After the momentary shock of sudden panic the scattered auditors began
shamefacedly drifting back for inquiry and a solution.
Newt Spooner saw General Braden and a companion carrying the limp figure
of the mountain lawyer down the stairway of the platform and heard them
cursing the lawlessness of the mountaineers who, "having made an
excursion from their own shambles were waging their damnable war on the
streets of a civilized town."
He saw the crowd opening to let out several men who bore another
prostrate figure, and, as they passed, one glance at the face, which had
fallen back, loose-jawed, between the supporting arms, told him that
some one had "gotten" Jake Falerin. Then he saw the town marshal,
supported by half-dozen volunteer deputies, fighting for a passage
through the throng with the prisoners, whose bodies they shielded with
their own. This group made its way up the stairs, and flattened itself
against the court-house wall.
Behind the drawn revolvers of the guard, the late convict recognized the
faces of Red Newton and his accomplice. Already the crowd, which had a
moment before been in panic-stricken flight, was pressing menacingly
forward, and talk of lynching ran like wildfire from mouth to mouth. The
officer was brandishing his pistol, and two of the volunteers were
holding aloft, in show of force, the revolvers they had taken from the
captives, whom they were waiting to slip through the court-house halls
to the jail. Someone had gone around to unlock the doors.
The prisoners themselves stood stoically enough with mask-like faces,
and if the roar of bluegrass wrath intimidated them, their eyes and lips
showed no trace.
The countenance of Red Newton even wore a satirical smile as he
commented to the other Spooner, loudly enough to be heard around a wide
radius:
"These-here furriners air shore hell-bent on law an' order, hain't they?
They're bounden fer ter have hit, even if they has ter lynch folks ter
git hit."
Then the door opened, and the officer with his prisoners backed swiftly
through it and slammed it in the faces of the crowd. Newt calmly walked
down the stairs, and strolled along the street. At a corner, he saw
Black Pete leaning nonchalantly against the wall in conversation with a
farmer, who was roundly berating the violence of the mountaineers. The
Deacon was chewing a wooden toothpick and regarding his chance companion
with grave and respectful attention, nodding his head in approval of the
sentiments expressed, but, as Newt passed him, he fell into step, and
the two walked together toward Mr. Cawsler's restaurant.
"Son," suggested the quiet giant who had arranged the little tragedy of
the afternoon, "this town's going to be a right-bad place for us
mountain men for a time. If I was you, I'd dig out."
"Thet's my business," retorted the other sullenly. "I've got a matter
ter settle up, fust--besides I reckon I kin prove I didn't have no hand
in these doin's. I was havin' speech with the policeman when hit busted
loose."
The Deacon came as near smiling as he ever came. One side of his long
mustache tilted up, but his eyes remained sadly grave.
"I reckon I can prove that I didn't have no part in it, either," he said
easily. "But some of these Falerins have seen me around town, and I
reckon they'll try to get me implicated. That Falkins crowd suspects
everybody. Come in here with me a minute, son."
The Deacon turned and led the way into a saloon, already noisy with
excited men having recourse to drink and discussion.
They passed through the place and into the yard at the rear, where,
after a look around to assure himself that they were alone, the older
man drew a heavy revolver from under his coat.
"If they try to get me into it," he said calmly, "I'm going to make them
search me. Keep my gun for me a while, if you don't mind. You were with
the policeman, and they won't suspicion you."
For a moment Newt hesitated, then came the thought of his own affairs. A
weapon was what, above all other things, he needed. Accordingly, he
took it silently, and slipped it inside his coat, and without a word or
a nod turned and walked back through the saloon, to disappear beyond its
swinging screens.
When night came a two-thirds moon rode high and paled the summer stars
into pin-points. Newt Spooner knew from talk on the streets that the
lawyer would recover to reap greater reputation from the affair in
which, even after leaving the storm of his own country, he had fallen
under a mountain hand. But Jake Falerin would reap nothing from the
afternoon's doings beyond an obituary in the newspapers: an obituary
which would recount a sanguinary career closed with a sanguinary climax.
These matters, however, gave Newt only minor concern. He was not to be
shaken from a fixed resolve by other men's hopes or disappointments.
Nightfall found him trudging out the moon-bathed turnpike between the
blue and silver mists of the fields; because, though uninvited, he was
going to a party. He was not going as a guest, nor yet wholly as an
onlooker. If one man was not among the guests, he would turn back from
the fringe of the festivity, touching it no further. If that one man was
there, Newt Spooner meant to break up the party, and add a sequel to the
shocking transpirings of the afternoon.
Many buggies passed him, driving slowly, for the night was gracious with
the sweet fragrance of the young summer, and the occupants of the
vehicles were young, too, and no part of a summer dance is better than
the going thither and the coming home. From this caravan came the music
of much laughter, and now and then the lilting of a song: sounds as
unaccustomed to Newt Spooner as grand opera. But the only impression
made on him was the realization that he was too early; so, when he found
a thick grove flanking the road, he climbed the fence and lay down under
a hedge and rested. While he was stretched there in the dewy grass, he
cocked and uncocked the revolver to make sure that, when he needed it,
it would not fail him.
It was a night for lovers and lovers were availing themselves of it, but
to Newt Spooner the seductive whispers through the upper branches of the
oaks carried no message of peace or minstrelsy. Yet, even to him, there
was a dumb sense that life here in the great "down below" was a
different thing, and, as he lay there fingering the mechanism of his
revolver, he could not escape a large and disturbing wonderment. The
breadth of the sky made him feel small and alone in the center of
vastness. At home, mountain walls rose confiningly on all sides and one
looked up at a narrowed patch of stars as if from the depth of a great
well. But here one could gaze away on the level of the eyes and watch
the wonderful phenomenon of a heaven coming down with its stars to meet
the edge of the flattened earth. At home, one would ride the dirt roads
on muleback and in silence, save where the hoofs splashed along the
creek-beds. But here the horses beat a sharp rat-tat with metal shoes on
a metaled road, and the rubber-tired wheels ran noiselessly. These
people, too, reversed the order of things even as their country reversed
them. At home, almost every one was poor; here every one seemed rich,
and the women, whom every mountaineer knows should be treated as
inferiors, suited only to the tasks of housework and child-rearing, were
treated by the men as equals. That he knew from the chatter and laughter
of those who passed in earshot, driving two and two. And what fools they
all were, for surely no people who were not fools could chatter and
laugh and sing!
After an hour, the buggies passed less frequently, leaving the road free
of travel, except for town-faring negroes on foot and singing. Then Newt
Spooner came out from behind his hedge and made his way once more along
the turnpike. What his eyes had once seen his memory retained with
photographic distinctness, and as soon as he reached the beginning of
the low stone fence, which he had noted that afternoon, he knew that he
was drawing near the dance.
But Newt would have known that he was near his destination without the
fence, for already, though blurred by the distance into an indistinct
and formless spot of brightness and color, he could make out the
illumination of the Chinese lanterns and there came to his ears across
the softness of the night the merry strains of a band playing a
two-step.
The mountain boy made a rapid survey. The house sat deeply back in the
woodland, some five hundred yards from the road, but the platform,
though almost directly at its front, lay nearer the farther side. The
lateral fences of the woodland were lined with locust groves, giving a
band of shadow along the edges. He might have crossed the fence at the
nearest corner and worked his way back, but time was not an object, and
so, before selecting his route, he went along the turnpike to the other
side of the place for fuller reconnaissance, and found there even better
and more continuous cover. Also, by taking that side, he was further
from the driveway and would arrive closer to the platform without
leaving the shadow. As Newt crossed into the woodland, he became
invisible, thanks to the inky shade of the locusts, just now heavy with
fragrance of bloom. The thickets of his own rhododendron and laurel
could not have availed him more serviceably. At his left were acres of
undulating bluegrass, broken generously with forest trees, and between
the trees lay a silver lake of open moonlight, dotted with islands of
shadow. But, by following the fence line back, he could invisibly draw
near to the platform, and creep still closer under the shelter of a
heavy growth of lilac bushes.
Suddenly, the mountain boy's heart began to pound in a strange way. He
had never been afraid of anything and he was not afraid now, but as he
crept, like a woodland animal, close enough to take in details, he felt
as a man might feel who finds himself pursuing an enemy on Mars. He was
in a new world and one so strange to him that its very difference
brought a sense of misgiving. He had been born and reared in a
windowless mountain cabin of one room. His light at night had been that
of crackling logs on a stone hearth and a single lamp without a chimney.
He had heard hatred of enemies preached before he could talk himself.
That his present purpose was righteous, he passionately believed; that
one should pay his blood-debt seemed axiomatic. Yet, as he looked out,
he could not shake off that sense of strange uneasiness. Something was
wrong. Perhaps it was simply the inarticulate realization that the scene
was set for merry-making and not for tragedy. At home, it was different.
The mountains were sterner and bred sterner emotions. The darkness there
seemed grimmer, too. This was not the night or place for a murder.
Criss crossed about the platform and between the trees swayed the vivid
color splashes of the lanterns, like magnified and luminous confetti.
Sifting and eddying on the swaying floor went the rhythmic whirlpool of
dancers. The soft colors of evening gowns, the ivory flashes of girlish
shoulders and the floating of filmy scarfs dizzied the boy, who by the
iron dictate of heredity and upbringing was a human rattle-snake. The
strange sight of men in evening dress, their shirt-fronts gleaming like
conspicuous targets, added to his bewilderment.
Between the trees passed strolling couples whose laughter lilted
musically, and, as he crept nearer in the shadow of the lilac bushes, he
saw a queer little affair which was also new to him, only a few yards
away. It was a rustic summer-house, over the timbers of which trailed
masses of honey-suckle, and into it, as he lay there peering sharply
ahead, went a man and a girl. The man was dutifully wielding a fan after
the flush of the dance and talking earnestly in a low tone, and the girl
was laughing up into his face with a silvery softness so unlike the
nasal voices of his own kind that Newt could make nothing of it. Nowhere
was the hint of hardship: the hardship which was in his country life's
dominant note. Back at the rear in the moonlight, the whitewashed barns
and fences gleamed like structures of ivory.
He lay there on his stomach, his elbows on the ground and his chin in
his hands, trying to search the faces of the dancers. But the dancers
shifted and sifted in so bewildering a maze that even had they been
nearer at hand he could hardly have identified familiar features. Then
the music stopped, and he drew a breath of relief, for the platform
partly emptied itself, and, as the couples came down and strolled under
the lanterns, it was easier to search for the face he wanted to see.
Newt Spooner had been there perhaps an hour while waltz and two-step
alternated to set the human mass he was trying to sift into fresh and
maddening puzzles of rapid movement and vagueness. At the distance he
had decided it was hopeless, and though the summer-house under the
honey-suckle seemed a favorite retreat to which couple after couple came
for a moment of rest and innocent flirtation, it had not proved a Mecca
for his victim, if indeed his victim were there at all. Of this
possibility he now felt a diminishing credulity. He would, nevertheless,
try to slip closer for a final scrutiny and then go back to town,
admitting temporary defeat. Then, as with snake-like movements he was
hitching himself forward, he suddenly stopped and crouched closer to the
ground and held his intaken breath in his throbbing throat.
A new couple came out of the shadow and strolled across the patch of
open moonlight toward the summer-house. The girl was she who had picked
him up on the road, and the man was Henry Falkins. Even in evening
dress, there was no mistaking the features, and that shirt-front was a
target to even an amateur's taste.
The girl wore a filmy gown and about her bare shoulders was thrown some
silky thing as iridescent as gossamer. But, unlike those others who had
come there, she was not laughing.
Instead, she was looking up with a very direct gaze into the man's face,
and her eyes and lips bore a somewhat wistful seriousness.
At the front of the summer-house, her companion stopped and broke a
spray of bloom from the vine.
"It always reminds me of you," he told her in a soft voice. "There may
be sweeter fragrances, but I doubt it. I guess that's why."
He lifted a drooping branch of leaf and bloom, and she passed under his
arm.
Newt Spooner was lying only a few yards away, but he must be closer. The
mass of vine obscured his line of vision, and he had no wish to kill
the girl. Behind his ambuscade of trellised supports, he could come near
enough to reach his hand through and touch his victim if he chose. It
was almost too simple--too easy. Yet, after all, it was a bad
arrangement, though that he could not remedy. He must announce himself
to the man he meant to kill, or defeat the satisfaction of revenge. To
let him die without realizing why would rob the punishment of its sting.
Then the woman would doubtless make an outcry, and his chance of escape
would end. Besides that there was a second objection: the girl had
befriended him. He was to some extent "beholden to her." He wished now
that he had refused to drive with her; but, when he had accepted her
invitation, he had had no idea that his purpose could concern her, and
his purpose came first.
Newt Spooner drew very near. He cautiously pulled back a branch of the
honey-suckle, and looked through. The girl was sitting with her eyes
downcast, and the man standing with one knee on the rough bench. He was
leaning forward and his voice, though tense with earnestness, was almost
a whisper. Newt might at that moment have been noisy instead of
noiseless without danger of distracting the attention of that man and
woman.
At home in the mountains, Henry Falkins would have been more wary, but
here in the bluegrass he had laid aside all thoughts of danger, as he
had laid aside his high-laced boots and corduroys. He was standing at
the other side of life's gamut. Enmity, for him, did not exist. The
universe was filled, he believed at that moment, to the boundary of the
last sentinel star with love. The night breathed it. He was breathing
it, the girl's eyes were just then raised to meet his, brimming with a
light that set his pulses bounding.
"Back there in the hills," he said, "there is a place high up the
mountainside that looks down on such a night as this over an ocean of
silver mists in the valley. I have often gone there alone and listened
to the nightingale talking about you. After this," he added joyously,
"all nights will be moonlight and starlight for me, dear, if--" But
there he broke off and became silent.
Newt Spooner advanced one knee a few inches, and steadied his position.
He drew the vine back a little further with his left hand, and slowly
thrust his right into his coat pocket. When it came back, it held the
pistol, and this Newt placed at his back, that the soft click of its
cocking might be muffled by his intervening body.
* * * * *
The stars were as bright and the moon as serene that night back in the
broken ramparts of the mountains as here in the lowlands. No hint of
brewing tragedy disturbed the majesty of the summits that raised their
crests into the cobalt, or marred the silvery flood that bathed the
valleys.
Where the college buildings nestled in a tidy village near the waters of
Fist-fight Creek, the picture was a nocturne that must have brought joy
to the heart of a painter whose soul responds to the beautiful.
Already, in the dormitories, most of the children were asleep, but one
girl, who was half child and half woman, crept noiselessly down the
stairs of the building where she had her room, and made her way to the
creek-bank.
She had spent a longer time over her studies than had her fellow pupils,
because in her serious little breast burned a hunger for that education
which might open new ways and make for her a life beyond the
imprisonment of her environment.
In years, Minerva Rawlins was a child, but the life of her people brings
early maturity and into her little brain had recently been creeping the
restlessness of new things--and of womanhood. To-night, the plaintive
call of the whippoorwills from the deep shadows of the timber was a call
to be under open skies, where the thoughts that assailed her might not
feel cramped within walls. There were many things of which she must
think--and it happened that the subject uppermost in her mind was Henry
Falkins.
She went with lithe tread and pliant carriage down beyond the saw-mill
to a spot where the sycamores hung low by the waters that swirled in a
cascade over a litter of huge rocks. On the steep mountainside beyond,
the flowering laurel and rhododendron were thick, and the forests hardly
showed a scar from the axes that had claimed the timber for the
buildings. She had discovered that here through a gap between two
summits she could see the same pale star to which the single pine had
pointed back there from the front door of the cabin, which, wretched as
it was, had been her only idea of home. In the silvers and grays and
cobalts of the picture, and in the night song of the whippoorwills and
booming frogs, there was solace, and to-night she wanted solace.
She told herself that this restlessness which would not let her sleep
was loneliness; but beyond that single feeling were others more complex
for which she had no analysis.
There was the starving eagerness for something very different from what
wares life had ever spread to her gaze, some yearning that had crept
down through lapsed generations from an ancestor or ancestress who had
known the courtly life of Old Virginia before the pioneer tide swept
them westward to their stranding. This hunger was a fiery thing, which
made the eagerness to learn blaze hotly because its attainment meant
struggle.
Then there was the conflict between that loyalty which the code of the
Cumberlands impresses as a cardinal duty upon its children, and an
insurgent hatred for the squalid family into which her father's second
marriage had thrown her.
The law of feudalism and of the clan writes at the head of its
decalogue, "Kith and kin above all." Minerva would have resented an
implication of wanted staunchness, and yet as she sat with her small and
well-chiseled chin cradled in the hands, which drudgery must soon make
hard and shapeless, her eyes filled with tears and her slender body
trembled with instinctive repulsion at the thought of return to the
cabin where the razor-backed hogs would scratch their backs under the
gaping floor timbers, and where darkness hung day-long between
smoke-blackened rafters.
And though she did not admit that either, a part of the restlessness was
the awakening of womanhood, and the woman's hunger for love. She thought
of all the young men she knew back there; of the boorish creatures whose
breath reeked with moonshine whiskey, and whose thoughts were as coarse
as their brogans, and once more a shiver ran through her.
It all made her feel very wicked. She had come to the college and
learned a little, and she had learned above all a fastidious discontent,
which was poisoning her thoughts.
She told herself she ought to be very happy. Then a smile stole across
her face as she sat there in the moonlight, and she drew from the collar
of her calico dress a small medal on a string. It was a medal that had a
few days before been awarded her for proficiency, but to her it stood
for the nearest glimpse she had ever had of romance, though of romance
passing by like a caravan which she had viewed from the wayside.
There had been spelling matches and recitations and the award of small
prizes at the college, and the rough folk had trooped in from the
countryside, riding mules or walking from many miles about. Women had
come in bright-hued calicoes and sun-bonnets, and bearded, gaunt men in
hodden-gray. Through that gathering and above it, since one who is very
young and very inexperienced may be pardoned for a finger-touch from the
gods of romance, a figure had stood out for Minerva Rawlins, endowed
with every superiority.
The guests of honor on that occasion had been Old Mack Falkins and his
son Henry. Old Mack had made a speech and, in awarding the prizes, his
son had followed him. The people of the countryside had listened, and
their applause had rocked the rafters, with that sincerity of admiration
which they accorded to his native-born eloquence. But it was the younger
man who had brought to Minerva Rawlins her first stir of hero-worship;
the adulation of the inexperienced young girl for the first man she had
seen who seemed an exemplar and a revelation.
Comparison is the one yard-stick of life, and by comparison this young
man, who had lived the life of the outer world as well as that at home,
might well have loomed large to such impressionable eyes.
Minerva was seeing that scene again; the school-room with its shuffling
audience, and the young speaker whose words carried no taint of dialect
or inelegance, as he spoke of the torch which was being lighted here to
dispel the murk of illiteracy.
What Henry Falkins had said became in a fashion Minerva's standards. She
found herself hating the lawlessness of the feud and the squalor of
backwoods ignorance. She found herself wishing to be a recruit in the
little army that sought to raise other ideals--but most of all she
found herself longing rebelliously for the chance to have in her own
life the companionship of some man like that. To herself she put it that
way. She did not say _that_ man, but, when she said "some man like
that," the features and bearing and voice of young Falkins portrayed
themselves, and as she sat with the medal in her fingers, listening to
the whippoorwills, her fancy conjured up his image.