Jacob's-staff upon the State line on the summit of the bald. His sworn
chain-bearers, two tall young fellows clad in jeans, with broad-brimmed
wool hats, their heavy boots drawn high over their trousers, stood ready
and waiting, with the sticks and clanking chain, on the margin of the
ice-cold spring gushing out on this bleak height, and signifying
more than a fountain in the wilderness, since it served to define the
southeast corner of Purdee's land. The two enemies were perceptibly
conscious of each other. Grinnell's broad face and small eyes laden
with fat lids were persistently averted. Purdee often glanced toward
him gloweringly, his head held, nevertheless, a little askance, as if he
rejected the very sight. There was the fire of a desperate intention
in his eyes. Looking at his face, shaded by his broad-brimmed hat, one
could hardly have doubted now whether it expressed most ferocity or
force. His breath came quick--the bated breath of a man who watches and
waits for a supreme moment. His blue jeans coat was buttoned close about
his sun-burned throat, where the stained red handkerchief was knotted.
He wore a belt with his powder-horn and bullet-pouch, and carried his
rifle on his shoulder; the hand that held it trembled, and he tried to
quell the quiver. “I'll prove it fust, an' kill him arterward--kill him
arterward,” he muttered.
In the other hand he held a yellowed old paper. Now and then he bent his
earnest dark eyes upon the grant, made many a year ago by the State
of Tennessee to his grandfather; for there had been no subsequent
conveyances.
The blacksmith had come begirt with his leather apron, his shirt-sleeves
rolled up, and with his hammer in his hand, an inopportune customer
having jeopardized his chance of sharing in the sensation of the day.
The other neighbors all wore their coats closely buttoned. Blinks
carried his violin hung upon his back; the sharp timbre of the wind,
cutting through the leafless boughs of the stunted woods, had a kindred
fibrous resonance. Clouds hung low far beneath them; here and there, as
they looked, the trees on the slopes showed above and again below the
masses of clinging vapors. Sometimes close at hand a peak would reveal
itself, asserting the solemn vicinage of the place, then draw its
veil slowly about it, and stand invisible and in austere silence. The
surveyor, a stalwart figure, his closely buttoned coat giving him a
military aspect, looked disconsolately downward.
“I hoped I'd die before this,” he remarked. “I'm equal to getting over
anything in nature that's flat or oblique, but the vertical beats me.”
He bent to take sight for a moment, the group silently watching him.
Suddenly he came to the perpendicular, and strode off down the rugged
slope over gullies and bowlders, through rills and briery tangles, his
eyes distended and eager as if he were led into the sylvan depths by the
lure of a vision. The chain-bearers followed, continually bending and
rising, the recurrent genuflections resembling the fervors of some
religious rite. The chain rustled sibilantly among the dead leaves, and
was ever and anon drawn out to its extremest length. Then the dull clank
of the links was silent.
“Stick!” called out the young mountaineer in the rear.
“Stuck!” responded his comrade ahead.
And once more the writhing and jingling among the withered leaves. The
surveyor strode on, turning his face neither to the right nor to the
left, with his Jacob's-staff held upright before him. The other men
trooped along scatteringly, dodging under the low boughs of the stunted
trees. They pressed hastily together when the great square rocks--Moses'
tables of the Law--came into view, lying where it was said the man of
God flung them upon the sere slope below, both splintered and fissured,
and one broken in twain. The surveyor was bearing straight down upon
them. The men running on either side could not determine whether the
line would fall within the spot or just beyond. They broke into wild
exclamations.
“Ye may hammer me out ez flat ez a skene,” cried the blacksmith, “ef I
don't b'lieve ez Purdee hev got 'em.”
“Naw, sir, naw!” cried another fervent amateur; “thar's the north. I
jes now viewed Grinnell's dad's deed; the line undertakes ter run with
Pur-dee's line; he hev got seven hunderd poles ter the north; ef they
air a-goin' ter the north, them tables o' the Law air Grinnell's.”
A wild chorus ensued.
“Naw!” “Yes!” “Thar they go!” “A-bear-in' off that-a-way!” “Beats my
time!” as they stumbled and scuttled alongside the acolytes of the
Compass, who bowed down and rose up at every length of the chain.
Suddenly a cry from the chain-bearers.
“Out!”
Stillness ensued.
The surveyor stopped to register the “out.” It was a moment of thrilling
suspense; the rocks lay only a few chains further; Grinnell, into
whose confidence doubt had begun to be instilled, said to himself, all
a-tremble, that he would hardly have staked his veracity, his standing
with the brethren, if he had realized that it was so close a matter as
this. He had long known that his father owned the greater part of the
unproductive wilderness lying between the two ravines; the land was
almost worthless by reason of the steep slants which rendered it utterly
untillable. He was sure that by the terms of his deed, which his father
had from its vendor, Squire Bates, his line included the Moses' tables
on which Purdee had built so fallacious a repute of holiness. He looked
once more at the paper--“thence from Crystal Spring with Purdee's line
north seven hundred poles to a stake in the middle of the river.”
Purdee too was all a-quiver with eagerness. He had not beheld those
rocks since that terrible day when all the fine values of his gifted
vision had been withdrawn from him, and he could read no more with eyes
blinded by the limitations of what other men could see--the infinitely
petty purlieus of the average sense. He had a vague idea that should
they say this was his land where those strange rocks lay, he would see
again, he would read undreamed-of words, writ with a pen of fire. He
started toward them, and then with a conscious effort he held back.
The surveyor took no heed of the sentiments involved in processioning
Purdee's land. He stood leaning on his Jacob's-staff, as interesting to
him as Moses' rocks, and in his view infinitely more useful, and
wiped his brow, and looked about, and yawned. To him it was merely the
surveying for a foolish cause of a very impracticable and steep tract of
land, and the only reason it should be countenanced by heaven or earth
was the fees involved. And this was what he saw at the end of Purdee's
line.
Suddenly he took up his Jacob's-staff and marched on with a long stride,
bearing straight down upon the rocks. The whole _cortège_ started
anew--the genuflecting chain-bearers, the dodging, scrambling, running
spectators. On one of the strange stunted leafless trees a colony of
vagrant crows had perched, eerie enough to seem the denizens of those
weird forests; they broke into raucous laughter--Haw! haw! haw!--rising
to a wild commotion of harsh, derisive discord as the men once more
gave vent to loud, excited cries. For the surveyor, stalking ahead,
had passed beyond the great tables of the Law; the chain-bearers were
drawing Purdee's line on the other side of them, and they had fallen, if
ever they fell here from Moses' hand and broke in twain, upon Purdee's
land, granted to his ancestor by the State of Tennessee.
He could not speak for joy, for pride. His dark eyes were illumined by
a glancing, amber light. He took off his hat and smoothed with his rough
hand his long black hair, falling from his massive forehead. He leaned
against one of the stunted oaks, shouldering his rifle that he
had loaded for Grinnell--he could hardly believe this, although he
remembered it. He did not want to shoot Grinnell; he would not waste the
good lead!
And indeed Grinnell had much ado to defend himself against the sneers
and rebukes with which the party beguiled the way through the wintry
woods. “Ter go a-claimin' another man's land, an' put him ter the
expense o' processionin' it, an' git his line run!” exclaimed the
blacksmith, indignantly. “An' ye 'ain't got nare sign o' a show at
Moses' tables!”
“I dunno how this hyar line air a-runnin',” declared Grinnell, sorely
beset. “I don't b'lieve it air a-runnin' north.”
The surveyor was hard by. He had planted his staff again, and was once
more taking his bearings. He looked up for a second.
“Northwest,” he said.
Grinnell stared for a moment; then strode up to the surveyor, and
pointed with his stubby finger at a word on his deed.
The official looked with interest at it; he held up suddenly Purdee's
grant and read aloud, “From Crystal Spring seven hundred poles
_northwest_ to a stake in the middle of the river.”
He examined, too, the original plat of survey which he had taken to
guide him, and also the plat made when Squire Bates sold to Grinnell's
father; “_northwest_” they all agreed. There was evidently a clerical
error on the part of the scrivener who had written Grinnell's deed.
In a moment the harassed man saw that through the processioning
of Purdee's land he had lost heavily in the extent of his supposed
possessions. He it was who had claimed what was rightfully another's.
And because of the charge Purdee was the richer by a huge slice of
mountain land--how large he could not say, as he ruefully followed the
line of survey.
But for this discovery the interest of processioning Purdee's land would
have subsided with the determination of the ownership of the limited
environment of the stone tables of the Law. Now, as they followed
the ever-diverging line to the northwest, the group was pervaded by a
subdued and tremulous excitement, in which even the surveyor shared.
Two or three whispered apart now and then, and Grinnell, struggling to
suppress his dismay, was keenly conscious of the glances that sought him
again and again in the effort to judge how he was taking it. Only Purdee
himself was withdrawn from the interest that swayed them all. He had
loitered at first, dallying with a temptation to slip silently from the
party and retrace his way to the tables and ascertain, perchance, if
some vestige of that mystic scripture might not reveal itself to him
anew, or if it had been only some morbid fancy, some futile influence
of solitude, some fevered condition of the blood or the brain, that had
traced on the stone those gracious words, the mere echo of which--his
stuttered, vague recollections--had roused the camp-meeting to
fervid enthusiasms undreamed of before. And then he put from him the
project--some other time, perhaps, for doubts lurked in his heart,
hesitation chilled his resolve--some other time, when his companions and
their prosaic influence were all far away. He was roused abruptly, as he
stalked along, to the perception of the deepening excitement among them.
They had emerged from the dense growths of the mountain to the
lower slope, where pastures and fields--whence the grain had been
harvested--and a garden and a dwelling, with barns and fences, lay
before them all. And as Purdee stopped and stared, the realization of a
certain significant fact struck him so suddenly that it seemed to take
his breath away. That divergent line stretching to the northwest had
left within his boundaries the land on which his enemy had built his
home.
He looked; then he smote his thigh and laughed aloud.
The rocks on the river-bank caught the sound, and echoed it again and
again, till the air seemed full of derisive voices. Under their stings
of jeering clamor, and under the anguish of the calamity which his
reeling senses could scarcely measure, Job Grinnell's composure suddenly
gave way. He threw up his arms and called upon Heaven; he turned and
glared furiously at his enemy. Then, as Purdee's laughter still jarred
the air, he drew a “shooting-iron” from his pocket. The blacksmith
closed with him, struggling to disarm him. The weapon was discharged in
the turmoil, the ball glancing away in the first quiver of sunshine that
had reached the earth to-day, and falling spent across the river.
Grinnell wrested himself from the restraining grasp, and rushed down the
slope to his gate to hide himself from the gaze of the world--his world,
that little group. Then remembering that it was no longer his gate, he
turned from it in an agony of loathing. And knowing that earth held no
shelter for him but the sufferance of another man's roof, he plunged
into the leafless woods as if he heavily dragged himself by a power
which warred within him with other strong motives, and disappeared among
the myriads of holly bushes all aglow with their red berries.
The spectators still followed the surveyor and his Jacob's-staff, but
Purdee lingered. He walked around the fence with a fierce, gloating eye,
a panther-like, loping tread, as a beast might patrol a fold before he
plunders it. All the venom of the old feud had risen to the opportunity.
Here was his enemy at his mercy. He knew that it was less than seven
years since the enclosures had been made, acres and acres of tillable
land cleared, the houses built--all achieved which converted the
worthlessness of a wilderness into the sterling values of a farm. He--he,
Roger Purdee--was a rich man for the “mountings,” joining his little to
this competence. All the cruelties, all the insults, all the traditions
of the old vendetta came thronging into his mind, as distinctly
presented as if they were a series of hideous pictures; for he was not
used to think in detail, but in the full portrayal of scenes.
The Purdee wrongs were all avenged. This result was so complete, so
baffling, so ruinous temporally, so humiliating spiritually! It was the
fullest replication of revenge for all that had challenged it.
“How Uncle Ezra would hev rej'iced ter hev lived ter see this day!” he
thought, with a pious regret that the dead might not know.
The next moment his attention was suddenly attracted by a movement in
the door-yard. A woman had been hanging out clothes to dry, and she
turned to go in, without seeing the striding figure patrolling the
enclosure. A baby--a small bundle of a red dress--was seated on the pile
of sorghum-cane where the mill had worked in the autumn; the stalks were
broken, and flimsy with frost and decay, and washed by the rains to
a pallid hue, yet more marked in contrast with the brown ground. The
baby's dress made a bright bit of color amidst the dreary tones. As
Purdee caught sight of it he remembered that this was “Grinnell's old
baby,” who had been the cause of the renewal of the ancient quarrel,
which had resulted so benignantly for him. “I owe you a good turn, sis,”
he murmured, satirically, glaring at the child as the unconscious mother
lifted her to go in the house. The baby, looking over the maternal
shoulder, encountered the stern eyes staring at her. She stared gravely
too. Then with a bounce and a gurgle she beamed upon him from out the
retirement of her flapping sun-bonnet; she smiled radiantly, and finally
laughed outright, and waved her hands and again bounced beguilingly,
and thus toothlessly coquetting, disappeared within the door.
Before Purdee reached home, flakes of snow, the first of the season,
were whirling through the gray dusk noiselessly, ceaselessly, always
falling, yet never seeming to fall, rather to restlessly pervade the air
with a vacillating alienation from all the laws of gravitation. Elusive
fascinations of thought were liberated with the shining crystalline
aerial pulsation; some mysterious attraction dwelt down long vistas
amongst the bare trees; their fine fibrous grace of branch and twig
was accented by the snow, which lay upon them with exquisite lightness,
despite the aggregated bulk, not the densely packed effect which the
boughs would show to-morrow. The crags were crowned; their grim faces
looked frowningly out like a warrior's from beneath a wreath. Nowhere
could the brown ground be seen; already the pine boughs bent, the
needles failing to pierce the drifts. On the banks of the stream, on the
slopes of the mountain, in wildest jungles, in the niches and crevices
of bare cliffs, the holly-berries glowed red in the midst of the
ever-green snow-laden leaves and ice-barbed twigs. When his house at
last came into view, the roof was deeply covered; the dizzying whirl had
followed every line of the rail-fence; scurrying away along the furthest
zigzags there was a vanishing glimpse of a squirrel; the boles of the
trees were embedded in drifts; the chickens had gone to roost; the sheep
were huddling in the broad door of the rude stable; he saw their heads
lifted against the dark background within, where the ox was vaguely
glimpsed. He caught their mild glance despite the snow that in-starred
with its ever-shifting crystals the dark space of the aperture, and
intervened as a veil. They suddenly reminded him of the season--that it
was Christmas Eve; of the sheep which so many years ago beheld the
angel of the Lord and the glory of the great light that shone about
the shepherds abiding in the fields. Did they follow, he wondered, the
shepherds who went to seek for Christ? Ah, as he paused meditatively
beside the rail-fence--what matter how long ago it was, how far
away!--he saw those sheep lying about the fields under the vast midnight
sky. They lift their sleepy heads. Dawn? not yet, surely; and they lay
them down again. And one must bleat aloud, turning to see the quickening
sky; and one, woolly, white, white as snow, with eyes illumined by the
heralding heavens, struggles to its feet, and another, and the flock
is astir; and the shepherds, drowsing doubtless, are awakened to good
tidings of great joy.
What a night that was!--this night--Christmas Eve. He wondered he had
not thought of it before. And the light still shines, and the angel
waits, and the eternal hosts proclaim peace on earth, good-will toward
men, and summon us all to go and follow the shepherds and see--what? A
little child cradled in a manger. The mountaineer, leaning on his gun
by the rail-fence, looked through the driving snow with the lights of
divination kindling in his eyes, seeing it all, feeling its meaning as
never before. Christ came thus, he knew, for a purpose. He could have
come in the chariots of the sun or on the wings of the wind. But He was
cradled as a little child, that men might revere humanity for the sake
of Him who had graced it; that they, thinking on Him, might be good to
one another and to all little children.
As he burst into the door of his house the elations of his high religious
mood were rudely dispelled by shrill cries of congratulation from his
wife and her mother. For the news had preceded him. Ephraim Blinks with
his fiddle had stopped there on his way to play at some neighboring
merry-making, and had acquainted them with the result of processioning
Purdee's land.
“We'll go down thar an' live!” cried his wife, with a gush of joyful
tears. “Arter all our scratch-in' along like ten-toed chickens all this
time, we'll hev comfort an' plenty! We'll live in Grinnell's good house!
But ter think o' our trials, an' how pore we hev been!”
“This air the Purdees' day!” cried the grandmother, her face flushed
with the semblance of youth. “Arter all ez hev kem an' gone, the
jedg-mint o' the Lord hev descended on Grinnell, an' he air cast out.
An' his fields, an' house, an' bin, an' barn, air Purdee's!”
The fire flared and faded; shadows of the night gloomed thick in the
room--this night of nights that bestowed so much, that imposed so much
on man and on his fellow-man!
“Ain't the Grinnell baby got _no_ home?” whimpered the hereditary enemy.
The mountaineer remembered the Lord of heaven and earth cradled, a
little Child, in the manger. He remembered, too, the humble child
smiling its guileless good-will at the fence. He broke out suddenly.
“How kem the fields Purdee's,” he cried, leaning his back against the
door and striking the puncheon floor with the butt of the gun till it
rang again and again, “or the house, or the bin, or the barn? Did he
plant 'em? Did he build 'em? Who made 'em his'n?”
“The law!” exclaimed both women in a breath.
“Thar ain't no law in heaven or yearth ez kin gin an' honest man what
ain't his'n by rights,” he declared.
An insistent feminine clamor arose, protesting the sovereign power
of the law. He quaked for a moment; dominant though he was in his own
house, he could not face them, but he could flee. He suddenly stepped
out of the door, and when they opened it and looked after him in the
snowy dusk and the whitened woods, he was gone.
And popular opinion coincided with them when it became known that he had
formally relinquished his right to that portion of the land improved
by Grinnell. He said to the old squire who drew up the quit-claim deed,
which he executed that Christmas Eve, that he was not willing to profit
by his enemy's mistake, and thus the consideration expressed in the
conveyance was the value of the land, considered not as a farm, but as
so many acres of wilderness before an axe was laid to the trunk of a
tree or the soil upturned by a plough. It was the minimum of value, and
Grinnell came cheaply off.
The blacksmith, the mountain fiddler, and the advanced thinker, who had
been active in the survey, balked of the expected excitement attendant
upon the ousting of Grinnell, and some sensational culmination of the
ancient feud, were not in sympathy with the pacific result, and spoke as
if they had given themselves to unrequited labors.
“Thar ain't no way o' settlin' what that thar critter Purdee owns
'ceptin' ez consarns Moses' tables o' the Law. He clings ter them,” they
said, in conclave about the forge fire when the big doors were closed
and the snow, banking up the crevices, kept out the wind. “There ain't
no use in percessionin' Purdee's land.”
And indeed Purdee's possessions were wider far than even that divergent
line which the county surveyor ran out might seem to warrant; for on
the mountain-tops largest realms of solemn thought were open to him. He
levied tribute upon the liberties of an enthused imagination. He exulted
in the freedom of the expanding spaces of a spiritual perception of the
spiritual things. When the snow slipped away from the tables of the Law,
the man who had read strange scripture engraven thereon took his way one
day, doubtful, but faltering with hope, up and up to the vast dome of
the mountain, and knelt beside the rocks to see if perchance he might
trace anew those mystic runes which he once had some fine instinct to
decipher. And as he pondered long he found, or thought he found, here a
familiar character, and there a slowly developing word, and anon--did
he see it aright?--a phrase; and suddenly it was discovered to him that,
whether their origin were a sacred mystery or the fantastic scroll-work
of time as the rock weathered, high thoughts, evoking thrilling
emotions, bear scant import to one who apprehends only in mental
acceptance. And he realised that the multiform texts which he had
read in the fine and curious script were but paraphrases of the simple
mandate to be good to one another for the sake of that holy Child
cradled in manger, and to all little children.