about David.” The shawl had slipped from her head and lay loose upon her shoulders; and she stood before him with her sad face, her pretty hair all tousled, and her eyes big with tears—a touching figure.
“Won’t ye tell me where he is? I wouldn’t ask it, I wouldn’t trouble you, but I’ve been waiting an awful long time, it seems, and I’m craving for news of him.”
The little man looked at her curiously. “Ah, now I remember,” he said to himself; and then to her, “You’re the lass who’s thinking of marrying him?”
“We’re engaged,” the girl answered simply.
“Well,” the other remarked, “as I said before, ye’re a brave one.” Then he went on, in a tone of voice which sounded both cynical and vaguely sad, “If he’s as good a husband to you as he has been a son to me, ye’ll have made a most remarkable match, my dear.”
Maggie’s anger flared up instantly.
“A good father makes a good son,” she answered almost boldly; and then, with infinite tenderness, “And I’m praying that a good wife will make a good husband.”
He smiled mockingly.
“I’m afraid that won’t help ye much,” he said.
But the girl paid no attention to this last sneering remark, she was so set on her purpose. She had heard of the one tender place in the heart of this little man with the tired face and mocking tongue, and she resolved to accomplish her purpose by appealing to it.
“You loved a lass yourself once, Mr. McAdam,” she said. “How would you have felt if she had gone away and left you? You’d have been driven mad by it; you know you would. And, Mr. McAdam, I love the lad yer wife loved.” She was kneeling at his feet now with both hands on his knees, looking up at him. Her sad face and trembling lips pleaded for her more powerfully than any words.
The little man was clearly touched by her.
“Ay, ay, lass, that’s enough,” he said, trying to avoid looking at those big imploring eyes, which were impossible to avoid.
“Won’t ye tell me?” she begged.
“I can’t tell ye, lass, because I don’t know,” he answered crossly. But in truth, he was moved to the heart by her misery.
The girl’s last hopes were dashed. She had played her last card and failed. She had clung despairing to this last possibility, and now it was taken from her. She had hoped, and now there was no hope. In the anguish of her disappointment she remembered that this was the man who, with his constant cruelty, had driven her love away.
She rose to her feet and stood back.
“You don’t know, and you don’t care!” she cried bitterly.
At these words, all the softness vanished from the little man’s face.
“You are unfair to me, lass; you are indeed,” he said, looking up at her with a false innocence which, if she had known him better, would have warned her to be on her guard. “If I knew where the lad was, I’d be the very first to tell you—and the police, too; eh, Wullie! He, he!” He chuckled at his wit and rubbed his knees, ignoring the scorn that blazed in the girl’s face.
“I cannot tell ye where he is now, but maybe ye’d like to hear about the last time I saw him.” He turned his chair in order to speak directly to her. “It was like this: I was sitting in this very chair, asleep, when he crept up behind me and leapt on my back. I knew nothing about it till I found myself on the floor and him kneeling on me. I saw by the look of him that he was determined to finish me off, so I said—”
The girl waved her hand at him, superbly scornful.
“You know you’re lying, every word of it,” she cried.
The little man hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, and yawned.
“An honest lie for an honest purpose is something any man may be proud of, as you’ll know by the time you’re as old as I am, my lass.”
The girl slowly crossed the room. At the door she turned.
“Then you won’t tell me where he is?” she asked with a heartbreaking tremble in her voice.
“On my word, lass, I don’t know,” he cried, now agitated.
“On your word, Mr. McAdam!” she said with a quiet scorn in her voice that might have stung even the worst of scoundrels.
The little man spun around in his chair, an angry red coloring his cheeks. In another moment he was calm and smiling again.
“I can’t tell you where he is now,” he said, smoothly; “but maybe I could let ye know where he’s going to.”
“Can you? Will you?” cried the simple girl, quite unsuspecting. In a moment she was across the room and at his knees.
“Come closer, and I’ll whisper.” The little ear, peeking from its nest of brown, moved tremblingly closer to his lips. The little man leaned forward and whispered one short, sharp word, then sat back, grinning, to watch the reaction to his revelation.
He had his revenge, though it was an unworthy revenge on such a victim. And, as he watched the girl’s face, in which cruel disappointment combined with the heat of her anger, he still had enough nobility of character to regret his triumph.
She sprang away from him as though he were unclean.
“And you are his father!” she cried in burning tones.
She crossed the room, and at the door she paused. Her face was white again, and she was quite self-possessed.
“If David did strike you, you drove him to it,” she said, speaking calmly and gently. “You know—no one knows better—whether you’ve been a good father to him, him with no mother, poor laddie! Whether you’ve been to him what she would have wanted you to be. Ask your conscience, Mr. McAdam. And if he was a bit troublesome at times, wasn’t there a reason? He had a heavy cross to bear, David had, and you know best if you helped to ease it for him.”
The little man pointed to the door; but the girl paid no attention.
“Do you think that when you were cruel to him, mocking and sneering, he never felt it, because he was too proud to show you? He had a big, soft heart, David, beneath the surface. Many’s the time when mother was alive, I’ve seen him throw himself into her arms, sobbing, and cry, ‘Eh, if only I had my mother! It was different when mother was alive; he was kinder to me then. And now I have no one; I’m alone.’ And he’d sob and sob in mother’s arms, and she, weeping herself, would comfort him, while he, little laddie, would not be comforted, crying, ‘There’s no one to care for me now; I’m alone. Mother’s left me and eh! I’m praying to be with her!’”
The clear, girlish voice shook. McAdam, sitting with his face turned away, waved at her, silently ordering her to be gone. But she held on, gentle, sorrowful, unstoppable.
“And what’ll you say to his mother when you meet her, as you must soon, now, and she asks you, ‘And what about David? What about the lad I left with you, Adam, to guard and keep for me, faithful and true, till this Day?’ And then you’ll have to speak the truth, God’s truth; and you’ll have to answer, ‘Since the day you left me I never said a kind word to the lad. I never was patient with him, and never tried to be. And in the end, by my hard treatment of him, I drove him to try and murder me.’ Then maybe she’ll look at you—you best know how—and she’ll say, ‘Adam, Adam! is this what I deserved from you?’”
The gentle, unyielding voice fell silent. The girl turned and slipped softly out of the room; and McAdam was left alone with his thoughts and the memory of his dead wife.
“Mother and father, both! Mother and father, both!” rang pitilessly in his ears.
CHAPTER 23
The Owd One
THE BLACK Killer still cursed the land. Sometimes the crimes would stop for a while; then a shepherd, making his rounds, would notice his sheep herding
together, pressing close in squares, as they never usually did; a raven, stuffed full up to his gullet, would rise into the air before him and flap wearily away, and he would come upon the murderer’s latest victim.
The Dalesmen were in despair, so completely useless had their efforts been. There was no proof; no hope, nothing to say that these crimes might soon be coming to an end. As for the Tailless Tyke, the only piece of evidence against him had vanished along with David, who, as it happened, had told no one what he had seen.
The £100 reward that had been offered had brought no result. The police had done nothing. The Special Commissioner had done no better. After the incident in the Scoop, the Killer never ran a risk, yet never missed a chance.
Then, as a last resort, Jim Mason made his attempt. He took time off from his duties and disappeared into the wilderness. For three days and three nights, no one saw him.
On the morning of the fourth day he reappeared, looking worn and exhausted, his hair wild and clothes creased, a sly and shifty expression in his eyes, gloomy for once, and irritable—he who had never been irritable before—and confessed his failure. Questioned further, he answered with a fierceness that was not like him: “I saw nothing, I tell ye. Which of you liars said I did?”
But that night, his wife heard him in his sleep puzzling over something to himself in a slow, fearful whisper, “Two of ’em; one behind the other. The first big, like a bull; the other—” At which point Mrs. Mason struck him a smashing blow in the ribs, and he woke in a sweat, crying terribly, “Who said I saw—”
◆ ◆ ◆
The days were slipping away; the summer was hot upon the land, and with it the Black Killer was forgotten; David was forgotten; everything else sank into oblivion before the consuming interest of the coming Dale Trials.
The battle for the Shepherds’ Trophy, which everyone had been looking forward to for so long, was looming close; soon everything that depended on the outcome of that struggle would finally be decided. Whether the Owd One had a right to claim his proud title would be settled forever. If he won, he would win for good—a thing that had never happened before in the history of the Cup; if he won, the place of Owd Bob of Kenmuir as first and foremost in his profession would be guaranteed for all time. Above all, it would be the last event in the six years of struggle between Red and Gray. It was the last time those two great rivals would meet in battle. The superiority of one would be decided once and for all. For, whether he won or lost, it was to be the last public appearance of the Gray Dog of Kenmuir.
And as every hour brought the great day closer, nothing else was talked about in the countryside. The Dalesmen’s enthusiasm was all the stronger because of their feverish anxiety. Many of them would lose more than they wanted to admit if the Owd One was beaten. But he wouldn’t be! Nay; old, indeed, he was—two years older than his great rival; there were a hundred risks, a hundred chances; but still: “What’s the odds against Owd Bob o’ Kenmuir? I’m taking ’em. Who’ll bet against the Owd Un?”
And now that the air was filled with this endless talk about the old dog, these announcements, made over and over, that he was certainly going to win; now that McAdam’s ears throbbed with the repeated boast that the gray dog was the best in the North, he became once again the silent man he had been six months before—gloomy, brooding, suspicious, muttering about conspiracy, plotting revenge, planning evil.
The scenes at the Sylvester Arms were the same as in earlier years. Usually the little man sat by himself in a far corner, silent and scowling, with Red Wull at his feet. Now and then he burst into a fit of insane giggling, slapping his thigh and muttering, “Ay, it’s likely they’ll beat us, Wullie. Yet maybe there’s a little something—a little something we know and they don’t, Wullie—eh! Wullie, he, he!” And sometimes he would leap to his feet and address his tavern audience, speaking to them passionately, or sarcastically, or tearfully, depending on his mood; and his subject was always the same: James Moore, Owd Bob, the Cup, and the plots against him and his Wullie; and always he ended with that hint of the surprise to come.
Meanwhile, there was no news of David; he had vanished as utterly as a ship sinking in the middle of the Atlantic. Some said he had joined the army; some, that he had gone to sea. And “So he has,” Sammel agreed, “floating with his heels uppermost.”
Having no gleam of comfort, Maggie’s misery was so deep that all hearts were sorry for her. She no longer went about her work singing cheerfully; and all the bounce had gone from her step. The people of Kenmuir competed with one another trying to comfort their young mistress.
◆ ◆ ◆
Maggie was not the only one whose life now had a great empty place in it because David was gone. Though he would have been the last to admit it, McAdam felt the boy’s loss painfully. It may have been that he missed having someone who was always there to be mocked and scolded; but it may have been a nobler feeling. Alone with Red Wull, now, too late, he felt how lonely he was. Sometimes, sitting by himself in the kitchen, thinking of the past, he experienced the sharp pangs of remorse; and this was especially so after Maggie’s visit. After that day, the little man, to be fair to him, was never known to hint by word or glance any mean thing about his enemy’s daughter. Once, indeed, when Melia Ross was speaking about Maggie with all the resources of her dirty imagination, McAdam shut her up with: “You’re a most amazing big liar, Melia Ross.”
Yet, though he now had no evil thoughts about the daughter, his hatred for the father had never been so stubborn.
He grew reckless in what he said. His life was one long threat against James Moore’s life. Now he openly declared his belief that, on the eventful night of the fight, James Moore, for a reason that was easy to guess, had urged David on to murder him.
“Then why don’t you go and tell him so, you great liar?” roared Tammas at last, driven wild with rage.
“I will!” said McAdam. And he did.
◆ ◆ ◆
It was on the day before the great summer sheep fair at Grammoch-town that he carried out his promise.
That day is always a big field-day at Kenmuir; and James Moore and Owd Bob had been up and working on the Pike from sunrise on. Throughout the widespread lands of Kenmuir the Master went with his untiring helper, rounding up the sheep, separating out some, moving part of the flock to better grasslands. It was already noon when the flock started from the yard.
As they came up, McAdam was sitting on the gate, next to the wooden steps over the wall.
“I have something to say to you, James Moore,” he announced, as the Master approached.
“Say it then, and quick. I have no time to stand gossiping here, if you have,” said the Master.
McAdam leaned forward till he nearly fell off the gate.
“It’s a queer thing, James Moore, that you should be the only one to escape this Killer.”
“You’re forgetting yourself, McAdam.”
“Ay, there’s me,” the little man agreed. “But you—how do you explain your luck?”
James Moore swung around and pointed proudly at the gray dog, now pacing watchfully around the flock.
“There’s my luck!” he said.
McAdam laughed unpleasantly.
“So I thought,” he said, “so I thought! And I suppose ye’re thinking that yer luck”—nodding at the gray dog—“will win you the Cup for certain a month from now.”
“I hope so!” said the Master.
“Strange if he doesn’t, after all,” said the little man thoughtfully.
James Moore looked at him suspiciously.
“What do you mean?” he asked sternly.
McAdam shrugged his shoulders.
“There’s many a slip twixt the Cup and the lip, that’s all. I was thinking some bit of bad luck might come to him.”
The Master’s eyes flashed dangerously. He recalled the many rumors he had heard, and the attempt to poison the old dog early in the year.
“I can’t think anyone would be coward
enough to murder him,” he said, standing tall.
McAdam leaned forward. There was a nasty glitter in his eye, and his face was quivering.
“You wouldn’t think anyone would be coward enough to get the son to murder his father. Yet someone did—someone set the lad to do me in. He failed, and next, I suppose, he’ll have a go at Wullie!” There was a flush on the pale face, and a vengeful ring to the thin voice. “One way or the other, fair or foul, Wullie or me, one or both, has got to go before Cup Day, eh, James Moore! Eh?”
The Master put his hand on the latch of the gate. “That’ll do, McAdam,” he said. “I won’t stay to hear any more from you, or I might get angry. Now get off this gate; you’re trespassing as it is.”
He shook the gate. McAdam tumbled off and went sprawling among the sheep that were clustered below. Picking himself up, he dashed on through the flock, waving his arms, kicking wildly, and scattering confusion everywhere.
“Just wait till I get them through, will you?” shouted the Master, seeing the danger.
When one man asked this of another, the rules of courtesy and consideration among shepherds demanded that he oblige. But McAdam rushed on anyway, dancing and spinning like a windmill. If it hadn’t been for the lightning-quick watchfulness of Owd Bob, the flock would have broken apart.
“I think yo’ might ha’ waited!” the Master scolded, as the little man burst his way through.
“Now I’ve forgot something!” the other cried, and he turned back toward the gate.
This was more than human nature could stand.
“Bob, keep him off!”
A flash of teeth; a blaze of gray eyes; and the old dog had leapt forward to stand in the way of the little man.
“Move out o’ my light!” he cried, trying to dash past.
“Hold him, lad!”
And hold him the old dog did, while his master opened the gate and put the flock through, the dog and the little man dodging back and forth in front of each other like players in a game of rugby.
“Out o’ my path, or I’ll strike!” shouted the little man in a fury, as the last sheep passed through the gate.
Alfred Ollivant's Bob, Son of Battle Page 18
