A JEST may be the smallest pebble that was ever dropped into the sunny
mid-ocean of the mind; but sooner or later it sinks to a hard bottom, sooner
or later sends it ripples toward the shores where the caves of the fatal
passions yawn and roar for wreckage. It is the Comedy of speech that forever
dwells as Tragedy's fondest sister, sharing with her the same unmarked
domain; for the two are but identical forces of the mind in gentle and in
ungentle action as one atmosphere holds within itself unseparated the zephyr
and the storm.
The following afternoon O'Bannon was ambling back to town--slowly and
awkwardly, he being a poor rider and dreading a horse's back as he would
have avoided its kick. He was returning from the paper mill at Georgetown
whither he had been sent by Mr. Bradford with an order for a further supply
of sheets. The errand had not been a congenial one; and he was thinking now
as often before that he would welcome any chance of leaving the editor's
service.
What he had always coveted since his coming into the wilderness was the
young master's school; for the Irish teacher, afterwards so well known a
figure in the West, was even at this time beginning to bend his mercurial
steps across the mountains. Out of his covetousness had sprung perhaps his
enmity toward the master, whom he further despised for his Scotch blood, and
in time had grown to dislike from motives of jealousy, and last of all to
hate for his simple purity. Many a man nurses a grudge of this kind against
his human brother and will take pains to punish him accordingly; for success
in virtue is as hard for certain natures to witness as success in anything
else will irritate those whose nerveless or impatient or ill-directed grasp
it has wisely eluded.
On all accounts therefore it had fallen well to his purpose to make the
schoolmaster the dupe of a disagreeable jest. The jest had had unexpectedly
serious consequences: it had brought about the complete discomfiture of John
in his love affair; it had caused the trouble behind the troubled face with
which he had looked out upon every one during his illness.
The two young men had never met since; but the one was under a cloud; the
other was refulgent with his petty triumph; and he had set his face all the
more toward any further aggressiveness that occasion should bring happily to
his hand.
The mere road might have shamed him into manlier reflections. It was one of
the forest highways of the majestic bison opened ages before into what must
have been to them Nature's most gorgeous kingdom, her fairest, most magical
Babylon: with hanging gardens of verdure
everywhere swung from the tree-domes to the ground; with the earth one vast
rolling garden of softest verdure and crystal waters: an ancient Babylon of
the Western woods, most alluring and in the end most fatal to the luxurious,
wantoning wild creatures, which know no sin and are never found wanting.
This old forest street of theirs, so broad, so roomy, so arched with hoary
trees, so silent now and filled with the pity and pathos of their ruin--it
may not after all have been marked out by them. But ages before they had
ever led their sluggish armies eastward to the Mississippi and, crossing,
had shaken its bright drops from their shaggy low-hung necks on the eastern
bank--ages before this, while the sun of human history was yet silvering the
dawn of the world--before Job's sheep lay sick in the land of Uz-- before a
lion had lain down to dream in the jungle where Babylon was to arise and to
become a name,--this old, old, old high road may have been a footpath of the
awful mastodon, who had torn his terrible way through the tangled, twisted,
gnarled and rooted fastnesses of the wilderness as lightly as a wild young
Cyclone out of the South tears his way through the ribboned corn.
Ay, for ages the mastodon had trodden this dust. And, ay, for ages later the
bison. And, ay, for ages a people, over whose vanished towns and forts and
graves had grown the trees of a thousand years, holding in the mighty claws
of their roots the dust of those long, long secrets. And for centuries later
still along this path had crept or rushed or fled the Indians: now coming
from over the moon-loved, fragrant, passionate Southern mountains; now from
the sad frozen forests and steely marges of the Lakes: both eager for the
chase. For into this high road of the mastodon and the bison smaller
pathways entered from each side, as lesser watercourses run into a river:
the avenues of the round-horned elk, narrow, yet broad enough for the
tossing of his lordly antlers; the trails of the countless migrating
shuffling bear; the slender woodland alleys along which buck and doe and
fawn had sought the springs or crept tenderly from their breeding coverts or
fled like shadows in the race for life; the devious wolf-runs of the
maddened packs as they had sprung to the kill; the threadlike passages of
the stealthy fox; the tiny trickle of the squirrel, crossing, recrossing,
without number; and ever close beside all these, unseen, the grass-path or
the tree-path of the cougar.
Ay, both eager for the chase at first and then more eager for each other's
death for the sake of the whole chase: so that this immemorial game-trace
had become a war-path--a long dim forest street alive with the advance and
retreat of plume-bearing, vermilion-painted armies; and its rich black dust,
on which hereand there a few scars of sunlight now lay like stillest
thinnest yellow leaves, had been dyed from end to end with the red of the
heart.
And last of all into this ancient woodland street of war one day there had
stepped a strange new-comer--the Anglo-Saxon. Fairhaired, blue-eyed, always
a lover of Land and of Woman and therefore of Home; in whose blood beat the
conquest of many a wilderness before this--the wilderness of Britain, the
wilderness of Normandy, the wildernesses of the Black, of the Hercinian
forest, the wilderness of the frosted marshes of the Elbe and the Rhine and
of the North Sea's wildest wandering foam and fury.
Here white lover and red lover had metand fought: with the same high spirit
and overstrung will, scorn of danger, greed of pain; the same vehemence of
hatred and excess of revenge; the same ideal of a hero as a young man who
stands in the thick of carnage calm and unconscious of his wounds or rushes
gladly to any poetic beauty of death that is terrible and sublime. And
already the red lover was gone and the fair-haired lover stood the quiet
owner of the road, the last of all its long train of conquerors brute and
human--with his cabin near by, his wife smiling beside the spinning-wheel,
his baby crowing on the threshold.
History was thicker here than along the Appian Way and it might well have
stirred O'Bannon; but he rode shamblingly on, un-touched, unmindful. At
every bend his eye quickly swept along the stretch of road to the next turn;
for every man carried the eye of an eagle in his head in those days.
At one point he pulled his horse up violently. A large buckeye tree stood on
the roadside a hundred yards ahead. Its large thick leaves already full at
this season, drew around the trunk a seamless robe of darkest green. But a
single slight rent had been made on one side as though a bough bad been
lately broken off to form an aperture commanding a view of the road; and
through this aperture he could see something black within-as black as a
crow's wing.
O'Bannon sent his horse forward in the slowest walk: it was unshod; the
stroke of its hoofs was muffled by the dust; and he had approached quite
close, remaining himself unobserved, before he recognized the school-master.
He was reclining against the trunk, his hat off, his eyes closed; in the
heavy shadows he looked white and sick and weak and troubled. Plainly he was
buried deep in his own thoughts. If he had broken off those low boughs in
order that he might obtain a view of the road, he had forgotten his own
purpose; if he had walked all the way out to this spot and was waiting, his
vigilance had grown lax, his aim slipped from him.
Perhaps before his eyes the historic vision of the road had risen: that
crowded pageant, brute and human, all whose red passions, burning rights and
burning wrongs, frenzied fightings and awful deaths had left but the
sun-scarred dust, the silence of the woods clothing itself in green. And
from this panoramic survey it may have come to him to feel the shortness of
the day of his own life, the pitifulness of its earthly contentions, and
above everything else the sadness of the necessity laid upon him to come
down to the level of the cougar and the wolf.
But as O'Bannon struck his horse and would have passed on, he sprang up
quickly enough and walked out into the middle of the road. When the horse's
head was near he quietly took hold of the reins and throwing his weight
slightly forward, brought it to a stop.
"Let go!" exclaimed O'Bannon, furious and threatening.
He did let go, and stepping backward three paces, he threw off his coat and
waistcoat and tossed them aside to the green bushes: the action was a
pathetic mark of his lifelong habit of economy in clothes: a coat must under
all circumstances be cared for. He tore off his neckcloth so that his high
shirt collar fell away from his neck, showing the purple scar of his wound;
and he girt his trousers in about his waist, as a laboring man will trim
himself for neat, quick, violent work. Then with a long stride he came round
to the side of the horse's head, laid his hand on its neck and looked
O'Bannon in the eyes:
"At first I thought I'd wait till you got back to town. I wanted to catch
you on the street or, in a tavern where others could witness. I'm sorry. I'm
ashamed I ever wished any man to see me lay my hand on you.
"Since you came out to Kentucky, have I ever crossed you? Thwarted you in
any plan or purpose? Wronged you in any act? Ill-used your name? By
anything I have thought or wished or done taken from the success of your
life or made success harder for you to win?
"But you had hardly come out here before you began to attack me and you have
never stopped. Out of all this earth's prosperity you have envied me my
little share: you have tried to take away my school. With your own good name
gone, you have wished to befoul mine. With no force of character to rise in
the world, you have sought to drag me down. When I have avoided a brawl with
you, preferring to live my life in peace with every man, you have said I was
a coward, you unmanly slanderer! When I have desired to live the best life
I could, you have turned even that against me. You lied and you know you
lied--blackguard! You have laughed at the blood in my veins--the sacred
blood of my mother--"
His words choked him. The Scotch blood, so slow to kindle like a mass of
cold anthracite, so terrible with heat to the last ashes, was burning in him
now with flameless fury.
"I passed it all over, I only asked to go on my way and have you go yours.
But now--" He seemed to realize in an instant everything that he had
suffered in consequence of O'Bannon's last interference in his affairs. He
ground his teeth together and shook his head from side to side like an
animal that had seized its prey.
"Get down!" he cried, throwing his head back. "I can't fight you as an equal
but I will give you one beating for the low dog you are."
O'Bannon had listened immovable. He now threw the reins down and started to
throw his leg over the saddle but resumed his seat. "Let go!" he shouted. "I
will not be held and ordered."
The school-master tightened his grasp on the reins.
"Get down! I don't trust you."
O'Bannon held a short heavy whip. He threw this into the air and caught it
by the little end.
The school-teacher sprang to seize it; but O'Bannon lifted it backward over
his shoulder, and then raising himself high in his stirrups, brought it
down. The master saw it coming and swerved so that it grazed his ear; but it
cut into the wound on his neck with a coarse, ugly, terrific blow and the
blood spurted. With a loud cry of agony and horror, he reeled and fell
backward dizzy and sick and nigh to fainting. The next moment in the deadly
silence of a wild beast attacking to kill, he was on his feet, seized the
whip before it could fall again, flung it away, caught O'Bannon's arm and
planting his foot against the horse's shoulder, threw his whole weight
backward. The saddle turned, the horse sprang aside, and he fell again,
pulling O'Bannon heavily down on him.
There in the blood-dyed dust of the old woodland street, where bison and
elk, stag and lynx, wolf and cougar and bear had gored or torn each other
during the centuries before; there on the same level, glutting their
passion, their hatred, their revenge, the men fought out their strength--the
strength of that King of Beasts whose den is where it should be: in a man's
spirit.
A few afternoons after this a group of rough young fellows were gathered at
Peter's shop. The talk had turned to the subject of the fight: and every one
had thrown his gibe at O'Bannon, who had taken it with equal good nature.
>From this they had chaffed him on his fondness for a practical joke and his
awkward riding; and out of this, he now being angry, grew a bet with Horatio
Turpin that he could ride the latter's filly, standing hitched to the fence
of the shop. He was to ride it three times around the enclosure, and touch
it once each time in the flank with the spur which the young horseman took
from his heel.
At the first prick of it, the high-spirited mettlesome animal, scarcely
broken, reared and sprang forward, all but unseating him. He dropped the
reins and instinctively caught its mane, at the same time pressing his legs
more closely in against the animal's sides, thus driving the spur deeper.
They shouted to him to lie down, to fall off, as they saw the awful danger
ahead; for the maddened filly, having run wildly around the enclosure
several times, turned and rushed straight toward the low open doors of the
smithy and the pasture beyond. But he would not release his clutch; and with
his body bent a little forward, he received the
blow of the projecting shingles full on his head as the mare shot from under
him into the shop, scraping him off.
They ran to him and lifted him out of the sooty dust and laid him on the
soft green grass. But of consciousness there was never to be more for him:
his jest had reached its end.