these hyar tables ez Moses flung down, an' we'uns 'lowed we'uns would
kem an' read some fur ourselves.”
[Illustration: Tables of the Law 347]
Purdee did not speak nor hesitate; he moved aside that the blacksmith
might stand where he had been--as it were at the foot of the page.
But what transcendent glories thronged the heavens--what august
splendors of dawn! Had the sun ever before risen like this, with the sky
an emblazonment of red, of gold, of darting gleams of light; with the
mountains most royally purple or most radiantly blue; with the prismatic
mists in flight; with the slow climax of the dazzling sphere ascending
to dominate it all?
The blacksmith knelt down to read. The musician, his silent violin under
his chin, leaned over his comrade's shoulder. The hunter stood still,
expectant.
Alas! the corrugations of time; the fissile results of the frost; the
wavering line of ripple-marks of Seas that shall ebb no more; growth of
lichen; an army of ants in full march; a passion-flower trailing from
a crevice, its purple blooms lying upon the gray stone near where it
is stamped with the fossil imprint of a sea-weed, faded long ago and
forgotten. Or is it, alas! for the eyes that can see only this?
The blacksmith looked up with a twinkling leer; the violinist recovered
his full height, and drew the bow dashingly across the strings; then let
his arm fall.
“Roger,” the blacksmith said, “dad-burned ef I kin read ennything hyar.”
The young musician looked over his brawny shoulder in silence.
“Whar d'ye make out enny letters, Roger?” persisted Spears.
Purdee leaned over and eagerly pointed with his ramrod to a curious
corrugation of the surface of the rock. Again the blacksmith bent down;
the musician craned forward, his yellow hair hanging about his bronzed
face.
“I hev been toler'ble well acquainted with the alphabit,” said Spears,
“fur goin' on thirty year an' better, an' I'll swar ter Heaven thar
ain't nare sign of a letter thar.”
Purdee stared at him in wild-eyed amazement for a moment. Then he flung
himself upon his knees beside the great rock, and guiding his ramrod
over the surface, he exclaimed, “Hyar, Spears; right hyar!”
The blacksmith was all incredulous as he lent himself to a new posture,
and leaned forward to look with the languid indulgence of one who will
not again entertain doubt.
“Nare A, nor B, nor C, nor none o' the fambly,” he declared. “These hyar
rocks ain't no Moses' tables sure enough; Moses never war in Tennessee.
They be jes like enny other rock, an' thar ain't a word o' writin' on
'em.”
He looked up with a curious questioning at Pur-dee's face--a strange
face for a man detected in a falsehood, a trick. The deep-set eyes were
wide as if straining for perception denied them. Despite the chill,
rare air, great drops had started on his brow, and were falling upon
his beard, and upon his hands. These strong hands were quivering; they
hovered above the signs on the rocks. The mystic letters, the inspired
words, where were they? Grope as he might, he could not find them. Alas!
doubt and denial had climbed the mountain--the awful limitations of
the more finite human creature--and his inspiration and the finer
enthusiasms of the truth were dead.
Dead with a throe that was almost like a literal death. This--on this he
had lived; the ether of ecstasy was the breath of his life. He clutched
at the stained red handkerchief knotted about his throat as if he were
suffocating; he tore it open as he swayed backward on his knees. He did
not hear--or he did not heed--the laugh among the little crowd on the
bald--satirical, rallying, zestful. He was deaf to the strains of the
violin, jeeringly and jerkingly playing a foolish tune. It was growing
fainter, for they had all turned about to betake themselves once more to
the world below. He could have seen, had he cared to see, their bearded
grinning faces peering through the stunted trees, as descending they
came near the spot where he had lavished the spiritual graces of
his feeling, his enthusiasm, his devotion, his earnest reaching for
something higher, for something holy, which had refreshed his famished
soul; had given to its dumbness words; had erased the values of the
years, of the nations; had made him friends with Moses on the “bald”;
had revealed to him the finger of the Lord on the stone.
He took no heed of his gestures, of which, indeed, he was unconscious.
They were fine dramatically, and of great power, as he alternately rose
to his full height, beating his breast in despair, and again sank upon
his knees, with a pondering brow and a searching eye, and a hovering,
trembling hand, striving to find the clew he had lost. They might have
impressed a more appreciative audience, but not one more entertained
than the cluster of men who looked and paused and leered in amusement
at one another, and thrust out satirical tongues. Long after they had
disappeared, the strains of the violin could be heard, filling the
solemn, stricken, strangely stunted woods with a grotesquely merry
presence, hilarious and jeering.
Purdee found it possible to survive the destruction of illusions. Most
of us do. It wrought in him, however, the saturnine changes natural upon
the relinquishment of a dear and dead fantasy. This ethereal entity is
a more essential component of happiness than one might imagine from the
extreme tenuity of the conditions of its existence. Purdee's fantasy may
have been a poor thing, but, although he could calmly enough close
its eyes, and straighten its limbs, and bury it decently from out the
offended view of fact, he felt that he should mourn it in his heart as
long as he should live. And he was bereaved.
There is a certain stage in every sorrow when it rejects sympathy.
Purdee, always taciturn, grave, uncommunicative, was, invested with an
austere aloofness, and was hardly to be approached as he sat, silent
and absent, brooding over the fire at his own home. When roused by some
circumstance of the domestic routine, and it became apparent that his
mood was not sullenness or anger, but simple and complete introversion,
it added a dignity and suggested a remoteness that were yet less
reassuring. His son, who stood in awe of him--not because of paternal
severity, but because no boy could refrain from a worshipping respect
for so miraculous a shot, a woodsman so subtly equipped with all elusive
sylvan instincts and knowledge--forbore to break upon his meditations
by the delivery of Grinnel's message. Nevertheless the consciousness of
withholding it weighed heavily upon him. He only pretermitted it for
a time, until a more receptive state of mind should warrant it. Day by
day, however, he looked with eagerness when he came into the cabin
in the evening to ascertain if his father were still seated in the
chimney-corner silently smoking his pipe. Purdee had seldom remained at
home so long at a time, and the boy had a daily fear that the gun on the
primitive rack of deer antlers would be missing, and word left in the
family that he had taken the trail up the mountain, and would return
“'cord-in' ter luck with the varmints.” And thus Job Grinnell's
enigmatical message, that had the ring of defiance, might remain
indefinitely postponed.
Abner had not realized how long a time it had been delayed, until one
evening at the wood-pile, in tossing off a great stick to hew into
lengths for the chimney-place, he noticed that thin ice had formed in
the moss and the dank cool shadows of the interstices. “I tell ye now,
winter air a-comm',” he observed. He stood leaning on his axe-handle
and looking down upon the scene so far below; for Pur-dee's house was
perched half-way up on the mountain-side, and he could see over the
world how it fared as the sun went down. Far away upon the levels of
the valley of East Tennessee a golden haze glittered resplendent, lying
close upon an irradiated earth, and ever brightening toward the horizon,
and it seemed as if the sun in sinking might hope to fall in fairer
spheres than the skies he had left, for they were of a dun-color and an
opaque consistency. Only one horizontal rift gave glimpses of a dazzling
ochreous tint of indescribable brilliancy, from the focus of which the
divergent light was shed upon the western limits of the land. Chilhowee,
near at hand, was dark enough--a purplish garnet hue; but the scarlet
of the sour-wood gleamed in the cove; the hickory still flared gallantly
yellow; the receding ranges to the north and south were blue and more
faintly azure. The little log cabin stood with small fields about it,
for Purdee barely subsisted on the fruits of the soil, and did not
seek to profit. It had only one room, with a loft above; the barn was a
makeshift of poles, badly chinked, and showing through the crevices what
scanty store there was of corn and pumpkins. A black-and-white work-ox,
that had evidently no deficiency of ribs, stood outside of the fence and
gazed, a forlorn Tantalus, at these unattainable dainties; now and then
a muttered low escaped his lips. Nobody noticed him or sympathized with
him, except perhaps the little girl, who had come out in her sun-bonnet
to help her brother bring in the fuel. He gruffly accepted her company,
a little ashamed of her because she was a girl; since, however, there
was no other boy by to laugh, he permitted her the delusion that she was
of assistance.
As he paused to rest he reiterated, “Winter air a-comin', I tell ye.”
“D'ye reckon, Ab,” she asked, in her high, thin little voice, her hands
full of chips and the basket at her feet, “ez Grinnell's baby knows
Chris'mus air a-comin'?”
He glowered at her as he leaned on the axe. “I reckon Grinnell's old
baby dunno B from Bull-foot,” he declared, gruffly.
The recollection of the message came over him. He had a pang of regret,
remembering all the old grudges against the Grinnells. They were
re-enforced by this irrepressible yearning after their baby, this
admission that they had aught which was not essentially despicable.
Nevertheless, he suddenly saw a reason for the Grinnell baby's
existence; he loaded up both arms with the sticks of wood, and, followed
by the peripatetic sun-bonnet, conscientiously weighed down with one
billet, he strode into the house, and let his burden fall with a mighty
clatter in the corner of the chimney. The sun-bonnet staggered up and
threw her stick on the top of the pile of wood.
Purdee, sitting silently smoking, glanced up at the noise. Abner took
advantage of the momentary notice to claim, too, the attention of his
mother. “I wish ye'd make Eunice quit talkin' 'bout the Grinnells' old
baby, like she war actially demented--uglies' bald-headed, slab-sided,
slobbery old baby I ever see--nare tooth in its head! I do despise them
Grinnells.”
As he anticipated, his father spoke suddenly: “Ye jes keep away
from thar,” he said, sternly. “I trest them folks no furder 'n a
rattlesnake.”
“_I_ ain't consortin' along o' 'em,” declared the boy. “But I actially
hed ter take Eunice by the scalp o' her head an' lug her off one day
when she hung on thar fence a-stare-gazin' Grinnell's baby like 'twar
fatten ter eat.”
The child's mother, a cadaverous, pale woman, was listlessly stringing
the warping-bars with hanks of variegated yarn. The grandmother, who
conserved a much more active and youthful interest in life, took down a
brown gourd used as a scrap-basket that was on a protruding lath of the
clay-and-stick chimney, and hunted among the scraps of homespun and bits
of yarn stowed within it. The room was much like the gourd in its aged
brown tint; its indigenous aspect, as if it had not been made with
hands, but was some spontaneous production of the soil; with its bits
of bright color--the peppers hanging from the rafters, the rainbow-hued
yarn festooning the warping-bars, the red coals of the fire, the blue
and yellow ware ranged on the shelf, the brown puncheon floor and walls
and ceiling and chimney--it might have seemed the interior of a similar
gourd of gigantic proportions. She dressed a twig from the pile of wood
in a gay scrap of cloth, casting glances the while at the little girl,
and handed it to her.
“I hain't never seen ez good a baby ez this,” she said, with the
convincing coercive mendacity of a grandmother.
The little girl accepted it humbly; it was a good baby doubtless of its
sort, but it was not alive, which could not be denied of the Grinnell
baby, Grinnell though it was.
“An' Job Grinnell he kem down ter the fence, an' 'lowed he'd slit our
ears, an' named us shoats,” continued her brother. Purdee lifted his
head. “An' sent a word ter dad,” said the boy, tremulously.
[Illustration: What word did he send ter me? 367]
“What word did he send ter--_me?_” cried Purdee.
The boy quailed to tell him. “He tole me ter ax ye ef ye ever read sech
ez this on Moses' tables in the mountings--' An' ye shell claim sech ez
be yer own, an' yer neighbors' belongings shell ye in no wise boastfully
medjure fur yourn, nor look upon it fur covetiousness, nor yit git a big
name up in the kentry fur ownin' sech ez be another's,'” faltered the
sturdy Abner.
The next moment he felt an infinite relief. He suddenly recognized the
fact that he had been chiefly restrained from repeating the words by
an unrealized terror lest they prove true--lest something his father
claimed was not his, indeed.
But the expression of anger on Purdee's face was merged first in
blank astonishment, then in perplexed cogitation, then in renewed and
overpowering amazement.
The wife turned from the warping-bars with a vague stare of surprise,
one hand poised uncertainly upon a peg of the frame, the other holding
a hank of “spun truck.” The grandmother looked over her spectacles with
eyes sharp enough to seem subsidized to see through the mystery.
“In the name o' reason and religion, Roger Purdee,” she adjured him,
“what air that thar perverted Philistine talkin' 'bout?”
“It air more'n I kin jedge of,” said Purdee, still vainly cogitating.
He sat for a time silent, his dark eyes bent on the fire, his broad,
high forehead covered by his hat pulled down over it, his long, tangled,
dark locks hanging on his collar.
Suddenly he rose, took down his gun, and started toward the door.
“Roger,” cried his wife, shrilly, “I'd leave the critter be. Lord knows
thar's been enough blood spilt an' good shelter burned along o' them
Purdees' an' Grinnells' quar'ls in times gone. Laws-a-massy!”--she wrung
her hands, all hampered though they were in the “spun truck “--“I'd
ruther be a sheep 'thout a soul, an' live in peace.”
“A sca'ce ch'ice,” commented her mother. “Sheep's got ter be butchered.
I'd ruther be the butcher, myself--healthier.”
Purdee was gone. He had glanced absently at his wife as if he hardly
heard. He waited till she paused; then, without answer, he stepped
hastily out of the door and walked away.
*****
The cronies at the blacksmith's shop latterly gathered within the great
flaring door, for the frost lay on the dead leaves without, the stars
scintillated with chill suggestions, and the wind was abroad on nights
like these. On shrill pipes it played; so weird, so wild, so prophetic
were its tones that it found only a shrinking in the heart of him whose
ear it constrained to listen. The sound of the torrent far below was
accelerated to an agitated, tumultuous plaint, all unknown when its
pulses were bated by summer languors. The moon was in the turmoil of the
clouds, which, routed in some wild combat with the winds, were streaming
westward.
And although the rigors of the winter were in abeyance, and the late
purple aster called the Christmas-flower bloomed in the sheltered grass
at the door, the forge fire, flaring or dully glowing, overhung with its
dusky hood, was a friendly thing to see, and in its vague illumination
the rude interior of the shanty--the walls, the implements of the trade,
the bearded faces grouped about, the shadowy figures seated on whatever
might serve, a block of wood, the shoeing-stool, a plough, or perched on
the anvil--became visible to Roger Purdee from far down the road as
he approached. Even the head of a horse could be seen thrust in at the
window, while the brute, hitched outside, beguiled the dreary waiting by
watching with a luminous, intelligent eye the gossips within, as if he
understood the drawling colloquy. They were suffering some dearth of
timely topics, supplying the deficiency with reminiscences more or less
stale, and had expected no such sensation as they experienced when a
long shadow fell athwart the doorway,--the broad aperture glimmering a
silvery gray contrasted with the brown duskiness of the interior and
the purple darkness of the distance; the forge fire showed Purdee's tall
figure leaning on the doorframe, and lighted up his serious face beneath
his great broad-brimmed hat, his intent, earnest eyes, his tangled black
beard and locks. He gave no greeting, and silence fell upon them as his
searching gaze scanned them one by one.
“Whar's Job Grinnell?” he demanded, abruptly.
There was a shuffling of feet, as if those members most experienced
relief from the constraint that silence had imposed upon the party. A
vibration from the violin--a sigh as if the instrument had been suddenly
moved rather than a touch upon the strings--intimated that the young
musician was astir. But it was Spears, the blacksmith, who spoke.
“Kem in, Roger,” he called out, cordially, as he rose, his massive
figure and his sleek head showing in the dull red light on the other
side of the anvil, his bare arms folded across his chest. “Naw, Job
ain't hyar; hain't been hyar for a right smart while.”
There was a suggestion of disappointment in the attitude of the
motionless figure at the door. The deeply earnest, pondering face,
visible albeit the red light from the forge-fire was so dull, was keenly
watched. For the inquiry was fraught with peculiar meaning to those
cognizant of the long and bitter feud.
“I ax,” said Purdee, presently, “kase Grinnell sent me a mighty cur'ous
word the t'other day.” He lifted his head. “Hev enny o' you-uns hearn
him 'low lately ez I claim ennything ez ain't mine?”
There was silence for a moment. Then the forge was suddenly throbbing
with the zigzagging of the bow of the violin jauntily dandering along
the strings. His keen sensibility apprehended the sudden jocosity as
a jeer, but before he could say aught the blacksmith had undertaken to
reply.
“Waal, Purdee, ef ye hedn't axed me, I warn't layin' off ter say nuthin
'bout'n it. 'Tain't no con-sarn o' mine ez I knows on. But sence ye
_hev_ axed me, I hold my jaw fur the fear o' no man. The words ain't
writ ez I be feared ter pernounce. An' ez all the kentry hev hearn
'bout'n it 'ceptin' you-uns, I dunno ez I hev enny call ter hold my jaw.
The Lord 'ain't set no seal on my lips ez I knows on.”
“Naw, sir!” said Purdee, his great eyes glooming through the dusk and
flashing with impatience. “He 'ain't set no seal on yer lips, ter jedge
by the way ye wallop yer tongue about inside o' 'em with fool words.
Whyn't ye bite off what ye air tryin' ter chaw?”
“Waal, then,” said the admonished orator, bluntly, “Grinnell 'lows ye
don't own that thar lan' around them rocks on the bald, no more'n ye
read enny writin' on 'em.”
“Not them rocks!” cried Purdee, standing suddenly erect--“the tables o'
the Law, writ with the finger o' the Lord--an' Moses flung 'em down
thar an' bruk 'em. All the kentry knows they air Moses' tables. An' the
groun' whar they lie air mine.”
“'Tain't, Grinnell say 'tain't.”
“Naw, sir,” chimed in the young musician, his violin silent. “Job
Grinnell declars he owns it hisself, an' ef he war willin' ter stan' the
expense he'd set up his rights, but the lan' ain't wuth it. He 'lows his
line runs spang over them rocks, an' a heap furder.”
Purdee was silent; one or two of the gossips laughed jeeringly; he had
been proved a liar once. It was well that he did not deny; he was put to
open shame among them.
“An' Grinnell say,” continued Blinks, “ez ye hev gone an' tole big tales
'mongst the brethren fur ownin' sech ez ain't yourn, an' readin' of
s'prisin' sayin's on the rocks.”
He bent his head to a series of laughing harmonics, and when he raised
it, hearing no retort, the silvery gray square of the door was empty. He
saw the moon glimmer on the clumps of grass outside where the Christmas
flower bloomed.
The group sat staring in amaze; the blacksmith strode to the door and
looked out, himself a massive, dark silhouette upon the shimmering
neutrality of the background. There was no figure in sight; no faint
foot-fall was audible, no rustle of the sere leaves; only the voice
of the mountain torrent, far below, challenged the stillness with its
insistent cry.
He looked back for a moment, with a vague, strange doubt if he had seen
aught, heard aught, in the scene just past. “Hain't Purdee been hyar?”
he asked, passing his hand across his eyes. The sense of having dreamed
was so strong upon him that he stretched his arms and yawned.
The gleaming teeth of the grouped shadows demonstrated the merriment
evoked by the query. The chuckle was arrested midway.
“Ye 'pear ter 'low ez suthin' hev happened ter Purdee, an' that thar war
his harnt,” suggested one.
The bold young musician laid down his violin suddenly. The instrument
struck upon a keg of nails, and gave out an abrupt, discordant jangle,
startling to the nerves. “Shet up, ye durned squeech-owl!” he exclaimed,
irritably. Then, lowering his voice, he asked: “Didn't they 'low down
yander in the Cove ez Widder Peters, the day her husband war killed by
the landslide up in the mounting, heard a hoe a-scrapin' mightily on
the gravel in the gyarden-spot, an' went ter the door, an' seen him thar
a-workin', an' axed him when he kem home? An' he never lifted his head,
but hoed on. An' she went down thar 'mongst the corn, an' she couldn't
find nobody. An' jes then the John's boys rid up an' 'lowed ez Jim
Peters war dead, an' hed been fund in the mounting, an' they war
a-fetchin' of him then.”
The horse's head within the window nodded violently among the shadows,
and the stones rolled beneath his hoof as he pawed the ground.
“Mis' Peters she knowed suthin' were a-goin' ter happen when she seen
that harnt a-hoein'.”
“I reckon she did,” said the blacksmith, stretching himself, his nerves
still under the delusion of recent awakening. “Jim never hoed none when
he war alive. She mought hev knowed he war dead ef she seen him hoein'.”
“Waal, sir,” exclaimed the violinist, “I'm a-goin' up yander ter
Purdee's ter-morrer ter find out what he died of, an' when.”
That he was alive was proved the next day, to the astonishment of the
smith and his friends. The forge was the voting-place of the district,
and there, while the fire was flaring, the bellows blowing, the anvil
ringing, the echo vibrating, now loud, now faint, with the antiphonal
chant of the hammer and the sledge, a notice was posted to inform the
adjacent owners that Roger Purdee's land, held under an original grant
from the State, would be processioned according to law some twenty days
after date, and the boundaries thereof defined and established. The
fac-simile of the notice, too, was posted on the court-house door in the
county town twenty miles away, for there were those who journeyed so far
to see it.
“I wonder,” said the blacksmith, as he stood in the unfamiliar street
and gazed at it, his big arms, usually bare, now hampered with his coat
sleeves and folded upon his chest--“I wonder ef he footed it all the
way ter town at the gait he tuk when he lit out from the forge?”