When Cal Maggard closed and locked his cabin door late the next
afternoon he stood regarding with sombre eyes his message of defiance
which, it seemed, no one had come to read.
Yet, as he turned his back a smile replaced the scowl, for he was going
to see a girl.
At the bend where the trail crossed the shallow creek, and a stray
razor-back wallowed at the roadside, Maggard saw a figure leaning
indolently against the fence.
"I suspicioned ye'd be right likely ter happen along erbout this time,"
enlightened Bas Rowlett as he waved his hand in greeting. "So I 'lowed
I'd tarry an' santer along with ye."
"I'm beholden ter ye," responded Maggard, but he knew what the other had
been too polite to say: That this pretended casualness marked the kindly
motive of affording escort because of the danger under which he himself
was travelling unfamiliar roads.
Over the crests heavy banks of clouds were settling in ominous piles of
blackness and lying still-heaped in the breathlessness that precedes a
tempest, but the sun still shone and Rowlett who was leading the way
turned into a forest trail.
As they went, single file, through a gorge into which the sun never
struck save from the zenith; where the ferns grew lush and the great
leaves of the "cucumber tree" hung motionless, they halted without a
word and a comprehending glance shot between them.
When two setters, trained to perfect team work, come unexpectedly upon
the quail scent in stubble, that one which first catches the
nostril-warning becomes rigid as though a breath had petrified him--and
at once his fellow drops to the stiff posture of accord.
So now, as if one hand had pulled two strings, Cal Maggard and Bas
Rowlett ceased to be upright animals. The sound of a crackled twig off
to the right had come to their ears, and it was a sound that carried the
quality of furtiveness.
Instantly they had dropped to their bellies and wriggled snake-like away
from the spots where they had stood. Instantly, too, they became almost
invisible and two drawn weapons were thrust forward.
There they lay for perhaps two minutes, with ears straining into the
silence, neither exaggerating nor under-estimating the menace that might
have caused that sound in the underbrush. After a while Rowlett
whispered, "What did ye hear?"
"'Peared like ter me," responded Maggard, guardedly, "a twig cracked
back thar in ther la'rel."
Rowlett nodded but after a space he rose, shaking his head.
"Ef so be thar's anybody a-layin' back thar in ther bresh, I reckon he's
done concluded ter wait twell he gits ye by yourself," he decided.
"Let's be santerin' along."
So they went forward until they came to a point where they stood on the
unforested patch of a "bald knob." There Rowlett halted again and
pointed downward. Beneath them spread the valley with the band of the
river winding tenuously through the bottoms of the Harper farm. About
that green bowl the first voices of the coming storm were already
rumbling with the constant growl of thunder.
"Thar's ther house--and thar's ther big tree in front of hit," said
Rowlett. "Ef I owned ther place I'd shorely throw ther axe inter hit
afore it drawed a lightnin' bolt down on ther roof."
Cal Maggard, who had known walnuts only growing in the forest, gazed
down now with something of wonderment at this one which stood alone. A
sense of its spreading magnificence was borne in upon him, and though
the simile was foreign to his mind, it seemed as distinct and separate
from the thousands of other trees that blended in the leagues of
surrounding forestry as might a mounted and sashed field marshal in the
centre of an army of common soldiery.
Even in the dark atmosphere of gathering storm its spread of foliage
held a living, golden quality of green and its trunk an inky blackness
that gave a startling vividness.
He did not know that this tree which grows stiff of head and narrow of
shoulder in the woods alters its character when man provides it with a
spacious setting, and that it becomes the noblest of our native growths.
He did not know that when Ovid wrote of folk in the Golden Age, who
lived upon:
Acorns that had fallen
From the towering trees of Jove,
he called acorns what we call nuts, and that it was not the oak but the
walnut that he celebrated.
But Maggard did know it had been through the leafage of that splendid
tree that he had first glimpsed the girl's face, and he did know that
never before had he seen a thing of trunk and branch and leaf that had
so impressed him with its stateliness and vital beauty.
If he were master at that house, he thought, he would not cut it down.
"I'm obleeged ter ye fer comin' thus fur with me," he observed, then
supplemented drily, "an' still more fer not comin' no further."
The other laughed. "I hain't ergoin' ter 'cumber yore projeck's none
ternight," he declared, good-humouredly, then added fairly enough, "but
termorrer night _I_ aims ter go sparkin' thar myself--an' I looks ter ye
to do as much fer me an' give me a cl'ar road."
Maggard had hardly reached the house when, with all the passionate
violence of the hills, the tempest broke. Safe inside, he talked and
smoked with the patriarch and his thoughts wandered, as he sat there by
the hearth, back to the room from which now and then drifted a fragment
of plaintively crooning song.
The stag horns over the fireplace and the flintlock gun that lay across
their prongs spoke of days long past, before the deer and bear had been
"dogged to death" in the Cumberlands. There were a few pewter pieces,
too--and these the visitor knew were found only in houses that went back
to revolutionary days.
This, mused Kenneth Thornton, was the best house and the most fertile
farm in all the wild surrounding country, and irony crept into his smile
with the thought that it was a place he could not enter save under an
anonymous threat of death.
By the time supper had been eaten, the storm voices had dwindled from
boisterous violence to exhausted quiet, and even the soft patter of warm
rain died away until through the door, which now stood ajar, the visitor
could see the moonlight and the soft stars that seemed to hang just out
of arm's reach.
Dorothy had slipped quietly into the room and chosen a seat at the
chimney corner where she sat as voiceless as a nun who has taken vows of
silence. Soon the old man's head began to nod in drowsy contentment. At
first he made dutiful resistance against the pleasant temptation of
languor--then succumbed.
The young man, who had been burning with impatience for this moment,
made a pretense of refilling his pipe. Over there out of the direct
flare and leaping of the flames the girl sat in shadow and he wanted to
see her face. Yet upon him had descended an unaccustomed embarrassment
which found no easy door opening upon conversation.
So they sat in a diffident silence that stretched itself to greater
awkwardness, until at last Dorothy rose abruptly to her feet and
Thornton feared that she meant to take flight.
"'Pears like ter me," she asserted, suddenly, "hit's nigh suffocatin'
hot in hyar."
"I war jest a-studyin' erbout thet myself," affirmed Maggard whose
quickness of uptake was more eager than truthful. "Ther moon's a-shinin'
outdoors. Let's go out thar an' breathe free."
As though breathing free were the most immediate of her needs, the girl
rose and stood for a moment with the firelight catching the pink of her
cheeks and bronzing her heavy hair, then she turned and led the way out
to the porch where, in the moisture of the fresh-washed air, the
honeysuckle vines were heavy with fragrance.
The walnut tree, no longer lashed into storm incantations, stood now in
quiet majesty, solitary though, at a respectful distance, surrounded.
The frogs and whippoorwills were voiceful, and from the silvery
foreground, shadow-blotted with cobalt, to the indigo-deep walls of the
ranges, the earth spilled over influences of sentient youth.
Maggard gazed down at the girl and the girl, with a hand resting on a
porch post, stood looking off out of eyes that caught and gave back the
soft light from the moon. To Maggard she seemed unconditionally lovely,
but the fetters of shyness still held them both.
"I don't know many folks hyarabouts yit," he said with impetuous
suddenness. "I'd plumb love ter hev ye befriend me."
Dorothy turned toward him and her lips relaxed their shyness into a
friendly smile--then impulsively she demanded: "Did yore foreparents
dwell hyarabouts a long time back?"
Thornton's face, with the moonlight upon it, stiffened into a mask-like
reticence at this touching upon the sensitive topic which threatened his
identification as a hunted man.
"I've done heered thet they lived somewhars in Kaintuck ginerations
afore my time," he made evasive answer. "What made ye ask me that
question?"
Then it was she who became hesitant but after a little she suggested,
"Come on down hyar under thet old walnuck tree. Seems like I kin talk
freer thar."
Together they went to the place where the shadows lay deep, like an
island in a lake of moonshine, and the girl talked on in the hurried,
shy fashion of one with a new secret and the need of a confidant.
"Ther mornin' ye fust come by ... an' stopped thar in ther high road ...
I'd jest been readin' somethin' thet ... was writ by one of my
foreparents ... way back, upwards of a hundred y'ars ago, I reckon." She
paused but he nodded his interest so sympathetically that she went on,
reassured; "She told how come she planted this hyar tree ... in them
days when ther Injins still scalped folks ... an' she writ down jest
what her husband looked like."
"What _did_ he look like?" inquired the man, gravely, and the girl found
herself no longer bashful with him but at ease, as with an old friend.
"Hit war right then I looked out an' seed ye," she said, simply, "an'
'peared like ye'd plum bodily walked outen them pages of handwrite.
Thet's why I asked whether yore folks didn't dwell hyar onc't. Mebby we
mout be kin."
Cal Maggard shook his head.
"My folks moved away to Virginny so fur back," he informed her, "thet
hit's apt ter be right distant kinship."
"This was all fur back," she reminded him, and in order that the sound
of her voice might continue, he begged:
"Tell me somethin' else erbout this tree ... an' what ye read in ther
book."
She was standing close to him, and as she talked it seemed to him that
the combined fragrances of the freshly washed night all came from her.
He was conscious of the whippoorwill calls and the soft crooning of the
river, but only as far-away voices of accompaniment, and she, answering
to dreamy influences, too, went on with her recitals from the journal of
the woman who had been a lady in Virginia and who probably lay buried
under the spot on which they stood.
"Hit's right amazin' ter listen at ye," he said at length. "But
plentiful amazin' things comes ter pass."
An amazing thing was coming to pass with him at that moment, for his
arms were twitching with an eagerness to close about her, and he seemed
struggling against forces of impulse stronger than himself.
It was amazing because he had sworn to avoid the folly of chancing
everything on too hasty a love declaration, and because the discipline
of patient self-control was strong in him. It was amazing, too, because,
with a warning recently received and appreciated, his ears had become
deaf to all sounds save her voice, and when the thicket stirred some
fifty yards away he heard nothing.
Even the girl herself would ordinarily have paused to bend her head and
listen to an unaccustomed sound, but in her as well as in him the
close-centred magic was working absorption.
Each of them felt the tense, new something that neither fully
understood, but which set them vibrating to a single impulse as the two
prongs of a tuning fork answer to one note. Neither of them thought of
the figure that hitched its way toward them--more cautious after that
first warning rustle--to watch and listen--the figure of an armed man.
For the girl reality seemed to recede into the gossamer of dreams. She
could fancy herself the other woman who had lived and died before
her--and the face of the man in the moonlight might have been that of
the pioneer Thornton. Fancy was stronger than actuality.
"Hit almost seems like," she whispered, "that ther old tree's got a
spell in hit--ter bewitch folks with."
"Ef hit has ... hit's a spell I loves right good," he fervently
protested.
He heard her breath come quick and sudden, as if under a hypnotic force,
and following the prompting of some instinctive mentor, he held out his
arms toward her.
Still she stood with the wide-eyed raptness of a sleepwalker, and when
Cal Maggard moved slowly forward, she, who had been so shy an hour ago,
made no retreat.
It was all as though each of them reacted to the command of some
controlling volition beyond themselves. The man's arms closed about her
slender body and pressed it close to his breast. His lips met her
upturned ones, and held them in a long kiss that was returned. Each felt
the stir of the other's breath. To each came the fluttering tumult of
the other's heart. Then after a long while they drew apart, and the
girl's hands went spasmodically to her face.
"What hev we been doin', Cal?" she demanded in the bewildered tone of
returning realization. "I don't skeercely know ye yit, nuther."
"Mebby hit war ther spell," he answered in a low but triumphant voice.
"Ef hit war, I reckon God Hisself worked hit."
The figure in the tangle had drawn noiselessly back now and slipped off
into the woods a few hundred yards away where it joined another that
stood waiting there.
"I hain't mad with ye, Cal," said Dorothy, slowly. "I hain't even
mortified, albeit I reckon I ought ter be sick with shame ... but I
wants ye ter go home now. I've got need ter think."
As they stood together at the fence they heard Bas Rowlett's voice
singing down the road, and soon his figure came striding along and
stopped by the stile.
"Howdy, Dorothy," he called, then recognizing that this was a
leave-taking he added, "Cal, ef ye're startin' home, I'll go long with
ye, fer comp'ny."
The moon was westering when the two men reached the turn of the road and
there Rowlett paused and began speaking in a cautious undertone.
"I didn't come along accidental, Cal. I done hit a-purpose. I got ter
studyin' 'bout that cracklin' twig we heered in ther bresh an' hit
worrited me ter think of yore goin' home by yoreself. I concluded ter
tarry fer ye an' guide ye over a trace thet circles round thet gorge
without techin' hit."
"I'm right sensibly beholden ter ye," answered Maggard, the more
embarrassed because he now knew this generous fellow to be a vanquished
rival. "But 'atter ternight ye've got ter suffer me ter take my own
chances."
Together they climbed the mountainside until they reached the edge of a
thicket that seemed impassable but through which the guide discovered a
narrow way. Before they had come far they halted, breathing deep from
the steep ascent, and found themselves on a shelf of open rock that
commanded a view of the valley and the roof of the Harper house, on
which the moonlight slept.
[Illustration: "_'Hit almost seems like,' she whispered, 'that ther
old tree's got a spell in hit--ter bewitch folks with.'_"]
"Thar's ther last glimpse we gits ternight of ther house an' ther old
tree," said Rowlett who stood a few feet away and, as Maggard turned to
look, the night stillness broke into a bellowing that echoed against the
precipice and the newcomer lurched forward like an ox struck with a
sledge.
As he fell Maggard's hand gripped convulsively at his breast and at the
corners of his mouth a thin trickle of blood began to ooze.
But before his senses went under the closing tide of darkness and
insensibility the victim heard Rowlett's pistol barking ferociously back
into the timber from which the ambushed rifle had spoken. He heard
Rowlett's reckless and noisy haste as he plowed into the laurel where
he, too, might encounter death, and raising his voice in a feeble effort
of warning he tried to shout out: "Heed yoreself, Bas ... hit's too late
ter save me."