The Bondboy. George W. Ogden

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СКАЧАТЬ him, I guess,” said Joe deliberately, as if he had considered his words. As he spoke he reached down for his hat, which he always placed on the floor beside his chair when he took his meals.

      “If there was a soul in this world that cared for me–if I had anywhere to go, I’d leave him this hour!” declared Ollie, her face burning with the hate of her oppressor.

      Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose with him and came around the side. He stopped on his way to 63 the door, looking at her with awkward bashfulness as she stood there flushed and brilliant in her tossed state, scarcely a yard between them.

      “But there’s nobody in the world that cares for me,” she complained sorrowfully.

      Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his face blank with surprise.

      “Why, you’ve got your mother, haven’t you?” he asked.

      “Mother!” she repeated scornfully. “She’d drive me back to him; she was crazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I’ll get all his property and money when he dies.”

      “Well, he may die before long,” consoled Joe.

      “Die!” said she; and again, “Die! He’ll never die!”

      She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches of his. Her hot breath struck him on the cheek; it moved the clustered hair at his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.

      “He’ll never die,” she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to a whisper in the end, “unless somebody he’s tramped on and ground down and cursed and driven puts him out of the way!”

      Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that feminine shock which would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to the strong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drew back from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, and mystified.

      “Why, you don’t suppose anybody would do that?” said he.

      Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.

      “Oh, no; I don’t suppose so,” she said, a little distant and cold in her manner.

      She began gathering up the dishes.

      Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as 64 they flew from plate to plate like white butterflies, as if something had stirred in him that he did not understand. Presently he went his way to take up his work, no more words passing between them.

      Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeing swiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well. Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If that slow hunk could be warmed with a man’s passions and desires; if she could wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only a boy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask of wild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange to his experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumbering force and charge it into life a day before its time!

      She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as he passed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the insulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath was on his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?

      She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut, the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low. What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.

      She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had planned and contrived it in her mind, 65 goaded on nearer and nearer to it by his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!

      She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with the team. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep yet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano’s throat in his slumbering soul.

      If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.

      66

CHAPTER IV

       A STRANGER AT THE GATE

       Table of Contents

      Rain overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he would flee. It aggravated the rheumatism in his knotted toes and stabbed his knee-joints with awl-piercing pains.

      For upward of forty-five years Isom had been taking the rains as they came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to them now, and trot to shelter from every shower like a hen.

      So he was in no sweet humor as he drew near his own barn-yard gate with the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat. It came to him as he approached that portal of his domain that if he had a son the boy would be there, with the gate flung wide, to help him. It was only one of the thousand useful offices which a proper boy could fill around that place, thought he; but his wives had conspired in barrenness against him; no son ever would come to cheer his declining days.

      Even if he had the kind of a wife that a man should have, reflected he, she would be watching; she would come through rain and hail, thunder and wild blast, to open the gate and ease him through without that troublesome stop.

      Matrimony had been a profitless investment for him, said he in bitterness. His first wife had lived long and eaten ravenously, and had worn out shoes and calico slips, and his second, a poor unwilling hand, was not worth her keep.

      So, with all this sour summing up of his wasted ventures in his mind, and the cold rain spitting through his years-worn 67 coat, Isom was in no humor to debate the way with another man when it came to entering into his own property through his own wide gate.

      But there was another man in the road, blocking it with his top-buggy, one foot out on the step, his head thrust around the side of the hood with inquiring look, as if he also felt that there should be somebody at hand to open the gate and let him pass without muddying his feet.

      “Ho!” called Isom uncivilly, hailing the stranger as he pulled up his team, the end of his wagon-tongue threatening the hood of the buggy; “what do you want here?”

      The stranger put his head СКАЧАТЬ