WE GO TO THE MOUNTAINS.
Weighborne was at the station on the following morning when, five
minutes before train time, I arrived. He was clad for his mountain
environment in high lace boots, corduroy breeches and flannel shirt, and
in this guise he loomed bigger and stronger of seeming than in
conventional clothing. His level, straight-gazing eyes held the cheery
satisfaction of facing, after a good breakfast, a prospect of action. He
was meanwhile willing to fill the interim of railroad travel with
conversation. I, on the contrary, knew that sleeplessness had left me
haggard, and met his advances, I fear, with churlish taciturnity.
In the smoking compartment, when we were under way, I sat gazing out of
the car window at fleeting fields still a-sparkle with frost crystals on
wood and stubble.
"You and Frances didn't just seem to hit it off," commented my companion
with a proffer of his cigar-case, "or rather Frances liked you all
right, but you--" He broke off with an amused smile and busied himself
with the kindling of a panatella.
A man can hardly explain to his fellow-man, "I was rude to your wife
because I love her. I worship her in a way your prosaic little soul can
never understand. It is only because civilization is all distorted that
I don't murder you and carry her off in triumph to my cave--where she
belongs."
So I mumbled some foolish contradiction. I thought her charming; I was
merely not a woman's man. I was still part savage. My unfortunate
temperament must be my apology.
Weighborne studied me for a moment in some perplexity. He knew I was
lying, but he had no suspicion why I lied and he could hardly argue in
her defense with me, a stranger. He changed the topic, but there was a
hurt expression in his face as though he were unable to understand my
subtle hostility, as he construed it, for a person entirely lovely. If I
did not like Frances there must be something abnormal about me, and the
expression was quite eloquent though wordless. I had no difficulty in
reading it. It was as though he wanted to say to me and was saying to
himself, "After all, our relations are those of business, and your
personal preferences and prejudices do not concern me, but we won't
speak of Her again. It shall be a prohibited topic between us." In this
tacit attitude I found an element of relief. If I were to be forced into
his daily companionship I must not be specifically reminded at every
turn that he was the husband of his wife. I had stepped knee-deep into
this miserable Rubicon of financial venture as the agent of others, and
turning back was impossible. Afterward.... But at this point I stopped.
I could not yet bring myself to think of any afterward.
Inasmuch as Weighborne and I were for a time to travel the same trail
and since, as my reason insisted, he was guilty of no injury to me
except an injury so fantastic that only destiny could be blamed, and
since, too, he was all unconscious even of that, there must be truce
between us.
Yet there rose insistently before me the lissom beauty of his wife. The
light that tangled itself in her hair blinded and tortured me.
The deity I had built out of fancy and under the influence of the
tropics, laid itself in parallel with the woman I had seen last night.
The goddess I knew. The woman I loved and doubted. Was she only the
coquette who wanted to lead me chained at her chariot wheel for the
cheap joy of conquest? My goddess had not been that sort. What had she
to offer me in return for such a tribute to her vanity? Was I merely to
flit in the background of her life giving all that the heart has,
receiving nothing but the occasional condescension of a smile? Does
great beauty so preempt a woman's soul as to drive out even the homely
virtues?
These questions bored insistently into my brain until it ached with
perplexity. Then came the memory of her momentary wistfulness; her
craving for something more than life had given her, or something
different.
What was that? At all events, I knew that to fall again within the scope
of her personality would mean to be swept rudderless from my moorings.
Whatever her object, be it exalted or petty, I must inevitably bow to
it, in unconditional surrender, if such were her good or evil pleasure.
Consequently the one end of all my thinking was the resolve that I
should not again see her.
The journey was progressing with more surety than my reflections. It
whisked us through the richness of Bluegrass pasture lands, and the
opulent ease of Bluegrass life into a barer country where the color of
the soil grew mean and outcropping rocks lay bare. The landscape, as
though in keeping with my mood, dropped down a scale of bleakness.
The cleanliness of dignified mansions, spacious barns and whitewashed
fences gave place to less pretentious farm-houses in disrepair, and
these in turn dwindled to log cabins that were hardly better than
shanties, and choking undergrowth instead of clean meadows.
We roared through foothills where the vivid green of young cedars dashed
the gray tangle of naked timber and scrub. At last we climbed into the
mountains themselves, lying in dreary ramparts of isolation under skies
that had grown sodden and raw. Here were the barriers of the Cumberland
heaping up gigantic piles of raggedness under bristling needle points of
timber.
We passed through anomalous villages where the nation's most primitive
and quarantined life was rubbing shoulders with the outriders of
capital's invasion. Shaggy men ridden in from distant cabins on shaggier
horses; men who probably nursed guilty knowledge of illicit stills,
gazed at the passing train out of humorless and illiterate eyes.
At last we left the train at a station over which the November dusk was
closing, where the coke furnaces glared in red spots along the shadowed
ridges. A four-mile drive brought us to the tawdry hotel, and after
attacking our eggs and ham we went to our rooms. I on a feather bed,
with the reek of a low-turned lamp in my nostrils, lay for hours gazing
at the patched and dirty wall-paper, and at last fell asleep to dream of
a wonderful lady who opened a door in a wall of rock, and led me through
it to things which could never be.
The next morning as we waited for the wagon which was to take us twenty
miles into the hills, Weighborne showed me the dingy court-house whose
weatherbeaten walls had in other days been penetrated by the gatling
guns of the militia. He pointed out boyish-looking figures whose eyes
were young and mild, yet who had more than once "notched their guns." He
showed me spots where this marked man or that had fallen, shot to death
from the court-house windows, by assassins who had never been
apprehended or prosecuted.
"That is all changing," he said. "When capital comes the feud must go."
Stolid groups of mountaineers, clad in butternut and jeans, eyed us with
mild curiosity. Here and there a father whose face was as stupid and
uneducated as that of a Russian peasant, walked side by side with a son
dressed in the season's ready-made styles. Between parent and child
yawned the gulf of schooling, which the younger generation had acquired
in a college "down below" or in the new schools at home, presided over
by "fotched on" teachers.
We traveled at snail's pace over twisting roads where our wagon strained
and creaked in tortuous ruts almost hub-deep, and where the scraggly
horses lay against their collars and tugged valiantly at the traces.
Quail started up before us with their whir of softly drumming wings and
disappeared into the thick cover of timber. Squirrels barked and
scampered to hiding at our coming. Occasionally a fox whisked out of
sight with a contemptuous flirt of its brush. Once only in twenty miles
we encountered another traveler. An old man, riding bareback on a mule,
drew up in the road and awaited us. Despite the cold, a gap of sockless,
dust-covered ankle showed between his rough brogan uppers and the
wrinkled legs of his butternut breeches. Across his mule's withers
balanced a rifle. His face was bearded and sad.
"Mornin' Rat-Ankle," drawled our driver, halting the team for converse.
"Mornin', Pate," came the nasal reply.
There was a long interval of silence while the mounted man contemplated
us with an unabashed stare. Finally he spoke again.
"Mornin', strangers," he said.
There followed a protracted series of questionings between the native
born as to the health and well being of their respective families.
I thought I saw the mountaineer's eyes glitter with sudden interest when
Weighborne's name was given him, but the light died quickly out of his
pupils, leaving only the weariness and sadness of his dull life.
At times the climbs were so steep that we had to trudge alongside,
lending a hand at the wheels. The last two miles of the journey, said
our driver, would be impassable for a wheeled vehicle. He would have to
deposit us and our luggage at Chicken-Gizzard Creek. A little later,
while we were walking up a steep incline, Weighborne drew me back out of
earshot of the teamster.
"I'd better post you on a few details," he said. "Ever hear of the
Keithley assassination?"
I shook my head.
"Keithley was the prosecuting attorney in some rather celebrated murder
trials. He was shot to death one afternoon as he came out of the
court-room."
"Yes?" I questioned.
"Six months later Con Hoover was shot from the laurel on this road. He
had allied himself with those who sought to avenge Keithley."
I nodded my head.
"There were Cale Springer, Bud Dode--I could enumerate other victims,
but that is all unnecessary detail. What concerns us is this. Jim Garvin
is county judge. In a rough way he is the political boss of the region
and he has built up a fortune. His own gun is unnotched, but a
half-dozen men who have incurred his displeasure have come to abrupt
ends. The newspapers in Louisville and Lexington have intimated that
besides being at the head of fiscal affairs and operating a general
store the judge also issues his orders to a murder syndicate."
"Why," I demanded in some disgust, "hasn't it been proven?"
"It is difficult to prove things of this sort--when the defendant is
more powerful than the law and when juries walk in terror," Weighborne
reminded me. "He has twice been tried for complicity. A company of state
guards patrolled the court-house yard to reassure venire-men and
witnesses. The only result was the defeat, at the next election, of the
judge and prosecutor who had made themselves obnoxious."
"Why," I inquired, "aren't such malefactors taken into a civilized
circuit, on a change of venue, and tried where jurors are not
intimidated?"
"They have been--with the same result," affirmed my informant. "You see,
while the jurors were freed from fear, the witnesses knew they must
return home."
"Shall we be likely to meet this highly interesting character?" I
questioned.
"The store where our wagon turns back," said Weighborne, "is his place."
"Then I am to be careful not to form or express any opinion adverse to
judicious homicide? Is that the point?"
Weighborne smiled.
"Our plans involve bringing a branch railroad along the way we have been
traveling," he replied, "and the coming of that railroad means the
death knell of Jim Garvin's power. What is still more to the point, our
attorney here and the man for whose house we are bound is the Hon.
Calloway Marcus. He was Keithley's law partner, and he is a marked man.
He it was who prosecuted Garvin--and lost his official head. His actual
head he keeps on his shoulders by riding at the center of a bodyguard. I
tell you these matters so that you may watch your words."
"Shall we encounter open hostility at this place?" I inquired.
Weighborne shook his head. "On the contrary, we shall be most
courteously received. Politeness is highly esteemed hereabouts. The fact
that a man means to 'lay-way' you to-night, with a squirrel gun, is not
deemed sufficient reason for relaxing his courtesy this afternoon."
An hour later our conveyance drew up at the junction of two ragged roads
where thin, outcropping ledges of limestone went down to the rim of a
shallow stream. Beyond the water rose a beetling bluff. One could
imagine that when summer brought to this hollow in the hills its
richness of green, and its profusion of trumpet flower and laurel and
rhododendron, there must be an eye-filling beauty, but now it was
unspeakably raw and desolate.
Two houses were in sight and both were of depressing ugliness. In the
fork of the road where the ground was trodden hard stood the "store." It
was a one-room shack built of logs and boarded over, but innocent of
paint. A leanto porch, disfigured by a few advertising signs, gave
entrance to a narrow door. The second house set back and higher up the
slope of the mountain. Its solidity was that of mortised logs and its
windows were protected behind solid shutters. Inside there was plainly
an abundance of space, as befitted the dwelling-place of the district's
overlord. A clump of white-armed sycamores partly masked its front, but
through the naked branches one could see that for a hundred yards about
it, in every direction, lay unbroken clearing, and that for all its
civilian seeming it might, if need arose, stand siege against anything
less formidable than gatling guns.
Stamping the cold and cramp from our feet, we settled our score with the
liveryman, and turned into the store.