The Bondboy. George W. Ogden

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      It was on Ollie’s account he hesitated. Ollie would think that he suspected her, when there was nothing farther from his mind. It was Morgan who would set the snare for her to trip into, and it was Morgan that he was going to send about his business. But Ollie might take offense and turn against him, and make it as unpleasant as she had shown that she could make it agreeable.

      But duty was stronger than friendship. It was stern and implacable, and there was no pleasant road to take around it and come out with honor at the other end.

      Joe made as much noise as he could with his big feet–and that was no inconsiderable amount–as he approached the house. But near the building the grass was long, and soft underfoot, and it bore Joe around to the kitchen window silently. His lips were too dry to whistle; his heart was going too fast to carry a tune.

      He paused a little way beyond the window, which stood open with the sun falling through it, listening for the sound of their voices. It was strangely silent for a time when the book-agent was around.

      Joe went on, his shadow breaking the sunbeam which whitened the kitchen floor. There was a little quick start as he came suddenly to the kitchen door; a hurried stir of feet. As he stepped upon the porch he saw Morgan in the door, Ollie not a yard behind him, their hands just breaking their clasp. Joe knew in his heart that Morgan had been holding her in his arms.

      Ollie’s face was flushed, her hair was disturbed. Her bosom rose and fell like troubled water, her eyes were brighter than Joe ever had seen them. Even Morgan was different, 77 sophisticated and brazen that he was. A flash of red showed on his cheekbones and under his eyes; his thin nostrils were panting like gills.

      Joe stood there, one foot on the porch, the other on the ground, as blunt as honesty, as severe as honor. There was nothing in his face that either of them could read to indicate what was surging in his breast. He had caught them, and they wondered if he had sense enough to know.

      Joe pushed his hat back from his sweating forehead and looked inquiringly at Morgan.

      “Your horse sick, or something?” he asked.

      “No,” said Morgan, turning his back on Joe with a little jerk of contempt in his shoulders.

      “Well, I think he must be down, or something,” said Joe, “for I heard a racket in the barn.”

      “Why didn’t you go and see what was the matter?” demanded Morgan crossly, snatching his hat from the table.

      Ollie was drowned in a confusion of blushes. She stood hanging her head, but Joe saw the quick turn of her eyes to follow Morgan as he went away in long strides toward the barn.

      Joe went to the tool-chest which stood in a corner of the kitchen and busied himself clattering over its contents. Presently he looked at Ollie, his hand on the open lid of the box.

      “Did you see that long whetstone lying around anywhere, Ollie?” he asked.

      She lifted her head with a little start. Joe never had called her familiarly by her name before. It always had been “Missis Chase,” distant and respectful.

      “No, I haven’t seen it, Joe,” she answered, the color leaving her cheeks.

      “All right, Ollie,” said he, holding her eyes with steady gaze, until she shifted hers under the pain of it, and the questioning reproach. 78

      Joe slammed down the lid of the tool-chest, as if with the intention of making as much noise as possible.

      There was something in the way he had spoken her name that was stranger than the circumstance itself. Perhaps she felt the authority and the protection which Joe meant that his voice should assume; perhaps she understood that it was the word of a man. She was afraid of him at that moment, as she never had been afraid of Isom in all their married life.

      “I suppose Isom put it away somewhere around the barn,” said Joe.

      “Maybe he did, Joe.”

      “I’ll go down there and see if I can find it,” he said.

      Ollie knew, as well as Joe himself, that he was making the whetstone the vehicle to carry his excuse for watching Morgan away from the farm, but she was not certain whether this sudden shrewdness was the deep understanding of a man, or the domineering spirit of a crude lad, jealous of his passing authority.

      The uncertainty troubled her. She watched him from the door and saw him approach Morgan, where he was backing his horse into the shafts.

      “All right, is he?” asked Joe, stopping a moment.

      Morgan was distant.

      “I guess he’ll live another day, don’t worry about him,” said he, in surly voice.

      “What time do you aim to be back today?” pursued Joe, entirely unmoved by Morgan’s show of temper.

      “Say, I’ll set up a bulletin board with my time-table on it if you’ve got to have it, Mr. Overseer!” said Morgan, looking up from the buckling of a shaft-strap, his face coloring in anger.

      “Well, you don’t need to get huffy over it.”

      “Mind your business then,” Morgan growled. 79

      He didn’t wait to discuss the matter farther, but got into the buggy without favoring Joe with as much as another glance, gave his horse a vindictive lash with the whip and drove off, leaving the gate open behind him.

      Joe shut it, and turned back to his mowing.

      Many a time he paused that morning in his labor, leaning on the snath of his scythe, in a manner of abstraction and seeming indolence altogether strange to him. There was a scene, framed by the brown casing of the kitchen door, with two figures in it, two clinging hands, which persisted in its disturbing recurrence in his troubled mind.

      Ollie was on dangerous ground. How far she had advanced, he did not know, but not yet, he believed, to the place where the foulness of Morgan had defiled her beyond cleansing. It was his duty as the guardian of his master’s house to watch her, even to warn her, and to stop her before she went too far.

      Once he put down his scythe and started to go to the house, his mind full of what he felt it his duty to say.

      Then there rose up that feeling of disparity between matron and youth which had held him at a distance from Ollie before. He turned back to his work with a blush upon his sun-scorched face, and felt ashamed. But it was not a thing to be deferred until after the damage had been done. He must speak to her that day, perhaps when he should go in for dinner. So he said.

      Ollie seemed self-contained and uncommunicative at dinner. Joe thought she was a little out of humor, or that she was falling back into her old gloomy way, from which she had emerged, all smiles and dimples, like a new and youthful creature, on the coming of Morgan. He thought, too, that this might be her way of showing her resentment of the familiarity that he had taken in calling her by her name.

      The feeling of deputy-mastership was no longer important upon his shoulders. He shrank down in his chair with a 80 sense of drawing in, like a snail, while he burned with humiliation and shame. The pinnacle of manhood was too slippery for his clumsy СКАЧАТЬ