"Go whar? An' leave you-uns a-cuddled down hyar so snug in the groun'
that the devil hisse'f will sca'cely nose ye out on the Jedgmint Day?
Naw, sir. I see nuthin' but resk fur me on all sides, but less hyar
'n ennywhars. I hev stood in ez much danger ez enny of ye. I hev tuk
my sheer o' the resk 'thout wingin', but I won't be kicked out like a
stray dog an' gin up ter the law 'kase you-uns air 'feared 'Dolphus
Ross 'lows I be a moonshiner. He can't find or hear o' me hyar. I got
ez much right hyar ez you-uns, 'Renzo Taft. I own my sheer in the
business, an' hyar I be goin' ter 'bide."
The other two moonshiners, Copley and young Dan Sykes, regarded him
askance and with sullen eyes. This minority might seem to be fraught
with no small danger. His chief fear lest Espey should be overtaken,
and the details of his refuge with the Larrabees be elicited, involving
himself and his mother as accessories to the crime, he never mentioned.
It so absorbed his thoughts, however, that for a time he did not
observe a symptom of the antagonism of his confrères which deeply
augured its seriousness.
A shaft hard by the still-room, if such the nook where the apparatus
was worked might be called, which was sunk into the very deepest
limits of the mine, came near relieving them of their perplexity on
this score, one day. Larrabee's foot slipped in the rotting refuse of
pomace on the verge while he was handling the bags of grain, and as he
came heavily to the floor, barely saving himself, he saw like a flash
a sudden irradiation of hope on the flushed, foolish face of the boy,
a keen expectation in Taft's eyes, and even in the elderly drudge's
wooden wrinkles a sort of disappointed resignation as he scrambled to
his feet, that daunted him more than the immediate danger.
His precious book he read no more by the light of the furnace
flicker, after this. Not that he now brooded over his cares, but his
watchfulness never flagged. Whether the accident suggested the idea to
Taft, or whether it were the flimsy fiction of the inimical atmosphere
and his own alert apprehensiveness, Larrabee thought that he was given
several opportunities to take leave inadvertently of the world. Once,
in cleaning a pistol said to be unloaded, the ball in the last chamber
whizzed sharply by his head. Again and again he was set to handle the
heavy bags of grain on the slippery verge of the shaft. After a time
a new cause of alarm was developed. Despite his crafty vigilance in
his determination to remain at all hazards, he did not notice, until
it became very marked, their unwillingness that he should leave the
still at all, and Taft's expertness in disallowing every pretext. The
truth dawned upon him at last, with its most valid reason. Although
they would be glad were he to quit the country, yet, since his
permanent absence could not be compassed, any chance excursion into
the Cove or neighborhood was fraught with danger, as he might be seen,
identified as Larrabee, and followed by the man who had spotted him
as a moonshiner to Taft's house, where, spending days and nights, the
mystery would soon be unfolded.
Larrabee came upon this discovery with a suffocating sense as of a
prisoner. Instantly he was possessed by a wild urgency for the outer
air and the freedom beyond that seemed as if its own impetus might
break through the barriers of a thousand feet of the solid ground. He
almost felt the wind blow in the strength of his keen desire; and when
he set himself instantly to compass his deliverance, eagerness outran
tact in his first demonstration.
"Hello, 'Renzo," he said in a cheerful, incidental voice, strikingly
at variance with the gruff tones that had of late served him in the
absolutely essential colloquies between them touching the work.
Taft's keen senses instantaneously apprehended the difference. He
glanced around with a quick eye, illumined by the feeble white gleam of
the lantern in his hand, for he had but just emerged from the tunnel.
He did not simulate. He looked as he felt, interrogative, expectant, as
he sat down on the side of a barrel without pausing to extinguish the
lantern. Its pallid glow suffused his florid face and yellow beard, and
brought out the tint and effect of translucency in his blue eyes. They
were fixed steadily on Larrabee, who was suddenly out of countenance.
He had intended a more casual disclosure of his project than the
impending interview permitted,--a sort of unpremeditated announcement
of his determination, as of being free to do as he would. He felt
that his face had changed, and he knew that the change was noted. A
new rush of alarm seemed to surge through his nerves. For, guarded as
Taft evidently was, he too had betrayed somewhat the importance which
he attached to the plans, even the words, of his employee, or his
partner, or his prisoner, as Larrabee might be variously regarded. It
daunted Larrabee: the latent ferocity that lurked in Taft's character,
repudiated in his burly good comradeship of manner and in his florid
face,--save for a certain beaklike outline of the nose that gave a
rapacious, cruel intimation,--was instinctively known to the young
mountaineer, who was not skilled in the craft of a knowledge of his
kind, and had no habit of analysis. He somehow flinched to be made
anew so definitely aware that he was a factor, and a troublous one, in
Taft's schemes. He felt no match for the elder tactician. He wished
he had gone long before, when the moonshiner sought so openly to be
rid of him. At all events, he would go now, and without chicanery or
subterfuge. He blurted out his plan, which he had intended to trench
upon with great care and circumspection, and which should have appeared
a natural evolution and outcome of the conversation.
"'Renzo," he said, with a distinct abatement of his former genial
inflections, but still with a pliable, amiable tone,--and for his life
he could not suppress an intonation of appeal,--"'Renzo, I'm a-studyin'
'bout takin' yer advice. Ye air old'n me an' hev got mo' 'speriunce
an'"--
"What advice?" Taft interrupted succinctly. The sentence seemed very
short in his big, mellow, sonorous voice; it was like a key struck
inadvertently on some great organ; the heavy vibrations in themselves
seemed to promise continuity.
"'Bout goin' out'n the Cove. I been studyin' it all out, an' I 'low
'twould be safer fur all consarned ef I war ter cut an' run."
Taft remained silent. His illumined eyes were glassy and fixed;
somehow, the absorbed, introspective thought seemed to eliminate their
expression.
"Jes' cl'ar out," said Larrabee, as if in explanation; he could not
repress the manner of asking a permission, although he raged inwardly
at himself.
"Whar'bouts?" Taft's great voice boomed out once more as it were
inadvertently.
"Ter Buncombe County in old Car'liny, whar I got some kinfolks
a-livin'," said Larrabee. "That's what I war a-studyin' 'bout," he
added, still striving for a more incidental effect.
The furnace door was open, for the fire was low, the still but just
emptied, and the work intermitted for the nonce. The bed of red coals
filled the place with a dull glow. In its dreamy light he saw suddenly
the broad, flabby face of Dan Sykes, the youngest of the moonshiners,
distorted with silent mirth, like the face of a caricature. He sat upon
a billet of wood in a lowly attitude, frog-like with his upturned head
which was supported by his two hands, his elbows resting on his knees
drawn high under his chin. His distended grin of evident delight in
Taft's answer showed that it was not unexpected.
"Why, law, Jasper," exclaimed Taft,--but the unctuous tone would not
mix with the lie of the intent, and floated in its midst like oil
on water,--"I couldn't make out _now_, jes' _now_, 'thout
you-uns. I be short-handed now, 'count o' Espey, an' I got word ter-day
from the cross-roads fur two barrels o' corn juice quick ez it kin be
got thar. Yer kin in Buncombe,"--his eye twinkled, for he suspected
the kin in Buncombe to be of that airy folk known only to dreams and
deceits,--"they'll keep. Ye'll hev jes' ter put off goin' fur a leetle
spell,--bein' so short-handed, ye know."
"What air they aimin' ter pay fur them bar'ls?" demanded Larrabee
calmly.
Thus he drew the conversation aside to the commercial aspects of the
situation, as if he acquiesced in Taft's view, and recurred to his
proposition no more. He controlled his voice, but his heart sunk like
lead. He had not dreamed but that they would be glad to let him go if
he quitted the region. He had not even feared that this resource was
in jeopardy. He could not imagine the turn of events which must needs
preclude his flight abroad, as well as his familiar appearance in his
wonted haunts about the Cove. He cursed his fatuity again and again
that he had not escaped when he could. What were the dangers of the
world at large in comparison with the mysterious menace that environed
him here? He dwelt continuously on these thoughts for a time, and it
was only gradually, and chiefly by reason of Sykes's leering grin and
secretly gleeful eye, that he became aware that this Benjamin amongst
them had been specially deputed to watch him. In the days of his own
terrors of the world without, he had ceased to go out for his meals or
to sleep. He subsisted on "snacks" which Taft fetched down from his own
table,--which abstraction caused no surprise to his small housekeeper,
for Miss Cornelia Taft had long since exhausted her capacities for
astonishment at any prodigies of food consumption on the part of her
father, who took such big bites in comparison with old Mrs. Jiniway's
custom,--and he slept at broken intervals, as his uneasy thoughts
permitted, on the empty meal sacks in the shadow of the piles of
barrels. This life continued now of necessity, as formerly of choice.
Larrabee's apparent acquiescence, he had a vague idea, surprised and
perturbed the others. They were evidently prepared for resistance
and harsh measures. They had lost their balance in some sort; their
attitude was like that of one who makes ready for a running leap,
and stops short of the jump. Thus, their unsteady, balked surprise
bore scant relation to their persistent, unchanged purpose, for their
watch upon him was not for one moment relaxed. Even in the network
of wrinkles about the sunken eyes of the elder distiller, a sort of
staggered, dumfounded suspicion expressed itself, in conjunction with
an observant heed of Larrabee's every movement which hitherto would not
have been allowed to absorb so much of the attention he was wont to
bestow on the still.
At first the discovery came near to breaking down Larrabee's reserve of
endurance. His heart thumped so loudly, so heavily, that he sometimes
thought they must hear its treacherous clamors as he sat and smoked in
the dull red glow, assuming a calm and somnolent, satisfied aspect.
Occasionally, with that terrible sense of the key turned, the door
closed, the realization of restricted liberty, so overwhelming to the
free habit of the mountaineer and the woodsman, with a charter to
wander as wide as the wilderness, the blood would surge to his head,
the copper boiler spin round and round, his companions slowly wheel
about in that dim space of shadow and light; and he thought he lost
consciousness at these times. But always when he came to himself he
was sitting as before, calmly smoking in his wonted place, seeming
a trifle disposed to shirk his work, perchance; and latterly he had
begun to drink heavily, as it were upon the sly. He could not have
said how the idea had come to him: it was not gradual; the scheme
was full fledged in an instant. He knew that his every movement was
under surveillance, and that he was under the special guard of the
young drunkard, who had been longer sober now, perhaps, than for many
a month. Dan Sykes watched with glistening eyes Larrabee's furtive
hand reaching for the jug of whiskey, the trick of the hasty swallow
aside, and presently Larrabee had a companion in his covert potations.
He trembled lest the young fellow's scanty powers of self-restraint
should not be adequate to conceal long enough to serve his plan the
swift ravages of drink in his recent abstinence. He seemed insatiable
and frantically keen of thirst, and the necessity of concealing his
indulgence from Taft, who had evidently sent forth some fiat against
it, developed an almost incredible deftness of craft. On the day that
the liquor was barreled and removed, Sykes had been drinking almost
without cessation. His share in the work was scant, his duties as guard
serving in substitution. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because of
the absorption in the enterprise, neither of the two elder moonshiners
noticed his condition; and indeed he had become singularly skilled
in assuming a sort of veneer of sobriety. It passed muster in this
instance.
Taft got away early in the night with his load, taking note,
apparently, of nothing beyond some extra hazard of the enterprise, as
Larrabee gathered from the caution with which he loaded his revolvers
and his frequent conferences aside with Copley, who enjoyed his special
confidence, being his near kinsman as well as coadjutor. The barrels
were to be concealed in the wagon under bags of feathers, dried fruit,
ginseng, and other strictly rural commodities of barter. Two barrels of
innocent and saccharine sorghum found themselves, too, in the unholy
company of those barrels that the still had furnished forth. It was
somewhat difficult to make out the load. Copley was eager for it to be
off, notwithstanding, but Taft persisted until all the probabilities
had been satisfied. There was much passing back and forth in the
tunnel; through its long lengths Larrabee could hear the commotion
in the room beneath the store. When the preparations were completed
at last, he knew as well as if he had seen it how the great white
canvas-covered wagon looked, standing with its two stanch mules before
the door of the store, under the early dusky night sky and the burly
overhanging purple heights, the yellow light streaming out from the
open door upon it, and all the cheerful bustle of departure rife as it
were in the very air. Taft came back at the last moment for his coat.
As he swung himself alertly into it, and crushed his big hat down on
his big yellow head, he had all the breezy impetus of one who is about
to start on a pleasant and successful journey.
"All loaded!" he cried cheerfully. "A kentry merchant a-goin' ter buy
goods can't be too keerful--oughter take along all the gear he kin ter
trade--ha! ha! ha! Good-by! Take keer o' yerse'fs!"
And thus he strode out with his light, elastic tread. Larrabee listened
as it beat on the dirt path, and then to the echoes that duplicated its
progress, till it ceased to sound.
Somehow the void about the circle was not without melancholy
intimations, the normal incident of departure, whether it be regretted
or cause for gratulation. Perhaps because of the sudden disordered
quiet and loneliness in the quitted scene, the unoccupied mind must
needs always reach forward into the unknown journeyings, meeting in
speculation the varied events denied to the home-abiding. Larrabee sat
still for a time in the low red glow of the furnace fire, exchanging
now and again an incidental comment with his companions on the subject
of the journey and its chances. The intervals of silence grew longer;
the shadows gathered and deepened; the younger man's head occasionally
nodded grotesquely in sleep, but more than once, as Larrabee was about
to rise to his feet, he saw in the obscurity the large bloodshot eyes
opened and fixed soberly upon him. He had waited long; long for the
certainty that Taft would not return on some forgotten errand; long
for the drunken sleep that must needs overcome the inimical vigilance
of the young moonshiner. He could wait no longer. With an abrupt,
shrill cry like that of a savage panther, he flung himself upon his
elder companion. Copley was a man of powerful physique, and his every
muscle was developed by the heavy labor in which it was exercised. In
his undiminished strength his age gave no advantage to his adversary,
whose slight bulk he might have flung from him with a single arm but
for the surprise and suddenness of the attack in which he was borne to
the ground. All Larrabee's strength hardly sufficed to hold him there
for a moment. There was a fierce struggle; a pistol ball whizzed by
Larrabee's head, and the narrow precincts were filled with the echoes
and with Copley's hoarse calls upon Sykes for help. The young fellow
rose in response, stupidly echoing the cries of his own name, took
one tottering step forward, and fell like a log, flabby, nerveless,
helpless, on the floor. Larrabee wondered afterward that it could all
be so quickly done. It was by virtue of surprise, desperation, sleight
of hand, deftness, and quickness rather than by strength or courage. A
meal bag served as a gag, and a rope, used in transporting the heavy
barrels up the steep incline to the store, to pinion the arms and
shackle the feet. Larrabee was almost exhausted by the capture of the
first prisoner, and it was perhaps auspicious for his freedom that
the young drunkard, beyond an ill-directed blow or two, could make no
resistance. The rope was made fast around the solid masonry of the
furnace; and as Larrabee contemplated his work, he felt sure that the
two prisoners, one yet vainly struggling, the other already sleeping
the sleep of the very drunk, would find no means of deliverance till
Taft's return the next day.
Again and again in his durance Larrabee had prefigured how swift would
be his flight along the tunnel to the free outer air. Now he feebly
plodded, and trembled, and faltered, and again went groping along
the densely black way, essaying to keep a straight line, but feeling
himself continually touching the wall, now on the right, and again on
the left, in his zigzag course. Once he paused with an alert start. A
sound of human voices had struck his ear, and at the merest possibility
that his escape was not complete, certain, every flaccid, exhausted
muscle was tense again. He lifted up his head, hardly breathing, that
he might listen, but heard only the uncontrolled motion of his own
heart plunging like an unruly horse. All else was silent in the black
stillness of the deeps of the earth, save for the slight purling of the
thread of a stream which farther on intersected the tunnel. No stir,
no sound from the still-room, his late prison-house, where his jailers
lay bound hand and foot; and yet he had thought he heard voices--human
voices--words--he could almost have sworn it. And suddenly the sound
came again. This time he recognized it,--louder than its custom, more
distinct, for he had heard it before,--the sound of the strange,
unexplained voices that at long intervals were wont to reverberate
along the tunnel of the Lost Time mine, and that were accounted by
the moonshiners echoes from their own wrangles or mirth or talk as
they toiled. He was certain that it did not come now from the still;
his fear that his work had been slack, and that his comrades were
liberated, was without foundation, but an earthly rational fear is a
wonderful exorcist of a ghostly terror. Otherwise, when he thought
of it afterward, he felt that he must have been struck dead with the
horror of it, when he suddenly heard, close at hand, the sound dulled
by the dense medium of the earth, a word of command, as it were, in a
queer, strained, false-ringing voice, and then the regular strokes of
a pick cleaving the earth with a workmanlike steadiness and precision.
His blood ran cold; for his credulity harbored no doubts. It was the
sound of the drowned miners, lost in the flooded shafts, still vainly
digging the graves that the niggard earth denied them. The thought
mended his speed; he flew like a shuttlecock from side to side of the
narrow passage, where he could but grope, for the lack of a lantern;
and although he often put forth his hands expecting to touch the boards
of the partition at the further end, he thrust into his palms a score
of the hairy splinters of the reverse side of the rude puncheons long
before he could have reasonably expected to reach his goal. He observed
none of the precautions and silence common to the moonshiners in their
exits from the still; and indeed the feat was hardly expected to be
attempted in the dense darkness. He dropped one of the boards, and the
deep, cavernous, clamorous echo coming up from the hollow vaults below
almost overwhelmed him, as it resounded again and again. He had lost
control of his nerves. He stumbled over the empty boxes and barrels in
the room beneath the store, tumbled up the ladder, and as he clambered
from the door beneath the counter he realized for the first time that
the room was built, as were many of the meaner cabins of the region,
without a window, depending on the door for ventilation and light. This
was a matter of precaution with Taft, and being a not uncommon feature
in the district occasioned no surprise; but Larrabee trembled as he
remembered that it was Taft's cautious habit to lock the door when
he himself was not in the store. Feeling that the bars were in place
against the battens, he was apprised that it had been thus secured
by the worthies down at the still, and perchance the key was now in
Copley's pocket. His only resource would be to retrace his way, all the
toil and risk of his escape to be repeated. But no, the bolt turned
in his hand, and as he stepped into the passage outside his eyes were
dazzled almost to blindness by a tallow dip blazing in the hand of
little Cornelia Taft, summoned by the noise to investigate its source.
Behind her, looking over her head, was Joe's round, careless, plump
face. Larrabee was little less staggered by the monition that there
might be other persons at hand in the house than by the expression
of Cornelia's prim, disapproving, unfriendly, intelligent little
countenance. The next instant he cared for neither; a salient change
in the aspect of the cabin claimed his attention. The open passage
between the two rooms had been boarded up, and a stout door fitted in,
barred and bolted, on which gleamed a strong new lock. There was no key
visible. He gazed at the lock with greedy eyes, silent, till the girl's
question had been twice repeated.
"Me--doin' hyar? Oh, I been doin' some work fur yer dad," he said,
more at ease, for he had seen her occasionally as he came and went,
presumably in the character of customer, and he detected recognition in
her calm and non-committal countenance. "I got shut up in thar,--mought
hev been noddin',--an' I war 'feared the door war locked." He advanced
upon the outer door.
"Ye can't git out'n that one," said the little girl coolly; "hit's
locked on the outside, an' dad hev goned away ter the cross-roads with
the key in his pocket."
Larrabee's first impulse was to try his strength to burst it open, and
once more that salutary monition of the probable presence of others in
the house controlled him. He turned toward the door of the opposite
room, partly to settle this doubt, and partly to discover--it had never
before occurred to him to notice--whether it had a window. The room was
vacant, and his eager eyes ranged the walls in vain for an aperture.
"It's like a trap," he muttered, as he sunk exhausted into a chair.
"What ails 'Renzo ter lock up the house an' make off with the key, an'
leave you-uns inside by yerse'fs?" he demanded.
The two children had followed him into the room. Joe stood by the
door, holding by the frame, swaying back and forth, attempting some
distortion of attitude impossible to the human configuration; but the
little girl had seated herself staidly in a chair opposite, and showed
herself not averse to conversation.
"'Kase thar be sech a lot o' strange, idle folks in the Cove," said the
prim Miss Cornelia, with an expression of strong disapprobation.
Larrabee could not restrain an exclamation of surprise. It was indeed
like a new world, the familiar Cove, so long he had been shut out of it.
"What folks?" he asked succinctly.
"Them ez hev been building the new hotel," said Sis. "Them, in course."
"What they doin' now? Ain't they buildin'?" he hazarded tentatively.
"Naw,"--the small Cornelia Taft pursed up her lips
contemptuously,--"jes' a-roamin' round the Cove in gangs, a-foolin' an'
a-idlin', an', my sakes, a-drinkin' whiskey, thick ez bees!"
A new light was breaking in on Larrabee. Taft had at first desired
that he should leave the Cove,--slip away quietly; now, since it was
infested with a troop of scattered workmen, apparently out of a job,
all of whom had doubtless spent an idle hour agape over the story
of the supposed Jasper Larrabee, the last nine days' wonder of the
Cove,--the facetious freak of the pretended arrest, the miraculous
escape of the fall from the cliffs, the mysterious disappearance, the
suspicion of moonshining, and the threatened vengeance of the deputy
sheriff,--it was scarcely probable that he could get away without
exciting notice which might lead to recognition, pursuit, and arrest.
He was safer at the still,--this he himself admitted now,--far safer in
the depths of the earth; except, indeed, for Taft and his fellows.
"Did you-uns see the fire?" demanded Joe suddenly, still writhing and
twisting against the door frame. "_I_ did!" in triumph.
"Ye wouldn't ef I hedn't a-woke ye up," said Sis, with acerbity. "I
'low ye didn't see much nohows, bein' so sleepy-headed."
Larrabee sat looking in surprise from one to the other, his questions
anticipated by their eager relish of the subject.
"Dad never seen nuthin'!" cried the boy triumphantly.
"Dad wouldn't b'lieve thar war a fire till he went an' viewed the
cinders of the hotel," said the girl.
The hotel! A sudden suspicion smote Larrabee, a recollection of
the threat to burn the building which had originated amongst the
moonshiners before a stone was laid in mortar or a timber lifted. He
did the craft injustice in this instance; Taft and his associates
had no part in the conflagration. But with Espey out of control, and
Larrabee touched with the suspicion of moonshining, a chance word might
fix upon the distillers this far more serious crime known to them both
to have already been broached here. There was much reason for his
detention,--too much. He must be going, and that shortly.
"I wonder ye all ain't 'feared o' burnin' up in hyar, locked up," he
said suddenly, the catastrophe seeming to render the danger of fire
more imminent, although he knew it to be the habit of the country folk
to lock small children in when convenient to leave home without them.
The little girl's thin lip curled.
"Ef we-uns hain't got no mo' sense 'n ter set the house or ourse'fs
afire, I reckon we'd be wuth ez much roasted ez raw," she replied.
"Dad, he locked the door so we-uns kin tell them stragglers ez he be
gone, an' they can't git in ter trade fur drink," put in Joe.
Larrabee said nothing more. He knew full well that the children were
not so alone as they seemed, since Copley, who was their mother's
half-brother, was wont to be in the store, in Taft's absence, often
enough to be at hand should he be required to suppress any disturbance;
and being a near relative, he had a personal interest in their safety.
Miss Cornelia Taft was a fine combination of her father's shrewdness
and her grandmother's preciseness. As Larrabee felt her small,
discerning eyes studying him, he became conscious that he was looking
about wildly and with manifest anxiety as to his next step. He made an
effort to allay her dawning curiosity.
"Things look powerful nice an' cle'n up in hyar," he remarked casually.
He was unprepared for the effect of his words. If Miss Cornelia Taft
had a soul, it was expressed in her housewifely instincts. In a dozen
frantic and funny juvenile misconceptions, the precepts brought from
Mrs. Jiniway's domicile were put into practice here. The basis of
them all, cleanliness and an effort for order, was plainly apparent,
and Sis spent the better part of her days in seeking to impress upon
Joe's unwilling mind the value of an occasional dish-washing, and
the utility of wood ashes in scouring. An evil day, Joe considered
it, when she came into his ragged, soapless, happy-go-lucky life; but
Taft connived at their wranglings over their primitive housekeeping
and Joe's subjection. "Keeps Sis busy, an' lets me git on her blind
side,--ef she hev got enny blind side," he added grimly.
Her pallid face flushed, her eyes sparkled; she cast a glance of
triumph at Joe, who had seated himself in a chair, and was twisting his
bare feet in and out of the rungs in a way painful to witness, if not
to experience, writhing his body to and fro, and rolling his head from
side to side over the high back of the chair in a restless frivolity of
motion that certainly had no family resemblance to the staid "manners"
which Mrs. Jiniway's disciple exhibited.
She had entered volubly upon a detail of her exploits here in reforming
Joe's misrule amongst the pots and pans and kettles.
"Dad's so 'way from home, an' Joe's so tur'ble shif'less," she
complained.
The task of redding up the Augean stables was slight in comparison, one
might believe, to judge from her show of horror now and then, and there
was considerable difference between the size of Sis and of Hercules.
She had succeeded in reaching some sense of culinary propriety in
Joe, or pride, for he now and again became sufficiently still to look
poutingly sullen, and to ejaculate, "'Tain't true!" "'Twarn't!" and
similar disaffected negations.
"I l'arnt all that whenst I lived with my granny," she concluded her
exposition of the true methods of dealing with the trivet and the
skillet and setting the house in order. "An' when we war done, we'd
knit stockings an' tell tales."
"Tales 'bout what?" asked Larrabee, seeking to conciliate her, for he
began to have a shrewd suspicion that she could aid him if she would.
His interest was the more easily simulated, for he had a literary taste
himself.
"Oh," she cried, with a little bounce forward, not unlike Joe's
elasticity, "them in gineral we-uns hearn the rider read,--'bout Sam'l."
"I hev read 'bout Sam'l," said Larrabee quickly, with an air of playing
willingly to her lead; and indeed she had struck him on his strong
suit. "An' old Eli. Eli war an able man, but he never 'peared ter me
ter hev much jedgmint."
"I jes' _lo-o-oved_ ter hear 'bout leetle Sam'l an' his mother,
an' her a-bringin' of him new clothes. He wore a white shut, an' she
brung him a leetle coat every year," continued Sis, with placid eyes
shining with the delighted reminiscence of the little prophet's fine
gear.
"Eli never could hev led the children of Isrul through the wilderness
like Moses done," said Larrabee meditatively, reverting naturally to
the elder character; whereas with Sis the _personnel_ of the Bible
was chiefly juvenile, rarely attaining a greater height than four feet.
"Jes' ter think," she cried, "they put Moses whenst a baby in a leetle
dug-out, an' anchored him 'mongst the willows under the ruver bank, an'
lef' him by hisself! Don't ye know, he hollered an' hollered! An' he
wondered whar all the folks war gone."
"An' Dan'l I hev read about," continued Larrabee.
"In the painters' den! Oo--oo!" The little girl shivered with a sort of
enjoyment of the terror of the situation, drawing up her shoulders, and
holding both hands over her mouth.
"He warn't 'feared. I reckon he mus' hev been a powerful hunter whenst
young. I wonder ef he ever hed enny 'speriunce with wolf an' bar, an'
sech?" Larrabee speculated.
"Them bars! Warn't that awful,--plumb turrible!" exclaimed Sis
suddenly, her scanty brows knitted as she frowningly recoiled into the
back of her chair, and her small eyes grew large. "Them two bars what
eat them forty childern,--though 'tain't manners, an' it never war, ter
make game o' yer elders."
"'Tain't true! No two bar ever eat forty childern. They'd hev bust!"
Joe interposed realistically. "Sis jes' made that up out'n her own
head."
"It air true," protested the little Biblical student. "I hearn the
rider read it myself."
"Them childern war obleeged ter be sorter sizable ter hev quit bein'
bald-headed tharse'fs, ef they war able ter run an' p'int thar fingers.
An' shucks! I hev been sassier 'n that a many a time, an' no bar hev
eat me yit," said Joe hardily.
"Ye air savin' up fur Satan, I reckon," retorted Miss Taft, with
acerbity. "I hev a heap o' trouble with this boy," she added, turning a
dreary, disgusted little face toward Larrabee.
Their unity of literary interest had fostered a degree of sympathy for
her. "Ye oughter go down sometimes an' set at Tems's," he suggested.
"He hev got a darter an' a niece, though they air older 'n ye be."
"I don't mind old folks," said Cornelia, evidently with no idea of the
gradations of age. "I be used ter granny. I wisht dad would marry one
of 'em at Tems's," she added.
Larrabee glanced keenly at her.
"What ails ye, ter say that?" he asked jealously.
"I'd like ter see a tuck took in Joe," said Sis bitterly.
She obviously spoke without further information or meaning. Larrabee
rose restlessly, the interest of the literary symposium at an end.
"I wisht ye could let me out'n hyar somehows," he said, glancing
uneasily about. Then, with a sudden recollection, "Ain't you-uns got a
key ez would open the sto' door, what ye brung from yer granny's house?
Mebbe 'twould open t'other."
"Dad took it; he didn't want the sto' do' opened whenst he hed locked
it."
"Hain't you-uns got no mo' keys, no kind o' keys?"
She hesitated, but he had won upon her somewhat obdurate predilections;
his acquaintance with the heroes of the tales that she had learned at
her grandmother's home was a pleasing and fresh bond of interest. She
divined his sympathy, and had seen his approval of the works she had
wrought in the service of order and cleanliness; he saw in her little
prim face that she had keys at hand, and presently she nodded brightly.
"Let's try 'em," he urged, as if the experiment had a mutual interest.
It was a bunch of two or three rusty old keys which she produced,
held together with a rough leather string, but they meant liberty
and life to Larrabee. He could hardly be still long enough to clean
and oil them before the attempt which should be decisive. The little
girl rubbed one with a will, while he busied himself with the other.
She held the candle as he knelt tremulously on the floor and applied
them successively to the lock. One slipped in and turned futilely all
round,--too small. The other would not even enter the keyhole.
As he knelt there, the tallow dip showed a white, set face. He was
remembering his comrades, bound hand and foot down at the still, and
prefiguring Taft's alarm,--which was in itself formidable in its
valiant disregard of all but his own safety,--his resentment and
revenge, when their imprisoned estate should be discovered to him.
Whatever might betide in the world without, it was death, indubitably,
to remain. He rose suddenly, almost overturning the child at his
elbow, starting toward the door of the store to get some implement to
serve to break the lock.
"Try a file," said Sis reasonably, misunderstanding his intention.
She was still holding the candle as he came back, its white light on
her precise little face and smooth hair put primly behind her ears,
and a tall womanly caricature of her aped her gestures as her shadow
stretched up on the new poplar weather-boarding of the partition.
Her suggestion worked like a charm. A few moments of a sharp, rasping
noise, while she set her little teeth, a second essay at the lock: the
bolt slipped back as if made for the rusty old key that had worked no
miracles before save that of opening old Mrs. Jiniway's "chist;" the
door swung open. A glimpse of the windy night, the clouds, the tossing
woods, and Sis, putting up the bars again, heard the last echo of
Larrabee's swift step as he strode away.