The Country Beyond: A Romance of the Wilderness. Curwood James Oliver

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СКАЧАТЬ woman's uneven shoulders drooped lower.

      "I won't say ennything, Jed. I – promise."

      The man dropped his uplifted hand with a harsh grunt.

      "I'll kill y' if you do," he warned.

      The girl had dropped her axe, and was coming toward them. She was a slim, bird-like creature, with a poise to her head and an up-tilt to her chin which warned that the man had not yet beaten her to the level of the woman. She was dressed in a faded calico, frayed at the bottom, and with the sleeves bobbed off just above the elbows of her slim white arms. Her stockings were mottled with patches and mends, and her shoes were old, and worn out at the toes.

      But to Peter, worshipping her from his hiding place, she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Jolly Roger had said the same thing, and most men – and women, too – would have agreed that this slip of a girl possessed a beauty which it would take a long time for unhappiness and torture to crush entirely out of her. Her eyes were as blue as the violets Peter had thrust his nose among that day. And her hair was a glory, loosed by her exertion from its bondage of faded ribbon, and falling about her shoulders and nearly to her waist in a mass of curling brown tresses that at times had made even Jed Hawkins' one eye light of with admiration. And yet, even in those times, he hated her, and more than once his bony fingers had closed viciously in that mass of radiant hair, but seldom could he wring a scream of pain from Nada. Even now, when she could see the light of the devil in his one gleaming eye, it was only her flesh – and not her soul – that was afraid.

      But the strain had begun to show its mark. In the blue of her eyes was the look of one who was never free of haunting visions, her cheeks were pallid, and a little too thin, and the vivid redness of her lips was not of health and happiness, but a touch of the color which should have been in her face, and which until now had refused to die.

      She faced the man, a little out of the reach of his arm.

      "I told you never again to raise your hand to strike her," she cried in a fierce, suppressed little voice, her blue eyes flaming loathing and hatred at him. "If you hit her once more – something is going to happen. If you want to hit anyone, hit me. I kin stand it. But – look at her! You've broken her shoulder, you've crippled her – an' you oughta die!"

      The man advanced half a step, his eye ablaze. Deep down in him Peter felt something he had never felt before. For the first time in his life he had no desire to run away from the man. Something rose up from his bony little chest, and grew in his throat, until it was a babyish snarl so low that no human ears could hear it. And in his hiding-place his needle-like fangs gleamed under snarling lips.

      But the man did not strike, nor did he reach out to grip his fingers in the silken mass of Nada's hair. He laughed, as if something was choking him, and turned away with a toss of his arms.

      "You ain't seein' me hit her any more, are you, Nady?" he said, and disappeared around the end of the cabin.

      The girl laid a hand on the woman's arm. Her eyes softened, but she was trembling.

      "I've told him what'll happen, an' he won't dare hit you any more," she comforted. "If he does, I'll end him. I will! I'll bring the police. I'll show 'em the places where he hides his whiskey. I'll – I'll put him in jail, if I die for it!"

      The woman's bony hands clutched at one of Nada's.

      "No, no, you mustn't do that," she pleaded. "He was good to me once, a long time ago, Nada. It ain't Jed that's bad – it's the whiskey. You mustn't tell on him, Nada – you mustn't!"

      "I've promised you I won't – if he don't hit you any more. He kin shake me by the hair if he wants to. But if he hits you – "

      She drew a deep breath, and also passed around the end of the cabin.

      For a few moments Peter listened. Then he slipped back through the tunnel he had made under the wood-vine, and saw Nada walking swiftly toward the break in the ridge. He followed, so quietly that she was through the break, and was picking her way among the tumbled masses of rock along the farther foot of the ridge, before she discovered his presence. With a glad cry she caught him up in her arms and hugged him against her breast.

      "Peter, Peter, where have you been?" she demanded. "I thought something had happened to you, and I've been huntin' for you, and so has Roger – I mean Mister Jolly Roger."

      Peter was hugged tighter, and he hung limply until his mistress came to a thick little clump of dwarf balsams hidden among the rocks. It was their "secret place," and Peter had come to sense the fact that its mystery was not to be disclosed. Here Nada had made her little bower, and she sat down now upon a thick rug of balsam boughs, and held Peter out in front of her, squatted on his haunches. A new light had come into her eyes, and they were shining like stars. There was a flush in her cheeks, her red lips were parted, and Peter, looking up – and being just dog – could scarcely measure the beauty of her. But he knew that something had happened, and he tried hard to understand.

      "Peter, he was here ag'in today – Mister Roger – Mister Jolly Roger," she cried softly, the pink in her cheeks growing brighter. "And he told me I was pretty!"

      She drew a deep breath, and looked out over the rocks to the valley and the black forest beyond. And her fingers, under Peter's scrawny armpits, tightened until he grunted.

      "And he asked me if he could touch my hair – mind you he asked me that, Peter! – And when I said 'yes' he just put his hand on it, as if he was afraid, and he said it was beautiful, and that I must take wonderful care of it!"

      Peter saw a throbbing in her throat.

      "Peter – he said he didn't want to do anything wrong to me, that he'd cut off his hand first. He said that! And then he said – if I didn't think it was wrong – he'd like to kiss me – "

      She hugged Peter up close to her again.

      "And – I told him I guessed it wasn't wrong, because I liked him, and nobody else had ever kissed me, and – Peter – he didn't kiss me! And when he went away he looked so queer – so white-like – and somethin' inside me has been singing ever since. I don't know what it is, Peter. But it's there!"

      And then, after a moment.

      "Peter," she whispered, "I wish Mister Jolly Roger would take us away!"

      The thought drew a tightening to her lips, and the pucker of a frown between her eyes, and she sat Peter down beside her and looked over the valley to the black forest, in the heart of which was Jolly Roger's cabin.

      "It's funny he don't want anybody to know he's there, ain't it – I mean – isn't it, Peter?" she mused. "He's livin' in the old shack Indian Tom died in last winter, and I've promised not to tell. He says it's a great secret, and that only you, and I, and the Missioner over at Sucker Creek know anything about it. I'd like to go over and clean up the shack for him. I sure would."

      Peter, beginning to nose among the rocks, did not see the flash of fire that came slowly into the blue of the girl's eyes. She was looking at her ragged shoes, at the patched stockings, at the poverty of her faded dress, and her fingers clenched in her lap.

      "I'd do it – I'd go away – somewhere – and never come back, if it wasn't for her," she breathed. "She treats me like a witch most of the time, but Jed Hawkins made her that way. I kin remember – "

      Suddenly she jumped up, and flung back her head defiantly, so that her hair streamed out in a sun-filled cloud in a gust of wind that came up the valley.

      "Some СКАЧАТЬ