respite from the torture of memory, when, still in the darkness,
thousands of tremulous penetrating sounds were astir, and with a great
start he recognized the rain on the roof. It was coming down in steady
torrents that made the house rock before the tumult of his plunging
heart was still, and he was longing again for the forgetfulness of
sleep. In vain. The hours dragged by; the windows slowly, slowly defined
their dull gray squares against the dull gray day dawning without. The
walls that had been left with only the first dark coat of plaster,
awaiting another season for the final decoration, showed their drapings
of cobweb, and the names and pencilled scribblings with which the fancy
of transient bushwhackers had chosen to deface them. The locust-trees
within the quadrangle drearily tossed their branches to and fro in the
wind, the bark very black and distinct against the persistent gray lines
of rain and the white walls of the galleried buildings opposite; the
gutters were brimming, roaring along like miniature torrents; nowhere
was the fox or the owl to be seen. Somehow their presence would have
been a relief--the sight of any living thing reassuring. As he walked
slowly along the deserted piazzas, in turning sudden corners, again and
again he paused, expecting that something, some one, was approaching to
meet him. When at last he mounted his horse, that had neighed gleefully
to see him, and rode away through the avenue and along the empty ways
among the untenanted summer cottages, all the drearier and more forlorn
because of the rain, he felt as if he had left an aberration, some
hideous dream, behind, instead of the stark reality of the gaunt and
vacant and dilapidated old house.
The transition to the glow and cheer of Sim Roxby's fireside was like a
rescue, a restoration. The smiling welcome in the women's eyes, their
soft drawling voices, with mellifluous intonations that gave a value to
each commonplace simple word, braced his nerves like a tonic. It might
have been only the contrast with the recollections of the night, with
the prospect visible through the open door--the serried lines of rain
dropping aslant from the gray sky and elusively outlined against the
dark masses of leafless woods that encircled the clearing; the dooryard
half submerged with puddles of a clay-brown tint, embossed always with
myriads of protruding drops of rain, for however they melted away the
downpour renewed them, and to the eye they were stationary, albeit
pervaded with a continual tremor--but somehow he was cognizant of a
certain coddling tenderness in the old woman's manner that might have
been relished by a petted child, an unaffected friendliness in the
girl's clear eyes. They made him sit close to the great wood fire; the
blue and yellow flames gushed out from the piles of hickory logs, and
the bed of coals gleamed at red and white heat beneath. They took his
hat to carefully dry it, and they spread out his cloak on two chairs at
one side of the room, where it dismally dripped. When he ventured to
sneeze, Mrs. Roxby compounded and administered a "yerb tea," a sovereign
remedy against colds, which he tasted on compulsion and in great doubt,
and swallowed with alacrity and confidence, finding its basis the easily
recognizable "toddy." He had little knowledge how white and troubled his
face had looked as he came in from the gray day, how strongly marked
were those lines of sharp mental distress, how piteously apparent was
his mute appeal for sympathy and comfort.
"Mill'cent," said the old woman in the shed-room, as they washed and
wiped the dishes after the cozy breakfast of venison and corn-dodgers
and honey and milk, "that thar man hev run agin the law, sure's ye air
born."
Millicent turned her reflective fair face, that seemed whiter and more
delicate in the damp dark day, and looked doubtfully out over the
fields, where the water ran in steely lines in the furrows.
"Mus' hev been by accident or suthin'. _He_ ain't no hardened sinner."
"Shucks!" the old woman commented upon her reluctant acquiescence. "I
ain't keerin' for the law! 'Tain't none o' my job. The tomfool men make
an' break it. Ennybody ez hev seen this war air obleeged to take note o'
the wickedness o' men in gineral. This hyer man air a sorter pitiful
sinner, an' he hev got a look in his eyes that plumb teches my heart. I
'ain't got no call ter know nuthin' 'bout the law, bein' a 'oman an'
naterally ignorunt. I dun'no' ez he hev run agin it."
"Mus' hev been by accident," said Millicent, dreamily, still gazing over
the sodden fields.
The suspicion did nothing to diminish his comfort or their cordiality.
The morning dragged by without change in the outer aspects. The noontide
dinner came and went without Roxby's return, for the report of the
washing away of a bridge some miles distant down the river had early
called him out to the scene of the disaster, to verify in his own
interests the rumor, since he had expected to haul his wheat to the
settlement the ensuing day. The afternoon found the desultory talk still
in progress about the fire, the old woman alternately carding cotton and
nodding in her chair in the corner; the dogs eying the stranger,
listening much of the time with the air of children taking instruction,
only occasionally wandering out-of-doors, the floor here and there
bearing the damp imprint of their feet; and Millicent on her knees in
the other corner, the firelight on her bright hair, her delicate cheek,
her quickly glancing eyes, as she deftly moulded bullets.
"Uncle Sim hed ter s'render his shootin'-irons," she explained, "an' he
'ain't got no ca'tridge-loadin' ones lef'. So he makes out with his old
muzzle-loadin' rifle that he hed afore the war, an' I moulds his bullets
for him rainy days."
As she held up a moulded ball and dexterously clipped off the surplus
lead, the gesture was so culinary in its delicacy that one of the dogs
in front of the fire extended his head, making a long neck, with a
tentative sniff and a glistening gluttonous eye.
"Ef I swallered enny mo' lead, I wouldn't take it hot, Towse," she said,
holding out the bullet for canine inspection. "'Tain't healthy!"
But the dog, perceiving the nature of the commodity, drew back with a
look of deep reproach, rose precipitately, and with a drooping tail went
out skulkingly into the wet gray day.
"Towse can't abide a bullet," she observed, "nor nuthin' 'bout a gun. He
got shot wunst a-huntin', an' he never furgot it. Jes show him a gun an'
he ain't nowhar ter be seen--like he war cotch up in the clouds."
"Good watch-dog, I suppose," suggested Dundas, striving to enter into
the spirit of her talk.
"Naw; too sp'ilt for a gyard-dog--granny coddled him so whenst he got
shot. He's jest vally'ble fur his conversation, I reckon," she
continued, with a smile in her eyes. "I dun'no' what else, but he is
toler'ble good company."
The other dogs pressed about her, the heads of the great hounds as high
as her own as she sat among them on the floor. With bright eyes and
knitted brows they followed the motions of pouring in the melted metal,
the lifting of the bullets from the mould, the clipping off of the
surplus lead, and the flash of the keen knife.
Outside the sad light waned; the wind sighed and sighed; the dreary rain
fell; the trees clashed their boughs dolorously together, and their
turbulence deadened the sound of galloping horses. As Dundas sat and
gazed at the girl's intent head, with its fleecy tendrils and its
massive coil, the great hounds beside her, all emblazoned by the
firelight upon the brown wall near by, with the vast fireplace at hand,
the whole less like reality than some artist's pictured fancy, he knew
naught of a sudden entrance, until she moved, breaking the spell, and
looked up to meet the displeasure in Roxby's eyes and the dark scowl on
Emory Keenan's face.
* * * * *
That night the wind shifted to the north. Morning found the chilled
world still, ice where the water had lodged, all the trees incased in
glittering garb that followed the symmetry alike of every bough and the
tiniest twig, and made splendid the splintered remnants of the
lightning-riven. The fields were laced across from furrow to furrow, in
which the frozen water still stood gleaming, with white arabesques which
had known a more humble identity as stubble and crab-grass; the sky was
slate-colored, and from its sad tint this white splendor gained added
values of contrast. When the sun should shine abroad much of the effect
would be lost in the too dazzling glister; but the sun did not shine.
All day the gray mood held unchanged. Night was imperceptibly sifting
down upon all this whiteness, that seemed as if it would not be
obscured, as if it held within itself some property of luminosity, when
Millicent, a white apron tied over her golden head, improvising a hood,
its superfluous fulness gathered in many folds and pleats around her
neck, fichu-wise, stood beside the ice-draped fodder-stack and essayed
with half-numbed hands to insert a tallow dip into the socket of a
lantern, all incrusted and clumsy with previous drippings.
"I dun'no' whether I be a-goin' ter need this hyar consarn whilst
milkin' or no," she observed, half to herself, half to Emory, who,
chewing a straw, somewhat surlily had followed her out for a word apart.
"The dusk 'pears slow ter-night, but Spot's mighty late comin' home, an'
old Sue air fractious an' contrairy-minded, and feels mighty anxious an'
oneasy 'boutn her calf, that's ez tall ez she is nowadays, an' don't
keer no mo' 'bout her mammy 'n a half-grown human does. I tell her she
oughtn't ter be mad with me, but with the way she brung up her chile, ez
won't notice her now."
She looked up with a laugh, her eyes and teeth gleaming; her golden hair
still showed its color beneath the spotless whiteness of her voluminous
headgear, and the clear tints of her complexion seemed all the more
delicate and fresh in the snowy pallor of the surroundings and the
grayness of the evening.
"I reckon I'd better take it along," and once more she addressed herself
to the effort to insert the dip into the lantern.
Emory hardly heard. His pulse was quick. His eye glittered. He breathed
hard as, with both hands in his pockets, he came close to her.
"Mill'cent," he said, "I told ye the t'other day ez ye thunk a heap too
much o' that thar stranger--"
"An' I tole ye, bubby, that I didn't think nuthin' o' nobody but
you-uns," she interrupted, with an effort to placate his jealousy. The
little jocularity which she affected dwindled and died before the
steady glow of his gaze, and she falteringly looked at him, her unguided
hands futilely fumbling with the lantern.
"Ye can't fool me," he stoutly asseverated. "Ye think mo' o' him 'n o'
me, kase ye 'low he air rich, an' book-larned, an' smooth-fingered, an'
finified ez a gal, an' goin' ter buy the hotel. I say, _hotel_! Now
_I'll_ tell ye what he is--I'll tell ye! He's a criminal. He's runnin'
from the law. He's hidin' in the old hotel that he's purtendin' ter
buy."
She stared wide-eyed and pallid, breathless and waiting.
He interpreted her expression as doubt, denial.
"It's gospel sure," he cried. "Fur this very evenin' I met a gang o' men
an' the sheriff's deputy down yander by the sulphur spring 'bout
sundown, an' he 'lowed ez they war a-sarchin' fur a criminal ez war
skulkin' round hyarabout lately--ez they wanted a man fur hevin'
c'mitted murder."
"But ye didn't accuse _him_, surely; ye hed no right ter s'picion _him_.
Uncle Sim! Oh, my Lord! Ye surely wouldn't! Oh, Uncle Sim!"
Her tremulous words broke into a quavering cry as she caught his arm
convulsively, for his face confirmed her fears. She thrust him wildly
away, and started toward the house.
"Ye needn't go tattlin' on me," he said, roughly pushing her aside.
"I'll tell Mr. Roxby myself. I ain't 'shamed o' what I done. I'll tell
him. I'll tell him myself." And animated with this intention to
forestall her disclosure, his long strides bore him swiftly past and
into the house.
It seemed to him that he lingered there only a moment or two, for Roxby
was not at the cabin, and he said nothing of the quarrel to the old
woman. Already his heart had revolted against his treachery, and then
there came to him the further reflection that he did not know enough to
justify suspicion. Was not the stranger furnished with the fullest
credentials--a letter to Roxby from the Colonel? Perhaps he had allowed
his jealousy to endanger the man, to place him in jeopardy even of his
life should he resist arrest.
Keenan tarried at the house merely long enough to devise a plausible
excuse for his sudden excited entrance, and then took his way back to
the barnyard.
It was vacant. The cows still stood lowing at the bars; the sheep
cowered together in their shed; the great whitened cone of the
fodder-stack gleamed icily in the purple air; beside it lay the lantern
where Millicent had cast it aside. She was gone! He would not believe it
till he had run to the barn, calling her name in the shadowy place,
while the horse at his manger left his corn to look over the walls of
his stall with inquisitive surprised eyes, luminous in the dusk. He
searched the hen-house, where the fowls on their perches crowded close
because of the chill of the evening. He even ran to the bars and looked
down across the narrow ravine to which the clearing sloped. Beyond the
chasm-like gorge he saw presently on the high ascent opposite footprints
that had broken the light frost-like coating of ice on the dead leaves
and moss--climbing footprints, swift, disordered. He looked back again
at the lantern where Millicent had flung it in her haste. Her mission
was plain now. She had gone to warn Dundas. She had taken a direct line
through the woods. She hoped to forestall the deputy sheriff and his
posse, following the circuitous mountain road.
Keenan's lip curled in triumph. His heart burned hot with scornful anger
and contempt of the futility of her effort. "They're there afore she
started!" he said, looking up at the aspects of the hour shown by the
sky, and judging of the interval since the encounter by the spring.
Through a rift in the gray cloud a star looked down with an icy
scintillation and disappeared again. He heard a branch in the woods snap
beneath the weight of ice. A light sprang into the window of the cabin
hard by, and came in a great gush of orange-tinted glow out into the
snowy bleak wintry space. He suddenly leaped over the fence and ran like
a deer through the woods.
Millicent too had been swift. He had thought to overtake her before he
emerged from the woods into the more open space where the hotel stood.
In this quarter the cloud-break had been greater. Toward the west a
fading amber glow still lingered in long horizontal bars upon the opaque
gray sky. The white mountains opposite were hung with purple shadows
borrowed from a glimpse of sunset somewhere far away over the valley of
East Tennessee; one distant lofty range was drawn in elusive snowy
suggestions, rather than lines, against a green space of intense yet
pale tint. The moon, now nearing the full, hung over the wooded valley,
and aided the ice and the crust of snow to show its bleak, wan, wintry
aspect; a tiny spark glowed in its depths from some open door of an
isolated home. Over it all a mist was rising from the east, drawing its
fleecy but opaque curtain. Already it had climbed the mountain-side and
advanced, windless, soundless, overwhelming, annihilating all before and
beneath it. The old hotel had disappeared, save that here and there a
gaunt gable protruded and was withdrawn, showed once more, and once more
was submerged.
A horse's head suddenly looking out of the enveloping mist close to his
shoulder gave him the first intimation of the arrival, the secret silent
waiting, of those whom he had directed hither. That the saddles were
empty he saw a moment later. The animals stood together in a row,
hitched to the rack. No disturbance sounded from the silent building.
The event was in abeyance. The fugitive in hiding was doubtless at ease,
unsuspecting, while the noiseless search of the officers for his
quarters was under way.
With a thrill of excitement Keenan crept stealthily through an open
passage and into the old grass-grown spaces of the quadrangle. Night
possessed the place, but the cloud seemed denser than the darkness. He
was somehow sensible of its convolutions as he stood against the wall
and strained his eyes into the dusk. Suddenly it was penetrated by a
milky-white glimmer, a glimmer duplicated at equidistant points, each
fading as its successor sprang into brilliance. The next moment he
understood its significance. It had come from the blurred windows of the
old ball-room. Millicent had lighted her candle as she searched for the
fugitive's quarters; she was passing down the length of the old house on
the second story, and suddenly she emerged upon the gallery. She
shielded the feeble flicker with her hand; her white-hooded head gleamed
as with an aureola as the divergent rays rested on the opaque mist; and
now and again she clutched the baluster and walked with tremulous care,
for the flooring was rotten here and there, and ready to crumble away.
Her face was pallid, troubled; and Dundas, who had been warned by the
tramp of horses and the tread of men, and who had descended the stairs,
revolver in hand, ready to slip away if he might under cover of the
mist, paused appalled, gazing across the quadrangle as on an
apparition--the sight so familiar to his senses, so strange to his
experience. He saw in an abrupt shifting of the mist that there were
other figures skulking in doorways, watching her progress. The next
moment she leaned forward to clutch the baluster, and the light of the
candle fell full on Emory Keenan, lurking in the open passage.
A sudden sharp cry of "Surrender!"
The young mountaineer, confused, swiftly drew his pistol. Others were
swifter still. A sharp report rang out into the chill crisp air, rousing
all the affrighted echoes--a few faltering steps, a heavy fall, and for
a long time Emory Keenan's life-blood stained the floor of the
promenade. Even when it had faded, the rustic gossips came often and
gazed at the spot with morbid interest, until, a decade later, an
enterprising proprietor removed the floor and altered the shape of that
section of the building out of recognition.
The escape of Dundas was easily effected. The deputy sheriff, confronted
with the problem of satisfactorily accounting for the death of a man who
had committed no offence against public polity, was no longer
formidable. His errand had been the arrest of a horse-thief, well-known
to him, and he had no interest in pursuing a fugitive, however obnoxious
to the law, whose personal description was so different from that of the
object of his search.
Time restored to Dundas his former place in life and the esteem of his
fellow-citizens. His stay in the mountains was an episode which he will
not often recall, but sometimes volition fails, and he marvels at the
strange fulfilment of the girl's vision; he winces to think that her
solicitude for his safety should have cost her her lover; he wonders
whether she yet lives, and whether that tender troubled phantom, on
nights when the wind is still and the moon is low and the mists rise,
again joins the strange, elusive, woful company crossing the quaking
foot-bridge.
HIS "DAY IN COURT"
It had been a hard winter along the slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains,
and still the towering treeless domes were covered with snow, and the
vagrant winds were abroad, rioting among the clifty heights where they
held their tryst, or raiding down into the sheltered depths of the Cove,
where they seldom intruded. Nevertheless, on this turbulent rush was
borne in the fair spring of the year. The fragrance of the budding
wild-cherry was to be discerned amidst the keen slanting javelins of the
rain. A cognition of the renewal and the expanding of the forces of
nature pervaded the senses as distinctly as if one might hear the grass
growing, or feel along the chill currents of the air the vernal pulses
thrill. Night after night in the rifts of the breaking clouds close to
the horizon was glimpsed the stately sidereal Virgo, prefiguring and
promising the harvest, holding in her hand a gleaming ear of corn. But
it was not the constellation which the tumultuous torrent at the
mountain's base reflected in a starry glitter. From the hill-side above
a light cast its broken image among the ripples, as it shone for an
instant through the bosky laurel, white, stellular, splendid--only a
tallow dip suddenly placed in the window of a log-cabin, and as suddenly
withdrawn.
For a gruff voice within growled out a remonstrance: "What ye doin' that
fur, Steve? Hev that thar candle got enny call ter bide in that thar
winder?"
The interior, contrary to the customary aspect of the humble homes of
the region, was in great disarray. Cooking utensils stood uncleaned
about the hearth; dishes and bowls of earthen-ware were assembled upon
the table in such numbers as to suggest that several meals had been
eaten without the ceremony of laying the cloth anew, and that in default
of washing the crockery it had been re-enforced from the shelf so far as
the limited store might admit. Saddles and spinning-wheels, an ox-yoke
and trace-chains, reels and wash-tubs, were incongruously pushed
together in the corners. Only one of the three men in the room made any
effort to reduce the confusion to order. This was the square-faced,
black-bearded, thick-set young fellow who took the candle from the
window, and now advanced with it toward the hearth, holding it at an
angle that caused the flame to swiftly melt the tallow, which dripped
generously upon the floor.
"I hev seen Eveliny do it," he said, excitedly justifying himself. "I
noticed her sot the candle in the winder jes' las' night arter supper."
He glanced about uncertainly, and his patience seemed to give way
suddenly. "Dad-burn the old candle! I dunno _whar_ ter set it," he
cried, desperately, as he flung it from him, and it fell upon the floor
close to the wall.
The dogs lifted their heads to look, and one soft-stepping old hound got
up with the nimbleness of expectation, and, with a prescient gratitude
astir in his tail, went and sniffed at it. His aspect drooped suddenly,
and he looked around in reproach at Stephen Quimbey, as if suspecting a
practical joke. But there was no merriment in the young mountaineer's
face. He threw himself into his chair with a heavy sigh, and desisted
for a time from the unaccustomed duty of clearing away the dishes after
supper.
"An' 'ain't ye got the gumption ter sense what Eveliny sot the candle in
the winder fur?" his brother Timothy demanded, abruptly--"ez a sign ter
that thar durned Abs'lom Kittredge."
The other two men turned their heads and looked at the speaker with a
poignant intensity of interest. "I 'lowed ez much when I seen that light
ez I war a-kemin' home las' night," he continued; "it shined spang down
the slope acrost the ruver an' through all the laurel; it looked plumb
like a star that hed fell ter yearth in that pitch-black night. I dunno
how I s'picioned it, but ez I stood thar an' gazed I knowed somebody war
a-standin' an' gazin' too on the foot-bredge a mite ahead o' me. I
couldn't see him, an' he couldn't turn back an' pass me, the bredge
bein' too narrer. He war jes obligated ter go on. I hearn him breathe
quick; then--pit-pat, pit-pat, ez he walked straight toward that light.
An' he be 'bleeged ter hev hearn me, fur arter I crost I stopped.
Nuthin'. Jes' a whisper o' wind, an' jes' a swishin' from the ruver. I
knowed then he hed turned off inter the laurel. An' I went on,
a-whistlin' ter make him 'low ez I never s'picioned nuthin'. An' I kem
inter the house an' tole dad ez he'd better be a-lookin' arter Eveliny,
fur I b'lieved she war a-settin' her head ter run away an' marry Abs'lom
Kittredge."
"Waal, I ain't right up an' down sati'fied we oughter done what we
done," exclaimed Stephen, fretfully. "It don't 'pear edzacly right fur
three men ter fire on one."
Old Joel Quimbey, in his arm-chair in the chimney-corner, suddenly
lifted his head--a thin head with fine white hair, short and sparse,
upon it. His thin, lined face was clear-cut, with a pointed chin and an
aquiline nose. He maintained an air of indignant and rebellious grief,
and had hitherto sat silent, a gnarled and knotted hand on either arm of
his chair. His eyes gleamed keenly from under his heavy brows as he
turned his face upon his sons. "How could we know thar warn't but one,
eh?"
He had not been a candidate for justice of the peace for nothing; he had
absorbed something of the methods and spirit of the law through sheer
propinquity to the office. "We-uns wouldn't be persumed ter _know_." And
he ungrudgingly gave himself all the benefit of the doubt that the law
accords.
"That's a true word!" exclaimed Stephen, quick to console his
conscience. "Jes' look at the fac's, now. We-uns in a plumb black
midnight hear a man a-gittin' over our fence; we git our rifles;
a-peekin' through the chinkin' we ketch a glimge o' him--"