Psyche, hanging up the raincape on the back of the door after having carefully hooked the inadequate catch, felt the vibration of thunder rolling close overhead. Rain, suddenly descending in torrents, hissed through the rusty iron chimney into the stove, and darkened a brown stain in cardboard which replaced a broken window-pane.
With nothing to do but wait, she sat down in an old rocker beside the stove, realizing for the first time how much she had come to depend on Mag’s constant presence at all times. Mag’s large form, flowing over a couch whose springs now almost touched the floor, had been such a fixture there for so many years that the shabby room seemed bare and denuded without her, and the shack itself, unanchored by her great weight, became a flimsy structure likely to disintegrate with each fresh peal of thunder.
Rubbing her hands up and down her arms, although she was not cold, she listened, tense and lonely, to the increasing fury of the storm: the soft menacing rush of water in flood, as the rain channeled through a cleft beneath the worn board floor; the heavy beat of thunder as it echoed and re-echoed against the low-slung vault of the night; the chattering rattle of ill-fitting casements; the sharp slapping of loose tarpaper as the wind clawed at it. And inside, a false vortex, a small bright square that was too quiet, too static, too empty.
She saw, rather than heard, the door-knob turning. And the tiny click, as the door itself, opening fractionally, caught against the hook, would have been inaudible if she had not known it was coming.
For an instant she did not stir, but rested frozen as she had been when she saw that first, stealthy movement where no movement should have been. Then, almost as if she had been waiting for this thing to happen, she moved with all the split-second swiftness of a young panther, so that when the cheap hook was torn screaming from its socket and the door crashed open against the wall, she was crouched in the far angle of the room behind the stove, a blue-black metal object held steadily in her right hand.
The man, half falling as he burst into the shack, found his balance again with an ease possible only to a trained fighter. And there was something so savagely beautiful in the cruel dark face and the perfectly co-ordinated muscles rippling visibly beneath shirt and trousers rain-plastered against them, that Psyche, if he had rushed her then, would have been physically incapable of shooting him.
Eyes slitted against the sudden light, he paused long enough to get his bearings, and in so doing lost his one opportunity of getting, possibly without even a struggle, what he had come for.
When his eyes did focus directly on her, Psyche, although breathing unevenly, had all her defenses in order again, and the cold barrel of the revolver showed no more promise of wavering than did the stony purity of the set face behind it.
The man smiled, although amusement, in the ordinary sense, was no part of his thoughts. “You little hell-cat—who let you loose with a gun? Put it down before you hurt somebody.” And, as he spoke, he began to edge smoothly, almost imperceptibly, across the room.
The rain, slanting in through the open doorway behind him, formed an ever-widening pool, and jagged yellow lightning framed his sleek dark head with a fleeting, infernal halo.
Pysche would see him again in dreams as he was then, dreams from which she would wake with reluctance, but her voice when she spoke was cool and emotionless. “You keep on comin’, the way you’re doin’, an’ it’s you who will get hurt—an’ hurt bad.”
In spite of the way she handled her weapon> he did not believe that she really knew how to use it, and her slim apparent fragility coupled with his own conceit led him to the conviction that she would not, when it came to the showdown, have either the courage or the will to fire it.
Without further warning, without any visible preparation or tensing of muscles, he sprang forward and sideways in one incredible leap which, if completed, would have brought him into the gap between stove and wall within reach of her. The bullet smashed into his shoulder before he was midway there. While the explosion still lingered on the shattered air, he crashed to the floor, his head striking the wall as he fall; and the red blood spurted through his shirt.
Moving like an automaton, her face as white as the man’s bloodstained shirt, Psyche came out from behind the stove, laid the revolver with precise care on the table, and knelt down beside him. Expressionless, neither regret nor compassion in her remote blue eyes, she turned him over, with some effort for he was heavy, and, without flinching, unbuttoned his shirt and examined the wound. She noted that the free bleeding was already lessening, and that his breathing, though fast, was neither shallow nor noticeably uneven. It was all exactly as Butch had told her it would be if she aimed straight and found her mark; and she had hit this man precisely where she had intended to.
It had not been real when Butch had been teaching her, and it was still not real., A marionette, its strings manipulated by an invisible hand, she continued to go through the well-taught motions of a lesson she no longer comprehended.
She rose, closed the open door, and, going to the dresser, took from the bottom drawer the one piece of cloth in the shack which she knew to be absolutely clean, Mag’s highly valued damask tea cloth. Tearing it into strips, she went back to the wounded man, sat down on the floor, and, making a pad out of the torn linen, placed it gently but firmly over the round, blackened hole where the bullet had gone in. Holding the pad in place with the flat of her hand, she became as still as the sprawled figure beside her.
The storm passed away, leaving in its wake a gentle, persistent rain, but Pysche was unaware of its passing. From time to time the stove contracted audibly as the fire died down, but she did not hear it. The lamp on the dresser flickered uncertainly for several minutes, and then went out, but Psyche, her face a cameo now half in shadow, never moved.
It was thus that Butch and Mag found her nearly an hour later.
Strife, and with it bloodshed, was not new to either of them, but they had already that day gone through what was for them a considerable strain, and so it was Psyche who spoke first, answering the unspoken questions on those two dazed faces.
“He ain’t dead,” she said evenly, “an’ he ain’t gonna die.” A crack appearing in her unnatural composure, she added piteously, “I hadda do it! He bust in here, an’ I hadda do it. He was goin’ to make me—to—to”
“You don’t have to say no more, kid,” Mag broke in, the story now as clear to her as though it had been explained at length. “You done quite right. Don’t never think you didn’t.” Crossing the room, dropping her coat on the floor as she came, she helped Psyche, now shaking violently, to her feet. “Butch, you big ape, don’t just stand there doin’ nothin’! Get some whiskey for the kid, and get it quick!”
“I don’t want—any” Psyche began, her teeth chattering.
“You gotta have somethin’,” Mag told her firmly, “an’ we ain’t got nothin’ else. I’ll fix you some tea soon’s I’ve looked at him.” She jerked her massive head in the general direction of the man to whom she had so far given no more than a cursory glance. If he had died where he lay, she would have considered it no more than he deserved, but her shrewd mind was already beginning to grasp implications in the situation which neither Psyche, in a state of shock, nor Butch, in his simplicity, as yet understood. When the doctor came, and he would have to come, it would only be the start of questions which would finally be asked in a court of law.
Her face suddenly drawn and grey, she turned her back on Psyche where she sat, still shaking, on the couch, and spoke to Butch. “We gotta get the kid away from here,” she said heavily. “She’s gotta go right away.”
Butch looked at her in blank astonishment. “The kid didn’t do nothin’ wrong, Mag. It was, like you might say, self-defense.”
All the defeated acceptance of injustice of her kind was in Mag’s voice when she replied. “The kid’s nobody, an’ we ain’t nobody neither. He’s somebody. They’ll take her away an’ put her in one of them reform schools, as sure as Christ is the livin’ God.
Anythin’—anythin’ at all—is better’n that. She ain’t eighteen yet, tar’s we know or can prove, an’ we ain’t got no papers for her. We couldn’t do nothin’ for her once they got her away from us. Why, she ain’t even got a proper name.”
Butch, his low forehead creased in great ridges, repeated stubbornly, “But she ain’t really done nothin’ wrong.”
“That ain’t the point. If he’d done her harm afore she plugged him, mebbe she’d have a better chance. Mebbe they’d take her away anyway. I dunno. All’s I know is I ain’t goin’ to let nobody put our kid in one of them stinkin’ reform schools. I’d as soon see her dead. Go take a look at him, an’ see he ain’t cold nor bleedin’ —rot him—an’ gimme a chance to think some.”
She sat down beside Psyche, and put a big, warm arm around her shoulder; something she had not done since Psyche was a small child. In this, the greatest crisis she had ever faced, she felt miserably inadequate. The kid was already lost to her, of that she was quite certain. It was for the kid herself that she must think now. With so little time in which to do this, a matter of a few hours only, how was she to find a place for the kid to go to, a place where she would have at least a fighting chance of a decent life?
“Oh God,” she prayed mutely, “what can I do? She’s a good kid, God, You know that. I ain’t got nobody nowheres I can send her to, an’ how can she go alone, God, without no real learnin’, nor trainin’, nor nothin’? We ain’t got enough cash, Butch an’ me, for her to eat an’ sleep proper for more’n a month, God, an’ she’s got to go a long ways from here, an’ go quick. If we was to take her out to the road, God, would You send someone decent to give her a ride—would You see that she landed up somewheres where she had a chance?”
“Kid——” She shook Psyche gently to get her attention. “Kid, you gotta—gotta go away for a spell. It ain’t noways fair, but what you done to-night—well, I’m feared you might get into bad trouble if you was to stay here.”
Reform school was an ugly threat which Psyche had heard used many times over when she was at school, and her actual ignorance of what such a place might be like made her fear of it no less than it would have been if she had known precisely. That it was infinitely worse than an ordinary school, she did realize, and that was enough in itself.
Although the words had come from what seemed to be a long way off, she had both heard and understood what Butch and Mag had said earlier, so now she asked only one question. “Where can I go, Mag?”
“You gotta be brave, kid, because you gotta——” A mental picture of the kid, whom she had come to think of almost as her own, alone and friendless on the dark highway, was for the moment too much for her. Her throat harsh and dry, she began again. “You ain’t got nowheres exactly, kid. But you’re growed, an’ you can cook real good, an’ if you starts out now——”
“Mag,” Psyche interrupted urgently, “I can’t go without I tell Nick first.”
The artist fellow! It was almost as if a sky-rocket had gone off inside Mag’s head. He had said—what had he said about the kid that day he had come to the shack? Something about wishing she could always work for him. He had laughed when he had said it, but he had sounded as if he meant it just the same. He had said— frantically she searched her memory, and suddenly it was as if he were beside her, saying again, “You ask me if she’s a good model. She is so good I wish I could carry her off to work for me indefinitely.”
Getting to her feet with an agility she had not known she still possessed, her face ten years younger than it had been a moment before, she cried, “Butch—Butch! You hear that? The artist fellow. The kid can go with him!”
“Where’s he goin’?” asked Butch, looking up from a not altogether unhappy examination of the result of his own teachings.
“Don’t ask no stoopid questions. There ain’t time.”
“This here bastard mebbe ain’t goin’ to come to ‘til momin’. He’s hit his head on somethin’ as well’s gettin’ plugged.”
“If we don’t do nothin’ about the doctor for——” Mag calculated rapidly, “—’bout two hours, is he gonna be all right?”
Butch, perhaps because his limited mental capacities had been taxed with little else since, remembered most of what he had learned as a member of the police force, and a rough and ready first-aid was still one of his few accomplishments. “Sure, he ain’t gonna die, not to-night, nor any time soon.”
“Can we move him? He’s in the road there.”
Slowly Butch shook his head. He had seen men, in worse condition than this, hauled ungently into a police wagon and survive, but it was not treatment he felt he could recommend. “Better leave him lay. I’ll get a blanket to put on him. He’s gotta he kep’ warm.”
By the time he had done this, Mag was seated at the table using a stub of pencil and a piece of lined paper torn from an old exercise book. “Light t’other lamp, will you. I can’t see so good as I useta.”
“What you doin’?”
Mag did not reply. A few minutes later she reread her own painful scrawl, was far from satisfied with what she had written, but decided it would do. Folding the paper twice, she levered herself up from the bench and addressed Butch. “Take this here letter to the hotel an’ find the artist fellow an’ give it to him. Don’t give it to no one else.”
Butch scratched his head in slow perplexity. Events were moving far too fast for him. “What you want for me to say to him?”
Psyche spoke then. “Mag wants for me to go with Nick, Butch, an’ I guess this here letter’s to tell him so. You see——” her voice broke, and she steadied it with an effort, “—you see I can’t stay here no more, else they—they’d get me sure.”
Butch’s big, hairy hand closed over the letter. He put it carefully in the pocket of his worn blue serge jacket. He took his hat from its hook, walked to the door, opened it, and then stood stock still. Without looking back, he said, “Mag—Mag, you mean the kid ain’t gonna rest with us no more?”
Mag tried to swallow the sharp lump in her throat, but it would not go down. “That’s right,” she said hoarsely. “Now don’t go awastin’ no more time.”
Butch stepped out into the darkness, and the door, which he usually slammed with careless violence, closed behind him without a sound.
3
PATIENCE was not one of Nick’s virtues. the evening of The second day of rain found him pacing up and down a room he considered supremely unattractive, the while he cursed the weather and wished himself anywhere else but in a stinking hole where, he had by now convinced himself, it rained from year’s end to year’s end. he had tried sitting in the hotel lobby, but had retired in disgust from its brass cuspidors, dusty palms, and odour of damp linoleum.
When Butch knocked on his door he had reached a stage where any kind of intrusion on his solitary frustration was a relief. Flinging the door open, confronted with an individual whom he had never seen before, he nevertheless said, “Come in.”
Butch came in, and there matters might have rested indefinitely if Nick had not said, “Did you want something?”
Butch’s life, like that of an old grizzly bear, ran in grooves, in trails of habit worn so deep it was surprising they were not there to be seen. Deflected, without sufficient warning, from his usual paths, his thinking was even more laboured than it normally was. This direct question, coupled with the cool self-sufficiency of the stranger who asked it, upset him, and he could find nothing to say.
Nick, already bored with an encounter which promised to be entirely unproductive, said again, somewhat impatiently, “Did you want something?”
Still unable to frame a suitable verbal reply, Butch simply drew the letter from his pocket and handed it over.
Mag’s illiterate note was not easy to read, but its content, once deciphered, was clear and to the point. Nick read it through three times before absently crumpling it up in his hand. Biting his lip, keen eyes looking straight through the bulk of Butch who stood fumbling awkwardly with hi
s old felt hat, he saw Psyche in one pose after another while he weighed the pros and cons of a situation which affected him more vitally than Mag could possibly have guessed.
If he did not, as the note suggested, take the girl away at once, his chances of ever painting her again appeared to be nil. He hadtwo sketches of her unfinished, and it was unthinkable that he fail to complete them, impossible that they represent his lastopportunity to work with a model whose equal he might never find again. If he did take her, could he keep her at the studio without advertising her presence there? Yes, that could probably bemanaged—and. Lord, what an opportunity! If he could have her there under ideal working conditions twenty-four hours a day, hecould accomplish in months what it might otherwise take years to do. Alice—could this thing be done without his wife’s knowledge? He would give his right—he mentally corrected himself his left arm before he would wilfully lose Alice. But Alice wasthree thousand miles away from the converted barn in its secludedvalley. She would be away until September—and this was onlythe beginning of June——
Suddenly he made up his mind. If the note contained truth, if the man were only injured, then he would take her. It was highly unlikely that an intensive search would be made for her if the man recovered. No charge more severe than juvenile delinquency could be made to stick, and taxpayers’ money was not usually thrown away on a widespread hunt for a juvenile with no previous record.
His eyes finding a shorter perspective again, he looked directly at Butch, and said decisively, “I’ll come.” He nodded toward a bottle of whiskey on the night-table. “Pour yourself a drink. I’ll be ready in twenty minutes.”
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