Stories of the Foot-hills Part 8

The boy felt his importance as the bearer of sensational tidings ebbing away.

"I don't care," he replied sullenly. "They'll hang 'im, anyway: the cor'ner said so."

He clutched his throat with his thumbs and forefingers, thrusting out his tongue and rolling his eyes in blood-curdling pantomime.

His companion turned away drearily. The boy's first words had called up a vaguely outlined picture of flight, pursuit, and capture, possibly violence. This faded away, leaving her brain numb under its burden of uncertainty and deceit. She had an aching consciousness of her own ignorance. Others knew what might happen to him, but she must not even ask. She shrank in terror from what her curiosity might betray. She must stand idly by and wait. Perhaps Lysander would know; if she could ask any one, she could ask Lysander. There had sprung up in her mind a shadowy, half-formed doubt concerning the wisdom of her silence. He had told it himself, Ulysses had said; and this had chilled the little glow at her heart that came from a sense of their common secret. If she could only see him and ask what he would have her do; but that was impossible. Perhaps, if he knew she had seen it, he might say she must tell, even if--even if-- She gave a little moan, and leaned her forehead against the sash. Below she could hear the subdued voices of the men, and the creaking of the kitchen floor as Minerva walked to and fro, putting away the remnants of the coroner's repast. Already the children were beginning to recover from their awestricken silence, and Melissa could see them darting in and out among the fig-trees, firing pantomimic revolvers at each other with loud vocal explosions.

The gap that the old man's death had made in the household was very slight indeed; not half the calamity that the drying up of the spring had been. Melissa acknowledged this to herself with the candor peculiar to the very wise and the very ignorant, who alone seem daring enough to look at things as they are.

"They hadn't ought to do anything to 'im; it ain't fair," she said to herself stoutly; "an' he just stood up an' told on hisself because he knowed he hadn't done anything bad. I sh'd think they'd be ashamed of themselves to do anything to 'im after that."

"M'lissy!" Mrs. Sproul called from the foot of the stairs, her voice dying away in a prolonged sniffle. "I wish 't you'd come down and help Lysander hook up the team. He's got to go down t' the Mission, and it'll be 'way into the night before he gets back."

The girl stood still a moment, biting her lip, and then hurried across the floor and down the staircase as if pursued. Minerva had left the kitchen, and there was no one to notice her unusual haste. Out at the barn, Lysander, almost disabled by the accession of a stiff white s.h.i.+rt and collar, was perspiring heavily in his haste to harness the mules.

"Minervy's got 'er heart set on havin' the Odd Fellers conduct the funer'l," he said apologetically. "Strikes me kind o' onnecessary, but 't won't do no harm, I s'pose. She says yer paw was an Odd Feller 'way back, but he ain't kep' it up. I dunno if they'll bury 'im or not."

The girl listened to him absently, straightening the mule's long ear which was caught in the headstall, and fastening the buckles of the harness. Her face was hidden by her drooping sunbonnet, and Lysander could not see its pinched, quivering whiteness. They led the mules out of the stable and backed them toward the wagon standing under a live oak. Melissa bent over to fasten the tugs, and asked in a voice steadied to lifeless monotony,--

"Do you think they'll do anything to him for it, Lysander?"

"I dunno, M'lissy," said the man. "He told the men at the camp it was self-defense, and mebbe he can prove it; but bein' no witnesses, they may lock 'im up fer a year or two, just to give 'im time to cool off.

It'll be good fer 'im. He oughtn't to be so previous with his firearms."

"But paw was--they don't know--mebbe"--panted the girl brokenly.

"Yes, yes, M'lissy, I don't doubt yer paw was aggravatin'; but we don't know, and we'd better not take sides. The young feller ain't nothin' to us, an' yer paw was--well, he was yer _paw_, we've got to remember that."

Lysander put his foot on the hub and mounted to the high seat, gathering up the reins and putting on the brake. The mules started forward, and then held back in a protesting way, and the wagon went creaking and sc.r.a.ping through the sand down the mountain road.

VII.

In the days that pa.s.sed wearisomely enough before the trial, Melissa heard much that did not tend to soothe her hara.s.sed little soul.

Lysander, having taken refuge behind the a.s.sertion that it "wasn't becomin' fer the fam'ly to take sides," bore his mother-in-law's stinging sarcasms in virtuous silence.

"Seems to me it depends on which side you take," sneered the old woman.

"I don't see anything so very impullite in gettin' mad when yer pap's shot down like a dog."

Lysander braced himself judicially.

"We don't none of us know nothin' about it," he contended. "If I'd 'a'

been there and 'a' seen the scrimmage, I'd 'a' knowed what to think. As 'tis, I dunno what to think, and there's no law that kin make you think when you don't hev no fax to base your thinkun' on."

"Some folks lacks other things besides fax to base their thinkun' on,"

the old woman jerked out sententiously.

Lysander pressed the tobacco into his cob pipe, and scratched a match on the sole of his boot.

"I think they've been middlin' fair," he said, between puffs, "fixin' up that water business. It's my opinion the young feller's at the bottom of it,--they say his father's well off; 't enny rate, it's _fixed_, an'

you're better off 'n you wuz,--exceptin', uv course, your affliction, an' that can't be helped." The man composed his voice very much as he would have straightened a corpse in which he had no personal interest.

"I'm in fer shuttin' up."

"They don't seem to want you to shut up," fretted his mother-in-law.

"They've s'peenied _you_."

"They're welcome to all I know; 'tain't much, an' 't won't help nor hender, as I c'n see, but such as it is, they kin hev it an' welcome."

Lysander stood in the doorway, with his hat on the back of his head. He tilted it over his eyes, as he made this avowal, and sauntered toward the stable, with his head thrown back, peering from under the brim, as if its inconvenient position were a matter entirely beyond his control.

Melissa was was.h.i.+ng dishes at a table in the corner of the kitchen. She hurried a little, trembling in her eagerness to speak to Lysander alone.

She carried the dishpan to the kitchen door to empty it, and the chickens came scuttling with half-flying strides from the shade of the geraniums where they were dusting themselves, and then fled with a chorus of dismayed squawks as the dish-water splashed among them. The girl hung the pan on a nail outside, and flung her ap.r.o.n over her head.

She could see Lysander's tilted hat moving among the low blue gums beside the shed. She drew the folds of her ap.r.o.n forward to shade her face, and went down the path with a studied unconcern that sat as ill upon her as haste. Lysander was mending the cultivator; he looked up, but not as high as her face.

"'Llo, M'lissy," he said, as kindly as was compatible with a rusty bit of wire between his teeth.

The girl leaned against the shaded side of a stack of baled barley hay.

"Lysander," she began quaveringly, "Lysander, if you'd seen paw shot, an' knowed all about it, could they make you tell--would you think you'd ought to tell?" She hurried her questions as they had been crowding in her sore conscience. "I mean, of course, if you'd seen it, Lysander."

Her brother-in-law straightened himself, and set his hat on the back of his head without speaking. Melissa could feel him looking at her curiously.

"Of course, that's all I mean, Lysander,--just if you'd seen it; would you tell?" she faltered.

"M'lissy," said the man impressively, "if I'd seen my own paw killed, an' n.o.body asked me to tell, I'd keep my mouth most piously shut; that's what I'd do."

"But if he was mad, Sandy, an' tried to kill somebody else, and, oh,"--her voice broke into a piteous wail,--"if they wuz thinkun' o'

hangin' 'im!"

"They ain't a-goin' to hang n.o.body, M'lissy," said Lysander confidently,--"hangin' has gone out o' fas.h.i.+on. And I don't think it's becomin' fer the fam'ly to interfere, especially the women folks; besides, we don't none of us know nothin' about it, you see. Don't you fret about things you don't know nothin' about. The law'll have to take its course, M'lissy. That young feller's goin' to git off reasonable,--very reasonable, indeed, considerin'."

Melissa rubbed her feet in the loose straw, restless and uncomforted.

"When's the trial, Lysander?" she asked, after a little pause, during which her companion resumed his encounter with the rusty wire he was straightening.

"The trial, M'lissy, is set for tuhmorruh," Lysander replied, a trifle oracularly. "I'm a-goin' down because they've sent fer me; if they hadn't 'a' sent, I wouldn't 'a' gone. I don't know nothin' exceptin'

that yer paw had one of his spells,"--inebriety was always thus decorously cloaked in Lysander's domestic conversation,--"an' went off up the canon that mornin' r'arin' mad about the spring. Of course they don't know that's all I know,--if they knowed it, perhaps they wouldn't want me; but if they hadn't sent fer me, you can bet I'd stick at home closer'n a scale-bug to an orange-tree, Melissy, perticular if I was a young girl, an' didn't know nothin' whatever about the hull fracas. An'

young girls ain't expected to know about such things; it ain't proper fer 'em, especially when they're members of the fam'ly."

This piece of highly involved wisdom quieted Melissa very much as a handkerchief stuffed into a sufferer's mouth allays his pain. She went about the rest of the day silent and distressed.

At daybreak the next morning, Lysander harnessed the dun-colored mules and drove to Los Angeles.

The sun rose higher, and the warm dullness of a California summer day settled down upon the little mountain ranch. Heat seemed to rise in s.h.i.+mmering waves from the yellow barley stubble. The orange-trees cast dense shadows with no coolness in them, and along the edge of the orchard the broad leaves of the squash-vines hung in limp dejection upon their stalks. The heated air was full of pungent odors: tar and honey and spice from the sage and eucalyptus, with now and then a warmer puff of some new wild fragrance from far up the mountain-side.

"We're a-goin' to have three hot days," said Mrs. Sproul, looking anxiously over the valley from the shelter of her husband's hat.

"Sandy'll swelter, bein' dressed up so. I do hope they won't keep him long. He don't know nothin' about it, noway. Seems to me they might 'a'

believed him, when he said so."