Elijah Rasba stalked homeward from the still in the dark, grimly and
expectantly erect. Now he was going to have that period of happiness
which he knew was the chief reason for people drinking moonshine
whiskey. He looked forward to the sensation of exuberant joy very much
as a man would look forward to five hours of happiness, to be followed
by hanging by the neck, till dead.
The stars were shining, and the over-ridge trail which he followed was
familiar enough under his feet, once he had struck into it from the
immediate vicinity of the lawbreakers. He saw the bare-limbed oak trees
against the sky, and he heard rabbits and other night runners scurrying
away in the dead leaves. The stars fluttering in the sky were stern eyes
whose gaze he avoided with determined wickedness and unrepentance.
Arriving at his own cabin, he stirred up the big pine-root log, and drew
his most comfortable rocking chair up before the leaping flames. He sat
there, and waited for the happiness of mind which was the characteristic
of his idea of intoxication.
He waited for it, all ready to welcome it. If it had come into his
cabin, all dressed up like some image of temptation or allurement, he
would not have been in the least surprised. He rather expected a real
and tangible manifestation, a vision of delight, clothed in some fair
figure. He sat there, rigidly, watching for the least symptom of unholy
pleasure. He had no clock by which to tell the time, and his watch was
thoroughly unreliable.
Again and again he poked up the fire. He was surprised, at last, to
hear a far-away gobble, the welcome of a wild turkey for the first false
dawn. By and by he became conscious of the light which was crowding the
fire flare into a subordinate place.
Day had arrived, and as yet, the delight which everybody said was in
moonshine whiskey had failed to touch him. However, he knew that he was
not properly in a receptive mood for happiness. His soul was still
stubborn against the allurements of sin. He stirred from his chair,
fried a rabbit in a pan, and baked a batch of hot-bread in a dutch oven,
brewing strong coffee and bringing out the jug of sorghum molasses.
He ate breakfast. He was conscious of a certain rigidity of action, a
certain precision of motion, ascribing them to the stern determination
which he had that when he should at last discover the whiskey-happiness
in his soul, he would let go with a whoop.
"Some hit makes happy, and some hit makes fightin' mad!" Rasba suddenly
thought, with much concern, "S'posen hit'd make me fightin' mad?"
A fluttering trepidation clutched his heart. The bells ringing in his
ears fairly clanged the alarm. He hadn't looked for anything else but
joy from being drunk, and now suppose he should be stricken with a mad
desire to fight--to kill someone!
No deadlier fear ever clutched a man's heart than the one that seized
Elijah Rasba. Suppose that when the deferred hilarity arrived, he was
made fighting drunk instead of joyous? The thought seized his soul and
he looked about himself wondering how he could chain his hands and save
his soul from murder, violence, fighting, and similar crimes! No
feasible way appeared to his frightened mind.
He dropped on his knees and began to pray for happiness, instead of for
violence, when the drink that he had had should seize him in its
embrace. He prayed with a voice that roared like thunder and which made
the charcoal fall from the log in the fireplace, and which alarmed the
jays and inquisitive mockingbirds about the little clearing.
He prayed while his voice grew huskier and huskier, and his head bowed
lower and lower as he wrestled with this peril which he had not
foreseen. All he asked was that when the moonshine began to operate, it
make him laugh instead of mad, but terrible doubts smote him. A glance
at his rifle on the wall made him fairly grovel on the floor, and he
knew that in his hands the andirons, the axe, the very hot-bread rolling
pin would be deadly weapons.
He hoped that he would not be able to shoot straight, but this hope was
instantly blasted, for a flock of wild turkeys came down into the
cornfield about ninety yards from his cabin, and although he seldom shot
anything in his own clearing, he now tried a shot at the turkey gobbler
and shot it dead where it strutted. If he should be stricken with anger
instead of with joy, no worse man could possibly live! There was no
telling what he would do if the liquor would work "wrong" on him. He
could kill men at two hundred yards!
He determined that he would see no human beings that day. Few people
ever visited him in his cabin, but he took no chances. He crept up the
mountain and skulking through the woods found an immense patch of
laurels. He crawled into it, and sat down there for hours and hours, so
that no one should have an opportunity to speak to him and stir the
latent devil of violence.
He returned to his cabin long after dark, and raking some hot coals out
of the ashes, whittled splinters and started a blaze. He was assailed
by hunger, and he baked corn pones and dry-salted pork, then added a
great flapjack of delicious sage sausage to the meal. He brought out
cans of fruit, whose juice assuaged his increasing thirst. Having eaten
heartily he resumed his vigil before the fireplace, and then he noticed
that some one had tied something on the stock of his rifle.
It was a letter which a passer-by had brought up from the Ford Post
Office, and when he opened it and looked at the writing, remorse
assailed him:
Dear Parsun:
Ever senct you preched here I ben sufrin count of my boy JocK. You
know Him for he set right thar, frade of no man, not the Tobblys,
nor the Crents. When tha drawed DOWN to shoot, he stud right thar an
shot back shoot fer shoot, an now he has goned awa down the Rivehs
an I am worited abot his soul because he is a gud boy an neveh was
no whars in all his borned days an an i hear now he is gettin bad
down thataway on Misipy riveh where thas all Bad Peple an i wisht
yud prey fer him so's he wont get bad. Mrs. drones panted church on
Clinch.
Rasba read the letter for the words at first. Then he went back after
the meaning, and the meaning struck him like a blow in the heart.
"Me pray fo' any man again," he gasped. "Lawse! Lawse!"
He didn't feel fit to pray for himself, let alone for any other sinner,
but there came to his memory a picture of Mrs. Drones, a motherly little
woman who had taken him home to a dinner at which seven kinds of
preserved fruit were on the table, and where the family laughed around
the fireplace--only to see Jock a fugitive the next night, and the
terrors of a feud war upon them.
"And Jock's getting bad down the Mississippi River!" Rasba repeated to
himself, striving to grapple with that fact. He could not think clearly
or coherently. The widow's voice, however, was as clearly speaking in
his thoughts as though she stood there, instead of merely having written
to him. He took to walking up and down the floor, back and forth, on one
plank.
He had forgotten that there was such a thing for humans as sleep. The
incongruity of his having been wide awake for two days and two nights
did not occur to him till suddenly his eyes turned to the bed in the
corner of the room and its purpose was recalled to his mind. He blinked
at it. His eyes opened with difficulty. He threw chunks on the fire and
went toward the bed, but as he stood by it the world grew black before
his eyes and clutching about him, he sank to the floor.