She answered resentfully, “What makes you
so glad, David? He didn’t come back to
make you drive your husband away!”
“I was always afraid he might make me kill him.
He tried hard enough, and sometimes I thought he might.
But blessed be the Lord, he’s dead. They’re
holding a funeral for him in the Temple. The news
is all through the Creek. I suppose you know
how Jane has fixed it up with James Redfield.
I feel to be sorry for Hughey Blake; but he never
could have mastered her. She’s got an awful
will, Jane has. But James has got an awful will
too, as strong as Jane—”
Nancy cut him short: “David, I don’t
care anything about Jane—now.”
“No,” he assented. “Where’s
Joey?” he asked, leaning inward with his hands
resting on either jamb of the door.
“Gone for Laban.”
“Well,” David said, with something like
grudge. “You hain’t lost much time.
But I don’t know as I blame you,” he relented.
“I wouldn’t care if you did, David,”
she answered.
Late in the long twilight of the early spring day
a stranger who was traveling in the old fashion on
horseback, with his legs swathed in green baize against
the mud of the streaming roads, and with his spattered
saddle-bags hung over the pommel before him, was riding
into Leatherwood. He paused in a puddle of the
lane that left the turnpike not far off, and curved
between the new-plowed fields in front of a double
log cabin, which had the air of being one of the best
habitations of its time though its time was long past;
the logs it was built of were squared; the chimneys
at either end were of stone masonry instead of notched
sticks laid in clay. Against the wall of the
porch between the two rooms of the cabin an old man
sat tilted back in his chair, smoking a pipe which
he took from his mouth at sight of the stranger’s
arrest.
“Can you tell me, please, which is my way to
the tavern, or some place where I can find a night’s
lodging?”
The old man dropped his chair forward, and got somewhat
painfully out of it to toddle to the edge of his porch.
“Why, there isn’t a tavern, rightly speaking,
in Leatherwood, now, though for the backwoods we had
a very passable one, once. I wish,” he
said after a moment, “that we could offer you
a lodging here; but if you’ll light and throw
your horse’s rein over the peg in this post,
I would be pleased to have you stay to supper with
us. My wife is just getting it.”
“Why, thank you, thank you,” the stranger
said. “I mustn’t think of troubling
you. I dare say I can get something to eat at
your tavern. I’ve often been over night
in worse places, no doubt. I’ve been traveling
through your State, and I’ve turned a little
out of my way to stop at Leatherwood, because I’ve
been interested in a peculiar incident of your local
history.”
The two men perceived from something in each other’s
parlance, though one spoke with the neat accent of
the countries beyond the Alleghanies, and the other
with the soft slurring Ohio River utterance, that they
were in the presence of men different by thinking
if not by learning from most men in the belated region
of a new country.
