266

THE HEGIRA.

CALLISTA roused that morning, to see Lance moving, light-footed, a shadow between her and the first struggling blaze of the fire he had kindled. With sleepy surprise she noted his activities. When she observed that he was packing her canned fruit, with quick, deft fingers, she inquired,

"What you doin' there. Lance? No use fixin' them up now. Sylvane won't be here till in the morning."

Lance broke off the low whistling which had wakened her, and turned to regard his wife for a moment before he spoke.

"I thought I'd get this packing done," he said non-committally. "If we was to go home to-day I could tote whatever we needed, and Buddy could fetch over the heaviest stuff to-morrow."

Callista dozed a little luxuriously, and woke to a smell of boiling coffee and frying pork.

"You've got breakfast enough there for three people," she commented, when she finally drew near the fire.

"Uh-huh," assented Lance. "I 'lowed Sylvane might come to-day, place of Saturday. Anyhow, we'll need something for a bite on 267 the way." And Callista realized that her husband was indeed making the final preparations for their return.

As they sat down either side the frying pan, and Callista lifted the lid from the Dutch oven to take the bread out, they became aware of the sound of scrambling hoofs and parting branches. Whenever there was high water in Caney, this little valley was cut off, it was a retreat unknown, unvisited; the newcomer could be nobody but Sylvane. A moment later the boy made his appearance, clambering over the rocks, leading Satan by a long line.

"I 'lowed you-all wouldn't mind coming back a day sooner," he apologized, as he gratefully seated himself for an addition to his hastily snatched breakfast eaten by candle-light. "They's a feller that the Company has sent up to look over lands, and he's a-buyin' mineral rights—or ruther, gettin' options—on everybody's farms. They'll pay big prices, and Sis' Roxy said I ought to come and tell Lance of it."

The man listened indifferently, but the woman was all aglow. The touch of practical life had dissolved whatever of the gipsy mood Lance's nature had been able to lend hers. She questioned the boy minutely. Lance listening with ill-concealed impatience; and when the subject was exhausted, began to ask him with great particularity concerning her truck patch at home and whether 268 Spotty, the young cow Lance had traded with Squire Ashe for, was doing well in her milk.

In spite of Lance's packing, there was much to do before camp could be struck, and on account of the canned fruit they moved so slowly that noon saw them still in the wilderness, dropping down by the stream's side to eat the snack they had brought with them. They went around by Father Cleaverage's this time, and stopped there, since Callista intended to present a few of her cherished huckleberries to Roxy, and they reached the cabin at the head of Lance's Laurel late in the afternoon.

For some reason which he could not himself have told you, Lance felt strangely wearied and dissatisfied. He looked back to the week past, and admitted that all had gone well; days of fishing and dreaming, evenings under the open sky with the banjo humming, the not unwelcome fire leaping up, and the baby asleep on Callista's lap. Could a man have asked more?

The son of the house had thriven amazingly on it, and this evening he was assuming airs so domineering that his father professed fear of him.

"Look a here, young feller," Lance said, as the big eight-months-old came creeping across the floor and hammered on his knee to be taken up, "you're about to run me out o' the house." He lifted his son on his arm, and, carrying the banjo in the other hand, beyond reach of the clutching, fat fingers, went to the doorstone with them. "Oh, you're your mammy over again," he 269 admonished the baby. "You don't own up to me at all. I wisht I had me a nice gal o' your size, that would admit I was her daddy."

Callista had her supper nearly ready. Growing now, with motherhood, intensely material,—or, as Lance had more than once jokingly declared, a trifle grasping,—the selling of the land to the Company for a big price occupied all her thoughts.

"You'll go over to Squire Ashe's soon in the morning, won't you Lance and see about the land?" she questioned. "Sylvane said the man was stayin' at Ashe's."

"I don't know as I want to sell," the owner of Jesse Lance's Gap hundred observed indifferently, running random little chords on his banjo. "I ain't rightly studied about it."

"Well, I wish you would study about it," urged Callista. "I think it's your duty to."

hummed Lance to a twanging accompaniment from the strings. "Looks like I've heard them words before somewheres. I'll be blessed if that ain't Sis' Roxy's tune you've took up, Callista!"

"Your sister does her duty in this world," asserted Callista tartly. "It's nothing but the mineral rights, they'll want. All that talk you had this mornin' about the land coming from your 270 gran'pappy, and your not wanting to leave it, is just to—to have your own way."

Lance raised his eyebrows.

"Would you say so?" he debated, his voice quiet, but the spark shining deep in his hazel eye. "Well now, I'd have said—if you'd axed me—that I've had my own way most generally without resorting to such. I'm ruther expectin' to have my own way from this time out, and take no curious methods of gettin' it."

"Well, what are you going to do about selling the land?" she persisted.

Lance lifted the baby's fat hand and pretended to pick the banjo strings with the pointed, inadequate fingers, to the young man's serious enjoyment. Callista waited for what she considered a reasonable time, and then prompted.

"Lance. Lance, did you hear me?"

"Oh, yes, I heared you well enough," Lance told her composedly. "I was just a-studyin' on the matter."

Again silence, punctuated by the aimless twanging of the banjo strings, the little sounds from the summer world without, the quick, light tapping of Callista's feet and the little whisper of her skirts as she moved about her task.

"Well—have you studied?" she inquired abruptly at length.

"Uh-huh," agreed Lance negligently, curling himself down on the 271 doorstone a little further, "an' I'm studyin' yet. Ye see that there feller they sent out for an agent met me on the big road one day about a month ago and bantered me to trade. I told him I'd let him know, time I got back."

"And you never named it to me!" Callista said sharply, pausing, dish in hand by the table side, and staring at her husband with reprehending eyes. "You never said a word to me about it; and you went off on that foolish camping trip! For the good gracious, I don't know what men are made of!"

"Some are made of one thing, and some of another," allowed Lance easily, leaning his head back against the door jamb and half closing his eyes.

"Before we went away," repeated Callista reproachfully. "Maybe you've lost your chance."

The spur to Lance Cleaverage, the goad, was ever the hint to go slower; applied recklessly, it was quite sufficient to make him dig heels and toes into the track and refuse to go at all. At Callista's suggestion that he had missed his chance, he balked entirely.

"Well, I don't know as I want to sell," he reiterated. "That's what I told the man—and that's the truth."

"Of course you want to sell," asserted Callista in exasperation, "and you want to sell terrible bad—we all do. Nobody in the Turkey Tracks has got any money. We just live from hand to 272 mouth, and dig what we get out of the ground mighty hard. Oh, I wish't I was a man. I'd go straight down to the Settlement and sell this land before I came back."

A faint color showed itself in her husband's brown cheeks. His lips parted slightly and remained so for a moment before he spoke.

"Not unless the man you was chanced to be me, you wouldn't sell my land," he said at length, speaking softly, almost dreamily.

Callista's temper was slow, but it was implacable. She eyed her husband for a moment and turned to begin dishing up her supper. Lance lifted his son back once more out of reach of the instrument, set him comfortably against the propped open door, took up the banjo and commenced to play a lively air for the boy's diversion.

"Flenton Hands has sold," Callista flung out the words as she bent over the hearth to a pot that stood there. She had the news from Roxy Griever.

"Uh-huh," agreed Lance indefinitely, and offered no question as to what the lands had brought or whether the deal was actually closed.

"Sylvane said Gran'pappy met him in the big road, and he said that them that didn't sell now, or that just give options, would be sorry afterwards. He thinks the Company's mistaken about the 273 coal being on this side o' the ridge, and that they'll soon find it out and quit buying."

"That so?" laughed Lance. "Well, in that case, I sha'n't make no efforts. I'd hate to get anything off the Company that wasn't coming to me, and I reckon—"

He broke off suddenly. Callista had turned to face him, white, angry as he had never seen her before. Her blue eyes rounded meaningly to the downy poll of the baby sitting on the floor between them. This was how much he cared for the up-bringing and the future of the child.

"Lance Cleaverage," she said in a low, even tone, "a woman that's married to a man, and lived with him for two years, and got his child to raise, ought to quit him for such a speech as that."

This was the ultimate challenge. Here was the gage thrown down. She dared him. He leaned forward to lift back the boy, who was clambering once more for the banjo. Then he straightened up and looked his Callista full in the eye, breathing light and evenly, half smiling, his face strangely luminous.

"All right," he said, and his voice rang keen-edged and vibrant. "If them's your ruthers—walk out. What's a'keepin' you? Shain't be said I ever hendered a woman that wanted to quit me."

Very softly, Callista set down the plate of bread she held. Gazing straight ahead of her, she stood a moment rigid, 274 in a waiting, listening attitude. Out of her mood of cold displeasure, of nagging resentment, flamed, at her husband's words, that sudden fire of relentless rage of which Callista was capable. Her sight cleared, and she became aware of what she was staring at—the wall, with its well-planned shelves of Lance's contriving; the beautifully whittled utensils and small, dainty implements of cedar which he had made for her use. Slowly her glance swept the circle of the room. Evidences of Lance's skill and cleverness were everywhere; proofs that he had persistently tamed both to the service of wife and home. Yet, at this moment, these things made no appeal. Mechanically she inspected her supper table, then turned and moved swiftly across the open passage to the room beyond. Promptly, unerringly, she gathered together a bundle of needments for herself and the child, thrust them in a clean flour sack, and swung it across her arm. Going back, she found her husband still sprawled in the doorway, his side face held to the darkening interior of the room behind him. Banjo on knee, he leaned against the lintel, whistling beneath his breath, his eyes on the far primrose band of light dying down in the west.

Callista gave no further glance at the home which had been much to her. She averted her gaze stonily from the husband who had once been all. Bending, with a single motion she swept the baby up in her arm, raised him to her shoulder and stepped to the 275 open doorway. Lance never turned his head or seemed to note her. He made room for her passage without appearing to move a muscle. Out she went and down to the gate—a real gate, that swung true and did not drag; Lance's planning and handiwork. She unlatched it, passed through, and drew it shut behind her, never looking back.

And with scarcely a change of attitude and expression, except that his fingers twitched a bit and the smile on his lean, brown, young face became set and unnatural, he watched her evenly swaying figure pass on down the road. Head defiantly erect, eyes strangely bright. Lance stared meaninglessly, like a man shot through but not yet crumpling to his fall. The baby fluttered a fat, white, little starfish of a hand over his mother's shoulder and called "Bye-by," the sum of all his attainments in the matter of language.

The man did not look up. His head was bent now, his gaze had forsaken the slender new moon swinging like a boat in the greenish haze of the western sky, where some smoldering coals of sunset yet sent up gray twilight smoke.

Callista vanished between the trees. It was dusk, and deeply still. Down in the alders, beside the spring branch, the whippoorwills were calling. In the intervals of their far, plaintive importunity, the silence was punctuated lightly by the 276 tiny, summer-evening chirpings in the grass.

The moon sank lower, the sunset coals burned into swart cinders; the hosts of the dark marched in upon the still figure on the doorstone where Lance crouched motionless, his face drooped almost to the threshold, his arms flung forward till they touched the nodding weeds by the path. So an hour counted itself out, and there was no change in his posture, no lifting of the head. The little moon finally dropped down behind the hills; dew lay thick on the curls beside the great limestone slab. About ten o'clock a cloud blew in through the Gap, bearing a tiny shower of summer rain. Under the cool pattering that drenched his hair and garments. Lance stirred not at all; but all the noises of the July night were hushed by it, and in the chill which followed, he shivered. Deep in the night's silent heart, a bird cried out; Lance started and raised his face to the darkness with a sort of groan.

"And this time she won't come back," he whispered.