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Updated: June 12, 2025
There was no sunlight except for a brief, sullen red fire in the west at the end of day. At night the winds blew bleakly down Greenstream valley. Shutters were locked, shades drawn, in the village; night obliterated it absolutely. No one passed, after dark, on the road above.
She kissed him willingly and studied him with wide-opened hazel-brown eyes. There wasn't another girl in Greenstream, in Virginia, with Hannah's fetching appearance, he decided with a glow of adoration. She had a a sort of beauty entirely her own; it was not exactly prettiness, but a quality far more disturbing, something a man could never forget. "She's done," he told her abruptly. "What?"
At the same time Hannah's desirability increased immeasurably. Never in Greenstream or any place else had he seen another like her; and he was about to lose her, lose Hannah. Automatically he repeated, "If Phebe were a man " He was powerless not only against exterior circumstance but to combat what lay with Hannah. Phebe would never set her hands in hot dishwater.
Here she had proclaimed her impatience with Greenstream, with its loneliness, her hunger for life. Here he had lost her. A sudden need to see Hannah's daughter invaded him and he returned to the kitchen. The child was present, silent; she had Hannah's eyes, Hannah's hair.
"I paid two hundred dollars for this dog," he pronounced, "as a piece of dam' foolishness, a sort of drunken joke on Greenstream. But it's no joke; the two hundred was cheap. I've seen a lot of good men I'm not exactly a peafowl myself but this young dog's better'n any man I ever stood up to; he's got more guts."
His face was dark, forbidding, the lines deeply bitten about a somber mouth, his eyes were like blue ice. He walked into Greenstream, where he saw the proprietor of the small single hotel; then, back in his room, he unwrapped from oiled leather a heavy blued revolver; and soon after he saddled his horse and was clattering in a sharp trot in the opposite direction from the village.
One by one that rocky patch was absorbing family and familiars. Life appeared to be a stumbling procession winding through Greenstream over the rise and sinking into that gaping, insatiable chasm. He was conscious of an invisible force propelling him into that sorry parade, toward those unpretentious stones marked with the shibboleth of names and dates.
Where the fields gave upon the road the buggy dropped sharply; Lettice cried out uncontrollably. He cursed Mrs. Caley savagely under his breath, "Can't you drive," he asked; "can't you?" The ascent to the crown of the ridge was rough, but beyond, winding down to the Greenstream valley, it was worse.
He abruptly turned his back upon the gathering, and descended to the road, carrying the limp, warm body all the way home. It was his own home to which he returned, the original dwelling of the Makimmons in Greenstream. He could not, he had told Lettice, be comfortable anywhere else; he could not be content with it closed against the living sound of the stream, or in strange hands.
"Right nor wrong don't make any figure I've ever discovered," he retorted; "Valentine Simmons has the power, he's got the money. That's it money's the right of things; it took my house away from me, like it's taken away so many houses, so many farms, in Greenstream " "But," she objected timidly, "didn't they owe Mr. Simmons for things? You see, people borrow, borrow, borrow, and never pay back.
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