down river on that ‘ere drift lawg.”
“That ‘uz Johnny, all over,” Jackson agreed. “Gittin’ a whoppin’ big time outen ever’ thing that come up.”
“He was a fine boy,”Mr. MacCallum said again.
“Listen.”
Again the hounds gave tongue in the darkness below them. The sound floated up upon the chill air, died into echoes that repeated the sound again until its source was lost and the very earth itself mighthave found voice, mournful and sad and wild with all regret.
Christmas was two days away, and they sat again about the fire after supper; again old General dozed at his master’s feet. Tomorrow was Christmas eve and the wagon was going into town, and although, with that grave and unfailing hospitality of theirs, no word had been said to Bayard about his departure, he believed that in all their minds it was taken for granted that he would return home the following day for Christmas; and, since he had not mentioned it himself, a little curiosity and quiet speculation also.
It was cold again, with a vivid chill that caused the blazing logs to pop and crackle with vicious sparks and small glowing embers that leaped out upon the floor, to be crushed out by a lazy boot, and Bayard sat drowsily in a drowse of heat, his tired muscles relaxed in the cumulate waves of it as in a warm bath, and the stubborn struggling of his heart glozed over too, for the time. Time enough tomorrow to decide whether to go or not. Perhaps he’d just stay on, without offering that explanation that would never be demanded of him. Then he realized that Rafe, Lee, whoever went, would talk to people, would learn about that which he had not the courage to tell them.
Buddy had come out of his shadowy niche and he now squatted in the center of the. semicircle, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, with his motionless and seemingly tireless ability for sitting timelessly on his heels. He was the baby, twenty years old. His mother was the old man’s second wife, and his hazel eyes and the reddish thatch cropped closely to his round head was a noticeable contrast to the others’ brown eyes and black hair. But the oldman had stamped Buddy’s face as clearly as ever a one of the other boys, and despite its youth, it too was like the others—aquiline and spare, reserved and grave though a trifle ruddy with his fresh coloring and finer skin.
The others were of medium height or under, ranging from Jackson’s faded, vaguely ineffectual lank-ness, through Henry’s placid rotundity and Rafe’s (Raphael Semmes he was) and Stuart’s poised and stocky muscularity, to Lee’s thin and fiery unrepose; but Buddy with his sapling-like leanness stood eye to eye with that father who wore his eighty-two years as though they were a thin shirt. “Long, spindlin’ scoundrel,” the old man would say, with bluff, assumed derogation. “Keeps hisself wore to a shadder totin’ around all that ‘ere grub he eats.” And they would sit in silence, looking at Buddy’s lean, jack-knifed length with the same identical thought, a thought which each believed peculiar to himself and which none ever divulged—that someday Buddy would marry and perpetuate the name.
Buddy also bore his father’s name, though it is doubtful if anyone outside the family and the War Department knew it. He had run away at eighteen and enlisted; at the infantry concentration camp in Arkansas to which he had been sent, a fellow recruit called him Virge and Buddy had fought him steadily and without anger for seven minutes; at the New Jersey embarkation depot another man had done the same thing, and Buddy had fought him, again steadily and thoroughly and without anger. In Europe, still following the deep but uncomplex compulsions of his nature, he had contrived, unwittingly perhaps, to perpetrate something which was later ascertained by authority to have severely annoyed the enemy, for which Buddy had received his charm, as he calledit. What it was he did, he could never be brought to tell, and the gaud not only failing to placate his father’s rage over the fact that a son of his had joined the Federal army, but on the contrary adding fuel to it, the bauble languished among Buddy’s sparse effects and his military career was never mentioned in the family circle; and now as usual Buddy squatted among them, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees^ while they sat about the hearth with their bedtime toddies, talking of Christmas.
“Turkey,” the old man was saying, with fine and rumbling disgust. “With a pen full of ‘possums, and a river bottom full of squir’ls and ducksand a smokehouse full of hawg meat, you damn boys have got to go clean to town and buy a turkey fer Christmas dinner.”
“Christmas ain’t Christmas lessen a feller has a little somethin’ different from ever’ day,” Jackson pointed out mildly.
“You boys jest wants a excuse to git to town and loaf around all day and spend money,” the old man retorted. “I’ve seen a sight mo’ Christmases than you have, boy, and ef hit’s got to be sto’-bought, hit ain’t Christmas.”
“How ‘bout town-folks?” Rafe asked. “You ain’t allowin’ them no Christmas a-tall.”
“Don’t deserve none,” the old man snapped. “Livin’ on a little two-by-fo’ lot, jam right up in the next feller’s back do’, eatin’outen tin cans.”
“Sposin’ they all broke up in town,” Stuart said, “and moved out here and took up land; you’d hear pappy cussin’ town then. You couldn’t git along without town to keep folks bottled up in, pappy, and you knows it.”
“Buyin’ turkeys,”Mr. MacCallum repeated with savage disgust. “Buyin’‘em. I mind the time when Icould take a gun and step out that ‘ere do’ and git a gobbler in thirty minutes. And a venison ham in a hour mo’. Why, you fellers don’t know nothin’ about Christmas. All you knows is a sto’ winder full of cocoanuts and Yankee-made popguns and sich.”
“Yes, suh,” Rafe said, and he winked at Bayard, “that was the biggest mistake the world ever made, when Lee surrendered. The country ain’t never got over it.”
The old man snorted again. “I’ll be damned ef I ain’t raised the damdest smartest set of boys in the world. Can’t tell ‘em nothin’, can’t learn ‘em nothin’; can’t even set in front of my own fire fer the whole passel of ‘em tellin’ me how to run the whole damn country. Hyer, you boys, git on to bed.”
Next morning Jackson and Rafe and Stuart and Lee left for town at sunup in the wagon. Still none of . them had made any sign, expressed any curiosity as to whether they would find him there when they returned that night, or whether it would be another three years before they saw him again. And Bayard stood on the frost-whitened porch, smoking a cigarette in the chill, vivid air while the yet hidden sun painted the eastern hills, and looked after the wagon and the four muffled figures in it and wondered if it would be three years again, or ever. The hounds came and nuzzled about him and he dropped his hand among their icy noses and the warm flicking of their tongues, gazing after the wagon, hidden now among the trees from which the dry rattling of it came unimpeded upon the soundless clear morning. “Ready to go?” Buddy said behind him, and he turned and picked up his shotgun where it leaned against the wall The hounds surged about them witheager whimperings and frosty breaths and Buddy led them across to a shed and huddled them inside and fastened the door upon their surprised protests. From another kennel he unfastened the young pointer, Dan. Behind them the hounds continued to raise their baffled and mellow expostulations.
Until noon they hunted the ragged, fallow fields and woods-edges in the warming am The frost was soon gone, and the air warmed to a windless languor; and twice in brier thickets they saw redbirds darting like arrows of scarlet flame. At last Bayard lifted his eyes unwinking into the sun.
“I must go back, Buddy,” he said. “Tin going home this afternoon.”
“All right,” Buddy agreed without protest, and he called the dog in. “You come back next month.”
Mandy got them some cold food and they ate, and while Buddy went to saddle Perry, Bayard went into the house where he found Henry laboriously soling fr pair of shoes and the old man reading a week-old . newspaper through steel-bowed spectacles.
