when a waiter handed him a note. It contained a single line scrawled in
pencil:--
"Come out and see me behind the house as before. I dussent come in on
account of her. C. BYERS."
"On account of 'her'!" Abner cast a hurried glance around the tables.
Certainly Mrs. Byers was not there! He walked in the hall and the
veranda--she was not there. He hastened to the rendezvous evidently
meant by the writer, the wilderness behind the house. Sure enough,
Byers, drunk and maudlin, supporting himself by the tree root, staggered
forward, clasped him in his arms, and murmured hoarsely,--
"She's gone!"
"Gone?" echoed Abner, with a whitening face. "Mrs. Byers? Where?"
"Run away! Never come back no more! Gone!"
A vague idea that had been in Abner's mind since Byers's last visit now
took awful shape. Before the unfortunate Byers could collect his senses
he felt himself seized in a giant's grasp and forced against the tree.
"You coward!" said all that was left of the tolerant Abner--his even
voice--"you hound! Did you dare to abuse her? to lay your vile hands on
her--to strike her? Answer me."
The shock--the grasp--perhaps Abner's words, momentarily silenced Byers.
"Did I strike her?" he said dazedly; "did I abuse her? Oh, yes!" with
deep irony. "Certainly! In course! Look yer, pardner!"--he suddenly
dragged up his sleeve from his red, hairy arm, exposing a blue cicatrix
in its centre--"that's a jab from her scissors about three months ago;
look yer!"--he bent his head and showed a scar along the scalp--"that's
her playfulness with a fire shovel! Look yer!"--he quickly opened his
collar, where his neck and cheek were striped and crossed with adhesive
plaster--"that's all that was left o' a glass jar o' preserves--the
preserves got away, but some of the glass got stuck! That's when she
heard I was a di-vorced man and hadn't told her."
"Were you a di-vorced man?" gasped Abner.
"You know that; in course I was," said Byers scornfully; "d'ye meanter
say she didn't tell ye?"
"She?" echoed Abner vaguely. "Your wife--you said just now she didn't
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