Bob, Son of Battle by Alfred Ollivant (crime books to read TXT) 📕

David shouted as he cleared the gate, but the brute paid no heed, and was almost touching the fugitive when Owd Bob came galloping round the corner, and in a second had flashed between pursuer and pursued. So close were the two that as he swung round on the startled sow, his tail brushed the baby to the ground;. and there she lay kicking fat legs to heaven and calling on all her gods.

David, leaving the old dog to secure the warrior pig, ran round to her; but he was anticipated. The whole matter had barely occupied a minute’s time; and Maggie, rushing from the kitchen, now had the child in her arms and was hurrying back with her to the house.

“Eh, ma pet, are yo’ hurted, deane?” David could hear her asking tearfully, as he crossed the yard and established himself in the door.

“Well,” said he, in bantering tones, “yo’m a nice wench to ha’ charge o’ oor Annie!”

It was a sore subject with the girl, and well he knew it. Wee Anne, that golden-haired imp of mischief, was forever evading her sister-mother’s eye and attempting to immolate herself. More than once she had only been saved from serious hurt by the watchful devotion of Owd Bob, who always found time, despite his many labors, to keep a guardian eye on his well-loved lassie. In the previous winter she had been lost on a bitter night on the Muir Pike; once she had climbed into a field with the Highland bull, and barely escaped with her life, while the gray dog held the brute in check; but a little while before she had been rescued from drowning by the Tailless Tyke; there had been numerous other mischances; and now the present mishap. But the girl paid no heed to her tormentor in her joy at finding the child all unhurt.

“Theer! yo’ bain’t so much as scratted, ma precious, is yo’?” she cried. “Rin oot agin, then,” and the baby toddled joyfully away.

Maggie rose to her feet and stood with face averted. David’s eyes dwelt lovingly upon her, admiring the pose of the neat head with its thatch of pretty brown hair; the slim figure, and slender ankles, peeping modestly from beneath her print frock.

“Ma word! if yo’ dad should hear tell o’ boo his Anne—” he broke off into a long-drawn whistle.

Maggie kept silence; but her lips quivered, and the flush deepened on her cheek.

“I’m fear’d I’ll ha’ to tell him,” the boy continued, “‘Tis but ma duty.”

“Yo’ may tell wham yo’ like what yo’ like,” the girl replied coldly; yet there was a tremor in her voice.

“First yo’ throws her in the stream,” David went on remorselessly; “then yo’ chucks her to the pig, and if it had not bin for me—”

“Yo’, indeed!” she broke in contemptuously. “Yo’! ‘twas Owd Bob reskied her. Yo’d nowt’ to do wi’ it, ‘cept lookin’ on—‘bout what yo’re fit for.”

“I tell yo’,” David pursued stubbornly, ~‘an’ it had not bin for me yo’ wouldn’t have no sister by noo. She’d be lying’, she would, pore little lass, cold as ice, pore mite, wi’ no breath in her. An’ when yo’ dad coom home there’d be no Wee Anne to rin to him, and climb on his knee, and yammer to him, and beat his face. An he’d say, ‘What’s gotten to oor Annie, as I left wi’ yo’?’ And then yo’d have to tell him, ‘I never took no manner o’ fash after her, dad; d’reckly yo’ back was turned, I—’”

The girl sat down, buried her face in her apron, and indulged in the rare luxury of tears.

“Yo’re the cruellest mon as iver was, David M’Adam,” she sobbed, rocking to and fro.

He was at her side in a moment, tenderly bending over her.

“Eh, Maggie, but I am sorry, lass—”

She wrenched away from beneath his hands.

“I hate yo’,” she cried passionately.

He gently removed her hands from before her tear-stained face.

“I was nob’but laffin’, Maggie,” he pleaded; “say yo’ forgie me.”

“I don’t,” she cried, struggling. “I think yo’re the hatefullest lad as iver lived.

The moment was critical; it was a time for heroic measures.

“No, yo’ don’t, lass,” he remonstrated; and, releasing her wrists, lifted the little drooping face, wet as it was, like the earth after a spring shower, and, holding it between his two big hands, kissed it twice.

“Yo’ coward!” she cried, a flood of warm red crimsoning her cheeks; and she struggled vainly to be free.

“Yo’ used to let me,” he reminded her in aggrieved tones.

“I niver did!” she cried, more indignant than truthful.

“Yes, yo’ did, when we was little uns; that is, yo’ was allus for kissin’ and I was allus agin it. And noo,” with whole-souled bitterness, “I mayn’t so much as keek at yo’ over a stone wall.”

However that might be, he was keeking at her from closer range now; and in that position—for he held her firmly still—she could not help but keek back. He looked so handsome ~—humble for once; penitent yet reproachful; his own eyes a little moist; and, withal, his old audacious self,—that, despite herself, her anger grew less hot.

“Say yo’ forgie me and l’ll let yo’ go.”

“I don’t, nor niver shall,” she answered firmly; but there was less conviction in her heart than voice.

“Iss yo’ do, lass,” he coaxed, and kissed her again.

She struggled faintly.

“Hoo daur yo’?” she cried through her tears. But he was not to be moved.

“Will yo’ noo?” he asked.

She remained dumb, and he kissed her again.

“Impidence!” she cried.

“Ay,” said he, closing her mouth.

“I wonder at ye, Davie!” she said, surrendering.

After that Maggie must needs give in; and it was well understood, though nothing definite had been said, that the boy and girl were courting. And in the Dale the unanimous opinion was that the young couple would make “a gradely pair, surely.”

M’Adam was the last person to hear the news, long after it had been common knowledge in the village. It was in the Sylvester Arms he first heard it, and straightway fell into one of those foaming frenzies characteristic of him.

“The dochter o’ Moore o’ Kenmuir, d’ye say? sic a dochter o’ sic a man! The dochter o’ th’ one man in the wand that’s harmed me aboon the rest! I’d no ha’ believed it gin ye’d no tell’t me. Oh, David, David! I’d no ha’ thocht it even o’ you, ill son as ye’ve aye bin to me. I think he might ha’ waited till his auld dad was gone, and he’d no had to wait lang the noo.” Then the little man sat down and burst into tears. Gradually, however, he resigned himself, and the more readily when he realized that David by his act had exposed a fresh wound into which he might plunge his barbed shafts. And he availed himself to the full of his new opportunities. Often and often David was sore pressed to restrain himself.

“Is’t true what they’re sayin’ that Maggie Moore’s nae better than she should be?” the little man asked one evening with anxious interest.

“They’re not sayin’ so, and if they were ‘twad be a lie,” the boy answered angrily.

M’Adam leant back in his chair and nodded his head.

“Ay, they tell’t me that gin ony man knew ‘twad be David M’Adam.”

David strode across the room.

“No, no main o’ that,” he shouted. “Y’ought to be ‘shamed, an owd mon like you, to speak so o’ a lass.” The little man edged close up to his son, and looked up into the fair flushed face towering above him.

“David,” he said in smooth soft tones, “I’m ‘stonished ye dinna strike yen auld dad.” He stood with his hands clasped behind his back as if daring the young giant to raise a finger against him. “Ye maist might noo,” he continued suavely. “Ye maun be sax inches taller, and a good four stane heavier. Hooiver, aiblins ye’re wise to wait. Anither year twa I’ll be an auld man, as ye say, and feebler, and Wullie here’ll be gettin’ on, while you’ll be in the prime o’ yer strength. Then I think ye might hit me wi’ safety to your person, and honor to yourself.”

He took a pace back, smiling.

“Feyther,” said David, huskily, “one day yo’ll drive me too far.”

Chapter XX. THE SNAPPING OF THE STRING

THE spring was passing, marked throughout with the bloody trail of the Killer. The adventure in the Scoop scared him for a while into innocuousness; then he resumed his game again with redoubled zest. It seemed likely he would harry the district till some lucky accident carried him off, for all chance there was of arresting him.

You could still hear nightly in the Sylvester Arms and elsewhere the assertion, delivered with the same dogmatic certainty as of old, “It’s the Terror, I tell yo’!” and that irritating, inevitable reply: “Ay; but wheer’s the proof?” While often, at the same moment, in a house not far away, a little lonely man was sitting before a low-burnt fire, rocking to and fro, biting his nails, and muttering to the great dog whose head lay between his knees:

“If we had but the proof, Wullie! if we had but the proof! I’d give ma right hand aff my arm gin we had the proof to-morrow.”

Long Kirby, who was always for war when some one else was to do the fighting, suggested that David should be requested, in the name of the Dalesmen, to tell M’Adam that he must make an end to Red Wull. But Jim Mason quashed the proposal, remarking truly enough that there was too much bad blood as it was between father and son; while Tammas proposed with a sneer that the smith should be his own agent in the IJatter.

Whether it was this remark of Tammas’s which stung the big man into action, or whether it was that the intensity of his hate gave him unusual courage, anyhow, a few days later, M’Adam caught him lurking in the granary of the Grange.

The little man may not have guessed his murderous intent; yet the blacksmith’s white-faced terror, as he crouched away in the darkest corner, could hardly have escaped remark; though—and Kirby may thank his stars for it—the treacherous gleam of a gun-barrel, ill-concealed behind him, did.

“Hullo, Kirby!” said M’Adam cordially, “ye’ll stay the night wi’ me?” And the next thing the big man heard was a giggle on the far side the door, lost in the clank of padlock and rattle of chain. Then—through a crack— “Good-night to ye. Hope ye’ll be comfie.” And there he stayed that night, the following day and next night—thirty-six hours in all, with swedes for his hunger and the dew off the thatch for his thirst.

Meanwhile the struggle between David and his father seemed coming to a head. The little man’s tongue wagged more bitterly than ever; now it was never at rest—searching out sores, stinging, piercing.

Worst of all, he was continually dropping innuendoes, seemingly innocent enough, yet with a world of subtile meaning at their back, respecting Maggie. The leer and wink with which, when David came home from Kenmuir at nights, he would ask the simple question, “And was she kind, David—eh, eh?” made the boy’s blood boil within him.

And the more effective the little man saw his shots to be, the more persistently he plied them. And David retaliated in kind. It was a war of reprisals. There was no peace; there were no truces in which to bury the dead before the opponents set to slaying others. And every day brought the combatants nearer to that final struggle, the issue of which neither cared