The Spread Eagle and Other Stories Part 7

Will Braddish, a painter by trade, met us one day with brushes and a great bucket of white paint, and, while he and Mary sat upon the doorstep talking in low tones or directing in high, Ellen and I made s.h.i.+ft to paint the little picket-fence until it was white as new snow.

At odd times Braddish himself painted the little house (it was all of old-fas.h.i.+oned, long s.h.i.+ngles) inside and out, and a friend of his got up on the roof with mortar and a trowel, and pointed-up the brick chimney; and my father and Mr. Sturtevant contributed a load of beautiful, sleek, rich pasture sod and the labor to lay it; so that by midsummer the little domain was the spickest, spannest little dream of a home in the whole county. The young couple bought furniture, and received gifts of furniture, prints, an A1 range, a tiny, s.h.i.+ny, desirable thing; and the whole world and all things in it smiled them in the face. Braddish, as you will have guessed, was a prosperous young man. He was popular, too, and of good habits. People said only against him that he was impulsive and had sudden fits of the devil's own temper, but that he recovered from these in a twinkling and before anything came of them. And even the merest child could see that he thought the world of Mary. I have seen him show her little attentions such as my sister retailed me of personages in fairy stories and chivalric histories. Once when there was a puddle to cross he made a causeway of his coat, like another Raleigh, and Mary crossed upon it, like one in a trance of tender happiness, oblivious of the fact that she might easily have gone around and saved the coat. His skin and his eyes were almost as clear as Mary's own, and he had a bold, das.h.i.+ng, independent way with him.

But it wasn't often that Braddish could get free of his manifold occupations: his painting contracts and his political engagements. He was by way of growing very influential in local politics, and people predicted an unstintedly successful life for him. He was considered unusually clever and able. His manners were superior to his station, and he had done a deal of heterogeneous reading. But, of course, whenever it was possible he was with Mary and helped her out with looking after Ellen and me. My mother, who was very timid about tramps, looked upon these occasions as in the nature of real blessings. There was nowhere in the countryside that we children might not safely venture with Will Braddish strolling behind. He loved children--he really did, a rare, rare thing--and he was big, and courageous, and strong, and quick. He was very tactful, too, on these excursions and talked a good part of the time for the three of us, instead of for Mary alone. Nice, honest talk it was, too, with just enough robbers, and highwaymen, and lions, and Indians to give it spice. But all the adventures through which he pa.s.sed us were open and honest. How the n.o.ble heroes _did_ get on in life, and how the wicked villains did catch it!

I remember once we were returning home past the Boole Dogge Farm, and Braddish, wiping his brow, for it was cruelly hot, seated himself as bold as could be on the boundary wall. The conversation had been upon robbers, and how they always, always got caught.

"It doesn't matter," Braddish said, "where they hide. Take this old farm. It's the best hiding-place in this end of the county--woods, and marshes, and old wells, and bushes, and hollows--"

We asked him in much awe if he had ever actually set foot on the place.

"Yes, indeed," he said; "when I was a boy I knew every inch of it; I was always hunting and trapping, and looking for arrowheads. And that was the best country. Once I spent a night in the woods yonder. The bridge was open to let a tugboat through and got stuck so they couldn't shut it, and there was no way back to Westchester except over the railroad trestle, and my father had said that I could go anywhere I pleased except on that trestle. And so here I was caught, and it came on to blither and blow, and I found an oak tree, all hollow like a little house, and I crept in and fell asleep and never woke till daylight. My father said next time I could come home by the trestle, or he'd know the reason why."

"But," said I, "weren't you afraid the bulldogs would get you?"

"Now, if they'd said bull-terriers," he said, "I might have had my doubts, but a bulldog's no more dangerous than a toadfish. He's like my old grandma. What teeth he has don't meet. And besides," he said, "there weren't any bulldogs on that farm. And I don't believe there ever were.

Now, I'm not sure, sonny," he said, "but you climb up here--"

I climbed upon the wall, and he held me so that I should not fall.

"Do you see," said he, "way down yonder over the tops of the trees a dead limb sticking up?"

I saw it finally.

"Well," he said, "I'd stake something that that's a part of the old hollow oak. Shall we go and see?"

But Mary told him that the farm was out of bounds. And he thought a moment, and then swung his legs over the wall.

"I won't be two minutes," he said. "I'd like to see if I'm right--it's fifteen years ago--" And he strode off across the forbidden farm to the woods. When he came back he said that he had been right, and that nothing had changed much. He tossed me a flint arrowhead that he had picked up--he was always finding things, and we went on again.

When we got to the middle of Pelham Bridge we all stopped and leaned against the railing and looked down into the swift, swirling current.

Braddish tore an old envelop into little pieces and dropped them overboard by pairs, so that we might see which would beat the other to a certain point.

But the shadows began to grow long now and presently Braddish had to leave us to attend a meeting in Westchester, and I remember how he turned and waved, just before the Boulevard dips to the causeway, and how Mary recollected something that she had meant to say and ran after him a little way calling, and he did not hear. And she came back laughing, and red in the face, and breathing quick.

Two days later my father, who had started for the early train, came driving back to the house as if he had missed it. But he said, no, and his face was very grave--he had heard a piece of news that greatly concerned Mary, and he had come back to tell her. He went into the study with my mother, and presently they sent for Mary and she went in to them.

A few minutes later, through the closed door, Ellen and I heard a sudden, wailing cry.

Poor Braddish, it seems, in one of his ungovernable tempers had shot a man to death, and fled away no one knew whither.

II

The man killed was named Hagan. He was a red-faced, hard-drinking brute, not without sharp wits and a following--or better, a heeling. There had been bad blood between him and Braddish for some time over political differences of opinion and advancement. But into these Hagan had carried a circ.u.mstantial, if degenerate, imagination that had grown into and worried Braddish's peace of mind like a cancer. Details of the actual killing were kept from us children. But I gathered, since the only witnesses of the shooting were heelers of Hagan's, that it could in no wise be construed into an out-and-out act of self-defence, and so far as the law lay things looked bad for Braddish.

That he had not walked into the sheriff's office to give himself up made it look as if he himself felt the unjustifiability of his act, and it was predicted that when he was finally captured it would be to serve a life sentence at the very least. The friends of the late Hagan would hear of nothing less than hanging. It was a great pity (this was my father's att.i.tude): Hagan was a bad lot and a good riddance; Braddish was an excellent young man, except for a bit of a temper, and here the law proposed to revenge the bad man upon the other forever and ever. And it was right and proper for the law so to do, more's the pity. But it was not Braddish that would be hit hardest, said my father, and here came in the inscrutable hand of Providence--it was Mary.

After the first outburst of feeling she had accepted her fate with a stanch reserve and went on with her duties much as usual. One ear was always close to the ground, you might say, to hear the first rumor of Braddish, either his capture or his whereabouts, that she might fly to him and comfort him, but the rest of her faculties remained in devoted attendance on my sister and me. Only there showed in them now and then a kind of tigerish pa.s.sionateness, as when I fell off the sea-wall among the boulders and howled so dismally. She leaped down after and caught me to her in the wildest distress, and even when I stopped howling could not seem to put me down. Indeed, she held me so tight that if any of my bones had been cracked by the tumble she must have finished by breaking them. The pathos of her efforts to romp with us as in happier days was lost upon me, I am happy to say. Nor did I, recalling to her what Braddish had said of robbers being inevitably caught, realize that I was stabbing her most cruelly. For she was, or tried to be, firm in the belief that Braddish would succeed where all others had failed. She had asked my father what would happen if Braddish got clean out of the United States, and he, hoping, I suppose, to be of indirect use to the young couple for whom he was heartily sorry, made her out a list of countries, so far as he knew them, wherein there was no extradition. My father hoped, I fondly believe, that she would get the list to Braddish for his guidance, conjecturing rightly that if Braddish made his whereabouts known to anybody it would be to Mary. But as to that, ten days pa.s.sed before Mary knew a jot more of it than another. And I must believe that it came to her then entirely by inspiration.

We were pa.s.sing the Boole Dogge Farm, my sister and I, intent upon seeing which of us could take the most hops without putting the held-up foot to the ground, when suddenly Mary, who had been strolling along laughing at us, stopped short in her tracks and turned, and stood looking over the green treetops to where the gaunt, dead limb of the hollow oak thrust sharply up from among them. But we had hopped on for quite a piece before we noticed that she no longer went alongside. So we stopped that game and ran back to her. What was it? Had she seen a rabbit? She laughed and looked very wistful. She was just thinking, children, that she would like to see the hollow tree where Will had pa.s.sed the night. She was not excited--I can swear to that. She guessed nothing as yet. Her desire was really to the tree--as she might have coveted one of Will's baby shoes, or anything that had been his. She had already, poor girl, begun to draw, here and there, upon the past for sustenance.

First, she charged Ellen and me to wait for her in the road. But we rebelled. We swore (most falsely) that we were afeard. Since the teeth of bulldogs no longer met, we desired pa.s.sionately to explore the forbidden farm, and had, indeed, extracted a free commission from my father so to do, but my mother had procrastinated and put us off. We laid these facts before Mary, and she said, very well, if our father had said we might go on the farm, go we might. He would, could and must make it right with our mother. And so, Mary leading, we climbed the wall.

Bulldogs' teeth or no bulldogs' teeth, my ancient fear of the place descended upon me, and had a rabbit leaped or a cat scuttled among the bushes I must have been palsied. The going across to the woods was waist high with weeds and brambles, damp and rank under foot. Whole squadrons of mosquitoes arose and hung about us in clouds, with a humming sound as of sawmills far away. But this was long before you took your malaria of mosquitoes, and we minded them no more than little children mind them to-day. Indeed, I can keep peacefully still even now to watch a mosquito batten and fatten upon my hand, to see his ravenous, pale abdomen swell to a vast smug redness--that physiological, or psychological, moment for which you wait ere you burst him.

The forbidden farm had, of course, its thousand novelties. I saw p.r.i.c.kly pears in blossom upon a ledge of rock; a great lunar-moth resting drowsily, almost drunkenly, in the parasol shade of a wild-carrot blossom; here was the half of a wagon wheel, the wood rotted away, and there in the tangle an ancient cistern mouth of brick, the cistern filled to the brim with alluring rubbish. My sister sprang with a gurgle of delight to catch a garter snake, which eluded her; and a last year's brier, tough and humorously inclined, seized upon Mary by the skirts and legs, so that it was a matter of five minutes and piercing screams of merriment to cast her loose again. But soon we drew out of the hot suns.h.i.+ne into the old orchard with its paltry display of deformed, green, runt apples, and its magnificent columns and canopies of poison ivy--that most beautiful and least amiable of our indigenous plants; and then we got among scale-bark hickories, and there was one that had been fluted from top to bottom by a stroke of lightning; and here the little red squirrels were most unusually abundant and indignant; and there was a catbird that miauled exactly like a cat; and there was a spring among the roots of one great tree, and a broken teacup half buried in the sand at the bottom.

We left the hickories and entered among the oaks, and here was the greatest to-do imaginable to find the one that was hollow. Ellen went to the left, I to the right, and Mary down the middle. Whenever I came to an unusually big tree I tiptoed around the trunk, goggle-eyed, expecting the vasty hollow to open before me. And I am sure that Ellen, whom I had presently lost sight of, behaved in the same way. Mary also had disappeared, and feeling lonely all of a sudden I called to her. She answered a moment later in a strange voice. I thought that she must have fallen and hurt herself; but when I found her she was cheerful and smiling. She was standing with her back to a snug hollow in the vast stem of the very oak we had been looking for.

"This is it," she said, and turned and pointed to the hollow. "Where's Ellen?"

"Here, Ellen," I called, "here--_we've_ found it!"

Then Ellen came scampering through the wood; and first I climbed into the hollow and curled up to see what sort of a night I might have of it, and then I climbed out and Ellen climbed in--and then both in at once, and we kept house for a while and gave a couple of dinners and tea parties. And then quarreled about the probable size of Friar Tuck, and Ellen drew the line at further imaginings and left me alone in the hollow.

This extended all the way up the main trunk and all but out through the top. Here and there it pierced through the outer bark, so that slants of pale light served to carry the eye up and up until it became lost in inky blackness. Now and then dust and little showers of dry rot descended softly upon the upturned face; and if you put your ear close to the wood you could hear, as through the receiver of a telephone, things that were going on among the upper branches; as when the breeze puffed up and they sighed and creaked together. I could hear a squirrel scampering and a woodp.e.c.k.e.r at work--or so I guessed, though it sounded more like a watch ticking. I made several essays to climb up the hollow, but the knotholes and crevices, and odds and ends of support, were too far removed from each other for the length of my limbs, and, furthermore, my efforts seemed to shake the whole tree and bring down whole smarting showers of dust and dry rot and even good-sized fragments. I got up a few feet, lost my hold, and fell into the soft, punky nest at the bottom.

"Can't you climb up?" said Ellen, who had recovered her temper by now.

"Because somebody has climbed up and stuck an ol' shoe out of a knothole way up."

I climbed out of the hollow and followed her point. Sure enough--thirty feet or so from the ground the toe of a much-used leather boot stuck out through a knothole.

Mary refused to take an interest in the boot. It was high time we went home. She herself had a headache. Our mother would be angry with her for taking us on the forbidden farm. She was sorry she had done so. No, she wasn't angry. We were good children; she loved us. Wouldn't we come?

"I'll tell you," said she, and her face, which looked sick and pale, colored, "if you'll come now, and hurry, we'll just have time to stop on the bridge and have some races."

And sure enough, when we got to the bridge Mary produced a stained sheet of paper, and tore it quickly into little bits of pieces (we were pressed for time) and launched pair after pair of sea-going racers upon the swirling tide.

When the last pair were gone upon their merry career she drew a long breath, and seemed as one relieved of a weight.

"Perhaps," she said, "you needn't tell your mother where you've been--unless she asks you. Do you think that would be wrong?"

I had never known Mary to suggest deceit of any kind.

"If you think it would get you into trouble," said my sister, aged eight, very stiffly, "why, of course, we won't say anything."

Mary was troubled. Finally she drew a deep breath and flung out her hands.

"Of course, it would be wrong not to tell," she said. "You _must_ tell her."

But by good fortune we met my father first and told him.

"And papa," said Ellen, she had been swung to his shoulder and there rode like a princess upon a genii, "what do you think, way up the trunk there was an old shoe sticking out of a knothole, and we all thought that somebody must have climbed up inside and put it there. But brother couldn't climb up because he's too little, and Mary wouldn't try, and we thought maybe Sunday you'd go with us and see if you could climb up."

I don't know why my father happened to take the line that he did; he may have seen something in Mary's face that we children would not be likely to see. He laughed first, and told us a story.