Meantime Darby, beginning to fill out and take on the shoulders and form of a man, began to fill also the place of the man in his little home.
This among other things meant opposition, if not hostility, to everything on Cove Mills's side.When old Darby died the Millses all went to the funeral, of course; but that did not prevent their having the same feeling toward Little Darby afterward, and the breach continued.
At first he used to go over occasionally to see Vashti and carry her little presents, as he had done at school; but he soon found that it was not the same thing.He was always received coolly, and shortly he was given to understand that he was not wanted there, and in time Vashti herself showed that she was not the same she had been to him before.
Thus the young fellow was thrown back on himself, and the hostility between the two cabins was as great as ever.
He spent much of his time in the woods, for the Stanley place was small at best, only a score or so of acres, and mostly covered with pines, and Little Darby was but a poor hand at working with a hoe --their only farm implement.He was, however, an unerring shot, with an eye like a hawk to find a squirrel flat on top of the grayest limb of the tallest hickory in the woods, or a hare in her bed among the brownest broomsedge in the county, and he knew the habits of fish and bird and animal as if he had created them; and though he could not or would not handle a hoe, he was the best hand at an axe "in the stump", in the district, and Mrs.Stanley was kept in game if not in meal.
The Millses dilated on his worthlessness, and Vashti, grown to be a slender slip of a girl with very bright eyes and a little nose, was loudest against him in public; though rumor said she had fallen afoul of her youngest brother and boxed his jaws for seconding something she had said of him.
The Mills's enmity was well understood, and there were not wanting those to take Darby's side.He had grown to be the likeliest young man in the district, tall, and straight as a sapling, and though Vashti flaunted her hate of him and turned up her little nose more than it was already turned up at his name, there were many other girls in the pines who looked at him languishingly from under their long sun-bonnets, and thought he was worth both the Mills boys and Vashti to boot.
So when at a fish-fry the two Mills boys attacked him and he whipped them both together, some said it served them right, while others declared they did just what they ought to have done, and intimated that Darby was less anxious to meet their father than he was them, who were nothing more than boys to him.These asked in proof of their view, why he had declined to fight when Old Cove had abused him so to his face.
This was met by the fact that he "could not have been so mighty afeared,"for he had jumped in and saved Chris Mills's life ten minutes afterward, when he got beyond his depth in the pond and had already sunk twice.
But, then, to be sure, it had to be admitted that he was the best swimmer on the ground, and that any man there would have gone in to save his worst enemy if he had been drowning.This must have been the view that Vashti Mills took of the case; for one day not long afterward, having met Darby at the cross-roads store where she was looking at some pink calico, and where he had come to get some duck-shot and waterproof caps, she turned on him publicly, and with flashing eyes and mantling cheeks, gave him to understand that if she were a man he "would not have had to fight two boys," and he would not have come off so well either.
If anything, this attack brought Darby friends, for he not only had whipped the Mills boys fairly, and had fought only when they had pressed him, but had, as has been said, declined to fight old man Mills under gross provocation;and besides, though they were younger than he, the Mills boys were seventeen and eighteen, and "not such babies either;if they insisted on fighting they had to take what they got and not send their sister to talk and abuse a man about it afterward."And the weight of opinion was that, "that Vashti Mills was gettin'
too airified and set up anyways."
All this reached Mrs.Stanley, and was no doubt sweet to her ears.
She related it in her drawling voice to Darby as he sat in the door one evening, but it did not seem to have much effect on him;he never stirred or showed by word or sign that he even heard her, and finally, without speaking, he rose and lounged away into the woods.
The old woman gazed after him silently until he disappeared, and then gave a look across to where the Mills cabin peeped from among the pines, which was full of hate.
.....
The fish-fry at which Darby Stanley had first fought the Mills boys and then pulled one of them out of the river, had been given by one of the county candidates for election as delegate to a convention which was to be held at the capital, and possibly the division of sentiment in the district between the Millses and Little Darby was as much due to political as to personal feeling; for the sides were growing more and more tightly drawn, and the Millses, as usual, were on one side and Little Darby on the other; and both sides had strong adherents.
The question was on one side, Secession, with probable war; and on the other, the Union as it was.The Millses were for the candidate who advocated the latter, and Little Darby was for him who wanted secession.
Both candidates were men of position and popularity, the one a young man and the other older, and both were neighbors.
