“Good heavens, Amy,” she said. “Look at that hat.”
Miss Amy smiled at him with indifferent sleepy cat-warmth.
“You want to fix yourself up, ’Gene,” she said, “so the girls will begin to notice you.”
He heard the strange song of Margaret’s laughter.
“Can you see him out courting?” she said. “The poor girl would think she had a demon lover, sure.”
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.
His eyes burned on her face, flowing with dark secret beauty.
“Get along, you scamp!” she ordered.
He turned, and, crying fiercely in his throat, tore down the road with bounding strides.
All the dusk blurred in her eyes.
“Leave him alone!” she whispered to no one. “Leave him alone!”
A light wind of April fanned over the hill. There was a smell of burning leaves and rubble around the school. In the field on the hill flank behind the house a plowman drove his big horse with loose clanking traces around a lessening square of dry fallow earth. Gee, woa. His strong feet followed after. The big share bit cleanly down, cleaving a deep spermy furrow of moist young earth along its track.
John Dorsey Leonard stared fascinated out the window at the annual rejuvenation of the earth. Before his eyes the emergent nymph was scaling her hard cracked hag’s pelt. The golden age returned.
Down the road a straggling queue of boys were all gone into the world of light. Wet with honest sweat, the plowman paused at the turn, and wiped the blue shirting of his forearm across his beaded forehead. Meanwhile, his intelligent animal, taking advantage of the interval, lifted with slow majesty a proud flowing tail, and added his mite to the fertility of the soil with three moist oaty droppings. Watching, John Dorsey grunted approvingly. They also serve who only stand and wait.
“Please, Mr. Leonard,” said Eugene, carefully choosing his moment, “can I go?”
John Dorsey Leonard stroked his chin absently, and stared sightlessly at his book. Others abide our question, thou art free.
“Huh?” he purred vaguely. Then, with a high vacant snigger he turned suddenly, and said:
“You rascal, you! See if Mrs. Leonard wants you.” He fastened his brutal grip with keen hunger into the boy’s thin arm. April is the cruellest of months. Eugene winced, moved away, and then stood quietly, checked by memory of the old revolt from awe.
He found Margaret in the library reading to the children from The Water Babies.
“Mr. Leonard says to ask you if I can go?” he said.
And her eyes were darkened wholly.
“Yes, you scamp. Go on,” she said. “Tell me, boy,” she coaxed, softly, “can’t you be a little bit better?”
“Yes’m,” he promised, easily. “I’ll try.” Say not the struggle naught availeth.
She smiled at his high mettled prancing nervousness.
“In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin’,” she said gently. “Get out of here.”
He bounded away from the nunnery of the chaste breast and quiet mind.
As he leaped down the stairs into the yard he heard Dirk Barnard’s lusty splashing bathtub solo. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. Tyson Leonard, having raked into every slut’s corner of nature with a thin satisfied grin, emerged from the barn with a cap full of fresh eggs. A stammering cackle of protest followed him from angry hens who found too late that men betray. At the barnside, under the carriage shed, “Pap” Rheinhart tightened the bellyband of his saddled brown mare, swinging strongly into the saddle, and with a hard scramble of hoofs, came up the hill, wheeled in behind the house, and drew up by Eugene.
“Jump on, ’Gene,” he invited, patting the mare’s broad rump. “I’ll take you home.”
Eugene looked up at him grinning.
“You’ll take me nowhere,” he said. “I couldn’t sit down for a week last time.”
“Pap” boomed with laughter.
“Why, pshaw, boy!” he said. “That was nothing but a gentle little dogtrot.”
“Dogtrot your granny,” said Eugene. “You tried to kill me.”
“Pap” Rheinhart turned his wry neck down on the boy with grave dry humor.
“Come on,” he said gruffly. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll teach you how to ride a horse.”
“Much obliged, Pap,” said Eugene ironically. “But I’m thinking of using my tail a good deal in my old age. I don’t want to wear it out while I’m young.”
Pleased with them both, “Pap” Rheinhart laughed loud and deep, spat a brown quid back over the horse’s crupper, and, digging his heels in smartly, galloped away around the house, into the road. The horse bent furiously to his work, like a bounding dog. With four-hooved thunder he drummed upon the sounding earth. Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.
At the two-posted entry, by the bishop’s boundary, the departing students turned, split quickly to the sides, and urged the horseman on with shrill cries. “Pap” bent low, with loose-reined hands above the horse-mane, went through the gate like the whiz of a crossbow. Then, he jerked the mare back on her haunches with a dusty skid of hoofs, and waited for the boys to come up.
“Hey!” With high bounding exultancy Eugene came down the road to join them. Without turning, stolid Van Yeats threw up his hand impatiently and greeted the unseen with a cheer. The others turned, welcoming him with ironical congratulation.
“ ‘Highpockets,’ ” said “Doc” Hines, comically puckering his small tough face, “how’d you happen to git out on time?” He had an affected, high-pitched nigger drawl. When he spoke he kept one hand in his coat pocket, fingering a leather thong loaded with buckshot.
“J. D. had to do his spring plowing,” said Eugene.
“Well, if it ain’t ole Handsome,” said Julius Arthur. He grinned squintily, revealing a mouthful of stained teeth screwed in a wire clamp. His face was covered with small yellow pustulate sores. How begot, how nourished?
“Shall we
