Chapter Ten C. G.
In which a pursuer loses thirty miles, and two hands learn to linger
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Back on the stalled train, the thick-set man was making considerably less graceful progress than the two he pursued.
His hands, clumsy with fury, tangled themselves in blankets and half-found garments while one eye stayed fixed on the window, terrified of losing sight of his quarry even for a second.
Where were they? Was this some kind of station?
He craned for a better look and found nothing but empty country — no platform, no depot, only the distant, improbable spires of a village that seemed, to his city-hardened eye, more mirage than destination.
He weighed, for one reckless moment, shouting for the conductor and having the pair simply detained — and dismissed the thought at once.
Halifax had been explicit: not one whisper of this business could reach outside ears, on pain of consequences worse than any of them cared to name aloud.
No, he would have to get off this train himself, quietly, and run them to ground on his own.
It would hardly be difficult. A frightened young couple like that would fold at the first real threat — he'd handled tougher pairs than this with far less trouble, and felt, if anything, considerably more at home in this kind of work than he had at Halifax's overdressed dinner table the night before.
He fought his way into one trouser leg backward, cursed, started over, and had just found his coat — money and papers safely inside it — when the distant whistle of an approaching express sounded, and his own train gave an answering shriek.
Down on the ground, his quarry was already crossing toward the embankment.
They're going down there. His stomach dropped.
If that other train passed and his own pulled out before he could get himself off it, the whole morning's advantage would evaporate in an instant — and he still could not find his shoes.
Fine. I'll go without them. He snatched up his coat and lunged for the door, straight into the arms of the porter, who was just returning from a gossip session with a brakeman up the line.
"Whoa there, sir!" The porter recovered his composure with practiced speed. "Somethin' I can help you with?"
"My shoes," the man snarled. "Where in blazes are my shoes?"
"Right where I always put 'em after a shine, sir — under the berth.
" The porter stooped, produced them without further comment, and the thick-set man snatched them up and made for the vestibule just as the train lurched into motion beneath them, the roar of the passing express drowning out whatever else either man might have said.
He found the outer door already shut fast, the little platform folded up tight, nothing left open but a narrow grated window above the coupling — far too small for any escape, however desperate.
He clung to it anyway, glaring back down the shrinking track, his face doing nothing to recommend him to the porter who came hurrying after.
"I want this train stopped," he bellowed. "I've lost something valuable back there — stop it now, or I'll have the railroad in court by noon."
"Can't stop her for that, sir, not without the conductor's say-so.
And we're an hour behind already — he'll be pushing hard clear to Buffalo.
" The porter's calm only fed the man's fury, and it took the better part of ten minutes and several sleepy, curious faces poking out from other berths before he finally gave up and let himself be steered back toward his own curtained bunk, still fuming.
He parted the curtains and craned for one last look down the track, and could just make out, far off, two small moving shapes on the pale ribbon of road below.
I know exactly where they're headed. If he'd only been a few seconds faster waking, he'd have been on their trail already instead of trapped on a train pulling steadily the wrong direction.
The conductor, when finally summoned, proved entirely unmoved by threats of lawsuits, and would offer nothing better than a promise to let the man off at the next water stop, ten miles on.
The thick-set man accepted this with poor grace and spent the intervening miles finishing his dressing in a black temper, missing both his usual morning drink and any real prospect of breakfast, and increasingly aware that his soft city legs were not built for a long walk over loose gravel.
He scanned the passing countryside for any hint of a garage, a barn, anything with wheels — and found nothing but river, willow, and a scattering of indifferent cows.
Not even a horse worth borrowing. By the time the conductor called the two-minute warning, he had resigned himself entirely to walking.
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He made, all told, a fairly pitiful figure standing alone on the cinder rise as the train pulled away without him — evening clothes hopelessly out of place against open farmland, ten miles between himself and his quarry, an indifferent blue sky overhead offering no sympathy at all.
He blamed himself bitterly for the whole predicament — he'd been the one to fall asleep, after all — set his jaw, and started walking.
The sun climbed and grew steadily meaner as the morning wore toward noon.
Trains roared past at intervals, offering no help at all.
Footsore, parched, and thoroughly wretched, he came at last to the spot where the cinder bank still bore the scuffed marks of a hasty descent, and found, snagged on a bit of bramble at the bottom, a torn scrap of purple silk.
He sat down, mopped his face, and allowed himself a grim, satisfied smile despite his blisters. He was back on their trail. That was something. He pushed on toward the village, certain now that food, transport, and answers all waited just ahead.
He arrived nearly spent and ate an enormous plate of stew at the same small house where Calie and Graham had breakfasted that morning, but found the proprietress carefully unhelpful — she couldn't rightly say whether her morning guests had been young, or good-looking, or worn anything particular in their hats.
She wasn't in the habit of studying people who paid their bills civilly.
Would he care for more coffee? He would, and two more slices of pie besides, but learned nothing further for his trouble.
It was at the general store, in search of something stronger than coffee, that his luck finally turned — or seemed to.
The same loungers from that morning had settled onto the same barrels and boxes, plainly delighted at the prospect of fresh entertainment.
The stranger's fine evening clothes sat oddly now against a day's hard travel — hat dented from its roll down the embankment, collar wilted, tie askew, patent leather shoes dust-caked and pinching after miles of unaccustomed walking.
His voice, when he finally spoke, gave him away as thoroughly as his ruined finery.
"Anybody see a couple of young folks pass through here this morning?" he asked, lighting a cigar with elaborate unconcern.
One man allowed that such a pair might have come through. Another, less cautious, volunteered that "Joe here run two parties up to Milton this mornin' — jest got back a while ago. Reckon he'd know."
Joe, a lanky young man leaning against the store's porch post, said nothing at all, and did not care for the look of this particular customer one bit.
He remembered a pair of forget-me-not blue eyes rather fondly, and had already decided, without quite admitting it to himself, that he owed their owner some measure of protection.
The stranger offered ten dollars for a ride to Milton, then fifteen when Joe proved slow to agree, and Joe accepted with the studied reluctance of a man in no particular hurry, ambling off to fetch a fresh horse and cart with a leisure that suggested he had, in fact, given the matter a good deal of private thought.
When Joe finally reappeared, the impatient traveler climbed aboard, and the loungers watched with poorly concealed amusement as Joe turned the cart, quite deliberately, toward Ashville — a good thirty-mile loop before Milton at all, though the stranger, unfamiliar with the local roads, had no way of knowing it.
"Reckon that there's their chauffeur, come lookin' for 'em?" one old-timer asked lazily, once the cart had rounded the bend and vanished.
"Naw," said a farmer's son, who went to the picture show in Milton twice a month and was widely regarded as an authority on romantic matters. "That's the rich father, come to break it up. Joe's not about to let him catch 'em before the wedding's proper done."
"Well, I reckon Joe figures the long way round is the short way home," the old-timer allowed, with evident approval. "Never did care for that stuck-up sort. But that girl now — she didn't take after her old man one bit."
"College, probably," the youth offered wisely. "That's what does it."
"Shame on a father sendin' his girl off to some fool college 'stead of keepin' her home learnin' to keep house," another grumbled, and a ripple of laughter went round the group before they scattered, each eager to be first home with the day's best story.
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All unaware of Joe's quiet chivalry, or of the thirty extra miles now standing between themselves and their pursuer, Calie and Graham spent a leisurely morning touring Milton.
They learned there was a Pittsburgh-bound train at three that afternoon.
Graham sent a coded wire to the Director confirming the message's safety and his own intention to reach Washington by the most direct route the day allowed, then took Calie to a small diner, where they perched on two high counter stools and ordered with an appetite that surprised them both — corn soup, roast beef, baked trout, coleslaw, three kinds of pie, and strong coffee with real cream, the whole meal costing less between them than either had expected to tip a Manhattan waiter.
It was, without question, the merriest meal either of them had eaten in longer than they could easily say.
Calie found, for the length of that lunch at least, that the weight she carried everywhere with her had simply lifted — that she was, for one bright hour, only a girl enjoying a good meal and better company, with no larger reckoning waiting anywhere in sight.
Afterward they wandered to a small park, where two white ducks paddled a tiny pond spanned by a rustic footbridge carved thick with old initials. Graham took out his pocketknife and, almost without thinking, carved a small C. H. into the weathered railing.
Calie watched him work, turning something over in her mind.
He cut my initials, not his own. The Gregory she remembered from childhood would never once have thought to do that — would have carved his own name first, last, and only, without a second thought for hers.
And he'd used only one H. Perhaps he simply thought of her now as Calie Hostetler without the Hawthorne; or perhaps, she thought with a small ache, he was thinking of nothing at all, only carving out of habit while his mind wandered somewhere she couldn't follow.
Those letters. They rose up again, as they always did, shadowing every bright hour she tried to hold onto.
He finished the C and the H, then began a second C — and instead of another H, carefully shaped a G beneath it.
C. G.? Her breath caught. Who is— And then, with a small, foolish rush of understanding: Gregory, of course. He started an initial for himself, by habit, and stopped.
He never finished the second letter. Instead he snapped the knife shut, laid his hand flat over the carving as though to hide it, and leaned against the rail.
"Perhaps someday we'll come back here," he said, "and remember this morning." Then, almost immediately, he seemed to hear his own words and regret them — he had no earthly right to hope for any such anniversary, and both of them knew it.
"Oh—" Calie looked up at him, startled, her old fear stirring visible in her eyes.
He read the trouble there plainly, and something in his own face answered it — open, tender, wanting badly to comfort her, though he had no right to that either.
Song of Solomon 2:7 rose in him, unbidden and oddly apt: "I charge you...
that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
" Not yet, he told himself firmly. Whatever this is, it is not mine to wake.
Not until she is free to choose it — or refuse it — with her eyes fully open.
The look between them lasted only an instant, but it brought color rushing to both their faces, and Graham, feeling the sudden urgent need of a safer subject, pointed down at the water.
"Look at those little fish."
Calie looked, blinking back an unexpected sting of tears, and watched the small, quick shapes dart through a shaft of sunlight like tiny silver sparks.
She leaned further over the rail to see them better, and her hand, resting there, brushed his.
She did not pull away. She could not have said, in that moment, exactly why — only that some new tenderness in her flinched from the thought of hurting him, even by so small a withdrawal.
Their two hands lay together on the weathered wood for a long, quiet minute, and to Graham the touch felt like something almost too fragile to bear — sweeter than anything he had ever known, and entirely, achingly forbidden.
He wanted very badly to close his fingers around hers, to feel her pulse the way he'd felt it once already, in a church the night before, when he had no earthly business feeling it even then.
But she was not his to claim, not truly, not until she'd had the chance to choose freely — and he could not imagine, knowing what he knew of his own deception, that she would ever choose him once the truth came out.
For that one suspended minute, something passed silently between them — a reaching toward understanding neither one dared name aloud.
Then a sharp whistle sounded somewhere down the road, and a farm boy came ambling into view with a new rake over one shoulder and a sack of feed corn on the other, and the two of them drew apart at once, startled back into themselves.
Calie felt, obscurely, as though she had come to the very edge of some disloyalty to her own better judgment and only just stepped back in time.
They walked the rest of the way to the station in a silence neither one broke, each turning the same small, wordless moment over in private, each entirely aware that the other was doing exactly the same thing.