# Her Beloved Enemy

   Love amid Tennessee crags. A strong man, a maid of the hills, and a fight you’ll never forget.
Her Beloved Enemy
by Hapsburg Liebe
Author of “The Law in Little Egypt,” “The Man-Breaker” etc.
SHE stood in the front doorway of her foster-mother’s honeysuckle-covered old log cabin, this little laurel blossom. Her chest nut-brown eyes, shaded from the hot June sun by a sunburned hand, were staring absently toward the logging-camp on the creek in the valley, a hundred yards below.
Her name was Lettie; she was nineteen, slender and roundish, as straight and as supple as a young cove birch, and as much a thing of the mountains as a young cove birch. The great hills had given to her in full measure of their strength, of their dumb pride, of their half-sad and half-riotous beauty, and of their wildness.
Her dress was of blue calico and simply made; she was bareheaded and barefooted; her hair, as brown as her eyes, hung below her waistline in a single three-ply plait. Granny Parkis, who had always lived there in that little house, low on the breast of Sunrise Mountain, had found her, seven teen years before, sitting alone on the door-step of a cabin that a desperate feud had either directly or indirectly robbed of all its other occupants. The old woman had taken Lettie and brought her up as well as she could.
There was a certain great spirit of unrest in the girl’s eyes. Lettie was full-grown, and she had no sweetheart! Not that she couldn’t have had a sweetheart. She could have shared the name and the fortunes of any of those strapping young timberjacks who now rollicked and wrestled and boxed around the two great rough-board buildings in the valley—wise old Bill Cole, the big; bearded, booted and corduroyed superintendent, always gave his men a half-holiday on Saturday afternoons.
Absently she watched the camp’s bully, Burley Mott, the brown giant, knock his man down and himself count ten over him; then she heard Mott bellow a challenge in the voice of a Goliath for another bout without rules and without gloves—which was not accepted.
Mott looked toward Lettie and waved a victorious hand; he had known that she was standing up there in plain view of it all. He claimed her as his sweetheart, that big brute of a man; he had told the other timberjacks that he was going to marry her some day.
Lettie tolerated his advances because she admired his savage strength. In most women there is a primitive something that admires savage strength.
Then Lettie, with a faint sigh, turned her eyes down the narrow-gage railroad over which the loaded logging-cars passed on their way to the great sawmill in the lowland, which wound through the valley like the trail of a monster snake, crossing the sparkling creek on log bridges at frequent intervals. Her troubled gaze turned at length up a crooked ribbon of a path that led across Sunset Mountain—the crest of which formed the western horizon of her life, even as the crest of Sunrise Mountain formed the eastern horizon of her life—and on that path her eyes, always accustomed to distances, spied a stranger. He was coming swiftly, with the unmistakable long strides of the native-born hillman, and he was singing as he came.
Lettie had more curiosity than the average woman. She gave one quick glance toward Granny Parkis, who sat dozing in her chair just inside the cabin, and then she ran down through the riotously blooming laurels. She wanted to see the stranger; she hid herself in the underbrush close beside the Sunset Mountain trail and waited. The song he was singing was an old song that the hills had borrowed from the old wild West:
We fit for nine long ow-ers, and ’en the fight give o’er The like o’dead and wounded, I never seen afore!
The’ was ten as brave a Rangers as ever trod the West,
Laid dead aside their comrades wi’ bullets in their breasts!
Lettie peered cautiously out from behind the blooming laurel bush that sheltered her. She could see him plainly now. He was young, not more than twenty-four; he was tall and strong-looking, smooth-faced, black-eyed and black-haired, and more than ordinarily handsome. There was an alertness about him that reminded her of the alertness of a panther. He wore the laced boots, the brown croduroys, and the broad-rimmed hat of a timberjack, and in one hand he carried a cheap canvas traveling-bag.
When he had come up even with her, he stopped his singing suddenly, shot out his right arm, caught her by a wrist and brought her gently but firmly to the path beside him!
“Look!” he laughed boyishly. “Look who’s a-waylayin’ me!”
She liked him for his masterfulness; but she struggled, and he freed her.
“What camp is that up thar in the valley, little gyurl?” he asked.
“It’s the Old King Cole camp o’ the Bell-Henry Loggin’ Comp’ny,” answered Lettie. “Bill Cole, the super, he’s knowed all over the world, I reckon, as ‘Old King Cole,’ and the camp it was named atter him. He’s all right. But ef you’re anyways afeard to fight, I’d edvise ye not to go on to that camp.”
“Afeared to fight! Me?” The young hillman laughed again. “Why, little gyurl, fight is my very fust name! I’ve been in loggin’-camps afore, ye see. Who’s the bully?”
“Burley Mott. Anybody ’at comes here has to fight Burley Mott. It’s the ’nitiation, he says.”
“Burley Mott; eh?” with a slow narrowing of his black eyes. “I know him. He’s from my home country. Old inemy o’ mine. Big as a skinned hippo-potaymus and about thutty-five year old, with sunburnt brown hair and beard, eh?”
“That’s shore him,” smiled Lettie. Then the stranger asked her:
“Won’t you show me the way up to the camp?”
“Jest go ahead,” she told him, “foller yore nose and the railroad, and you cain’t miss it!”
“All right,” agreeably. “Afore I go, I want to ax what might be yore name, little gyurl?”
“It might be ’most anything,” said the girl mischievously; she had not quite forgiven him for finding her hidden beside the trail. “It might be Sadie, Sallie, Sue, Mary, Mollie, or Minnie—or it might be Pete, Henry, Bill, Charley, or Sam—or Towser, Fido, or Toodles. But it ain’t!”
Then she turned her nose up at him and disappeared in the laurels.
“Humph!” said the young mountaineer. “Humph! Purty as a speckled pup with a ring around its neck—and a heap sassier’n the devil! Be durned,” he went on, as he started for the camp, “ef I couldn’t love her to death!”
And Lettie heard him say it.
THE timberjacks stopped their rough play when the newcomer entered the grounds about the commissary and the boarding-house. Burley Mott recognized his enemy of other days, and he scowled with murder in his pale blue eyes. No man ever hated another man more than the bully hated young Tom Dunellen, from the Pigeon River country. Dunellen walked as straight to Bill Cole’s office in the rear end of the commissary building as if he had already been there a hundred times; he stopped and laughed aloud at the chalk-writing on the half-closed door—it had been put there during muddy weather:
CLEAN YOUR DAM FEET PLEASE
Bill Cole had known that Lettie and her foster-mother, the only women in the camp’s vicinity, couldn’t read when he put it there. Tom Dunellen rapped on the doorfacing, and Bill Cole’s voice bellowed—
“Come right on in!” heartily.
Tom opened the door a little wider and stepped into the office. The timberjacks, all but Mott, crowded around the door, and behind them was Lettie.
“I’m atter a job,” Lettie heard the stranger say.
“You’ve done got it, son,” Bill Cole replied gruffly. “If you ain’t afraid to handle dynamite, and if you know about batteries to bust it with. I’ve got to blast out a roadbed to get at the Gentry’s Hell Timber.”
“Dynamite is my fust name,” smiled Dunellen, “and I know all about bustin’ it with batteries. Not a braggin’, though. Well, I’m ongodly hongry, and I’ll hunt grub, ef ye don’t mind.” He was one of the few hillmen who hang on to their drawling dialect in spite of long association with lowlanders.
The crowd opened for him as he stepped out of the office, and his quick black eyes caught a glimpse of Lettie trying to hide from him.
“Hello thar, Toodles!” he cried teasingly. It angered Burley Mott.
“Smarty!” clipped the girl.
Then Burley Mott stepped before Tom Dunellen. Mott’s bearded lips worked; he wanted to say something and he feared to say it. He knew that Dunellen was the finest and the fairest barehanded logging-camp fighter in the Unakas. But no other person there knew it.
Dunellen put his cheap canvas traveling-bag down and pushed the front of his black hat’s broad rim up.
“I onderstand,” he said in low and even tones, “’at you’re the bad man here. With that in mind, I want to say that I have never started none o’ my quar’ls and have never failed to stop ’em all.”
Burley Mott the brown giant laughed a great laugh. His place as bully of the Old King Cole camp was secure only as long as he avoided a fight with Tom Dunellen. Therefore he must avoid a fight with Tom Dunellen.
“Oh, go on to grub, boy!” he said easily. “You’re hungry and tired, and I ain’t goin’ to force a fight on you.”
Dunellen laughed, took up his luggage and went toward the boarding-house. Lettie tugged at Mott’s corduroy coat-sleeve.
“Who is he?” she asked.
Mott told her. He continued:
“And Tom is the last livin’ man o’ the Pigeon River Dunellens; all the others was killed fightin’ feuds with their boots on,” which was true. “When you fight a Pigeon River Dunellen, you’ve got to kill him in the end; and that’s why I didn’t care to fight this one,” which was false. Mott went on glibly: “I didn’t want to kill him. I could do it, but I didn’t want to.”
Lettie smiled somehow queerly.
“You’re afeard of him!” she declared.
Mott saw red and closed his teeth with a snap.
WHEN the noontime meal was over on the next day, which was Sunday, a tall, strong young fellow in new blue serge walked proudly out of the boarding-house in the valley and went straight toward the little old honeysuckle-covered cabin on the breast of Sunrise Mountain. A good-natured smile was on his face, and in his movements there was the lithe grace of a buck deer and the alertness of a panther.
He stopped at the weather-beaten paling fence that ran around the old log house, plucked a blooming zinnia and drew its stem through the buttonhole of his left coat lapel, and shouted, after the fashion of hill folk—
“Hello in thar!”
Lettie gave a quick glance toward Granny Parkis, who sat dozing in her chair before the stone hearth, and went to the front door. She had seen Tom Dunellen coming, and she had hurriedly put on a freshly laundered dress of blue-figured percale; also she had tied the end of her long plait of chestnut-brown hair with a faded blue ribbon.
She stood there blushing and smiling, and one of her bare little big-toes burrowed bashfully into a knothole in the worn door-step. Shoes and stockings she had none; the only money she and Granny Parkis had was that which they earned by mending the clothing of the timberjacks, which wasn’t much, although the timberjacks sometimes tore their clothing intentionally. Anyway, what was the need of shoes and stockings in the Summer-time?
“I jest thought I’d come up and see ye,” Tom said amiably. His masterfulness admitted of no diffidence.
“All right,” replied Lettie, her eyes twinkling. “Look at me all ye want to!”
“I don’t mean that,” smiled Dunellen. “S’posen we walk down to the creek and look for flowers and sech things, eh?”
“You’d call me ‘Toodles,’” mischievously.
“Be durned ef I do!”
Lettie went with him down through the sea of white and waxen laurel bloom, and they sat down not very close together on a flat stone beside the creek, under a spreading beech, that aristocrat of trees. About them grew in profusion tiny pure blue day-flowers and tinier Job’s-tears, red-spurred wild columbine and monk’s-hood; the air was as sweet and as fragrant as the air of an Eden.
For a long time they said nothing, but they looked at each other frequently. It was as natural for them to fall in love with each other as it was for the water in Nobody’s Creek to flow.
“I wonder,” said Tom finally, “ef you could ever come to like me well enough to marry me?”
“Maybe,” said Lettie, trying hard to conceal the fact that she was pleased. “Gi’ me time. I heerd you was awful bad to fight, Tom. I heerd that all o’ yore people was dead on account o’ their bein’ so bad to fight. Tell me about it.”
“The wasn’t but a few famblies of us,” muttered Dunellen. “They was mostly all men-folks; and all o’ the men-folks but me has been killed in feuds. All the old women is done dead, and the young women is all married off and gone—I don’t know whar. I’ve l’arned a lesson, Lettie, by the others. I never fit a fight with anything but my bare hands, and I never expect to. And I’ve never started a quar’l, though maybe I’ve brought a good many to a end.
“I’m not a bad man. But people thinks I am, jest acause my name is Dunellen and acause I’m from the Pigeon River country. Lettie, I’ve suffered a good deal about that. It made it hard for me to be a clean, straight man. But I am a clean, straight man. I’m a-givin’ it to ye right, Lettie.”
The telling of his unfortunate people and of his ill-starred life had stirred the old, old and bitter sadness in him; great was the burden that Tom Dunellen had carried for years. He saw sympathy in the girl’s pretty face and it touched him deeply; for few had ever sympathized with him. He was merely one of those “Pigeon River Dunellens.”
“I’m shore sorry for ye, Tom,” Lettie murmured barely above the rippling of little Nobody’s Creek.
He bent toward her and took one of her sunburned hands.
“I believe it,” he said almost brokenly. “And God knows I’m much obliged. I never had a reel friend in my life, afore. I’ve been mighty lonesome without people, and without friends, and without anybody to like me.”
“I’m lonesome too,” Lettie told him. “My folks was all killed in feuds too. Jest like you’re the last, I’m the last. I’m glad I met you, acause I didn’t know the’ was anybody else but me that didn’t have no folks.”
She looked at him with swimming eyes. Then it happened. Neither ever knew how it came about; they knew only that it did come about. They suddenly found their arms around each other, with everything else on earth forgotten.
“We’ll marry, won’t we?” whispered Tom. “And I’ll allus love you, and you’ll allus love me.”
Less than three rods behind them, well hidden among the laurels, crouched Burley Mott, listening. His pale blue eyes shone with fury, and his teeth were clenched; in one of his great brown hands he held a bright, short-barreled revolver.
“Yes,” said Lettie, with her face against Dunellen’s shoulder. She continued: “I’m a-thinkin’, Tom, about somethin’ Granny Parkis told me no more’n a month ago. It was this here:
“‘Now that you’re old enough to marry, be mighty keerful who it is ye fall in love with, Letitia,’ she says to me—she allus did say that word ‘Letitia’ so primpy-like! ‘Acause,’ she says to me, ‘it’ll be a long-time thing with you. The’ was one good p’int about yore people, anyhow,’ she says: ‘they loved, as well as they hated, to the grave and beyan’; and I never knowed none of ’em to love but one time.’
“And so,” the girl went on, “I reckon the one time has come for me. I feel like it. I’ll love you to the grave and beyan’.”
Tom kissed her reverently on the forehead. She went to her feet.
“I’ll go and tell Granny Parkis about it,” she said.
“All right,” smiled Tom; and he, too, rose.
Lettie hastened toward the honeysuckle-covered old cabin on the breast of Sunrise Mountain. Tom turned toward the boarding-house, and as he went he sang gaily, joyously, out of the fulness of his heart, the song the hills had borrowed from the old wild West:
Come all you jolly cowboys, wharever you may be,
And listen to some troubles that happened unto——
Burley Mott followed him stealthily, and twice he had an aim at his back. Mott did not fire because he knew that his revolver was not a dependable weapon; he feared that he might miss, and he knew what it would mean if he fired at Tom Dunellen and missed.
LETTIE found Granny Parkis still dozing in her chair before the hearth. She shook her foster-mother gently, and the old creature rubbed her eyes and sat up almost straight.
“La, la!” she cackled, her parchment-like face breaking into a very good smile. “I’m mighty glad ye woke me up, Letitia! I was a-settin’ here a-dreamin’ about black cats, and ’at shore is a bad dream!”
Blushingly, somewhat falteringly, Lettie told the old woman of the wonderful thing that had come to pass. Granny Parkis grew pale as she listened, but she did not interrupt. When the girl had finished, Granny Parkis went to her feet without the aid of her staff; her wrinkled face was working almost spasmodically.
“The good Lord ha’ marcy!” she cried shrilly and tremulously. “He’s one o’ them same Dunellens that killed out all o’ the Batesfords but you! It was on Pigeon River, seventeen year ago, that I found you and brung you here. Had ye forgot, child, had ye forgot? But no,” with a sorrowful shake of her white head. “But no. You hain’t heerd the name o’ Dunellen and Pigeon River mentioned sence ye was a little bitsy baby. A course you cain’t marry no Dunellen, Letitia. It’s not to be thought on, child. And yit—ef you’re like all o’ the rest o’ the Batesfords, you’ll allus love him and never nobody else! Hain’t it a black shame, Letitia? Hain’t it a onholy, black shame?”
Lettie had gone as white as chalk. Even her lips were pale.
She walked slowly to the worn front door-step and crumpled there like a woodland plant in a furnace-blast, weak of limb and broken-hearted. Without in the least realizing what she was doing, she plucked marigold after marigold and tore them slowly to pieces. This simple child of the hills, unaccustomed always before to any great emotion, had known the heights and the depths of heaven and hell in less than an hour.
Many minutes went by, and still she sat there with her brown head bent low, dry eyed, plucking marigolds to pieces. Then the soft voice of Tom Dunellen, which she loved with a great love, and which she hated with a great hate, fell upon her ears.
“They tell me down at the camp ’at the grannywoman is so ongodly proud ’at she won’t let nobody give her nothin’, and ’at she makes her livin’ by doin’ the camp’s mendin’,” Tom was saying; “so I thought I’d bring her up a little work.”
He threw a bundle of clothing lightly to the cabin floor. Lettie did not look up; therefore he did not see the signs of grief that were on her face. Granny Parkis limped to the clothing and picked it up gratefully. In the holy name of charity, it had been torn almost to shreds.
“La, son,” she creaked as she examined it, “and la, la! And tell me how on earth ye come by gittin’ yore clo’es all tore up like this here?”
She did not know, of course, that she was addressing the last of the Pigeon River Dunellens.
“Onforchunately,” and the young hill-man’s eyes twinkled merrily, “I was called upon suddently to fight a bunch o’ wildcats in a buckthorn tree, and I plumb forgot to take off my clo’es.”
Granny Parkis chuckled. It was then that Lettie rose and faced her foster-mother.
“That’s him,” she said in a bleak voice.
The old woman dropped the bundle of clothing.
“Who? The Dunellen?”
“Yes. The Dunellen,” said Lettie.
Granny Parkis pointed one palsied forfinger at the torn garments.
“You take them rags away from here!” she ordered grimly. “You low-down Dunellen! Atter the way yore people went and killed out this here pore little gyurl’s people, you’ve got the pore narve to come here and wheedle her into lovin’ ye—ye sarpent o’ the devil!”
Tom’s black eyes flashed quickly to Lettie. She was standing very straight, and her head was very high.
“Ef I was a man,” she told him in a strange-sounding voice, “I might kill you. I don’t never want to see you no more.”
And yet she loved him, and she would love him to the grave and beyond. She went on, solely for the purpose of hurting him:
“I think I’d better marry Burley Mott. He’s wanted me to for so long. I’m shore he’d be good to me. When ye go back to the boardin’-house, Mr. Dunellen, ef ye please, I wisht ye’d tell Mr. Mott I want to see him at oncet.”
“Marry Burley Mott!” cried Tom, horrified. He thought she was in earnest. “I’m no hand to talk about a man to his back, but—ef you was only a friend o’ mine, I’d say, ‘Don’t.’ Ef you was somebody I didn’t know, I’d say, ‘Don’t.’ Even ef yo was the wust kind of a’ inemy o’ mine, I’d say, ‘Don’t.’ As it is, I’d rather kill Burley Mott ’an to see you marry him. Acause I know Burley Mott. I know his past. I know his life. It’s all been black. Pot black would look like snow on Burley Mott’s life.”
“Lies!” and Lettie smiled queerly.
Tom Dunellen took up the bundle he had brought and started for the camp below. Lettie watched him with burning eyes. She saw him throw the torn clothing into a thicket of laurel. She saw him go to the front door of the boarding-house, and she heard him call out—
“Burley!” And again, “Burley!”
Bill Cole came to the door and shook his head. Tom Dunellen sat down in the doorway, and for a long time he sat very still.
Then Lettie saw Burley Mott walk out of the woods to the left of the boarding-house, and she saw Tom Dunellen rise and go toward him.
Lettie ran from the cabin down through the sea of laurel bloom, without being seen by either of them; she was close enough to hear every word they said when they met. Dunellen’s face was pale. Mott’s face was red and ashen by turns.
“Burley,” began Tom, “you’ve got to leave here for good and all, and you’ve got to do it right now.”
All the real courage the brown giant possessed flared up quickly.
“How so?” he growled.
“Ef for no other reason, jest acause I said so,” and Tom Dunellen threw off his coat and his hat, and tightened his belt
Lettie caught her breath. Unless Mott gave in, it meant a great fight.
Mott had no intention of giving in. He too threw aside his coat and his hat, and he too tightened his belt. It was desperation that spoke when he said:
“We’ll see about it. I’ll put my shoe-calks in your face, Tom, and turn my heel on it. I’ll put my trademark on you.”
Again Lettie caught her breath.
IN THESE logging-camps they’ll tell you that a strong first blow well followed up is not merely a good beginning but almost the whole battle; and Tom Dunellen, who had always had to fight for his own self-preservation, who had been kicked and cuffed even as a boy, had long known that fact. He sprang toward Mott and led for the jaw; but Mott ducked tardily, and he struck the giant on the forehead, shattering a bone in his best hand.
Dazed for the moment, Mott reeled backward. Dunellen followed and struck the bully low on the breast, expelling the air from his lungs with a hoarse “Hogh!” Mott rallied, and they clenched and fell a hard dogfall.
From the boarding-house came a joyous cry, “Fight!” Bill Cole and a score of his timberjacks, hatless and coatless, rushed toward the two belligerents, and Lettie joined them without being noticed.
The combatants rose and began to hammer away at each other with savage force. The younger man struck quite as often with his injured hand as he struck with the other. Now Mott knocked Dunellen down; now Dunellen knocked the bully down. There were no sounds save those of their rapid breathing and their crashing blows, so great was the interest in the fight. Mott was the stronger; but the man with the grace of a buck deer and the alertness of a panther was by far the quicker, and soon the tide began to turn in his favor.
Lettie clutched at her dress below her throat when the bully made a last great attempt to rally. Her love for the Pigeon River Dunellen was fast outgrowing her hatred for him. Then they clenched again, bloody-faced, panting hoarsely, and fell with Mott’s great back to the ground. Suddenly Lettie sprang toward them, crying out shrilly—
“He’s got a knife!”
The other watchers saw it; it gleamed for half a second in the golden light of the lowering Sabbath sun, and it was in Burley Mott’s right hand. Then Dunellen, going all at once as white as death, caught Mott’s right hand in both his own and drove the blade into Mott’s left breast. It happened so quickly that the watching timberjacks could not prevent it. Both men straightened on the ground and lay still.
Bill Cole made a hasty examination of the two silent figures. The bigger man was beyond human aid. Dunellen was still alive, but he had a deep gash in his left side where Mott’s knife had gone in; the bare end of a shattered bone showed through the skin of the back of his right hand. They carried him to the bed in Bill Cole’s room, in the lower story of the boarding-house, and a small, geared logging locomotive was sent thundering to the lowland for a doctor.
Night came, and a slender figure in an old black shawl crept up to one of the windows of the superintendent’s room. By this time she had realized clearly why Tom Dunellen was lying at the door of death—a beggar, perhaps, at the door of death. He had done it for her, to save her.
She blamed herself heavily, as she stood there and looked at the white and motionless face and the battered hand that lay still on the coverlets. All he had told her of his persecuted life now came back to her.
In the yellow light of the little oil lamp, the faces of Bill Cole and the timbermen looked very haggard and drawn. Bill Cole stood close beside the bed, with his watch in his hand. He was counting the jerky beats of Dunellen’s heart. When he faced his men, he shook his head sadly.
Hours went by, and still Lettie Batesford stood there in the darkness beside the window. Then she saw Tom’s black eyes open and she saw them turn toward the superintendent. Bill Cole bent over, his beard brushing Tom’s shoulder.
“Did I kill Mott?” Dunellen said weakly.
“In defense of yourself, son,” quickly.
“It was the only time I ever fit—with anything but my bare hands,” Lettie heard Tom mutter. “I hate that I had to do it. But the little gyurl was a-goin’ to marry him. I done it to save her—I know Burley Mott. He’s all—all black.”
And after a long pause:
“I didn’t do it for myself. She hates me. I’m a Dunellen, y’know. Ef I go out, tell her the only thing—I ever keered much about was her. Tell her the last thing—I thought about was her. And ef God ’lmighty keers anything about a pore —— timberjack, I hope—ef I do wake up in another place—the fust thing I see will be her——”
He closed his eyes in the manner of one who is very weary. Bill Cole stood up straight and turned to his loggers.
“What a —— of a man!” he said huskily. “Oh, what a —— of a man! Some of you go out and listen for that cussed snail of an engine.”
Lettie had gone to her knees under the window-ledge, and now she was sobbing. She hated Tom Dunellen no more. If he lived, he could have her for his dog—if he wanted her for his dog. Bill Cole heard the choking sounds she made, and he went to the window and leaned out. One of his big hands went down and caught her gently by the shoulder.
“Is this you, Lettie?”
Lettie rose and felt her way, like one blind, around to the door. When she entered, the men divided and let her through. She knelt beside the bed and leaned forward.
“Tom!” she murmured chokingly.
It was a magic voice, at least to Tom Dunellen. He looked toward her. She turned her eyes away, ashamed, and saw only that poor hand with the end of a shattered bone showing through the skin.
“Toodles!” he said queerly.
“Tom, ef you will not die——”
“What?” he whispered.
“I’ll be yore dawg!”
The Pigeon River Dunellen smiled.
“Not die,” he gasped, and then went on, “that’s my fust name!”
The sputtering of a little locomotive fell upon their ears, and a few minutes later the doctor entered.
NINE days went by. Tom Dunellen was sitting up, with pillows to his back, in Old King Cole’s bed. His recovery was certain now. Granny Parkis, reconciled, sat dozing in her chair beside an open window. Lettie sat beside Tom. Suddenly Bill Cole entered the room, and in his hands he carried a battery and some two hundred feet of insulated wire.
“Look at this, Tom!” he smiled. “Here’s the battery we missed the Monday after you were hurt; I found it hidden in the laurels behind the dynamite house, and the wires ran into the dynamite—Burley Mott meant to blow you up! And he could have pulled it off very easily, too; it would ha’ looked like an accident. When you made him kill himself, you saved yourself twice! You’re entirely in the clear so far as both the law and your conscience are concerned. Anything I can do for you now, Thomas?”
“Ef it comes in handy, you might send for a preacher and a marriage license,” said the Pigeon River Dunellen, “and much obliged.”
“You might send by the next log-train,” added Lettie.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1957, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 66 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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