I was thus meditating when a thrashing in the cornstalks just beyond the fence startled me into rigidity. Something that might have been a person stumbled toward the carriage, snuffling and moaning, to throw itself down by the prostrate bodies, its anguished noises growing more high-pitched and piercing.
By now I was sure this was a passenger who had jumped from the carriage at the start of the holdup, but whether man or woman it was impossible to tell. I moved forward gingerly, but somehow I must have betrayed my presence, for the creature, with a terrified groan, slumped inertly.
My hands told me it was a woman I raised from the ground and I sensed somehow that she was quite young. “Don’t be afraid, Miss,” I tried to reassure her. “I’m a friend.”
I could hardly leave the girl lying in the road, nor did I feel equal to carrying her to Haggershaven—which I reckoned must be about six miles further. I tried shaking her, rubbing her hands, murmuring encouragement, all the while wishing the moon would come out, feeling somehow it would be easier to revive her in the moonlight.
At last she stirred and began whimpering again. Repeating that I was not one of the gang, I urged her to get up and come with me. I couldn’t tell whether she understood or not for she merely moaned at intervals. I managed to get her arm over my shoulder and, supporting her around the waist, began walking again, impeded by my valise on one side and the girl on the other.
I could only guess how much time had been taken by the holdup and how slow my progress to Haggershaven would be. It did not seem I could arrive before midnight unless, which was unlikely, I could leave the girl at a hospitable farmhouse. And I could not imagine a more awkward hour to explain the company of a strange female.
We had made perhaps a mile—a slow and arduous one—when the moon at last came up. The light showed my companion even younger than I had thought, and extraordinarily beautiful. Her eyes were closed in a sort of troubled sleep, and she continued to moan, though at less frequent intervals.
I had just decided to stop for a moment’s rest when we came upon one of the horses. He had trailed one of the clumsily cut traces and caught it on the stump of a broken sapling. Though still trembling he was over the worst of his fright; after patting and soothing him I got us onto his back and we proceeded in more comfortable fashion.
It wasn’t hard to find Haggershaven; the sideroad to it was well kept and far smoother than the highway. We passed between what looked to be freshly plowed fields and came to a fair sized group of buildings, in some of which I was relieved to see lighted windows. The girl had still not spoken; her eyes remained closed and she moaned occasionally.
Dogs warned of our approach. From a dark doorway a figure came forward with a rifle under his arm. “Who is it?”
“Hodge Backmaker—I’ve got a girl here who was in a holdup. She’s had a bad shock.”
He hitched the horse to a post. I lifted the girl down. “I’m Asa Dorn,” he said. “Let’s go into the main kitchen—it’s warm there. Here, take my arm.”
She made no response and I half-carried her, with Dorn trying helpfully to share her weight. The building through which we led her was obviously an old farmhouse, having been enlarged and remodelled a number of times. Gas lights revealed Asa Dorn as perhaps 30, with very broad shoulders and very long arms, and a dark, rather melancholy face. “There’s been a gang operating around here,” he informed me, “that’s why I was on guard with the gun. Must be the same one.”
We bustled the girl into a chair before a great fieldstone fireplace which gave the big room its look of welcome, though the even heat came from sets of steampipes under the windows. “Should we give her some soup? Or tea? Or should I get Barbara, or one of the others?”
His fluttering brushed the outside of my mind. My attention was concentrated on the girl, who looked no more than sixteen or seventeen, perhaps because she was severely dressed in some school uniform. Long, thick black hair hung softly in loose curls around her shoulders. Her face, which seemed made to reflect emotions—full, mobile lips, faintly slanted eyes, high nostrils—was instead impassive, devoid of vitality and this unnatural passivity was heightened by the dark eyes, now wide open and expressionless. Her mouth moved slowly, as though to form words, but nothing came forth except the faintest of guttural sounds.
“Why,” exclaimed Dorn, “she’s… dumb!”
She looked agonizedly toward him. I patted her arm helplessly.
“I’ll go get—” he began.
A door opened and Barbara Haggerwells blinked at us. “I thought I heard…” Then she caught sight of the girl. Her face set in those lines of strange anger I had seen in the bookstore. “Really, Mr. Backmaker, I thought I’d explained there were no facilities here for this sort of thing.”
Dorn broke in. “But Barbara, she’s been in a holdup. She’s dumb—”
Fury made her ugly. “Is that an additional attraction? Dumb or not, get the slut out of here! Get her out right now, I say!”
“Barbara, you’re not listening. You don’t understand.”
She turned her back on him and faced me. “I should have remembered you were a ladies’ man, Mr. Self-taught Backmaker. No doubt you imagined Haggershaven as some obscene liberty hall. Well, it isn’t! You’ll be wasting any further time you spend here. Get out!”
I SUPPOSE—RECALLING the scene with Little Aggie—I was less astonished by her frenzy than I might have been. Besides, her rage and misunderstanding were anti-climactic after the succession of excitements I had been through that day. Instead of amazement or outrage I felt only vague puzzlement and tired annoyance.
Dorn, after getting Barbara out of the room, offered stumbling explanations (“Overwork, overwork”) which jolted between the patent loyalty prodding him to cover her defects and a painful desire to distract my mind from the episode. Only when we were relieved of our responsibilities by the arrival of several women who effectually sealed the girl away from all further masculine contact and he took me to Mr. Haggerwells’ study, did his nervousness somewhat abate.
Thomas Haggerwells, large-boned like his daughter, with the ginger hair faded, and a florid, handsome complexion, made me welcome, but he seemed to have something else on his mind. Finally he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and turned to Dorn. “Ace, Barbara is quite upset.”
I thought this extreme understatement, but Dorn merely nodded. “Misunderstanding, Mr. H,” and he explained the situation.
Mr. Haggerwells began pacing the flowered carpet. “Of course, of course. Naturally we can’t turn the poor girl out. But how can I explain to Barbara? She… she came to me,” he said half proudly, half apprehensively. “I don’t know quite—” He pulled himself together. “Excuse me, Mr. Backmaker. My daughter is high-strung. I’m afraid I’m allowing concern to interfere with our conversation….”
“Not at all, sir,” I said. “I’m very tired, if you’ll excuse me…?”
“Of course, of course,” he answered with evident relief. “Ace will show you your room. Sleep well—we will talk more tomorrow. And Ace—come back here afterward, will you?”
Barbara Haggerwells certainly seemed to have both Ace Dorn and her father pretty well cowed, I thought, as I lay awake. But it was neither Barbara nor overstimulation from all I’d been through that day which caused my insomnia. A torment, successfully suppressed for some hours, invaded me. The chance the hold-up gang could have been supplied with Sprovis’ firearms was remote far beyond probability; connecting the trip of the Escobars with the counterfeiting of Spanish pesetas was fantasy. But what is logic? I could not quench my feeling of responsibility with ridicule, nor charge myself merely with perverse arrogance in magnifying my trivial errands into accountability for all that flowed from the Grand Army. Guilty men cannot sleep because they feel guilty. It is the feeling, not the abstract guilt, which keeps them awake.