"Did he make her do things, then?" Jarrod said.
"You've been listening to Alvina King," the proprietress said. "He never made her do anything. How could he? He never left that bench. He never leaves it. He would just sit there and watch her playing, until she began to get too old to play in the dirt. Then they would talk, sitting on the bench there. How could he make her do things, even if he had wanted to?'
"I think you are right," Jarrod said. "Tell me about when she swam the river."
"Oh, yes. She was always afraid of water. But one summer she learned to swim, learned by herself, in the pool. He wasn't even there. Nor at the river either. He didn't know about that until we knew it. He just told her not to be afraid, ever. And what's the harm in that, will you tell me?"
"None," Jarrod said.
"No," the proprietress said, as though she were not listening, had not heard him. "So she came in and told me, and I said, 'With the snakes and all, weren't you afraid?' And she said: " Tes. I was afraid. That's why I did it.'
"'Why you did it?' I said. And she said: "'When you are afraid to do something you know that you are alive. But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of you are dead.'
"'I know where you got that,' I said. I'll be bound he didn't swim the river too.' And she said: "'He didn't have to. Every time he wakes up in the morning he does what I had to swim the river to do. This is what I got for doing it: see?' And she took something on a string out of the front of her dress and showed it to me. It was a rabbit made out of metal or something, about an inch tall, like you buy in the ten-cent stores. He had given it to her.
"'What does that mean?' I said.
"'That's my being afraid,' she said. 'A rabbit: don't you see? But it's brass now; the shape of being afraid, in brass that nothing can hurt. As long as I keep it I am not even afraid of being afraid.'
"'And if you are afraid,' I said, 'then what?'
"'Then I'll give it back to him,' she said. And what's the harm in that, pray tell me? even though Alvina King always has been a fool. Because Louise came back in about an hour. She had been crying. She had the rabbit in her hand. 'Will you keep this for me?' she said. 'Don't let anybody have it except me. Not anybody. Will you promise?'
"And I promised, and I put the rabbit away for her. She asked me for it just before they left. That was when Alvina said they were not coming back the next summer. 'This foolishness is going to end,' she said. 'He will get her killed; he is a menace.'
"And, sure enough, next summer they didn't come. I heard that Louise was sick, and I knew why. I knew that Alvina had driven her into sickness, into bed. But Doctor Jules came in June. 'Louise has been right sick,' I told him.
"'Yes,' he said; 'I know.' So I thought he had heard, that she had written to him. But then I thought how she must have been too sick to write, and that that fool mother of hers anyway..." The proprietress was watching Jarrod.
"Because she wouldn't have to write him."
"Wouldn't have to?"
"He knew she was sick. He knew it. She didn't have to write him. Now you'll laugh."
"I'm not laughing. How did he know?"
"He knew. Because I knew he knew; and so when he didn't go on back to Saint Louis, I knew that she would come. And so in August they did come. Louise had grown a lot taller, thinner, and that afternoon I saw them standing together for the first time. She was almost as tall as he was. That was when I first saw that Louise was a woman. And now Alvina worrying about that horse that Louise says she's going to ride."
"It's already killed one man," Jarrod said.
"Automobiles have killed more than that. But you ride in an automobile, yourself. You came in one. It never hurt her when she swam that river, did it?"
"But this is different. How do you know it won't hurt her?"
"I just know."
"How know?"
"You go out there where you can see that bench. Don't bother him; just go and look at him. Then you'll know too."
"Well, I'd want a little more assurance than that," Jarrod said.
He had returned to Mrs. King. With Louise he had had one interview, brief, violent, bitter. That was the night before; to-day she had disappeared. "Yet he is still sitting there on that bench," Jarrod thought. "She's not even with him. They don't even seem to have to be together: he can tell all the way from Mississippi to Saint Louis when she is sick. Well, I know who's in the blind spot now!"
Mrs. King was in her room. "It seems that my worst competitor is that horse," Jarrod said.
"Can't you see he is making her ride it for the same reason he made her swim that snake-filled river? To show that he can, to humiliate me?"
"What can I do?" Jarrod said. "I tried to talk to her last night. But you saw where I got."
"If I were a man, I shouldn't have to ask what to do. If I saw the girl I was engaged to being ruined, ruined by a man, any man, and a man I never saw before and don't even know who he is old or not old; heart or no heart..."
"I'll talk to her again."
"Talk?" Mrs. King said. "Talk? Do you think I sent you that message to hurry down here just to talk to her?"
"You wait, now," Jarrod said. "It'll be all right. I'll attend to this."
He had to do a good bit of waiting, himself. It was nearly noon when Louise entered the empty lobby where he sat.
He rose. "Well?"
They looked at each other. "Well?"
"Are you still going to ride that horse this afternoon?" Jarrod asked.
"I thought we settled this last night. But you're still meddling. I didn't send for you to come down here."
"But I'm here. I never thought, though, that I was being sent for to compete with a horse." She watched him, her eyes hard. "With worse than a horse. With a damned dead man. A man that's been dead for twenty years; he says so himself, they tell me. And he ought to know, being a doctor, a heart specialist. I suppose you keep him alive by scaring him like strychnine, Florence Nightingale." She watched him, her face quite still, quite cold. "I'm not jealous," he went on. "Not of that bird. But when I see him making you ride that horse that has already killed..." He looked down at her cold face. "Don't you want to marry me, Louise?"
She ceased to look at him. "It's because we are young yet. We have so much time, all the rest of time. And maybe next year, even, this very day next year, with everything pretty and warm and green, and he will be... You don't understand. I didn't at first, when he first told me how it was to live day after day with a match box full of dynamite caps in your breast pocket. Then he told me one day, when I was big enough to understand, how there is nothing in the world but living, being alive, knowing you are alive. And to be afraid is to know you are alive, but to do what you are afraid of, then you live. He says it's better even to be afraid than to be dead. He told me all that while he was still afraid, before he gave up the being afraid and he knew he was alive without living. And now he has even given that up, and now he is just afraid. So what can I do?"