Three sides of the blacksmith's shop, the door, and the window were in
full view from the little hamlet; the blank wall of the rear was close
to a sheer precipice. The door was locked, and the key was in the
sheriff's pocket.
The prisoner, bound with cords around his ankles and limbs, and with his
wrists manacled, was gone!
Every detail was as it had been left, except that at the rear, the only
point secure from observation, there were traces of burrowing in the
earth. In the cavity thus made between the lowest log and the 'dirt
floor' a man's body might with difficulty have been compressed--but a
man so shackled! Undoubtedly he had had assistance. This was a rescue.
Only a moment elapsed before the great barn-like doors were widely
flaring, and the anxious care of the officers and the eager curiosity of
the crowd had explored every nook and cranny within.
The ground was dry, and there was not even a footprint to betoken the
movements of the fugitive and his rescuers; only in the freshly upturned
earth where he effected escape were the distinct marks of the palms of
his hands, significantly close together.
Evidently he was still handcuffed when he had crawled through.
'He's a-wearin' my bracelets yit!' exclaimed the sheriff excitedly. 'Him
an' his friends warn't able ter cut them off, like they done the ropes.'
A search was organized in hot haste.
Every cabin, the corn-fields, the woods near at hand, were ransacked.
Parties went beating about through the dense undergrowth. They climbed
the ledges of great crags. They hovered with keen eyes above dark
abysses. They pursued for hours a tortuous course down a deep gorge,
strewn with gigantic boulders, washed by the wintry torrents into divers
channellings, overhung by cliffs hundreds of feet high, honeycombed with
fantastic niches and rifts.
What futile quest! What vastness of mountain wilderness!
The great sun went down in a splendid suffusion of crimson colour, and a
translucent golden haze, with a purple garb for the mountains, and a
glamourous dream for the sky, and bestowing far and near the gilded
license of imagination.
The searchers were hard at it until late into the night; never a clue
to encourage them, never a hope to lure them on.
More than once they flagged, these sluggish mountaineers, who had passed
the day in unwonted excitement, and had earned their night's rest. But
the penalties of refusing to aid the officers of the law spurred them
on.
Even old Hoodendin--not so old as to be exempt from this duty, for the
sheriff had summoned every available man at the Settlement to his
assistance--hobbled from stone to stone, from one rotting log to
another, where he sat down to recuperate from his exertions.
The search degenerated into a mere form, an aimless beating about in the
brush, before Micajah Green could be induced to relinquish the hope of
capture, and blow the horn as a signal for reassembling.
The bands of fagged-out men, straggling back to the Settlement toward
dawn, found reciprocal satisfaction in expressing the opinion that
'Cajah Green had 'keerlessly let Rick git away, an' warn't a-goin' ter
mend the matter by incitin' the mounting ter bust 'round the woods like
a lot o' crazy deer all night, ter find a man ez warn't nowhar.'
They wore surly enough faces as they gathered about the door of the
store, or lounged on the stumps and the few chairs, waiting for a
mounted party that had been ordered to extend the search down in the
adjacent coves and along the spurs.
The agile Jer'miah scudded about, furnishing such consolation as can be
contained in a jug. Had the quest resulted differently, they would have
laughed and joked and caroused till daybreak. As it was, their talk was
fragmentary; slight and innuendo were in every word.
The sheriff had supplemented his own negligence by a grievous disregard
of their comfort, and the sense of defeat, so bitter to an American
citizen, completed the aesthetic misery of the situation.
The waggons still stood about in the clearing; here and there the burly
dark steers lay ruminant and half asleep among the stumps. Among them,
too, were the cattle of the place; the cows, milked late the evening
before, had not yet roamed away.
Against a dark background of blackberry bushes a white bull stood in the
moonlight, motionless, the lustre gilding his horns and touching his
great sullen eyes with a spark of amber light. In his imperious
stillness he looked like a statue of a masquerading Jupiter.
A sound.
'Hist!' said the sheriff.
The moon, low in the west, was drawing a seine of fine-spun gold across
the dark depths of the valley. In that enchanted enmeshment were tangled
all the fancies of the night; the vague magic of dreams; vagrant
romances, dumb but for the pulses; the gleams of a poetry too delicately
pellucid to be focused by a pen. The mountains maintained a majesty of
silence. All the world beneath was still. The wind was laid.
Far, far away, once again, a sound.
So indistinct, so undistinguishable--they hardly knew if they had heard
aright. There was a sudden scuffle near at hand. Over one of the rail
fences, gleaming wet with dew, and rich with the loan of a silver beam,
there climbed a long, lean old hound; with an anxious aspect he ran to
the verge of the crag. Once more that sound, alien alike to the mountain
solitudes and the lonely sky; then the deep-mouthed baying broke forth,
waking all the echoes, and rousing all the dogs in the cove as well as
the canine visitors and residents at the Settlement.
'Dod-rot that critter!' exclaimed the sheriff angrily. 'We can't hear
nuthin' now but his long jaw.'
'Jes' say "Silence in court!"' suggested Amos James from where he lay at
length in the grass.
The sheriff nimbly kicked the dog instead, and the night was filled
with wild shrieks of pain and anger. When his barking was renewed, it
was punctuated with sharp, reminiscent yelps, as the injustice of his
treatment ever and anon recurred to his mind.
The sound of human voices grew very distinct when it could be heard at
all, and the tramp of approaching horses shook the ground.
Every eye was turned toward the point at which the road came into the
Settlement, between the densities of the forest and the gleaming array
of shining, curved blades and tossing plumes, where the corn-field
spread its martial suggestions. When an equestrian shadow suddenly
appeared, the sheriff saluted it in a tremor of excitement.
'Hello!' he shouted. 'Did ye ketch him?'
The foremost of the party rode slowly forward: the horse was jaded; the
rider slouched in the saddle with an aspect of surly exhaustion.
'Ketch him!' thundered out Gid Fletcher's gruff voice. 'Ketch the
devil!'
The bold-faced deputy was brazening it out. He rode up with as dapper a
style as a man may well maintain who has been in the saddle ten hours
without food, sustained only by the strength of a 'tickler' in his
pocket, whose prospects are jeopardized and whose official prestige is
ruined. The demeanour of the other riders expressed varying degrees of
injured disaffection as they threw themselves from their horses.
The blacksmith dismounted in front of the cumbersome doors of his shop,
on which still hung the sheriff's padlock, and with the stiff gait of
one who has ridden long and hard he strode across the clearing, and
stopped before the group in front of the store.
He looked infuriated. It might have been a matter of wonder that so
tired a man could nourish so strong and active a passion.
'Look a-hyar, 'Cajah Green!' he exclaimed, with an oath, 'folks 'low ter
me ez I ain't got no right ter my reward fur ketchin' that thar greased
peeg,--ez ye hed ter leave go of--kase he warn't landed in jail or
bailed. That air the law, they tells me.'
'That's the law,' replied the sheriff. His chair was tilted back against
the wall of the store, his hat drawn over his brow. He spoke with the
calmness of desperation.
'Then 'pears like ter me ez I hev hed all my trouble fur nuthin', an'
all the resk I hev tuk,' said the blacksmith, coming close, and
mechanically rolling up the sleeve of his hammer-arm.
'Edzac'ly.'
The blacksmith turned on him a look like that of a wounded bear. 'An' ye
sit thar ez peaceful ez skim-milk, an' 'low ez ye hev let my two
hundred dollars slip away?' he demanded. 'Dad burn yer greasy soul!'
'I hopes it air all I hev let slip,' said the sheriff quietly. There was
so much besides which he had cause to fear that it did not occur to him
to be afraid of the blacksmith.
Perhaps it was the subacute perception that he shared the officer's
attention with more engrossing subjects which had the effect of
tempering Gid Fletcher's anger.
The rim of the moon was slipping behind the purple heights of Chilhowee.
Day was suddenly upon them, though the sun had not yet risen--when did
the darkness flee?--the day, cool, with a freshness as of a new
creation, and with an atmosphere so clear that one might know the ash
from the oak in the deep green depths of the wooded valley.
The hour had not yet done with witchery: the rose-red cloud was in the
east, and the wild red rose had burst its bud; a mocking-bird sprang
from its nest in a dogwood-tree, with a scintillating wing and a soaring
song, and a ray of sunlight like a magic wand fell athwart the
landscape.
Gid Fletcher sat vaguely staring. Presently he lifted his hand with a
sudden gesture demanding attention.
'Ye ain't goin' ter be 'lected, air ye, 'Cajah Green?'
The sheriff stirred uneasily. His ambition, a little and a selfish
thing, was the index to his soul. Without it he himself would not be
able to find the page whereon was writ all that there was of the
spiritual within him. He writhed to forego it.
'Naw,' he said desperately. 'I s'pose I ain't.' He pushed his hat back
nervously.
He heard, without marking, the sudden rattling of one of the waggons
that had left some time ago: it was crossing a rickety bridge near the
foot of the mountain; the hollow reverberations rose and fell, echoed
and died away. One of the cabin doors opened, and a man came out upon
the porch. He washed his face in a tin pan which stood on a bench for
the public toilet, treated his head to a refreshing souse, and then,
with the water dripping from his long locks upon the shoulders of his
shirt, the bold-faced deputy, much refreshed by a snack and his
ablutions, came lounging across the clearing to join them.
Suddenly Micajah Green noted that the blacksmith was looking at him with
a significant gleam in his black eyes and a flush on his swarthy face.
'Who said ye warn't goin' ter be 'lected?'
'Why, this hyar prophet o' yourn on the Big Smoky.'
'Why did he 'low ez that warn't comin' ter pass?'
'He wouldn't gin no reason.'
'He lef' ye ter find that out. An' ye fund it out?'
The sheriff said nothing. He was breathlessly intent.
'An' he met me in the woods, an' lowed ez Rick Tyler oughtn't ter be
tuk, an' hed done no wrong; an' he called the gov'nor's reward
blood-money, an' worked hisself nigh up ter the shoutin' p'int; an'
called me "Judas" fur takin' the boy, sence me an' him hed been
frien'ly, an' lowed ez them thar thirty pieces o' silver warn't out o'
circulation yit.'
'An' then,' the bold-faced deputy struck in, 'he rode up yestiddy,
a-raisin' a great wondermint over a gaynder-pullin', ez if thar'd never
been one before; purtendin' 'twar wicked, like he'd never killed an' eat
a fowel, an' drawin' pistols, an' raisin' a great commotion an' excitin'
an' _de_stractin' the Settlemint, so a man handcuffed, an' with a rope
twisted round his arms an' legs, gits out of a house right under thar
nose, an' runs away. Rick Tyler couldn't hev done it 'thout them ropes
war cut, an' he war gin a chance ter sneak out. Now, I ain't a prophet
by natur'e but I kin say who cut them ropes, an' who raised a
disturbamint outside ter gin him a chance ter mosey.'
'Whar's he now?' demanded the sheriff, rising from his chair and
glancing about.
'He was a-huntin' with the posse, las' night,' said the deputy. 'He
never lef' till 'bout an hour ago. He never wanted nobody ter 'spicion
nuthin', I reckon. Mebbe that's him now.'
He pointed to a road in the valley, a tawny streak elusively appearing
upon a hilltop or skirting a rocky spur, soon lost in a sea of foliage.
Beside a harvested wheat-field it was again visible, and a tiny moving
object might be discerned by eyes trained to the long stretches of
mountain landscape. The sun was higher, the dew exhaled in warm and
languishing perfume, the mocking-bird filled the air with ecstasy. The
men stood among their elongated shadows on the crag, staring at the
moving object until it reached the dense woods, and so passed out of
sight.