There in the High Fork country, with peaks saw-toothing into the sky and hollows diving away down and trees thicketed every which way, you'd think human foot had never stepped. Walking the trail between high pines, I touched my guitar's silver strings for company of the sound. But then a man squandered into sight around a bend-young-like, red-faced, baldy-headed. Gentlemen, he was as drunk as a hoot. I gave him good evening.
"Can you play that thing?" he gobbled at me and, second grab of his shaky hand, he got hold of my hickory shirt sleeve. "Come to the party, friend. Our fiddle band, last moment, they got scared out. We got just only a mouth-harp to play for us."
"What way was the fiddle band scared?" I asked him to tell.
"Party's at Miss Donie Carawan's," he said, without replying me. "Bobbycue pig and chicken, bar'l of good stump-hole whisky."
"Listen," I said, "ever hear tell of the man invited a stranger fiddler, he turned out to be Satan?"
"Shoo," he snickered, "Satan plays the fiddle, you play the guitar. I don't pay your guitar no worry. What's your name, friend?"
"John. What's yours?"
But he'd started up a narrow, grown-over, snaky-turny path you'd not notice. I reckoned the party'd be at a house, where I could sleep the night that was coming, so I followed. He nearly fell back top of me, he was so stone drunk, but we got to a notch on the ridge, and the far side was a valley of trees, dark and secret looking. Going down, I began to hear loud laughing talk. Finally we reached a yard at the bottom. There was a house there, and it looked like enough men and women to swing a primary election.
They whooped at us, so loud it rang my ears. The drunk man waved both his hands. "This here's my friend John," he bawled out, "and he's a-going to play us some music!"
They whooped louder at that, and easiest thing for me to do was start picking "Hell Broke Loose in Georgia"; and, gentlemen, right away they danced up a storm.
Wild-like, they whipped and whirled. Most of them were young folks dressed their best. One side, a great big man called the dance, but you couldn't much hear him, everybody laughed and hollered so loud. It got in my mind that children laugh and yell thataway, passing an old burying-ground where ghosts could be. It was the way they might be trying to dance down the nervouses; I jumped myself, between picks, when something started moaning beside me. But it was just a middling-old fellow with a thin face, playing his mouth-harp along with my guitar.
I looked to the house—it was new and wide and solid, with white-washed clay chinking between the squared logs of it. Through a dog-trot from front to back I saw clear down valley, west to where the sunball dropped red toward a far string of mountains. The valley-bottom's trees were spaced out with a kind of path or road, the whole length. The house windows began to light up as I played. Somebody was putting a match to lamps, against the night's fall.
End of the tune, everybody clapped me loud and long. "More! More!" they hollered, bunched among the yard trees, still fighting their nervouses.
"Friends," I managed to be heard, "let me make my manners to the one who's giving this party."
"Hi, Miss Donie!" yelled out the drunk man. "Come meet John!"
From the house she walked through the crowded-around folks, stepping so proud she looked taller than she was. A right much stripy skirt swished to her high heels; but she hadn't such a much dress above, and none at all on her round arms and shoulders. The butter yellow of her hair must have come from a bottle, and the doll pink of her face from a box. She smiled up to me, and her perfume tingled my nose. Behind her followed that big dance-caller, with his dead black hair and wide teeth, and his heavy hands swinging like balance weights.
"Glad you came, John," she said, deep in her round throat.
I looked at her robin-egg blue eyes and her butter hair and her red mouth and her bare pink shoulders. She was maybe 35, maybe 40, maybe more and not looking it. "Proud to be here," I said, my politest. "Is this a birthday, Miss Donie Carawan?"
Folks fell quiet, swapping looks. An open cooking fire blazed up as the night sneaked in. Donie Carawan laughed deep.
"Birthday of a curse," and she widened her blue eyes. "End of the curse, too, I reckon. All tonight."
Some mouths came open, but didn't let words out. I reckoned that whatever had scared out the fiddle band was nothing usual. She held out a slim hand, with green-stoned rings on it.
"Come eat and drink, John," she bade me.
"Thanks," I said, for I hadn't eaten ary mouthful since crack of day.
Off she led me, her fingers pressing mine, her eye-corners watching me. The big dance-caller glittered a glare after us. He was purely jealoused up that she'd made me so welcome. Two dark-faced old men stood at an iron rack over a pit of coals, where lay two halves of a slow-cooking hog. One old man dipped a stick with a rag ball into a kettle of sauce and painted it over the brown roast meat. From a big pot of fat over yet another fire, an old woman forked hush-puppies into pans set ready on a plank table.
"Line up!" called Donie Carawan out, like a bugle. They lined up, talking and hollering again, smiles back on their faces. It was some way like dreams you have, folks carrying on loud and excited, and something bad coming on to happen.
Donie Carawan put her bare arm through my blue-sleeved elbow while an old man sliced chunks of barbecued hog on paper plates for us. The old woman forked on a hush-puppy and a big hobby of cole slaw. Eating, I wondered how they made the barbecue sauce—wondered, too, if all these folks really wanted to be here for what Donie Carawan called the birthday of a curse.
"John," she said, the way you'd think she read what I wondered, "don't they say a witch's curse can't work on a pure heart?"
"They say that," I agreed her, and she laughed her laugh. The big dance-caller and the skinny mouth-harp man looked up from their barbecue. "An old witch cursed me for guilty twenty years back," said Donie Carawan. "The law said I was innocent. Who was right?"
"Don't know how to answer that," I had to say, and again she laughed, and bit into her hush-puppy.
"Look around you, John" she said. "This house is my house, and this valley is my valley, and these folks are my friends, come to help me pleasure myself."
Again I reckoned, she's the only one here that's pleasured, maybe not even her.
"Law me," she laughed, "it's rough on a few folks, holding their breath all these years to see the curse light on me. Since it wouldn't light, I figured how to shoo it away." Her blue eyes looked up. "But what are you doing around High Fork, John?"
The dance-caller listened, and the thin mouth-harp man. "Just passing through," I said. "Looking for songs. I heard about a High Fork song, something about a little black train."
Silence quick stretched all around, the way you'd think I'd been impolite. Yet again she broke the silence with a laugh.
"Why," she said, "I've known that song as long as I've known about the curse, near to. Want me to sing it for you?"
Folks were watching, and, "Please, ma'am," I asked her.
She sang, there in the yellow lamplight and red firelight, among the shady-shadowy trees and the mountain dark, without ary slice of moon overhead. Her voice was a good voice. I put down my plate and, a line or two along, I made out to follow her with the guitar.
I heard a voice of warning,
A message from on high,
"Go put your house in order
For thou shalt surely die.
Tell all your friends a long farewell
And get your business right—
The little black train is rolling in
To call for you tonight."
"Miss Donie, that's a tuneful thing," I said. "Sounds right like a train rolling."
"My voice isn't high enough to sound the whistle part," she smiled at me, red-mouthed.
"I might could do that," said the mouth-harp man, coming close and speaking soft. And folks were craning at us, looking sick, embarrassed, purely distasted. I began to wonder why I shouldn't have given a name to that black train song.
But then rose up a big holler near the house, where a barrel was set. The drunk man that'd fetched me was yelling mad at another man near-about as drunk, and they were trying to grab a drinking gourd from each other. Two-three other men on each side hoorawed them on to squabble more.
"Jeth!" called Donie Carawan to the big dance-caller. "Let's stop that before they spill the whisky, Jeth."
Jeth and she headed for the bunch by the barrel, and everybody else was crowding to watch.
"John," said a quiet somebody—the mouth-harp man, with firelight showing lines in his thin face, salty gray in his hair. "What you really doing here?"
"Watching," I said, while big Jeth hauled those two drunk men off from each other, and Donie Carawan scolded them. "And listening," I said. "Wanting to know what way the black train song fits in with this party and the tale about the curse. You know about it?"
"I know," he said.
We carried our food out of the firelight. Folks were crowding to the barrel, laughing and yelling.
"Donie Carawan was to marry Trevis Jones," the mouth-harp man told me. "He owned the High Fork Railroad to freight the timber from this valley. He'd a lavish of money, is how he got to marry her. But," and he swallowed hard, "another young fellow loved her. Cobb Richardson, who ran Trevis Jones's train on the High Fork Railroad. And he killed Trevis Jones."
"For love?" I asked.
"Folks reckoned that Donie Carawan decided against Trevis and love-talked Cobb into the killing; for Trevis had made a will and heired her all his money and property—the railroad and all. But Cobb made confession. Said Donie had no part in it. The law let her go, and killed Cobb in the electric chair, down at the state capital.
"I declare to never," I said.
"Fact. And Cobb's mother—Mrs. Amanda Richardson—spoke the curse."
"Oh," I said, "is she the witch that—"
"She was no witch," he broke me off, "but she cursed Donie Carawan, that the train that Cobb had engine-drove, and Trevis had heired to her, would be her death and destruction. Donie laughed. You've heard her laugh. And folks started the song, the black train song.
"Who made it?" I asked him.
"Reckon I did," he said, looking long at me. He waited to let me feel that news. Then he said, "Maybe it was the song decided Donie Carawan to deal with the Hickory River Railroad, agreeing for an income of money not to run the High Fork train no more."
I'd finished my barbecue. I could have had more; but I didn't feel like it. "I see," I told him. "She reckoned that if no train ran on the High Fork tracks, it couldn't be her death and destruction."
He and I put our paper plates on one of the fires. I didn't look at the other folks, but it seemed to me they were quieting their laughing and talking as the night got darker.
"Only thing is," the mouth-harp man went on, "folks say the train runs on that track. Or it did. A black train runs some nights at midnight, they say, and when it runs a sinner dies."
"You ever see it run?"
"No, John, but I've sure God heard it. And only Donie Carawan laughs about it."
She laughed right then, joking the two men who'd feathered up to fight. Ary man's neck craned at her, and women looked the way you'd figure they didn't relish that. My neck craned some, itself.
"Twenty years back, the height of her bloom," said the mouth-harp man, "law me, you'd never call to look at anything else."
"What does she mean, no more curse?"
"She made another deal, John. She sold off the rails of the High Fork Road, that's stood idle for twenty years. Today the last of them was torn up and carried off. Meanwhile, she's had this house built, across where the right of way used to be. Looky yonder, through the dog-trot. That's where the road ran."
So it was the old road bed made that dark dip amongst the trees. Just now it didn't look so wide a dip.
"No rails," he said. "She figures no black train at midnight. Folks came at her invite—some because they rent her land, some because they owe her money, and some—men folks—because they'll do ary thing she bids them."
"And she never married?" I asked.
"If she done that, she'd lose the money and land she heired from Trevis Jones. It was in his will. She just takes men without marrying, one and then another. I've known men kill themselves because she'd put her heart back in her pocket on them. Lately, it's been big Jeth. She acts tonight like pick-herself a new beau lover."
She walked back through the lamplight and firelight. "John," she said, "these folks want to dance again."
What I played them was "Many Thousands Gone," with the mouth-harp to help, and they danced and stomped the way you'd think it was a many thousands dancing. In its thick, Donie Carawan promenaded left and right and do-si-doed with a fair-haired young fellow, and Jeth the dance-caller looked pickle-sour. When I'd done, Donie Carawan came swishing back.
"Let the mouth-harp Play," she said, and dance with me."
"Can't dance no shakes," I told her. "Just now, I'd relish to practice the black train song."
Her blue eyes crinkled. "All right. Play, and I'll sing."
She did. The mouth-harp man blew whistle-moanings to my guitar, and folks listened, goggling like frogs.
A bold young man kept mocking,
Cared not for the warning word,
When the wild and lonely whistle
Of the little black train he heard.
"Have mercy, Lord, forgive me!
I'm cut down in my sin!
O death, will you not spare me?"
But the little black train rolled in.
When she'd sung that much, Donie Carawan laughed like before, deep and bantering. Jeth the dance-caller made a funny sound in his bull throat.
"What I don't figure," he said, "was how you all made the train sound like coming in, closer and closer."
"Just by changing the music," I said. "Changing the pitch."
"Fact," said the mouth-harp man. "I played the change with him."
A woman laughed, nervous. "Now I think, that's true. A train whistle sounds higher and higher while it comes up to you. Then it passes and goes off, sounding lower and lower."
"But I didn't hear the train go away in the song," allowed a man beside her. "It just kept coming." He shrugged, maybe he shivered.
"Donie," said the woman, "reckon I'll go along."
"Stay on, Lettie," began Donie Carawan, telling her instead of asking.
"Got a right much walking to do, and no moon," said the woman. "Reuben, you come, too."
She left. The man looked back just once at Donie Carawan, and followed. Another couple, and then another, went with them from the firelight. Maybe more would have gone, but Donie Carawan snorted, like a horse, to stop them.
"Let's drink," she said. "Plenty for all, now those folks I reckoned to be my friends are gone."
Maybe two-three others faded away, between there and the barrel. Donie Carawan dipped herself a drink, watching me over the gourd's edge. Then she dipped more and held it out.
"You drink after a lady," she whispered, "and get a kiss."
I drank. It was good stump-hole wlusky. "Tasty," I said.
"The kiss?" she laughed. But the dance-caller didn't laugh, or either the mouth-harp man, or either me.
"Let's dance," said Donie Carawan, and I picked "Sourwood Mountain" and the mouth-harp moaned.
The dancers had got to be few, just in a short while. But the trees they danced through looked bigger, and more of them. It minded me of how I'd heard, when I was a chap, about day-trees and night-trees, they weren't the same things at all; and the night-trees can crowd all round a house they don't like, pound the shingles off the roof, bust in the window glass and the door panels; and that's the sort of night you'd better never set your foot outside . . ..
Not so much clapping at the end of "Sourwood Mountain." Not such a holler of "More!" Folks went to take another drink at the barrel, but the mouth-harp man held me back.
"Tell me," he said, "about that business. The noise sounding higher when the train comes close."
"It was explained out to me by a man I know, place in Tennessee called Oak Ridge," I said. "It's about what they call sound waves, and some way it works with light, too. Don't rightly catch on how, but they can measure how far it is to the stars thataway."
He thought, frowning. "Something like what's called radar?"
I shook my head. "No, no machinery to it. Just what they name a principle. Fellow named Doppler—Christian Doppler, a foreigner—got it up."
"His name was Christian," the mouth-harp man repeated me. "Then I reckon it's no witch stuff."
"Why you worrying it?" I asked him.
"I watched through the dog-trot while we were playing the black train song, changing pitch, making it sound like coming near," he said. "Looky yonder, see for yourself "
I looked. There was a streaky shine down the valley. Two streaky shines, though nary moon. I saw what he meant—it looked like those pulled-up rails were still there, where they hadn't been before.
"That second verse Miss Donie sang," I said. "Was it about—"
"Yes," he said before I'd finished. "That was the verse about Cobb Richardson. How he prayed for God's forgiveness, night before he died."
Donie Carawan came and poked her hand under my arm. I could tell that good strong liquor was feeling its way around her insides. She laughed at almost nothing whatever. "You're not leaving, anyway," she smiled at me.
"Don't have any place special to go," I said.
She upped on her pointed toes. "Stay here tonight," she said in my ear. "The rest of them will be gone by midnight."
"You invite men like that?" I said, looking into her blue eyes. "When you don't know them?"
"I know men well enough," she said. "Knowing men keeps a woman young." Her finger touched my guitar where it hung behind my shoulder, and the strings whispered a reply. "Sing me something, John."
"I still want to learn the black train song."
"I've sung you both verses," she said.
"Then," I told her, "I'll sing a verse I've just made up inside my head." I looked at the mouth-harp man. "Help me with this."
Together we played, raising pitch gradually, and I sang the new verse I'd made, with my eyes on Donie Carawan.
Go tell that laughing lady
All filled with worldly pride,
The little black train is coming,
Get ready to take a ride,
With a little black coach and engine
And a little black baggage car,
The words and deeds she has said and done
Must roll to the judgment bar.
When I was through, I looked up at those who'd stayed. They weren't more than half a dozen now, bunched up together like cows in a storm; all but Big Jeth, standing to one side with eyes stabbing at me, and Donie Carawan, leaning tired-like against a tree with hanging branches.
"Jeth," she said, "stomp his guitar to pieces."
I switched the carrying cord off my neck and held the guitar at my side. "Don't try such a thing, Jeth," I warned him.
His big square teeth grinned, with dark spaces between them. He looked twice as wide as me.
"I'll stomp you and your guitar both," he said.
I put the guitar on the ground, glad I'd had but the one drink. Jeth ran and stooped for it, and I put my fist hard under his ear. He hopped two steps away to keep his feet.
Shouldn't anybody name me what he did then, and I hit him twice more, harder yet. His nose flatted out under my knuckles and when he pulled back away, blood trickled.
The mouth-harp man grabbed up my guitar. "This here'll be a square fight!" he yelled, louder than he'd spoken so far. "Ain't a fair one, seeing Jeth's so big, but it'll be squarer just them two in it, and no more!"
"I'll settle you later," Jeth promised him, mean.
"Settle me first," I said, and got betwixt them.
Jeth ran at me. I stepped sidewise and got him under the ear again as he went shammocking past. He turned, and I dug my fist right into his belly-middle, to stir up all that stump-hole whisky he'd been drinking, then the other fist under the ear yet once more, then on the chin and the mouth, under the ear, on the broken nose—ten licks like that, as fast and hard as I could fetch them in, and eighth or ninth he went slack, and the tenth he just fell flat and loose, like a coat from a nail. I stood waiting, but he didn't move.
"Gentlemen," said the drunk man who'd fetched me, "looky yonder at Jeth laying there! Never figured to see the day! Maybe that stranger-man calls himself John is Satan, after all!"
Donie Carawan walked across, slow, and gouged Jeth's ribs, with the pointy toe of her high-heeled shoe. "Get up," she bade him.
He grunted and mumbled and opened his eyes. Then he got up, joint by joint, careful and sore, like a sick bull. He tried to stop the blood from his nose with the back of his big hand. Donie Carawan looked at him and then she looked at me.
"Get out of here, Jeth," she ordered him. "Off my place."
He went, cripply-like, with his knees bent and his hands swinging and his back humped, the way you'd think he carried something heavy.
The drunk man hiccupped. "I reckon to go, too," he said, maybe just to himself.
"Then go!" Donie Carawan yelled at him. "Everybody can go, right now, this minute! I thought you were my friends—now I see I don't have a friend among the whole bunch! Hurry up, get going! Everybody!"
Hands on hips, she blared it out. Folks moved off through the trees, a sight faster than Jeth had gone. But I stood where I was. The mouth-harp man gave me back my guitar, and I touched a chord of its strings. Donie Carawan spun around like on a swivel to set her blue eyes on me.
"You stayed," she said, the way she thought there was something funny about it.
"It's not midnight yet," I told her.
"But near to," added the mouth-harp man. "Just a few minutes off. And it's at midnight the little black train runs."
She lifted her round bare shoulders. She made to laugh again, but didn't.
"That's all gone. If it ever was true, it's not true any more. The rails were taken up—"
"Looky yonder through the dog-trot," the mouth-harp man broke in. "See the two rails in place, streaking along the valley."
Again she swung around and she looked, and seemed to me she swayed in the light of the dying fires. She could see those streaky rails, all right.
"And listen," said the mouth-harp man. Don't you all hear something?"
I heard it, and so did Donie Carawan, for she flinched. It was a wild and lonely whistle, soft but plain, far down valley.
"Are you doing that, John?" she squealed at me, in a voice gone all of a sudden high and weak and old. Then she ran at the house and into the dog-trot, staring down along what looked like railroad track.
I followed her, and the mouth-harp man followed me. Inside the dog-trot was a floor of dirt, stomped hard as brick. Donie Carawan looked back at us. Lamplight came through a window, to make her face look bright pale, with the painted red of the mouth gone almost black against it.
"John," she said, "you're playing a trick, making it sound like—"
"Not me," I swore to her.
It whistled again, woooooeeeee! And I, too, looked along the two rails, shining plain as plain in the dark moonless night, to curve off around a valley-bend. A second later, the engine itself sounded, chukchukchukchuk, and the whistle, woooooeeeee!
"Miss Donie," I said, close behind her, "you'd better go away."
I pushed her gently.
"No!" She lifted her fists, and I saw cordy lines on their backs—they weren't a young woman's fists. "This is my house and my land, and it's my railroad!"
"But—" I started to say.
"If it comes here," she broke me off, "where can I run to from it?"
The mouth-harp man tugged my sleeve. "I'm going," he said. "You and me raised the pitch and brought the black train. Thought I could stay, watch it and glory in it. But I'm not man enough."
Going, he blew a whistle-moan on his mouth-harp, and the other whistle blew back an answer, louder and nearer.
And higher in the pitch.
"That's a real train coming," I told Donie Carawan, but she shook her yellow head.
"No," she said, dead-like. "It's coming, but it's no real train. It's heading right to this dog-trot. Look, John. On the ground."
Rails looked to run there, right through the dog-trot like through a tunnel. Maybe it was some peculiar way of the light. They lay close together, like narrow-gauge rails. I didn't feel like touching them with my toe to make sure of them, but I saw them. Holding my guitar under one arm, I put out my other hand to take Donie Carawan's elbow. "We'd better go," I said again.
"I can't!" She said it loud and sharp and purely scared. And taking hold of her arm was like grabbing the rail of a fence, it was so stiff and unmoving.
"I own this land," she was saying. "I can't leave it."
I tried to pick her up, and that couldn't be done. You'd have thought she'd grown to the ground inside that dog-trot, sprang between what looked like the rails, the way you'd figure roots had come from her pointy toes and high heels. Out yonder, where the trackmarks curved off, the sound rose louder, higher, chukehukchukchuk—woooooeeeee! And light was coming from round the curve, like a headlight maybe, only it had some blue to its yellow.
The sound of the coming engine made the notes of the song in my head:
Go put your house in order
For thou shalt surely die—
Getting higher, getting higher, changing pitch as it came close and closer—
I don't know when I began picking the tune on my guitar, but I was playing as I stood there next to Donie Carawan. She couldn't flee. She was rooted there, or frozen there, and the train was going to come in sight in just a second.
The mouth-harp man credited us, him and me, with bringing it, by that pitch-changing. And, whatever anybody deserved, wasn't for me to bring their deservings on them. I thought things like that. Also:
Christian Doppler was the name of the fellow who'd thought out the why and wherefore of how pitch makes the sound closeness. Like what the mouth-harp man said, his name showed it wasn't witch stuff. An honest man could try . . .
I slid my fingers back up the guitar-neck, little by little, as I picked the music, and the pitch sneaked down.
"Here it comes, John," whimpered Donie Carawan, standing solid as a stump.
"No," I said. "It's going—listen!"
I played so soft you could pick up the train-noise with your ear. And the pitch was dropping, like with my guitar, and the whistle sounded wooooeeeee! Lower it sounded.
"The light—dimmer—" she said. "Oh, if I could have the chance to live different—"
She moaned and swayed.
Words came for me to sing as I picked.
Oh, see her standing helpless,
Oh, hear her shedding tears.
She's counting these last moments
As once she counted years.
She'd turn from proud and wicked ways
She'd Leave her sin, O Lord!
If the little black train would just back up
And not take her aboard.
For she was weeping, all right. I heard her breath catch and strangle and shake her body, the way you'd look for it to tear her ribs loose from her backbone. I picked on, strummed on, lower and lower.
Just for once, I thought I could glimpse what might have come at us.
It was little, all right, and black under that funny cold-blue light it carried. And the cars weren't any bigger than coffins, and some way the shape of coffins. Or maybe I just sort of imagined that, dreamed it up while I stood there. Anyway, the light grew dim, and the chukchukchukchuk went softer and lower, and you'd guess the train was backing off, out of hearing.
I stopped my hand on the silver strings. We stood there in a silence like what there must be in some lifeless, airless place like on the moon.
Then Donie Carawan gave out one big, broken sob, and I caught her with my free arm as she fell.
She was soft enough then. All the tight was gone from her. She lifted one weak, round, bare arm around my neck, and her tears wet my hickory shirt.
"You saved me, John," she kept saying. "You turned the curse away."
"Reckon I did," I said, though that sounded like bragging. I looked down at the rails, and they weren't there, in the dog-trot or beyond. Just the dark of the valley. The cooking fires had burned out, and the lamps in the house were low.
Her arm tightened around my neck. "Come in," she said. "Come in, John. You and me, alone in there."
"It's time for me to head off away," I said.
Her arm dropped from me. "What's the matter? Don't you like me?" she asked.
I didn't even answer that one, she sounded so pitiful. "Miss Donie," I said, "you told a true thing. I turned the curse from you. It hadn't died. You can't kill it by laughing at it, or saying there aren't such things, or
pulling up rails. If it held off tonight, it might come back."
"Oh!" She half raised her arms to me again, then put them down.
"What must I do?" she begged me.
"Stop being a sinner."
Her blue eyes got round in her pale face.
"You want me to live," she said, hopeful.
"It's better for you to live. You told me that folks owe you money, rent land from you and such. How'd they get along if you got carried off?"
She could see what I meant, maybe the first time in her life.
"You'd be gone," I minded her, "but the folks would stay behind, needing your help. Well, you're still here, Miss Donie. Try to help the folks. There's a thousand ways to do it. I don't have to name them to you. And you act right, you won't be so apt to hear that whistle at midnight."
I started out of the dog-trot.
"John!" My name sounded like a wail in her mouth. "Stay here tonight, John," she begged me. "Stay with me! I want you here, John, I need you here!"
"No, you don't need me, Miss Donie," I said. "You've got a right much of thinking and planning to do. Around about the up of sun, you'll have done enough, maybe, to start living different from this on."
She started to cry. As I walked away I noticed how, further I got, lower her voice-pitch sounded.
I sort of stumbled on the trail. The mouth-harp man sat on a chopped-down old log.
"I listened, John," he said. "Think you done right?"
"Did the closest I could to right. Maybe the black train was bound to roll,on orders from whatever station it starts from; maybe it was you and me, raising the pitch the way we did, brought it here tonight."
"I left when I did, dreading that thought," he nodded.
"The same thought made me back it out again," I said. "Anyway, I kind of glimmer the idea you all can look for a new Donie Carawan hereabouts, from now forward."
He got up and turned to go up trail. "I never said who I was."
"No, sir," I agreed him. "And I never asked."
"I'm Cobb Richardson's brother. Wyatt Richardson. Dying, my mother swore me to even things with Donie Carawan for what happened to Cobb. Doubt if she meant this sort of turn-out, but I reckon it would suit her fine."
We walked into the dark together.
"Come stay at my house tonight, John," he made the offer. "Ain't much there, but you're welcome to what there is."
"Thank you kindly," I said. "I'd be proud to stay."