Eugene Rathburn could hardly be said to have awakened from his deep
sleep, that stormy night in the Great Smoky Mountains, when Jake Baintree
kept his strange vigil by the side of the dying fire. The alien scenes
of his dream were suddenly possessed by a wild, unrealized tumult. His
dormant consciousness became in some sort aware of a piercing sound,
a fibrous, funnel-shaped glare, fierce but fleeting, and then he saw
no more, knew no more, not even thus vaguely. How long he lay there on
the floor of the mountain hut, in a pool of his own blood, he never
sought to compute. One morning, while the rain yet beat on the roof, and
the gullies ran full beneath the eaves; while the mists still further
secluded the solitary spot, practically as inaccessible as if it had been
lifted amidst the clouds that closed about it, his memory came back to
him, his identity renewed with his body its coexistence, and he realized
who it was lying wounded, fevered, exhausted from the loss of blood, on
the fireless hearth, where he had fallen asleep when it was all a-sparkle
and aglow, his own pistol, smoke-blackened, albeit but freshly cleaned
and oiled, on the floor beside him.
“When the corpse is found,” he said impersonally, “if it ever is found,
it might suggest a suicide.”
He experienced a feeble surprise to gauge the interest with which he
noted the relative position of his weapon and his helpless body, and
vaguely presaged the deductions of the coroner’s jury.
The fallibility of the supposititious verdict recurring to his mind after
the sense of a long and vacant interval made him aware that he had again
been unconscious, and had but now revived anew. Somehow, he wondered
that he had ever dwelt upon it. He no longer thought of himself as the
lifeless shell that might lie here impassive till some chance—nay, the
predestined urgency of retribution—should lead hitherward a stranger’s
step to discover Jake Baintree’s crime. He felt the throb of a turbulent
resentment. He thirsted for revenge. A frail tenement, to be sure, his
shattered body afforded for these robust and full-pulsed passions.
Professionally speaking, he presently recognized the symptom with a new
hope,—he was stronger, far stronger than he had thought. He had slept, he
was sure,—slept despite his burning thirst, his gnawing pain. He had a
dual series of impressions, the keenness of the one hardly mitigated by
the poignancy of the other. He took note of his own sensations, both as
physician and patient, and when he had lifted himself upon his elbow to
examine the wounds,—there were two, the pistol-shots fired at such close
range as to scorch his garments,—his face blanched to a yet more pallid
tint as he looked; but with a sort of mechanical professional reticence
he said not a word that might have roused the alarm of a patient in like
case. As he lay back upon the blood-soaked rug, he closed his eyes to
wait,—to hope that it might not be long. His wounds were serious enough
in any case, but here, without food, parched with thirst, without skilled
care or the merest ignorant help, it was only a question of time. His
mind canvassed the alternatives,—to die of his wounds and the exposure,
or to starve. As he thought of the relative anguish of the two fates
that impended, he felt that his wounds were not so hopeless; he had
doubtless exaggerated their menace; he would starve to death, here in
these lofty altitudes, very slowly, very painfully; for although he was
of no great stature or muscular strength, his constitution was tough and
promised resistance. “I’ll have an awful time before I get off,” he said
to himself in a panic. He writhed slightly as he spoke, although he had
sedulously sought to lie still, that the gaping wounds might not bleed
afresh, and as he stirred his hand touched something cold, from which
he recoiled. It was only the barrel of his pistol, sleek and shining,
and with a ready suggestion lurking in its muzzle. The time might be no
longer than he willed it, the pain no greater than he chose to bear. He
had a definite technical knowledge wherewith to plant the ball in lieu of
Baintree’s clumsy hap-hazard ignorance. He drew back his hand from the
cold touch of the insensate metal that beguiled him with this reasoning
from out its hollow jaws; he shrank from the idea as if he definitely
appreciated the crime to which he was tempted. “No,” he said aloud in a
strong voice,—“no, my good friend Jake, this is _your_ job, and you shall
swing for it. I’ll do nothing to hinder, if I lie here a year and a day
in the pangs of hunger.”
Once more he recognized, with a start, the lapse of a vacant interval.
His professional consciousness, first of all his mental faculties, took
note of it. “Sleep is the best thing,—quiet and sleep,—itself a curative
agent,” he muttered feebly, drowsing off again. He waked now, however, at
frequent intervals. Once he noted that the rain had ceased its melancholy
drone on the roof, and once he heard the wind. The mists fell away from
the window, where he had dully marked their presence close to the rift
in the batten shutter, and feeble shafts of sunlight flickered across
the melancholy, fireless hearth, and anon faded out. Suddenly a galvanic
thrill jarred every pulse, as he lay motionless, his eyelids half closed.
Delirium, surely. How hard it was, he thought, that he would have
differentiated the symptoms so certainly were the hurt another man’s, but
that even his own professional skill could avail him naught, could not
serve as the one friend in the world he had earned, as he lay here dying
and alone in this innermost seclusion of solitude! Deny it however his
reason might, call it fever, or fantasy, or fear, his eyes were fastened
on Baintree’s face peering in at the rifts of the shutter,—peering in,
a pallid, drawn, distorted likeness of himself, such as might haunt the
dying dreams of the man he had murdered. Fact or fiction, the sight
petrified Rathburn. He did not stir a fibre; his half-closed eyes were
fixed; while his mind took eager cognizance of the probability that this
should be the figure to loom in his fevered fancy, he wondered that the
delirium should so furnish forth the detail and circumstance of its
delusion; that the face in the rift of the shutter should blanch, and
shrink away, and come again, with a look of fascinated horror, to peer
within; that the figment of fever should put up a hand, so long, so thin,
so well remembered, to hold the flapping shutter still; that the mere
idea of crafty, furtive, terrified eyes should scan the lines of his
motionless figure with an expression he could never have imagined, as if
hoping to detect a movement, yet fearing, and then despairing. Suddenly,
with a spasm of remorse that naught but the actuality of anguish could
depict upon a human countenance, the face disappeared. Was it fancy,
too, or did he hear the dead leaves rustle beneath a shambling step?
Other ears, hardly so keen, so expectant, as his own, took heed. There
was the tramp of hoofs outside, trotting from the shanty of a stable
and around the house, and his mare’s shrill whinny of recognition rang
out cheerfully, as if the creature welcomed the sight of any familiar
being, so long left lonely as she had been. Rathburn doubted no more. He
heard his feeble breath flutter, his faint heart beat, the sound seeming
loud and obstructive in the silence, so did his ear yearn to follow the
footsteps, hoping that they were bearing Jake Baintree away, satisfied
that his work had been done thoroughly, and fearing lest he enter to
reassure himself anew. It seemed long, long after he could detect no
further intimation of Baintree’s progress that the mare, whom he fancied
standing still without, gazing after the slouching, retreating figure,
turned, and slowly ambled back to her stall. Even in the tumult of his
agitation Rathburn reflected with satisfaction that she was at liberty,
with food and running water at hand. “Else I’d have to get out of this
somehow,” he said, for he would have sacrificed much in the sacred cause
of physical suffering; even a brute’s pain might not appeal to him in
vain. A new hope came to him. Could he but foster the strength to lift
himself, to creep to the door, to make shift to mount the animal, he
might still escape; he might reach some friendly hut, and, with food and
nursing, save his life. With hope a torturing fear arose because the mare
was at liberty. She would grow tired and lonely, and would wander away.
He heard again the quick beat of her hoofs, as she came snorting forth
once more, expectant of Baintree’s return. He forgot her the next moment,
in the realization of what this possibility boded for him. Remorse, was
it, on Baintree’s face, as he peered in at the rigid form, so still
on the fireless hearth? How long would it have lasted, Rathburn asked
himself, with a sneer, had the rigid form moved, had the eyelids stirred,
had Baintree possessed more expert knowledge of the signs of death? A
chance might bring him back, as a chance had brought him first to gaze,
with a fascinated horror, on the deed he had done, and then he would do
it, in self-defense, more surely. No sound, no stir without, listen as
he might, but the wind and the scudding leaf, till presently, with a
long-drawn breath, the mare trotted back once more to munch her corn.
Rathburn was all on the alert, although he strove to lie still and calm
his nerves. “All this excitement is bad,” he rebuked himself, as if he
were an unruly patient. And then relapsing into his other _rôle_, he
strove to adjust his mind in obedience to the professional dictum. He
could sleep no more, with the expectation, the fear, of Baintree’s return
vigilant in every nerve. He watched the sunlight strike across the floor,
reddening now, with vague motes bespangling the broad bars, so still,
so silent, that when a rat, swift and lean and whiskered, sped through
it, he gave a start of repulsion that sent a pain as of dislocation
throughout his frame, and roused a new terror in his helplessness. But
the rat fled as he lifted his hand, and his attention was called to the
lure that had brought it from its hole—the broken bits of bread fallen
from the table when overturned last night—last night?—he knew not how
many nights ago, and never was the wiser. Some of the food was within his
reach,—it had lain on the unswept floor, and the rats had perhaps fought
over it; he had a strong loathing for it, but he felt better after eating
a morsel of bread, and reflected that he was hardly likely to relish
daintier food if he had had it. So much of vigor did it impart that he
dragged himself, after a time, by slow and agonized degrees, across the
floor to the shelf whereon was the little medicine-chest the gratuitous
services of which he had proffered to Baintree. He lay still for some
time, exhausted by his exertions, when he had crawled back to his pallet.
At last, mindful of the dulling light, he opened the lid of the chest,
and his hand poised hovering above the rows of bottles.
“This opportunity,” he remarked satirically, “of trying one’s remedies
_in propria persona_ is one which few young surgeons have the privilege
of enjoying.”
And then he was reminded to glance up warily at the window, trembling
anew at the thought of Baintree and the conclusive significance of his
attitude should the crafty mountaineer once more peer through the window,
lured again by some morbid fascination to the scene of his crime.
He was glad to watch the red light fade on the brown walls, to note the
purpling spaces of the twilight through the rift in the batten shutter;
for as the shadows mustered about him he felt indistinguishable in their
midst,—indistinguishable even to eyes so keen, so furtive, as those he
fancied forever at the window.
He thought of the caution, the vigilance, the skill, that, were he the
poorest charity patient in the wards of a hospital, his wounds would
command; and the contrast of his plight here, to die so far from help,
and the prospect of the suffering of the dreary interval before his
release, forced a groan from his lips. He distrusted the treatment he
had administered; he had used perforce what he had, not what he would
have chosen. His mind ran continually upon the remedies that he would
have applied had the means been at hand. He kept thinking of himself as
some impersonal patient. A gnawing trouble beset his mind because of the
deficiency of his resources.
“I ought to get somebody to look after that chap. He’s a goner, I reckon,
but somebody ought to go through the motions of trying to save him.”
His fever was rising; more than once he caught himself lifted upon his
elbow, and searching with dilated eyes amongst the rows of bottles in
the chest, in the dim glimmer of the twilight, for he knew not what. “I
oughtn’t to be trusted with these things!” he cried in a sudden lucid
panic, as the realization of the rift between his discriminating mind
and his groping, foolish hands, free to follow their own vague impulses
amongst the powerful drugs, forced itself into his thoughts. He closed
the lid with a snap, and gathering his strength and setting his teeth
hard, he flung the chest from him, he knew not where in the darkness. He
heard it crash against the wall and drop to the floor, with a fine, high,
crystalline shiver, as of the breaking of the vials within; then, as he
lay still, with perverse ingenuity his uncontrollable thought began to
canvass where it had fallen, deducing the locality from the sound. “Oh, I
could get it again, get it mighty easy, if I am delirious, and could take
enough poison to establish a suicide and set Jake Baintree free.”
He dwelt upon the idea with irritable suspense, now and again starting
violently, as if he truly harbored the fancied impulse that he sought to
restrain. A stir without,—the approach of a real danger nullified this
terror of the nerves. The dead leaves rustled. A step—the wind? He lay
motionless, hardly daring to breathe. It came again, and presently a
crunching sound and a snarl. He experienced momentary relief: some wild
thing was gnawing the bones and bits of meat flung out into the yard, for
the prospectors had not been careful housekeepers. He had often heard
this as he chanced to wake at night, but now he reflected that the door
must be ajar,—a touch would open it; and with his wounds and fever and
helplessness he was at the mercy of the wild beasts. He reached out his
hand to make sure that the revolver was beside him. In touching it his
confidence was restored in some sort, yet in this environment he could
not sleep, despite the drowsy influences of weakness and fever. The
repulsion of it even in a measure dominated delirium. Sometimes he would
hear his voice break forth incoherently upon the air; then subdue himself
to silence to listen to the jaws of the startled beast, once more at work
upon the bones.
Toward midnight the moon rose. Through the rift in the batten shutter
the melancholy golden bars struck across the floor. The scene within, so
hateful to his eyes, revived from the encompassing gloom,—the few chairs,
the overturned table, the great, wide, vacant hearth, his long figure
stretched at length amongst the rigid, blood-stiffened folds of the rug,
and the untouched pallet of the fugitive. And later, down the broad shaft
of the stick-and-clay chimney the clear lustre burned amid the fireless
gray ashes, all gleaming white. No sound from without now, and the wind
was laid. Here all solitary, save for the moon. As the reminiscent,
meditative mood that comes in her train drowsed down with quiescent
influence upon his senses, he wondered vaguely that he should think of
the great golden disk, waning and yellow, as it looked when it hung above
the pines without, and silvered the frosted grasses of the great bare
dome of the mountain, and made the vast spaces of the sky blue with that
fine deep tint of the lunar nights; not as it had looked elsewhere, in
foreign lands, or shimmering in deep sea waters, or in the grotesque
incongruity of its melancholy and its poetry over the sordid streets of
cities,—only here, where it seemed native. And the faces that came to him
were not those that he had known in that wider life of his, conventional,
comfortable, eventless, he seemed discarded by the past, an alien to the
future. He could only think of the days just at hand, and of those who
had walked through them, and his heart was bitter against them all,—all
except Marcella. And somehow, with her face in his mind, and her name
forming itself on his lips, he fell asleep in the silence of the dull
gray dawn and the fading glamours of the yellow moon.
Her name was on his lips when he woke. “Marcella!” he cried aloud, with
a vague idea that she was standing in the door. He lifted himself on
his elbow, his heart throbbing with the thought that she had brought
deliverance to him, and a fear that the image was but the distraught
fantasy of his fevered brain. She seemed to change her identity before
his very eyes. He had a vague sense that the walls were still resounding
with a shrill cry; was it he who had uttered it, or she?
It was not repeated. Of all the possibilities to steady Mrs. Bowles’s
nerves in this unlooked-for emergency, naught could have been as
efficacious as the error of mistaking her for another woman.
“’Tain’t Marcelly!” she observed stiffly, while he still lay motionless,
half lifted on his elbow, staring at her as if every faculty were merged
in that of sight.
She made a motion as if to withdraw, despite her curiosity; then she
bethought herself of her inexplicable intrusion, the breach of good
manners on which she piqued herself, and thus of her errand.
“I knocked, but nobody answered,” she observed primly and politely,
although her bead-like eyes, glancing to and fro, were distended to a
degree which had no precedent of elasticity in their experience, as she
noted the paucity of the furniture, the dust, the fireless hearth. “The
door was on the jar, an’ I ’lowed I’d push it open, an’ mebbe would
see one o’ the wimmen-folks o’ the fambly.” She said this with a manner
which implied that she did not preferably confer with the men-folks.
She assumed a matronly air as she proceeded: “I be a-sarchin’ fur my
leetle boy ez strayed off from home. Mebbe some o’ the wimmen-folks hev
seen him—ef they air up an’ doin’.” Thus she conveyed a reproof upon his
seeming sloth and late hours. Once more her bead-like eyes quickly took
an inventory of the belongings. “Whar be the wimmen-folks? A-washin’ of
clothes at the spring—_of a Wednesday_?”
Perhaps it was a pity, for the sake of discipline in the abstract and the
promulgation of correct housekeeping principles, that these were merely
mythical women to whose methods Mrs. Bowles thus definitely made known
her objections. A somewhat lively life she might have led them on the
Great Smoky, despite the wide, unpopulous stretches of wilderness. She
turned her head as she stood on the vantage-ground of the doorstep which
commanded the descent to the left of the cabin, where the path in sinuous
vagaries led down among the bowlders to the spring. The growth about it
was leafless now, and she could see the steely gleam of the water under
the dull gray sky. It did not seem to move; its margin was solitary; no
whisking, spiral twirls of smoke climbed that unwilling gray sky; no
flash of red and yellow flames made cheerful the dull, dun wintry day,
merrily wreathing about the great wash-kettle, and singing a roundelay
with the bubble of the boiling water, and the sharp crackling of the
briery fuel, and the strokes of the paddles beating the clothes white as
behooved them; no agents of all this domestic industry were visible, with
skirts pinned back and sleeves rolled up. Some such picture Mrs. Bowles’s
expectation had projected upon the gray background of wood and mountain;
she turned with a bewildered stare from the blank nullity of the
prospect. Her flexible lips were more firmly compressed, the bead-like
gleam of her eyes more definitely antagonistic, as she looked again at
the recumbent figure. The tears had sprung to Rathburn’s eyes,—he was so
weak, so full of pain, the deliverance she had brought near so sorely
needed, so beyond all license of hope! He could hardly speak in answer to
her query, and when he did a sob was in his throat.
“Don’t you see what’s the matter?” Once more her unfriendly eyes dilated.
“Laziness,” she declared unequivocally. “Though I reckon ye’d ’low ye
air ailin’ somehows.” She turned to go. “Waal, I hev got no time ter
waste. I’ll jes’ leave”—She was about to leave her respects for the
“wimmen-folks,” then concluded to deprive of the honor any housekeepers
who maintained a hearth like that.
A low cry escaped Rathburn’s lips; he held out his hand. “Don’t you see
I am dying—I am dying?” he exclaimed. “I have been murdered! I have
been shot and left for dead!” Mrs. Bowles stared speechless at him. “Do
you live near here? Can you get me away from this accursed place?” he
continued,—“anywhere—anywhere to die but on this floor!”
“I live a good piece off,” she replied. “Yander at the Notch. I be Mis’
Bowles.” Then with a sudden recollection of his ecstatic cry “Marcella!”
she added, “Ef ye air ’quainted in the Cove, ye mus’ hev hearn tell ’bout
me. I war M’ria White.” The name woke no responsive recognition in his
face; he seemed agitated, exhausted, almost spent. “I be kin ter Marcelly
Strobe—ye hev hearn her talk ’bout’n me?”
His tact was not prolonged beyond his other waning faculties. He
forlornly shook his head, and Mrs. Bowles’s face suddenly hardened. He
had had something better, perchance, to talk of with Marcella Strobe; and
he evidently had never even heard her name. They had already forgotten
her in those precincts of the Cove,—forgotten her as if she had been
carried away to her lifeless grave in the little burying-ground instead
of her living grave up on the mountain. A cynical sob rose into the
throat of the exile. A forlorn yearning she experienced, very poignant,
for all it was so pitiful a paradise from whose meagre joys she was
excluded.
“I reckon yer folks will be back presently. I mus’ be a-goin’,” she said
stiffly.
“I have no folks!” he exclaimed, his eyes once more wide with the terror
of being deserted. “I have been shot—Baintree, Jake Baintree, shot me,
and has gone. Nobody lives here,—nobody! He left me here to die.”
He could not account for the terror in Mrs. Bowles’s face. She turned
very pale; she had backed toward the door. “I ’lowed ye talked sorter
funny,—sorter like they say the valley folks do. I mought hev knowed
ye warn’t from this kentry. I’m sorry fur ye, but I be ’feard o’ the
moonshiners myself, an’”—
“I’m not a revenue officer!” Rathburn almost screamed, divining her
thoughts, so well had he come to know the country people and their state
of mind toward the officials of the Revenue Department. “I’m just a plain
fool.”
She hesitated. Somewhere in her limited spiritual capacity there was
conscience enough to rebel against passing by on the other side. She
looked at him more wistfully than might have seemed possible to those
bright, soulless eyes.
“We have been trying to find silver,” he gasped. “Baintree killed Samuel
Keale in this same business, and now he has tried to kill me.” The
significant name, the mysterious tragedy, the bootless search for the
precious metal, were all long familiar to her, and coerced belief in any
subsequent development that might be predicated upon them. He noted the
change in her face. “I wonder you have heard nothing about my being here;
everybody in the Cove knows it now.”
Mrs. Bowles winced to be found ignorant of what everybody knew.
Nevertheless she was equal to the occasion. “I be sech a stay-at-home,”
she said, her red lips parting over her fine teeth in a pleasant smile.
“The mos’ o’ the news I know is what my chil’n air a-doin’ of, an’ how
the pig-pen an’ the poultry air a-thrivin’.”
She is not the first woman of frustrated worldly ambitions who makes a
boast of simple domesticity. But it was a sentiment eminently beguiling
to the masculine mind.
She saw approval in his eyes; she saw, too, how handsome they were,
albeit so hollow,—how intelligent. She relished an admiration calculated
to be so discriminating. There was, however, nothing of the married
coquette in Mrs. Bowles, and her manner was all that a discreet matron’s
might be. The utterly dead and cold aspect of the fireplace struck her
anew as she came forward into the room. She was not a logical reasoner,
but the dislocation of the domestic situation was sufficiently marked
to smite even her ill-developed appreciation of cause and effect. “Who
gin ye yer breakfus’?” she demanded, pausing to look down from under the
roseate brim of her pink sun-bonnet.
He pointed at the broken fragments on the floor, beside the overturned
table. “The rats,” he said scornfully, but with tears in his eyes. “They
have had a high old time dragging these scraps about the floor, and they
were good enough to leave some in my reach.”
Mrs. Bowles’s shallow, round, shiny eyes looked from him to the bits he
indicated, as if with difficulty she grasped the idea that a day could be
begun, the light dawn, the sun go through the ceremony of rising, without
the equally natural and essential phenomena of the getting of breakfast
and the subsequent washing of dishes. “Waal, sir!” she exclaimed beneath
her breath, coping at last with this revulsion of nature. “I’ll make some
coffee fust thing,” she added aloud. “Leastwise,” she continued, her eyes
dwelling with disfavor on the array of cooking utensils, “ef thar’s enny
sech thing ez gittin’ some o’ the grime off’n that thar coffee-pot.”
A starving man lay on the floor, but the coffee-pot in question was
scoured outside with ashes, as well as inside, before the coffee was
ground and set to boil; even the coffee-mill came in for energetic
discipline of this sort, Mrs. Bowles merely replying to Rathburn’s
insistence that he did not care, and that she need not be so particular,
by the tart inquiry, “Don’t ye know dirt is pizen?” which choice axiom
of toxicology he was at liberty to add to his store of scientific lore
at his leisure. The reclaimed coffee-pot shone very cheerful as it sat,
somewhat battered as to shape, upright on a trivet over the live coals;
and it began almost straightway to gurgle and to sing, and to give out
a most refreshing fragrance. The fire seemed lean, somehow, after all
its beds of ashes had been removed, for Mrs. Bowles sharply announced
that she “warn’t used to no such slack-twisted ways of keepin’ a
h’a’th-stone,” and wondered that he was not worse off than he was, being
evidently of the opinion that the surplus of ashes was as pernicious
to the health as Jake Baintree’s bullet. The spare brightness of the
flames illumined all the room; the radiance cheered him; the warmth was
a luxury; and as he drank the coffee she brought him in a cup, also
chastened with severe applications of soap and water, he looked at her
with great gratitude, and declared that he could never thank her.
“Waal, now, don’t ye _do_ it!” she said, flashing her bright dark eyes
at him, and showing all her fine teeth. She sat in one of the rickety
chairs beside the hearth, resting from her culinary exertions; the tint
of her crisp pink dress here and there deepened and paled as the glow of
the fire rose and fell; her face, still shaded by the pink sun-bonnet,
was a trifle flushed, and its plump curves were illumined by the glancing
light. A placid content rested upon her features. A cultured criticism
could never have deemed her beautiful, but she seemed a well-favored
creature, pleasing to look upon, and of the kindliest expression. She
had not at first impressed Rathburn thus, and he wondered at it as he
lay comforted and tended, and enjoying the fire, and the cleanly aspect
of things, and the good coffee, and the cheerful sight of her. In truth
a change had been wrought in Mrs. Bowles’s outlook at life within the
last hour. It is a truism that all is for the best, but we accept it
in exactly the proportion in which the dispensation adjusts itself to
the requirements of our scheme of things. Mrs. Bowles found it easier
to recognize the utility in Rathburn’s misfortunes than the sufferer
himself might have readily been brought to do. The fact that her benign
ministrations to the wounded man, at the brink of starvation, would be
noised abroad throughout Broomsedge Cove, the excitement and sensation
that so unusual an incident as her discovery of Baintree’s victim in
the nick of time would necessarily rouse, must serve to mitigate any
harsh criticism of her conduct to the fugitive Bob, if not altogether
to nullify it. Possibly her absence from home in the guise of good
Samaritan would suffice to explain any commotion in the deserted domestic
sphere, even Bob’s flight itself. No one need know which had first
left the roof. Her eyes, full of forecast, were on the floor. Her lips
were adjusted primly as the words were dumbly fashioned upon them. “I
reckon Bob mus’ hev strayed off through sarchin’ fur me,”—she fancied
herself thus accounting for the incident. What more natural to say and
to credit? Rathburn’s self-esteem had been grievously cut down of late,
but even in its reduced estate he could never have dreamed that the chief
significance of Baintree’s crime and his own deep wounds could be to any
one merely the means of innocuously accounting for the small Bob Bowles’s
flight from his home. He had not yet finished his coffee. He was too
feeble to take more than a few swallows at long intervals. Mrs. Bowles
fixed her eyes upon him from time to time, evidently expecting that he
would hand back the cup, and waiting to wash it. In the mean while she
renewed her canvass of the place. “I ’low ez Jake Baintree mought hev
been sati’fied ’thout turnin’ the furniture topsy-turvy,” she commented
upon the overturned table. She rose as she spoke and righted the article
in question, gathering up the fragments of bread and the broken crockery,
and going to the door to throw them out. “I’d like ter sweep this hyar
floor. I reckon the dust wouldn’t choke ye much.” She spoke in a tone
that curiously partook of a demand as of a right, and yet of a request as
for a favor. She gazed searchingly into the corners. “Laws-a-massy!” she
cried, her voice striking the high key of mingled surprise and ridicule.
“I don’t believe the man hev so much ez got a broom!”
Albeit this praiseworthy intention was thus frustrated, she still dwelt
upon the incidents of the floor. “Air that Baintree’s shootin’-iron?” she
asked, with knitted brows, as she noted the revolver.
“No, mine,” said Rathburn.
“Did you-uns shoot back?” demanded Mrs. Bowles judicially, evidently not
to be prejudiced against the absent Baintree.
“I?” exclaimed Rathburn. “I was asleep.”
Mrs. Bowles turned suddenly pale. “Ye warn’t a-fightin’?” she asked,
amazed.
“I tell you I was asleep,” said Rathburn angrily, the blood rising to his
face. “We had had a quarrel”—
“What about?” interrupted Mrs. Bowles, eagerly relishing gossip so highly
flavored, so fraught with danger, as this.
Rathburn was nothing loath. His attack upon Baintree seemed so small
a matter in comparison with the dastardly crime which his enemy had
committed that he had lost all the sense of humiliation, of repentance,
that had so oppressed him. “Why, I made him tell me where that man Samuel
Keale lost his life. That’s where I believe silver is to be found.”
Mrs. Bowles glanced over her shoulder with a gleam of scornful laughter.
All unmindful, Rathburn went on:—
“I choked him till he told me. He wouldn’t tell me till I had half choked
the life out of him.”
“They say they can’t try him no mo’ fur that nohow,” she said. “I dunno
what ails him ter be so tongue-tied ’bout’n it now. Whar war the place?”
she queried, in sheer curiosity. She evidently attached little importance
to his answer. She cared naught for justice in the abstract, and she
had no special enmity toward Baintree. She leaned forward after she had
spoken, and mended the fire, which was beginning to show a tendency to
smoke.
“That’s the queerest turn of all,” said Rathburn. A gleam of excitement
shone in his eyes. “He tracked this man Keale to a cave; he never saw him
again. There were the prints of feet about the place, and the cave was on
Teck Jepson’s land.”
The half-burned fagot fell from Mrs. Bowles’s hand with a sharp crash
upon the hearth; the smoke curled out into the room unheeded. Still
bending over the fire, she turned her head and fixed upon him excited
eyes, in which suspicion smouldered. “Teck Jepson!” she cried. “His bones
hid in a cave on Jepson’s land! No wonder the jury floundered an’ the law
failed! Jepson! ah—h!” Her eyes narrowed and her lip curled. “I’ll be
bound Teck Jepson hed a hand in Keale’s takin’-off; ennybody mought hev
suspicioned it—ah—h!”
“I never said that,” stipulated Rathburn warily, animated by that
reluctance felt by all civilized men to unnecessarily assume
responsibility. “I only know that I forced Baintree to tell where the
place was,—fairly choked the words out of him; and because I declared
that I would search that cave of Jepson’s he shot me while I was asleep,
and left me for dead—with my own revolver. Why, this old thing,” he said,
clasping its handle, “I couldn’t tell when it has been discharged. He had
to clean it—rusty old”—
“Put it down,—put it down!” cried Mrs. Bowles, with an unwonted show of
timidity, and shrinking back against the jamb of the chimney. “I can’t
abide them bob-tailed shootin’-irons,—I can’t place no dependence in ’em
like rifles; they look ter me ez ef they’d ez soon go off ez not, an’ a
leetle ruther.”
Rathburn had ceased to meddle with the “bob-tailed shootin’-iron,” and
went on: “He not only shot me twice, so determined was he to have me
silenced and dead and out of the way, but long afterward—the next day, or
the next—he came there to that slit in the window, to look in and make
sure that he had done his work thoroughly.”
Mrs. Bowles turned half-way round in her chair, and fixed her dilated,
startled eyes upon the crevice, as if she expected to see the long, keen,
narrow face, with its furtive, crafty glance, peering through. “I lay as
stiff and as rigid as a corpse could,” Rathburn went on. “I’ll bet you
there was a glaze on my eyes, half shut I held ’em— What’s the matter?
Where are you going?” he broke off suddenly.
For Mrs. Bowles had risen so precipitately, with so wild an aspect, that
despite the stiff neatness of her starched pink skirts and sun-bonnet
she seemed suddenly disheveled. Her face was blanched, her eyes moved
restlessly about. “Oh, my Lord!” she exclaimed, “I mus’ be a-goin’—I mus’
be a-gittin’ away from hyar—I—I—I’m ’feard o’ Jake Baintree.”
“One minute,—wait one minute!” cried Rathburn, lifting himself upon his
elbow, dismayed by the result of his graphic description of Baintree’s
visit. “He only came once,—that is, so far as I know; he isn’t likely to
come again; he has probably left the country.”
“Shucks!” Mrs. Bowles summarily and contemptuously disposed of his logic,
her suave graces and benign ministering disposition dispersing in thin
air before the approach of personal danger. “Ef what he hev told ’bout
that thar cave on Teck Jepson’s land be wuth killin’ you-uns ’bout,
it air wuth killin’ me too, an’ his comin’ back shows he air powerful
partic’lar ’bout’n his job. Leastwise I ain’t goin’ ter resk his comin’
back agin an’ murderin’ me hyar.” As her roving eye fell upon him, seeing
his pain, his terrible straits, all expressed in his face, she recoiled
a trifle before their dumb, unconscious, pallid reproach. “I have got
a fambly dependin’ on me,” she said justifying her care for personal
safety. She spoke with flabby white lips, and her eyes still maintained
their hasty, restless movements.
“Oh, you’re all right,” Rathburn made haste to stipulate; the touch
of satire in his voice was so light as to be almost unappreciable.
“Altogether a matter of choice. Each for one’s self, and devil take the
hindmost.”
“I’ll put this bread an’ water whar ye kin git it, an’ pile up some wood
hyar so ez ye kin make a fire.”
“When I am able,” he seemed to assent.
“An’”—she turned upon him her disingenuous eyes—“I’ll tell the folks in
the Cove whar ye be, an’ send some of ’em after ye.”
He could not have explained how he knew it so definitely, he pretended to
no gift of forecast, but he was sure that her lips would be sealed so far
as the tragedy in the deserted mountain hut was concerned; that she would
not dare to overtly frustrate Baintree’s vengeance, since he was at large
and bent upon it, or to aid to fix his crime upon him. She would send no
help. She would ostensibly hope that he might recover, but feel that it
was the solution of a dangerous perplexity if he should die, realize how
much she had done for his comfort, and reflect that in no event was it
any affair of hers.
“If it would take no more time, I’d thank you instead to buckle the girth
of the saddle about that gray mare of mine, and hitch her bridle to the
ring at the door. I may take a little ride to-day. Oh, I’m a great deal
stronger than you think.” He smiled affably to meet her dismayed glance.
She stood motionless, doubting and deliberating. He looked like death;
but he was a physician,—he had told her this,—and he was a better judge
of his strength than she. She could not retrieve the fact that she had
been here and become cognizant of Baintree’s crime, thereby incurring
danger from him, and this Rathburn might detail whenever liberated.
If perchance he should ride boldly down into the Cove,—it seemed
impossible,—the story of her desertion of him in such a time of need
would furnish a terrible supplement as well as convincing proof of any
deductions of cruelty to the fugitive Bob. Without this incident, indeed,
Bob’s flight could hardly be innocuously passed over.
He could not understand the change in her face; it brightened with sudden
resolution.
“Why, to be sure I kin,” she said cordially. “An’ mebbe ye kin kem
right along down the mounting arter me inter the Cove. I’d wait fur ye,
’ceptin’ I be ’bleeged ter look arter that leetle boy o’ mine; it pesters
me mightily ter hev ter leave ye, an ef ’twarn’t ez I be bound ter go
down inter the Cove I’d ax ye ter kem an’ bide at my house.”
It assuaged her discontent in some sort to be able to go through this
form of hospitality, meaningless as it was, for nothing could have
induced her to harbor a man with a dangerous secret like this, and whose
death Jake Baintree, already red-handed, sought.
“Thank you very much,” Rathburn said civilly, but glad to show his
independence. “I reckon I had better go to the Cove, to some friends I
have there,—the Strobe family. I know they will take me in.”
She once more remembered his ecstatic cry of “Marcella!” when she first
stood in the door. She grudged a guest of this quality to the Strobes,
albeit she had no wish to open her own house. She supposed it possible
that they had made his acquaintance through Eli’s machinations with the
strings of government. She had always believed that there was much social
advantage in politics. Being so debarred, she was keener of perception in
this regard, and quicker to appraise such opportunities than most of the
mountaineers.
She carried these thoughts with her while she buckled the saddle-girth
about the mare, glancing fearfully ever and anon over her shoulder at
the gray solitudes glooming round. If he were strong enough to reach the
Cove, he would compass this without her aid, and would have much of her
dereliction to report. If he were not strong enough, he would die by
the way, and thus would tell no secrets, either of the crime that Jake
Baintree had committed, or of the knowledge of it that she reluctantly
possessed. The mare was a tall beast, frisky and fat, and unused to being
handled by women. She lowered her head and flung up her heels as the pink
skirts swayed about her hoofs, but bridled and saddled she was at last,
and the hitching rein was slipped through the ring on the door.
Mrs. Bowles was a little hasty in her leave-taking. “I’ll tell the
Strobes they mought ez well look out ter see ye, eh?” she called through
the half-open door.
“If you will oblige me,” he responded in turn.
There was naught of offense in the tone and the words, but her face was
lowering beneath her jaunty pink-head-gear as she once more slipped her
foot in the stirrup, glad enough to feel it there again, and mounted into
her worn old sidesaddle. “Perliteness is on his lips, but not in his
heart,” she said bitterly, for there are none who so resent insincerity
as the insincere.
As she jogged off down the bridle-path, she noted the threatening aspect
of the day. All above the circling sombre purple mountains, on every
side, darkening clouds hung in sinister abeyance. Below in the Cove, the
stretches of the broomsedge flared, in its tawny ruddy tint the only
suggestion of sunshine in the landscape; where the forests intervened,
the thickly massed myriads of bare boughs, even the heavily draped
branches of the pines, were null as to color, and lurked darkling in the
valleys, intensifying the great gloom of the scene. Only far away could
she see lighter tints, albeit of a gray diffusiveness, and this was
along the summit of a distant range, where the nebulosity of the cloud
had been resolved into vague slanting lines intimating rainfall. The
weather could hardly be more unpropitious for her journey to the Cove,
but with the recent events in the forlorn little shanty in mind, with
the terror of the possible propinquity of the murderous Baintree lurking
in the wintry woods somewhere, she did not hesitate, she had no wish to
linger. Only once she looked back: when she had progressed so far down
the descent, at a thumping, lunging walk,—for her horse had a gait unique
in its way, especially adapted to these precipitous descents and slippery
verges of the Great Smoky,—that another turn amongst the leafless wands
of the undergrowth would conceal the house from view, she halted for a
moment, and glanced over her shoulder. The ragged, bare slope of the
mountain stretched high above; amongst the leafless boughs of the gnarled
old trees, imposed in definite lines against the slate-tinted sky, she
saw the wreathing blue smoke of the fire she had made, and beneath the
branches at the end of the vista, the little hut, the oblique line of the
gray roof cut sharply against the sombre purple masses of a neighboring
mountain visible across the valley. The door was shut, and there rode
down the path, mounted upon the gray mare, an emaciated figure, with a
face all pallid and ghostly in the dim light of the day; and Mrs. Bowles,
although unimaginative, received a terrible suggestion of the Biblical
Death upon the pale horse, as the rider came swaying in the saddle
between the slate-colored clouds and the purple-black mountains in those
forlorn altitudes, where solitude possessed the wilderness and the storm
impended.
“He can’t keep the saddle fur haffen the way,” she said to herself.
Then she turned, and urged her horse down and down the descent, losing
as she went, being considerably in advance, the sound of the hoofs that
followed.