The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [167]
“Don’t count on it hee hee,” she said.
The warden gave her a wounded look as if she had failed to return a favor. Come to think of it, she realized after the men were gone, she had.
They would not let her see Ernest at St. Vincent’s. She had to wait at the hospital and speak with the mother superior to request permission and explain that, while not related to Ernest Bodenhammer, she was the only person who had visited him regularly in the penitentiary. The mother superior was kind and considerate but had to inform Viridis that Ernest was under guard and also under heavy sedation. Possibly, Viridis could see him tomorrow, but she would need written permission from Warden T.D. Yeager.
All the rest of that day she stayed in the newsrooms of the Gazette. If any word came in of Nail’s having been spotted or recaptured, or anything at all, she could learn it faster in the newspaper office. Tom Fletcher did not mind her being there, but he advised her that several days might pass before any news developed.
And he was right. Many days would pass before she heard the first rumor that any trace of Nail had been seen, and even that would turn out to be a false lead. She was impatient to get on to Newton County and wait for him there. She had anticipated, when she planned to leave the canvas bag for him, departing Little Rock herself within a few days to go back to Stay More. She had been in correspondence with both me and the old woman in the Jacob Ingledew house who had been her friend and hostess during her previous visit to Stay More.
I had kept her informed of the swelling local sentiment against Judge Sewell Jerram and his gang. Strangely, his crony Judge Lincoln Villines remained popular enough to be touted as a possible candidate for governor (only in the event his friend George Hays chose not to seek reelection), but Sull himself was so unwelcome that a joke went the rounds about his having to pay Duster Snow time-and-a-half overtime wages to serve as his personal bodyguard. The good sheriff we’d had before Snow, W.J. Pruitt, had let everybody know that he intended to oppose Snow in the November election, and almost everybody planned to vote for him.
Viridis had written me to ask if I thought it was safe for Dorinda to return home. The school term in Little Rock had already come to a close when Nail escaped, and Dorinda was honestly homesick, or that’s what Viridis said; I had sort of been hoping that Rindy herself might write and tell me how much she missed us, but I suppose her penmanship lessons hadn’t got that far. I had told Viridis, after asking the advice of my parents, Rindy’s parents, and even John Ingledew, that Sull would have killed Rindy by now to silence her if he was ever going to do it; besides, the man was smart enough to realize that the point had long since passed beyond which her silence meant anything at all. He probably wished she did not exist and wished even more that she had never existed, but there wasn’t much likelihood he would be any further threat to her. Bring her home, I said.
Now Viridis was ready to do just that. She had taken Rindy out and bought her a fancy suitcase to take all of her nice new clothes and belongings back home with her. She did not intend to return Rindy to Stay More by the same means she had taken her out: riding double on Rosabone. No, she was going to arrange for a wagon in Pettigrew to meet their train and take them and their luggage (she was bringing more than one trunk herself, and hatboxes), with Rosabone tied behind, the miles across the mountains to Stay More.
I knew she was coming. But I did not know that Nail had escaped. That news didn’t reach us at all until the following Thursday, when we read it in the local newspaper. On the second page of the Jasper Disaster, under a small headline, nail chism makes his escape, was a brief condensation of the same story that had appeared in the Gazette five days before, now