Backwoods Girl Page 2

  She smiled, and Jim was startled at the change it made in her. She looked younger, and now he was convinced she could not be more than eighteeen or nineteen, though previously he had believed her in her late twenties.

  “You know what I think?” Her tone was amused, conspiratorial. “I bet Storekeeper sneaks outen the house o’ nights and sticks them nuggets where folks’ll find ‘em come daylight. They get all excited-like and spread the word around-their friends and folks keep a-comin’ to Ghost Creek, and Storekeeper makes him a pile o’ money rentin’ ‘em shacks to live in, whilst they’re washin’ for more o’ them nuggets.”

  Jim’s eyes twinkled. “That’s what they call salting a mine out West,” he agreed. “Does this storekeeper make enough off of his summer visitors to justify sprinkling nuggets around?”

  “Oh, sure. Nobody never finds more’n one or two durin’ a whole summer. Lots o’ folks think Storekeeper’s got him a mess o’ them nuggets squirrelled away, like maybe he stole ‘em from the Indians. Folks think the Indians buried a lot o’ gold ‘fore they was shoved off to the West, thinkin’, maybe, the pore fools, somebody might let ‘em come back some day and dig ‘em up.”

  CHAPTER 2

  To Jim, it was a scene that might have been lifted straight out of fantasy—the snug, thick-walled cabin; the huge fieldstone fireplace that filled one end of it and took logs five feet long and the thickness of a man’s body; the scrubbed, spotless cleanliness of it, and the girl, like one of her own pioneer women ancestors. The limp calico dress, with its full, long skirt that nearly reached her ankles, the clumsily-made, snugly-fitted bodice that enhanced the round firmness of exquisitely molded breasts was dark-red with small white flowers scattered over it. Her hands, as they moved swiftly and expertly across the loom, were brown and deft, the hands of a woman who worked hard and without sparing herself.

  “It must be terribly lonely for you up here, Cindy,” he said at last.

  “There’s a heap o’ things-worse than bein’ lonesome,” she told him.

  “Well, of course, being born and brought up here, I can see that you’d be fond of the place,” he admitted. “But you’re young, and lovely. Don’t you ever want to see the city? Movies, and shop windows and pretty clothes and dates—all the things pretty young girls like?”

  Her busy hands slowed on the loom, and her dark, velvety eyes were on the leaping flames. He saw her draw a deep, anguished breath that made her lush, full bosom strain hard against the calico of her bodice.

  “I been to the city,” she told him. “I seen movies, an’ shop windows. I had me some dates. I had me some pretty clothes.” Her voice broke, and he saw her hands clench tightly.

  “I don’ never want to see none o’ them things again,” she burst out, her voice so rough, shaking so that the dog lifted his head and growled uneasily. “I don’t never want to live nowhere but right here, and I don’t never want nobody with me. Just Seth, an’ Bessie, an’ Sadie-May an’ Black Billy.”

  “That sounds like quite a family,” Jim said, puzzled by her agitation. “Seth and Black Billy I know. Who’s Bessie and Sadie-May?”

  “Bessie’s the cow and Sadie-May’s the mule. They’re all the fambly I want. An’ this is the only home,” she told him, tight-lipped, and went back to her weaving, her hands less sure and steady than they had been.

  Obviously her memories were plaguing her again, and Jim turned his eyes away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I hate folks that come pryin’ and askin’ questions that ain’t none o’ their business,” she told him.

  Jim flushed beneath the sting of her voice, but smiled wryly. “I didn’t mean to pry, Cindy. It’s just that I can’t imagine a girl like you living such a lonely life, ‘way up here by yourself.”

  She bent her head over her weaving, and when she spoke, she had herself under better control. “’Long as we’re askin’ questions, maybe I got a right to ask you some,” she said. “Like what you’re doin’ ‘way off up here this time o’ the year.”

  “A perfectly fair question.” He smiled tautly at her. “I’m running away.”

  Startled, she turned swiftly. “You mean you done somethin’ wrong?” she gasped. “The law’s after you?”

  “Nothing like that,” he reassured her swiftly. “What I did was wrong, terribly wrong, but the law can’t touch me for it. I helped kill a man, Cindy.”

  Her hands were once more idle, once more clenched tightly in her lap, and her eyes were enormous in her oval face. “And the law can’t touch you for that? How’d you do that?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

  “I’m a lawyer, Cindy,” he said slowly, his eyes on the fire, speaking as to himself alone, as if he had forgotten that she was listening. “I was appointed by the court to defend a man charged with murder. He was broke; had a wife and two small children, and he had been out of work. Had no money for an attorney, so I was appointed to defend him. I wasn’t sure in my own mind that he was innocent, but I put up as stiff a fight for him as I could. But—I lost, and he went to the electric chair.”

  “But that warn’t your fault,” she said, and added, “Was it?”

  “A month or more after he was executed, the police arrested a man who had tried to shoot it out with them, and had been fatally wounded. On his death bed, this man confessed the hold-up murder for which my client had already died,” Jim said harshly.

  Cindy nodded slowly. “And now you think maybe, just because you didn’t think the fellow was innocent you didn’t fight hard enough for him.” She read his unhappy thought.

  Jim nodded, his hands locked tightly together between his knees, his jaw set so hard that his face was without expression.

  “That’s it,” he said, grateful for her unexpected understanding. “He had no alibi. He had been out of work, and his wife and children were in a bad way. I could understand why a man in such a position would be desperate enough to try to hold up a small grocery store, lose his head and shoot the grocer who tried to defend himself. You see, though I was doing everything my law books had taught me, everything I could think of to try to get him off, in my mind I doubted his innocence, and that may have weakened my fight, slowed down my defense.”

  “That’s a bad thing to have to live with,” said Cindy.

  “I keep remembering how, when the trial was over, he thanked me for putting up such a good fight, and the way that poor little wife, holding a child by each hand, wept and told me what a good man I was to try to help them. I keep remembering how he went to the electric chair, and how his last words were that he was innocent. I remember how even then I had the feeling that he wasn’t, and that he was getting what was coming to him, his just punishment. The grocer had a wife, too, and children.”

  He pounded one clenched fist into the palm of his other hand, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “So can you imagine, Cindy, how I felt when this dying crook with a police record as long as your arm, told of coming into the grocery just as my client had been denied any further credit and was walking out. The fellow told of how he had waited, pretending to order groceries, until my client was out of earshot and then shot the grocer.” Jim was reliving that unutterable horror, visualizing the scene when he had opened the morning paper and had read the story.

  “That’s awful,” said Cindy softly.

  “The understatement of the century,” Jim said. “I think if my client’s widow had reproached me, had screamed at me, accusing me, I might have felt better.”

  “She come to see you?” asked Cindy.

  “I went to her,” Jim said. “I tried to tell her how sorry I was—but how can you find words to say things like that? She just stood there, looking at me, and saying, ‘You did all you could, Mr. McCurdy. The children and I are grateful, and now that his name has been cleared and eve
rybody knows he was innocent, we can learn to live again.’ “

  “She’s got guts,” Cindy said, and her tone made it the highest accolade one woman could offer another.

  Jim nodded. “She’s got compassion, too. She let me make what amends I could, because she knew I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t. She let me make over to her as a trust for the children everything I owned. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that they won’t go hungry. It’ll keep them in some degree of comfort, and give the children an education, and she can be at home with them.”

  Cindy nodded soberly. “An’ then you took to the mountains.”

  “I tried running away from myself,” he answered. “I find it doesn’t work—but I can never practice law again as long as I live.”

  “I reckon you would feel like that,” she said. “Havin’ folks’ lives right in your hand must be a scaresome sort o’ thing. Like bein’ a doctor, maybe.”

  Her hands had gone back to her weaving, but long practice made it possible for her to work without even looking at the frame. “You got any plans now?” she asked at last.

  He grinned at her ruefully, a grin that was without mirth, little more than a contraction of his facial muscles. “Just to hibernate like a bear here in the mountains until I get myself adjusted. I’ll find work somewhere. Maybe I’ll go down to Ghost Creek and try washing gold,” he said. “What do you do for money, Cindy?”

  She touched the weaving. “Winters, I weave,” she told him. “Springs an’ summers an’ falls, I gather yarbs for the drug men that come through Ghost Creek two-three times a year. I make me a garden and can up the stuff I can’t eat. I got me a smokehouse full of good hawg meat, an’ I’m a good hunter. I make out.”

  Jim studied her curiously. “If a kid like you can ‘make out,’ I guess I can too,” he said.

  The air of hostility, of suspicion that had gripped her since he had first set eyes on her had faded with their growing understanding of each other, but now as they sat in silence, studying each other, he saw the flicker of uneasiness in her eyes as she thrust the frame away from her and stood up.

  “It’s gittin’ on fer bedtime,” she said. “Reckon you better stay here by the fire whilst I fix your bed.”

  He stood up, too, knocking the ashes out of his pipe into the fireplace. “Let me—,” he began and put out his hand in a friendly, unconscious gesture. He was startled to see her draw sharply away from him and fear dawn in her eyes again. “Cindy, for Pete’s sake, you’re not afraid of me?” he protested.

  “The man I got to be afraid of ain’t been born yet,” she said. “I ain’t afraid o’ nobody, an’ I don’t trust nobody, neither. You stay here and mind your own business.”

  Jim’s jaw tightened, but he stood well away from her. His eyes narrowed as she slid past him, carefully avoiding any contact with him. She went up the steep ladder to the hayloft and lifted the trap door at the top. She disappeared from his sight, and Jim stood watching until the big dog growled uneasily. Jim looked swiftly at him. The dog was propped halfway up, his front paws rigid, his unblinking yellow eyes fastened to Jim’s face.

  “Oh, go to hell!” Jim growled at the dog and dropped back into his chair, as the dog once more relaxed, but without removing his unblinking gaze.

  Jim listened to the sound of Cindy moving briskly about overhead, and then she was back down the ladder, standing well out of reach of him, her dark eyes watchful, as hostile as those of the dog. Now Seth stood with his body pressed against her legs, between her and Jim.

  “Your bed’s ready,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Jim answered and moved towards the foot of the ladder. “Reckon maybe you better stay up there till I call you in the mornin’,” she told him. “Any idee you got ‘bout wanderin’ ‘round, don’t fergit Seth sleeps mighty light, an’ he’ll be right here all night.”

  “You’re a very nasty-minded female, Cindy, my girl,” he told her. “I really believe you when you say you trust nobody at any time.”

  “You better believe it, ‘cause it’s so!”

  Jim mounted the ladder without looking back and once inside the loft, he dropped the trap door in place with an angry thump. An oil lamp stood on the floor. There were no furnishings whatever except for a thick, straw-filled mattress that lay near the chimney, which gave off a pleasant warmth up here. The mattress was covered with thick, dark-wool blankets and several gaily-colored patchwork quilts. There were no sheets; but the fat pillow of goose feathers was neatly enclosed in a clean flour-sacking slip.

  He took off his shoes and his coat, decided against undressing any further, and slid between the ample covers. Before he could think much about the girl and her dog who stood guard below, the exhaustion of his body had blotted out all thought in deep sleep.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dawn was flooding the loft, brilliant sunshine stealing through the narrow window, when he awoke, to realize that Cindy was calling to him from downstairs.

  He answered her call and slid out of the makeshift bed. Pulling on his stout boots, carrying his thick windbreaker in his hands, he descended the stairs, to find Cindy placing food on the table, which was laid for one. As she came from the kitchen, carrying a large, ancient coffee pot, he gestured towards the one place.

  “Aren’t you having breakfast, Cindy?” he asked.

  Her smile was young, and gay and charming. “Law me, Mister. I et breakfast two-three hours ago,” she drawled. “I been up since four-thirty. I already fed the chickens, an’ the pig, an’ done the milkin’ an’ churned. The day’s half gone.”

  Jim glanced at the ancient clock, ticking solemnly away on the mantel that was a roughly-split log above the huge fireplace, and saw that the hands marked a quarter after nine. He merely shrugged and offered no comment as he sat down to an enormous platter where fried bacon, crisp and brown, accompanied two fried eggs, with slices of the cold hominy, from last night, that had been browned in bacon drippings. There were hot biscuits and another bowl of the wild strawberry jam.

  “Usually, I’m an orange juice, toast and coffee man,” he said with a grin, “but somehow I seem to have discovered an appetite.”

  “Eat your fill, Mister. They’s plenty more where that come from,” she assured him, using a phrase with which he was to become quite familiar as he lingered in this out-of-the-way mountain place. It typified the hospitality with which a mountaineer assured the stranger under his roof that the supply of provisions was ample, even though it might well be that the family larder had been scraped to the bone to supply what was on the table.

  Cindy was at her weaving as he ate, and he watched her, seeing in the morning sunlight that she was even more beautiful than last night’s firelight and shadows had revealed. He was not conscious of the tenseness of his scrutiny, until he saw the color creep into her cheeks, and she turned to him, her head held high, her eyes cold. “You see somethin’ funny-lookin’, Mister, the way you’re settin’ there, lookin’ at me like you hadn’t never set eyes on a gal before?” she demanded.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude,” he apologized. “It’s just that I hadn’t realized how lovely you really are—.”

  “You shet up! An’ you stop lookin’ at me like that! I don’t want menfolks lookin’ at me like I was somethin’ good to eat!” she burst out, her voice shaking.

  Jim put down his knife and fork, and brought out his pipe. “Cindy, you are really an amazing creature,” he said soberly. “You’ve told me over and over that you trust nobody, and I believe it. But what could have happened to you, living up here like this, to make you distrust every living human being? I can assure you, Cindy, that I wouldn’t harm you for anything in the world. You’re only a child!”

  Her lovely, soft mouth thinned to an ugly bitterness. “Don’t kid yourself, Mister.” Her voice was thin with contempt. “I’m a wo
man, full-growed, an’ I ain’t never been allowed to forget it, not even when I was just a gal-young-’un, runnin’ barefoot around here. An’ I got me some mighty good reason why I don’t trust nobody.”

  She looked at the platter which he had emptied, and then she stood up, her head held high, her bottomless black eyes frosty. “Reckon if you’ve et, Mister, time you was pullin’ your freight,” she told him. “There’s a smell o’ snow in the air, an’ if it ketches you here on Ole Hungry, you ain’t never goin’ to git to Ghost Creek, ner no place else.”

  Jim stood up immediately and, tight-lipped, donned his thick windbreaker and slipped his arms into the straps of the shoulder pack that held all his baggage.

  “Sorry I’ve been such a nuisance,” he told her and dropped a five-dollar bill on the table.

  The girl drew back as though he had struck her, and her wide, blazing eyes clung to the money in utter revulsion.

  “What’s that for?” she demanded.

  “For food and a night’s lodging.”

  “I ain’t chargin’ nothin’ for you sleepin’ an’ eatin’,” she told him. “I don’ want no money frum you, ner no other man.”

  Jim stared at her, puzzled and resentful. “You really have had a bad time of it, haven’t you?” he asked slowly.

  She caught her breath, and her lovely face went white as she pulled herself erect, her eyes blazing. She turned to the door, swung it open to a draft of icy air, and said through her teeth, “Git!”

  Jim shrugged the shoulder pack into position, caught up the money and thrust it into his pocket. As he passed her, she drew her lithe, slender body back, fearful that he might touch her. As he walked through the door, it slammed hard behind him, and he heard the stout bar drop into place.

  He stood for a moment, frowning. Then he stalked across the narrow porch and gasped as the icy wind swept down upon him, almost throwing him off his feet. He crossed the dooryard, bleak now beneath its icy wintering, and saw a faint trail that led downward, a narrow, winding trail that he followed slowly and carefully, his mind busy with the problem of the lonely girl and her bitter isolation.