In Happy Valley | Page 5

Happy Valley or elsewhere in the hills. So he stood still, his hands open, and waited. For a while Jay did not move, and his eyes, when they did open, looked dazed. He rose slowly, and as things came back to him his face became suddenly distorted. Nothing alive could humiliate him that way and still live; he meant to kill now.
"Look out!" screamed the girl. Jay rushed for the gun and Ira darted after him; but there was a quicker flash from the bushes, and Jay found his own gun pointed at his own breast and behind it Allaphair's black eyes searing him.
"Huh!" she grunted contemptuously, and the silence was absolute while she broke the pistol, emptied the cartridges into her hand, and threw them far over into the bushes.
"Less go on home, Iry," she said, and a few steps away she turned and tossed the gun at Jay's feet. He stooped, picked it up, and, twirling it in his hand, looked foolishly after them. Presently he grinned, for at bottom Jay was a man. And two hours later, amid much wonder and many guffaws, he was telling the tale:
"The damned leetle spindle-shank licked me--licked me! An' I'll back him agin anybody in Happy Valley or anywhar else--ef you leave out bitin', gougin', and wrasslin'."
"Did ye lose yo' gal, too?" asked Pleasant Trouble.
"Huh!" said Jay, "I reckon not--she knows her boss."
The two walked home slowly and in silence--Ira in front and Allaphair, as does the woman in the hills, following close behind, in a spirit quite foreign to her hitherto. The little school-teacher had turned shy again and said never a word, but, as he opened the gate to let her pass through, she saw the old, old telltale look in his sombre eyes. Her mother was crooning in the porch.
"No ploughin' termorrer, mammy. Me an' Iry want the ole nag to go down to the Couht House in the mornin'. Iry's axed me to marry him."
Perhaps every woman does not love a master--perhaps Allaphair had found hers.

THE COMPACT OF CHRISTOPHER
The boy had come home for Sunday and must go back now to the Mission school. He picked up his battered hat and there was no good-by.
"I reckon I better be goin'," he said, and out he walked. The mother barely raised her eyes, but after he was gone she rose and from the low doorway looked after his sturdy figure trudging up the road. His whistle, as clear as the call of a quail, filled her ears for a while and then was buried beyond the hill. A smaller lad clutched her black skirt, whimpering:
"Wisht I c'd go to the Mission school."
"Thar hain't room," she said shortly.
"The teacher says thar hain't room. I wish to God thar was."
Still whistling, the boy trudged on. Now and then he would lift his shrill voice and the snatch of an old hymn or a folk-song would float through the forest and echo among the crags above him. It was a good three hours' walk whither he was bound, but in less than an hour he stopped where a brook tumbled noisily from a steep ravine and across the road--stopped and looked up the thick shadows whence it came. Hesitant, he stood on one foot and then on the other, with a wary look down the road and up the ravine.
"I said I'd try to git back," he said aloud. "I said I'd try."
And with this self-excusing sophistry he darted up the brook. The banks were steep and thickly meshed with rhododendron, from which hemlock shot like black arrows upward, but the boy threaded through them like a snake. His breast was hardly heaving when he reached a small plateau hundreds of feet above the road, where two branches of the stream met from narrower ravines right and left. To the right he climbed, not up the bed of the stream, but to the top of a little spur, along which he went slowly and noiselessly, stooping low. A little farther on he dropped on his knees and crawled to the edge of a cliff, where he lay flat on his belly and peeked over. Below him one Jeb Mullins, a stooping, gray old man, was stirring something in a great brass kettle. A tin cup was going the round of three men squatting near. On a log two men were playing with greasy cards, and near them another lay in drunken sleep. The boy grinned, slid down through the bushes, and, deepening his voice all he could, shouted:
"Throw up yo' hands!"
The old man flattened behind the big kettle with his pistol out. One of the four men leaped for a tree--the others shot up their hands. The card-players rolled over the bank near them, with no thought of where they would