Father stood with a bowl of ice in his hand and his fingers were just
closing around a squat, black bottle that I knew contained the rarest
and choicest whiskey ever run from a distillery. His iron-gray hair was
rampant, his dressing gown fell away from his throat and showed the
knotting of the great cords that ran down into his shoulders, and his
dark eyes glittered under their heavy, black brows, while his mouth was
twisted and white. Then, as I looked, something happened. A stealthy
padding of feet came around the house from the garden and up the back
steps, under the budding rose vine that was climbing through the trellis
as if to clutch at the light, and a huge figure loomed up from out the
shadow.
It was the powerful Harpeth Jaguar out hunting, and his weapon was a
hoe, while under his arm he carried a roll that looked like a
contribution to a rag man of bedding and old clothes.
"I tell you, Mr. Powers, there is frost in the air and I have collected
everything in the parsonage that would cover those late anemones. I saw
your light and I thought you might add to the collection. Now what would
we do if they should be wilted by the frost just as they are ready to
burst bud? Our honor is involved with Graveson, who brought the seeds
all the way from Guernsey through the trenches of France and trusted
them to me for propagation. Why, they represent a man's life work, and
that life may be put out by a bullet any moment! We'll have to rescue
them." As he spoke, the great jeweled eyes shone with excitement under
the dull gold brows and he seemed not to see at all the incriminating
ice and bottle.
"Could you get into Mrs. Dabney's linen closet? We've got to have
something." He shivered in a little wind that blew under the rose vine
with a frosty gust. I was just observing that he was attired in his
pajama jacket and gray flannel trousers, and that his bare heels and
ankles declared themselves above and at the back of his slippers, when
my eyes were drawn to my father's face and rested there. My heart stood
still while I watched it change. All the pain and appetite, straining as
a beast strains at a leash, faded from his face. The deathly pallor
vanished and the color of human blood returned. The glitter in his deep
old eyes changed in a second from that of ferocity to that of anxious
excitement.
"I do not know where the household linen is kept and I hesitate to
disturb Dabney, as he retired with an aching tooth; but I observed a box
of my daughter's apparel beside a trunk in the back hall which Dabney
had not carried up on account of its weight and which he was requiring
his wife to unpack piece by piece. I'll raid it for enough to save our
treasures and accept whatever is my just chastisement in the morning,"
he said in a voice of guilty stealth.