My American

by Stella Gibbons

  Maybe he will shoot me, and the kid too, thought Bob as he turned the car off the main road into one that led up into the mountains. But I guess he won’t; Dan isn’t a killer. Poor little kid, I bet he’s scared! I’ve got to get him out of this, and safe, too. I’ve got the chance now to make up for what I did to him. And he drove on, ashamed that he had even let the thought of going back enter his head.

  He was now working his way straight across the State by lesser roads, where the only traffic was an occasional Ford full of parcels and children on its way back from shopping to some lonely farm. The rainstorm that had swept down from the hills with the giant cloud was now over, and had shattered the cloud itself into long banks of grey lying above a serene and gorgeous afterglow of gold. The little faces of some children looking through the windows of an old car which he passed were glorified by this radiance from the west, and their quick smiles and the small hands they waved to him seemed beautiful. But ahead of him rose the barrier of the Gluscap Mountains, spread for hundreds of miles with their sombre woods against the sky of the north. The children’s faces made him think tenderly of Amy, and he wondered if Francey had called them up at home yet and given his message? It’ll seem crazy to them, he thought, and they’ll wonder why I couldn’t call them up myself, and who the heck Francey is, but it’s better than leaving them without a word.

  The road grew rougher and lonelier under the fast-darkening sky as the car steadily climbed. The air was keen here, and he caught wafts of scent from berry-bushes scattered over with little flowers, from patches of wiry grass drenched by rain and from the sombre branches of pines where already the night wind was faintly hissing, from hemlocks and pines standing motionless with raindrops glittering on their leaves from the glow in the west. To-morrow I’ll be here with her, he thought. It’s beautiful here—I wish she could see it now. And he thought how different it would look to-morrow, under the hot sun and blue sky, with the katydids fiddling and the morning glories open. His mind went over into to-morrow and rested there in happiness, as if to-morrow were paradise.

  He switched on the lights, and turned the car up a track leading to the heart of the hills.

  Amy looked out of her window before she went down to dinner to see if Bob might be crossing the lawn. But it was dark except for the faintest streak of light in the west, and she could make out nothing. She drew her head in, disturbed and anxious, and went downstairs.

  “Bob back?” inquired Mr. Vorst, shaking cocktails in the drawing-room, whence all traces of the party had been cleared away.

  “I don’t know, dear; I haven’t heard him. Myron, is Bob back?” asked Mrs. Vorst, as the handyman came in to speak to Mr. Vorst.

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, startled.

  “Yep. He ain’t in. Reckon something’s happened to him,” retorted Myron with satisfaction.

  “Don’t be a fool! What could have happened to him? He only went to mail a letter!” said Mr. Vorst sharply: Amy had suddenly sat upright in her low chair and was staring across at Myron with a white face.

  “Dunno, but it’s mighty queer; goin’ out to mail a letter and not comin’ back,” persisted Myron sulkily, looking at Amy out of the corner of his eye. “Crazy kind o’ thing to do, the first night o’ visitors bein’ here, and so forth.”

  “Maybe he went down to see his Aunt Carol; I might just go and call her up,” and Mrs. Vorst went quickly out of the room.

  “Mrs. Vorst’s sister is in bed; had a touch of grippe,” explained Mr. Vorst. “She thought maybe Bob might have gone down to see her. Is that right for you, Miss Lee?” coming across to her with a glass held up and smiling.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said faintly, taking it in her cold fingers.

  “Don’t worry, he’s perfectly all right,” he said very kindly completely dropping his pretence of not noticing her agitation. “It’s just some quite ordinary thing, I’m sure … only naturally we all still feel a bit jumpy about Bob, because of what happened——”

  “Yes!” she said gratefully, looking up at him. “He’s only just come back, you see, hasn’t he?”

  He nodded, returning her look steadily. Myron was still fussing about the window as they spoke, with his back to them, but listening to every word. Suddenly a telephone bell rang faintly as if from a distant part of the house.

  “That’s in my study—you can’t get through while Mrs. Vorst’s talking in the dining-room—maybe it’s Bob—there now, Miss Lee, you’ll have to come and give him a talking-to!” and he hurried, smiling, out of the room. She heard him running upstairs with the heavy step of middle-age, and then there was silence except for the distant sound of Mrs. Vorst’s low voice through the half-open door as she talked on the telephone to her sister-in-law’s house.

  Myron finished what he was doing to the window and came slowly across the room to the door. To reach it he had to pass Amy, and when he was level with her he suddenly said—

  “Worried about Bob, ain’t yer?”

  “Yes! Oh, yes, I am! And I’m frightened!” she answered at once, turning round in her chair to face him with her hands pressed together. She could think of nothing but that scrap of newspaper! that awful picture of something lying on the ground! The longing to tell someone about it was torturing her.

  “So’m I,” he said gloomily, standing on one foot and lowering his queer battered face so that it looked dolefully down at her. “All very well, but I reckon something must hev happened to him.”

  “What could have, do you think?” she asked fearfully.

  “Well, I dunno. But I reckon Dan Carr’s got hold o’ him again, somehow. I kind o’ feel it. He’s been round here lately. Buddy o’ mine down at Hannigan’s Pool Rooms saw him only yesterday. An’ he wouldn’t like Bob leavin’ his mob an’ comin’ back home. Jest out o’ spite he’d want him ter go back with them again.”

  “Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do?” she said quietly, beginning to rock to and fro, staring down at the ground.

  “Quit bein’ hysterical, fer a start,” said Myron at once—just as he had to the weeping Helen three months ago. “That don’t help any. If Bob is with Dan, I reckon he’ll be all right. He’s a poor thing, Dan Carr, a poor mean thing. Hain’t got no faculty. When he was a kid I used to notice his hands. Like a bear’s paws—no good fer anythin’. All talk, he was, an’ still is. Now Bob’s hands—they’re a human creature’s hands. Clever. There’s a lot in hands, if you notice.”

  She nodded, drying her eyes and not looking at him, but she had stopped rocking.

  “Yes——” he went on musingly in his unlovely New England voice. “I reckon that’s about what’s happened. Now what I’m jest wonderin’ is this——”

  For the next moment she did not hear what he was saying, for she was wondering whether to tell him about the scrap of newspaper. In spite of his spiteful, inquisitive manner, she felt at ease with him in a strange way, exactly as a child feels more at home with another child, even an unpleasant child, than with the kindest and most intelligent grown-up. She knew that Myron would believe her story about the scrap of newspaper. He might say it was queer, but he would at once see how queer it was, and would not try to soothe her by explaining it away.

  She came out of her agitated thoughts to hear him saying:

  “—An’ I reckon ef he’s got him anywhere, that’s wheer he is.”

  “I want to tell you something,” she began at once, not heeding what he said. “I’ve had queer dreams sometimes about Bob (he and I are going to get married, you know,” she explained simply, lifting her wet eyes to Myron, whose own dim brown ones seemed at once to blaze with passionate interest) “and there’s one dream I had that frightened me very much. It was about a bit of newspaper. It was a photograph of a cabin in the woods somewhere, and there were some men standing round a—a—dark thing lying on the ground. It might have been someone dead. Do you think it could have anything to do with Bob?”

  “Ain’t that just
what I’ve been tellin’ yer?” he said shortly, suddenly stooping to pick up a dirty glass which someone had left down beside a chair. “Dan’s got a cabin he uses up in the Gluscaps, on the Moon River. That’s wheer I reckon he’s took Bob—ef he’s got him. That’s wheer you dreamt about. Ah, I believe in dreams. My uncle married a woman from Missouri and they had a darkey servant as used to see hants. (That’s what they call a ghost down South; a hant.) He saw a hant in the woods one day when he was out berryin’ with my aunt’s children an’ he fainted clean away. Skeered, you know. Sure, that’s wheer you dreamt about. Dan’s cabin.” And he began to move towards the door with the usual spiteful yet wooden expression on his face.

  “But if Dan really has got him, and taken him there, can’t we do something?” she exclaimed desperately, getting up and moving after him.

  “Oh, maybe it ain’t so at all, maybe it’s all imaginin’ an’ so forth,” he said at once, backing out of the room. “Can’t go to the police with a tale like that now, can we? Me thinkin’ Dan may hev get him, an’ you dreamin’ about a picture that may be Dan’s cabin. Why, the police wouldn’t go anywheer fer that. Psychopaths’ ward, thet’s wheer they’d put us.”

  “And perhaps Dan hasn’t got him at all!” she said, a great relief suddenly coming over her. “Perhaps it’s just some quite ordinary thing, and in a minute he’ll come in, and we’ll all feel so silly for having been so frightened——”

  “Mebbe,” he said, but he said it doubtfully, and just then Mrs. Vorst came past him into the room, trying not to look worried.

  “No, he isn’t down at Aunt Carol’s,” she said. “Didn’t the telephone go upstairs?” to Myron.

  “Sure. Mr. Vorst’s up theer now.”

  “Oh, then perhaps it’s Bob——”

  But Mr. Vorst was coming down the stairs shaking his head. “Only the Sentinel, wanting me to look in tomorrow,” he said.

  Mrs. Vorst took up her drink and stared at it. She seemed to have forgotten Amy’s presence. At last she said:

  “Oh, well. Perhaps we’d better have dinner. Tell Olga, will you, Myron?”

  Myron went out, and Mr. Vorst drained his glass.

  “Another, Miss Lee?”

  She shook her head, smiling painfully.

  “Sharlie?”

  “No, thanks. Webster, do you think he could have fallen and twisted his ankle?”

  “In Carr’s Wood? He knows it like the back of his own hand. No; there’s some perfectly good and simple reason … oh, he’ll be in any minute now.”

  “Maybe Myron ought to go down with a torch and look——”

  “Oh, Sharlie!” He dropped his hand affectionately on her shoulder, turning to smile at Amy. “Be your age! We’re getting all worked up over nothing. Let’s come in and eat. It’s queer,” he went on, as they crossed the hall to the dining-room, “I always eat everything in sight at a cocktail party and yet I’m never so ready for my dinner as after we’ve thrown one——”

  They sat down, and the Polish girl began to hand the soup.

  Out in the kitchen, Myron sat himself down in his old hickory rocker with that morning’s Sentinel and began to read the first column of the first page. But before he had read half-way down he sighed loudly, crumpled the paper into a ball, and dropped it on the floor. Then he got up and went into the little room opening off the kitchen which was his lair.

  Here he hoarded old coats discarded years ago by Boone and Bob, back numbers of Life and the Sentinel, a buffalo robe worn greasy with age, flattened moccasins, and a drawerful of beautiful and fantastic tiny toys carved out of scraps of wood; fairylike boats with full-rigged sails made from bits of bright stuff discarded by Lou in her dressmaking; models of his own rocker fitted with a minute cushion, cradles with peanut-babies in them, little sofas fitted with roly-poly pillows, and miniature birdcages made from fragments of wire, with tiny birds of cork and killdeer or chickadee feathers inside. No child had ever been gladdened by a present of one of these marvels save Lou; Boone and Bob and Irene had years ago forgotten that they existed, but Lou still possessed a set of doll’s furniture, bed, table, chairs and sofa, given to her by Myron when she was eight. He admired her deftness; she had always been clever with her hands, and the elfin furniture was a tribute from one artist to another.

  But this evening Myron had not come to admire his drawerful of toys; he had business with the drawer next to it. Then he put on his overcoat and hat and came out into the kitchen.

  Olga looked up from the salad she was mixing.

  “Goin’ to the movies,” remarked Myron, and went out to the yard. Presently, while she was nicely dropping in the oil, Olga heard his old car start up and drive away.

  Bob stopped at last at the beginning of a track too rough for the car to attempt, which went up into the woods. All was still, but long streamers of cloud moved quickly across the bright stars as if there was a high wind blowing up there, and far off he could hear the roar of falling water—the Mooween, dashing down between its rocks. He remembered how black they used to look against the white foam, like big animals crouching to drink. The Indians had seen them thus: the river’s name meant Black Bear. He shut the door of the car and turned up his collar against the wind and set off along the track.

  The wood was full of little sounds and movement, while the clouds moved quickly among the black branches over his head, now hiding a big glittering star, now leaving it flashing clear, and the fresh woodsy smell he so well remembered came out from wet moss and drenched leaves. Once he went past a clearing where trees had been cut down, and their stumps glimmered; he saw the woodsmen’s deserted cabin and the blackened ring left by their fire. He thought vaguely about the woods, rolling away across their mountain-range, always beautiful, full of darting secret life, and able to do without man. It’s cold and lonely here but it’s beautiful, he thought, glancing away on either side into the confusion of tree trunks now beginning to be visible in the radiance forerunning the rising moon. I wonder where Dan’s parked the car? Poor little kid; he must be scared. And by now at home they’ll have called up all sorts of folk in Morgan to see if I’m there, and they’ll be getting scared, too. She’ll be frightened. I wish I’d called them up myself, now. It was a fool thing to do. But I had to come. I’ve got to get Joe back.

  It’ll be all right, I guess. It’s just one of Dan’s crazy jokes.

  But if they catch him this time he won’t get off.

  When he had been walking steadily for nearly an hour he came to a place where he stopped, and stared up into the branches overhead.

  A white rag hung there, showing plainly even in the confusing gloom, and he at once turned aside and entered the forest.

  Soon his shoes and his trousers as far as the knee were soaked in dew as he moved slowly through the undergrowth, with a slightly swaying movement like that of a man wading in deep water. The moon had risen and its light made his way a little easier and the roar of the water sounded loud and very near.

  And at last he came out into a glade where old stumps showed grey by the doubtful light from the young moon, and across the far end of the clearing something white moved and splashed among black rounded shapes: the Mooween between its bearlike rocks. A ruined cabin, dark and silent, stood on the far edge of the clearing where the trees began again.

  The moon had brought the sense of summer back into the night. Its light seemed to calm the moving tops of the trees. The wind had fallen. Little flowers on a bush showed white as Bob went past and a sweet smell wafted over him. He put his hands in his pockets and, still walking towards the hut with his eyes fixed on its shut door, he shouted:

  “Dan! Hullo there!”

  The loud sound seemed to have nothing to do with the motionless trees, the rushing water, the faint light from the moon.

  He shouted again, still advancing—

  “Dan!”

  . . .

  Mrs. Vorst said suddenly—

  “I can’t stand this a minute longer, Webster!
Where is he? He went out to mail a letter and he’s been gone three hours!”

  She crushed out her cigarette and stood up quickly, looking wildly at her husband. Amy, too, was looking at Mr. Vorst, but with an absolutely expressionless face. Her terror and anxiety had so increased during the last hour that she was now almost incapable of thought, let alone sensible speech, and automatically she had put on once more the mask that had served her so well in her childhood.

  “Now, don’t worry, Sharlie. Everything’s going to be all right,” Mr. Vorst said soothingly. “I’m still sure the boy’s perfectly safe, but if it will make you feel better we’ll have Myron go down to Carr’s and see if he has turned his ankle or met a wild Indian or something—why, you’ll give Miss Lee a very poor opinion of Vine Falls if you go on like this——” he went on turning to smile at Amy. But the faint movement of the lips and the agonized stare with which she met his smile stopped him from finishing his speech. Good God, she’s terrified out of her wits, he thought, returning her stare and trying to think of something to say. Her terror communicated itself to him, and when he spoke again it was in a changed tone.

  “I’ll go down with him. It certainly is very strange—Miss Lee’s first evening here——” and he hurried out of the room.

  “What can have happened?” said Mrs. Vorst at once in a low voice, turning to Amy. “Oh, I’m so frightened! It’s crazy of me, I suppose, but I can’t help being afraid of Dan Carr.”