It was not so dreary in the dark depths of the cavern as in the still
white world without; and the constable of the district, one Ephraim
Todd, found the flare of the open furnace and the far-reaching lights,
red among the glooms, and a perch on an empty barrel, and the warm
generosities of the jug, a genial transition. Nevertheless he protested.
'You-uns oughter be plumb 'shamed, Pete,' he said, 'ter toll me hyar,
an' me a off'cer o' the law.'
'Ye hev been hyar often afore, the Lord above knows,' asseverated Pete,
'an' ye needed mighty little tollin'.'
'But I warn't a off'cer o' the law then,' said the constable, wrestling
with his official conscience. 'An' I hev tuk a oath an' am under bonds.
An' hyar I be a-consortin' with law-breakers, an' 'tain't becomin' in a
off'cer o' the law.'
'Ye ain't tuk no oath, nor entered into no bonds ter keep yer throat ez
dry ez a limekiln,' retorted Pete. 'Jes' take a swig at that thar jug
an' hand it over hyar, will ye, an' hold yer jaw.'
Thus readily the official conscience, never rampant, was pacified. The
constable had formerly been, as Pete said, an _habitue_ of the place,
but since his elevation to office he had made himself scarce, in
deference to the promptings of that newly acquired sense of dignity and
propriety.
Should some chemical process obliterate for a time a leopard's spots,
consider the satisfaction of the creature to find himself once more
restored to his natural polka-dots; and such was the complacence of the
constable, with his artificial conscience evaporated and his heart
mottled with its native instincts of good and evil. He was glad to be
back in the enjoyment of the affluent hospitalities of the moonshiner's
jug.
He was a big, portly fellow, hardly more symmetrical than the barrel
upon which he was seated. He had an inexhaustible fund of good humour,
and was not even angry when Pete, in sheer contrariety, told him the
reason for his enticement to the still.
He said he would be glad enough if Rick Tyler could swear out anything
that would benefit the parson, and declared that he believed only
Micajah Green's malice could have compassed his incarceration.
''Cajah inquired o' me whar this place war, Pete,' he said,
'a-purtendin' like he hed been hyar wunst. But I jes' tole him 'twar ez
safe ez a unhatched deedie in a aig--an' I batted my eye, jes' so, an'
he shet up purty quick.'
The gleam from the furnace door showed Pete's own light grey eyes
intently staring at the visitor, but he said nothing and the matter
passed.
When the constable's heart was warmed by the brush whisky he understood
the sensation as happiness, and he translated happiness as a religious
excitement.
He seemed maudlin as he talked about the parson, who, he declared, had
led him to grace, and he recited some wonderful stories of religious
experience, tending to illustrate his present righteousness and the
depths of iniquity from which he had been redeemed.
Pete's perversity operated to curtail these.
'That's a fac'!' he would heartily assent; 'ye useter be one o' the
meanes' men on these hyar mountings!' Or 'Grace hed a mighty wrastle
with Satan in yer soul. I dunno whether he air cast out _yit_!'
The constable--his big owlish head askew--was embarrassed by these
manoeuvres, and presently the talk drifted to the subject of the
parson's spiritual defection. This he considered a mental aberration.
'Hi Kelsey,' he said, 'war always more or less teched in the head. I hev
noticed--an' ye may sot it down ez a true word--ez ev'y man es air much
smarter'n other men in some ways, in other ways air foolisher. He mought
prophesy one day, an' the nex' ye wouldn't trest him ter lead a blind
goose ter water. He air smarter'n enny man I ever see--Pa'son Kelsey
air. Thar's Brother Jake Tobin ain't got haffen his sense; an' yit
nobody can't say ez Brother Jake ain't sensible.'
The philosopher upon the barrel, as he made this nice distinction, gazed
meditatively into the bed of live coals that flung its red glare on his
broad flushed countenance and wide blinking eyes.
It revealed the others, too: the old man's hard, lined, wrinkled visage
and his stalwart supple frame; Pete, with his long tangled hair, his
pipe between his great exposed teeth; Ab, filling the furnace with wood,
his ragged beard moved by the hot breath of the fire; the big-boned,
callow Sol, with his petulant, important face; and Ben, in the dim
background tossing the sticks over to Ab from the gigantic wood pile.
They fell with a sharp sound, and the cave was full of their multiplied
echoes. The men as they talked elevated their voices so as to be heard.
Ab was rising from his kneeling posture. He closed the furnace door, and
as it clashed he thought for an instant he was dreaming. In that instant
he saw Pete start up suddenly with wild, distended eyes, and with a
levelled pistol in his hand.
The next moment Ab knew what it meant. A sharp report--and a jet of red
light, projected from the muzzle of the weapon, revealed a group of
skulking, unfamiliar figures stealthily advancing upon them.
The return fire was almost instantaneous, and was followed by
multitudinous echoes and a thunderous crash that thrilled every nerve.
The darkness was filled with the clamours of pandemonium, for the
concussion had dislodged from the roof a huge fragment of rock, weighing
doubtless many tons.
The revenue raiders lagged for a moment, confused by the overwhelming
sound, the clouds of stifling dust, and the eerie aspect of the place.
They distinguished a sharp voice presently, crying out some imperative
command, and after that there was no more resistance from the
moonshiners. They had disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them.
The intruders were at a loss. They could not pursue and capture the men
in the dark. If the furnace door were opened they would be targets in
the glare for the lurking moonshiners in the glooms beyond. It did not
occur to them that the cave had another outlet, until, as the echoes of
the fallen fragment grew faint, they heard far away a voice crying out,
'Don't leave me!' and the mocking rocks repeating it with their tireless
mimicry.
It was the constable. He never forgot that agonized retreat down those
unknown black depths. He was hardly able to keep pace with his swifter
fellows, falling sometimes, and being clutched to his feet rudely
enough, as they pressed on in a close squad; feeling now and then the
sudden wing of a bat against his face and interpreting it as the touch
of a human pursuer; sometimes despairing, as they scrambled through a
long, low, narrow passage, scarcely wide enough for the constable's
comfortable fatness. Then it was that fear descended upon him with
redoubled force, and he would exclaim in pity of his plight, 'An' me a
off'cer o' the law!'
He impeded their flight incalculably, but to their credit be it said the
lighter weights had never a thought of deserting their unfortunate guest
despite the danger of capture and the distress of mind induced by the
loss of their little 'all.' The poor constable fitted some of the
tube-like passages like the pith in the bark, and as he was at last
drawn, pallid, struggling, his garments in shreds, from an aperture of
the cave in a dense untrodden jungle of the laurel, he again piteously
exclaimed, 'An' me a off'cer o' the law!'
There was little leisure, however, to meditate upon his degraded
dignity. He followed the example of the moonshiners, and ran off through
the laurel as fleetly as a fat man well could.
The raiders showed excellent judgment. They offered no pursuit down
those dark and devious underground corridors. Acquiring a sense of
security from the echoes growing ever fainter and indicative of
lengthening distances, they presently opened the furnace door, and by
the aid of the flare cut the tubs and still to pieces, destroyed the
worm, demolished the furnace, and captured in triumph sundry kegs and
jugs of the illicit whisky. There was a perfunctory search for the
distillers at the log cabin on the mountain slope. But the officers made
haste to be off, for the possibility of rally and recapture is not
without parallel facts in the annals of moonshining.
Perhaps the mountain wilds had never sheltered a fiercer spirit than old
Groundhog Cayce when he ventured back into his den and stood over the
ruins of his scanty fortunes--the remnants of the still; the furnace, a
pile of smoking stones and ashes and embers; the worm in spiral
sections; the tubs half burnt, riven in pieces, lying about the ground.
The smoke was still dense overhead and the hot stones were sending up
clouds of steam. It was as well, perhaps, since the place would never
again be free from inspection, that it could not be used as it once was.
The great fragment of rock, fallen from the roof, lay in the course of
the subterranean stream, and the water, thus dammed, was overflowing its
channel and widely spreading a shallow flood all along the familiar
ground. It was rising. He made haste to secure the few articles
overlooked by the raiders: a rifle, a powder-horn on one of the ledges
that served as shelf, a bag of corn, the jovial jug. And for the last
time he crept through the narrow portal and left the cavern to the dense
darkness, to the floating smoke, to the hissing embers, and the slow
rising of the subterranean springs.
For days he nursed his wrath as he sat upon the cabin porch beneath the
yellow gourds and the purple blooms of the Jack-bean, and gazed with
unseeing eyes at the wide landscape before him. The sky was blue in
unparalleled intensity. The great 'balds' towered against it in sharp
outlines, in definite symmetry, in awful height. The forests were
aflame with scarlet boughs. The balsams shed upon the air their
perfumes, so pervasive, so tonic, that the lungs breathed health and all
the benignities of nature. The horizon seemed to expand, and the
exquisite lucidity of the atmosphere revealed vague lines of far-away
mountains unknown to the limitations of less favoured days.
In the woods the acorns were dropping, dropping, all the long hours. The
yellow sunshine was like a genial enthusiasm, quickening the pulses and
firing the blood. The hickory trees seemed dyed in its golden
suffusions, and were a lustrous contrast to the sombre pine, or the
dappled maple, or the vivid crimson of the black-gum. But the future of
the year was a narrowing space; the prospects it had brought were
dwarfed in the fulfilment, or were like an empty clutch at the empty
air. And winter was afoot; ah, yes, the tenderest things were already
dead--the flowers and the hopes--and the splendid season cherished in
its crimson heart a woeful premonition. And thus the winds, blowing
where they listed, sounded with a melancholy cadence; and the burnished
yellow sheen was an evanescent light; and the purple haze, vaguely
dropping down, had its conclusive intimations in despite that it
loitered.
Dorinda, with her hands folded too, sat much of the time in dreary
abstraction on the step of the porch, looking down at the yellowed
corn-field which she and Rick ploughed on that ecstatic June morning.
How long ago it seemed! Sometimes above it, among the brown tassels,
there hovered in the air a cluster of quivering points of light against
the blue mountain opposite, as some colony of gossamer-winged insects
disported themselves in the sunshine. And the crickets were shrilling
yet in the grass. She saw nothing, and it would be hard to say what she
thought. In the brilliancy of her youthful beauty--a matter of linear
accuracy and delicate chiselling and harmonious colouring, for Nature
had been generous to her--it might seem difficult to descry a likeness
to the wrinkled and weather-beaten features of her father's lowering
face, as he sat in his chair helplessly brooding upon his destroyed
opportunities. But there was a suggestion of inflexibility in both: she
had firm lines about her mouth that were hard in his; the unflinching
clearness of her eyes was a reflection of the unflinching boldness of
his. Her expression in these days was so set, so stern, so hopeless,
that one might have said she looked like him. He beheld his ruined
fortunes; she, her bereft heart.
Amos James, one day, as he stood on the porch, saw this look on her
face. She was leaning on her folded arms in the window hard by. She had
spoken to him as absently and with as mechanical courtesy as the old
moonshiner at the other end of the porch. He came up close to her. It
was a wonderful contrast to the face she had worn when they talked, that
day at the spring, of Rick Tyler's escape. With the quickened intuition
of a lover's heart he divined the connection.
'Ye hain't kep' yer promise, D'rindy,' he said in a low tone.
'What promise?' she demanded, rousing herself and knitting her brows as
she looked at him.
'Ye 'lowed ye'd let me know ef ever ye kem ter think less o' Rick
Tyler.'
Her eyes, definitely angry, flashed upon him.
'Ye shan't profit by it,' she declared.
And so he left her, still leaning in the vine-framed window, the lilac
blossoms of the Jack-bean drooping until they touched her black hair.
Rick Tyler was dismayed by the result of his jealousy and the strange
'lesson' that Dorinda had learned. He found her inflexible. She reminded
him sternly of the conditions of her promise and that he had failed. And
when he protested that he was jealous because he loved her so, she said
she valued no love that for her sake grudged a word, not in generosity,
but in simple justice, to liberate an innocent man in the rigours of a
terrible doom. And when at this man's very name he was seized with his
accustomed impetuous anger, she looked at him with a cool aloof
scrutiny that might have expressed a sheer curiosity. It bewildered and
tamed him. He had never heard of a Spartan. He only thought of her as
immovable, and as infinitely remote from his plane as the great dome of
the mountain. He remembered that she had always softened to his
misfortunes, and he talked of how he had suffered. But she said that was
all over now, and he had been 'mighty lucky.' He sought to appeal to her
in her own behalf, and reminded her how she had loved him through it
all, how she would have married him, despite the fierce pursuit of the
law. She had loved him; he would not forget that.
'No,' she said drearily. 'I never loved ye. I loved what I thunk ye war.
But ye warn't that--nuthin' like it! Ye war suthin' else. I war jes' in
love with my own foolishness.'
Poor Dorinda! Alas, for the fair ideals! these things are transient.
He went away at last, indignant and amazed. Once he thought of offering
to make the affidavit, not cognizant of its fatal defect, and then the
conviction took hold upon him that this melancholy was her deep
disappointment because she loved the man she sought to aid. And
sometimes he could not believe he had lost her heart. And yet when he
would go back, her dull indifference to his presence would convince him
alike that he was naught to her now and that he had been supplanted.
His contradictions of feeling began to crystallize into a persistent
perversity. He took pleasure in denying the story she had told of his
escape, and many people hardly knew which version to believe. He
congratulated Brother Jake Tobin one evening at the cabin on having
turned Hi Kelsey out of the church, and called him a wolf in sheep's
clothing.
And then for his pains he was obliged to listen to her defence of the
absent man; she declared the parson was like one of the prophets--like
some man in the Bible. As to that confession he had made in the church,
'twar plain he war out'n his head.'
Meantime Brother Jake Tobin discreetly bent his attention upon the honey
and fried chicken on the supper table, and Rick Tyler fumed in silence.
After the news of the nolle prosequi, Rick went about the mountain with
his former large liberty. His step-brothers were desirous of
obliterating his recollection of their avoidance, and made him a present
of several head of cattle and some hogs. He lived at home among them,
and began to have prospects for the future.
He was planning with the younger Cayces to start a new still, for a
region is particularly safe for that enterprise immediately after a
visit from the revenue officers, their early return being improbable.
And he talked about a house-raising while the weather held fine, and
before snow.
'I'm a-thinkin' 'bout gittin' married, Pete, ter a gal over yander ter
the Settlemint,' he said, looking for the effect on Dorinda.
She was as silent, as stern, as listless as ever. And but for the sheer
futility of it, he might have fallen to upbraiding her and protesting
and complaining as of yore, and repudiated the mythical 'gal at the
Settlemint.'
All the leaves were falling. Crisp and sere they carpeted the earth and
fled before the wind. They seemed in some wise to illumine the slopes as
they lay in long yellow vistas under the overhanging black boughs. Many
a nest was revealed--empty, swinging on the bare limb.
The mountains near at hand were sad and sombre, the stark denuded
forests showing the brown ground among the trees, and great jutting
crags, and sterile stretches of out-cropping rocks, and fearful abysmal
depths of chasms--and streams, too, madly plunging. All the scene was
stripped of the garb of foliage, and the illusion of colour, and the
poetry of the song birds and the flowers.
More distant ranges were of a neutral vagueness, and farther still they
seemed a nebulous grey under a grey sky. When the sun shone they were
blue--a faint, unreal blue, a summer souvenir clinging to the wintry
landscape like some youthful trait continued in a joyless age.
For it was November, and the days were drear.
About this time an excited rumour suddenly prevailed that Parson Kelsey
had returned to the Great Smoky Mountains.
It was widely discredited at first, but proved to be authorized by Gid
Fletcher, who was himself just back from Shaftesville, where he had been
to testify in the trial for the rescue of Rick Tyler. A story of
discomfiture he retailed, and he seemed ill at ease and prone to lay
much blame on Rick, whose perverse circulation of diverse accounts of
the escape had greatly unnerved him before his journey, and prevented
the prosecution from summoning Rick as a witness, if indeed he would
have permitted himself to be served with the subpoena.
The judge was testy during the trial, and charged the jury in favour of
the prisoner; after the verdict of acquittal, he stated indignantly that
there had been practically no evidence against the defendant, and that
it was a marked instance of the indifference or ignorance of the
committing magistrate and the grand jury that such a case of flagrant
malice could get beyond them and into the jurisdiction of the court.
Gid Fletcher solaced himself by telling how Green played the fool on the
stand when the judge snarled at him, and contradicted himself and cut a
'mighty pore figger.'
'Though ez ter that, the pa'son riz up an' reviled both me an' 'Cajah in
open court,' said Fletcher. ''Pears like he hed read the Bible so
constant jes' ter l'arn ev'y creepy soundin' curse ez could be called
down on the heads o' men. An' somebody said ter the jedge arterward ez
he oughter fine pa'son fur contempt o' court. An' the jedge 'lowed he
warn't a statute; he hed some human natur in him, an' he wanted me an'
'Cajah ter hear the truth spoke one time.'
The blacksmith declared, too, that he was 'fairly afeard o' pa'son' and
his fierce threats of revenge, and was glad enough that they were not
obliged to make the journey together, for he, having a horse, had
ridden, while the parson had been constrained to walk.
'I reckon he's hyar by this time,' Fletcher said to Nathan Hoodendin,
'but I ain't a-hankerin' ter meet up with him agin. He's more like a
wild beastis 'na man; ter see him cut his blazin' eye aroun' at ye,
ye'd 'low ez he'd never hearn o' grace!'
The snow came with Kelsey.
One day, when the dull dawn broke, the white flakes were softly
falling--silent, mysterious, ghostly invasion of the wild wintry air and
the woods. All adown chasms and ravines, unexplored and unknown, the
weird palpitating motion animated the wide and desert spaces. The ground
was deeply covered; the drifts filled the hollows; they burdened the
crests of the jutting crags and found a lodgment in all the fissures of
their dark and rugged faces. The white lines on the bare black boughs
served to discriminate their sylvan symmetry. Vague solemnities pervaded
the silent marshalling of these forces of Nature.
The wind held its breath. An austere hush lay upon the chilled world.
The perspective had its close limitations and the liberties of vision
were annulled. Only the wild things were abroad; but the footprints of
the rabbit or the deer were freshly filled, and the falling snow seemed
to possess the world. When it ceased at last, it lay long on the ground,
for the cold continued. And the wilderness was sheeted and still.
There were presently visible occasional ruts winding in and out among
the trees, marking the course of the road and the progress of some
adventurous waggon and ox-team--sometimes, too, the hoof-prints of a
saddle-horse. One might easily judge how few of the mountaineers had
ventured out since the beginning of the 'cold snap.' These marks were
most numerous in front of the log-house where Hiram Kelsey and his uncle
and the two old men sat around the fire. There was a prevalent curiosity
as to how the parson had endured the double humiliation of imprisonment
and being cast out of the church. They were hardly prepared for the
tempestuous fury which animated him upon the mention of the prosecution
and the witnesses' names. But when hesitating inquiries were propounded
by those of his visitors disposed to controversy--seeking to handle his
heresies and gauge his infidelity--he would fall from the ecstasies of
rage to a dull despondency.
'I dunno,' he would say, looking into the heart of the red fire. 'I
can't sati'fy my mind. Some things in the Bible air surely set
contrariwise. I can't argyfy on 'em. But thar's one thing I kin
_feel_--Christ the Lord liveth. An' sometimes that seems doctrine
enough. An' mebbe some day I'll find Him.'
A thaw came on, checked by a sudden freeze. He thought it as cold as
ever one afternoon about sunset as he trudged along the road. He saw a
tiny owl, perched in a cedar-tree hard by the rail-fence. The creature's
feathers were ruffled, and it looked chill. The atmosphere was of a
crystalline clearness. The mountains in the east had dropped the snow
from the darkling pines, but above, the towering balds rose in unbroken
whiteness, imposed in onyx-like distinctness upon the azure sky. There
were vague suggestions of blue and violet and rose on the undulations of
the steep, snow-covered slopes close at hand. The crags were begirt with
icicles, reaching down many feet and brilliant with elusive prismatic
glimmers. He heard a sudden crash: a huge scintillating pendant had
fallen by its own weight. Chilhowee stood massive and richly purple
beyond the snowy valley; above was a long stretch of saffron sky, and in
its midst the red sun was going down. He stood to watch its fiery disc
slip behind the mountains, and then he turned and pursued his way
through the neutral-tinted twilight of the wintry evening.
Old Cayce's log-cabin rose up presently, dark and drear against the high
and snowy slopes behind it. The drifts still lay thatch-like on the
roof; the eaves were fringed with icicles. The overhanging trees were
cased in glittering icy mail. The blackened corn-stalks, left standing
in the field as is the habit until next spring's ploughing should
begin, were writhen and bent, and bore gaunt witness to the devastation
of the winter wind. The smoke was curling briskly from the chimney, and
as the door opened to his knock, the great fire of hickory and ash,
sending up yellow and blue flames all tipped with vivid scarlet, cast a
genial flare upon the snowy landscape, slowly darkening without. He
experienced a sudden surprise as his eye fell upon old man Cayce, the
central figure of the group, having heard stories of the moonshiner's
deep depression, consequent upon the disastrous raid, and of the apathy
into which he had fallen. They hardly seemed true. He sat erect in his
chair, his supple frame alert, his eye intent, every fibre charged with
energy, his face deeply flushed. He looked expectant, eager. His
stalwart sons sat with him in a semicircle about the wide, warm hearth.
All their pipes were freshly alight, for the evening meal was just
concluded. They, too, wore an aspect of repressed excitement.
Kelsey detected it in their abstraction during the formal greetings, and
when he was seated among them, ever and anon they shifted uneasily in
their chairs, which grated harshly on the puncheon floor. Sometimes
there sounded a faint jingling of spurs when they moved their feet on
the ill-adjusted stones of the hearth. They had their pistols in their
belts and perchance their lives in their hands. His admission was in
some sort a confidence, but although he marvelled, he said nothing.
The bare and humble furnishing of the room was very distinct in the rich
glow--the few chairs, the shelves with the cooking utensils, the churn,
a chest, the warping-bars, the spinning-wheel; and their simple domestic
significance seemed at variance with the stern and silent armed men
grouped about the fire.
A vibrant sound--one of the timbers had sprung in the cold. Soloman rose
precipitately.
'Nuthin', Sol, nuthin',' said the old man testily. 'Tain't nigh time
yit.'
Nevertheless Sol opened the door. The chill air rushed in. The yellow
flames bowed and bent fantastically before it. Outside the gibbous moon
hung in the sky, and the light, solemn, ghostly, pervaded with pallid
mysteries the snowy vistas of the dense, still woods. The shadow of the
black boughs lay in distinct tracery upon the white surface; there was a
vague multiplication of effect, and the casual glance could ill
distinguish the tree from its semblance. Vacant of illusions was the
winding road--silent, and empty, and white, its curve visible from the
fireplace through the black rails of the zigzag fence. Hiram Kelsey
caught a glimpse, too, of the frosty dilations of a splendid star; then
the door closed and Sol came back with jingling spurs to his seat by the
fireside.
'Be you-uns satisfied?' demanded Pete with a sneer.
Sol, abashed, said nothing, and once more the ominous silence descended,
all moodily watching the broad and leaping flames and the pulsating
coals beneath.
Somehow the geniality of the fire suggested another bright and dominant
presence that was wont in some sort to illumine the room.
'Whar be D'rindy?' asked Kelsey suddenly.
'Waal--D'rindy,' said Ab, the eldest of the sons, evidently withdrawing
his mind with an effort, 'she hev gone ter Tuckaleechee Cove, ter holp
nuss Aunt Jerushy's baby. It's ailin', an' bein' ez it air named arter
D'rindy, she sets store by it, an' war powerful tormented ter hear how
the critter war tuk in its stummick. She kerried Jacob along, too, 'kase
she 'lows she hankers arter him when she's away, an' she makes out ez
we-uns cross him in his temper, 'thout she air by ter pertect him. I war
willin' 'kase it air peacefuller hyar without Jacob 'n with him--though
he air my own son, sech ez he be. An' D'rindy hev pompered him till he
air ez prideful ez a tur-r-key gobbler, an' jes' about ez
cornsiderate.'
'She lef' Mirandy Jane an' me,' said Pete, facetiously showing his great
teeth.
'Waal,' said the old man, speaking with his grave excited eyes still on
the fire. 'I be toler'ble glad ez D'rindy tuk this time ter leave home
fur a few days, 'kase she hev been toler'ble ailin' an' droopy. An'
t'other day some o' the boys got ter talkin' 'bout'n how sure they be ez
'twar 'Cajah Green--dad-burn the critter!--ez gin the revenue hounds the
word whar our still war hid. An' D'rindy, she jes' tuk a screamin' fit,
an' performed an' kerried on like she war bereft o' reason. An' she got
down old Betsy thar'--pointing to a rifle on the rack--'ez Pete hed made
her draw a mark on it ter remember 'Cajah Green by, an' his word ez he'd
jail her some day, an' she wanted me and the boys ter swear on it ez
we-uns would never shoot him.'
'An' did you-uns swear sech?' asked Hiram Kelsey, in fierce reprobation.
Beneath the broad brim of his hat his eyes were blazing; their large
dilated pupils cancelled the iris and the idea of colour; they were
coals of fire. His shadowed face was set and hard; it bore a presage of
disappointment--and yet he was doubtful.
Pete turned and looked keenly at him.
'Waal,' said the old man, embarrassed, and in some sort mortified,
'D'rindy, ye see, war ailin', an', an'--I never hed but that one darter
an' sech a pack o' sons, an' it 'pears like she _oughter_ be
humoured--an'----'
'Ye w-wants him shot, hey, pa'son?' Pete interrupted his critical study
of the unconscious subject.
Kelsey's eyes flashed.
'I pray that the Lord may cut him off,' he said.
'Waal, the Lord ain't obleeged ter use a rifle,' said Pete pertinently.
'Even we-uns kin find more ways than that.'
'The pa'son mought ez well go along an' holp,' said Groundhog Cayce.
Kelsey turned his eyes in blank inquiry from the old man to Pete by his
side.
'We air a-layin' fur him now,' Pete explained.
'He hain't been so delivered over by the Lord ez ter kem agin, arter
informin' the raiders, inter the Big Smoky?' Kelsey asked, forgetting
himself for the moment, and aghast at the doomed man's peril.
Pete tapped his head triumphantly.
'Tain't stuffed with cotton wool,' he declared. 'We let on ter the
mounting ez we never knowed who done it. An' we jes' laid low, an' held
our tongues betwixt our teeth, when we hearn 'bout'n his 'quirin' round
'bout'n the still, from this'n an' that'n, d'rectly arter the 'lection.
We got him beat fur that, jes' 'count o' what he said ter D'rindy,
'kase she wouldn't g-g-gin her cornsent ter shootin' him, an' got dad
set so catawampus, he obeyed her like Jacob wouldn't fur nuthin'.
An''--with rising emphasis--'th-th-the blamed critter 'lows he lef' no
tracks an' ain't been found out yit! An' hyar he be on the Big Smoky
agin, a-finishin' up some onsettled business with his old office. I seen
him yander ter the Settlemint, an' talked with him frien'ly an'
familiar, along o' Gid Fletcher, an' fund out when he war ter start down
ter Eskaqua Cove, ter bide all night at Tobe Grimes's house.'
'But--but--ef they never tole him--surely none o' 'em told him'--argued
Kelsey breathlessly.
Pete showed his long teeth.
'Somebody tole him,' he said, with a fierce smile. 'H-h-he couldn't git
the mounting ter t-t-turn agin we-uns; they war _afeard_!' cynically
discriminating the motive. 'So he kem nosin' roun' 'mongst our
c-c-chillen--the little chillen, ez didn't know what they war a-tellin'
an' Jacob tole him whar the cave war, an' 'bout haulin' the apples fur
pomace. Jacob war the man, fur Mirandy Jane hearn him say it. She hed
seen 'Cajah Green afore, when he war sher'ff.'
It was a palpable instance of bad faith and imposition, and it tallied
well with Hiram Kelsey's own wrongs. He sat brooding upon them, and
looking at the fire with dulled meditative eyes. One of the logs, burnt
in twain, broke with a crash under the burden of the others, and the
fire, quickening about them, sent up myriads of sparks attendant upon
the freshening flames; among the pulsating red coals there were dazzling
straw-tinted gleams, and a vista of white heat that repelled the eye.
Outside the wind was rising--its voice hollow, keen, and shrill as it
swept over the icy chasms; the trees were crashing their bare boughs
together. It was a dreary sound. From far away came the piercing howl of
some prowling hungry wolf, familiar enough to the ears that heard it,
but its ravening intimations curdled the blood. A cock's crow presently
smote the air, clear and resonant as a bugle, and with a curse on
tardiness the impatient Sol once more rose and opened the door to look
out.
A change was impending. Clouds had come with the wind, from the west to
meet the moon. Though tipped with the glint of silver, the black portent
was not disguised. Rain or snow, it mattered not which. The young
mountaineer held the door open to show the darkening sky and the
glittering earth, and looked over his shoulder with a triumphant
glance.
'That will settle the footprints,' he said.
There was something so cruel in his face, so deadly in his eyes, a
ferocious satisfaction in the promised security so like the savage joy
of a skulking beast, that it roused a normal impulse in the breast of
the man who read the thoughts of his fellow-men like an open book.
Kelsey was himself again.
He raised his hand suddenly, with an imperative gesture.
'Listen ter me!' he said, with that enthusiasm kindling in his eyes
which they honoured sometimes as the light of religion, and sometimes
reviled as frenzy. 'Ye'll repent o' yer deeds this night! An' the
jedgmint o' the Lord will foller ye! Yer father's grey hairs will go
down in sorrow ter the grave, but his mind will die before his body. An'
some of you-uns will languish in jail, an' know the despair o' the bars.
An' he that is bravest 'mongst ye will mark how his shadder dogs him.
An' ye will strike yer hands tergether, an' say, "That the day hed never
dawned, that the night hed never kem fur we-uns!" An' ye'll wisht ye hed
died afore! An' but for the coward in the blood, ye would take yer own
life then! An' ye'll look at the grave before ye, an' hope ez it all
ends thar!'
His eyes blazed. He had risen to his feet in the intensity of his
fervour. And whether it was religion or whether it was lunacy it
transfigured him.
They had all quailed before him, half overborne by the strength of his
emotion, and half in deprecation, because of their faith in his
mysterious foreknowledge. But as he turned, pushed back his chair, and
hastily started toward the door, they lost the impression. Pete first
recovered himself.
'Wh-wh-whar be you-uns a-goin'?' he demanded roughly.
The parson turned fiercely. He thrust out his hand with a gesture of
repudiation, and once more he lifted the latch.
'Naw, ye ain't g-g-goin',' said Pete, with cool decision, throwing
himself against the door. 'Ye hev sot 'mongst we-uns an' h-hearn our
plans. Ye 'peared ter gin yer cornsent w-when dad said ye could go
'long. Dad thought ye'd like ter hev a s-sheer in payin' yer own grudge.
We hev tole ye what we hev tole no other livin' man. An' now ye hev got
ter hev our reason ter h-h-hold yer yaw. I don't like ter s-shoot a man
down under our own roof ez kem hyar frien'ly, but ef ye fools with that
thar latch agin, I reckon I'll be obleeged ter do it.'
If Pete Cayce had possessed an acute discrimination in the reading of
faces, he might have interpreted Kelsey's look as a pondering dismay;
the choice offered him was to do murder or to die! As it was, Pete only
noted the relinquishment of the parson's design when he sat down silent
and abstracted before the fire.
But for his deep grudge, it might have seemed that Kelsey had intended
to forewarn Micajah Green of the danger in the path, and to turn him
back. Pete did not feel entirely reassured until after he had said:
'I 'lowed ez ye s-s-swore ye fairly _de_-spise 'Cajah G-G-Green, an'
r-raged ter git even with him.'
'I furgits it sometimes,' rejoined Kelsey.
And Pete did not apprehend the full meaning of the words.
'An' don't do no more o' yer prophesyin' ter-night, Hiram,' said the old
man irritably. 'It fairly gins me the ager to hear sech talk.'
The night wore on. The fire roared; the men, intently listening, sat
around the hearth.
Now and then a furtive glance was cast at Hiram Kelsey. He seemed lost
in thought, but his eye glittered with that uninterpreted, inscrutable
light, and they were vaguely sorry that he had come among them.
They took scant heed of his reproach. It has been so long the unwritten
law of moonshiners that the informer shall perish as the consequence of
his malice and his rashness, that whatever normal moral sense they
possess is in subjection to their arbitrary code of justice and the
savage custom of the region.
The mysterious disappearance of a horse-thief or a revenue spy,
dramatically chronicled, with a wink and a significant grin, as 'never
hearn on no more,' or 'fund dead in the road one mornin',' affects the
mountaineers much as the hangman's summary in the Friday evening papers
impresses more law-abiding communities--shocking, but necessary.
The great fire was burnt to a mass of coals. The wind filled the ravines
with a tumult of sound. The bare woods were in wild commotion. The gusts
dashed upon the roof snow, perhaps, or sleet, or vague drizzling rain;
now discontinued, now coming again with redoubled force.
Suddenly, a growl from the dogs under the house; then the sound of a
crunching hoof in the snow.
The men sallied forth, swift and silent as shadows. There was a frantic
struggle in the road; a wild cry for help; a pistol fired wide of the
mark, the report echoing in the silence from crag to crag, from chasm to
chasm, with clamorous iteration, as if it would alarm the world. The
horses were ready. The men hastily threw themselves into the saddle.
It had been arranged that Kelsey, who had no horse, should ride before
the prisoner.
He mounted, drew about his own waist the girth which bound the doomed
man, buckling it securely, and the great grey horse was in the centre of
the squad.
Micajah Green begged as they went--begged as only a man can for his
life. He denied, he explained, he promised.
'Ye cotton ter puttin' folks in jail, 'Cajah! Yer turn now! We'll put ye
whar the dogs won't bite ye,' said the old man savagely.
And the rest said never a word.
The skies were dark, the mountain wilds awful in their immensity, in
their deep obscurities, in the multitudinous sounds of creaking boughs
and shrilling winds.
They were in the dense laurel at last. The branches, barbed with ice,
and the evergreen leaves, burdened with snow, struck sharply in their
faces as they forced their way through.
The swift motion had chilled them; icicles clung to their hair and
beard; each could hardly see the dark figures of the others in the dense
umbrageous undergrowth as they recognised the spot they sought and
called a halt.
It was the mouth of the cave; they could hear the sound of the dark cold
water as it rippled in the vaulted place where the dammed current rose
now half way to the roof.
Their wretched prisoner, understanding this fact and the savage
substitute for the rifle, made a despairing struggle.
'Lemme git a holt of him, Hi,' said Pete, his teeth chattering, his
numbed arms stretched up in the darkness to lay hold on his victim.
'Hyar he be,' gasped the parson.
There was another frantic struggle as they tore the doomed man from the
horse; a splash, a muffled cry--he was cast headlong into the black
water. A push upon a great boulder hard by--it fell upon the cavity with
a crash, and all hope of egress was barred.
Then, terrorized themselves, the men mounted their horses; each, fleeing
as if from pursuit, found his way as best he might out of the dark
wilderness.
One might not know what they felt that night when the rain came down on
the roof. One might not dare to think what they dreamed.
The morning broke, drear and clouded, and full of rain, and hardly less
gloomy than the night. The snow, tarnished and honeycombed with dark
cellular perforations, was melting and slipping down the ravines. The
gigantic icicles encircling the crags fell now and then with a
resounding crash. The drops from the eaves dripped monotonously into the
puddles below. The roof leaked. Sol's bridle-hand had been frozen the
night before in the long swift ride.
But the sun came out again; the far mountains smiled in a blue vagueness
that was almost a summer garb. The relics of the snow exhaled a silvery
haze that hung airily about the landscape. Only the immaculate whiteness
of those lofty regions of the balds withstood the thaw, and coldly
glittered in wintry guise.
A strange sensation thrilled through the fireside group one of these
mornings when Amos James came up from the mill, and as he smoked with
them asked suddenly, all unaware of the tragedy, 'What ailed 'Cajah
Green ter leave the Big Smoky in sech a hurry?'
'Wh-wh-at d'ye mean?' growled Pete in startled amaze.
And then Amos James, still unconscious of the significance of the
recital, proceeded to tell that shortly after daybreak on last Wednesday
morning he heard a 'powerful jouncin' of huffs,' and looking out of the
window he saw Micajah Green on his big grey horse, flying along the
valley road at a tremendous rate of speed. Before he could open the
window to hail him, man and horse were out of sight.
It was a silent group that Amos left, all meditating upon that swift
equestrian figure, pictured against the dreariness of the rainy dawn,
and the grey mist, and the shadowing mountains.
'Amos seen a ghost,' said Pete presently. He looked dubiously over his
shoulder, though the morning sunshine came flickering through the door,
widely ajar.
'That ain't nuthin' oncommon,' said the old man sturdily. Then he told a
ghastly story of a legal execution--that the criminal was seen afterward
sitting in the moonlight under the gallows on his coffin-lid; and other
fearful fantasies of the rural mind, which, morbidly excited, will not
accept the end of the rope as a finality.
It was only when Obediah Scruggs came to their house searching for his
nephew, saying that Hiram had not been seen nor heard of since he had
set out one evening to visit them, that a terrible premonition fell upon
Groundhog Cayce. His iron will guarded it for a time, till some one
journeying from Shaftesville reported having seen there Micajah Green,
who was full of a terrible story of a midnight attack upon him by the
Cayce tribe, from whom he had miraculously escaped in the midst of the
struggle and darkness, he declared, and more dead than alive. Then
mysteriously and with heavy presage Pete and his father made a
pilgrimage to the cave. They pried up the boulder over the cavity. They
heard the deep water held in the subterranean reservoir still sighing
and echoing with the bubbling of the mountain spring. On the surface
there floated a hat--Hi Kelsey's limp and worn old hat.
They never told their secret. They replaced the boulder, and sealed
their lips.
The old man began to age rapidly. His conscience was heavier than his
years. But it was a backwoods conscience, and had the distortions of his
primitive philosophy. One day he said piteously:
'It air a dreadful thing, Pete, ter kill a man by accident.'