The trouble at Pinelands A detective story
place. Then he came home to live, quite openly. I think that killing had
been too much for mother. She died about six months later.
“I lived on with him. There was nothing else to do. I was growing up,
and I was strong; mother’d taught me to cook; I had to stay; I’d nowhere
to go, and I was afraid of him. When he was angry with me he’d threaten
to get married again and bring another woman home with him to keep me
from getting ‘uppity.’
“And then Doctor Gaskell came. He was on a hunting trip, and my
stepfather brought him home to supper one night. I’d never supposed
there were such men in the world. He was wonderful! I lay awake all
night, just thinking about him. He told my stepfather he was forty-nine,
I remember; and that was just the age my father would have been if he’d
lived. I lay there--I was only eighteen--and pretended Doctor Gaskell
was really my father, and we were just visiting up there, just camping
out, and in a few days we’d go back home, down the mountains, into the
settlements, which mother used to talk about sometimes, into a real
house, with carpets and hard-wood floors and a bathtub and a furnace and
all the wonderful furnishings I’d dreamed about and never seen. It was a
very beautiful dream.
“Things were worse than ever just then; my stepfather was ‘sitting up,’
as they call it, with a widow on Lick Run, and I just couldn’t bear to
think of another woman in the house where mother had died. And so I
slipped away and went to Doctor Gaskell’s tent on the other side of the
mountain, and I talked to him. I’d never been to school a day; for one
thing, we were too poor, and I had no dress to wear, and then my
stepfather wouldn’t let me. He didn’t believe in schooling; said it made
women high-toned and finickin. He used to laugh and sneer at my poor
mother, because she wasn’t strong, and say it was book learning made her
that way. But mother’d taught me a lot.
“And Doctor Gaskell was so good to me! If he’d really been my own father
he couldn’t have been better. He offered to take me down to the
settlements with him and find me work there and fix it so I could go to
night school. I didn’t dare at first; I told him Roaring Lafe would kill
us both. But he just laughed. That was the most wonderful thing of
all--he wasn’t afraid of Lafe Rutledge! Until then I’d supposed
everybody in the world must be afraid of him.
“So, the end of it was, I slipped out in the night, and Doctor Gaskell
took me with him down the mountain and into Asheville. I was so
frightened; I thought that must be the biggest city in the world. I’d
never dreamed of anything so grand. And we took the train there and went
to Raleigh, and the doctor got a place for me in the hospital as an
attendant. I studied at night and worked hard! After a year or two I got
into the nurses’ training school, and I went through it and graduated.
The whole world seemed going just right for me; I was very happy.”
She paused and sighed. Her dreamy eyes seemed to dwell on that vision of
past happiness.
“But it didn’t last,” she went on. “I knew all the time, some way, that
it couldn’t last. I don’t know how he found out, but one night my
stepfather came to the hospital and asked for me, just as I was going on
duty; I was charge nurse on a ward then. I came out, wondering who it
could be, for I hadn’t many friends, and thinking perhaps Doctor Gaskell
might have come down from Pinelands--I hadn’t seen him for a year
almost--and it was Roaring Lafe! I just stood there dumb. He told me to
get my bundle and come with him. I was frightened to death. I’ve been
afraid of him all my life. But I think I’d have found courage to refuse,
to call the police, to do _something_, rather than go back with him, but
he just stood there, pulling at that great, bushy beard, and he laughed
that awful, roaring laugh, so that the orderly ran out to see what the
noise was. Then he caught my arm--I wore the mark of it for a month--and
dragged me close and whispered in my ear. The smell of raw corn whisky
was on him, and his eyes were terrible.
“‘You come along quiet,’ he told me. ‘If you don’t, to-night that
mis’able furriner, Gaskell, will git his comeuppance! I’ll go plumb f’om
here to Pinelands, a-puppose t’ waylay him; I’ll fill his gizzard with
buckshot. You comin’, you huzzy, or do you aim t’ stay here with these
furriners in th’ settlemints?’
“So I went with him. What else could I do? I could have screamed for
help, though I don’t believe he’d have laid his hand on me in anger. But
I knew he’d keep his word. I knew he’d leave me there at the hospital
and go straight here to Pinelands and kill Doctor Gaskell, just as he
said. And I couldn’t bear that, after all he’d done. Why, I wouldn’t be
alive, if it weren’t for him! Because I might just as well be dead, as
buried up there in the hills, as I was till he came. And I’ve always
made believe in my own mind that Doctor Gaskell was my own father come
to life again; I’ve always thought of him as a father; it was just like
hearing my own father had been killed, that morning, when you told us,
Mr. Uhlman.”
She turned to me, as if to apologize for her fainting that fateful
morning, and her big violet eyes were tragic.
“So I went back,” she said, as she took up her pitiful tale. “I went
back to the log house on the Devil’s Branch and put by my nice clothes
and wore homespun again and cooked salt pork and corn pone. At night I
waited alone for my stepfather to come home, shouting and roaring. I
used to sit huddled in a corner, shaking all over, while he drank raw
corn liquor until he fell over, dead drunk, and I pulled off his boots
and put him to bed. And all the while I was frightened, frightened out
of my wits, though he never laid his hands on me. But there was a devil
peeping out of his eyes at me. Oh, he’s a terrible man!
“And yet I do believe that he thought he was doing the right thing by
me. He always used to say he’d saved my soul by bringing me back there.
“It went on from week to week and month to month, for three whole years.
At first it was unbearable, and I used to cry all night and think of
killing myself. After a while I got sort of deadened and lost interest
in things. The days slipped by, and I dropped into a daze and went on
like some machine, without even thinking any more. I put on flesh, and
my stepfather gloated over the fact, saying how strong I was, as if I’d
been a horse or a mule! He insisted that I was outgrowing my finical
ways and book learning, and getting to be a healthy, honest woman. If he
could have had my poor mother earlier, he used to say, before she was
plumb ruined with education, she’d have been healthy, too. And even that
didn’t rouse me much. I felt so dull and stupid, and I got so I’d sleep
all the time. There are women like that in the mountains, strange, fat,
stupid-looking creatures, with wide, flat faces, who just sleep and mope
around all the time, like cows, without ever caring about anything. They
look almost deformed; they’re unnatural. Some of them have great
goiters. I used to wonder if I’d ever be like them, but I didn’t care
much, even for that.”
Her voice fell. Behind the impassive, commonplace words I felt such a
bitterness of desolation, such a gripping, terrible memory of those
monotonous, lifeless days, that my throat closed upon the words of
sympathy I strove to utter.
Doctor Somers raised his head, his gray-green eyes impersonally alight.
“I thought so! A goiterous region! Mighty interesting, that! You know
there is a similar region in the mountains of Switzerland, where most of
the women have goiter. We used to think it was the water; but we know
better now. I must go up there and investigate. You haven’t any struma,
Miss Christie,” said Somers, stooping forward to touch her rounded
throat, at which the girl blushed vividly, “but you developed a
condition of hypothyroidism instead.” And he went on didactically into a
maze of “hormones” and “endocrines” and “internal secretions,” which
nobody understood. “But you’re safely out of that hole now,” he
concluded practically, “and your condition is practically cured, thanks
to the thyroid I gave you. You’ve changed wonderfully in just this ten
days, child! You’re a hundred per cent brighter, less somnolent. And,”
as if the idea had just struck him, “you’ve grown mighty pretty. Why,
Anne, child--you’re really beautiful!”
The girl’s first name came from his lips unhesitatingly, as if he
thought of her thus, and not as Miss Christie. His tone was one of naïve
surprise at this discovery.
“You’re a raving beauty, Anne!” he repeated.
The girl blushed vividly, the bright color sweeping up to the very edge
of her fair hair. Her eyes, which had been so bravely, so candidly fixed
upon Somers throughout her pitiful story, dropped modestly and were
veiled by long, curved lashes.
“Do you think so?” she asked demurely.
CHAPTER XXIV
A PROJECTED EXCURSION
“Don’t interrupt,” ordered Dorothy peremptorily. Like the rest of us,
she was eager for the end of the nurse’s tale. “You can talk about her
good looks later; we want to hear what happened next. Go on, Miss
Christie!”
And Miss Christie went on, rather less sadly, I thought.
“Well, I’d have been up there yet, I reckon, if last fall my stepfather
hadn’t wanted me to get m-married.” She blushed. “There was a man,
Calvin Collender, whom they called ‘Cal Col.’ He used to work with my
stepfather. Since prohibition, you see, my stepfather had been making
corn whisky faster than ever. He bought up corn from all over the
mountains and put up a bigger still, and they used to smuggle it out
some way and sell it down in the settlements. He used to come back with
his pockets just bulging with money, all in gold; he had no faith in
paper money, and he’d bury the gold somewhere. Why, he must have made
thousands and thousands of dollars--is making it yet, I suppose. And
this Collender, this Cal Col, was his chief helper, a tall, thin man,
with a sharp nose and a short chin, like those mountaineers have, and
little, mean-looking eyes. He was lots older than I; he was a widower,
too. And my stepfather kept after me and after me. He said I ought to be
grateful; that it wasn’t every man would marry a woman like me, who’d
had book learning and knew things it wasn’t fitting for a woman to know.
“I couldn’t stand that. It was bad enough with Roaring Lafe, but to go
to this other man, this Cal Col, who wasn’t even brave, I couldn’t! I
remembered my poor mother, and how she’d just faded away, and I thought
it was better to die right then. And Lafe Rutledge was a _man_; you had
to respect him, in spite of all his terrible ways. But this Cal Col was
just like a creeping, crawly snake, afraid of my stepfather, afraid of
the law, afraid of everything, even of me, I think. He used to look at
me sideways, with those dry, bright little eyes, just like a
rattlesnake. And I knew he’d beat me if he dared.
“So one night last winter I just ran away, down the mountain all alone.
It began to snow while I was climbing down toward Asheville, and I was
so glad! I knew the dogs couldn’t follow me then. My stepfather had a
dozen bloodhounds. And I got clear away, somehow, and bought a veil to
put over my face; then I took the train and came right here to
Pinelands; I didn’t know what else to do. If I went back to Raleigh, I
knew my stepfather would find me.
“And I got off the train here and went to a hotel. It was in the winter,
you see, and the town was full of tourists from the North; nobody
noticed one more. I phoned to Doctor Gaskell, and he came right away and
told me about this place. Miss McGregor had asked him to find a nurse
for her that very day.