Henry Falkins and Lucinda Merton had not kept close count on the flying
moments since they had entered the summer-house. The girl had promised
to sit out two consecutive dances with him, since to-morrow morning he
must go back to the mountains. So, having only a little while and much
to say, he had plunged in, and, though his voice was low, his words came
tumultuously. Of course, she knew that he was in love with her, but
until to-night it had been a thing which had been given no concrete
declaration. Except for a glow of confession in her eyes, she had said
nothing of loving him. Yet now, when he wished to claim every moment for
himself, she had asked him to tell her about his hills and their people,
of whom she and her world knew so little.
"I want you to understand the life and conditions there," he told her,
"and yet I don't want to talk of that to-night. I would like to paint
for you true pictures of my mountains just as they look under this moon,
as they will look when to-morrow's sun comes up over the peaks and
begins to drive away the lingering mists; of the elder bushes and
rhododendron and wild roses that bloom on the tangled slopes; but
to-night I want to talk only of you and me."
He paused, and her voice carried a responsive thrill as she said:
"I should love your mountains! It must all be very beautiful--but so
different from this." Her eyes traveled out with native pride over the
smooth opulence of the country, which had seemed the Promised Land to
the eyes of its pioneer discoverers.
"Yes," he admitted; "it is very different. We have rugged fields and
rugged people. Down here you spring from Cavalier stock. But to-night
there are in the world only ourselves. Let's talk of our private
universe." His voice was feverishly eager. "Until I can in some way
improve my fortunes, God knows I ought to be silent as to love." He
leaned forward and added desperately: "But I can't be silent. After all,
what is the use? You know I love you. If I never spoke a syllable of it,
you would still know it. You can feel it in the tremor of my hand when I
take yours in greeting. And if I lock my lips, my eyes give them the
lie. You know I love you, but you will never know how much."
He leaned forward and his breath came fast while his heart pounded with
the great anxiety of putting his fortunes to the touch. He had knowledge
of other lovers who had come and gone; gone very reluctantly, from the
quest of her heart.
He had known her a year, and friendship had grown into that intimacy
which tacitly admits something deeper than the casual. In her house he
had been accepted almost as a member of the family--but that need not
mean that he was accepted as a lover. In his mountains such an
association would have been tantamount to an engagement, but here in the
bluegrass it was different.
There had been sometimes a quality in her smile which he had never seen
on her lips or in her eyes for other men, and she must know of his love.
Still, he had heretofore been content to hope without certainty--and now
the moment had come when, if he had builded on false dreams, he must
wake to a reality of which he could think only with terror.
For his own crude land, he was a rich man, whose status was the status
of a baron; but, down here in the counties of aristocracy and wealth, he
was poor and a mountaineer.
"I suppose," he went on, with a voice that came from a taut throat,
which he forced into measured syllables, "I suppose that until I can
offer you a home like this, I should not ask you to confess a love for
me, even if you could feel it. I can't even ask you to marry me yet, and
still because you must know it, because you have a heart that must tell
you, it seems to me that it is only hypocritical to lock my lips. My
heart is too full to be damned up. It must have utterance. It must say,
'I love you.' I can't go on any longer being just a favored friend." He
paused a moment and wiped the moisture of his anxiety from his brow, and
his voice was tensely even in its control. "It means too much now, for
that. If I am living in a fool's paradise I must know it before it is
too late. They say we men of the Cumberlands have somber natures that
take things seriously. To hope too long--and then fail--" He broke off
again and added quietly--"that would be a thing that would utterly ruin
me. I love you."
The girl did not at once speak. He saw that her face was downcast and
that her breast rose and fell, in an emotion which might be pity.
Perhaps she, too, found speech difficult because she was merciful. A man
and a girl were coming toward the summer-house, and Henry Falkins
watched them with a fascination of fear lest they interrupt. The seconds
seemed to stretch into an interminable suspense. Slowly he put out his
hand, and took hers. Her fingers trembled in his grasp and slowly he
bent and kissed her lowered head.
"I am waiting," he whispered; but something in the voice said more and
told her of the torture of his doubt.
At last, very slowly, her face came up and her eyes met his. They were
misty eyes, but smiling, and as he bent with a wild leaping of his
pulses and took her in his arms, her lips, too, met his, responsive to
his kisses.
Finally he rose, and now it was his own hands that trembled and his own
senses that swam with the intoxication of a happiness which seemed to
him miraculous.
"I suppose," laughed the girl, "I ought to be ashamed to surrender so
quickly--but I'm not. I'm very proud."
For a moment after that they sat silent and across the moonlight came
the band music and the softened laughter of the dancers. And it was at
that moment that Newt Spooner, so close that they could almost have
heard his breathing, was reaching into his pocket for his borrowed
revolver. The pause was brief, for the girl, looking into her lover's
eyes, became suddenly beset by a new thought--perhaps some subtle
premonition--and in its wake came panic. She laid her hands on his
shoulders and bent so close that he could feel the play of her breath on
his forehead.
"But you are going back there," she exclaimed; "back to the mountains,
and I'm afraid. Are you in any danger, because, if you are, you sha'n't
go! I won't let you go. Why, only to-day, there in Winchester, think
what happened!"
The man laughed.
"I sha'n't be hurt," he assured her. "Your love will be my talisman."
"If my love has such power," she exclaimed, "you will go on living to
the end of time."
He took her two hands in his.
"Let's have no thought of danger to-night," he said. "To-night belongs
to love, dearest: to love and to us."
And that was the exact moment at which Black Pete Spooner closed his
hand over the pistol, thrusting his thumb between hammer and pin, and
his forefinger between trigger and guard.
So suddenly interrupted at the threshold of his attainment, a man from
the lowlands would have betrayed himself with oath or exclamation, or at
least have struggled noisily in the grip that thwarted him. Newt
Spooner was a mountaineer. Ambuscading caution was to him as instinctive
as to the fox or weasel. He felt his hand drawn down at his back so
forcibly that, crouching with his weight on one knee and one foot, he
could not rise--yet he remained utterly noiseless. He carefully turned
his head, and at the distance of a few inches recognized, even in the
darkness, the drooping mustache and square jaw of the Deacon. The Deacon
was holding a finger of the disengaged hand to his lips in an imperative
command for silence. Black Pete was always a diplomat. He regarded this
moment as one of rather desperate crisis, calling for extreme finesse.
No word of explanation could be spoken; the slightest sound of scuffling
would give the alarm fatal to both. He knew that the implacable hatred
of this single-idead boy was not a thing to yield readily. So he
continued to put into his manner and touch something of subtle and
friendly reassurance, lest Newt flare into reckless and needless
antagonism. And Newt felt at the moment a wave of relief in recognizing
one of his own people.
The strategist gently shook the hand which held the weapon in hint that
Newt should surrender it, while he nodded and laid the other hand
conciliatingly on the boy's shoulder. But Newt, although he made no
sound or motion, held tightly to the pistol, and so for a moment while
Henry Falkins was boasting of his safety with the confidence of youth
and love, his intended assassin crouched not six feet away while the
man who sought to prevent his act bent over him, holding his hand, and
the wills of the two wrestled in utter silence.
There is in all leaders, good or bad, a psychological, almost hypnotic
element of power which can, at need, act without words. Black Pete was
recognized so thoroughly as a man of leadership that the enemy talked
peace only on the basis of his exile. Newt Spooner had always regarded
him with awe as the leader of his clan. Moreover, the Deacon's attitude
just now was rather that of a friend who carried a warning than that of
an enemy. The hypnotism of his masterful quiet was telling on the
infuriated boy and yet there flared anew in his breast a dangerous
resentment against the balking of his purpose. How it might have ended
is problematical, but as they held their strained pose, and as Henry
Falkins talked on in false security, a second couple came strolling to
the summer-house. Finding it occupied, they banteringly apologized for
intrusion, while Miss Merton and her escort blushingly declared
themselves on the point of departure, and went back to the dance. So the
chance was gone. Slowly, Newt surrendered his pistol, and the Deacon
silently rose to his feet and pointed off through the bushes. The boy
strode sullenly on ahead and neither he nor his captor made a sound or
spoke a word until they had progressed so far into the shadow that they
were safe from overhearing. Then and then only Newt wheeled. His voice
was almost a sob in its bitter and vibrant passion, as, with blazing
eyes and snarling teeth, he demanded:
"What in hell did ye do thet fur? Damn ye, he b'longs ter me. Ye didn't
hev no call ter interfere." He threw himself prone on the ground,
clawing into it with his lean fingers as a frenzied animal might claw,
and his thin body racked itself with silent sobs of anger and
frustration. It ended in a fit of coughing which he could not control,
and which he smothered in his two hands until the paroxysm passed.
The Deacon sought to soothe him. Most mountaineers speak with a nasal
harshness, but this man had the exceptional quality that gave to his
words an ingratiating and velvety smoothness.
"Don't worry, son. I wouldn't have interfered, only I was obliged to.
He's your enemy, and he did you wrong, but this ain't the moment to kill
him. Go back home and bide your time. If you need help, call on me after
a little."
"Hits as fitten a time es any," blurted Newt tensely. "They hain't no
manner of use puttin' hit off. I tells ye I'm ergwine ter git him. Hit
hain't ergwine ter do no good to argify with me. Nothin' hain't ergwine
ter change me none."
"Son," insisted the other calmly, "I ain't aimin' to change you. I've
never let men change me, have I? But there's a time for everything, an'
just now you must hearken to me." He sketched briefly and forcibly his
interviews in the office of the commonwealth attorney and at the jail.
He enlarged on the fatality of having another shooting by a mountaineer
tread so close on the heels of the first tragedy.
"You ain't aimin' to put these boys' necks into ropes, son," he
suggested chidingly at the end. "You can get your man without makin'
your own kin pay such a steep price. All I ask of you is to pass me your
word that you won't do anything until you get back to the hills. Seems
to me that's fair enough."
Newt sat silent for a time, scowling blackly, but at last he rose and
nodded.
"I gives ye my hand on thet--because I don't see no way ter holp
myself," he capitulated. It is the mountain's formula of oath, and
though the men who use it rarely shake hands, its utterance is a
recognized bond.
"Come along to town with me," suggested the Deacon. "You can sleep at my
boardin' place, and in the morning you can start out."
But to that proposition Newt shook his head.
"I aims ter start right now, es soon es I kin buy a snack ter put in my
pocket," he announced decisively. "Which road goes towards Jackson?"
When at last he did lie down for sleep that night, it was under the lee
of a last year's straw stack and surrounded by the rustling spears of
this year's corn, where he could look up at the stars and call defiantly
upon them all to bear witness that he had no intention of being deterred
by the interference of any man.
It had been a very exhausting day, strenuous with much footsore
tramping; strenuous, too, with the buffeting of emotions as sudden and
violent as the tempests which sometimes swept across his hills; bending
the forests, lashing the sandstone ramparts, shrieking through valleys
and cannonading along the slopes. And like the hills when such a storm
has wreaked its noisy wrath and swollen all the thread-like streams to
freshets, he lay by his straw stack supine and shaken. It seemed to him
that he had only just stretched himself out on the straw when he opened
his eyes to see the east pallidly kindling with the preface of dawn, yet
it had been long enough for his limbs to have cramped and chilled under
the moisture of the night. He rose and ate a small supply of his
provender, and took a swig from the flask, wiping the mouth of the
bottle with his palm, after the custom of his country. After that he
started on with the gray dawn growing rosy at his front. At length, he
halted and drew a long breath of relief and satisfaction, for already he
was beginning to recognize, in the changing character of the country,
harbingers of home. The smooth swell of the bluegrass began to break
into a choppier formation and assume raggedness, while far away the
sky-line was broken by a climbing back-bone of foothills.
Unless he could mend his rate of travel he had still ahead several days
of journeying, but early in the afternoon, when he sat down to rest, it
was by a woodland stream where the underbrush grew in a tangle and the
wild roses were blooming among scrub oaks. Cornucopias of the
trumpet-flower flared vividly, and here and there he caught a glimpse
of a chinked log-cabin. That night he slept at Clay City, where the
channel of Red River was almost choked with logs; logs floated down from
higher up. Once more he slept in a "feather-bed," for a distant relative
had taken him in, willing to "eat an' sleep him" for no greater
remuneration than the news of what had happened in Winchester; willing
even to produce from some hidden place a jug from which moonshine liquor
ran white and colorless.
The next day brought such a dawn as he had not seen since he had left
Jackson with cuffed wrists, a dawn in which the sun did not blaze forth
at once unobscured, but came up to dissipate the mists and flare redly
through their vanishing, before he stood forth master of the day. And
even then the skies were full of sullen hinting at rain. Nature seemed
to brood in accord with his own dreariness of mind; and wisps of cloud
trailed down the summits, as he nodded with a curt, "I'm obleeged ter
ye," and pushed onward, boring into hills that grew ever taller and
wilder.
At last, he came to Jackson, the shack town that is the county seat of
Breathitt, which the world knows as "bloody." But even the twisting and
steep streets beyond the bridge offered this traveler no security for
tarrying. Jackson knew that in Winchester Jake Falerin had fallen, and
that Black Pete was back from the West, and Jackson was a Falerin
strong-hold. The outlook was for stormy days, and it would be as well
for the boy to push at once to his own section, some twenty miles away,
where along the waters of Troublesome and Lost Creeks he would be among
his own people. In front of the court-house and along the main street he
saw groups of men, some of them Falkinses and some Spooners, and though
there was no open hostility, they separated studiously into their own
respective groups and their movements were characterized by an alertness
which told of mutual and restive suspicion.
Newt Spooner was not afraid, but just now he was not wasting his
activities. Moreover, he was still half-sick and not courting quarrels
save those of his own choosing. As he strolled through the streets of
the town, no one seemed to notice him. He had been forgotten. He paused
before the court-house with the small "jail-house" squatting in the yard
and surveyed both with wormwood bitterness of unforgiving memory.
Across the street where brick banks and modern plate-glass store fronts
stood jammed between frontier-like shacks, he halted once more. Court
was adjourning for the noon recess, and a homicide jury came out of the
dingy doors, marching in columns of twos, while behind, shirt-sleeved
and collarless, stalked the sheriff, herding the panel to its mid-day
meal and bearing a long hickory staff. They were rude and bearded men,
for the most part spare and sinewy, but the elder among them tramped
with a shambling gait that told of unrelieved drudgery.
Newt made his way to the north end of the town, and took the road
across the hills. By nightfall he would be in his own territory.
Now he was once more treading familiar trails, and though he was tired
and the way became steeper, he walked with a resilient stride. The roads
along the valley gulches were only creek-beds, and where they looped
over the tops of ridges they were uneven stairways of broken rock.
Sometimes for a little space they ran level along high banks where the
sand was like that of a beach. But Newt had taken off his shoes and as
he splashed along the water courses, where straining "jolt-wagons" had
cut smooth ruts almost hub-deep into the shaly beds, the grateful water
stimulated him. About him were great forests almost virgin to the ax.
Spruce pines and walnuts and poplars towered over him, and the road
dipped often through a gloom like that of a dim chapel. Down there
little cascades whispered, and out of fern banks rose huge brown and
gray and green bowlders of sandstone, like altars of the Druids. The
rhododendron, which his people called "laurel," and the laurel, which
they called "ivy," cloaked the open slopes. It was a country where a
good walker can travel faster afoot than mounted. He drank from wayside
springs and from the flask which his kinsman had refilled. His mind
turned to its magnet, and he planned anew the death of Henry Falkins,
but now that he was at home he planned with confidence of success and in
this conviction he found a certain contentment. It was something to be
where he belonged and something to walk free of the chaingang. Around
him the hills closed in comforting tiers of ramparts. From the high
points of the road, he could look off over valleys to other peaks and
see here and there the roof of a cabin with its small patch of corn and
its rude out-houses. He passed tilting fields where red and blue calico
dresses flashed as entire families worked with hoes, and roadside
habitations of logs where raggedy children fled inside to gaze timidly
around the corners of door-jambs. Razor-backed hogs and flocks of geese
wandered near every habitation, and mules flapped their long ears as
they looked out from primitive stables, fashioned by closing in with
fence shelters under overhanging shelves of rock.