THE VOICE IN THE MIST
It has been said that Mr. Carson set an example for the people at Lee
which many were tempted to follow. And partly it was the spring calling
them; partly it was an itching desire to find the Disbrows. Lee was
pretty well disgusted with itself as time went on, for not starting after
the absconding undertaker and his family immediately after their
disappearance, and they told themselves they certainly would have done it
if Mr. Carson hadn’t been so dead set against it. And he was put up to
acting the way he did, they knew, by Annie Laurie, who was too
soft-hearted altogether.
It was a little surprising, all things considered, that the Reverend
Absalom Summers should have been the next after Hi and Jim to yield to
the temptation to take to the hills. Resisting temptation, as his little
wife pointed out to him, ought to be his specialty. But he contrived to
down her argument.
“You don’t seem to understand my noble soul at all, Barbara,” he said.
“My real reason for taking to the hills is that I want to visit my two
uncles back on Longstreet Mountain.”
“But why should you visit them, Absalom, dear? Do you really care about
seeing them? Aren’t they two quarrelsome old men?”
“Well, they are some quarrelsome, Barbara, and that’s why I think I ought
to see them, carrying a dove of peace on my shoulder.”
“They’d kill a dove of peace and eat it, wouldn’t they?” she asked
laughingly. “Don’t they shoot everything in sight?”
“Pretty nigh,” agreed Absalom. “They certainly do have nervous
dispositions. They own a lot of land up there on Longstreet Mountain,
and the two of them used to live side by side. But their chickens were
so inquisitive about what was doing in the next yard, and they got so
mixed up running through the fence and forgetting which place was home,
that there was a row on early and late between my uncles. It was the
same with the calves. If they wanted to break into a field and eat up
the corn, they always picked out the field of the next door neighbor.
And that made the brothers just dancing mad. Then once Uncle Ephriam
shot a hound of Uncle Aaron’s—said he thought it was a timber wolf.
“And so it went. There was always trouble. When they heard I’d become a
preacher they sent for me to come up and straighten things out. I stayed
up there a month and talked things over and I couldn’t get either old
stiff-neck to give an inch. So I worked out a plan. Aaron had a likely
building site for his house, but Uncle Ephriam’s was on a slope and water
ran into the cellar when it rained. Well, just in front of them was a
deep ravine—mighty pretty it is too. I proposed that Ephriam should move
across to the other side of that gulley. I told him if he would, I’d
stay and help him put up his house. So Aaron bought Ephriam’s old house
to use for a barn, and Ephriam moved—chickens, stock, truck and
all—across the gulley. We got him a nice sizable house there, and
settled him and his wife as comfortable as you please. It was altogether
too much work for the calves and the chickens to get across that crack in
the earth, and so everyone lived in peace.”
“That was fine. But why should you leave Jonathan and me to go to see
them if they’re doing so well?”
“They aren’t doing so well as you might think, wife. No sooner had I got
those families separated, by a convulsion of nature, so to speak, than
they took to pining for each other.”
“Nonsense, Absalom.”
“It’s a fact, my dear. They were as lonely as owls. Said they didn’t
have anyone to talk to, and that it wore them all out plunging up and
down that gulley.”
“Well, what can you do about that? You don’t propose moving Uncle
Ephriam back again, do you?”
“Not at all, Barbara, not at all. I merely propose making conversation
easy and simple for them.”
“With a telephone?”
“Not at all. A telephone would be out of place in the hands of my
reverend uncles. I can’t precisely tell you why, but you’ll have to take
my word that it would. No, what I propose to do is to carry them
megaphones.”
“Megaphones, Absalom!”
“Certainly. Megaphones will become them. They are sturdy, seafaring
sort of men—”
“Why, they’ve never seen the sea!”
“Don’t be so literal, dear. They are sturdy, space-roaming,
wilderness-faring men in whose hands megaphones will be appropriate. I
shall strap one on each side of my horse and set forth—to-morrow.”
“But will you get your sermon prepared?”
“I shall prepare it while I’m riding. Seriously, Barbara, the wild man
in me is uppermost. You have tried to civilize me. Our young son has
labored to do the same thing. But you scratch a Russian and find a
Tartar; and you scratch a mountain man and you find a rover.”
“And you’ve been scratched, wild man?”
“I have. I’m off to-morrow. Bear with me, dear. I’ll come back as tame
as a house cat.”
Barbara looked at him with shining eyes.
“You’ll have a wonderful sermon,” she said. “I know you, dear. Go to
your hills—”
“From whence,” broke in the Reverend Absalom, his voice changing, “cometh
help.”
So away he went in the early morning, knapsack well filled, blankets
rolled, and a megaphone dangling from each side of his excellent horse.
Yes, he was glad to leave domesticity and towns behind him; glad to be
away from the sound of voices and from the need of proprieties. He was a
hill man, after all, he told himself, and lifting his face to the sky he
thanked God that he was. They satisfied him, these ancient mountains
which once had been lofty peaks and which through all the changing
centuries had crumbled and shrunken till they were the friendly little
mountains that he knew. They were so old—so old and so full of secrets.
And they satisfied his restless, longing, laughing, dreaming soul, the
curious soul of Absalom Summers, which differed from all the other souls
on earth. Yes, he mused, each soul must differ from another, as the
stars in heaven differ.
On he rode through the long day, thinking, dreaming, living a deep and
silent life. At night he made his meal, fed his horse, smoked his pipe
and thought of his sermon. The stars rolled over him in their silent and
majestic courses, and beneath them he knelt to pray for his wife and
babe, those inestimably dear treasures of his, those lovely creatures of
the hearth-side. They liked their roof; he liked his sky. Well,
blessings on them, and might he be forgiven if he harbored too wild a
nature in his bosom! It was not a silent prayer that the Reverend
Absalom put up. Far from it. He shouted to the whispering pines; he
addressed the distant stars; he felt as if he must send his voice beyond
the barriers of silence and reach his God. For that was the kind of man
the Reverend Absalom was.
Then, as trusting as a child in his mother’s arms, he laid him down to
sleep. For he felt the “Everlasting Arms” about him.
The next morning he arose at sunup and went singing on his way. He
breakfasted at about seven o’clock, and stimulated by his powerful cup of
coffee—which, truth to tell, was a fearsome liquid—he pushed onward. The
road he had chosen was difficult to keep and hard to traverse. There
were, of course, easier ways of reaching Longstreet Mountain, but in
order to reach them he would have had to take a train, and nothing was
further from his inclination at present than riding by steam. He wanted
just what he was having, the heave of good horseflesh beneath him.
The day passed without events other than the sort he desired: the lift of
a bird from a bush, the rippling of a stream across his path, the nosing
of the horse at the ford, a burst of laurel blossoms in a sunny path. He
went on, whistling and singing. Oftenest it was his old, best-loved
hymn: “A mighty fortress is our Lord.”
Along late in the afternoon a mist began to gather over the mountain. It
blurred everything delicately; it put a soft, filmy veil over the face of
the landscape and enhanced its beauty by so doing. But after a while it
began to be a bit eerie. As the wanderer cooked his evening meal it
seemed as if shadowy white figures drew near, bending over him, and then
flitting away as he arose. It did no more than amuse him, of course. He
knew the tricks of the mountain mist. But he couldn’t help remembering
how terrified he had been once as a child when he had been out on a night
much like this, and had had a five mile walk alone with a lantern in his
hand, which seemed to summon ghostly figures from the roadside.
“It would be a bad night for a man with a bad conscience,” he said aloud.
“He would think there were avenging spirits on his track, sure enough.
Come to think of it, I’ve plenty of things to have a bad conscience about
myself. I’d better be watching out or the goblins will get me. And
whatever would wife Barbara and baby Jonathan do then, poor things!”
The place where he had lighted his camp fire was in a little hollow and
the mist gathered very thickly there, so he concluded that it would be
better to go on farther up the mountain. It was possible that he might
find an airier place where the draft would keep the heavier clouds away.
So once more he put his horse to the path and went on silently, rather
weary, and heartily wishing that the night were fair.
He was very far from the beaten road, in a place so solitary that he
could not hope to meet anyone, so it was with no little surprise that he
found himself, suddenly, almost upon a group of human beings. They were
sitting, three of them, around a fire, well wrapped from the chill.
There was a sort of rude hut beside them, fashioned of saplings and
thatched with pine boughs. Here, apparently, they slept. They were not
then like himself, wanderers, but campers. Well, it was a quiet place
for a camp, and no doubt a sightly one—
His thoughts broke off like a thread that is snapped. He recognized the
persons at whom he was looking. They were the Disbrows! They were the
fugitives. At first he thought of going right up to them, but something
withheld him. He could hear Mrs. Disbrow’s voice, and he slid from his
horse and having tied him, crept nearer with as much stealth and skill in
silence as an Indian, that he might listen. There were things he felt
that he must know, and that as Sam’s friend he had a right to know.
“I don’t mean to go on, pa,” Mrs. Disbrow was saying. “What’s the use of
going on? Whatever would it mean for me but another house to look after,
and me lacking the strength to do it? Hannah would drudge and drudge,
and that’s all there’d be to it. Living like this there aren’t any
pantry shelves to clean or doorsteps to scrub. That’s a great point to a
woman with no elbow grease. You understand, pa, it’s been pretty dull
for me these last few years back. You can’t tell what it is to lie awake
all night wondering if the morning will ever come, and when the morning
comes, hating it because the light tears your eyes out and the noise
splits your ears.”
“But you seem to stand the light and the noise here well enough, ma.”
“So I do. That’s why I want to stay. The only noise is what the
crickets and birds make, with now and then a bee humming or an owl
screeching. And the light is green, coming through the trees. Why, it’s
as if a thousand years had rolled off my back. There’s no one around
wondering about me, and trying this trick and that to get a sight of me.”
“No one ever did that, ma,” cried out the shrill voice of Hannah. “That
was just your imagination. It was your being sick made you think that
way.”
“Well, however that may be, out here we’re free. Now I propose, since
you’ve got some money, pa, that we move around here and there, like a
nice family of bears—the father, and the mother and the baby bear.”
She gave a curious, unaccustomed laugh. Then suddenly she turned toward
her husband, and Mr. Summers could see her wild eyes gleaming in the
firelight.
“But what I can’t make out, Hector,” she said, “is where you got that
money. Why don’t you talk out the way a husband should to a wife? Here
we’ve been living so close to the wind that we hadn’t enough to satisfy
us, and Hannah’s been going without enough to clothe her decently. Now,
of a sudden, your pockets are full of money! What does it mean, Hector?
And why did you clear out of Lee in the night? When you gave the word to
go I was feeling so dull in my head that I didn’t care whether the thing
was right or wrong. But now I seem to have come to life. I’ve got to
thinking again, like I was a real human being. And Hector—”
Her voice carried on the air with the wild note of a loon.
“Hector!”
“Well, ma, go on, for goodness sake.”
“How did it come that you got that money just when Simeon Pace’s money
disappeared? Tell me that, husband! Tell me you didn’t have anything to
do with it! My life’s been queer and dark, but it’s been honest. You’ve
turned out a different man from what I thought you’d be. I hoped on and
on for you, but you didn’t get anywhere, and I got worn out and took to
my bed and meant never to get out of it. But even when you’d taken all
the spunk out of me I never thought you was anything but honest. Are
you, Hector? Are you honest—or a thief?”
It wrung Summers’ heart; yet he knew that the time had come for judgment.
He had been a boy of wild pranks and he loved a prank still. An idea
came flashing into his head. He crept back to his horse, loosened one of
the megaphones and put it to his mouth, and in that voice which had
electrified great camp meetings, magnified many times by the horn, he
bellowed into the mist:
“Disbrow, thief! Give back the money you stole! Make restitution!
Return the money of the orphan! Simeon Pace is in his grave, and his
orphan’s money is in your pocket! Disbrow, thief!”
The great megaphone waved up and down in the air, and the accusing voice
was borne to the group around the fire, as if carried on winds from the
furthermost heaven. In the white gloom, with the wreathing wraiths of
the mist dancing about them, the dark cavern below, the sighing trees
above, the monstrous voice, like that of an angry angel, besieged their
ears. Summers was too far from them to see them cower, and he could not
see their stricken faces. His heart secretly misgave him for what he
might be doing to the woman and the girl, but he did not flinch for all
that. He gave out one last call:
“Make restitution! To-morrow at sunrise set out upon your journey. Do
not pause till wrong has been made right. This is the first warning.
Beware the second!”
The mountain echoes caught it up and shouted the words back, while up and
down the chasm below the roadway the mist figures writhed and climbed.
Summers mounted his horse and stole back the way he had come till he
reached the bottom of the gulch, then taking the path on the other side
of it, he proceeded on his way. It was almost dawn when he drew rein,
tethered his horse, and laid him down to sleep.
“I hope,” he said to his horse, “that I haven’t scared those poor women
to death. But it had to be, you see—nothing else for it.” And then
suddenly he burst into a wild torrent of laughter. It rolled out of him
in waves; it shook him like a convulsion. And having eased his soul, he
lay down and slept.