As the surveyor planted his Jacob's staff anew he drew a long sigh of
fatigue, and gazed out discerningly at the weather signs from over a
craggy, jutting precipice at one side, which in its savage bareness
disclosed from the midst of the dense forest a vast expanse of the
tremulous mountain landscape below. The uncertain flicker of the
sunshine was now on the green of the wooded valley, which presently
dulled to the colorless neutrality of the persistent shadow, albeit the
summits of the far horizon line gleamed delicately azure, as if the
tint possessed some luminous quality and glowed inherently blue. To the
right hung masses of vaporous gray; and beneath, fine serried lines
were drawn in myriads against the darker tints of half-seen slopes,
where the rain was falling. Still beyond, a great glamourous sunburst
appeared in the mist, with so rayonnant an effect of the divergent
splendors from its dazzling focus that it might seem a fleeting glimpse
of the actual wheel of the chariot of the sun. It rolled away speedily.
A rainbow barely flaunted its chromatic glories across the sky, and
faded like an illusion, and all the world was gray again; from a dead
bough starkly thrust out of the wooded slopes half way to the valley a
rain crow was calling and calling.
The other men, too, were looking over the valley, so long obscured by
the dense forest trees and still denser undergrowth through which they
had taken their way. It seemed much nearer than when they had last seen
it from the dome, even allowing for the distance they had traversed,
and they noted, with that interest always excited by a familiar scene
from a new standpoint, the aspect of the well-known landmarks, all
changed and strange. Kenniston had drawn near the verge; he stood
sharply outlined against the sky, a field-glass in his hand, which
again and again he brought to bear upon the smouldering black mass on
the cliffs far below that once was the new hotel, only to be located
now by the thinly curling smoke from its ruins. The instrument was
familiar enough to the mountaineers, who had most of them observed its
use during the war; but to a certain type of rustic an affectation of
ignorance is the prettiest of jests.
"Say, mister," Rodolphus Ross adjured him, with a show of eager
anxiety, "air yer contraption strong enough ter view enny insurance on
that thar buildin'?"
The echo caught his laughter and blended it with the rain crow's call.
He was not sensitive himself, and he could not appreciate sensitiveness
in others. The fact that the building had perished in the flames,
without insurance, was well known to the community; and how could it
help or hinder that he should sharpen his wits by a little exercise on
the theme?
Kenniston made no reply, still sweeping the landscape with his glass.
As the surveyor bent to take sight, Kenniston suddenly turned.
"Stop," he said; "you will stop this farce right here. This is a
conspiracy!"
The surveyor, still in his stooping posture, looked at him in amazement.
"Hey?" he exclaimed, as if he did not believe his senses.
"A conspiracy!" Kenniston reiterated.
The surveyor, in the course of his brawny career, had been offered
few insults, and these he had promptly requited with stout blows. But
the sight of a man who has lost reason, temper, and policy together
has sometimes a steadying effect on the spectator. Besides, he was in
the performance of a sworn duty, and, being a faithful and efficient
officer of the county, he had a high ideal of the functions of his
office. He was nettled by Kenniston's self-magnifying attitude, but
it was obviously in order to give him the correct measurements, not
of himself, but of his land, and although he retorted, it was in good
enough temper.
"Conspirin' with the meridian line?" he demanded, with a sneer,
thrusting his quid of tobacco into his leather jaw with a tongue
grown expert by long practice in thus clearing the way for its own
utterances. "Or maybe ye think the points o' the compass have got in a
mutiny against ye?"
Cap'n Lucy came alongside the Jacob's staff, and gave Kenniston a
rallying wink, sly, malicious, sarcastic, and altogether unworthy of
the fine eye that it eclipsed. "Conspirin' with a monimint o' boundary
knowed ez Big Hollow Boulder?" he said.
Luther turned away suddenly, with an accession of hang-dog furtiveness
in his manner, and Kenniston's fury was stemmed for the moment by his
surprise and doubt and bewilderment. Still with choleric color mantling
his face, his eyes bright and wide, his white teeth pressing on the
lip which he was biting visibly despite the thick abundance of beard,
with all the fire eliminated from the angry facial expression that he
yet retained, he stared silently at Captain Lucy, who was scornfully
laughing. The surveyor took advantage of the seeming lucidity of the
interval to seek to rehabilitate pacific relations.
"I can't help _how_ ye expected the line ter run out, Mr.
Kenniston. I'm runnin' it 'cordin' ter the calls an' the compass. Ye
an' Cap'n Tems are here as owners o' the adjoinin' tracts, ter see it
done fur yerselves."
"Not me!" cried Cap'n Lucy. "I ain't looked at yer durned bodkin" (thus
he demeaned the magnetic needle) "sence I kem out. It mought waggle
todes the north pole, like ye sez it do,--'pears onstiddy enough fur
ennything,--or it mought waggle todes the east pole. I ain't keerin'.
It may know the poles whenst it sees 'em,--though I dunno ef that
needle hev got an eye. My main dependence air in that monimint o'
boundary knowed ez the Big Hollow Boulder--corner rock--corner o' the
lines--oh my!--yes!"
The significance of this was hardly to be overlooked.
"See here, Cap'n Lucy," said Kenniston, suddenly dropping his
aggressions even to the unusual point of giving the old man his
accustomed title, "what do you mean by that?"
Cap'n Lucy gave him a broadside of big bright eyes.
"Why, don't you-uns know that monimint o' boundary knowed ez Big Hollow
Boulder--corner mark--been thar so long?"
"Well, what about it?" demanded Kenniston impatiently.
"Why, it's _known_ ez Big Hollow Boulder, 'cordin' ter yer own
notice posted up at the mill," said Cap'n Lucy tantalizingly.
Kenniston still stared, and the surveyor, seeking to cut short a futile
waste of time, bent once more to take sight. "The only way ter git
things settled is ter run out the line 'cordin' ter the calls an' the
compass, an' I'm a-doin' of it fair an' square."
"There is something radically wrong," persisted Kenniston angrily. Then
turning to Cap'n Lucy, he continued vehemently, "I know--and _you_
know--that Wild Duck River is on my land, and doesn't touch yours in
any of its windings; and look there!--Wild Duck Falls!"
He pointed diagonally across a ravine, where, amidst the dusky depths
of green shadows, and close to a gray cloud that came surging through
the valley, a narrow, gleaming, white, feathery mountain cataract, with
an impetus and a motion like the flight of an arrow smartly sped from
the bow, shot down into the gorge.
It transfixed Cap'n Lucy. He stood staring at it, motionless, amazed,
it might seem aghast. For the boundary line that the surveyor was
running according to the compass and calls had thrown within his tract
this mountain torrent, this wayward alien, which he had known for many
a year as the native of the Kenniston woods.
"It makes no difference, gentlemen, what ye hev 'lowed ye owned, an'
what ye didn't," interposed the surveyor: "this boundary line I'm
runnin' out will show ye the exac' extent o' yer possessions." And once
more he bent to take sight.
Then he rose and stalked forward, his Jacob's staff held before him,
his eyes intent and fixed, the links of the chain once more dully
clanking as it writhed through the grass, and the chain-bearers, with
their cabalistic refrain, "Stick!" "Stuck!" bowing down and rising up,
as they ever and again drew it out taut to its extreme length between
them.
The spectators followed on either hand, plunging into the deeper
forest, which, as it interposed before the cliffs, cut off the view
of the wide landscape, that seemed lifted into purer light and more
transparent color by the contrast with the bosky shadows as it
disappeared, and again was vaguely glimpsed between the boles and
hanging branches, and once more vanished, leaving the aspect of the
world the bare breadth of the herder's trail through the laurel.
Two of the men--shaggy of beard and of hair, and shabbier far of
garb than the others--gazed at the proceeding with the eyes of deep
wonderment and reluctant acceptance, as if it were some formula of
necromancy which revolted credulity. They were denizens of a deeply
secluded cove near by, lured hither by the report of the processioning,
and looking for the first time upon the simple paraphernalia of
land-surveying,--the chain, the Jacob's staff, and the compass; even
the surveyor and the chain-bearers were only the verification of wild
rumors that had reached them. They were not unintelligent; they were
only uninformed. The knowledge and experience of the commonplace
process which the others possessed might hardly be considered an
adequate set-off against such fresh and illimitable capacities of
impressionability. Few people can so enjoy a day of sight-seeing as
fell to the share of these denizens of "Painter Flats."
Kenniston lingered for a few minutes, still sweeping with the
field-glass the rugged ravine where Wild Duck Falls gleamed white,
swift, amidst the deep, dusky green shadows: disappearing beneath the
approaching gray cloud as its filmy gauzes expanded and floated into
the larger spaces of the ravine, then piercing its draperies with a
keen, glimmering shaft of white light, and vanishing again as the cloud
thickened and condensed in its passage through the narrowing limits
of the gorge. He turned away at last, the glass still in his hand,
following hard on the steps of the surveyor, marking all the successive
stages of the proceedings with a keen, alert, inimical observation. He
wore a grim, set face, and his manner expressed a sustained abeyance,
watchfulness, and a dangerous readiness.
The landmarks were such as were easily common to any line. When the
deed had called for four hundred and fifteen poles northwest to a white
oak-tree, the chain-bearers had brought up, without a link amiss, at
the gnarled foot of one of a cluster of such trees. A half-obliterated
indentation upon it the surveyor accepted as the specific mark of
identification, although others considered it an old "blaze" indicating
an ancient trail, and Kenniston declared it merely a "cat-face." Again,
the line, diverging, ran due north eight hundred poles to a stake
in the middle of Panther Creek. The chain found the middle easily
enough, though not the stake, which was, of course, in the nature of
things, a temporary mark, and liable to be carried away in a freshet,
or broken down by floating logs or other obstruction. The stream,
however, kept an almost perfectly straight line--barring the slight
sinuous meandering inherent to a natural channel which did not affect
the general direction--for more than a mile through a grassy glade
almost free of undergrowth, purling along under the shadow of the great
trees and rocks. Thus, if the previous markings were correct, this of
necessity depended upon them. The surveyor had a stub driven down, in
place of the missing stake, in the middle of the stream, re-marking the
line according to the law. Once more the chain-bearers, dripping like
spaniels from their excursions into the water, began their series of
genuflections and their ringing outcry, "Stick!" "Stuck!"
All had observed Kenniston curiously during the halt, and the doubt
and discussion as to the missing mark, expectant of some wrathful
demonstration. If he did not coincide with the surveyor's opinion, he
made no sign. In one sense, his demeanor balked them of the amusement
which they had ravenously looked for. He made no protest, which,
reasonable or unreasonable, they would have relished. His attitude,
his face, his words, were constrained to a stern neutrality and
inexpressiveness. He seemed only grimly watchful, waiting. The change
itself afforded food for speculation, an entertainment more subtle
and of keener interest than his previous outbreaks, although less
alluring to the maliciously mirthful spectator. It seemed, however, to
disconcert the surveyor more than active interference and aggression.
Submissiveness is so abnormal a trait in a man of Kenniston's type
that its symptoms indicate a serious moral crisis. Now and again, the
surveyor, pausing to mark the "out," appealed directly to him. To be
sure, the remark was in relation to the weather, for the clouds were
gathering overhead, a slate-tinted canopy, seeming close upon the
summits of the tall trees, till a white lace-like film scudding across
it in contrary currents of the wind served to show, by the force of
comparison, the true distance of the higher vapors. Kenniston had only
monosyllables for reply, and the man of the compass could but mop his
brow, and listen anxiously to the distant rumblings of thunder, and
wish this troublous piece of work well over, and take his bearings
anew. When the call in the deed for a girdled and dead poplar-tree was
found to have no correspondent mark on the face of the earth, being,
as he observed, a mark bound to be obliterated in the course of time,
since the tree was dead when the deed, which was of remote date, was
written, Kenniston's silence had evidently an unnerving effect.
"Why, look here," the surveyor broke out in self-defense at length. "I
ain't got no sort o' interest in the line except to run it according
ter the calls an' the compass. I'll git my fees, whether or no. 'Tain't
nuthin' ter me which gits the most lan', you or Cap'n Tems."
As Kenniston still continued silent, he looked appealingly at Cap'n
Lucy, and, receiving no encouragement, set his teeth, addressed himself
to his work, and communed thenceforward with naught more responsive
than his Jacob's staff.
But what, alack, had befallen Cap'n Lucy? Did ever a gamecock, that
had never so much as felt his adversary's gaff, drop his feathers so
suddenly? He was all at once old, tired, anxious, troubled. He tugged
along at the rear of the party, lagging and flagging as he had never
done on certain forced marches that had seemed a miracle of endurance.
For Cap'n Lucy's frame had been upborne by his spirit in those ordeals,
and now that ethereal valiance had deserted him. For what mystery was
this? The moving of the monument of boundary "known as the Big Hollow
Boulder"--he thought of it thus for the first time without the sneer
of inscrutable offense which the rotund phrasing had occasioned--had,
instead of stripping him of his possessions, resulted in throwing much
land, which he doubted not belonged to his neighbor, within his own
lines. That Kenniston had himself moved the corner landmark or connived
at the commission of this felony, if not otherwise preposterous, was
thus rendered absolutely incredible. But who, then, could have moved
it? When? How? For what unimaginable reason? How strange that he should
have discovered the change! And what mad freak of fate was it that it
should be he, he himself, who should profit by it, acquiring the legal
title to hundreds of acres at Kenniston's expense? Cap'n Lucy was
an honest man, and the thought made him gasp. Had it been possible,
he would at that moment have flung all the Great Smoky Mountains at
Kenniston's feet. No recantation was too bitter, no renunciation was
too complete, rather than be suspected, with any show of reason, as
he had suspected Kenniston. Not that he cared for the groundless
suspicion, but for its justification. This consideration summoned his
tardy policy. He must needs have time to think. Were he bluntly to
declare the corner-stone to have been moved, it might seem to criminate
himself; for albeit the line was running to his advantage here, who
could say how its divergences might affect his possessions lower down
on the mountain? "Windin' an' a-twistin' like the plumb old tarnation
sarpient o' hell!" Cap'n Lucy vigorously described it in a mutter to
his beard.
Moreover, even if the later results were also to his benefit, as it
had been notoriously contrary to his wishes that the land should be
processioned at all, it might seem that moving the boulder had been
his scheme to thus thwart any definite establishment of the line of
boundary,--and this was a felony.
Cap'n Lucy experienced a sudden affection of the spine which seemed
to him abnormal, and, at the moment, possibly fatal, so curious, so
undreamed of heretofore, were its symptoms. A cold chill trembled along
its fibres; responsive cold drops bedewed his forehead. His hand had
lost its normal temperature, and was cold to the touch. For the first
time in all his life Cap'n Lucy's nerves were made acquainted with
the shock of fear. He did not identify it; he could not recognize it.
He was spared this acute mortification. He only felt strangely ill
and undecided and tremulous, and he doubted his survival. He began
to wonder if Kenniston suspected aught. He no longer questioned the
genuineness of his enemy's demeanor earlier in the day, when each
unexpected divergence of the line had seemed by turns to perturb and
to anger him. Cap'n Lucy noted the cessation of the protestations, the
grimly set jaw, the smouldering fire of the eye, the attitude of tense
expectancy and waiting. He wondered if Kenniston were "laying for" him
now as he had been "laying for" Kenniston. He thought of the intention
deferred from "out" to "out" to loudly proclaim his discovery of the
removal of the corner landmark, of his relish of his enemy's fancied
security in outwitting him. He had only given Kenniston a little line,
a little more, as it were, that he might hang himself with it, and now,
forsooth, this noose was at his own service.
He felt a moderate and tempered gratulation that he had not been
precipitate in the matter, that as yet no one knew of his discovery;
but suddenly he remembered his ill-starred confidence to Luther. For
the first time he marked his son's furtive, skulking, downcast manner.
"Like a sheep-killin' dog!" said Cap'n Lucy to himself, in a towering
rage. "What ef he do know it's been moved: did I move it?"
He remembered, too, his reiterated allusions to the perambulatory
boulder, and Kenniston's amazement, which then he had thought
affectation, but which he now believed to be quite genuine. Were they
the exciting cause, so to speak, of that grim air of abeyance and
biding his time?
"The boulder can't be put back," said Cap'n Lucy to himself, suddenly
on the defensive. "Nobody could make out whar it kem from fust, 'kase
it never lef' a trace on the rock; an' a dozen horse couldn't haul it
up sech a steep slope. It mus' hev been blowed down by dam-i-nite."
It was a fine illustration of a moral descent, impossible to be
retraced; but Cap'n Lucy did not think of that. His mind was full of
the complications of his position, the dangers of disclosure, and
the impossibility to him of accepting the boundary line, thus taking
possession of another man's land, even if the owner would compose
himself to sleep upon his rights. Judging from Kenniston's looks, it
was easily to be argued that he would prove very wide awake in this
emergency.
But for the changing weather signs the old man's altered demeanor might
have encountered other notice than Kenniston's keen watchfulness.
Now and again the thunder pealed among the mountain tops, and the
slate-colored cloud had spread until it overhung all the visible world,
when they once more drew so near to the verge of the precipice as to
have glimpses of the densely wooded cove and the circling mountains.
The ranges were all sombre gray or deeply purple, save far away, where
some rift in the clouds admitted a skein of sunbeams suspended in
fibrous effect over a distant slope that was a weird yellowish-green
in this scant illumination which had fallen to its share, rendered
more marked by the dull estate of its dun-tinted and purple compeers.
Nearer at hand, the shadows were deepening momently in the forest.
Once or twice, when the sharp blades of the lightnings cleft them, the
lifeless bronze aisles of the woods sprang into a transient glare of
brilliant green that was hardly less dazzling, and again the thunder
pealed.
Two or three of the mountaineers left the party, evidently with no
mind to be drenched. A man with a hacking cough remained, animated by
that indisposition to self-denial, that avidity of enjoyment, that
determination to seize all which niggard life holds out, characteristic
of a type of consumptive invalids. "'Tain't goin' ter rain," he
declared buoyantly. It might seem that nothing less potent than powder
and lead could wean from the sight of processioning the land the two
denizens of Panther Flats. They patrolled every step that the surveyor
took. Whenever he paused, they came up and stared, fascinated, and at
close quarters, at the Jacob's staff. They counted the chains from
"out" to "out." As one of them observed to the other, he "was just
beginning to get the hang of the thing." He could keep under shelter at
a more convenient season.
A sudden flash that seemed to pierce the very brain, so did it
outdazzle the capacity of vision, a simultaneous deafening detonation,
beneath which the mountains appeared to quake and to cry out with
a terrible voice, while again and again the echoes repeated the
thunderous menace, and then all the air was permeated by a swift
electrical illumination, visibly transient, but so instantly succeeded
by a similar effect that it seemed permanent,--in this weird glare the
surveyor bent once more to take sight.
"Old man sticks ter his contrac' like a sick kitten ter a hot brick!"
cried Rodolphus Ross to one of the chain-bearers.
But the chain-bearers had scant sympathy for the spectators, and
visited upon the company in general their displeasure because of the
reflections upon the "old man's" work, for which Kenniston alone was
responsible.
"Whyn't ye wear yer muzzle, 'Dolphus?" the one addressed retorted
gruffly.
Most of the party had now deserted the spectacle, in deference to a
timely admonition as to the fate of the horses picketed on the "bald,"
and their peculiar susceptibility to the fear of lightning. When the
progress of the surveying again brought its adherents to the verge of
the mountain and an extended outlook over the valley, there remained
only the two men from Panther Flats, Rodolphus Ross, Cap'n Lucy, the
chain-bearers, the surveyor, Luther, and the owner of the tract at
whose instance the processioning was made.
As they looked out over the gray valley, distinct under the sombre sky,
as though only color, and not light, were withdrawn,--Cap'n Lucy's
cabin, the inclosures, the grim black crags beyond, the smouldering
mass of the ruins of the burnt building, even the shanties of the
workmen in the gorge at the foot of the cliffs, all perfectly
distinguishable in their varied interpretation of gray and brown and
blurring unnamed gradations of neutral tones, all overhung by the
storm-cloud definitely and darkly purplish-black, with now and again,
one knew not how, fleeting lurid green reflections,--Kenniston, brisk
and dapper, lightly tapping his spurred boots with his riding-whip,
smiling debonairly, but with a dangerous sarcastic gleam in his fiery
eyes, stepped up to the surveyor. He carried his field-glass in one
hand.
"Now, if you will come a few paces this way,--and you, colonel," in
parenthesis to poor Cap'n Lucy,--"and use your telescope, you are
obliged to see that if you run out the line seventeen hundred poles
to the north, according to the deed, you will go beyond the site of
the hotel. I seem to have built my house on the colonel's land. It was
_your_ house that was destroyed, colonel. Let me beg you to accept
my condolences,--ha, ha, ha!"
A flash brighter than all that had preceded it, and his satiric
laughter was lost in the roll and the reverberation of the thunder.
A sudden darkening overspread the landscape, like a visible
thickening of the clouds; the form of a horse darted along the verge
of the precipice, so swift, so gigantic, defined against the green
suffusions of that purple-black storm-cloud, that it seemed like the
materialization of the hero of some equine fable. A wild cry went up
that the horses had broken loose, and were stampeding through the
woods. A terrible wrenching, riving sound followed another flash,
and they could see a stricken tree on the slope below, in the instant
before the blinding descent of the torrents. The wind rose with a wild,
screaming cry; the forests bent and writhed; no one of the party could
discern his neighbor's face; and, despite the pluck of the surveyor,
the processioning of the Kenniston tract remained unfinished.