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  II

  No one carried to old Tom Farnsworth the tidings of how his son first beat Bobbie, but they could not help repeating how the big Negro had crushed Sam and Jud. Farnsworth made inquiry after that, learned the whole truth about the disgraceful fashion in which his son had behaved himself, and called young Tom before him—with thunder in his face.

  “Tom,” he said, “I’m ashamed of you and disgusted with you. And, by the eternal, unless you go this instant and beg the pardon of Bobbie, I swear I shall disinherit you. A Farnsworth to strike a servant . . . a Farnsworth! Thunderation, Tom, I see that you were created only to break my heart. This shame will never go out of the family.”

  Tom was brave enough. He dreaded nothing except the necessity of having to go to work. If he were disowned, he would have to labor with his hands. Rather than that, there was no humiliation through which he would not have passed. He went out, therefore, found Bobbie, and humbled himself before the Negro. But Bobbie would not hear him. It was not Master Tom who had struck him, he declared. It was simply a devil that had got into Master Tom for the moment, and which, he knew, would never come back again. But, no matter how much he said, he knew that young Tom would never forgive the servant, for the servant had been the means to this humiliation. He would far rather have faced the whipping again than to know that there was now a deep malice in the heart of young Tom Farnsworth.

  Nor, in the meantime, were the results of that whipping ended. For, of course, the strange tale was carried straight to Deborah Kinkaid. She would not believe it at first, but, when the whole degrading fact was proved to her, she colored with shame and declared that, if she passed Tom Farnsworth again on the street, she would cut him dead. The very next day she did so straightway. To the amazement and the horror of young Tom, Deborah went by him with her head in the air, her eyes fixed on the enjoyment of some far-off prospect. He went home and lay all night in his bed, raging and tossing and twisting. First of all, he wanted to destroy the entire world and Deborah with it, and then he wanted to perish gloomily. Eventually he resolved to go East at once. He even leaped out of bed, dressed, and started to pack. But, after all, he decided that he would see Deborah again, even if his very heart had to bleed with the humiliation of bowing to her insult. For he could not go away before he had solved the mystery of why she was so hostile to him.

  On the following night he went to see her. He slipped up behind the house and hesitated under the hedge for a long time. Young Jack Pattison was sitting on the porch, chatting with her, and the foolish laughter of the pair rattled and rang in his ears, tormenting him where he lay. Finally Pattison went away, and Tom got up to go to the girl before she entered the house. He must have a few words with her alone. If all did not turn out well, it must not be publicly known that he had so far debased himself that he had gone to cringe and crawl before this slip of a girl. For all the town of Daggett was repeating and relishing the story of how she had snubbed the rich man’s son. He did not have a chance to see her in the dark of the porch, however, for young Jack Pattison had no sooner disappeared than she slipped into the house and ran up the stairs to her room. He saw the light flare in her window, and then he saw the shade pulled down, so that it became a dull rectangle, glowing. Then he decided that he must take one longer step in the adventure.

  It was extremely rash. If he had been a thoughtful boy, he would never have done it, but Tom was not thoughtful. He followed the first impulse and went up the side of the house, climbing by means of the tree-like trunk and the sturdy branches of a great old climbing rose vine that had been planted when Mr. and Mrs. Kinkaid were married, and was, therefore, a year older than Deborah herself. It seemed a little wonderful to Tom, as he climbed, that creatures of one age should be so different—the vine, old and declining, Deborah in the very pink and flush of tender youth.

  Now he sat on the ledge of her window, his heart thundering from the labor and the excitement of that climb. He tapped twice, cautiously. Suddenly it came to him with a shock that it would be a terrible thing if some other person should be in that room with the girl, if that other person—her mother, perhaps—should open the window and look down into his face. What could he do? He had no time to decide, for now the window was raised. The shade lifted, and there was Deborah herself just before him. He had been wondering how she would address him. He could never have guessed the words she chose.

  She said simply: “Tom Farnsworth, you idiot! Tom, you crazy boy! What are you doing here?” And then, surprise and alarm both leaving her apparently, she dropped into a chair and burst into the heartiest laughter.

  He studied her the while with a sort of gloomy disgust. She was not lovely, certainly. When she laughed, and one saw the alarming width of her mouth, she was not even pretty. Yet, while his reason dissected her and decided upon fault after fault she most unquestionably possessed, his instinct was every instant saying to him: How delightful, how rapturously charming this creature is. Oh, oh, that she could be mine.

  “Why are you laughing, Deborah?”

  “Because you look so perfectly undignified and unFarnsworthy on that windowsill. Come inside, Tom.”

  “Good heavens, Deborah, you don’t think that I would do a thing that might compromise you.”

  “Hush,” said the girl, with a careless gesture. “Do you think it’s any better for me to have you seated in my window where everyone within a mile can see you?”

  This suggestion made him tumble hastily into the room.

  “Why did you come?” asked Deborah, very curious, and not a little excited, but still smiling, as she looked at the red fragments of bark that littered his clothes and the scratches on his face and his hands. A modern Romeo was Tom.

  “Because I’m such a weak fool,” said Tom, crimson with rage and shame. “Because . . .” He could not finish, but drew himself up and glowered down on her.

  “Oh,” said Deborah with a sudden change of tone. “I think I understand. You wanted to know why . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Because they told me that you flogged Bobbie.”

  “In the name of heaven,” cried Tom, “what’s Bobbie to you?”

  “A fine fellow, I understand.”

  “A nigger . . . and a fine fellow?”

  “Certainly! Why not? He’s a human being, Tom.”

  “Deborah, if such a thing . . .”

  “Well?”

  He looked hopelessly at her. Every instant that she insulted and defied him made him pass through an agony of shame—and made him love her all the more violently.

  “I’ll say one thing!” she cried suddenly to him. “I was a nasty cat yesterday. I’m really sorry for it. I shouldn’t have passed you in that way. I apologize, Tom.”

  It was not a great concession, but it quite melted Tom and made the way easier for him. “Deborah,” he told her, “I’ve been sick with it every moment of the time. Why the devil you did it, I can’t make out. If you really mean that black rascal . . .”

  “Why do you call him a rascal?”

  “He’s a nigger, isn’t he?”

  “Tom, everyone in Daggett respects him, and everyone is a little afraid of him.”

  “I wish his bones were bleaching in the rain!” Tom cried angrily. “But let’s forget him. I’ve come here to talk about you and not about my valet.”

  She started to answer him with some heat, but then she changed her mind, after the fashion of one who feels that mere words are not tools sufficiently strong for the purpose at hand. “If you want to talk about me, I’m willing, of course,” she said. “But you won’t be silly, Tom?”

  “You mean by that you hope I’ll not be foolish enough to say that I love you. Is that it?”

  “You have a nasty, sharp way of speaking, Tom.”

  “Frank people always hate frankness,” he answered with equal testiness.

  “Have you come to quarrel with me?” she asked, half angry and half smiling in spite of herself.

  “I’ve come t
o make love to you,” said Tom, “and I seem to be making a most awful mess of it.”

  “So you do . . . and yet . . .”

  “Well?”

  “I like you better this way than with the grand manner, Tom. I’d rather see you blush and grow angry than looking like the grand duke of something or other.”

  “Be serious for two seconds, Deborah.”

  “I am serious . . . more than you dream.”

  “I want to say two or three short words that have been said a good many times before. I want you to know that I love you, Deborah. Confound it, I’ve fought against it. I’ve told myself that, if I have to stay out here to court you, I’ll lose you anyway . . . but, even if I win, it means that I’m condemned to spend the rest of my life in the West, because you’d never move to the East, I know.”

  “Never, Tom,” she admitted, glad that he had passed from his declaration into something else that gave her a chance to take her breath. “Do you know I’m astonished?” she could not help adding.

  “Nonsense! You’ve seen me hanging about you, mooning like a sick calf.”

  “I’ve seen you now and then, drifting near me and looking me over with a sort of contemplative amusement, as if you wondered what sort of a watch ticked behind the queer case.” She said this without resentment.

  “Good gad, Deborah, are you using me for your amusement?”

  “I’m not a bit amused. I’m terribly excited.”

  “Then tell me what to expect, and I’ll bother you no more.”

  “Even when you tell me you love me,” she said with anger and curiosity commingled, “you speak more like a king than a suitor. I feel almost like crying . . . aye, aye, sir . . . like a sailor aboard a ship when the captain calls.”

  “Deborah, this is an infernally embarrassing position. I’m in a torment. Tell me yes or no, and then I’ll go.”

  “I’d like to be so certain that I could answer it in that way, with a single word, and be sure that I’m right. Yesterday I was sure . . . but, when I heard how you’d treated Bobbie, I was convinced there was no man in the world so worthy of being hated. Today I’m beginning to doubt. Partly it’s because I’m immensely flattered that you notice me . . . partly because I guess at all sorts of good things behind that cynical exterior of yours.”

  “You are a thousand times kind,” he said coldly.

  “There you are with your cynical touch again. Oh, Tom, confess frankly that you’re carrying on this whole affair for a joke or a bet. Confess it, shake hands, and we’ll part without malice.”

  A dull red burned up under his cheek, and, when he attempted to smile, his lips simply drew back in an ugly line. “That’s your answer, then, Deborah?”

  “It has to be. Let’s be friends, Tom. Come to see me again. Let’s grow to know one another.”

  “Every step I take toward you is an agony,” he said. “The whole town of Daggett knows that you cut me, and the whole town will laugh and sneer when it sees me pursuing you.”

  “But you despise the whole town so much that you surely will not care a whit what it thinks of you.”

  He started at this and drew in his breath slowly, as though this were a new thought.

  “It won’t do, though,” said the girl. “I think that I know how it is, Tom. You’re one of those proud fellows who would sneer at the king of England to show your independence, but in your heart of hearts you care for the opinion of the smallest child and the poorest beggar on the street corner.”

  “Ridiculous!” Tom cried.

  “I know I’m right.”

  He felt she had seen through him. He was partly relieved, partly amused, and in part he was very, very angry. It was just as if a strong man, in the midst of a passion of honest rage, should be tickled in the short ribs and forced to burst into laughter. What he wanted to do was to frown the opinion of Deborah into some other limbo, but what he did was to smile sheepishly upon her. “Confound it, Deborah,” he said, “you turn me into a milk-and-water creature.”

  “Every minute,” she said, “I see new things in you, Tom. Promise me that you’ll do what I ask. We’ll become friends. If the town of Daggett laughs at us, we’ll laugh at the town of Daggett. And in the end we’ll understand what’s best to do. What’s best right now is for you to go home . . . please. If someone should find you here, it would be mighty embarrassing.”

  “Shall I try to slip downstairs?”

  “Dad is a wolf, when it comes to ears. You’d never get out that way. You’ll have to go as you came.”

  He went to the window. “Deborah, I think that I shall go with hope.”

  “Of course you will.”

  She came up to him and took his hand, looking all the time into his eyes very earnestly, as though she were striving with all of her might to make out what might be going on inside his mind, guessing at the best, hoping for the best, but not quite sure. She seemed to Tom Farnsworth at that moment the loveliest and the best of women. He was so moved that he trembled—so shaken by her close scrutiny that he had to hide his face from her eyes by hurriedly raising her hand to his lips and then turning again to the window.

  “Listen,” she said as he sat poised for an instant on the window ledge, “I’ll ride down to the river tomorrow, near the hill with the three willows on the top. I’ll go in the middle of the afternoon when everyone else is sleeping. Will you be there, Tom?”

  “A thousand soldiers couldn’t keep me from being there. Good night, Deborah.”

  “Good night, Tom.” She watched him swing into the darkness.

  “Wild man . . . wild man,” she whispered to herself, then closed the window, and drew back the shade once more.

  III

  As for Tom Farnsworth, he climbed down to the ground with a happy and reckless feeling growing in his heart. He had demeaned himself, of course, in going to her in this fashion, but dignity was one thing, and love was quite another, and they could not be near neighbors. She had despised him when he came; she had liked him well enough before he left. One more meeting might do much. He discovered that he no longer complained to himself because he was enchanted, as he had felt at first, without cause. Deborah became more and more one with his ideal of what a woman should be.

  When he reached the earth, he was humming softly his content, and so, turning from the house, he saw a rudely outlined form in the darkness of the night, doubly black with the shadow of the house and the trees.

  “What the devil . . . ?” began Tom.

  “This is Jack Pattison,” said the other quietly. “I wonder if I may have the privilege of a short chat with you, Farnsworth?”

  Farnsworth followed him among the trees, bewildered, hot with shame, angry. “Now,” he said, when at last they had reached a plot of open grass, “tell me what you want, Pattison?”

  “An explanation.”

  “Really?”

  “This night I have asked Deborah Kinkaid to be my wife. As I left the house and went down the road, I stopped a while behind the hedge to moon at her lighted window, like a fool. Then I saw something work up the side of the house. The window opened. A man clambered inside the room. I’ve waited here, Tom, to meet that man when he came down again. I suppose you understand what’s on my mind?”

  An impulse of good-natured openness formed in the brain of Tom. He wanted to make a clean breast of everything—of all the shame and dread of the public voice that had kept him from going to Deborah openly by day or night. He wanted to explain it all clearly, as from one friend to another, but he changed his mind at the last instant. He had not the moral courage to humiliate himself.

  “I neither know nor care what’s in your mind, Pattison,” he said. “But what I wish to understand is . . . how do you dare to spy on me and then stop me to ask what’s in my mind?”

  “Is that your attitude?”

  “That’s my attitude.”

  “Then I have to tell you that you’re an overbearing, egotistical ass, Farnsworth. You’ve made yourself despised a
nd hated by everyone in the county. I’m glad to have this chance to tell you my own opinion.”

  “You have a polished tongue, Pattison.”

  “As for Deborah, trust me that I’ll have a full explanation out of you.”

  “In what way, Pattison?”

  “If I have to beat it out of you, I’ll do it.”

  “Dear me,” murmured Farnsworth. “You’re a violent fellow, Pattison.”

  “Tom,” cried the other, setting his grip on the breast of Farnsworth’s coat, “you’ll have to tell me everything I’ve asked, otherwise I’ll go mad. I can’t live and doubt Deborah.”

  The restraint with which Tom had held himself snapped. He struck off the hand of Pattison and leaped back. “Live or die and go to perdition for all of me!” he exclaimed. “Get out of my path, Pattison.”

  “Tom, this means a fight.”

  “As you please.”

  “Tom, I’m armed. For heaven’s sake, be a man and a gentleman, and don’t force us to do a murder here. I ask you for an explanation that you know I have a right to hear. Will you give it?”

  “Not a syllable to any man on earth . . . by force.”

  “Then . . . God be on the right side!”

  He jerked a hand for his hip pocket, but Farnsworth was much before him. He had already managed to shift his weapon to the deep pocket of his coat. He now dropped his hand upon it, found it lying already in line, and had merely to curl his finger around the trigger. Jack Pattison whirled around, throwing his revolver far into the brush, and fell on his face. The startling report of his own gun sobered and wakened Tom. He dropped instantly upon his knees beside the fallen man and turned him on his back. All that he could make out, in the dullness of the starlight, was the welling of blood from the very center of Pattison’s forehead. Was he dead?

  Tom stood up. Two birds, having been disturbed in their sleep by the roar of the gun beneath them, had soared a little distance into the air, but now they settled back to their roosting branch, with little sharp voices of complaint. The wind, tangling through some newly planted pine saplings, brought their freshness and purity of breath to Tom. Now he heard the outbreak of many voices from the Kinkaid house. A door slammed. Somebody ran noisily across the veranda.