The day fixed for processioning Kenniston's land dawned with an element
of perplexity all its own to add to the troublous questions which it
was expected to decide. The weather was the aptest illustration of
uncertainty. The first gray light came with a rolling cloud and a dank
wind sweeping along quick gusts of rain; then the sun rose, diffusive,
promissory, with a great lavishness of red and yellow suffusions, a
range and degree of rank, heavy color that seemed nearer to the hues
of sunset than to the luminous purity and delicacy of wonted matutinal
freshness. The slate-tinted clouds were massed once more, the beams
failed, the wind brought the rain anew, and when it ceased at last,
light mists were stealing along the heavy purple mountains, and rising
from every chasm and depression; even far away amongst those vague
contours, gray and dun-tinted and brown, that were like the first
lifeless sketch of the dazzling azure ranges that the sunny days were
wont to paint with such brilliant softness upon the fair field of the
horizon, these vapors, white, soft, opaque, flocculent, could be seen.
So from the furthermost reaches to the nearest limits invisibility was
visibly garnered.
As Kenniston, perturbed because of the weather signs, turned ever
and anon in his saddle, as he rode up and up the mountain to the
tryst at the Big Hollow Boulder, he saw now the great outward bend
of the mountain, with heavily wooded green slopes under the gray
sky, all the coloring heightened by the impending tufty white of the
masses of silent approaching vapor; the surly crags of the terrace
dark with the moisture and the shadow; and the great black mass of
the charred wood still sending up a slow, melancholy thread of smoke
where the hotel lay in ruins. And again, looking over his shoulder to
verify some half-forgotten detail of the scene, the trees twenty feet
away were barely visible in the encompassing medium, so fleetly did
the impalpable cloud press upon them. To him, unversed in mountain
weather, the enterprise of the day seemed impracticable; and he was
half surprised to see the surveyor, with his Jacob's staff and his
chain-bearers, already waiting at the boundary corner. The figures
of the group of men, with their horses picketed hard by, stood out
against the inexpressive whiteness about them with the distinctness
of sketches on otherwise blank paper. They were easily recognizable
even from a distance, and Cap'n Lucy's slim proportions and grace of
movement further served to differentiate him from the burlier forms of
the others.
"Ah, colonel," called out Kenniston as he dismounted, "you here?"
It might hardly be believed by one who had experienced its causticity,
but Cap'n Lucy's tongue was blunted of much of its capacities under
his own roof-tree by the exactions of hospitality. Now he felt the
franchise of the free outer air.
"I'm a mighty confidin' young critter, I know," he replied, advancing
a few paces with his hands thrust in his pockets, "but this hyar
man"--he nodded at the surveyor and affected to lower his voice
confidentially--"hev got the name o' bein' sorter tricky, an' I 'lowed
I hed better kem along like a good neighbor ter holp ye some, else he
mought cheat ye out'n a passel o' lan'."
The surveyor, a tall, saturnine, businesslike body, took not the
slightest notice of this fling, but his two young chain-bearers grinned
their appreciation, and the other men laughed outright with evident
enjoyment, notably a tall, dark-eyed fellow, whom Kenniston presently
recognized as the deputy sheriff, with whom he had already had some
slight colloquy touching the possibly incendiary origin of the fire
that had destroyed the new building. The recollection furnished him
with a retort. He had flushed darkly, and his eyes were angry.
"I shouldn't be surprised to be ill treated in any way now in the
Cove--after what _has_ happened."
The laughter was checked by his tone. The men glanced at one
another constrainedly. Before his coming, the event had promised
to the volunteer assistants an episode of sociability affording
the interchange of ideas and jocular converse, the interest of the
developments sufficiently great to repay them for the hardship of
the steep scramble down the mountain side. The significance of the
proceeding was reasserted, and the silence was unbroken until the
surveyor, busily adjusting his compass, remarked to Kenniston that he
had noted one or two blazes indicating an old line, as he came up the
mountain.
"Ye won't go a-nigh them blazes!" cried Cap'n Lucy sarcastically,
waving his hand along an imaginary line. "Ye take my word fur it, ye
won't see them blazes 'twixt hyar an' the mounting's foot."
Kenniston detected a covert meaning in the tone, and glanced keenly
around at the speaker. But Cap'n Lucy's face was as enigmatically
satiric as his laughter; and as Kenniston's questioning stare sought
out the son, Luther turned away to avoid meeting his eyes, lowering,
anxious, and it seemed somehow conscious. Conscious, too, was the
hang-dog manner with which the usually bluff young mountaineer spoke to
the deputy sheriff Ross, observing that he did not see how the surveyor
could get his bearings such a shut-in day as this.
The deputy sheriff had found it easily compatible with his
interpretation of his duty to spare the time to assist as idle
spectator at anything promising so much interest and excitement as
the processioning of the Kenniston tract. For the antagonism between
the disputants had already been noised abroad, and Rodolphus Ross,
albeit a "peace officer" within the meaning of the statute, was not
so attached to the service of the white-winged goddess that he did not
cherish a lively expectation of whatever sport could be extracted from
Cap'n Lucy's and Kenniston's belligerent idiosyncrasies. He protested
now so clamorously that it might seem he feared that this unique
opportunity would be wrested from him, and, assuming the rôle of a
trustworthy weather prophet, maintained that whenever it rained before
twelve o'clock, noon, an early clearance was the certain sequel. The
discussion and the aspect of the weather diverted the general attention
from Cap'n Lucy's singular words, and from Luther's unwillingness to
proceed and surly disaffection.
But Kenniston, whose already keen observation was whetted by the
appreciation of the enmity he sustained and the magnitude of the
disaster that had befallen him, followed Luther's motion with an alert,
apprehending eye, and hardly lost sight of him even when the mists
swept between them and gave him but a distorted looming presentment
of the young mountaineer; though thus caricatured, Luther never lost
for a moment his uncharacteristic and already significant demeanor.
Small as the group was, the figures of two or three were now and again
abstracted from it, as if literally caught up in the clouds, slowly
materializing again as the mists shifted. The horses hard by were
sometimes invisible in the dense white medium, and anon only their
heads would appear here and there in various attitudes, like studies
for a cavalry subject. Even the Big Hollow Boulder, the corner of
the lines, seemed to recede, and again was near at hand, in a manner
altogether inconsistent with its accepted attributes of immovability as
a monument of boundary. The great felled trees, lying close by athwart
the outcropping ledges of rock,--traces of the mountain tempest,--were
obliterated and invisible in the encompassing whiteness. The chilly
sound of the rain beating heavily below in the valley rose on the dank
air, and more than once the white gauzy suffusions of the encompassing
vapor were pervaded with a transient yellow glow, broad and innocuous
reflections of the lightning of the storm-cloud of the lower levels.
The surveyor was a tall, well-knit man of forty-five or fifty, with a
square, short, grizzled beard decorating his chin, high cheek-bones, a
blunt nose, a far-seeing gray eye, and a quid of tobacco that seemed to
render him indifferent to the joys of conversation. His high boots were
drawn to the knees over his trousers,--a style affected by the rest
of the party; Kenniston's correct equestrian garb being sufficiently
dissimilar to give him that air of peculiarity and modishness that
somehow seems so unworthy and flippant among plain and humble folk, as
if they cared for better things than fashion. It made him a trifle ill
at ease, and he had a sense of being out of his sphere, added to the
conviction of the vicinage of enemies. He stood with his riding-whip in
his hand beside the surveyor as he adjusted his instrument, conscious
of sustaining the curious attention of the chain-bearers, two stalwart
young fellows arrayed in brown jeans and heavy boots, amply competent
for the task of carrying the chain through that rugged wilderness;
conscious, too, of Cap'n Lucy's brilliant, laughing, handsome eyes, the
doubtful, furtive glances of the others, and Luther's anxious, troubled
gaze.
Suddenly, with an infinitely light, elastic effect that permeated
all its vast area, the cloud began to uplift; the great grassy bald
of the mountain towering above them showed its vast green dome as it
were between precipitous white cliffs of still higher cloud mountains.
An eagle's wing caught the sunlight as he soared above, beyond rifle
range, and as he felt the rising wind his keen, exultant cry floated
down to them. A tempered white glister suffused all the clouds about
them; the sun was out, and as the illumined masses parted, the blue
mountains afar off now glimmered with a dusky section of the quiet
valley below, and again were veiled with the gleaming gauze. Between
its shining folds a glittering green avenue opened out down the woods,
as the surveyor, bending first to take sight, then holding his Jacob's
staff stiffly before him, set out from the Big Hollow Boulder with a
fair start and a long, elastic step; the two chain-bearers in file
alertly followed, alternately bowing down and rising again, while the
chain writhed through the grass between them like some living sinuous
thing, ever and again drawn out tense and straight, and the echoes
rang with the strophe and antistrophe of their sudden short cry,
"Stick!" "Stuck!" "Stick!" "Stuck!"
It might seem that all the oreads of the Great Smoky were set to flight
by this invasion of their sylvan haunts, so many a flitting white robe
fluttered elusive among the dense shadows of the trees, gone ere you
could look again; so often a glistening white arm was upflung in the
deepest green jungle of the laurel. They sprang up by every shadowy
cliff and lurking chasm, by every hidden spring and trickling stream,
and fled with tattered white scarfs streaming in the wind behind them.
All the way the rout continued as Science came down the slope, led by
a compass rather than the sun or the shadow, and with her votaries to
mete out the freedom of the wilds, and the grace of the contour of the
slopes, and the beauty of herbage and flowering growth, and the largess
of the gracious earth, and to reduce all to an arbitrary scale, and
judge it by the rod or perch or pole.
The grizzly old surveyor saw naught of this,--not even when, in
advance of all the company, he threaded the sun-glinted green glade,
and strode almost in the midst of a bevy of white gauze-draped
fleeing figures. Nor his chain-bearers, young though they were,
and presumably impressionable,--not even when they rose from their
alternate genuflections, and their sudden call "Out!" resounded on the
air, though they stood idle and looked about them while the surveyor
paused to mark the "out." Nor Cap'n Lucy, as light and swift on his
feet as the youngest, fierce, jaunty, with his clear, defiant eye. Nor
Rodolphus Ross, finding great opportunity for mirth behind Cap'n Lucy's
back as he scuffled along amongst the knot of spectators, keeping up
as best they might, skirting the barriers that the surveyor and his
chain-bearers, constrained by duty, went over, and tumbling, pulling,
and struggling with each other now and then for the best and foremost
place. "Look at old Cap'n Tems!" cried Ross. "Ain't he the very model
of a game rooster? He ain't big, an' he ain't strong, an' he ain't
heavy, but Lord! how he thinks he is!" Nor Kenneth Kenniston, beginning
to pause now and again,--albeit he did not flag, despite the hard pull
over the impracticable ground, for he was a man of stalwart physique
and a practiced pedestrian,--to look instead at the memorandum of the
calls of the title-deed, which original paper the surveyor held in his
hand, in doubt at first, in growing dismay, then in hot and mounting
anger. At the next "out," when the surveyor set down his Jacob's staff,
Kenniston strode over and tapped him somewhat imperatively on the
shoulder.
"My good friend," he said, with an evident effort at self-repression,
"are you not making some mistake? You surely are not following the
calls as they are set forth in these papers?"
To the professor of an exact science the suggestion of mistake is an
imputation of incapacity. The claims of the quid of tobacco were
disregarded for the nonce. The surveyor spoke, albeit with his mouth
full, and spoke to the point:--
"I reckon I know what I'm about, Mr. Kenn'ston. If you don't like the
way I'm runnin' this line, run it yerse'f."
"The blazes on those trees on the side of the mountain, that you called
my attention to, indicating the old line, are away over yonder on that
sharp ridge." Kenniston waved his hand with the paper in it toward
a high rocky crest to the left; then he fixed insistent eyes on the
surveyor, and stroked his full brown whiskers mechanically with the
other hand.
The surveyor followed with perplexed eyes the direction pointed out. He
gave a little puzzled sniff, as if he sought to smell the line. Then he
reverted to that prop of common sense, his Jacob's staff.
"D'ye want me to run the line according to the compass and the calls
of the title papers, or by the old blazes scattered about in the woods
on the trees?" he demanded. "You don't know whether they ever were
intended to mark the line, nor who put 'em thar, nor for what. I know
they ain't no kin ter the line I'm runnin' now, 'cordin' ter the calls
an' the compass."
Once more he took his bearings, and, holding his Jacob's staff before
him, walked steadily forward into the deeps of the wilderness; the two
sworn chain-bearers, who had listened with indignant, sullen brows to
the wrangle, and reflection on the work, again began diligently to bow
down and rise up, as they ejaculated their "Stick!" "Stuck!" "Stick!"
"Stuck!"--the clanking of the chain sounding loud and metallic in the
sylvan quiet. The other men, with their shadows, all pressed forward in
a close squad, for the pause had given the stragglers time to gather.
Kenniston was aware that Cap'n Lucy carried the sympathies and good
wishes of all the company, save perhaps the impartial surveyor, who
would suffer himself to be influenced by nothing less just than his
compass. He realized that he was looked upon as the "town man," and a
rich one, desirous of wresting, by a slight technicality of the law, a
very little land from a poor man who had in good faith built his house
upon it. He had grown extremely bitter in his sentiment toward the
people of the section because of the fire in which so much of value had
perished, for he believed its origin incendiary. He was conscious of
sustaining much antagonism, and he had fiercely resolved to deserve it.
He had, in his first uncontrolled rush of anger, declared that he would
punish somebody,--the true culprit, if possible; but _somebody_
should kick his heels in jail for a while, and go to the penitentiary
if might be. He did not in reality go so far in feeling as in
expression, but his was not a prudent tongue. He earnestly desired
success in the matter of the processioning; the scheme of the new
hotel had grown very close to him; it seemed to him that one log cabin
might serve the mountaineer as well as another, and that, moreover,
in justice to himself, he should claim his own. He had felt sure,
perfectly sure, that his deed called for the land that Cap'n Lucy held.
For the first time, as he clambered with the rest down the rugged
slopes, a doubt of this entered his mind. It made him wince from the
probable result. He was not prepared to occupy the position of having
sought to despoil a man, and a poor man, of his own, his very own, and
fail. He knew that if he succeeded the countryside would wish that he
had failed, and Cap'n Lucy would be a popular and picturesque object of
commiseration. But he could not endure the idea of the rejoicings in
his failure. To work a hardship to another was bad, indeed, and he had
never contemplated it without the salve of an ample money compensation.
To futilely seek to work a hardship was far worse. Again and again he
knit his brows, as he gazed at the treacherous annotations in his hand,
while the interchange of glances behind him commented on his attitude
and his evident state of mind. Cap'n Lucy, who could not have read a
word of the notes, strode on, apparently indifferent to fate, the "very
model of a game rooster," esteeming Kenniston's show of anxiety the
merest subterfuge; for would that monument of boundary known as the Big
Hollow Boulder have become so nimbly peripatetic, despite its tons of
weight, if the line run out therefrom were not to be materially altered
for the betterment of the claimant at whose instance the processioning
was held?
And still the chain clanked and writhed its length along the ground,
and the cries "Stick!" "Stuck!" of the chain-bearers alternated as
before, until the sudden call "Out!" resounded, and the surveyor paused
to mark the "out" once more.