The thing in the woods
grinned, backing a little at my approach.
"Hello, sis," I said. "Who lives in that house there?"
"'S Mister Menning's."
"Ah!" I took another backward glance at the ill-kept yard, with its
indescribable litter. As I did so a low moan, almost human in its
misery, came from the barn behind the jumbled sheds. It was
repeated, long-drawn and mournful, the protest of a dumb thing
exhausted by suffering. I turned to the child sharply.
"What's the matter there?"
"It's the cow." She shuffled her bare toes in the dust, looking with
a fascinated curiosity towards the place whence the sound came. "She
hollers awful sometimes."
"Is it ill?"
"Mennin beats her." She said with the curious indifference of the
country-bred child towards animal suffering. "He's allus beatin'
her. Gran'pap's spoke to him, onct. He says she don't make no
profit an' Gran'pa says she can't make no profit if he's allus
beatin' her."
I remembered her face suddenly.
"Aren't you Mrs. Nevill's little girl, from the Bend?"
"Yep. Gran'pa's house is jest back there." She jerked her head up
the road.
"How's your mother? I'll step in and see her, as I'm here."
"Mother's up. She's been washin'."
She began to retreat up the road, with the sudden movement of a
half-wild thing, and I followed her, glad enough to turn my back on
the chicken-huckster's dwelling. The moaning of the cow was in my
ears again as I walked on.
I knew the Nevills' cottage, and my road from there lay straight
enough. I had never approached the Bend before from this side, and
so the lie of the land was unfamiliar to me. The Nevills were one of
the few Irish families about. The household consisted of a rheumatic
old grandfather, his daughter, whom I had attended a short while ago,
and her husband, a steady young fellow who worked at a harness
factory in the village.
Paddy was an old sinner if there ever lived one, but now, along in
the green seventies, he confined himself to the cultivation of
religion and the smoking of a particularly vile corncob pipe. He had
been employed most of his life on the railway, and his rheumatism was
the result of six weeks' work in a flooded cutting. Providence had
released him some two years ago from a vituperative wife, whose
latter years had been soured by the burden of an invalid husband; I
gathered from the old man's talk that she had to her last day
regarded his rheumatism as a form of criminal idleness, and since her
death Paddy had taken a fresh lease of life.
I found him on his usual corner of the cottage porch, his square old
head with its bristly jaws--Paddy still shaved once a week--framed by
the window-ledge and its row of flowering plants in tin cans. His
daughter was inside, getting supper, and the new baby lay in a
ramshackle baby-coach near Paddy's elbow. He was rocking the coach
with one toe on the wheel while he smoked, the smell of his
unspeakable tobacco mingling with that of the frying onions in the
kitchen, through the open door.
I always felt like holding my breath when I approached the Nevill
cottage. The stuffiness was of that permanent, impenetrable sort
which seems to encompass the house solidly for a radius of five yards
at least.
I sat down on the porch step and asked after Paddy's rheumatism. He
looked down at his feet, shapeless in list slippers, like fearsome
parcels.
"I ain't long fur this world, doctor, and that's truth I'm tellin'
yer. Don't I know it? We ain't a long-lived fam'ly. Me father died
at seventy-eight an' me brother at eighty, an' I'm thinkin' I won't
be long after thim." He raised his voice suddenly to a shout,
without turning, "Mary, git a cheer out fur th' doctor!"
I refused the chair hastily; the porch step at least bordered on
fresh air.
"I've just come round by Aaron Menning's place," I said. "I met the
little girl there."
Paddy's face darkened.
"Ain't I allus tellin' the young limb I won't hev her hangin' round
the likes of thim dirrty Dutchmen! It's her mother'll be after
takin' the strap to her fur that. The place ain't fit fur a dog
these days. Did ye take heed to the cow there?"
I nodded.
"The poor baste do be after cryin' day an' night, like a Christian.
I've told him again an' again, but he's a bad man is Aaron. He's
took after his brother, an' that's sayin' ill enough of anyone. Ye
wouldn't mind Jake Mennin', doctor?"
"No. It was before I came here."
"Sure I've lived neighbors to thim fifteen years, an' I've seen
things to turn your stomach on yer. He had a bad streak in him,
Jake, an' it was the devil took him in the end. They had a little
girl there workin', the year before Jake died.... That's why I tell
Lizzie I'll break her neck before I see her hangin' round there. The
ould mother's a decent woman, or used to be. God knows the poor
soul's had enough to turn her crazy."
"There is a mother, then?"
"Sure, but ye don't see her nowadays. 'Tis Aaron keeps her to the
house, most like. I used to be civil spoke to Aaron a while back,
but sence Jake died there ain't no good to him at all. Would any
Christian man treat a dumb baste the way he does? An' he treats his
ould mother the same, if all's known."
He pulled on his pipe.
"Two weeks ago, it would be, as we saw her last. Yes, I mind now it
was the day I was thinkin' of puttin' the new winder-pane in. She
come over to borry a half-cup o' sugar, an' I says to Mary to let her
have it, the poor soul. She had her hand all wrapped up to here"--he
measured a space on his gaunt grimy wrist--"an' she says to Mary as
she'd scalded it in the kitchen. Aaron was away with the wagon, or
she wouldn't 'a' come then."
"I suppose Aaron does a good business," I said casually.
"By the talk he does. I do be thinkin' he does most of it in the
next county, fur I don't see him drivin' the village way more'n onct
in a week or so. He'll be gone three days on a stretch wid the
wagon, an' Lizzie's seen him come home mornin's wid the poor baste in
a lather. Lizzie says he has hundreds o' chickens there, an' he
can't be after sellin' thim all. They die on him all the time, fur
she's seen him pull 'em out o' the coops and throw 'em to the pigs."
I asked after his son and rose to go, after turning the half of my
tobacco pouch into Paddy's old tin box. It was getting on toward
five o'clock, and I would have just time to clean up, get the mare
put in, and drive to the depot for the afternoon train.
XI
JAKEY WALKS
It did me good to see Herrick's cheery face on the platform, and to
feel the hand-grip he gave me. Our friendship dated back to college
days, and unlike so many of those early intimacies, it had
strengthened instead of decreased with the passage of time. Then, as
now, Herrick had been the same curious mixture of enthusiast and
practical hard-headed worker, and in spite of the inevitable
schooling of experience and years of exacting and often discouraging
labour, he had carried into the early forties a certain boyish
confidence, a freshness of outlook, which gave to one instinctively,
on meeting him, the impression of indomitable health and vitality.
When we had tucked his valise into the back of the buggy and turned
the mare about, he looked at me with a laugh.
"Well, Haverill, you look quite the country practitioner already!
Seven weeks' change--ye gods! But you haven't grown a beard yet!"
"I'm keeping the beard for my leisure moments," I told him. "So far
they haven't been many."
"Don't tell me this place is in the throes of an epidemic! It looks
like one of those ideal Sleepy Hollows where you get about one call
for whooping-cough every six months. I came here for repose, you
know."
"Oh, you'll get it," I assured him. "You'll get the kind of repose
that keeps you awake nights wondering where it's going to hit you
next. They don't want a doctor down here; they want a new lunacy
commission officer, and the first suspect will be me. Oh, I'm going
to make you work, Jack! Have no idle dreams on the subject."
"Work! You look as if you'd forgotten the meaning of the word! If
ever a man had the luck to stumble on a good excuse for a holiday
it's you. This air, this sky, these woods to fish and loaf in----
Hello, what's up? The whooping-cough I spoke of, or have you
arranged a little semblance of business for my benefit! That good
lady seems about to welcome us with open arms."
A woman was hurrying down the road toward us, from the direction of
my house. She had a gingham sunbonnet on which flapped at each step
as she walked, and on catching sight of the buggy with the familiar
roan mare in the shafts she waved her hand in unmistakable signal. I
pulled Bess up, and by the time the woman came pantingly abreast of
us I recognized her for Mrs. Sliefer, who lived in the first
farm-house beyond the Bend, past the cross roads.
"I been to your house, doctor," she began, "an' Mis' Searle told me
you weren't to hum, so I come right on. My niece is took bad an'
she's been queer sence the mornin', and I'd like you to come straight
back with me an' see her."
She spoke with an air somewhat of indignation, born of her toilsome
walk. Mrs. Sliefer was a stout lady, to put it at the mildest, and
the heat and exercise had obviously tried her. I leaned from the
buggy.
"Get right up, Mrs. Sliefer! There's plenty of room, and you can
tell me as we drive."
She hoisted herself laboriously into the buggy, with our combined
help, and collapsed, rather than sat down, between us. Luckily the
seat was a broad one. As it was, her generous proportions all but
crushed us.
I kept the mare at a walk while Mrs. Sliefer told her errand.
Briefly, as I gathered from her rather spasmodic utterance, the facts
were these.
Her niece, Rebecca Durn, who lived with Mr. and Mrs. Sliefer at the
farm, was keeping company with the young man from Haskell's grocery
store. The young couple were in the habit of meeting of an evening,
after Rebecca had washed her supper dishes, in the woods near the
sawmill, some fifteen minutes from the farm-house and in the line of
the short cut which the young man used to walk up from the village.
They usually took a short stroll about the dam before returning to
the farm, to finish the evening in the older folks' company on the
home porch. Yesterday, as I have said, was rainy, and Rebecca had
expected her sweetheart at the house. As he did not arrive, however,
and the weather had lifted since five o'clock, Rebecca, thinking he
might possibly have gone to the usual trysting-place, put on a shawl
and her rubber shoes and went out to find him. He was not to seen,
and she loitered a few moments in the neighborhood of the dam before
returning home. It was then just getting dusk. According to her
account, she was strolling near the saw-mill when the ghost of Jakey
Menning, surrounded by light and with flames coming from his mouth,
sprang out from the bushes and yelled at her. Rebecca, struck of a
heap, as she expressed it, had still the sense to turn and run, and
being a sturdy young woman she speedily outdistanced the alleged
ghost and gained the shelter of her own home. Once on the porch,
however, she collapsed in hysterics, and it was not until she came
to, a good half-hour after, that her aunt and uncle could learn what
had happened. Rebecca's sweetheart had meantime arrived, and being a
strong-minded young man had at once induced Mr. Sliefer to set out
with him, armed with a stout cudgel and the farmer's shotgun, to
investigate. They patrolled the neighborhood of the saw-mill
thoroughly, but needless to say nothing was found.
Rebecca recovered, but this morning, on the matter being mentioned at
breakfast, had promptly gone off again into hysterics, a state which