That same "foreigner," for a "foreigner," was acting strangely. Surely
he was dressed in a garb hitherto almost unknown in the rough mountains,
certainly none of the mountaineers whom he had met (and he had met, with
plain unwillingness, a few, as he had climbed up to the rocky clearing
where his fire had blossomed so remarkably) had recognized him. But,
despite all this, it was quite plain that he was traveling through a
country of which he found many details familiar. Now and then a little
vista caught his view and held him for long minutes while he seemed to
be comparing its reality with pictures of it stored within his memory;
again he paused when he discovered that some whim of tramping
mountaineers or roaming cattle, some landslide born of winter frosts;
some blockade of trees storm-felled, had changed the course of an old
path. Always, in a case like this, he investigated carefully before he
definitely started on the new one.
When he had first come into the neighborhood he had made his way with
caution, almost as if fearing to be seen, but now, after the bits of
rocks which he had taken from Madge Brierly's clearing, had slipped into
his pocket, he used double care in keeping from such routes as showed
the marks of many recent footsteps, in sly investigations to make sure
the paths he chose were clear of other wayfarers. His nerves evidently
on keen edge, he seemed to fear surprise of some unpleasant sort. Each
crackling twig, as he passed through the thickets, each rustling of a
frightened rabbit as it scuttled from his path, each whir of startled
grouse, or sudden call of nesting king-bird, made him pause cautiously
until he had quite satisfied himself that it meant nothing to be feared.
He was ever carefully alert for danger of some sort.
But not even his continual alarms, his constant watchfulness, could keep
his mind away from the rough bits of rock which he had chipped from the
outcropping in the clearing. More than once, as he found convenient and
safe places--leafy nooks in rocky clefts, glades in dense, impenetrable
thickets--he took out the little specimens, turned them over in his
hands with loving touches, and gazed at them with an expression of
picturesquely avaricious joy. Had any witnessed this procedure they
would have found it vastly puzzling, for the specimens seemed merely
small, black stones and valueless. But once, while looking at them
lovingly, he burst into a harsh and hearty laugh as of great triumph,
quite involuntarily; but hushed it quickly, looking, then, about him
with an apprehensive glance. Each step he made was, in the main, a
cautious one, each pause he made was plainly to look at some familiar,
if some slightly altered, vista.
It was quite clear that with the finding of the little bits of rock he
had achieved the errand which had brought him to the mountains, and that
now he roamed to satisfy his memory's curiosity. Smiles of recognition
constantly played upon his grim and grizzled face at sight of some old
path, some distant, mist-enshrouded crag, even some mighty pine or oak
which had for years withstood the buffeting of tempestuous storms; now
and then a little puzzled frown, added its wrinkles to the many which
already creased his brow, when, at some spot which he had thought to
find as he had left it, long ago, he discovered that time's changes had
been notable.
Once only did the man become confused among the woods-paths (where a
stranger might have lost himself quite hopelessly in twenty minutes) and
that was at a point not far from where Madge Brierly and Layson had, on
their way up from the clearing, paused while she told her youthful
escort of the grim but simple tragedy of her feud-darkened childhood.
Before the old man reached this spot he had been traveling with puzzled
caution, for a time, across a slope rough-scarred by some not ancient
landslide which had changed the superficial contour of the
mountain-side. When, suddenly, he debouched upon the rocky crag, hung, a
rustic, natural platform above a gorgeous panorama of the valley, the
view came to him, evidently, as a sharp, a startling, most unpleasant
shock.
That the place was quite familiar to him none who watched him would have
doubted, but no smiles of pleasant memories curved his thin, unpleasant
lips as he surveyed it. He did not pause there, happily, communing with
his memory in smiling reminiscence as he had at other points along the
way. Instead, as the great view burst upon his gaze, he started back as
if the outlook almost terrified him. He had been traveling astoop,
partly because the burden of his years weighed heavy on his shoulders,
partly as if his muscles had unconsciously reverted to the easy,
slouching, climbing-stoop of the Kentucky mountaineer. But at sight of
this especial spot his attitude changed utterly, the whole expression,
not of his face, alone, but of his body, altered. His stoop became a
crouch. His hands flew out before him as if, with them, he strove to
ward away the charming scene. His feet paused in their tracks, as if
struck helpless and immovable by what his eyes revealed to him.
For a full moment, almost without moving, he stood there, fascinated by
some old association, plainly, for there was nothing in the prospect
which, to an actual stranger, would have seemed more notable than
details of a dozen other views which he had peered at through his
half-closed, weather-beaten eyes within the hour. Here, clearly, was the
arena of some great event in his past life--an arena which he gladly
would have never seen again. His face went pale beneath its coat of tan,
his shoulders trembled slightly as he tried to shrug them with
indifference to brace his courage up. Twice he started from the spot,
determined, evidently, to shut away the crowding and unpleasant
recollections it recalled to him, twice he returned to it, to carefully,
if with evident repugnance, make closer study of some detail of its
rugged picturesqueness. More than once, as he lingered there against his
will, his hands raised upward to his eyes as if to shut away from them
some vivid memory-picture, but each time they fell, with strangely
hopeless gesture. The picture which they strove to hide plainly was not
before his eyes in the actual scene, but painted in the brain behind
them and not to be shut out with screening, claw-curved fingers.
The effect of this especial spot on the old man, indeed, was most
remarkable. His lips, as he stood gazing there, moved constantly as if
with words unspoken, and, once or twice, the crowding sentences found
actual but not articulate voice. Whenever this occurred he started, to
look about behind him as if he feared that some one, who might overhear,
had crept up upon him slyly. Finally, making absolutely certain that he
had not been observed by any human being, and evidently yielding to an
impulse almost irresistible, he went over the ground carefully,
examining each foot of the little rocky platform with not a loving, but
a fascinated observation.
When he finally left the spot a striking change had come upon his
features. He had reached the place sly, cunning, and, withal,
triumphant, as if he had accomplished, that day, through securing the
small stones, some secret thing of a great import. His countenance, as,
at length, he went away, was not triumphant but half terrified. It was
as if some long-forgotten scene of horror had been brought before his
gaze again, to terrify and astonish him.
His footsteps had been slow and leisurely, the footsteps of a
contemplative, if a surreptitious sightseer, but now they quickened
almost into running, and the intensely disagreeable effect of the
mysterious episode had not left him wholly, when, twenty minutes
afterward, he had mounted the rocky hill path by a precipitous climb and
found himself within a little, cupped inclosure in the rocks, secluded
enough and beautiful enough to be a fairies' dancing-floor. There,
again, he seemed to recognize old landmarks, but with fewer of
unpleasant memories connected with them. Plain curiosity glowed, now, in
his narrow, crafty eyes.
"I wonder," he exclaimed, "if it's here yet."
As he spoke his glance flashed swiftly to the far side of the little
glade, where, on the face of a dense thicket, a trained eye, such as
his, might mark a spot where bushes had been often parted with extreme
care not to do them injury and thus reveal the fact that through them
lay a thoroughfare. Noting this with a wry smile of malicious
satisfaction, he started slowly toward the spot.
The caution of his movements was redoubled, now. While he had worked,
back in the clearing, cooking his simple noonday meal and chipping off
the little specimens of rock, he had shown that he wished not to have
his strange activities observed. On the mountain paths he had plainly
been most anxious not to run across chance wayfarers who might ask
questions, or (the possibility was most remote, but still a possibility)
remember him of old. He had been merely cautious, though, not definitely
fearful.
Now, however, actual and obsessive dread showed plainly on his face and
in his movements. Such a fear would have induced most men to abandon any
enterprise which was not fraught with compelling necessity; with him
insistent curiosity seemed to counterbalance it. The man's face, rough,
hard, cruel, was, withal, unusually expressive; its deep lines were more
than ordinarily mobile, and every one of them, as he proceeded,
soft-footed as a cat, amazingly lithe and supple for his years, as
competent to find his way unseen through a woods country as an Indian,
showed that irresistible and fiercely inquisitive impulse was
offsetting in his mind a deadly apprehension.
In one way only, though, in spite of the accelleration of his eager
curiosity, did he drop his guard, at all, and this was quite apparently
the direct result of high excitement. That he had dropped it he was
clearly quite unconscious, but when his lips moved, now, they more than
once let fall articulate words.
"Ef th' old still's thar ..." they said at one time; then, after a long
pause devoted to worming troublous way through tangled areas of
windfall, they muttered, in completion of the sentence: "... it'll be
th' son that's runnin' it." Another busy silence, and: "Thar was a girl
... th' daughter of...."
Either a spasmodic contraction of the throat at mere thought of the
name--a grimace, almost of pain, which suddenly convulsed the old man's
evil face might well have made a stranger think that his muscles had
rebelled--or an unusually difficult struggle across a fallen tree-trunk
prevented further speech, as, probably, it prevented for the time,
consecutive further thought of old-time memories. His mind was tensely
concentrated on the work of climbing through the tangle of dead trunks
and branches, and, when he had accomplished the hard passage, was turned
wholly from the things which he had been considering by a slight
crackling, as of some one stepping on a brittle twig, at a distance in
advance of him.
Instantly he was on his guard, showing signs quite unmistakable of
deadly fear. He shrank back into the thicket with the speed and silence
of a frightened animal.
The panic which had seized him soon had passed, however, for, within a
few short seconds it was clear to him that the noise which he had heard
had not been made by any one suspicious of his presence or a-search for
him.
Peering cautiously between the slender boles of crooked mountain-laurel
bushes, he soon found a vantage point from which he could see on beyond
the densely woven foliage, and, to his astonishment, found, before he
had thought, possible that he had progressed so far, that he had already
reached the place he sought. Memory had made the way to it a longer one
than it was really, and, in spite of the delays caused by his advancing
age and awkward muscles, long unaccustomed to the work of threading
mountain paths, he had traveled faster than he thought.
Not fifty feet away from him, separated from the thicket he was hiding
in but by a narrow stretch of mountain sward, he saw, among the mountain
side's disordered rocks, the carefully masked entrance to a cave.
An untrained eye would never have made note of the few signs which made
it clear to him, at once, that this cave was, as it had been long years
before when he had known it well, a place of frequent call for footsteps
skilled in mountain cunning. No path was worn to its rough entrance,
but, here and there, a broken grass-blade, in another place a pebble
recently dislodged from its accustomed hollow, elsewhere a ragged bit of
paper, torn from a tobacco-package, proved to him that, although hidden
in the wilderness of old Mount Nebo's scarred and inaccessible sides,
this spot was yet one often visited by many men.
A grim smile stirred the leathern folds of his old cheeks.
"Thar yet," he thought, "an' doin' business yet."
Again, after he had worked about to get a better view.
"Best-hidden still in these here mountings. Revenuers never _will_ get
run of it."
The place had a mighty fascination for him, as if it might have played a
tremendous part in long-gone passages of his own life. As he stood
gazing at it cautiously, the mountaineer seemed definitely to emerge
from his low-country dress and superficial "bluegrass" manner, fastened
on him by long years of usage. Old expressions of not only face but
muscles came clearly to the front. Now, no person watching him, could
ever for a moment doubt that he was mountain-born and mountain-bred, if
they but knew the ear-marks of that people--almost a race apart. The
sight of the old cave-mouth plainly stirred in him a horde of memories
not wholly pleasant. Leathern as his face was, it none the less showed
his emotions with remarkable lucidity now that he was off his guard. Now
sly cunning dominated it, with, possibly, a touch left of the early fear
to flavor it.
"I bet a hundred revenuers in these mountains have looked for that there
still," he thought, "an' no one ever found it, yet. Forty years it's
been thar--through three generations o' th' Loreys--damn 'em!--an' no
one's ever squealed on 'em. I ... wonder...."
A look of vicious craft and malice wholly drove away the searching
curiosity which had possessed the old man's features. For a time he
plainly planned some work of bitter vengefulness. Then, with shaking
head, he evidently abandoned the enticing thought.
"Too resky," he concluded, and edged a little nearer to the thicket's
edge. "Might stir up old--"
He paused suddenly, alert and keenly listening. From another path than
that by which he had approached the place there came the sound of voices
raised in talk and laughter. He easily identified them, to his great
surprise, as those of some young mountain-girl and some young bluegrass
gentleman. Their tones and accents told this story plainly. Surprised
and curious, he went farther, his head bent, with study of the voices,
peering, meanwhile, through the thicket's tangle to get sight of them
as soon as they appeared within the clearing. Suddenly he dropped his
jaw in blank amazement.
"Frank Layson!" he exclaimed.
The girl's voice he did not recognize, but knew, of course, from its
peculiar accent, that it was some mountain maiden's.
"Well!" he exclaimed beneath his breath in absolute astonishment. "I
didn't think it of Frank Layson! What would Barbara--"
The pair emerged, now, from a gully by-path, and came into view. He
tightly shut his jaws and watched them with a peering, eager curiosity.
A moment later, and by her wonderful resemblance to her dead mother, he
recognized the girl.
She, above all people, must not know that he was there, even if she only
thought him to be Horace Holton, newcomer among the bluegrass gentry in
the valley. His plans had been laid carefully, and for her to find them
out would almost certainly upset them all. He was far from anxious to
meet Layson, there among the mountains, for it would mean awkward
questioning, but he was doubly anxious to avoid a meeting with the girl,
first because she owned the land on which he had secured the bits of
rock then nestling in his pocket, and, second, because she was the
daughter of--
His thoughts were interrupted, for, for a second, he thought they must
have seen him, so definite was their approach straight toward the
thicket where he hid. He crouched, frightened. It would be a very
awkward matter to be found there by them, and, besides, he did not know
who might be out of sight within the hidden still. It was quite possible
that there might lurk a deadly enemy. He must worm back through the
thicket with great caution, and, following the secluded ways which he
had traversed in his coming, get back to the railroad camp, where was
safety.
He stepped backward hastily, and, in so doing, trod upon a rotten
branch. He had not been as cautious as he had intended, and this
mis-step unbalanced him and sent him to the ground, with a tremendous
crashing of the brittle twigs and dead-wood.
Springing to his feet while the young people, startled by the great
disturbance, paused where they were standing, for an instant, he hurried
back into the hidden, thicket-bordered path, now using all his
recrudescent skill of silent woods-progression, and made complete
escape, leaving them not sure that the disturbance had been caused by
human blundering and not some vagrant beast's.
Madge held back, but Layson hurried to the thicket, with gun raised
ready for a shot.
Just then, from the carefully concealed cave-entrance, came Joe Lorey,
rifle poised for trouble, eyes gleaming fiercely, evidently keyed to
meet a raid by revenuers.
It was plain enough that he believed the noise which had disturbed,
alarmed him, had been made by this young sportsman. Indeed, as he who
really had caused the uproar was, now, well on a cautious backward way
along the path by which he had come up, and the girl and Layson were the
only folk in sight, the young moonshiner's mistake was natural.
Madge, almost as much disturbed as Lorey was by the crashing in the
thickets, was looking in the direction whence the noise had come, and,
at first, did not see him. When she did she smiled at him, and called to
him, but, absorbed in study of the bluegrass youth who had so suddenly
appeared there in his secret place among the mountains in company with
the girl whom he, himself, adored, Joe did not answer her, at first.
When he did it was with nothing more than a curt nod. He was astonished
and alarmed to see her in such company.
After that curt nod he waited for no explanation, but, like a shadow,
slipped into a thicket, disappearing instantly. No Indian from Cooper's
tales could have more instantly obliterated all trace of himself, could
have more quickly, noiselessly, mysteriously disappeared amongst the
greenery, than did this mountaineer. His movements, made with the
instinctive cunning of the woodsman and with muscles trained not only by
wild life there in the mountains to speed, endurance and exactitude,
but by many an hour of stealthy stalking of the "revenuers" sent to
search out his moonshine still, raid it, take him prisoner, were almost
magically active, cautious, furtive and effective.
For an instant Madge herself, accustomed to the native's skill in
woodcraft, as she was, gazed after him, astonished by the magic of his
disappearance, and, at first, piqued not a little by his scanty
courtesy. Then realizing that the mountaineer was, possibly, quite
justified in feeling grave suspicions of the stranger who was with
her--of any stranger coming thus, without a herald to the mountains--she
turned again to Layson, and, with her hand lightly guiding him by touch
as delicate, almost, as a wind-blown leaf's upon his sleeve, led him to
the nearest mountain path and on, toward a point whence she could
clearly point out to him the way to his own camp.
And, suddenly, her own heart throbbed with worry. Had she not done wrong
in bringing this unknown and, therefore, this mysterious stranger so
close upon the heart of Lorey's secret? She had chosen the path
thoughtlessly. She realized that, now, and much regretted it. The man
had wholly won her confidence, but had it been considerate or fair to
Joe, her lifelong friend, or to the other people of the mountains who
had things to hide from strangers, to be quite so frank with him in her
revelation of the byways of the wilderness?
Between the mountain-dwellers and the people of the lowlands never
could exist real confidence or friendship. From her babyhood she had
been taught to feel suspicion of all strangers: that was, indeed, first
article in the creed of all folk mountain-born. Why had she so freely
dropped her mantle of reserve before _this_ stranger? That he had saved
her from the bush-fire was excuse for her own gratitude, but was it
valid reason for exposing her best friends to danger at his hands, if
they proved treacherous? The revenuers, she had been informed, were men
of devilish craft, unscrupulous cunning. Might not this youth with the
fine clothes, the splendid manner, the great learning, the soft voice,
the quick resource and the undoubted bravery, very well be one of them?
She had once heard a mountain preacher draw a picture of the devil,
which made him most attractive and in the same way that this youth was
most attractive. Certain of the sympathies of his rough hearers, the man
had painted Beelzebub with broad, rough, verbal strokes, as a bluegrass
gentleman intent on the destruction of the honor, independence, liberty
of mountaineers. The mountaineer has never and will never understand
what right the government of state or nation has to interfere with
whatsoe'er he does on his own land with his own corn in his own still.
Just why he has no right to manufacture whiskey without paying taxes on
the product he really fails to comprehend. He regards the "revenuer" as
the representative of acute and cruel injustice and oppression. When he
"draws a bead" on one he does it with no such thoughts as common
murderers must know when they shoot down their enemies. He does not
think such killings are crude murder, any more than he regards feud
killings as assassinations.
With such ideas Madge had been, to some extent, imbued. With feud
feeling she was quite in sympathy--had not she lost her loved ones
through its awful work? Could she ever have revenge on those who had
thus bereaved her through any means save similar assassination?
And certainly the revenuers were her enemies, for they were the foemen
of her friends. If this young man should be a revenuer she might have
done a harm incalculable by guiding him along the secret mountain byways
which they had been travelling.
Her heart was in her throat from worry, for an instant. Had she, whose
very soul was fiercely loyal to the mountains and their people, been the
one to show an enemy the way into their citadel? Had she, bound
especially to Joe Lorey, not only by the ties of lifelong friendship but
by that other comradeship which had grown out of mutual wrongs and
mutual hatred of Ben Lindsay (not dimmed, a whit, by the mere fact that,
terrified, he had, years ago fled from the mountains), done Joe the
greatest wrong of all by leading this fine stranger to the very
entrance of his hidden still? _Was_ he a revenuer in disguise?
The magnitude of her possible indiscretion filled her with alarm. That
crashing in the bushes back of them might have been made by some
associate of his, who had trailed them at a distance, ready to give
assistance, if needs be, or, in case all things went right and the
bolder man who had gone first and fallen into the great luck of an
acquaintance with her had no need of help, to corroborate his
observations, help him to scheme the way by which to make attack upon
the still when the time for it should come.
As she considered all these possibilities, quite reasonable to her
suspicious mind, she shuddered.
But then, as she went slowly down the mountain path beside the stranger
she looked up and caught the frank calm glances of his eyes.
Surely there was nothing of cowardice such as would fool a trusting girl
into betrayal of her friends, in them; surely there was not the low
craft of a spy in them; surely their clear and unexcited gaze was not
that of a keen hunter, unscrupulously on the trail of human game, who
has just learned through the innocent indiscretion of a girl who trusted
him, the secret of its covert.
As she looked at him she was convinced of two things, vastly comforting.
One was that Layson had no knowledge of the still; that, untrained to
mountain ways and unsuspicious, he had not even guessed at the secret
of the little hidden place among the mountains. Another was--and this
gave her, although she could have scarcely explained why, a greater
comfort than the first had--that had he had that knowledge he would not
have used it meanly.
She thrilled pleasantly with the complete conviction that the man whom
she had liked so much at first sight, the man who had shown such pluck
in saving her from fire, the man who had exhibited such thoughtfulness
and helpfulness in starting her upon the rocky path toward education,
was true and fair and fine--was, in the curt language of the mountains,
"decent."
When she left him at the foot of the rough path which wound up to the
cabin where she lived alone, she had quite recovered confidence in him.
She eagerly assented to his suggestion that they meet again, the
following day, for the continuation of her studies.