Felix Guthrie rode far and fast that afternoon. The pillage of his
herds fired his blood, and his anger lent motive power to his sloth.
Many a mile his search led him through the tangled mountain woods,
and in devious ways along the craggy ledges, the sun sinking low in
the sky, the reeking horse flecked with foam, before the slaughtered
beef was at last found, far astray--according to the old herder's
report. Long before he reached the spot the circling flight of the
strong-winged mountain vultures, high in the air, served to verify
the story. Others rose gibbering from their quarry as his panting
horse galloped up the slope. He paused to assure himself how plain his
brand was marked upon the creature's hide. It had been killed, then,
in defiance of the name of Felix Guthrie, and the idea brought the
hot blood into his cheek. Killed for spite or for a purpose? And what
purpose? The choicest cuts only were taken, and the great carcass left
to waste and for the buzzards. He pondered vaguely as he once more put
his foot into the stirrup.
"Somebody ez likes ter feed on beef," he muttered his conclusion.
"They 'lowed I'd never find it out till the cattle war rounded up in
the fall; then think a wolf cotch 'em so fur from home." Suddenly the
conviction smote him that the larder which the beef had served could
hardly be distant. "They wouldn't want ter lug the meat fur," he said.
He flung himself into the saddle, riding slowly through the pathless
forest, guided only by the sun in the sky, the shadows on the ground.
He seemed as native to these deep seclusions as if he had been bred
a savage thing in their midst. And yet he had never before traversed
their intricacies. His adaptation to the conditions of these unknown
fastnesses was like a worldling's facile mastery of the ways of a
strange city. He looked about him with the speculative interest of a
new-comer. Once, when the woods gave way upon the crest of a precipice,
he rose in his stirrups to gaze over the jungle of the laurel and
upon the great mountain panorama stretching to the horizon. Here were
landmarks that he recognized, and again features of the landscape all
strange to his experience.
"I never knowed ez folks lived hyarabouts," he observed, in surprise.
"Ef I ain't powerful out'n my reckoning, Crazy Zebedee's cell mus' be
somewhar nigh."
He sighed deeply for the thought as he slowly took his way once more
into the dense dark-green leafage of the woods; the very sky was shut
out, and the ethereal blue and purple tints of the great mountain
masses, that seemed to express the idea of light almost as definitely
as the luminous heavens, were withdrawn, leaving a sense of loss and
monotony, like the vanishing mirage of a desert. And in the more heavy
glooms of the shadows he sighed again as if they weighed upon him.
"Zeb hed ruther hev hed this than the jail in town," he muttered, "an'
so he runned away, an' hid hyarabouts. I dun'no' ef he war so durned
crazy; the trees air mighty green, an' it air sorter peaceful out'n the
sight an' the sound o' folks."
He had a melancholy affinity with sorrow--from so long ago had its
fellowship with him dated. He realized, with almost the strength of
divination, the sentiments of the fate that the distraught creature
had wrought out here. He gazed with a sort of vicarious recognition
at the shadows, at the grewsome crags, at the deep, dark waters
of a pool, where some riving of the rocks suffered them to gather
lake-like. He wondered, with a morbid alertness of fancy, how did the
forest look to the hot and fevered brain?--what strange distortions
of fact metamorphosed these simple and majestic dendritic forms, and
the crags, and the waters? It was a severe tension of the sympathetic
power of reduplicating another's sentiment. He hardly knew what hideous
phantasy of speculation had crept into his mind. So far it had swung
from its wonted poise that when a sudden, faint, blood-curdling shriek
of foolish laughter rang through the utter silence, he did not for an
instant credit its reality. He only drew up his horse with a hasty
convulsive clutch upon the rein, a cold tremor stealing over him, and
sat motionless, a terrible superstition quickening his breath and
dilating his eye.
Naught stirred. The gloomy primeval magnificence of the forest seemed
tenantless. Adown none of those green ferny aisles, where the light
trembled to intrude, could a willing fancy discern even a flitting
dryadic shape, so native to these haunts. A fairy ring was on the
grass beneath a tulip-tree. But who did see the dance? Not even the
wind might come and go, for the woods would be lonely and were all
a-brooding. Far, far less possible than any was the wild, dishevelled,
haggard apparition that Felix Guthrie strained his eyes, yet feared,
to see. And when the laugh rose again, faint, faint from the depths
of the earth, ending in a wild derisive cackle, he became all at once
impressed with its genuineness, and the idea of "Crazy Zeb's cell"
flashed into his mind again, coupled with the recollection of his
injury and the object of his search.
"The very place! Hevin' a reg'lar barbecue off'n my beef, the lazy,
shif'less half-livers," he exclaimed, angrily, forgetting his terrors,
although his face had not regained its wonted hue.
He was all alert now, erect in the saddle, the reins drawn closely in
his hand, keenly peering to the right, and again to the left, as if he
had some definite goal in mind. For alien though he was to the place,
he had heard it frequently described in those horror-loving tales of
the winter-night firesides.
"A gate"--he repeated the oft-spoken words--"a gate of rocks that looks
like it mought open on hell; a gate, an' a windin' way walled in, an' a
big hollow in the solid cliff ez would be a cave 'ceptin' it air open
on one side, high, high above the ruver."
And then the pulsing of the current of a stream made its impression
upon his senses. He had not heard it before, so essentially sylvan
a sound it was, its monotony so germane to the silence. It was near
at hand, this river; and here was the deep pool wherein its hurrying
tributary was lulled, and dallied quiescent by the way. He lifted
his eyes to two great neighboring crags, each beetling toward the
other, the first of a tunnel-like series. A gateway? Could even fancy
have wrought these simple forms into the semblance of a portal?--he
marvelled with that incredulity which possesses the mind when looking
for the first time upon some reputed similitude in nature to an
artificial object. Nevertheless, he slowly dismounted, intently gazing
all the while, and as he gazed the resemblance grew upon him. So
definitely had the idea tutored his fancy that he had not a doubt when
he hitched his horse in the dense covert of the laurel, and took his
way across the narrowest portion of the stream by means of scrambling
cat-like along a pendulous branch of an overhanging tree, and springing
lightly from its elastic extremity near to the opposite bank. He waded
out, his long boots full of water--a small matter to a hardy woodsman,
save that he could hear the splash which thereafter accompanied each
step, as his feet were lifted in the roomy integuments, thus preventing
a noiseless approach. When he was at last beneath the great jagged gray
rocks, with their niches filled here with moss, and again flaunting a
tangled vine, he paused and looked up, a smile of iconoclastic ridicule
upon his face. So this was what was thought to resemble a gate by the
few who knew the place. And then he was minded to imagine how like an
infinitely magnified portal it was--so gaunt, so vast, so grim and
grewsome, leading down to the dark unknown! "Like the gates o' hell fur
true," he muttered, plunging into the gloomy, tunnel-like way.
For one moment after the darkness had enveloped him he fancied he heard
a step behind him--a shambling, stumbling step--and the snuffling snort
of a frightened horse. He paused in the narrow corridor, and looked
back, but the tortuous turnings of the passage obscured the entrance,
and the light that it admitted was feeble and far behind. He heard his
own breath in a quickly drawn _susurrus_; it echoed sibilantly. He
might have counted the throbs of his heart. It was a chilly place, but
the surge of excitement warmed his blood, and with another turn he had
burst forth from the narrow passage.
For all his expectancy, his preparation for the emergency, he was dazed
for a moment as he stood in the open space facing the great western
sky. The breadth of this impression left scant room for detail--a
charring fire, where only an ember glowed; a recumbent, somnolent
figure wrapped in a blanket beside it; two men playing cards on a
saddle; a horse's head looking out from a shadowy niche; and a cry of
rage as a man who was grooming the creature turned, with the curry-comb
in his hand. The sound was like a bugle call to rouse the others. It
rang through Guthrie's senses with a menacing clamor. Here was matter
far more significant than cattle-stealing; he had tracked home some
terrible deed, he knew by the unguarded anger of the startled tones.
His logic, such as he had, made itself felt in deeds. Long before the
slow processes of his brain had consciously evolved the idea of danger,
he had drawn his pistols, and stood, his back against the wall, a
weapon in either hand.
It was an attitude that commended a temporizing policy and invited
parley. Taken off their guard, the party made an ineffectual effort to
secure their arms. The man beside the horse had indeed grasped a rifle
that leaned against the wall, but it was an old-fashioned weapon, whose
single discharge would exhaust its offensive and defensive capacities,
leaving him at a pitiable disadvantage against the six-shooters which
the intruder held, and therefore he forbore even to sight it. One of
the card-players had struggled up on his knee, his hand behind him
grasping his revolver in his pistol pocket. In view of the bead drawn
upon him, he did not dare to pull it; he moved not a muscle. The other
held nothing more deadly than a "bobtailed flush," which a moment ago
he had regarded as the extremest spite of fate. There was something
ludicrous in his petrified attitude, as he sat mechanically holding
his cards before him, his mind apparently indissolubly associated with
the game, his eyes fixed upon Guthrie as if he had been some amazing
combination--a "show of hands" altogether uncalled for and beyond all
limits of expectation. To none of them was the moment charged with such
signal force as to Steve Yates, rising from his affected slumber, for
it was only by feigning thus among his merry comrades that he could be
alone with his own thoughts. He turned his face, full of astonished
anxiety, upon Guthrie, and then he turned it away, suffused with shame,
anticipating accusation. It came upon the instant.
[Illustration: "IT WAS AN ATTITUDE THAT COMMENDED A TEMPORIZING
POLICY."]
"Hyar ye air, Steve Yates! This is whar ye hev disappeared to, hey? I'd
do yer wife an' Mose a favior ef I war ter fill up yer carcass with
lead. An' ef I hed it ter spare, I'd do it."
Guthrie looked about, expectant of the signs of some illegal
occupation--not moonshining, for his judgment and conscience could
approve of this defiance of the law, as well as his heart bear it
sympathy, but something that outraged the popular sense of right. There
was naught, unless those fine-limbed shadowy equine figures might
suggest it.
"Hoss-thievin', hey? An' hed ter steal my cattle ter feed ye on beef
whilst hid out?"
"Say, now, Fee, war _that_ yer cow?" cried Beckett, the man under the
insufficient protection of the "bobtailed flush." Perhaps the fact of
being a helpless object of pity to his opponents both at cards and
at arms quickened his sense of expedients, and lubricated his clumsy
tongue. "We-uns didn't know it. Durned ef we don't pay ye fur it," with
an air of unctuous sympathy.
"Naw, ye won't," retorted Guthrie--"ye won't, now. I won't tech yer
lyin', thievin', black-hearted money!"
A sudden anxiety crossed the face of Derridge, who still stood by the
horse's side. "It's jes' ez well ye don't want our money, _fur we ain't
got none_," he said, flashing a significant glance at the card-player,
who was still mechanically holding his cards well together, although
his opponent's hand lay scattered on the saddle that served as board.
"Pete means we'd gin ye a beastis fur the one we tuk. But ef ye don't
want her, go lackin'." He sarcastically waved his hand, and the gesture
in a measure shielded the other hand as he slyly cocked the rifle.
"Steve Yates hev got inter a sorter difficult with the law, an' axed
we-uns ter take him in," continued Derridge, recovering his reasoning
faculties from the chaos of his fear and surprise, and adding to them
the protean influences of imagination. "We-uns stop by hyar at Crazy
Zeb's cell whenst ridin' arter cattle, ter swop lies, an' take a leetle
drink, an' play kyerds; leastwise the t'others, not me. Them boys air
gettin' ter be tur'ble gamesters, a-bettin' thar money an' gear an'
sech, an' wunst in a while hevin' a reg'lar knock-down an' drag-out
fight. I ain't s'prised none ef the church folks in the cove hears o'
thar goin's on an' turns 'em out; they bein' members in good standing,
too; an' I wouldn't blame pa'son an' the deacons an' sech. Naw, sir, I
wouldn't."
"Me nuther," said Guthrie, his vigilance relaxed, his credulity
coerced. All at once the gathering of the coterie in this sequestered
place, that had been so mysterious a moment ago, seemed readily
explicable. Jollity, companionship, card-playing, sloth--all combined
to attract the mountain loafers, expert to fend off work with any
odd dallying with time. He felt the pistol in each hand a cumbrous
superfluity. He did not realize why he had drawn them, why he had so
quickly assumed the aggressive. He wondered that, interrupted thus in
their pacific absorptions, they did not reproach him. It was no longer
in suspicion, but with a sort of attempt to justify his precipitancy,
that he demanded, "What hev Steve Yates been a-doin' of ter run him off
from home an' be searched fur ez dead?"
He had unconsciously moved several paces from the wall; the weapons in
his hands were lowered and hung listlessly; the fire-light slanted
athwart the place; the monstrous elongated shadows of the men extended
across the floor and up the side of the niche; a bee went booming by;
the river sang; and the entrance behind him was so noiseless that these
trivial sounds he heard, and not Cheever's step.
The leader of the gang wore an excited face as he suddenly came in.
It turned pale in the moment. He threw his arm across his eyes with
a wild, hoarse cry, while the others stared in amazement, until Bob
Millroy, also entering, his superstition always on the alert, was
reminded of that strange intruder here revealed once before to Cheever,
then visible to none else.
"Thar, now! the extry man!" he cried out, hardly less discomposed.
Guthrie, a trifle shaken by the uncomprehended commotion, reverted to
the instinct of self-defence. He perceived, with a flutter of fear and
a pang of self-reproach, that his remitted watchfulness had permitted
him to be surrounded. They had all drawn their pistols in the interval.
He spoke upon his impulse. "Lemme git out'n this!" he growled, half
articulately, advancing upon Cheever, intending to push by to the only
exit. Cheever, restored by the sight of the revolvers and the sudden
recognition of the young mountaineer's face, laid a hand upon Guthrie's
shoulder, grinding his teeth, and with a concentrated fury in his eyes.
"So ye hev fund out whar we-uns war, ye peekin', pryin' sneak; _she_
tole ye ez Steve war along o' we-uns--the leetle Pettingill she-devil,
that frazzle-headed vixen of a Letishy!"
Her name stunned Guthrie in some sort; he stood wide-eyed, quiescent,
in amazed dismay, hearing naught of the babel of remonstrance from the
others: "Hesh! hesh! he dun'no' nuthin'. Don't tell him nuthin'! Let
him be--let him be!"
Guthrie realized the situation only when Cheever, whose grip prevented
the use of the pistols, cried suddenly, "Take that!" and he heard
his flesh tear under the knife, and felt a pain like the pangs of
dissolution, as his warm blood gushed forth--"an' that! an' _that_!"
The next moment all the thunders of heaven seemed loosed in the cavern.
How he wrenched himself away he could never say. He only knew that he
was firing alternately the pistols in both hands, retreating backward
through the dark tunnel. He flung himself upon the horse that stood
saddled and bridled cropping the grass without, and he was miles away
before he realized that the hot pursuit, which he had heard at first in
full hue and cry after him, must of necessity be futile, since it was
Cheever's incomparable steed that in his haste he bestrode, and not his
own.
He felt a certain glow of achievement, a fervor of pride in his
prowess; no slight thing it was to have escaped with his life from
that desperate gang of outlaws. With a kind of valiant boastfulness he
made light of his wounds as his step-mother dressed them, herself the
impersonation of a panther whose young is wounded, snarling and fierce
and tender. She had a sort of reverential admiration of his courage,
his ferocity, that her own savagery had fostered. It was said in the
cove that her semblance of kindness and affection for him was the
natural outgrowth of her respect for anybody that was a "better man"
than she--a pluckier fighter. She, too, would admit no efficacy in
aught that Cheever could do.
"I'll be bound them pistol balls o' yourn worked many a button-hole
whar thar warn't no buttons in the gyarmints ter match!" she cried,
bitterly joying in the possible execution of the shots.
But Ephraim surveyed the yawning slashes with a groan, and went with
averted eyes hastily out of the door, and an old house-dog stood beside
Felix, and wheezed pitifully and licked his hand with an unrecked-of
sympathy.
Felix was out next day, but with that singular parchment-like pallor
that ensues on a great loss of blood. Mrs. Guthrie had remonstrated
against all exertion, then openly applauded his decision.
"Ef 'twar you-uns, Eph," she said, looking after Felix as he rode
Cheever's horse down the winding mountain way, "I mought look for'ard
ter three solid weeks a-nussin' ye; ye would be tucked up in bed. But
twenty yoke o' oxen couldn't hold Fee Guthrie down; he couldn't even
die handy, like other folks. He hev got the very sperit o' livin' in
him. Ye mark my words, he ain't a-goin' ter die handy."
And in truth it was a very spirited and gallant figure that the fine,
clean-limbed roan carried down into the cove. Guthrie's curling hair
flaunted back from his broad shoulders; his wide-brimmed hat was cocked
to one side; his spurs jingled on the heels of his great boots. And
he sat in the saddle proudly erect, in defiance of the sore-rankling
wounds--the knife had not had the mercy to be sharp, and in lieu of
clean cuts had torn and jagged the flesh. There was one wound sharper
than all, that no blade had dealt, that was so keen, so deep, so
insidious that it made a coward of him, and set astir a chill in his
blood and a quiver in his heart.
It was one word--Letitia--from lips that he had never thought to hear
it. Letitia! So she knew of Steve Yates's crime; and more than once he
wondered what it might be, pausing to look absently down with unseeing
eyes, as his stirrup-irons, sweeping through the blooming weeds that
bordered the bridle-path, sent the petals flying. Was she a party,
too, to the deception the wife maintained, to her pretended desertion,
her affected ignorance of Yates's whereabouts? "Letishy oughtn't ter
be mixed up in sech," Guthrie said to himself. "_She_ oughtn't ter be
abidin' along o' Mis' Yates, whose husband air hid out with a gang o'
evil-doers, purtendin' ter be dead an' disappeared. Litt oughtn't ter
know about thar thieveries an' dens. It can't tech _her_--thar ill-got
gains--but she oughtn't ter know secrets agin the law."
He remembered, with a throb between anger and pain, the evenings that
he had spent at the Yates cabin, the air of desolate sorrow that the
deserted wife maintained, even when she seemed to seek to cast it
off, and to respond to neighborly kindness. A flush mounted to his
pallid cheek, he so resented a deceit sought to be practised upon him.
And how ready a gull he must have seemed, he thought, with a sneer
at the memory of his cumbrous phrases of hope and consolation, at
which Letitia had not scrupled to laugh. "_She_ warn't puttin' on no
lackadaisical pretence," he thought, with a glowing eye. "She hev got
the truth in her too deep. She jes' busied herse'f a-spinnin' ez gay ez
a bird, an' tole them queer tales ez Mr. Shattuck hev gin out, 'bout
cave-dwellers long time ago, an' sun-worshippers, an' a kentry sunk in
the sea, named Atlantis or sech outlandish word; tole 'em over agin
nearly every evenin'. An' I could listen through eternity! She hev got
sech smartness an' mem'ry. I dun'no' how she _do_ make out ter remember
sech a lot o' stuff. An' Mis' Yates--a deceitful sinner that woman
air!--a-bustin' out cryin' agin, fust thing ye know. Litt oughtn't ter
'sociate with sech ez knows secrets agin the law."