“If he bleeds across the yard,we can't hide it,”she gasped.“Give me your shimmy,Melanie,and I'll wad it around his head.”
Melanie's white face went crimson.
“Don't be silly,I won't look at you,”said Scarlett.“If I had on a petticoat or pantalets I'd use them.”
Crouching back against the wall,Melanie pulled the ragged linen garment over her head and silently tossed it to Scarlett,shielding herself as best she could with her arms.
“Thank God,I'm not that modest,”thought Scarlett,feeling rather than seeing Melanie's agony of embarrassment,as she wrapped the ragged cloth about the shattered face.
By a series of limping jerks,she pulled the body down the hall toward the back porch and,pausing to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand,glanced back toward Melanie,sitting against the wall hugging her thin knees to her bare breasts.How silly of Melanie to be bothering about modesty at a time like this,Scarlett thought irritably.It was just part of her nicey-nice way of acting which had always made Scarlett despise her.Then shame rose in her.After all—after all,Melanie had dragged herself from bed so soon after having a baby and had come to her aid with a weapon too heavy even for her to lift.That had taken courage,the kind of courage Scarlett honestly knew she herself did not possess,the thin-steel,spun-silk courage which had characterized Melanie on the terrible night Atlanta fell and on the long trip home.It was the same intangible,unspectacular courage that all the Wilkeses possessed,a quality which Scarlett did not understand but to which she gave grudging tribute.
“Go back to bed,”she threw over her shoulder.“You'll be dead if you don't.I'll clean up the mess after I've buried him.”
“I'll do it with one of the rag rugs,”whispered Melanie,looking at the pool of blood with a sick face.
“Well,kill yourself then and see if I care!And if any of the folks come back before I'm finished,keep them in the house and tell them the horse just walked in from nowhere.”
Melanie sat shivering in the morning sunlight and covered her ears against the sickening series of thuds as the dead man's head bumped down the porch steps.
No one questioned whence the horse had come.It was so obvious he was a stray from the recent battle and they were well pleased to have him.The Yankee lay in the shallow pit Scarlett had scraped out under the scuppernong arbor.The uprights which held the thick vines were rotten and that night Scarlett hacked at them with the kitchen knife until they fell and the tangled mass ran wild over the grave.The replacing of these posts was one bit of repair work Scarlett did not suggest and,if the negroes knew why,they kept their silence.
No ghost rose from that shallow grave to haunt her in the long nights when she lay awake,too tired to sleep.No feeling of horror or remorse assailed her at the memory.She wondered why,knowing that even a month before she could never have done the deed.Pretty young Mrs.Hamilton,with her dimple and her jingling earbobs and her helpless little ways,blowing a man's face to a pulp and then burying him in a hastily scratched-out hole!Scarlett grinned a little grimly thinking of the consternation such an idea would bring to those who knew her.
“I won't think about it any more,”she decided.“It's over and done with and I'd have been a ninny not to kill him.I reckon—I reckon I must have changed a little since coming home or else I couldn't have done it.”
She did not think of it consciously but in the back of her mind,whenever she was confronted by an unpleasant and difficult task,the idea lurked giving her strength:“I've done murder and so I can surely do this.”
She had changed more than she knew and the shell of hardness which had begun to form about her heart when she lay in the slave garden at Twelve Oaks was slowly thickening.
***
Now that she had a horse,Scarlett could find out for herself what had happened to their neighbors.Since she came home she had wondered despairingly a thousand times:“Are we the only folks left in the County?Has everybody else been burned out?Have they all refugeed to Macon?”With the memory of the ruins of Twelve Oaks,the MacIntosh place and the Slattery shack fresh in her mind,she almost dreaded to discover the truth.But it was better to know the worst than to wonder.She decided to ride to the Fontaines'first,not because they were the nearest neighbors but because old Dr.Fontaine might be there.Melanie needed a doctor.She was not recovering as she should and Scarlett was frightened by her white weakness.
So on the first day when her foot had healed enough to stand a slipper,she mounted the Yankee's horse.One foot in the shortened stirrup and the other leg crooked about the pommel in an approximation of a side saddle,she set out across the fields toward Mimosa,steeling herself to find it burned.
To her surprise and pleasure,she saw the faded yellow-stucco house standing amid the mimosa trees,looking as it had always looked.Warm happiness,happiness that almost brought tears,flooded her when the three Fontaine women came out of the house to welcome her with kisses and cries of joy.
