filled with the rural population who are interested in the liquor
cases,--and our rural population is unmistakable."
"If that's the sign, then it isn't on, for only about half the town
looked egregiously rural. Now I think of it, though, the court is going
to sit day after to-morrow."
"Of course. It's the first Monday in May, isn't it?"
"Please ask me how I knew it. Thank you, Mrs. Carroll. I see that you
are about to oblige me. Know then, good people, that this humble worm
that you see before you has had the honor of occupying the same seat in
the train with a minion of the law,--in fact, a revenue officer."
"Coming out to-day?"
"Yes. And, furthermore, he paid the flag-station of Flora the
distinguished attention of getting out there."
"Was he after somebody?"
"He was about to jog the memories of several people, and I think you'll
be surprised to know who one of them is. Mrs. Carroll, how can you
expect the less fortunate part of your community to keep in the
straight and narrow way, when the aristocracy--yea, verily, the
nobility--sets it so bad an example?"
"What do you mean, John?"
"I'm going to write a tale to be called 'The Titled Moonshiner; or, The
Baron's Quart of Corn.'"
Sydney and Bob looked at each other with dawning comprehension, yet
without the ability entirely to clear away the fog.
"John, are you hinting any slur against Baron von Rittenheim, our
neighbor and good friend?" The old lady was radiating dignity and
indignation.
"I'm not hinting a thing, my dear Mrs. Carroll. I'm telling you what
the affable revenue man told me. About a month ago, it seems, your
friend and neighbor entertained a guest who proved to be, not an angel
in disguise, but a deputy-marshal on his way to Asheville. Not knowing
the official position of his visitor, von Rittenheim sold him a quart
of whisky of his own vintage. Whereupon, like all other chilled vipers
that have been warmed by this or other means, even from the far days of
fable, the beast retaliated. He returned the next day and arrested
him."
Mrs. Carroll and Katrina cried out in surprise and indignation. Bob's
eyes were fixed upon Sydney, and she, ghastly white, was crumbling her
bread into bits.
"The next day? Why, that is why he didn't come here for so long,
Sydney!"
"He's under bond to appear at the next sitting of the United States
Court, and, as that comes in on Monday, you understand the appearance
of my friend the enemy on the train."
"Poor fellow!" murmured Katrina.
"Why in the world should the Baron sell any whisky, I should like to
have some one tell me," demanded Mrs. Carroll. "And why didn't we see
it in the paper?"
"Probably the name was put in incorrectly," Bob suggested. "The
Asheville reporters aren't accustomed to German."
Sydney was silent. But upon Bob, for his father's sake, she laid
accusing eyes, for she thought she had a clue to the words that had
come to her ears through the clear air as she stood upon the top of
Buck Mountain.
X
Through the Mist
One day in the autumn, a few weeks after he had bought Ben Frady's
farm, von Rittenheim had taken his gun, and had whistled to heel one of
the hounds that had preferred to stay in his old home with an unknown
master rather than endure the precarious temper of the known quantity,
and had climbed Buzzard, the mountain behind his cabin, in search of
squirrel or quail.
As the day advanced, fleecy clouds gathered over the sky and obscured
the sun, and then thickened and turned leaden. Suddenly, as the
huntsman tramped across a clearing, a one-time cornfield high on the
side of the mountain, he saw a mass of fog rolling towards him, and
before he could descend below its level he found himself enveloped in
the mist of a passing cloud. Heavy as a palpable thing it closed around
him, impenetrable to the eye, chilling to the whole physical being,
fraught with discouragement and depression to the mind.
Friedrich tried to regain a path that he remembered to have crossed a
few minutes before, but under the trees the gloom was too dense for
profitable search. Moisture began to collect upon the leaf tips and to
drip upon him. The dog did not answer to his whistle. There were no
points of the compass; there was no view of the valley below. He was
like a ship rudderless. He only knew of a surety that the earth was
beneath his feet, and as night drew on, and he could no longer see the
soil his boot-soles pressed, he only knew that he was descending.
And then of a sudden came the barking of a dog in greeting, and the
bray of a hungry mule, and he found himself close upon a cabin, and by
a freak of fortune it proved to be his own, and he was at home.
Vaguely enough, yet insistently, the experience kept recurring to him
during the days in Asheville, when he was awaiting his trial.
He went into the court-room in the Federal Building and watched, with a
languid curiosity born of its foreignness, the easy-going ceremony of
the opening of court. A group of lawyers laughed and gossiped at the
front. A larger number of men, who proved to be potential jurors,
gathered on one side and talked together more quietly, impressed by the
novelty of their experience; while the men who had served on the jury
before explained the furnishing of the room to them.
Some ladies were ushered into seats near the bench by a dapper young
lawyer. Behind a railing, all about von Rittenheim, in front of him,
beside him, and back of him, were the lean forms and bent shoulders of
the mountaineers who were witnesses or principals in the whisky cases
that fill so fully the docket of this court. From their appearance it
was impossible to tell which were the law-breakers and which the
bearers of testimony against them. There were old men and boys.
Children were clinging to the skirts of their mothers, who had come to
town either as witnesses or for the holiday. One woman was quieting a
crying baby with the gag that a baby never refuses. She herself was
soothed by the snuff-stick that protruded from the space left vacant by
the early decay of her two front teeth.
The air rapidly grew heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies and of
moist tobacco, and with the peculiar oily odor of corn whisky.
A short man of important bearing stepped in front of the rail and
scanned the mass behind it. He easily singled out von Rittenheim, whose
cropped head shone fair from among the towsled pows around him.
"Oh, von Rittenheim," he called, "step out here a minute."
"My so good friend, Mr. Weaver?" acknowledged Friedrich, looking at him
through the squinting eyes that a sharp headache gave him.
"You'll be held by the grand jury, of course, von Rittenheim, but you
needn't stay here all the time. Just drop in once or twice a day and
see how the list stands. Some of these are old cases crowded out of the
last term, and we may not get to you until Wednesday or Thursday. It
ain't a right enjoyable place to stay in, and you'd better go out in
the fresh air--you look sick."
"My head does give me pain," Friedrich admitted.
"Your case can't possibly be called to-day, anyway. You'd better go off
until to-morrow."
"I thank you. I will when I have seen the honorable judge come in. It
is most new to me, these customs of yours."
"I reckon they must be," returned Weaver, with something like pity in
his upward glance at the drawn face above him. He scuttled off as a
voice cried,--
"The court! the court!"
The lawyers scampered to their places behind the bar, and stood to
acknowledge the entrance of the judge.
Beyond thinking him strangely unjudicial in appearance, Friedrich took
no interest in him, for he did not regard him as the arbiter of his
fate, since he had learned the customary sentence for cases like his,
which was pronounced with the regularity of machinery and knew no
variety.
He waited until another half-hour's observation had made clear to him
the method of drawing the jurors. He left this task still in process of
being fulfilled, and urged his way out of the press that held him fast.
The fresh, cool air was as wine to him, for wine invigorates the body
while it clouds the mind. His lungs greedily took in great draughts of
its light purity, and his blood raced so merrily that he grew confused.
Always the pain bit into his eyes, and through his half-closed lids he
saw but dimly the people around him and the pavement beneath his feet.
He went back to the little room that he had hired, and slept heavily
into the afternoon. When he went out to get his supper at a restaurant,
the gaunt figures of his fellow-criminals were at every step. They
gazed curiously into the lighted shop-windows; they talked in groups
that overflowed the curbstone into the gutter. In a vacant lot back of
the Methodist church the glare of a camp-fire showed the covered wagon
that was to give a night's shelter to the family whose shadows were
cast large against its canvas side.
As he passed each group of them the odor that he had breathed for an
hour in the morning assailed his nostrils and seemed to force itself
into his lungs. He could not eat his supper, and he spent a restless
night, filled with horrid dreams. Sydney was selling whisky to Mr.
Weaver. The Judge turned into Dr. Morgan, who grinned triumphantly at
his victim as he stood in the crowd behind the rail. He bent to kiss
the hand of Mrs. Carroll, and she held in it a shell filled with
bird-shot.
Always the sickening odor of the overheated court-room choked him, and
his head throbbed unceasingly, and the balls of his eyes beat in
anguished unison.
The first electric-car passing the house in the early dawn crashed into
his dream as the bullet that was speeding from his revolver to Dr.
Morgan's heart, and found its resting-place in Sydney's breast instead.
He woke to find himself soaked with the sweat of exhaustion.
The cloud of that day on the mountain still clung around his fancy as
he went out upon the street again. A horrible something, as penetrable
as mist, as keen as the sting of conscience, as inevitable as the
burden of life, seemed to inwrap him. He felt it dully, and wondered
how much of it was physical and how much mental, and he didn't care
which it was.
He ate a little breakfast, though it was odious to him, and went out
to meet again the lantern-jawed mountaineers, who, like him,--_like
him_,--were drifting towards the Federal Building.
Yes, he was going to the court-room to be tried for a criminal offence;
he was a criminal, a criminal, a criminal. It buzzed angrily through
his head.
He stumbled over a child sitting beside his mother on the edge of the
sidewalk in front of the post-office. The woman had her elbows on her
knees and her face in her hands, and in her eyes was the look of
waiting that comes to women with uncertain husbands. She cuffed the
child, and then shook him to still the uproar she had created. Two more
children sat on the curb beyond her, and beyond them, up Haywood
Street, men leaned against the iron fence or squatted in pairs upon the
sidewalk. Friedrich wondered how they kept their balance, and went on
up the stairs, through pools of tobacco-juice, to the court-room, where
the day's work already had begun.
He secured a seat, and leaned his head against the wall. A negro man,
accused of fraudulently obtaining a pension, was explaining volubly how
he had received the injury upon which he based his claim.
His case was given to the jury, which filed out, and the second set of
men made themselves comfortable in the abandoned seats, with much
scraping of chairs and of throats, and adjustment of cuspidors to the
range of each juror.
The case of the next prisoner, tried on a charge of a fraudulent use of
the mails, lashed to frenzy the prosecuting attorney. He compared this
foul violator of the laws of his country with Sextus and Benedict
Arnold and Judas Iscariot. The national eagle had been insulted in his
nest, and his screams were ringing from mountain-peak to mountain-peak.
The echoes of Mitchell were sending back the cry, and Saint Elias's
snowy top gave forth an answering sound.
Von Rittenheim understood enough of the rapid English to realize its
irrelevancy, and wondered idly why the man was such a fool, not knowing
that it was the presence of a visiting national senator from the hotel
that had inspired this eloquence.
The air grew worse as more and more people pushed into the already
crowded room. Some one opened a window, and some one else immediately
begged to have it shut. There was a constant shuffling of feet and a
restless moving of hands. Friedrich found himself smothered by the
evil-smelling clothes of his companions as he sat against the wall, and
he stood, to bring his head up into a clearer air. The steam in one of
the radiators began to thump and clang, and each crash smote a raw
nerve in his beating temple.
The feeling of striving against the mist, yielding but inexorable, had
him fully in its possession, and through the fog he saw the face of
Wilder, the deputy-marshal. Their eyes met, and the malice in the
officer's drove the German mad. How long must he stand here and wait
among these swine? Yet he remembered many hours of waiting motionless
upon his horse, and he rebuked himself for a poor soldier.
Ah, if only he could tell the whole truth; if only he could stand
before the bar of the world--of God himself--and say, "I am guilty. Of
violating the law I am guilty. I am willing to bear my punishment for
what I have done. But if I am guilty, how is he innocent who brake my
bread and then tempted me? He who ate my last mouthful, and then
offered me an unlawful chance to get more? Is the law of hospitality to
be held of no account? And how is he innocent who poses as my friend,
who drinks from my cup, who holds my hand in his, and who goes forth to
betray me? Is there no law that binds a friend in honor? I have broken
a law--the law of man. Those two men of whom I speak have broken the
laws of the heart, the ties of honor and of love. I am a criminal in
the eyes of men. They are sinners before the face of God."
Friedrich was trembling as he felt these words flow through his mind.
The men on each side of him noticed his agitation, and drew away from
the emotion of his tense face. So insistently did the words ring in his
ears that it seemed to him that he must have spoken them aloud. Yet he
was conscious that he had not, and that when the time came for him to
face this throng he would never go beyond the first three words, "I am
guilty."
He found himself speaking quietly to Mr. Weaver, and looked on at the
conversation as if he were a thing apart from himself.
"The next case but one after this will begin the moonshine cases, and
you-all surely won't come on until to-morrow morning. You might as well
go now."
"I thank you," said Friedrich, and stumbled from the room.
In the corridor he leaned for a moment against the wall, that he might
be sure to keep his balance as he went down the steep stairs dizzying
before him.
How he reached the court on the next day he never could remember. He
was conscious of feeling very ill, worse than ever he had felt in his
life. His spine pulsed painfully up into his brain; his eyes burned
back in their sockets until the two shafts of anguish met in one
well-nigh unbearable torture. The cloud-mist wrapped about him and
hindered him, and yielded only to blind him more. The same evil smells
reeked around him, and a wave of nausea surged within him.
He heard his name called, and some one guided him to that part of the
Judge's platform that served as a dock. He raised his hand, and heard
afar off some words about the truth and God. He was bidden to kiss the
filthy cover of a book. Dimly he heard a question and answered it.
"I am guilty."
A chair was pushed towards him and he sat down, conscious of a strange
silence in the usually noisy room.
He heard Wilder telling his story of his purchase of a quart of whisky,
"an' he owned it was blockade," and a long and detailed account of "the
Dutchy's" resistance to arrest, in which the ferocity of his behavior
would have been creditable to a bloodthirsty villain driven to
desperate straits.
A voice asked him if he had anything to say, and he heard himself
repeating once again, "I am guilty."
Then the voice of the laureate of the eagle's nest soared, and fell to
a whisper, and swelled again, and Friedrich wondered if "example" would
be "_Muster_" or "_Beispiel_." And "different class,"--what did that
mean? How stupid he was about English!
By-and-by there was silence, and the Judge's voice said,--
"Three months or a hundred dollars."
And then there was a long, long silence.
XI
In the Corn
Summer had come.
The soft days of spring had gone by, the days when the feeling of
growth impresses every sense. The haze-filled April mornings, warming
into the forcing ardor of noon, had stirred into life the activity
latent in root and twig. May's glowing sun, shining through the
scantily covered branches, made dancing motes of heat wave above the
surface of red clay. The aspens fluttered into exquisite greenness. The
sourwood put forth the satin of its tender leaves. All over the
mountain-sides and through the forest thickets the oak-tips blushed
faint pink, a delicate velvet against the stout bristles of the yellow
pines.
Birds flew over, bound for the North, each with his instinctive goal;
some almost at their journey's end, others with many a long ethereal
mile before them. Some of them sojourned for a few days, following the
ploughman as he overturned the mellow earth. Others let this high land
be the end of their wanderings, and settled here to the duty of
love-making and the pleasures of domestic life.
The azalea flamed in yellow and orange and scarlet glory, a note of
savage color on spring's soft palette. The delicate clusters of the
laurel, and, later, of the rhododendron, crowned the stems of the
parent bush, as sometimes a fair girl springs from a rough and ugly
father.
The germ grew strong within its warm seed-prison, and sent inquiring
leaflets into the upper world; and the adventurers never returned, but
sent back demands for food and drink, as colonists to a new land rely
upon the mother-country for sustenance and support.
On the steep mountain-sides, and in the coves that dimple the lower
slopes; on the flat lands of the plateau, and in the meadows along the
French Broad, the slender shafts of the corn-leaves were pushing upward
with what success their position fostered. By mid-June the crop in the
bottom-land was knee-high, while that nourished by the field over which
Sydney had stumbled on the top of Buck Mountain was only half as tall.
Bud Yarebrough and Pink Pressley were hoeing among stalks half-way
between these heights on the upland slopes of the Baron's farm, whose
cultivable land they had hired for the season. Stripped to their
shirts, whose open throats showed each a triangle of sunburned skin,
they worked rapidly down the adjoining furrows, one keeping a hoe's
length behind the other, that their tools might not interfere.
Conversation was more pithy than voluble.
"Damn hot," ejaculated Pink, stopping to hitch up his trousers, and
then to spit on his hands before resuming his hoe.
"Mos' dinner time," returned Bud, looking up at the sun, and then over
his shoulder towards the spring-betraying group of trees to which
Melissa was accustomed to bring his dinner when he was working here.
"They's some feller tyin' his horse in front of the cabin. Who is hit?"
Pink leaned on his hoe and squinted across the blazing field to the
grove that sheltered von Rittenheim's house.
"Bob Morgan, Ah reckon. Looks like his horse."
"Come to get somethin' fo' Mr. Baron. O-oh, Bob!"
Bob looked around his horse's nose, and held up his hand in token of
understanding. He unlocked the cabin and disappeared within, coming out
again with a bundle, which he tied on to the saddle, and then led his
animal towards the trees at the spring. The two laborers tossed down
their hoes and moved to the same haven.
"What time is hit, Bob?"
Morgan looked at his watch.
"Five past twelve, Pink. Working hard?"
"Yep. Tol'able big crop." He sat down at the foot of a tree and opened
his dinner-pail.
"Have some?" he asked, pointing the opening at Bob, who was settling
into repose with his hat over his face.
"No, I thank you. I must be going home in a few minutes. How are you
getting on? Bought any more stock lately?"
Bob lay on his back with one long leg balanced on the other knee like a
see-saw on a saw-horse. The rowel of his spur rattled as he jerked his
foot up and down at the ankle.
"No." Pink had his mouth full.
"How many head have you got now?"
"Oh, jus' a mule 'n a couple o' cows."
"Sold your horse?"
"'M. Here Bud, take some o' this. Ah jus' natchelly hate to have
you-all die o' starvation."
"No, she's comin'. Ah see her now." And Bud ran to meet his wife and to
relieve her of the baby.
"Hungry, ain' he?" sneered Pink, as he watched his partner's alacrity,
while Bob struggled to his feet to greet Melissa.
"Say, you-all wasn' wantin' to buy a cow, was ye, Bob?" asked Pink.
"Got one to sell?"
"Yes, the muley cow."
"No, I don't guess I want her."
"You seemed so damn curious about my stock, Ah 'lowed ye were
purchasin'."
"Oh, no. I just thought you must have an extra lot of cattle to be
providing for, or you wouldn't have needed to hire this land and to
make an extra big crop of corn."
A dull red showed on Pink's forehead above the tan-mark, and crowded
into his pale-blue eyes, destitute of lashes. The two men looked
steadily at each other. Then, as Melissa drew near, Pink broke into an
ugly laugh.
"Give a dog a bad name, eh? You-all needn' be quite so bigoty now yo'
fine friends have been at the same business."
He waved his hand towards the cabin, and Bob, in his turn, flushed as
he shook hands with Melissa.
The girl gave scant greeting to Pressley. Her husband's new friendship
with him was distasteful to her; it filled her with foreboding when she
remembered his threats.
Yet there had been nothing definite of which she could complain to Bud
since the day when Miss Carroll had caught Pink trying to kiss her. He
had never been to the cabin since his rebuff, but she knew that he and
Bud were constantly together, and this partnership in the hiring of the
Baron's land was a culmination of their friendly relations.
"Ah don' see how ye c'n stan' him, nohow, Bud," she often said, and Bud
as often replied,--
"Ah never did see anythin' like the prejudice o' women! They certainly
ain' no doubt about yo' sex, M'lissy."
Pink bore his part in the present conversation with no trace of
embarrassment. Indeed, there was an assertiveness in his bearing that
reacted upon Melissa to produce extreme shyness. Neither cause nor
effect escaped Morgan's shrewd black eyes.
"How's Mr. Baron?" asked Bud, between bites.
"Doing very well. He gets out on the porch every day now."
"Great luck he has," growled Pressley. "Yo' father never paid my fine
when Ah was given mah choice between 'a hundred dollars or three
months.'"
"My father likes to choose his friends," replied Bob, sternly. Melissa
looked distressed.
"What's sauce fo' the goose ought to be sauce fo' the gander," argued
the ex-moonshiner.
"It ain' fittin' fo' you-all to say anythin' ag'in' Dr. Morgan,
whatever he may _se_-lect to do," asserted Bud, combatively, and Pink
hastened to hedge.
"Ah 'low not. He certainly was white to me when Ah broke mah laig. 'N
as fo' Mr. Baron, Ah always did like him, 'n this is a new tie between
us. Now we're brothers."
He chuckled with a full appreciation of his insolence, for the story of
von Rittenheim's downfall and its cause was well known throughout the
country.
Melissa went white at the malignity of his tone. She turned to Bob with
a question:
"Mrs. Carroll 'n Miss Sydney--are they wore to a frazzle takin' care o'
him?"
"Mrs. Carroll's all right. They've had two nurses from Asheville all
the time, you know. Miss Sydney's wonderful. There's such a lot to do
about a house when there's a serious illness, even for people who
aren't doing the actual nursing."
"Ah s'pose so. Wouldn' hit be nice, jus' like a story, 'f they'd fall
in love with each other--Mr. Baron 'n Miss Sydney?"
"Now, ain' that jus' like a girl!" ejaculated Bud, gulping the last of
his coffee.
Bob sat down and fanned himself with his hat.
"Hot, ain' hit?" observed Pink, dryly. Then he turned to Melissa.