half-way across the mountains in a county on the Virginia line; he was
not an active partizan of either side in the feud. These Tranthams,
disregarding all the ethics, went before this circuit judge and asked
him for a change of venue, and got it, which was more; so that instead
of being tried in Clayton County--and promptly acquitted--Anse Dugmore
was taken to Woodbine County and there lodged in a shiny new brick jail.
Things were in process of change in Woodbine. A spur of the railroad had
nosed its way up from the lowlands and on through the Gap, and had made
Loudon, the county-seat, a division terminal. Strangers from the North
had come in, opening up the mountains to mines and sawmills and bringing
with them many swarthy foreign laborers. A young man of large hopes and
an Eastern college education had started a weekly newspaper and was
talking big, in his editorial columns, of a new order of things. The
foundation had even been laid for a graded school. Plainly Woodbine
County was falling out of touch with the century-old traditions of her
sisters to the north and west of her.
In due season, then, Anse Dugmore was brought up on a charge of
homicide. The trial lasted less than a day. A jury of strangers heard
the stories of Anse himself and of the dead Pegleg's white-eyed nephew.
In the early afternoon they came back, a wooden toothpick in each mouth,
from the new hotel where they had just had a most satisfying fifty-cent
dinner at the expense of the commonwealth, and sentenced the defendant,
Anderson Dugmore, to state prison at hard labor for the balance of his
natural life.
The sheriff of Woodbine padlocked on Anse's ankles a set of leg irons
that had been made by a mountain blacksmith out of log chains and led
him to the new depot. It was Anse Dugmore's first ride on a railroad
train; also it was the first ride on any train for Wyatt Trantham, head
of the other clan, who, having been elected to the legislature while
Anse lay in jail, had come over from Clayton, bound for the state
capital, to draw his mileage and be a statesman.
It was not in the breed for the victorious Trantham to taunt his hobbled
enemy or even to look his way, but he sat just across the aisle from the
prisoner so that his ear might catch the jangle of the heavy irons when
Dugmore moved in his seat. They all left the train together at the
little blue-painted Frankfort station, Trantham turning off at the first
crossroads to go where the round dome of the old capitol showed above
the water-maple trees, and Dugmore clanking straight ahead, with a
string of negroes and boys and the sheriff following along behind
him. Under the shadow of a quarried-out hillside a gate opened
in a high stone wall to admit him into life membership with a
white-and-black-striped brotherhood of shame.
Four years there did the work for the gangling, silent mountaineer. One
day, just before the Christmas holidays, the new governor of the state
paid a visit to the prison. Only his private secretary came with him.
The warden showed them through the cell houses, the workshops, the
dining hall and the walled yards. It was a Sunday afternoon; the white
prisoners loafed in their stockade, the blacks in theirs. In a corner on
the white side, where the thin and skimpy winter sunshine slanted over
the stockade wall, Anse Dugmore was squatted; merely a rack of bones
enclosed in a shapeless covering of black-and-white stripes. On his
close-cropped head and over his cheekbones the skin was stretched so
tight it seemed nearly ready to split. His eyes, glassy and bleared with
pain, stared ahead of him with a sick man's fixed stare. Inside his
convict's cotton shirt his chest was caved away almost to nothing, and
from the collarless neckband his neck rose as bony as a plucked fowl's,
with great, blue cords in it. Lacking a coverlet to pick, his fingers
picked at the skin on his retreating chin.
As the governor stood in an arched doorway watching, the lengthening
afternoon shadow edged along and covered the hunkered-down figure by the
wall. Anse tottered to his feet, moved a few inches so that he might
still be in the sunshine, and settled down again. This small exertion
started a cough that threatened to tear him apart. He drew his hand
across his mouth and a red stain came away on the knotty knuckles. The
warden was a kindly enough man in the ordinary relations of life, but
nine years as a tamer of man-beasts in a great stone cage had overlaid
his sympathies with a thickening callus.
"One of our lifers that we won't have with us much longer," he said
casually, noting that the governor's eyes followed the sick convict.
"When the con gets one of these hill billies he goes mighty fast."
"A mountaineer, then?" said the governor. "What's his name?"
"Dugmore," answered the warden; "sent from Clayton County. One of those
Clayton County feud fighters."
The governor nodded understandingly. "What sort of a record has he made
here?"
"Oh, fair enough!" said the warden. "Those man-killers from the
mountains generally make good prisoners. Funny thing about this fellow,
though. All the time he's been here he never, so far as I know, had a
message or a visitor or a line of writing from the outside. Nor wrote a
letter out himself. Nor made friends with anybody, convict or guard."
"Has he applied for a pardon?" asked the governor.
"Lord, no!" said the warden. "When he was well he just took what was
coming to him, the same as he's taking it now. I can look up his record,
though, if you'd care to see it, sir."
"I believe I should," said the governor quietly.
A spectacled young wife-murderer, who worked in the prison office on
the prison books, got down a book and looked through it until he came to
a certain entry on a certain page. The warden was right--so far as the
black marks of the prison discipline went, the friendless convict's
record showed fair.
"I think," said the young governor to the warden and his secretary when
they had moved out of hearing of the convict bookkeeper--"I think I'll
give that poor devil a pardon for a Christmas gift. It's no more than a
mercy to let him die at home, if he has any home to go to."
"I could have him brought in and let you tell him yourself, sir,"
volunteered the warden.
"No, no," said the governor quickly. "I don't want to hear that cough
again. Nor look on such a wreck," he added.
Two days before Christmas the warden sent to the hospital ward for No.
874. No. 874, that being Anse Dugmore, came shuffling in and kept
himself upright by holding with one hand to the door jamb. The warden
sat rotund and impressive, in a swivel chair, holding in his hands a
folded-up, blue-backed document.
"Dugmore," he said in his best official manner, "when His Excellency,
Governor Woodford, was here on Sunday he took notice that your general
health was not good. So, of his own accord, he has sent you an
unconditional pardon for a Christmas gift, and here it is."
The sick convict's eyes, between their festering lids, fixed on the
warden's face and a sudden light flickered in their pale, glazed
shallows; but he didn't speak. There was a little pause.
"I said the governor has given you a pardon," repeated the warden,
staring hard at him.
"I heered you the fust time," croaked the prisoner in his eaten-out
voice. "When kin I go?"
"Is that all you've got to say?" demanded the warden, bristling up.
"I said, when kin I go?" repeated No. 874.
"Go!--you can go now. You can't go too soon to suit me!"
The warden swung his chair around and showed him the broad of his
indignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk he
shoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed him
crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a
negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him
put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap,
black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy
warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five
dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took
them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate
that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the
inbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for the
little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went
slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and
sometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window the
wondering warden sourly watched the crawling, tottery figure.
"Damned savage!" he said to himself. "Didn't even say thank you. I'll
bet he never had any more feelings or sentiments in his life than a
moccasin snake."
Something to the same general effect was expressed a few minutes later
by a brakeman who had just helped a wofully feeble passenger aboard the
eastbound train and had steered him, staggering and gasping from
weakness, to a seat at the forward end of an odorous red-plush day
coach.
"Just a bundle of bones held together by a skin," the brakeman was
saying to the conductor, "and the smell of the pen all over him. Never
said a word to me--just looked at me sort of dumb. Bound for plumb up at
the far end of the division, accordin' to the way his ticket reads. I
doubt if he lives to get there."
The warden and the brakeman both were wrong. The freed man did live to
get there. And it was an emotion which the warden had never suspected
that held life in him all that afternoon and through the comfortless
night in the packed and noisome day coach, while the fussy,
self-sufficient little train went looping, like an overgrown measuring
worm, up through the blue grass, around the outlying knobs of the
foothills, on and on through the great riven chasm of the gateway into a
bleak, bare clutch of undersized mountains. Anse Dugmore had two bad
hemorrhages on the way, but he lived.
* * * * *
Under the full moon of a white and flawless night before Christmas, Shem
Dugmore's squatty log cabin made a blot on the thin blanket of snow, and
inside the one room of the cabin Shem Dugmore sat alone by the
daubed-clay hearth, glooming. Hours passed and he hardly moved except to
stir the red coals or kick back some ambitious ember of hickory that
leaped out upon the uneven floor. Suddenly something heavy fell limply
against the locked door, and instantly, all alertness, the shock-headed
mountaineer was backed up against the farther wall, out of range of the
two windows, with his weapons drawn, silent, ready for what might come.
After a minute there was a feeble, faint pecking sound--half knock, half
scratch--at the lower part of the door. It might have been a wornout dog
or any spent wild creature, but no line of Shem Dugmore's figure
relaxed, and under his thick, sandy brows his eyes, in the flickering
light, had the greenish shine of an angry cat-animal's.
"Whut is it?" he called. "And whut do you want? Speak out peartly!"
[Illustration: HE DRAGGED THE RIFLE BY THE BARREL, SO THAT ITS BUTT MADE
A CROOKED FURROW IN THE SNOW.--_Page 197._]
The answer came through the thick planking thinly, in a sort of gasping
whine that ended in a chattering cough; but even after Shem's ear caught
the words, and even after he recognized the changed but still familiar
cadence of the voice, he abated none of his caution. Carefully he
unbolted the door, and, drawing it inch by inch slowly ajar, he reached
out, exposing only his hand and arm, and drew bodily inside the shell of
a man that was fallen, huddled up, against the log door jamb. He dropped
the wooden crossbar back into its sockets before he looked a second time
at the intruder, who had crawled across the floor and now lay before the
wide mouth of the hearth in a choking spell. Shem Dugmore made no move
until the fit was over and the sufferer lay quiet.
"How did you git out, Anse?" were the first words he spoke.
The consumptive rolled his head weakly from side to side and swallowed
desperately. "Pardoned out--in writin'--yistiddy."
"You air in purty bad shape," said Shem.
"Yes,"--the words came very slowly--"my lungs give out on me--and my
eyes. But--but I got here."
"You come jist in time," said his cousin; "this time tomorrer and you
wouldn't a' never found me here. I'd 'a' been gone."
"Gone!--gone whar?"
"Well," said Shem slowly, "after you was sent away it seemed like them
Tranthams got the upper hand complete. All of our side whut ain't
dead--and that's powerful few--is moved off out of the mountings to
Winchester, down in the settlemints. I'm 'bout the last, and I'm
a-purposin' to slip out tomorrer night while the Tranthams is at their
Christmas rackets--they'd layway me too ef----"
"But my wife--did she----"
"I thought maybe you'd heered tell about that whilst you was down yon,"
said Shem in a dulled wonder. "The fall after you was took away yore
woman she went over to the Tranthams. Yes, sir; she took up with the
head devil of 'em all--old Wyatt Trantham hisself--and she went to live
at his house up on the Yaller Banks."
"Is she----Did she----"
The ex-convict was struggling to his knees. His groping skeletons of
hands were right in the hot ashes. The heat cooked the moisture from his
sodden garments in little films of vapor and filled the cabin with the
reek of the prison dye.
"Did she--did she----"
"Oh, she's been dead quite a spell now," stated Shem. "I would have
s'posed you'd 'a' heered that, too, somewhars. She had a kind of a
risin' in the breast."
"But my young uns--little Anderson and--and Elviry?"
The sick man was clear up on his knees now, his long arms hanging and
his eyes, behind their matted lids, fixed on Shem's impassive face.
Could the warden have seen him now, and marked his attitude and his
words, he would have known what it was that had brought this dying man
back to _his_ own mountain valley with the breath of life still in him.
A dumb, unuttered love for the two shock-headed babies he had left
behind in the split-board cabin was the one big thing in Anse Dugmore's
whole being--bigger even than his sense of allegiance to the feud.
"My young uns, Shem?"
"Wyatt Trantham took 'em and he kep' 'em--he's got 'em both now."
"Does he--does he use 'em kindly?"
"I ain't never heered," said Shem simply. "He never had no young uns of
his own, and it mout be he uses 'em well. He's the high sheriff now."
"I was countin' on gittin' to see 'em agin--an buyin 'em some little
Chrismus fixin's," the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into his
rasping whisper. "I reckon it ain't no use to--to be thinkin'--of that
there now?"
"No 'arthly use at all," said Shem, with brutal directness. "Ef you had
the strength to git thar, the Tranthams would shoot you down like a fice
dog."
Anse nodded weakly. He sank down again on the floor, face to the boards,
coughing hard. It was the droning voice of his cousin that brought him
back from the borders of the coma he had been fighting off for hours.
For, to Shem, the best hater and the poorest fighter of all his
cleaned-out clan, had come a great thought. He shook the drowsing man
and roused him, and plied him with sips from a dipper of the unhallowed
white corn whisky of a mountain still-house. And as he worked over him
he told off the tally of the last four years: of the uneven, unmerciful
war, ticking off on his blunt finger ends the grim totals of this one
ambushed and that one killed in the open, overpowered and beaten under
by weight of odds. He told such details as he knew of the theft of the
young wife and the young ones, Elvira and little Anderson.
"Anse, did ary Trantham see you a-gittin' here tonight?"
"Nobody--that knowed me--seed me."
"Old Wyatt Trantham, he rid into Manchester this evenin' 'bout fo'
o'clock--I seed him passin' over the ridge," went on Shem. "He'll be
ridin' back 'long Pigeon Roost some time before mawnin'. He done you a
heap o' dirt, Anse."
The prostrate man was listening hard.
"Anse, I got yore old rifle right here in the house. Ef you could git up
thar on the mounting, somewhar's alongside the Pigeon Roost trail, you
could git him shore. He'll be full of licker comin' back."
And now a seeming marvel was coming to pass, for the caved-in trunk was
rising on the pipestem legs and the shaking fingers were outstretched,
reaching for something.
Shem stepped lightly to a corner of the cabin and brought forth a rifle
and began reloading it afresh from a box of shells.
* * * * *
A wavering figure crept across the small stump-dotted "dead'ning"--Anse
Dugmore was upon his errand. He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so that
its butt made a crooked, broken furrow in the new snow like the trail of
a crippled snake. He fell and got up, and fell and rose again. He
coughed and up the ridge a ranging dog-fox barked back an answer to his
cough.
From out of the slitted door Shem watched him until the scrub oaks at
the edge of the clearing swallowed him up. Then Shem fastened himself in
and made ready to start his flight to the lowlands that very night.
* * * * *
Just below the forks of Pigeon Roost Creek the trail that followed its
banks widened into a track wide enough for wagon wheels. On one side lay
the diminished creek, now filmed over with a glaze of young ice. On the
other the mountain rose steeply. Fifteen feet up the bluff side a fallen
dead tree projected its rotted, broken roots, like snaggled teeth, from
the clayey bank. Behind this tree's trunk, in the snow and half-frozen,
half-melted yellow mire, Anse Dugmore was stretched on his face. The
barrel of the rifle barely showed itself through the interlacing root
ends. It pointed downward and northward toward the broad, moonlit place
in the road. Its stock was pressed tightly against Anse Dugmore's
fallen-in cheek; the trigger finger of his right hand, fleshless as a
joint of cane, was crooked about the trigger guard. A thin stream of
blood ran from his mouth and dribbled down his chin and coagulated in a
sticky smear upon the gun stock. His lungs, what was left of them, were
draining away.
He lay without motion, saving up the last ounce of his life. The cold
had crawled up his legs to his hips; he was dead already from the waist
down. He no longer coughed, only gasped thickly. He knew that he was
about gone; but he knew, too, that he would last, clear-minded and
clear-eyed, until High Sheriff Wyatt Trantham came. His brain would
last--and his trigger finger.
Then he heard him coming. Up the trail sounded the muffled music of a
pacer's hoofs single-footing through the snow, and after that, almost
instantly Trantham rode out into sight and loomed larger and larger as
he drew steadily near the open place under the bank. He was wavering in
the saddle. He drew nearer and nearer, and as he came out on the wide
patch of moonlit snow, he pulled the single-footer down to a walk and
halted him and began fumbling in the right-hand side of the saddlebags
that draped his horse's shoulder.
Up in its covert the rifle barrel moved an inch or two, then steadied
and stopped, the bone-sight at its tip resting full on the broad of the
drunken rider's breast. The boney finger moved inward from the trigger
guard and closed ever so gently about the touchy, hair-filed
trigger--then waited.
For the uncertain hand of Trantham, every movement showing plain in the
crystal, hard, white moon, was slowly bringing from under the flap of
the right-side saddlebag something that was round and smooth and shone
with a yellowish glassy light, like a fat flask filled with spirits. And
Anse Dugmore waited, being minded now to shoot him as he put the bottle
to his lips, and so cheat Trantham of his last drink on earth, as
Trantham had cheated him of his liberty and his babies--as Trantham had
cheated those babies of the Christmas fixings which the state's five
dollars might have bought.
He waited, waited----
* * * * *
This was not the first time the high sheriff had stopped that night on
his homeward ride from the tiny county seat, as his befuddlement
proclaimed; but halting there in the open, just past the forks of the
Pigeon Roost, he was moved by a new idea. He fumbled in the right-hand
flap of his saddlebags and brought out a toy drum, round and smooth,
with shiny yellow sides. A cheap china doll with painted black ringlets
and painted blue eyes followed the drum, and then a torn paper bag, from
which small pieces of cheap red-and-green dyed candy sifted out between
the sheriff's fumbling fingers and fell into the snow.
Thirty feet away, in the dead leaves matted under the roots of an uptorn
dead tree, something moved--something moved; and then there was a sound
like a long, deep, gurgling sigh, and another sound like some heavy,
lengthy object settling itself down flat upon the snow and the leaves.
The first faint rustle cleared Trantham's brain of the liquor fumes. He
jammed the toys and the candy back into the saddlebags and jerked his
horse sidewise into the protecting shadow of the bluff, reaching at the
same time to the shoulder holster buckled about his body under the
unbuttoned overcoat. For a long minute he listened keenly, the drawn
pistol in his hand. There was nothing to hear except his own breathing
and the breathing of his horse.
"Sho! Some old hawg turnin' over in her bed," he said to the horse, and
holstering the pistol he went racking on down Pigeon Roost Creek, with
Christmas for Elviry and little Anderson in his saddlebags.
* * * * *
When they found Anse Dugmore in his ambush another snow had fallen on
his back and he was slightly more of a skeleton than ever; but the bony
finger was still crooked about the trigger, the rusted hammer was back
at full cock and there was a dried brownish stain on the gun stock. So,
from these facts, his finders were moved to conclude that the freed
convict must have bled to death from his lungs before the sheriff ever
passed, which they held to be a good thing all round and a lucky thing
for the sheriff.
VII
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN
There was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that
used to bother strangers in our town until they got used to it. It
started usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up
interminably--so it seemed to them--a monotonous, jarring thump-thump,
thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at
breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a
steamy hot halo of their own goodness, these aliens knew what it was
that had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt
amply recompensed for the lost hours of their beauty sleep.
In these degenerate latter days I believe there is a machine that
accomplishes the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and
crushing, which no doubt is efficacious; but it seems somehow to take
the poetry out of the operation. Old Judge Priest, our circuit judge,
and the reigning black deity of his kitchen, Aunt Dilsey Turner, would
have naught of it. So long as his digestion survived and her good right
arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the
judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or
a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled
wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as
plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of
tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread
and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then,
with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round
disks and delicately pink each one with a fork--and then, if you were
listening, you could hear the stove door slam like the smacking of an
iron lip.
On a certain Sunday I have in mind, Judge Priest woke with the first
premonitory thud from the kitchen, and he was up and dressed in his
white linens and out upon the wide front porch while the summer day was
young and unblemished. The sun was not up good yet. It made a red glow,
like a barn afire, through the treetops looking eastward. Lie-abed
blackbirds were still talking over family matters in the maples that
clustered round the house, and in the back yard Judge Priest's big red
rooster hoarsely circulated gossip in regard to a certain little brown
hen, first crowing out the news loudly and then listening, with his head
on one side, while the rooster in the next yard took it up and repeated
it to a rooster living farther down the road, as is the custom among
male scandalizers the world over. Upon the lawn the little gossamer
hammocks that the grass spiders had seamed together overnight were
spangled with dew, so that each out-thrown thread was a glittering
rosary and the center of each web a silken, cushioned jewel casket.
Likewise each web was outlined in white mist, for the cottonwood trees
were shedding down their podded product so thickly that across open
spaces the slanting lines of the drifting fiber looked like snow. It
would be hot enough after a while, but now the whole world was sweet and
fresh and washed clean.