it had pleased the Lord to prosper him. His countenance fell suddenly.
His discomfiture in her unexpected disclosure was twofold, in that it
furnished a reason for Tyler's evident depression of spirits,
demolishing the augury that his manner had afforded as to the success of
the guest's mission, and furthermore, to Nehemiah's trafficking soul, it
suggested that a money consideration might be exacted to mollify the
rigors of parting.
For Nehemiah Yerby had risen to the dignities, solvencies, and
responsibilities of opening a store at the cross-roads in Kildeer
County. It was a new and darling enterprise with him, and his mind and
speech could not long be wiled away from the subject. This abrupt
interjection of a new element into his cogitations gave him pause, and
he did not observe the sudden rousing of Tyler Sudley from his revery,
and the glance of indignant reproach which he cast on his wife. No man,
however meek, or however bowed down with sorrow, will bear unmoved a
gratuitous mention of his debts; it seems to wound him with all the
rancor of insult, and to enrage him with the hopelessness of adequate
retort or reprisal. It is an indignity, like taunting a ghost with
cock-crow, or exhorting a clergyman to repentance. He flung himself all
at once into the conversation, to bar and baffle any renewed allusion to
that subject, and it was accident rather than intention which made him
grasp Nehemiah in the vise of a quandary also.
"Ye say ye got a store an' a stock o' truck, Nehemiah. Air ye ekal ter
keepin' store an' sech?" he demanded, speculatively, with an inquiring
and doubtful corrugation of his brows, from which a restive lock of hair
was flung backward like the toss of a horse's mane.
"I reckon so," Nehemiah sparely responded, blinking at him across the
fireplace.
"An' ye say ye hev applied fur the place o' postmaster?" Tyler prosed
on. "All that takes a power o' knowledge--readin' an' writin' an'
cipherin' an' sech. How air ye expectin' to hold out, 'kase I know ye
never hed no mo' larnin' than me, an' I war acquainted with ye till ye
war thirty years old an' better?"
The tenor of this discourse did not comport with his customary suavity
and tactful courtesy toward a guest, but he was much harassed and had
lost his balance. He had a vague idea that Mrs. Sudley hung upon the
flank of the conversation with a complete summary of amounts, dates, and
names of creditors, and he sought to balk this in its inception.
Moreover, his forbearance with Nehemiah, with his presence, his
personality, his mission, had begun to wane. Bitter reflections might
suffice to fill the time were he suffered to be silent; but since a part
in the conversation had been made necessary, he had for it no honeyed
words.
"I'd make about ez fit a postmaster, I know, ez that thar old ow_el_
a-hootin' out yander. I could look smart an' sober like him, but that's
'bout all the fur my school-larnin' kerried me, an' yourn didn't reach
ter the nex' mile-post--an' that I know."
Nehemiah's thin lips seemed dry. More than once his tongue appeared
along their verges as he nervously moistened them. His small eyes had
brightened with an excited look, but he spoke very slowly, and to
Laurelia it seemed guardedly.
"I tuk ter my book arterward, Brother Sudley. I applied myself ter
larnin' vigorous. Bein' ez I seen the Lord's hand war liberal with the
gifts o' this worl', I wanted ter stir myself ter desarve the good
things."
Sudley brought down the fore-legs of his chair to the floor with a
thump. Despite his anxiety a slow light of ridicule began to kindle on
his face; his curling lip showed his strong white teeth.
"Waal, by gum! ye mus' hev been a sight ter be seen! Ye, forty or fifty
years old, a-settin' on the same seat with the chil'n at the deestric'
school, an' a-competin' with the leetle tadpoles fur 'Baker an' Shady'
an sech!"
He was about to break forth with a guffaw of great relish when Nehemiah
spoke hastily, forestalling the laughter.
"Naw; Abner Sage war thar fur a good while las' winter a-visitin' his
sister, an' he kem an' gin me lessons an' set me copies thar at my
house, an' I larnt a heap."
Leander lifted his head suddenly. The amount of progress possible to
this desultory and limited application he understood only too well. He
had not learned so much himself to be unaware how much in time and labor
learning costs. The others perceived no incongruity. Sudley's face was
florid with pride and pleasure, and his wife's reflected the glow.
"Ab Sage at the cross-roads! Then he mus' hev tole ye 'bout Lee-yander
hyar, an' his larnin'. Ab tole, I know."
Nehemiah drew his breath in quickly. His twinkling eyes sent out the
keenest glance of suspicion, but the gay, affectionate, vaunting laugh,
as Tyler Sudley turned around and clapped the boy a ringing blow on his
slender shoulder, expressed only the plenitude of his simple vainglory.
"Lee-yander hyar _knows it all_!" he boasted. "Old Ab himself don't know
no mo'! I'll be bound old Ab went a-braggin'--hey, Lee-yander?"
But the boy shrank away a trifle, and his smile was mechanical as he
silently eyed his relative.
"Ab 'lowed he war tur'ble disobejient," said Nehemiah, after a pause,
and cautiously allowing himself to follow in the talk, "an' gi'n over
ter playin' the fiddle." He hesitated for a moment, longing to
stigmatize its ungodliness; but the recollection of Tyler Sudley's
uncertain temper decided him, and he left it unmolested. "But Ab 'lowed
ye war middlin' quick at figgers, Lee-yander--middlin' quick at
figgers!"
Leander, still silent and listening, flushed slightly. This measured
praise was an offence to him; but he looked up brightly and obediently
when his uncle wagged an uncouthly sportive head (Nehemiah's anatomy
lent itself to the gay and graceful with much reluctance), thrust his
hands into his pockets, and, tilting himself back in his chair,
continued:
"I'll try ye, sonny--I'll try ye. How much air nine times seven?--nine
times seven?"
"Forty-two!" replied the boy, with a bright, docile countenance fixed
upon his relative.
There was a pause. "Right!" exclaimed Nehemiah, to the relief of Sudley
and his wife, who had trembled during the pause, for it seemed so
threatening. They smiled at each other, unconscious that the examination
meant aught more serious than a display of their prodigy's learning.
"An', now, how much air twelve times eight?" demanded Nehemiah.
"Sixty-six!" came the answer, quick as lightning.
"Right, sir, every time!" cried Nehemiah with a glow of genuine
exultation, as he brought down the fore-legs of the chair to the floor,
and the two Sudleys laughed aloud with pleasure.
Leander saw them all distorted and grimacing while the room swam round.
The scheme was clear enough to him now. The illiterate Nehemiah, whose
worldly prosperity had outstripped his mental qualifications, had
bethought himself of filling the breach with his nephew, given away as
surplusage in his burdensome infancy, but transformed into a unique
utility under the tutelage of Abner Sage. It was his boasting of his
froward pupil, doubtless, that had suggested the idea, and Leander
understood now that he was to do the work of the store and the
post-office under the nominal incumbency of this unlettered lout. Had
the whole transaction been open and acknowledged, Leander would have had
scant appetite for the work under this master; but he revolted at the
flimsy, contemptible sham; he bitterly resented the innuendoes against
the piety of the Sudleys, not that he cared for piety, save in the
abstract; he was daunted by the brutal ignorance, the doltish
inefficiency of the imposture that had so readily accepted his patently
false answers to the simple questions. He had a sort of crude reverence
for education, and it had seemed to him a very serious matter to take
such liberties with the multiplication table. He valued, too, with a
boy's stalwart vanity, his reputation for great learning, and he would
not have lightly jeopardized it did he not esteem the crisis momentous.
He knew not what he feared. The fraud of the intention, the groundless
claim to knowledge, made Nehemiah's scheme seem multifariously guilty in
some sort; while Tyler Sudley and his wife, albeit no wiser
mathematically, had all the sanctions of probity in their calm,
unpretending ignorance.
"Ef Cap'n or Neighbor wanted ter run a post-office on my larnin', or ter
keep store, they'd be welcome; but I won't play stalkin'-horse fur that
thar man's still-hunt, sure ez shootin'," he said to himself.
The attention which he bent upon the conversation thenceforth was an
observation of its effect rather than its matter. He saw that he was
alone in his discovery. Neither Sudley nor his wife had perceived any
connection between the store, the prospective post-office, and the
desire of the illiterate would-be postmaster to have his erudite nephew
restored to his care.
It may be that the methods of his "Neighbor" and the "Captain" in the
rearing of Leander, the one with unbridled leniency, the other with
spurious severity and affected indifference, had combined to foster
self-reliance and decision of character, or it may be that these
qualities were inherent traits. At all events, he encountered the
emergency without an instant's hesitation. He felt no need of counsel.
He had no doubts. He carried to his pallet in the roof-room no
vacillations and no problems. His resolve was taken. For a time, as he
listened to the movements below-stairs, the sound of voices still rose,
drowsy as the hour waxed late; the light that flickered through the
cracks in the puncheon flooring gradually dulled, and presently a harsh
grating noise acquainted him with the fact that Sudley was shovelling
the ashes over the embers; then the tent-like attic was illumined only
by the moonlight admitted through the little square window at the gable
end--so silent, so still, it seemed that it too slept like the silent
house. The winds slumbered amidst the mute woods; a bank of cloud that
he could see from his lowly couch lay in the south becalmed. The bird's
song had ceased. It seemed to him as he lifted himself on his elbow that
he had never known the world so hushed. The rustle of the quilt of gay
glazed calico was of note in the quietude; the impact of his bare foot
on the floor was hardly a sound, rather an annotation of his weight and
his movement; yet in default of all else the sense of hearing marked it.
His scheme seemed impracticable as for an instant he wavered at the head
of the ladder that served as a stairway; the next moment his foot was
upon the rungs, his light, lithe figure slipping down it like a shadow.
The room below, all eclipsed in a brown and dusky-red medium, the
compromise between light and darkness that the presence of the embers
fostered, was vaguely revealed to him. He was hardly sure whether he saw
the furniture all in place, or whether he knew its arrangement so well
that he seemed to see. Suddenly, as he laid his hand on the violin on
the wall, it became visible, its dark red wood richly glowing against
the brown logs and the tawny clay daubing. A tiny white flame had shot
up in the midst of the gray ashes, as he stood with the cherished object
in his cautious hand, his excited eyes, dilated and expectant, searching
the room apprehensively, while a vague thrill of a murmur issued from
the instrument, as if the spirit of music within it had been wakened by
his touch--too vague, too faintly elusive for the dormant and somewhat
dull perceptions of Nehemiah Yerby, calmly slumbering in state in the
best room.
The faint jet of flame was withdrawn in the ashes as suddenly as it had
shot forth, and in the ensuing darkness, deeper for the contrast with
that momentary illumination, it was not even a shadow that deftly
mounted the ladder again and emerged into the sheeny twilight of the
moonlit roof-room. Leander was somehow withheld for a moment motionless
at the window; it may have been by compunction; it may have been by
regret, if it be possible to the very young to definitely feel either.
There was an intimation of pensive farewell in his large illumined eyes
as they rested on the circle of familiar things about him--the budding
trees, the well, with its great angular sweep against the sky, the still
sward, the rail-fences glistening with the dew, the river with the
moonlight in a silver blazonry on its lustrous dark surface, the
encompassing shadows of the gloomy mountains. There was no sound, not
even among the rippling shallows; he could hear naught but the pain of
parting throbbing in his heart, and from the violin a faint continuous
susurrus, as if it murmured half-asleep memories of the melodies that
had thrilled its waking moments. It necessitated careful handling as he
deftly let himself out of the window, the bow held in his mouth, the
instrument in one arm, while the other hand clutched the boughs of a
great holly-tree close beside the house. It was only the moonlight on
those smooth, lustrous leaves, but it seemed as if smiling white faces
looked suddenly down from among the shadows: at this lonely hour, with
none awake to see, what strange things may there not be astir in the
world, what unmeasured, unknown forces, sometimes felt through the
dulling sleep of mortals, and then called dreams! As he stood breathless
upon the ground the wind awoke. He heard it race around the corner of
the house, bending the lilac bushes, and then it softly buffeted him
full in the face and twirled his hat on the ground. As he stooped to
pick it up he heard whispers and laughter in the lustrous boughs of the
holly, and the gleaming faces shifted with the shadows. He looked
fearfully over his shoulder; the rising wind might waken some one of the
household. His "Neighbor" was, he knew, solicitous about the weather,
and suspicious of its intentions lest it not hold fine till all the oats
be sown. A pang wrung his heart; he remembered the long line of seasons
when, planting corn in the pleasant spring days, his "Neighbor" had
opened the furrow with the plough, and the "Captain" had followed,
dropping the grains, and he had brought up the rear with his hoe,
covering them over, while the clouds floated high in the air, and the
mild sun shone, and the wind kept the shadows a-flicker, and the
blackbird and the crow, complacently and craftily watching them from
afar, seemed the only possible threatening of evil in all the world. He
hastened to stiffen his resolve. He had need of it. Tyler Sudley had
said that he did not know how the law stood, and for himself, he was not
willing to risk his liberty on it. He gazed apprehensively upon the
little batten shutter of the window of the room where Nehemiah Yerby
slept, expecting to see it slowly swing open and disclose him there. It
did not stir, and gathering resolution from the terrors that had beset
him when he fancied his opportunity threatened, he ran like a frightened
deer fleetly down the road, and plunged into the dense forest. The wind
kept him company, rollicking, quickening, coming and going in fitful
gusts. He heard it die away, but now and again it was rustling among a
double file of beech-trees all up the mountain-side. He saw the
commotion in their midst, the effect of swift movement as the scant
foliage fluttered, then the white branches of the trees all a-swaying
like glistening arms flung upward, as if some bevy of dryads sped up the
hill in elusive rout through the fastnesses.
* * * * *
The next day ushered in a tumult and excitement unparalleled in the
history of the little log-cabin. When Leander's absence was discovered,
and inquiry of the few neighbors and search of the vicinity proved
fruitless, the fact of his flight and its motive were persistently
forced upon Nehemiah Yerby's reluctant perceptions, with the destruction
of his cherished scheme as a necessary sequence. With some wild craving
for vengeance he sought to implicate Sudley as accessory to the
mysterious disappearance. He found some small measure of solace in
stumping up and down the floor before the hearth, furiously railing at
the absent host, for Sudley had not yet relinquished the bootless quest,
and indignantly upbraiding the forlorn, white-faced, grief-stricken
Laurelia, who sat silent and stony, her faded eyes on the fire, heedless
of his words. She held in her lap sundry closely-rolled knitted
balls--the boy's socks that she had so carefully made and darned. A
pile of his clothing lay at her feet. He had carried nothing but his
fiddle and the clothes he stood in, and if she had had more tears she
could have wept for his improvidence, for the prospective tatters and
rents that must needs befall him in that unknown patchless life to which
he had betaken himself.
Nehemiah Yerby argued that it was Sudley who had prompted the whole
thing; he had put the boy up to it, for Leander was not so lacking in
feeling as to flee from his own blood-relation. But he would set the law
to spy them out. He would be back again, and soon.
He may have thought better of this presently, for he was in great haste
to be gone when Tyler Sudley returned, and to his amazement in a
counterpart frame of mind, charging Nehemiah with the responsibility of
the disaster. It was strange to Laurelia that she, who habitually strove
to fix her mind on religious things, should so relish the aspect of Ty
Sudley in his secular rage on this occasion.
"Ye let we-uns hev him whilst so leetle an' helpless, but now that he
air so fine growed an' robustious ye want ter git some work out'n him,
an' he hev runned away an' tuk ter the woods tarrified by the very sight
of ye," he averred. "He'll never kem back; no, he'll never kem back; fur
he'll 'low ez ye would kem an' take him home with you; an' now the Lord
only knows whar he is, an' what will become of him."
His anger and his tumultuous grief, his wild, irrepressible anxiety for
Leander's safety, convinced the crafty Nehemiah that he was no party to
the boy's scheme. Sudley's sorrow was not of the kind that renders the
temper pliable, and when Nehemiah sought to point a moral in the absence
of the violin, and for the first time in Sudley's presence protested
that he desired to save Leander from that device of the devil, the
master of the house shook his inhospitable fist very close indeed to his
guest's nose, and Yerby was glad enough to follow that feature
unimpaired out to his horse at the bars, saying little more.
He aired his views, however, at each house where he made it convenient
to stop on his way home, and took what comfort there might be in the
role of martyr. Leander was unpopular in several localities, and was
esteemed a poor specimen of the skill of the Sudleys in rearing
children. He had been pampered and spoiled, according to general report,
and more than one of his successive interlocutors were polite enough to
opine that the change to Nehemiah's charge would have been a beneficent
opportunity for much-needed discipline. Nehemiah was not devoid of some
skill in interrogatory. He contrived to elicit speculations without
giving an intimation of unduly valuing the answer.
"He's 'mongst the moonshiners, I reckon," was the universal surmise.
"He'll be hid mighty safe 'mongst them."
For where the still might be, or who was engaged in the illicit
business, was even a greater mystery than Leander's refuge. Nothing more
definite could be elicited than a vague rumor that some such work was
in progress somewhere along the many windings of Hide-and-Seek Creek.
Nehemiah Yerby had never been attached to temperance principles, and,
commercially speaking, he had thought it possible that whiskey on which
no tax had been paid might be more profitably dispensed at his store
than that sold under the sanctions of the government. These
considerations, however, were as naught in view of the paralysis which
his interests and schemes had suffered in Leander's flight. He dwelt
with dismay upon the possibility that he might secure the postmastership
without the capable assistant whose services were essential. In this
perverse sequence of events disaster to his application was more to be
desired than success. He foresaw himself browbeaten, humiliated,
detected, a butt for the ridicule of the community, his pretensions in
the dust, his pitiful imposture unmasked. And beyond these aesthetic
misfortunes, the substantial emoluments of "keepin' store," with a
gallant sufficiency of arithmetic to regulate prices and profits, were
vanishing like the elusive matutinal haze before the noontide sun.
Nehemiah Yerby groaned aloud, for the financial stress upon his spirit
was very like physical pain. And in this inauspicious moment he
bethought himself of the penalties of violating the Internal Revenue
Laws of the United States.
Now it has been held by those initiated into such mysteries that there
is scant affinity between whiskey and water. Nevertheless, in this
connection, Nehemiah Yerby developed an absorbing interest in the
watercourses of the coves and adjacent mountains, especially their more
remote and sequestered tributaries. He shortly made occasion to meet the
county surveyor and ply him with questions touching the topography of
the vicinity, cloaking the real motive under the pretence of an interest
in water-power sufficient and permanent enough for the sawing of lumber,
and professing to contemplate the erection of a saw-mill at the most
eligible point. The surveyor had his especial vanity, and it was
expressed in his frequent boast that he carried a complete map of the
county graven upon his brain; he was wont to esteem it a gracious
opportunity when a casual question in a group of loungers enabled him to
display his familiarity with every portion of his rugged and mountainous
region, which was indeed astonishing, even taking into consideration his
incumbency for a number of terms, aided by a strong head for locality.
Nehemiah Yerby's scheme was incalculably favored by this circumstance,
but he found it unexpectedly difficult to support the figment which he
had propounded as to his intentions. Fiction is one of the fine arts,
and a mere amateur like Nehemiah is apt to fail in point of consistency.
He was inattentive while the surveyor dilated on the probable value, the
accessibility, and the relative height of the "fall" of the various
sites, and their available water-power, and he put irrelevant queries
concerning ineligible streams in other localities. No man comfortably
mounted upon his hobby relishes an interruption. The surveyor would stop
with a sort of bovine surprise, and break out in irritable parenthesis.
"That branch on the t'other side o' Panther Ridge? Why, man alive, that
thread o' water wouldn't turn a spider web."
Nehemiah, quaking under the glance of his keen questioning eye, would
once more lapse into silence, while the surveyor, loving to do what he
could do well, was lured on in his favorite subject by the renewed
appearance of receptivity in his listener.
"Waal, ez I war a-sayin', I know every furlong o' the creeks once down
in the Cove, an' all their meanderings, an' the best part o' them in the
hills amongst the laurel and the wildernesses. But now the ways of sech
a stream ez Hide-an'-Seek Creek are past finding out. It's a 'sinking
creek,' you know; goes along with a good volume and a swift current for
a while to the west, then disappears into the earth, an' ain't seen fur
five mile, then comes out agin running due north, makes a tremenjious
jump--the Hoho-hebee Falls--then pops into the ground agin, an' ain't
seen no more forever," he concluded, dramatically.
"How d'ye know it's the same creek?" demanded Nehemiah, sceptically, and
with a wrinkling brow.