My heart jumped at that. A dozen times in my life I had talked with hunters from the mountains who had been west of the Mississippi, or who had heard tales from their friends about the prairies. I had in mind a vague picture of the bison of the plains and of how the Indians hunted them. To me the very word prairie was like a hint of heaven.
“It sounds like a good idea. Your trail would be lost there without much trouble.”
“Perhaps it would, but for the West a man needs some sort of equipment… horses, guns, traps, and what not. A trader needs capital. That’s the main reason that has brought me here.”
I saw Uncle Abner’s face change color. “I suppose you do,” he said in a weak voice.
“Now,” said Will Dorset, “I left you a thousand to put into your farm or keep for my boy, just as you pleased, and I left you another five hundred to be kept in hard cash, ready at all times in case I might ever need it. You remember you agreed to that?”
“I remember,” said Abner, “I agreed under the condition the boy didn’t cost more than a thousand….”
“You agreed,” cut in my father, “with no conditions. But now that I’ve come for the money, you’ll tell me that you had to spend it on him?”
“A hundred dollars a year,” said Uncle Abner in a fumbling voice, “isn’t much to spend….”
“A hundred dollars a year!” cried my father, standing up. “Why, your whole family lives on less than that, and always has, while you, like a miser, count up the pennies. You’ve taken that money, then?”
“Will,” said my uncle, “I want to be calm and talk….”
“I want money, not talk. Will you get it for me?”
“Whatever I have….”
“Two hundred dollars. I’ll compromise for that amount.”
“Two hundred dollars! What little I have is tied up….”
“By the heavens,” said my father, “I don’t believe it. Yonder in that old chest you used to keep spare cash, and a good deal of it.”
Uncle Abner turned white. Then he raised his hand. “listen,” he said, and off through the night we could hear the baying of bloodhounds in a deep chorus. “They’ve put the dogs on your track, Will!”
“Damn the dogs,” he said. “What I want and what I’ll have is a sufficient supply of cash, and you’ll give it to me. That chest….”
“You’re wrong, Will.”
“You fool, I’ve seen you put money into it myself, when you thought I was sleeping on the far side of the room. I’ll have a look at it now.”
He started forward, and Uncle Abner, with a wild cry, snatched up a rifle. He had not time to get to the trigger. But he used it as a club. It was an old-fashioned, heavy gun, and Uncle Abner, as I’ve said, was a giant. But it seemed to me that my father put aside that blow as if it were delivered with a feather. He stepped in and struck with that knotted fist, and Abner slumped down against the wall.
There was a big maul nearby, used for driving posts and all manner of heavy work. It had a twenty-five pound head, but my father lifted and whirled it as though it were nothing. At the first blow the lock on the chest bulged. At the second it snapped, and the lid of the chest heaved open.
Inside there was a litter of papers and books and small boxes. Among the latter my father worked. He did not pause to unlock them. He simply crushed them in his great fingers and broke them open as I could have broken kindling wood. At last he jumped up with a shout, and there was a little time-soiled canvas bag in his hand.
“Good bye, Abner,” he said. “This will do for me.”
I shouted with all my might as I saw him going for the door: “Father! Oh, Father!”
But just then, as I jumped through the trap door, the wind came fresh, and the whole chorus of the big hound pack boomed and crashed around the house and drowned my voice. I saw Father tear the door open and leap out into the darkness. I tried to follow him, but a long arm reached out, a big hand caught me, and dragged me back. Uncle Abner had recovered his senses in time to make at least one arrest.
YOUNG DORSET’S ESCAPE
I remember, in a wild yarn Aunt Agnes once read to me, there was an account of how a fisherman in a small boat was surprised at his lines by a white, slimy, greasy arm that writhed like a snake over the edge of his craft and fixed itself upon him by means of suckers. How he pulled against that flexible arm, and how his effort simply made the arm grip deeper, burning the flesh that it touched. How another arm came to join the first, wrapped about his body, and drew him to the gunwale over which, staring down into pale green surface water, he saw a flat, shapeless face with two huge saucer eyes. Toward that shadowy creature the arms were drawing him. He had one hand free. With it, he seized upon a wide-bladed hatchet that was near and hewed at the creature’s limbs, and other arms were flung out to aid the first crippled ones.
Such a nightmare of fear came writhing up in me while I listened to that story that I had jumped to my feet and shouted: “Aunt Agnes! Did the devilfish get him? Don’t read any more .. .just tell me!”
It was a horror somewhat like this I felt when the great hand of Uncle Abner seized upon me and dragged me down to the floor. I writhed in his grip. I smashed at his face. It was like striking at a stone image. What was my boy’s might compared to his seasoned power? He crushed me in his arms and sneered down at me.
“They’ll get him. You rest easy, son. They’ll get him. This time it’ll be hanging, and no doubt about it. He’s left dead men behind him on his trail, the fool.”
I remember feeling then, in spite of my fury and my hate and the exquisite agony of my desire to get out to my fleeing father and help him against the posse, that if Uncle Abner killed a man, the outer world would never have a chance to learn of it. He would accomplish the most terrible of crimes not boldly, face to face as my poor father had done, but by stealth and from behind. No one would know. And the next Sunday he would be praying with the loudest voice in the church.
I had such a loathing for the man come upon me, I could only bow my head and submit to his grip. In the meantime the hunt reached the little house and roared past. I heard the beating of the horses’ hoofs and the shouting of men, making a great undertone beneath the clamoring of the dogs. It seemed a fitting thing to me that such a man as my father, having gone on his way through the country, should drag behind him a wake of this sort, full of hatred and blind fury. I remember that I rejoiced because of the greatness of his strength - because to a boy nothing seems really worthwhile but strong hands and a stout heart.
When the leaders of the hunt had poured past, some of the tag-enders kicked open the door of the house and lunged in upon us. There must have been a score of men who swept around the shack and searched every cranny in it. Heaven alone could tell how many men had gone ahead with the main body of the hunt. Virginia has always loved the chase, whether of beast or of man. And the pursuit of my father was not that of some cowed slave, but of a whole-hearted man who could strike in his self-defense, as Will Dorset had already done and left blood behind him.
The men who rushed into the house showed me the most demoniacal faces I had ever seen. I was filled with terror. They stormed through the building. They herded my Aunt Agnes out into the one big room with the rest of us. They even tore up the flooring and went into the dark little cellar in their hunt for the lost man. They reminded me of nothing so much as of ferrets, red-eyed with the blood lust, blind to greater dangers.
I had always thought of myself as brave, even very brave. I had wondered what danger in the world could unnerve me and make me helpless, as fear made some boys when I attacked them - turning them into hulks to be pummeled or booted about at my pleasure. But I understood now what it was. I was sick at the stomach and dizzy of brain, so great was my fear. One of the biggest, a brute with an unshaven face and little pig eyes, glittering with excitement, caught me by the nape of the neck and wrenched me out upon the floor of the room.