THE night after the second day’s search Libby Keith had gone to bed for a while, because she was unable longer to stand up. Again she had risen when the moon rose, and Isobel McLaughlin, hearing her in the kitchen, had risen to find her washing out a shallow tin milk pan. Libby had managed to make her purpose known. Her voice was altogether gone now, after so much calling to her Lammie, and she was starting out with the pan and the poker, so that when her Peter heard the noise she was making, he would know that help was near. With Isobel following her as best she might, she beat back and forth up and down the roads again till morning, when she fell exhausted near the McCreaths’ at dawn, so that they had to hitch up and take her home. And lying in the wagon, she muttered and moaned. Isobel understood that sometimes she was simply saying her son’s name. Sometimes she was trying to tell what a good lad he had always been. And sometimes she said, “Only forty yards from home”; sometimes, “A wee’an’s bones!” But some of the neighbors gathering had heard her pan’s din and praying, and the hunt was on again, before the sun was well up. Later that morning Isobel McLaughlin sat telling[221] Wully about that night, in the Keiths’ kitchen, whispering, looking carefully towards the door of the room where Libby was supposed to be resting. She was sitting by the breakfast table. On the red cloth three cold half-drunk cups of tea told how negligible a thing food was in that household. Suddenly she said passionately:
“Wully, you’ve got to bring him home alive to-day!” and with that, to her son’s consternation, she burst into great weeping.
Wully, fearing the sight of his aunt’s grief, hadn’t wanted to come that morning to the accursed house. But his father had asked him to, looking at him, Wully thought, with an unusual sharpness, so that hurriedly, to avoid suspicion, he had said he would come. He had dreaded the errand. But he had never foreseen this. He never remembered seeing his mother cry before, not even at the time of his brother’s death, though she must have wept then. And now—well, it was no wonder she was undone, after forty-eight hours of such nightmare. But he was beside himself at the sight. He got up and strode around the room, at his wits’ end. Life was upside down. Chirstie at his mother’s broken and nervous from her shock; his aunt raving mad; his mother crying noisily....
“You think he’s alive, don’t you, Wully?” she was asking him, between sobs and sniffles. “You don’t think he’s dead, do you?” He marveled to see how utterly she shared his aunt’s grief. She[222] could scarcely have wanted more Peter’s return, if he had been her own son. He answered staunchly;
“No! Of course he’s not dead, mother! A man don’t die from sleeping outdoors a couple of nights in July!”
“You don’t think—he’s fallen into some slough—and drowned, do you?”
“No, mother! Of course not! He’s around some place, drunk, likely! Don’t cry, mother!”
“How could he be alive—some place—and let us all go on hunting him?”
Suddenly she added, with a greater sob, lifting her head;
“Wully, if Peter’s alive, and just letting his mother think he’s lost, we ought to whip him when he’s found! Every man that’s spent a day hunting him ought to give him a—beating! Wully, he’d never do that! I think he’s—he’s dead!”
“Mother, mother! Don’t you cry so! It’ll be all right. They’ll find him soon!”
“If you don’t find him soon, Auntie will go mad!”
Wully could have cried aloud the conviction that came flooding over him that minute: “If we do find him alive, and I get my hands on him, you will go mad!” He began, like a child begging;
“Mother, don’t you stay here! You come home with me! It’s enough to kill you, staying here with Auntie! Let someone else stay a while.[223] Why can’t Aunt Flora stay with her to-day? You come on home with me!”
“I can stay. She wants me. I can stand anything, if only he’s found. Wully!” she cried, raising a face toward him distorted with tears, “don’t you know where he is?”
If Chirstie had been there to see that face, she would have thought that now, at last, Isobel McLaughlin was betraying her secret, so visibly did forbidden questions tremble on her tongue. Wully only said, soothingly, indulgently;
“If I knew where he was, don’t you think I would go there and find him? Mother, you need a rest. You haven’t had enough sleep!”
His mother sat bending towards him, beseeching him with all her soul to tell her the truth. But not one of her passionate unspoken entreaties reached him. It never occurred to him that she might know. He sat looking at her sympathetically, troubled that she spoke words of such unusual foolishness, being overwrought by all that had befallen her.
“Won’t you come home with me?” he said again.
“No, I won’t!” she said, with some asperity, and put her head down on her arms on the table, and went on crying.
He rode away to his place in the hunt, and underneath all his greetings, his short and dry comments on the day’s possibilities, there stayed with him a troubled sense of pity for his mother.[224] She was getting old. And he had treated her badly. Sometimes he even thought that he had treated her very badly in that affair, even though it was over now. All those hours, those murderous hours of the last days, he had never given her a thought. He hadn’t stopped in his hating long enough to imagine how deeply, how terribly, he was about to wound her. If he came upon Peter, and killed him—as he must&mdas............