CHAPTER XLII

THE WATCH

THE

HEIR refuge, dreary under any circumstances, was all but unbearable in the actual situation. They found a few bits of candle left from the last sugar season, and with some mouldy straw did their best to make a bed for the unconscious man. Amanda helped Barnaby

get him from the horse and into the camp. The contusion behind the ear showed black with the infusion of blood. Barnaby worked as in a dream, the sense of Amanda's nearness making doubly strange any task involving Ashgrave.

"We must get a doctor," Amanda announced, standing in helpless fright before the unconsciousness and the heavy breathing.

"Some leeches, if we had them, might help, until he can reach here," Barnaby suggested.

"Bloodsuckers?" Amanda asked, using the country

name.

She had set herself to work, with a woman's instinct, to make more tolerable the hole in which they were hidden. Whatever she might feel in the future for this man, now there was only tenderness and apprehension in her heart. The impulsion to do, to help, the informing spirit of the helpmate, was controlling and left no place for resentment or recrimination. At last she said aloud what she had been thinking while she was working: "They 're in a jar, on the second shelf of the kitchen cupboard."

Barnaby, who was loath to leave, though he knew she had really meant him to go for the physician, looked at her enquiringly, and when she got the meaning of the look, she realized how blind her statement was. she added:

"The bloodsuckers."

Then

"I can go and get them," he said, looking down at the unconscious man. "They might save his life.”

"There is no one there," she explained, adding, “I could get in through the shed." Then she turned to him "Can you take care of him?”

"Unless they come.

were here."

Then it would not help, if you

When she prepared to go, he raised objections to which she refused heed, giving him directions for bathing Ashgrave's head. She had already loosened his neckband. When Barnaby felt himself compelled to yield, he made this suggestion:

"We have nothing to eat. If you could get some

"No," she said, with positiveness. "The bloodsuckers they are for the sick. To take bread would be stealing."

"From your father's house?" he urged.

"I can't help it," she said. "Father said he would n't give him a night's shelter nor a crust of bread if he was dying. We'll have to take our chances on food.”

She plunged into the dark and left him with the injured man. When she came out of the grove on the crest of the hill, the flames were shooting straight up from the interior of the house and barn, fed by the roof timbers, which had fallen in. Like swarming ants, men and boys were darting here and there in the intense light, and she saw a pile of what seemed articles taken from the house lying on one side. Just on the edge of

the darkness were groups of spectators, who had evidently been drawn together by the unusual sight, among whom she distinguished a number of women. It was possible her mother was of them, and in any event they afforded her cover in taking the shortest way home, for if she were recognised, it would naturally be assumed that she too had come to see the fire.

She found the house deserted and easily accomplished her purpose. It seemed as if she had been from home a long time. An irresistible impulse seized her to go through the house and take another look at all that had been familiar through long years and had already, in so brief hours, under the stress of new experience, taken on an air of strangeness. She went to her own room, and in a dim way recalled the shame she had felt when Ashgrave came there with her; but she had to stop and reason with herself before she could accept it that it was that very evening on which she had that experience, which had grown dim and far away.

In the pantry she came upon some loaves of freshly baked bread, standing on end and cooling under white cloths thrown lightly over them. She thought of Barnaby's suggestion, but her resolution did not falter, and she turned away unremorseful for the hunger of the morrow. She took some vinegar, for when a bloodsucker will not take hold, one can force him by washing the place with vinegar.

On her way back, a group passed her in the sunken path, where she drew herself into the bushes. The fire had begun to die down and they were going homeward, with curiosity sated. A man was speaking:

"It's a gold watch, they found it in a locked dra'r in the highboy. One o' the Graves boys broke it open with a stun. They du say it b'longs to thet air Barnaby

that went off sudden like a year ago come July, an' was a'terward found over Milbank way."

"Sho! How'd it come thar?" One of the women spoke.

The other, more quick to catch the significance of the affair, exclaimed:

"Joe Ashgrave must a' stole it from him."

Some on 'em think mebbe 't was wuss 'n thet.”

A sudden faintness came over Amanda and she was near falling. Barnaby's watch in Ashgrave's bedroom! Stolen it must have been. That was plain; but even beyond that was the question, When? How? Ashgrave had said that Barnaby went in the direction of the cross-road. The man had declared that some people thought it was worse than stealing. Was it then Ashgrave who was responsible for Barnaby's supposed accident? If so, he must have attacked and robbed him, leaving him helpless to wander away and perish, if it so happened. And all these months, he had lied about the matter, thus concealing his great crime with the meanness of falsehood! She went on, staggering and stumbling like a blind person or one walking in the dark along an unknown road.

Yet she set herself, on reaching the camp, to the task of caring for the wounded man, finding in this doing the only relief from the torment of bitter thought that ran riot within. She forgot her assertion to Barnaby that God had taken him from her until she had confessed, and it had ceased to be possible that they should marry. She saw now only the human side, exemplified in Ashgrave's agency. The accidental touch of Barnaby's hand, as he joined in some task for the comfort of the injured man; the noise of his moving about the shed; the mere knowledge that he was delaying starting for

the physician, because he would not leave her alone in the night with that mob of men and boys at hand, kept alive the thought that he had been tender and protecting, where her husband had stripped her of purity and robbed her of her last defender.

Out of this confusion, one thought came constantly to the fore, only to come again and again with insistent force when she strove to thrust it back, and that was, had she at last filled the measure of repentance that God demanded, and was this the means and hour of her deliverance? In placing it on God, she seemed to divorce herself from responsibility for any ungenerosity of thought involved in such a question. She had yielded when He demanded of her the greatest sacrifice a woman could give. Was she to shrink on behalf of another where she had not hesitated for herself?

If God was now to spare her further, it was not her help He needed, nor was she to offer it. What He had determined would be, and her part in it was merely to wait on Him and receive what He gave. Therefore, repugnant as was the thought of relief, she worked with her utmost might to do all in behalf of Ashgrave that she knew. In this mood too she urged Barnaby to go for a physician, and was insistent with him when he averred that for no consideration could he leave her at this lonely spot, with the injured man to care for, and men and boys at hand who had just been guilty of so wanton an act of destruction, which had inflamed passions and, perhaps, left them reckless of what further acts they might commit.

As the night wore on, he tried to induce her to take some sleep, or at least rest on a bed of straw he spread in the corner farthest from that in which Ashgrave lay; but the events of the day and evening had wrought too keenly on her nervous force to permit sleep. To this