Chapter V

IN the direction they had gone he drove to the first crossroad and turned right. After many miles in vain that way he came back to the point at which he had turned right, and turned left. Returning again he drove straight ahead to the next crossroad and went first right and then left. In this manner he searched the country methodically. Nobody had seen them. They had passed without trace if they passed at all.

Thus a fortnight had elapsed when one morning Dreadwind’s quest was almost rewarded and then immediately disappointed again in a very singular manner.

He had spent the latter part of the night in the automobile, a little off the road, in a space screened on three sides by a high wild hedge. He came awake as streaks of light began to show in the east. For several moments he lay motionless, observing the sky. Suddenly in a spectral manner a tall, lone figure appeared in the road. He recognized it instantly as Weaver; and even in that dim light he could see that the old man was in extreme trouble with his thoughts. He would start, stop, turn, walk up and down, and kept twisting his hands together. Then he seemed to have resolved it, for suddenly he left the road, leaped the ditch, and stood in the edge of a field of wheat. From Dreadwind’s angle of vision he was in silhouette above the wheat and so exaggerated in stature that he seemed supernaturally tall, touching the sky. The whole omen of him was evil. Dreadwind had a flash of phantasy. He though of Abraham about to sacrifice his son, and shuddered.

What happened next was mysterious. Out of the depths of an inner garment the old man produced as it were a pouch or small sack, opened it, dipped his fingers therein and appeared to be casting an impalpable substance on the air. There was a fresh breeze blowing against the wheat and that of course would account in a natural way for what Dreadwind at this moment observed with a superstitious feeling—namely, that the wheat seemed to be running from Weaver, not toward him. Although he took rational note of the obvious physical explanation, still he could do nothing with the fancy that it was running from the old man in terror.

After Weaver had several times repeated the act of sowing something on the air, Dreadwind’s curiosity moved him. He rose and approached. Weaver neither saw nor heard him. With only the ditch between them Dreadwind stopped and called his name.

The old man turned his face—only his face. Its expression was so calamitous, so mingled of pity, pain and cruel resolve, that Dreadwind was shocked. Before he could speak again, Weaver dropped the pouch and went stumbling away through the wheat, trampling it in a heedless manner and never once looked back. His walking down the wheat in that way, as if it were nonexistent or lifeless, so contrary to the feeling of tenderness hitherto revealed, was a sight that unnerved Dreadwind. He said it was like an act of murder unconsciously committed. When he had so far recovered as to be able to act the old man was invisible.

The first thing he did was to pick up the abandoned pouch. It was still half full of some fine, brownish stuff with a sick, unpleasant odor. He put this away in his pocket and then went about the neighborhood leisurely, making no inquiries at first, expecting to come upon Weaver and Cordelia in a casual manner. He imagined that Weaver had not recognized him. There had been no sign of recognition in that extraordinary expression; and this was all the more probable from the fact that one of Weaver’s peculiarities was a morbid longsightedness. When he was in a state of feeling his eyes focused slowly and with difficulty upon near-by objects.

But not only was there no trace of either Weaver or Cordelia in the immediate vicinity; there was not a house within a radius of many miles where they had been seen. Dreadwind was disagreeably astonished. Elusiveness in this degree was adroit, not accidental. Forebodings assailed him. He began to have ugly thoughts about Weaver.

And now it occurred to him to work backward. The woman who had delivered Cordelia’s mute token might know with whom they had stopped before coming to her. If she did, then in the same way others might be able to refer him back, and so he would go from one place to another until he had discovered their source.

Thus he came again to the house where all the beginning was, and knocked—as by this time he had learned to do—at the kitchen door. The woman’s name was Purdy. She was not surprised to see him and seemed to be indulgently amused.

“I knew you wouldn’t find them,” she said before Dreadwind had spoken.

No. She had no news of them. They had not been back.

“Do you know where they were before coming here?” Dreadwind asked.

“That won’t do you any good,” she said.

She had been making bread. There was dough on her hands. She gathered it into a little ball and rolled it thoughtfully between her palms.

“Perhaps not,” said Dreadwind. “You’ve been right so far, I’m sorry to say. However, I’d like to try.”

She gave him the name of a family in the next county, together with explicit directions about the way to go, twice repeated.

“Now be sure you don’t get lost,” she called after him. He turned to thank her again. “And stop again if you are passing this way,” she added.

He found the place. The migrants had passed four days there, and to one side of the house it was a sore matter. The woman lost her temper at the mention of Weaver’s name and denounced him for a witch. She was more voluble than coherent. Presently her husband appeared, put her aside and stood himself in the whole doorway. He wished to talk of womankind for listening womankind’s benefit. Dreadwind wished only to know where the Weavers had been before this. Gradually the man admitted the probability that they might have been with a family twelve miles south. Dreadwind was departing with this information. The man followed him to the gate and there created a man-to-man atmosphere, with no annotating female in the background.

Dreadwind, he said, would know what he meant. Women were not such as had judgment into them. They put on everything a man said and wore it hard around the house whether it was intended that way or not. Weaver was all right, only sometimes he had a strong way of saying things and it wasn’t everybody knew how to take it.

Dreadwind asked what he had been saying here to jeopardize his welcome on the feminine side.

Things there wasn’t anything into really, the man said. Things nobody would notice unless they put them on like women always done. Such as one morning at breakfast the woman said she dreamed of the devil and Weaver said you dreamed of the devil when you let the dishwater stand. There was nothing into that, was there? How did he know she let her dishwater stand? But the woman got mad and let herself go. Well, things like that. If you had short fingernails you was a tale bearer. If you kicked up your dress behind you was a thief. Maybe, maybe not. You would see many things that was both so and not so. What was so of a field might not be so of a furrow. Anyhow, it wasn’t meant personal, like the woman took it, not even about the hair. He said if birds made a nest of your hair you went crazy. So ever since the woman was going about the place knocking birds’ nests out of the trees and raking the grass for bits of her hair that might have blowed out of the house, thinking the old man put a spell on her mind. But as for him being a witch, it was like them inquisitors calling everybody heretics and burning them up because they couldn’t understand what they said. Suppose he could talk with dumb animals, like he said. Wasn’t that on account of him being born Christmas? And if he could read cobwebs and tell what the rest of the winter was going to be according to how the liver and spleen was pointed in a fresh-killed hog, that was knowledge. Whatever you might say it came out that way.

“Juknow,” the man asked, eyeing Dreadwind keenly—”juknow why you never seen a blue jay on Friday and why on the first Thursday in July at two o’clock all the toads turn pink for thirty minutes?”

“Why?” said Dreadwind.

“Ask him,” the man answered.

With that he was through. He became suddenly apprehensive. To further questions he returned evasive, suspicious monosyllables. Dreadwind offered to shake hands. The man hastily popped out of the gate.

“Never shake hands over a gate,” he said.

At the next place, twelve miles south, there was a tidy woman who never let her dishwater stand and was careful of her hair. She had liked Cordelia and felt very sorry for her on the ground that in being so devoted to that old curmudgeon of a father she was throwing her life away. It seemed hardly natural, and such a lovely girl too. However, she said nothing against Weaver directly. Her husband smiled vaguely, a little uneasily, at some secret recollection of the old man, saying: “He’s a character all right.” Dreadwind said he had been told that Weaver was a kind of witch who worked upon people’s superstitions.

“Yes,” said the man. “He might do that But you’ll see there’s generally some point to it. There are people you can’t get at in any other way for their own good. There’s a man near here that never fed his stock properly. Weaver told him at twelve o’clock Christmas Eve cows kneel down and talk with the devil in the language of the Old Testament and complain if they haven’t been used right. And that was the reason he had been having bad luck. The man believed it. Weaver nailed two brooms in a cross on the barn—you can see them as you go by—and said they would keep evil spirits away as long as the cows got enough to eat. And he believed that. It was good for the cows. What’s more, the man’s having better luck.”

“Anything else?” Dreadwind asked.

“He can find water with a peach twig,” said the man. “I never took any stock in that myself until I saw him do it right here on this place.”

In that way and from place to place Dreadwind got a lot of information he was not seeking, all of it interesting, and nothing to the main point. Nobody knew who Weaver was nor how it happened that he came to be wandering over the wheat country year after year with a beautiful daughter attached. Their trail was easy to follow in this backward fashion until it jumped off the earth in Texas. It appeared to have started there, not once but several times, for people remembered their coming again and again; only here nobody knew whence they came or where they had been last. Here was their point of departure, it seemed, but not their source; and Dreadwind was more mystified than ever.

He had been three times to see a family that was said to have known the Weavers in a time long past. The last member of the family had now denied it. The clew was therefore false and Dreadwind was leaving it.

Outside the gate in the shade of an ash tree, on a little bench, sat a man who had long since ceased to observe the world or mind its vanities. He had cut it off. His hands were folded, his knees lay together, his toes turned in, and the long, wonderful beard that had absorbed his masculinity was tucked into his shirt bosom. He seemed very little, very old and wholly impenetrable. Dreadwind had noticed him before, always in that place on the bench, remote and unseeing. You could imagine that without power, authority or grandeur of any sort he lived there among his progeny, begotten of himself and a strong woman, and derived his dignity from the one phenomenon of venerable silence; also that he took a great deal of ironic pleasure in it.

“I don’t suppose you knew Absalom Weaver?” said Dreadwind, more out of curiosity to see how he would react when directly provoked than with any sort of expectation.

The patriarchal deposit did not stir. One could not believe that anything within it stirred. Dreadwind stood looking down at it for a minute, then turned away and had one foot on the running board of his car when a far-away voice at the pitch of an unoiled hinge arrested him. The bearded figure had uttered words. Dreadwind asked him what they were. After a long time he repeated them.

“Ye can suppose it,” he said.

“Well, do you?” Dreadwind asked.

“Better nor he knew himself,” was the answer when at length it came.

Dreadwind sat down on the grass, facing the motionless figure, and gave the impulse plenty of time to augment itself.

“What made him a vagabond?” he asked.

“If you ask him why he don’t own any land—if you ask him—do you know what he will say?”

“What will he say?” asked Dreadwind.

“He will say he ain’t fit to own land. And he ain’t fit.”

“Why will he say that?” asked Dreadwind.

“I told him. I told him he were not fit to own land. And he ain’t the one to forget it.”

It was an afternoon’s work, requiring much subtlety and patience, to mine that dry cavern of its treasure. Each fragment was parted with reluctantly. And it was a plain story, deserving to be briefly told.