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Kinemon was seated in a rocking-chair with a stained and torn red plush cushion, that moved with a thin complaint on a fixed base. Allen was over against the stove, his corduroy trousers thrust into greased laced boots, and a black cotton shirt open on a chest and throat like pink marble.
All the mountains would think of him as a coward that Kinemon who wouldn't stand up to the men who had destroyed Allen and his father! A sob heaved in his chest; rebellious tears streamed over his thin cheeks. He was crying like a baby. He threw an arm up across his eyes and stumbled from the room.
Don't you grow up too fast, David," she directed him, in an irrepressible maternal solicitude. "I want a boy something young round a while yet." Hunter Kinemon sat erect and reached for his pipe. The visible strain of his countenance had been largely relaxed. When his wife had left the room for a moment he admitted to David: "That was a hard one. I thought she had me that time."
"There he comes now," David replied, his heart pounding wildly and dread constricting his throat. Hunter Kinemon and his wife reached the stage at the same moment. Both were plaster-white; but the woman was shaking with frightened concern, while her husband was deliberate and still. "Help me carry him in to our bed," he addressed Ed Arbogast.
"I'd thank you to drive the stage into Crabapple, Ed," he said; "and if you see the doctor coming over the mountain he's been rung up for ask him, please sir, will he hurry." He turned and walked abruptly away, followed by David. Allen lay under the gay quilt in the Kinemons' big bed. His stained clothes drooped from a chair where Mrs. Kinemon had flung them.
The roan had been untied, and turned as the boy entered; but David, at first, failed to find Hunter Kinemon; then he almost stepped on his hand. His father lay across a corner of the earthen floor, with the bridle tangled in stiff fingers, and his blue eyes staring blankly up. David stifled an exclamation of dread, and forced himself to bend forward and touch the gray face.
It was as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter Kinemon, had found complete expression in his son David.
When Hunter Kinemon turned back toward house and supper David made a wide circle, ostensibly to see whether there was rock salt enough out for the cattle, but in reality to express his superabundant youth, staying qualities and unquenchable vivid interest in every foot of the valley.
And he, David Kinemon, had had to step back, like a coward or a woman, and let the Hatburns triumph. The stage drew up before the Beaulings post-office in the middle of the afternoon. David delivered the mail bags, and then led the team back to a stable on the grassy verge of the houses clustered at the end of tracks laid precariously over a green plain to a boxlike station.
Kinemon occasionally complained, powerful lonely, with the store two miles up the road, Crabapple over a heft of a rise, and no personable neighbors; and she kept a loaded rifle in an angle of the kitchen when the men were all out in a distant pasturage.
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