“I s’pose,” said Pete, “that them air fellers what robbed your house must a come down from Jinkins Run. They’re the blamedest set up there I ever see.”
“Ya‑as,” said Schroeder, “put how did Yinkins vellers know dat I sell te medder to te Shquire, hey? How tid Yinkins know anyting ’bout the Shquire’s bayin’ me dree huntert in te hard gash—hey?”
“Some scoundrels down in these ’ere parts is a-layin’ in with Jinkins Run, I’ll bet a hoss,” said Pete. Ralph wondered whether he’d bet the one with the white left forefoot and the white nose. “Now,” said Pete, “ef I could find the feller that’s a-helpin’ them scoundrels rob us folks, I’d help stretch him to the neardest tree.”
“So vood I,” said Schroeder. “I’d shtretch him dill he baid me my dree huntert tollars pack, so I vood.”
And Betsey Short, who had found the whole affair very funny, was transported with a fit of tittering at poor Schroeder’s English. Ralph, fearing that his silence would excite suspicion, tried to talk. But he could not tell what he knew, and all that he said sounded so hollow and hypocritical that it made him feel guilty. And so he shut his mouth, and meditated profitably on the subject of bull dogs. And when later he overheard the garrulous Jones declare that he’d bet a hoss he could p’int out somebody as know’d a blamed sight more’n they keerd to tell, he made up his mind that if it came to p’inting out he should try to be even with Jones.
VIII
The Struggle in the Dark
It was a long, lonesome, fearful night that the schoolmaster passed, lying with nerves on edge and eyes wide open in that comfortless bed in the “furdest corner” of the loft of Pete Jones’s house, shivering with cold, while the light snow that was falling sifted in upon the ragged patchwork quilt that covered him. Nerves broken by sleeplessness imagine many things, and for the first hour Ralph felt sure that Pete would cut his throat before morning.
And you, friend Callow, who have blunted your palate by swallowing the Cayenne pepper of the penny-dreadfuls, you wish me to make this night exciting by a hand-to-hand contest between Ralph and a robber. You would like it better if there were a trapdoor. There’s nothing so convenient as a trapdoor, unless it be a subterranean passage. And you’d like something of that sort just here. It’s so pleasant to have one’s hair stand on end, you know, when one is safe from danger to one’s self. But if you want each individual hair to bristle with such a “Struggle in the Dark,” you can buy trapdoors and subterranean passages dirt cheap at the next newsstand. But it was, indeed, a real and terrible “Struggle in the Dark” that Ralph fought out at Pete Jones’s.
When he had vanquished his fears of personal violence by reminding himself that it would be folly for Jones to commit murder in his own house, the question of Bud and Hannah took the uppermost place in his thoughts. And as the image of Hannah spelling against the master came up to him, as the memory of the walk, the talk, the box-elder tree, and all the rest took possession of him, it seemed to Ralph that his very life depended upon his securing her love. He would shut his teeth like the jaws of a bulldog, and all Bud’s muscles should not prevail over his resolution and his stratagems.
It was easy to persuade himself that this was right. Hannah ought not to throw herself away on Bud Means. Men of some culture always play their conceit off against their consciences. To a man of literary habits it usually seems to be a great boon that he confers on a woman when he gives her his love. Reasoning thus, Ralph had fixed his resolution, and if the night had been shorter, or sleep possible, the color of his life might have been changed.
But some time along in the tedious hours came the memory of his childhood, the words of his mother, the old Bible stories, the aspiration after nobility of spirit, the solemn resolutions to be true to his conscience. These angels of the memory came flocking back before the animal, the bull-doggedness, had “set,” as workers in plaster say. He
