The anomaly of administering upon one's own estate Lorenzo Taft was
permitted in some sort to experience. A definite realization of
finality attended his meditations, at he sat bending over the embers in
the great fireplace of the store, in the rain-clouded morning that rose
upon the conclusion of his labors of removing the still and destroying
all its approaches. His vocation was gone, and naught remained. He had
no more affinity than a fox or a wolf for a law-abiding occupation.
The possible profits that might stick to his hands in the process of
the conversion of the goods upon the shelves from the wholesale ratio
to the retail failed to allure him, for the store had never been aught
but a "blind." The furrow was no thoroughfare. That wild gambling with
the chances of the sun and wind and the rain in its season, and often
out of its season, known as farming, and doubtless permitted by the law
only because it insures its own punishment, was risky enough to jump
with his humor, but the stakes were hopelessly inadequate. He could not
look forward, and the glance backward over the shoulder needs a good
conscience to commend the prospect.
Now and again he lifted his heavy boot and kicked the embers together
fiercely, as if at great odds with his thoughts and his own counsels.
Like many another, he undervalued his success, its hairbreadth
jeopardies and its difficulty of attainment, now that it was fairly
secured. It seemed to him a slight thing, the device of his quick
wits to insure his safety, and his satisfaction in its triumphant
exploitation had already evanesced. Had it been possible to reëstablish
the status of yesterday, doubtless he would have hardily risked the
discovery of the still, the disclosure of Larrabee, the capture of
Espey, Dan Sykes's drunken tongue, and, as a result of these, the
"shootin'-irons" of the "revenuers" and the sentence of the federal
court. But gunpowder as a factor in a scheme admits of no second
thoughts.
He even upbraided his own acumen that, in the emergency, he had sought
with an eye single the safety of himself, his one remaining comrade,
and the apparatus, regardless of all considerations of enmity. But now
that judgment was satisfied and escape certain, vengeance clamored.
Whenever he thought of Larrabee outside, triumphant, free, enjoying
an absolute immunity from the law by reason of the destruction of the
moonshiners' lair, which rendered the discovery of his complicity
impossible, Taft frowned heavily and swore beneath his breath, and
kicked the unoffending embers into a new adjustment, so bitter was the
fact that his own safety made Larrabee's protection complete. Even poor
Dan Sykes's exile--and doubtless the young sot was well on the way to
Texas by this time--was as necessarily a measure taken in Larrabee's
behalf as if it were the dearest desire of Taft's heart to shield and
screen him. The realization that, despite himself, Larrabee shared his
security cheapened it. Less and less he realized its value. A turbulent
pulse began to stir within his veins. His heavy cheek was red and
pendulous beneath his yellow beard. Occasionally he dropped his lower
jaw with an expression of angry dismay, so ill had the event fallen out
with his liking. The sight of Copley wandering about the half-darkened
house, lighted only by the fire and the pallid grayness from the door
ajar opening upon the rainy outside world, as uneasy as a homeless cat,
able to settle to nothing, his face a palimpsest of care and trouble
and failure, overwritten again and again above the half-obliterated
script of years agone, irritated him vaguely. Taft eyed him loweringly,
as the two children in the opposite room besieged him for the detail of
the adventures and dramatic "taking off" of a certain "black b'ar," a
vanquished enemy of his earlier days, which he recounted as aimlessly
as if the story were elicited by a wooden crank; but responding to a
spirited encore, he plucked up heart of grace to add new and fresh
particulars. His worn and not unkindly face did not ill become the
armchair and the propinquity of the juvenile heads. His serenity, as
the two resorted from contradiction to blows, smartly administered
across him to his own great jeopardy, bespoke a grandfatherly
tolerance, nearly related to affection, for the combatants. Without
more masterful leading than his own mind could originate or his own
propensities could furnish, he might spend the rest of his life at the
plough-handles, and ask no better society, and hope for naught beyond
his coarse garb and his coarser fare. He was growing old, and this
might be a better prospect than the still could promise, with always
the possibility of a federal prisoner's cell at the vanishing point of
the long perspective.
Taft could preëmpt no such demesne of mild content. His rankling regret
for all that he had done, and done so well, in that it served his enemy
perforce as one with himself, deepened as he began to realize that in
escaping so great and imminent a danger none sustained appreciable
injury but himself. He alone seemed at the end. He could not for years,
perhaps, safely rehabilitate the still. A new place must be sought, a
new trade established, new dangers guarded against; and complicated
by his relations with Larrabee, at large and at enmity, a removal
unobserved and a reëstablishment without pursuit seemed impossible.
He dwelt with futile persistence on the peculiar adaptability of his
hiding-place, now demolished forever. Nowhere else could he have
commanded such advantages of seclusion. Surely nowhere else could his
dangerous vocation have been so safely plied. He enumerated the varied
precautions that he had observed, the dangers that he had successfully
balked. All the chances of the world outside had run in his favor; even
the mysterious burning of the hotel was strangely calculated to aid his
design in preventing the advent into the Cove of summer sojourners,
that might lead to the discovery of his lair. Doubtless, too, by this
time, in addition, Kenniston's plans were definitely and forever
baffled by the untoward result of processioning the land. And as the
thought of it recurred to him he started suddenly, the color deepened
in his face, and he beheld the events of which he had elected to play
the motive power in a new and baleful light.
Certainly there was no flaw in his reasoning that stormy night when
he had betaken himself in company with the wind and the rain, high up
into the solitudes of the "bald" of the mountain. A wild night, with
none else abroad save perchance a stray marauder of the furry gentry.
Only the mists dogged his steps, and only the lightnings searched out
his path. The gigantic boulder that seemed immovable, grim, gaunt,
forbidding, the agency of giant powder set astir easily enough; and
although the charge, accurately calculated for the purpose, was not
sufficient to fracture the great mass, its equilibrium on the steep
slope was destroyed. A wild turbulent dance it had as it hurled down
the slope from the spot where the ebbing seas of centuries agone had
left it stranded. A thunderous crashing voice it lifted as it went, and
the thunder of the clouds seemed to reply. In the pallid dawn of the
rainy day, Taft had crept back through the wet clouds of the summits
and the spent winds lingering in the dank woods, to behold it lying
there in this alien stop, as immovable of aspect as of yore, with great
trees uprooted by the tempest athwart the rocky ledges about its path,
and every trace of the action of powder effaced by the persistent rain.
It marked a new corner for the beginning of Kenniston's survey; on a
line with the old, it is true, but full five furlongs distant. It was
a north-westerly line to be run out thence; the greater divergence
would occur in the Cove, which fact Taft had learned as Kenniston made
a swift plat of his irregularly shaped land with his cane on the floor
of Cap'n Lucy's cabin porch. A simple scheme enough, this,--that the
one available site for the hotel should be thrown within the lines
of Cap'n Lucy, who would not bargain, sell, or convey, and thus the
ill-omened caravansary crowded out of the space it was expected to
occupy; for as yet Bruin's intervention as incendiary was among the
uncovenanted things, and since the unlucky threat to burn the building
had originated among the moonshiners Taft feared discovery should he
apply the torch himself. A simple scheme, well planned and carried out
with full effect,--and how should its completion so ill please its
projector?
The fact that Cap'n Lucy should profit by it Taft had heretofore hardly
heeded, since this was the necessary incident of his own greater
profit. Now, however, that treachery, as he esteemed it, had riddled
the whole finespun web and brought it to naught, a turmoil of rage
possessed him. It seemed some curious chicanery of fate that he alone
should sustain loss, and that to others should accrue all the advantage
of his subtle weavings of chance and fact, as if the threads still
held fast. Cap'n Lucy was in possession, doubtless, of many hundred
acres of Kenniston's land. He suddenly grudged them to Cap'n Lucy as
he had never bethought himself to grudge them to Kenniston. Jealousy
is an intimate passion, and insistently of the soil. The neighbor, the
associate, the friend's friend,--it makes no far casts. Kenniston was
beyond its restricted bounds.
Cap'n Lucy's causticity, his arrogance, his insulting courage which
belittled the possibilities of another man's wrath, his intrenchment in
the subservience of his household, and his preëminence in the esteem
of his small world did not serve to commend him to his unwilling
benefactor, who stood in immediate contemplation of his own loss.
And as the radiant face of Julia appeared in the dim midst of Taft's
recollection, he rose to his feet, his resolution taken in the instant.
He had not forgotten the look in Larrabee's eyes when Espey had
demanded of him whom he had been "a-courtin' at Tems's." Now, with
Espey gone, and Larrabee foot-loose and free, it might chance that
these hundreds of acres of which he had bereft Kenniston would one day
fall into Larrabee's possession as his wife's inheritance, when Cap'n
Lucy should go to his account,--which Taft doubted not would be a long
one.
"I'll be dad-burned," he cried, "ef I'll stand by an' see Kenniston
choused fur old Lucy or Lar'bee, air one!"
Few human motives are simple. The travesty of restitution served to
cloak even to himself jealousy and grudging and revenge, and that
mad impulse to hurl down and wreak woe upon those who had chanced
to prosper in the dispensations which he had ordered himself, and
which had wrought perversely to his injury. He had, however, nothing
of the appearance or the manner of a subtle villain when he was on
horseback in the slanting lines of rain, that multiplied till they
hid the mountains near at hand, and erased the Cove, and nullified
all the conditions of the familiar world. On the contrary, his bluff,
bold, open aspect was of a reassuring geniality, notwithstanding its
overbearing intimations, and served to identify him to Kenniston, as
he lounged in his unsubstantial domicile, and looked out ruefully at
the dull day with the gray rain and the grayer mist and the ochreous
pools of water, seeing naught else till this massive equestrian figure
materialized in its vaporous midst and seemed to ride straight out of
it. Taft flung himself from his saddle with a decision which implied a
mission; and despite Kenniston's intention to discourage the visits of
the mountaineers, he could not, with so assured a guest, have withheld
the customary greeting of hospitality without more definite rudeness
than he had expected to adventure.
The new-comer was the more welcome since Kenniston's companion in
keeping the monkey stove warm was Rodolphus Ross, who had come to the
Cove for the purpose of examining the scene of the fire, and ferreting
out the incendiary. He had, under the guise of questioning Kenniston
on the subject, inflicted his society upon his restive host for the
better part of an hour, now and then desisting from the discussion to
work away at the damper of the monkey stove, which he patronizingly
denominated a "smart little trick," albeit by reason of the heavy
air and ill adjustment and the lack of adequate draught it was doing
itself no credit. Ross experimented with an ardor and uninformed energy
which threatened the total wreck of its constitution. The clatter of
the metal was hardly more grating upon Kenniston's educated nerves
than were his guest's speech and bearing. There was something in the
exaggeration of the deputy's urban boorishness, the plaid of his
ill-fitting garments, the hilarity of his vulgar townish impudence,
that daunted a charitable acceptation of his foibles. So distasteful to
Kenniston's cultured taste was the degree of sophistication acquired
by the deputy sheriff, and with many a misconception adapted to his
personality, that the absence of it seemed dignity in the mountaineer,
and Taft's unvarnished address the unpolished substratum of good
manners.
"How's ducks in the hills?" Ross greeted him, dropping the small
poker, and looking up with bright dark eyes, the two prominent front
teeth visible beneath the short upper lip. There was a moment of
rabbit-like expectancy of expression; then his lips widened to a laugh
as the burly stranger turned his serious, impressive face toward him.
"Air you-uns speakin' ter me, sir?" demanded Taft, in a grave, direct
manner, his steady eye full upon him.
The airy deputy shifted ground for once. "Good day fur ducks," he
modified his speech.
"Cornsider'ble fallin' weather," admitted Taft incidentally, and,
seating himself in the chair indicated by Kenniston, he proceeded
to take part in the conversation, his big booming voice rendering
interruption impossible save as he listed.
"I hev viewed you-uns afore at old Cap'n Lucy Tems's house," he said to
Kenniston, crossing his legs, and eying the steam casually as it rose
from the damp boots under the persuasive heat of the stove. "Yes, sir,
Taft is my name."
"I remember you very well," said Kenniston affably. "Won't you light
your pipe?" He pushed a match holder and tobacco pouch across the table
to him.
Taft, without comment, filled his pipe from an inexhaustible supply of
tobacco that seemed always loose in his pocket; it was far stronger
than that of his host, as the rank odor which rose on the air presently
demonstrated. Rodolphus Ross had looked at him with a grin of hopeful
anticipation, which shrunk at once when he recognized and adapted to
his own needs the uses of the lucifer match.
"Yes, sir," Taft resumed, "I war toler'ble sorry ter hear 'bout'n yer
hotel bein' burnt. I didn't view it at the time." He puffed the coals
into a glow, and pulled away comfortably.
"Meanes' people on yearth, these hyar mountaineers!" cried Ross. "They
jes' so durned ignorant they don't know sin from salvation, nor law
from lying."
"Then they ain't 'sponsible," remarked Taft coolly. He pressed down the
burning tobacco in the bowl with a callous forefinger indurated by long
practice to crowding his pipe, and resumed: "I 'lowed it mought gin ye
a start ef I war ter tell ye I hearn sev'ral men talkin' 'bout burnin'
it,--long time ago, 'fore it war begun."
Kenniston was leaning back in his chair, much at his ease, noting with
a sort of languid interest the intimations of force and ferocity in
his visitor's face: the keen sagacity, rather as of the instinctive
endowment of one of the lower orders of creation than an enlightened
intelligence; the beaklike nose; the contradictory geniality of the
full blue eye and broad floridity. He brought his tilted chair suddenly
to the floor, leaned forward on the table, with a slight exclusive
gesture toward Rodolphus Ross, which, although it escaped that worthy,
caused Taft a sharp regret for his precipitancy.
The deputy sheriff was all a-clamor.
"Why, now, my big bull o' Bashan, ye hev got ter make that statement
under oath with full partic'lars,--names, dates, and place!" He rose up
on the opposite side of the monkey stove, with the lifter in his hand,
with which he gesticulated imperatively.
Kenniston could hardly repress his impatience.
"Of course, Mr. Ross, of course,--all in due season," he said irritably.
"But abuse the authorities, in season an' out, an' 'low the devil will
ketch the officer, in due course o' jestice, 'fore the officer'll ketch
the malefactor. I ain't a-goin' ter lose you, Mr. Durham, ye bet high
on that!" he added, turning to Taft.
"Mr. Taft expects to swear to the facts, of course," said Kenniston. He
paused abruptly, meditating a remonstrance with the tumultuous brute;
but Ross's very vulgarity, his clamorous brutality, the impossibility
of reaching through his hardened exterior any sensitiveness, or pride,
or sense of decorum, or whatever sanction may control the heart of a
man who is a gentleman in jeans, gave him an advantage over a man of
breeding which no culture could compass. Kenniston could not cope with
him; his training had prepared him for no such encounter.
Only Taft's great sonorous voice could overbear the deputy's words,
which sounded in his first utterance with the disjointed effect of
Christmas firecrackers enlivening the booming of Christmas guns.
"I'll make oath ter statements ez ter date an' person, but not
place,--I hev no call ter drag other folks inter sech. I dunno ez they
fired the hotel; I only heard 'em threat it."
"But why?" demanded Kenniston eagerly.
"Deviltry,--deviltry, o' course," protested Ross. He had contrived to
smirch his face in the careless handling of the poker of the monkey
stove, which added a certain grotesque effect to his appearance, if one
were in the mood to be amused by it.
Kenniston's mood was far from such influences.
"I must ask you to be quiet, sir," he said, with acridity.
"Ye must?" sneered Rodolphus Ross. "An' who war that ez 'lowed ef the
local force war so 'torpid,'--_torpid_, ye hed it,--ye'd hev up
private detectives from Bretonville ter settle the hash o' these kentry
varmints?"
He threw up his eyebrows almost to the smirches obliquely laid across
his forehead, laughed with a gleam of white teeth and an intent
widening of the dark eyes, the whole facial expression gone in an
instant.
"Waal, we ain't 'torpid' no longer. 'Wake up, snakes!' Now, old buck,
answer my questions, an' tell me why they warn't willin' ter let Mr.
Kenniston build his hotel in the Cove."
Kenniston folded his arms as he tilted himself back in his chair, and
resigned the conversation to its unique leadership. The ceaseless
motion of the falling lines of rain gave a spurious effect of motion
to the great monastic forms of the mountains cowled with mists and
robed in dreary hue, seeming continually in sad processional along the
horizon. The ochreous pools near at hand had lost all capacity for
reflection, although the dark green branches of the firs here and there
bent above them, and the gray rain dripping from the fibrous fringes
upon the unquiet tremulous surface took its color, and was seen no
more. His returning glance met Taft's eye as he was about to speak, and
somehow in that momentary contact a quiet understanding was established
between them.
"The reason, I reckon, they didn't want Mr. Kenniston ter build his
hotel hyar war 'kase 'twould bring too many strangers round."
"An' what's the objection to strangers?" asked Kenniston anxiously. It
was not merely a retrospective interest that the question served. He
asked for the future.
"Waal, I reckon they hed some moonshinin' or sech on hand," returned
Taft coolly.
"Thar, now! what did I tell ye?" vociferated Rodolphus Ross, appealing
to Kenniston. "An' I'll bet this hyar Larrabee war one of 'em."
Taft nodded, and Kenniston meditatively eyed the dull flashes from the
stove, recollecting the strange conversation of Larrabee here, and his
sudden significant betrayal of secret knowledge of the origin of the
fire when it was mentioned.
"Strangers air powerful onhealthy fur the moonshinin' business," said
Taft, as a sort of corollary of his former statement.
"Speak from experience?" sneered Rodolphus Ross.
"I do so," declared Taft unequivocally. Then turning to Kenniston, "I
sarved a prison term fur illicit distillin' whenst I war a young man.
I 'lowed, like all these other young muskrats, ez I could do what I
pleased with my own corn an' apples. But whenst I traveled all through
six or seben States goin' to the North, an' seen this big kentry an'
sech, I knowed I warn't ekal ter runnin' agin its laws; an' whether
thar's reason in 'em or no, I ondertook ter keep 'em arterward."
This unexpected confession disconcerted Ross in some sort. He silently
eyed Taft, whose criminal experience seemed rather an error of an
unripe judgment than the turpitude of law-breaking, and his candor in
admitting it bluntly did not detract from the serious impression he
had evidently made upon Kenniston. With Ross nothing was serious long.
There was a sudden breaking up of the gloss of intentness in his round
dark eyes, and as they shifted they fell upon the poker of the stove,
and he once more thrust it through the bars and rattled it smartly.
"I oughter say," said Taft, meditatively sucking his pipestem, "that
'twar Espey ez fust 'lowed ter burn ye out. 'Burn his shanty!' he say."
A picture as definite as if it were the reality of pigments and canvas
glowed suddenly before his contemplation,--the red walls of his den
a-flicker in the flare of the furnace fire, the burnished gleam of the
copper, the burly forms of the tubs of mash, familiars of the brown
gloom, and the circle of faces, definite with those sharply marked
shadows and striking high lights that a strong artificial glow elicits
from the darkness. For his life he could not repress a long-drawn sigh,
and then he shifted his position and cleared his throat raucously. But
the picture, like many another masterpiece of the painter Memory, was
not on general exhibition. For all its close detail and strong salience
and brilliant reality of hue, it was invisible to Kenniston. As to the
regretful sigh, fat men are often wont to sigh for very fatness, and it
passed without significance.
After a meditative pause, "Did it ever occur to you that this Larrabee
is a crank," asked Kenniston, "what you call, and very aptly,
touched-in-the-head?"
"Who? Larrabee?" exclaimed Taft vehemently, all alert once more, his
eyes on fire, his angry breath quick. "He's smart ez the very devil!
Don't you let him pull the wool over yer eyes with the lunacy purtense."
Rodolphus Ross gave a final rasping clatter of the poker between the
bars; then flung it, resounding, down upon the floor. He rose to his
feet, stamping with first one and then the other to shake out his
trousers from their persistent kneed effect, and, turning to Taft, he
said, with an off-hand manner, "Now, look-a-hyar, Prize Beef, when did
ye an' this sca'ce buzzard Lar'bee meet the last time?"
The "Prize Beef" apparently perceived no sort of offense in this form
of address.
"I ain't viewed him in--I dunno when. I 'lowed he hed lef' the kentry
till he war up at my store, a few nights ago. I warn't thar, but my
leetle gal, she seen him."
The sly, predatory look was in Rodolphus Ross's eyes. He lifted his
knee and smote it as if he had discovered a very apt coincidence.
Taft hesitated; then he said, "Ye'd better go up yander an' talk ter
my leetle darter 'bout'n it." He hesitated once more. He feared that
Copley might be inadequate to the situation, but, with his ever alert
suspicions, he would doubtless fly at the very sight of a stranger; and
as to Sis, he could rely upon Rodolphus Ross's address and manner to
arouse the enmity of old Mrs. Jiniway's disciple in etiquette, and he
knew of old that Sis was wont to give her adversary no quarter. A dozen
of such as Rodolphus Ross would hardly be a handful for Sis. He would
learn naught from her which he wanted to know. "Take my mare out thar,
bein' ready saddled," he said hospitably. "I'll wait hyar till ye kem
back."
Contrariety was the breath of the deputy's life. The congeniality of
his vocation lay much in the opposition of his duties to the desires of
those of his fellow-men with whom he was brought into official contact.
He earnestly wished to negative Taft's suggestion, but the possibility
of getting at closer quarters with Larrabee, of once more finding his
trail, which had seemed to disappear from the face of the earth, was
stronger for the moment. His enmity had not grown cold; it was the more
vehement the more it was baffled. He lingered a moment; then, turning
up his collar, and pulling down the broad rim of his hat all around to
afford eaves to conduct the rain from his head, he plunged out into the
steady torrents with a discordant yawp that made the little shanty ring.
Taft gazed thoughtfully after him as he vaulted into the saddle and
rode off with a good deal of unnecessary heel-and-toe exercise in the
region of the animal's ribs. The restive mare apparently resented the
ungentle treatment, for the last that was seen of mount and rider was
a profile rampant against the blank white expanse of the closing mists
ere they were enveloped in the opaque multitudinous folds.
"They tell me that Gawd made man," said Taft at last. "'Pears ter me ez
the Almighty slighted _that_ job, sure."
Kenniston was a man of painfully orderly instincts. He could not
satisfactorily resume the conversation without gathering up the poker,
the lifter, and other appurtenances of the stove which Ross had
scattered about the little zinc square on which it sat, replacing them,
rearranging the writing materials, newspapers, tobacco, and cigars
on the table, and stirring the fire to brightness and a possibility
of burning. As he threw himself into his chair he marked how the
encroaching mists had invested the house. Not half a dozen paces
of the path remained visible from the door; even upon the threshold
the vapor hung in vague white wreaths, to vanish in the heat, and be
replaced by white clouds floating in with a rolling motion,--never
disappearing utterly, but venturing no further. On the roof and in the
invisibilities of the white mists outside they could hear the chilly
rain still steadily falling. The seeming isolation gave a certain
confidential character to the conversation even before its developments
warranted this.
"How did the percessionin' turn out?" Taft demanded.
"The rain stopped it," returned Kenniston, gloomily eying the
thickening mists, while Taft critically but covertly observed him.
"Satisfied ez fur ez it went, I s'pose?" Taft flicked off the ashes
from his pipe, and pressed down the remainder of its contents with that
salamander of a forefinger.
"No," said Kenniston irritably. "It is a great surprise to me."
"Mr. Kenniston," said Taft, with that blunt directness which so
commended him to the experienced man and so warped his judgment,
"that thar Big Hollow Boulder, the beginning o' yer survey, hev been
bodaciously moved."
Kenniston lifted his head suddenly, the excitement of the moment
showing red in his face. A half-scornful incredulity was in his eyes,
almost on his lips. He was about to speak; then paused doubtfully. The
testimony of his recollections of Cap'n Lucy's significant insistence
on the phrase "Big Hollow Boulder" and a thousand satiric allusions to
the stationary functions of a monument of boundary overwhelmed him for
the moment; for their incongruity with a culpable knowledge or agency
in the fact was more than inexplicable; it was mysterious. There needed
no dexterous jugglery with phrase and fact, however, to account for
Luther's furtive, hang-dog manner and averted eye.
"It seems impossible! But I will not believe that old man Lucy had
anything to do with moving it," Kenniston began. He suddenly caught his
lip and bit it hard. It was evident from his flaunting remarks that the
old mountaineer had not been similarly generous to his neighbor.
"A heap o' land," suggested the politic Taft. "But then I s'pose ter
run yer eastern line out would show whar yer corner is?" He asked the
question eagerly.
"Oh no. Calls for permanent natural objects usually control calls
for distance. I suppose that rule would hold fast in this instance.
My eastern line can only run to the boulder, which is presumably
immovable."
Taft's countenance fell. He had thought that the further survey of
the eastern boundary would serve to reëstablish the corner where the
boulder should be; on the contrary, Cap'n Lucy was invested with many
hundred acres for which he had given no equivalent in goods, or money,
or even occupancy.
"I saw that something was mighty wrong with the line that the surveyor
was running; and so did Cap'n Lucy, for that matter," said Kenniston,
revolving the events of the processioning. "He looked dumfounded when
he saw Wild Duck Falls in his boundary, and the hotel,--or rather the
place where the hotel ought to be."
Taft caught a quick inspiration. "That's it,--them boys is
a-moonshinin' fur true. They must hev moved the boulder ter crowd ye
out of a buildin' site. An' then they burnt the hotel."
"Well, they've got me pretty badly crowded,--I'll say that for them."
Kenniston was looking out of the door, with that sullen sense of
injury and hopelessness which oppresses a city man in the country
in bad weather. The world had slipped away, somehow; he was left to
the vague unresponsiveness of the inexpressive white mists; the rain
would probably continue forever; the day was of a longevity known to
no other that had ever dawned; without the prompting of his watch he
could not have said if it were morning or afternoon. The roof leaked;
the boots of his uncouth visitors tracked up the floor with red clay
mud. A saddle in one corner gave out an obtrusive odor of leather,
and the monkey stove, despite all this dankness, filled the room with
that baking, dry, afflicting aroma common to all its kindred. His
pugnacity was abated under these untoward conditions; his enthusiasms
were overwhelmed beneath the depression of the rain. He thought
wistfully of Bretonville, and of a cosy corner in the reading-room of
a certain club, and of his office, and sighed as his mind reverted to
the jeopardy of the present, the futility of the money and thought he
had spent here, and the froward tangle which must needs be untwisted if
these unpromising assets were to be utilized at all.
"Mus' hev been Lar'bee an' Espey a-moonshinin'." Taft once more sought
to prompt that inimical sense of injury. "An' moved the boulder
bodaciously,--the corner landmark."
"A felony," said Kenniston thoughtfully.
The patter of the rain came heavily through the silence, and in that
bleak whiteness without they heard far away the wind rousing from its
lair in furthest denies. The terrors of its voice did not shake the
mists; only the sound touched a responsive chord of feeling, and the
day was the drearier for the broken stillness.
"A felony," he said, and fell a-musing. He vaguely repudiated the
idea, and then bethought himself, contradictorily, of the strange
subterfuge with which he had been summoned to the door. For no harm,
surely, he argued. There was a certain fascination in the thought of
the new star that the mountaineer had brought to his contemplation. Not
a bad face, this star-gazer's, and with a coloring which had always
commended itself to his artistic sense. A good face and finely cut, he
would have said but for that association of ideas, "a felony," that
sudden conscious expression as of some guilty knowledge of the burning
of the hotel. He could not believe it of his star-gazer, with his
elated upward look! He remembered afterward that he thought then that
the dankness of the weather, in relaxing all manner of tension, had
slackened his rigid standards and his taut personal exactions. He was
morally limp, doubtless, as well as physically; but he shrunk from the
phrase in this application, and he considered that the most definite
sensation of that most indefinite day was the relief he experienced
when Rodolphus Ross came plunging out of the mists.
In high dudgeon the deputy was with the events and results of his
mission, and he had wreaked his resentment on the unoffending animal
which he rode. The mare's sides showed the marks of his stinging lash,
and she had retaliated as well as she could by perversely refusing to
pause where he wished to dismount to avoid the pools. A false start
or two dragged him through water knee-deep, and as he came into the
house his eyes were flashing with his various anger, and his lip curled
scornfully.
"I tell ye," he said to Taft, with his fractious mirthfulness, "thar's
money in that brat o' yourn, that Cornelia Taft! Buy her a muzzle an' a
chain an' jine a show, an' she'll draw a crowd ez the Leetle She-B'ar
o' Persimmon Cove! Bless my boots! I'm glad I'm all hyar. The leetle
b'ar like ter tore me ter fringes!" he exclaimed metaphorically. He
canted his head mockingly to one side as he threw himself into a chair
beside the stove, seized the poker, and administered a rousing shake.
"I tell you what," he said, eying Taft gloweringly, "I'd keep her nails
an' teeth well pruned, my friend."
For Miss Cornelia Taft and Rodolphus Ross had failed signally to hit it
off amicably. Copley had watched the interview through the open door
of the store with varying emotions of anxiety: first, lest Ross was a
"revenuer" or a spy; then, lest, as an officer of the state law, he had
some charge against them; again, lest he cause Sis some apprehension;
and lastly, lest the temerity of the doughty Sis bring woe and wreck
upon the devoted household. Joe cowered in a corner of the fireplace,
leaning against the great jamb, essaying only a few of the writhings
and twistings of his anatomy which he affected, and sometimes sitting
still altogether, so did the interest of the colloquy over-master the
tendency of his muscles.
"Hello, youngsters!" was Ross's affable greeting as he tramped in when
Joe opened the door. He flung himself into a chair before the fire,
then turned and surveyed Cornelia, whose prim, pale, precise face
looked more unfriendly and forbidding and negative than usual, as she
sat, her hands demurely crossed on her lap, on the opposite side of the
fireplace.
"My Lord! is this all? I 'lowed yer dad hed a heap bigger gal 'n you.
Some similar ter a shrunk-up gran'mammy; ye look like ye mought hev
lasted sence the flood. How's yer fambly, ma'am?"
The juvenile heart resents a scoff. Cornelia Taft's faculties were
limited, but she gathered herself for revenge.
"Waal, then," he demanded, as she sat stiffly silent and insulted,
"how's rats?"
"I couldn't jedge," she piped up suddenly. "We-uns hain't hed a terrier
happen in hyar afore now fur a consider'ble time."
He was fairly silenced for the nonce. Elated by the execution of her
sally, and not propitiated by his subsequent effort to ignore this
passage at arms, she took full advantage of the opportunity to harass
him which was presented when he announced himself an officer of the
law, and demanded to know when and where she had seen Larrabee the last
time. No perverse adult witness could have more dexterously baffled him
with indefinite statements; and when he appealed from her to Joe, whose
clumsy efforts to remember were hopelessly inadequate, her open glee
was peculiarly tantalizing to Ross; for none can so resent a jest as a
confirmed joker. Then it was that he made his fatal false step.
"Look-a-hyar, Small Female, leetle ez ye be, I'll arrest you-uns an'
kerry ye off ter jail, ef ye don't spry up an' answer my question."
And then it was that Sis, bracing her small back, defied the majesty
of the State of Tennessee as exemplified in Rodolphus Ross. So it came
to open war. She was animated, too, by a partisan spirit for Larrabee.
She remembered, with her infrequent approval, how he had conducted
himself on the occasion in question; how quiet, how gentle, he was,
how observant of the graces of her housekeeping, how commendatory of
her dominion over Joe. Their conversation had since been often in her
mind; she had rehearsed it, as she sat in the gloaming on her stool
before the flickering fire, with the history of the Biblical worthies
of which it was redundant. With no one else could she talk of these
things. With quick adulation she had transformed Larrabee into a hero,
and she longed to see him again. Her tongue, being feminine, could not
be held altogether, but she told Ross naught which he desired to hear.
She sounded the praises of Larrabee on many a key, and "disremembered"
persistently whether it was Friday or Monday, or last week or week
before, when she had seen him.
"Waal, what war he a-doin' of hyar, ennyhows?" queried Ross.
"Talkin'."
"'Bout what, gal?"
"'Bout no gal," Miss Taft responded, with a flash of the eye.
"Waal, then,"--even he was fain to concede, in the hope of finding some
thoroughfare in thus beating about the bush,--"'bout what boy?"
She hesitated. She had not intended to cheapen the subject of her
interest and enthusiasm by mention in this queer symposium. The talk
with Larrabee had been in the nature of a confidence, as in the
admiring canvass of mutual friends; she had a sense as if it were not
the thing for general public and unworthy conversation. Nevertheless,
her affinity for the subject constrained her. There was a light in her
face, a placid softening of feature. Her flabby little colorless cheek
mustered up a dimple.
"'Bout Sam'l," she said, with a smile.
"Sam'l who?" he demanded keenly.
Sis hesitated, suddenly posed. "I--I disremember his--his--surname,"
she admitted.
"Did ye see him with Lar'bee?" he asked, his big pertinacious eyes on
her face, expectant of immediate developments.
"I--I ain't never seen _him_. I--I reckon"--it seemed too terrible
to contemplate--"I reckon he mus' be--daid." She had never before
looked upon it in this light, and her heart sank.
"Friend o' Lar'bee's?" he persisted.
"I reckon so; he hed read 'bout him."
"Read 'bout him? Whar? In the 'Colb'ry Gazette'?" He lowered his voice
respectfully, for to him personal mention in the 'Colbury Gazette'
meant fame.
"Naw. In the Bible, o' course," said Sis, stiffly reproving.
He stared at her in blank amaze for a moment; then he smote his leg a
sounding thwack, and burst into a howl of derisive laughter.
"Ye an' Lar'bee hed a pray'r-meetin', did ye? An', my son," he
continued through his nose with a sanctimonious whine, turning to Joe,
"did ye lead the saints in supplication, or raise the hyme-chune?"
Joe responded with a fat chuckle of delighted laughter, rejoiced to
see his Mentor, the professor of many novel and distasteful arts of
household economy, put to ridicule and out of countenance.
It was only for a moment. She turned acridly against the domestic
insurgent.
"_He_ tuned up arterward. Joe done _his_ quirin' arter
Lar'bee war gone, an' the wind riz, an' the rain kem down. He wisht an'
wisht Lar'bee hed bided. He fairly blated fur skeer!"
"I never!" protested Joe in pouting indignation. "_I_ warn't
'feared o' the wind an' rain, nare one! 'T war the racket them dead
ones kep' up in the Los' Time mine diggin' thar graves. This hyar house
air right over the mine."
Ross's great shifting wild eyes widened as he looked from one to the
other.
"Thar _ain't_ no dead ones diggin' thar graves!" cried Sis
didactically. She must needs spend too many lonely hours here for that
suggestion to be a welcome one. "Them ez dig ain't dead. Dad say jes'
some boys, he reckon, a-moonshinin' or sech of a night in the Lost Time
mine."
Rodolphus Ross rose to his feet. He was elated, confident. He snapped
his fingers noisily in the air as he took two or three of the sideway
paces usually preliminary to a clog dance, which accomplishment he
had acquired by viewing what he termed a "minstrel show." He had
long suspected Larrabee of moonshining, and here was the _locus in
quo_. He had said that Larrabee's trail had seemed to disappear from
the face of the earth; with what literal reason he had not dreamed.
Notwithstanding his haste, however, he must needs tarry for a fleer.
"Gran'mammy Taft," he said, leering at the little girl, with her prim,
antique aspect, "I never thunk ter find ye hobnobbin' with moonshiners."
"Lar'bee ain't no moonshiner," she protested, with swift alarm.
He joyed in her evident flutter.
"Ah, gran'mammy Taft, ye kin consider yerse'f under arrest fur aidin'
an' abettin' in moonshinin', ye an' all yer fambly."
"Ye ain't no revenuer!" cried Sis, moving back a step, however. "Ye
ain't 'lowed ter _purtend_ ter be one, nuther. I hearn o' a man in
Persimmon Cove ez _purtended_ ter be a off'cer o' the law, an' got
'rested hisse'f. An' I would hev thunk enny-ways ez ye hed hed enough
o' arrestin' folks fur fun, sence that time ye flung Lar'bee over the
bluffs, an' nigh kilt him. Ef ye be so sharp set ter 'rest ennybody, go
find Jack Espey an' 'rest him."
Ross was out of countenance. Nevertheless--"How many j'ints hev her
tongue got?" he demanded of Joe, with a feint of serious interest.
But Joe had deserted to the enemy. He thought that Sis was in the
ascendant, and Ross's threat at once angered and terrified him. He
received with pouting silence the officer's aside, while Sis went on
triumphantly:--
"Dad say my granny Jiniway air kin somehows ter the high sher'ff's
wife; an' whenst I go ter Colb'ry nex' week with dad, I be goin' ter
go ter her house an' ax the high sher'ff ef he 'lows his dep'ties ter
arrest people fur joke, an' _purtend_ ter be revenue off'cers, an'
skeer leetle gals by arrestin' 'em, an' 'lowin' he'll take the whole
fambly fur moonshinin'. My granny Jiniway's third cousin air the high
sher'ff's wife!"
In the face of this genealogical detail, it was with a somewhat subdued
spirit that Ross mounted the mare and set forth on his return; for the
high sheriff was a man with a most attenuated sense of humor, a literal
interpretation of the duties of his office, and notwithstanding the
fact that Ross's willingness to ride long distances, in all manner of
weather, relieved him of this the most irksome of duties to an inert
temperament, he had begun to look doubtfully upon him, particularly
since the untoward result of the facetious arrest of the supposed
Larrabee, and Ross felt that his tenure was not altogether secure. As
he passed the portal of the Lost Time mine, the thought of his quest
recurred to his mind, and the important clue which he deemed he had
obtained from the little girl's conversation. He no longer considered
it important, for from the rough-hewn portal of the cavern poured forth
the compressed stream of the divers subterranean currents, gathered
together and hurled forth in a great spout, and with a plunging force
that astonished him, remembering as he did the far tamer flow of the
earlier season. He ascribed the change to the persistent autumn rains
flooding some watercourse that doubtless pierced the hidden chambers.
It filled the outlet within a few feet of the summit of the arch. Any
entrance here was impossible; as for another opening to the mine, he
looked about him upon the limitless tangled wilderness of wood and
rock, the shifting beclouding mists, the endless skeins of the rain,
and he swore between his big front teeth an oath which, despite the
grotesque humor of its phraseology, had within it all the bitter
profanity of his baffling disappointment. And in default of aught else
on which to wreak his anger, he cruelly lashed Taft's mare; and so
he went down to join the others at Kenniston's quarters amongst the
shanties of the workmen in the Cove.