Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/48

38 be stopped in some manner, opened with a hesitating, "Say!"

"You might jest call me Andy," the deep voice answered, before the mountain-man negatived the proposition of adding a front door to the habitation.

Kerry slept again. Mountain air and weariness are drugs potent against a bad conscience, and it was broad daylight outside the cave when he wakened. He was a little surprised to find his host still sleeping, yet his experience told him that the wound was of a nature to induce fever, followed by considerable exhaustion. As the Irishman lifted his coat from where he had had it folded into a bundle beneath his head, the handcuffs in the pocket clicked, and he frowned. He stole across to look at the man who had called himself Andy, lying now at ease upon his bed of leaves, one great arm underneath his head, the injured hand nursed upon his broad breast. Those big eyes which had so appalled Kerry upon a first view yesterday were closed. The onlooker noted with a sort of wonder how sumptuous were the fringes of their curtains, long and purple-black, like the thick, arched brows above. To speak truly, Kerry, although he was a respectable member of the police force, had the artistic temperament. The harmony of outline, the justness of proportion in both the face and figure of the man before him, filled the Irishman with delight; and the splendid virile bulk of the mountain-man appealed irresistibly to the other's masculinity. The little threads of silver in the tempestuous black curls seemed to Kerry but to set off their beauty.

"Gosh! but you're a good-looker!" he muttered. And putting his estimate of the man's charm into such form as was possible to him, he added, under his breath, "I'd hate to have sech a feller as you tryin' to court my Katy."

This was the first of many strange days; golden September days they were, cool and full of the ripened beauty of the departing summer. Kerry's host taught him to snare woodcock and pheasants—shoot them the Irishman could not, since the excitement of the thing made him fire wild.

"Now ain't that the very divil!" he would cry, after he had let his third bird get away unharmed. "Ef I was shootin' at a man, I'd be as stiddy as a clock. Gad! I'd be cool as an ice-wagon. But when that little old brown chicken scoots a-scutterin' up out o' the grass like a hummin'-top, it rattles me." His teacher apparently took no note of the significance contained in this statement; yet Kerry's very ears were red as it slipped out, and he felt uneasily for the handcuffs, which no longer clinked in his pocket, but now lay carefully hidden under his fern bed.

There had been a noon-mark in the doorway of the cave, thrown by the shadow of a boulder beside it, even before the Irishman's big nickel watch came with its bustling, authoritative tick to bring the question of time into the mountains. But the two men kept uncertain hours: sometimes they talked more than half the night, the close-cropped, sandy poll and the unshorn crest of Jove-like curls nodding at each other across the fire, then slept far into the succeeding day; sometimes they were up before dawn and off after squirrels—with which poor Kerry had no better luck than with the birds. Every day the Irishman dressed his host's hand; and every day he tasted more fully the charm of this big, strong, gentle, peaceful nature clad in its majestic garment of flesh.

"If he'd 'a' been an ugly, common-looking brute, I'd 'a' nabbed him in a minute," he told himself, weakly. And every day the handcuffs under the dried fern-leaves lay heavier upon his soul.

On the 20th of September, which Kerry had set for his last day in the cave, he was moved to begin again at the beginning and tell the big mountaineer all his affairs.

"Ye see, it's like this," he wound up: "Katy—the best gurrl an' the purtiest I ever set me two eyes on—she's got a father that 'll strike her when the drink's with him. He works her like a dog, hires her out and takes every cent she earns. Her mother—God rest her soul!—has been dead these two years. And now the old man is a-marryin' an' takin' home a woman not fit fer my Katy to be with. I says when I heard of it, says I: 'Katy, I'll take ye out o' that hole. I'll do the trick, an' I'll git the reward, an' it's married we'll be inside of a month, an' we'll go West.'