21

THE ROAD AGAIN

When he had turned the corner, I said to Lefty: “Well?”

“Back to the stable, kid, as fast as you can trot with me,” said Lefty. We headed back that way. “Because,” he went on, as we hurried, “what we have to travel in is a buggy with a trotting horse. If they take a notion to light out after us, they have riding horses in this town, and they have some damned fast-looking ones, too.”

You couldn't get around logic like that. Those Western towns were real fire, when they got started. They were very easy and lazy, mostly, about hunting down crooks, but when once they got on a tear after you, it was a good idea to make a fast start. They would think nothing of giving you a roll in tar and feathers. If it was anything serious, they stopped all wasting of time by just arranging a little rope around your neck and hoisting you up to swing in the wind and dry out there.

We were both pretty serious, you can believe me!

“If I get out of this town,” said Lefty, “with a whole skin, we won't stop in another this side of a hundred and fifty miles.” He meant it, too.

In the livery stable, we slapped that Tippety into the harness, tumbled into the rig, spanked him out of the stable, down the back alley, and up past the house of Kate. When I saw that Lefty intended to go right on past, I could only turn and stare at him.

“Lefty,” I said, “it ain't possible that you mean to go right on by and not even say good-bye to her?”

I could see that he was hard hit, but he didn't say a word. He just whistled a sharp note that he used for calling Smiler. There was a crash of glass, and Smiler sailed right out of a second-story window. That fool dog would have jumped right over a cliff if he had heard the whistle of his boss. He landed in a shrub with a crash, and in another minute he was sitting up in the rig beside us with a couple of cuts on the head and another on the shoulder where the glass had sliced him, but just as happy as a picture to be back there with us on the road, again.

I watched that house for what I was afraid would happen. Sure enough, I was right. Around the corner of the house came Kate Perigord. She didn't stand and stare. She just gave us one look, turned right around, bowed her head, and walked away. So that I knew she didn't need to be told what was happening. There was hardly anybody in the world so understanding as her.

Maybe Lefty knew that she was watching. He didn't say anything and he didn't let on. He stuck out his jaw, and he drove along down that road with the reins just tight enough for him to push on them, as you might say. Tippety clipped along as pretty as a picture, showing off how gay he was. Old Lefty wasn't thinking about anything in the world except that girl that was behind him.

The minute that we was out of the town of Perigord, Lefty doubled right back up the valley, his old trick of doing the unexpected thing. They would expect him, if they give him a chase, to be spinning down the valley. But he was away in the other direction, switching off from the main valley road, and cutting into little side paths and twisting alleys. He worked his way toward the mountains, keeping to courses where an automobile wouldn't have dared to follow without busting its springs.

Tippety knocked along as cheerful as ever, but even his spirits was run out by the time we got up the grade. He stopped to blow right close to the place where we had first stopped the night before and seen the valley for the first time all spread out underneath us. We didn't look back now, it was too plumb sad.

Lefty said: “This is the end of everything. You can cheat and dodge around for a long time, but then, when you do become honest, you find out that you still have to cheat and to dodge…or else to die. The habit that you make of living is a lot stronger than the heart in you. And because I've played the fool and cheated a rube town by being a blind man with painted-up eyes, I'll never see Kate again. Never!”

Tippety, having finished blowing, started on again. He was like that. You never had to whip him. As long as he was feeling right, he would go along just as fast as the road would let him go. When he got tired, he would slow up and give himself a blow. He was a great little horse, always turning his head and cocking it a little sideways so as he could watch us while he went nodding along.

Tippety couldn't cheer me. All the heart in me had run down into my boots and wouldn't come up again. Lefty didn't talk any more, and even after we had had our lunch and he begun to chat about something, you could see that he was just forcing himself. We made a point of never meeting each other's eyes; we knew, inside, that things could never be the same and that most of the happiness, somehow, had leaked out of life. Just the same, it seemed to me that I liked Lefty better than ever, though I seen how bad and how weak he was in lots of ways. Partly I pitied him and partly I just liked him awful well, and it seemed to me that I could see right down to the bottom of him. In spite of how old he was and how many things he could do and how brave and how strong he was, he was really more of a boy than me. I don't expect that you can understand me when I say this, because it is a very hard thing to feel and a harder thing to say. Just the same, it is a fact.

That was the most mournful day that we ever had. It was worse than anything that I had ever gone through at Aunt Claudia's house, even the Sundays. Yes, I knew right then that all the rest of my life, even if I was to live to be a hundred, I would never get the thought of Kate out of my head, and the ache all out of my heart.

 

We came, along in the evening, to a little side road branching off from the main trail that we were following. There was grass growing all over that side road, not the grass of a month or two, but the grass of a year or two. Lefty said that most likely that road would lead off to the wreck or the ruins of a house, and that we would see what it was. I said that, if we went in there, people hunting us would think that house one of the most likely places to look. Lefty said: “You put in your oar too much. Just remember that you're a boy and that I'm a man. I can't be bothered arguing. You do what I tell you to do and shut up the talk!”

I never had had talk like that out of Lefty before. I didn't say anything back, because I knew what was wrong. It wasn't Lefty that wanted to say such things, but it was the sorrow that was in Lefty.

We came in through the old road and saw the house; it was a regular old ripper, I can tell you, about sixty years old. It was big, had two stories, and a part of the roof had fallen in. The first thing that happened when we went inside through the door that had fallen down, Lefty's foot went right through the floor. That was how rotten the wood was, if you understand what I mean. Anyway, there was plenty of rotten old wood to make a fire out of. I ripped it away and brought along great big armfuls of it. It burned up like paper. There we cooked our supper; I washed up the tins afterwards. It was the first time that Lefty hadn't offered to help me; he just sat there and didn't even smoke, he was so low and so sick.

After a while it begun to rain, and we dragged our things under the trees because we didn't want to spend the night in that ratty old house. But it wasn't any use, because that wasn't any common rain. It was a real mountain rain, which is different a lot from low-ground rains. The wind began to squeal and snort and roar, and, the first thing you know, the lightning was rip-ripping across the sky. Finally the wind was driving the rain right through that tree we was under and soaking us to the skin underneath—no easy, lazy rain, but one that came swashing down. Take one step in it and you were as wet as a drowned rat.

We got our stuff together and made for the old house. All the windows downstairs were out, and all the places oozing and dripping with water. We tried our chance of climbing up the stairs. They held pretty good, only one of the steps giving way.

Upstairs, it was better, because the roof of that old house had a pretty good overhang to it, and it sheltered those upper windows a good deal. We brought all our junk up there, rolled out our blankets, and turned in. Poor little Tippety came to the door downstairs and gave us a call to please let him come in, too. You would laugh to have heard him! Even Lefty and me, wet and mean as we felt, we had to laugh.

There ain't anything so tiring as sorrow. I just lay awake for a minute or two, listening to the skittering of the bugs and the other things that rain had driven into the house, and then I was sound asleep.

I thought it was the stillness that woke me up, at last, on account of the rain having stopped and only a dripping going on in the night. There was light in the room, too, account of the moon shining very clear. Pretty soon I saw that I wasn't the only one that was awake. Lefty was raised up on one elbow and listening. He turned his head over toward me, put his hand on me, and gave me a grip but didn't say a word.

It wasn't the silence only that had waked me up. It was the feel of danger coming that had aroused me. And now I heard a creak somewheres in that old house—and my heart turned over about a hundred times in a second!