“Jeanette had disappeared from Aunt Jed’s three months before.  They had not found her, for they had watched for her only where I was.  She had gone to William’s little house.  She had been hidden away there.  While she was well enough, she had not let him send for me.  There was panic in William’s letter, for he wrote that he would meet the first train by which I could come, and every other train thereafter.

“You heard William say the other day that he had never driven like that since—­and there I stopped him.  It was since the day I came back to Jeanette he was going to say.  We didn’t mind the horses breaking that day.  Where the going was good, they ran because they felt like it; where it was bad, they ran because I made them.  I asked William if he had a doctor, and he said he had.  He had done more than that:  he had married Mrs. Tuck to look after Jeanette.

“We stopped in the village for the parson.  I was going to blurt out the truth to him, but William was wiser.  He told him that some one was dying.  So we got the old man between us, and I drove while William held him.  He would have jumped out.  He thought we were mad.”

CHAPTER XLVII

Leighton paused as he thought grimly over that ride.  Then he went on: 

“The last thing my father paid for out of his own pocket on my account was that team of horses from the livery stable.  They got to William’s all right, but they were broken—­broken past repair.  Poor beasts!  Even so we were only just in time.  The old parson married me to Jeanette.  I would have killed him if he had hesitated.  I didn’t have to tell him so; he saw it.

“For one blessed moment Jeanette forgot pain and locked her arms about my neck.  Then they pushed me out, and William and the parson with me.  Mrs. Tuck and the doctor stayed in there.  You were born.”  Leighton gripped his hands hard on his stick.  “What—­what was it the old Woman—­the fortune-teller—­said?”

“‘Child of love art thou,’” repeated Lewis, in a voice lower than his father’s. “’At thy birth was thy mother rent asunder, for thou wert conceived too near the heart.’”

Leighton trembled as though with the ague.  He nodded his head, already low sunk upon his breast.

“It was that—­just that,” he whispered.  “They called us in, the old preacher and me.  Jeanette stayed just for a moment, her hand in mine, her eyes in mine, and then—­she was gone.  The old parson cried like a child.  I wondered why he cried.  Suddenly I knew, and my curses rose above his prayers.  I sprang for William’s rifle in the corner, and before they could stop me, I shot you.

“Boy, I shot to kill; but the best shot at a hundred yards will miss every time at a hundred inches.  The bullet just grazed your shoulder, and at the sting of it you began to gasp and presently to cry.  Tears afterward the doctor told me you would never have lived to draw a single breath if it hadn’t been for that shot.  The shock of it was what started your heart, your lungs.  They had tried slapping, and it hadn’t done any good.”