IV

The dank, green smell hung in their nostrils after they had left the

ravine for a fertile tableland. They trotted through a village strung

along the road, a village of deeply-scrolled eaves under the thick foliage

of maples, of an incredible number of churches--"Reformed," "Established,"

qualified Methodist, uncompromising Baptist. They were all built of wood,

and in varying states of repair that bore mute witness to the persuasive

eloquence of their several pastors.

Beyond, the way rose once more, sunny and dusty and monotonous. The priest

was absorbed, muttering unintelligibly over a small, flexible volume. The

conversation between Lettice Hollidew and Buckley fell into increasing

periods of silence. The stranger lit a fresh cigar, the smoke from which

hung out back in such clouds that the power of the stage might well have

been mistaken for steam.

The road grew steeper still, and, fastening the reins about the whipstock,

Gordon swung out over the wheel and walked. He was a spare man, sinewy and

upright, and past the golden age of youth. He lounged over the road in a

careless manner that concealed his agile strength, his tireless endurance.

This indolent carriage and his seemingly slight build had, on more than

one occasion, been disastrously misleading to importunate or beery

strangers. He could, and did, fight whenever chance offered, with a cold

passion, a destructive abandon, that had won him, throughout the turbulent

confines of Greenstream, a flattering measure of peace.

In this manner his father, just such another, had fought before him, and

his grandfather before that. Nothing further back was known in

Greenstream, It was well known that the first George Gordon Makimmon--the

Mac had been speedily debauched by the slurring, local speech--had made

his way to Virginia from Scotland, upon the final collapse of a Lost

Cause. The instinct of the highlander had led him deep into the rugged

ranges, where he had lived to see the town and county of Greenstream

crystallize about his log walls and stony patch.

There, finally breaking down the resistance of a heroic constitution, he

had succeeded in drinking himself to death. His son had grown up imbued

with local tradition and ideas, and was settling seriously to a repetition

of the elder's fate, when the Civil War offered him a wide, recognized

field for the family belligerent spirit. He was improving this chance to

the utmost with Morley's Raiders when a slug ended his activities in the

second year of the war.

It was characteristic of the Makimmons that they should each have left

their family in precarious circumstances. They were not, they would

contemptuously assert, farmers or merchants. When the timber was cut from

the valley, the underbrush burned, and the superb cloth of grass started

that had formed the foundation of a number of comfortable fortunes, the

Makimmons, scornful of the effort, had remained outside the profit.

Such income as they enjoyed had been obtained from renting their acres to

transient and indifferent farmers. In the crises of life and death, or

under the desire for immediate and more liquor, they sold necessary

slices. This continued until nothing remained for the present Gordon

Makimmon but the original dwelling--now grotesquely misshapen from the

addition of casual sheds and extensions--and a small number of acres on

the outskirts of town.

There he lived with Clare, his sister. Their mother, the widow of that

Makimmon whose disputatious temper had been dignified by the epitaph of

"heroic sacrifice," had died of a complicity of patent medicines the

winter before. An older brother had totally disappeared from the

cognizance of Greenstream during Gordon's boyhood; and a married sister,

completing the tale, lived at the opposite end of the county, held close

by poverty and her own large brood.

Summer and winter Gordon Makimmon drove the stage between Greenstream and

Stenton. At dawn he left Greenstream, arriving in Stenton at the end of

day; the following morning he re-departed for Greenstream. This

mechanical, monotonous routine satisfied his need without placing too

great a strain on his energy; he enjoyed rolling over the summer roads or

in the crisp clear sunlight of winter; he liked the casual converse of the

chance passengers, the inevitable deference to his local knowledge, the

birdlike chatter and flattery of the young women. He liked, so easily, to

play oracle and wiseman; he liked the admiration called forth by a certain

theatrical prowess with the reins and whip.

On the occasions when he was too drunk to drive--not over often--a

substitute was quietly found until he recovered and little was said.

Gordon Makimmon was invaluable in a public charge, a trust--he had never

lost a penny of the funds he continually carried for deposit in the

Stenton banks; no insult had been successfully offered to any daughter of

Greenstream accompanying him without other care in the stage.

V

They rose steadily, crossing the roof of a ridge, and descended abruptly

beyond. Green prospects opened before them--a broad valley was disclosed,

with a broad, shallow stream dividing its meadows; scattered farmhouses,

orderly, prosperous, commanded their shorn acres. A mailbag was detached

and left at a crossroad in charge of two little girls, primly important,

smothered in identical, starched pink sunbonnets. The Greenstream stage

splashed through the shallow, shining ford; the ascent on the far side of

the valley imperceptibly began.

The sun was almost at the zenith; the shadow of the stage fell short and

sharp on the dry, loamy road; a brown film covered the horses and vehicle;

it sifted through the apparel of the passengers and coated their lips. The

rise to the roof of the succeeding range seemed interminable; the road

looped fields blue with buckwheat, groves of towering, majestic chestnut,

a rocky slope, where, by a crevice, a swollen and sluggish rattlesnake

dropped from sight.

At last, in the valley beyond, the half-way house, dinner and a change of

horses were reached. The forest swept down in an unbroken tide to the

porch of the isolated roadside tavern; a swift stream filled the wooden

structure with the ceaseless murmur of water. In the dusty, gold gloom of

a spacious stable Gordon unhitched his team. Outside, in a wooden trough,

he splashed his hands and face, then entered the dining-room.

A long table was occupied by an industrious company that broke the

absorbed silence only by explosive requests for particularized dishes.

Above the table hovered the wife of the proprietor, constantly waving a

fly brush--streamers of colored paper fastened to a slender stick--above

the heads of her husband and guests.

Gordon Makimmon ate largely and rapidly, ably seconded by the strange

passenger and Buckley Simmons. The priest, Merlier, ate sparingly, in an

absent, perfunctory manner. Lettice Hollidew, at the opposite end of the

table, displayed the generous but dainty appetite of girlhood. The coat to

her suit, with a piece of lace pinned about the collar, and a new, flat

leather bag with a silver initial, hung from the back of her chair.

They again listlessly took their places in the stage. Buckley Simmons

emulated the stranger in lighting a mahogany-colored cigar with an

ornamental band which Buckley moved toward his lips before the swiftly

approaching conflagration. Gordon drove with his mind pleasantly vacant,

lulled by the monotonous miles of road flickering through his vision, the

shifting forms of distant peaks, virid vistas, nearby trees and bushes,

all saturated in the slumberous, yellow, summer heat.

Gradually the aspect of their surroundings changed, the forms of the

mountains grew bolder, streams raced whitely over broken, rocky beds; the

ranks of the forest closed up, only a rare trail broke the road. The

orderly farmhouses, the tilled fields, disappeared; a rare cabin, roughly

constructed of unbarked logs, dominated a parched patch, cut from the

heart-breaking tangle of the wild, a thread of smoke creeping from a

precarious chimney above the far, unbroken canopy of living green.

Children with matted hair, beady-eyed like animals, in bag-like slips,

filled the doorways; adults, gaunt-jawed and apathetic, straightened

momentarily up from their toil with the stubborn earth.

At the sharpest ascent yet encountered Gordon again left the stage.

Buckley Simmons recalled a short cut through the wood, and noisily

entreated Lettice Hollidew to accompany him.

"It's awfully pretty," he urged, "and easy; no rocks to cut your shoes.

I'll go ahead with a stick to look out for snakes."

She shuddered charmingly at the final item, and vowed she would not go a

step. But he persisted, and in the end persuaded her. The stranger

continued unmoved in his place; Merlier shifted not a pound's weight, but

sat with a cold, indifferent face turned upon the straining horses.

Gordon walked ahead, whistling under his breath, and, with a single

skilful twist, he rolled a cigarette from a muslin bag of tobacco labeled

Green Goose.

The short cut into which Buckley and Lettice Hollidew disappeared refound

the road, Gordon knew, over a mile above; and he was surprised, shortly,

to see the girl's white waist moving rapidly into the open. She was alone,

breathing in excited gasps, which she struggled to subdue. Her face that

five minutes before had been so creamily, placidly composed was now hotly

red; her eyes shone with angry, unshed tears.

Gordon's lips formed a silent exclamation ... Buckley evidently had made

an error in judgment. Lettice stepped out into the road, and, plainly

unwilling to encounter the questioning eyes in the stage, walked rigidly

beside Gordon. Behind the obvious confusion, the hurt surprise of her

countenance, an unexpected, dormant quality had been stirred into being.

The crimson flood in her cheeks had stained more than her clear skin--it

had colored her gracile and candid girlhood so that it would never again

be pellucid; into it had been spilled some of the indelible dye of woman.

Gordon Makimmon gazed with newly-awakened interest at Lettice; for the

first time he thought of her as other than a school-girl; for the first

time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex.

Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting,

unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an

intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable

lapse of time. A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him ... she had been

in his, Gordon Makimmon's, care. The anger touched his pride, his

self-esteem, and grew cold, deliberate: he watched with a contracted jaw

for Simmons' appearance.

"Why," he exclaimed, in a lowered voice, "that lown tore your pretty

shirtwaist!"

"He had no reason at all," she protested; "it was just horrid." A little

shiver ran over her. "He ... he held me and kissed ... hateful."

"I'll teach him to keep his kissing where it's liked," Gordon proclaimed.

His instinctively theatrical manner diminished not a jot the menace of the

threat.

"Oh! please, please don't fight." She turned a deeply concerned

countenance upon him. "That would hurt me very much more--"

"It won't be a fight," he reassured her, "only a little hint, something

for Buck to think about. No one will know." He could not resist adding,

"Most people go a good length before fighting with me."

"I have heard that you are awfully--" she hesitated, then, "brave."

"It was 'ugly' you heard," he quickly supplied the pause. "But that's not

true; I don't fight like some men, just for a good time. Why, in the towns

over the West Virginia line they fight all night; they'll fight--kill each

other--for two bits, or a drink of liquor.... There's Buckley now, coming

in above."

Buckley Simmons entered the road from a narrow trail a number of yards

ahead of the stage. He tramped heavily, holding a hickory switch in one

hand, cutting savagely at the underbrush. The stage leisurely caught up to

him until the horses' heads were opposite his thickset form. Gordon, from

the other side of the team, swung himself into his seat. He grasped the

whip, and, leaning out, swept the heavy leather thong in a vicious circle.

It whistled above the horses, causing them to plunge, and the lash,

stopped suddenly, drew across Buckley Simmons' face. For an instant his

startled countenance was white, and then it was wet, gleaming and scarlet.

He pressed his hands to his mouth, and stumbled confused into the ditch.

Gordon stopped the stage. Merlier gave vent to a sibilant exclamation,

and Lattice Hollidew covered her eyes. The stranger sprang to the road,

and hurried to the injured man's side. Gordon got down slowly. "Where did

it get him?" he inquired, with a shallow show of concern. He regarded with

indifferent eyes the gaping cut across Simmons' jaw, while the stranger

was converting a large linen handkerchief into a ready bandage.

Buckley, in stammering, shocked rage, began to curse Gordon's clumsiness,

and, in his excitement, the wound bled more redly. "You will have to keep

quiet," he was told, "for this afternoon anyhow."

"I'm not a 'dam' blind bat," Gordon informed his victim in a rapid

undertone; "my eyes are sharper than usual to-day." Above the stained

bandage Simmons' gaze was blankly enraged. "That won't danger you none,"

Gordon continued, in louder, apparently unstudied tones; "but you can't

kiss the girls for a couple of weeks."

Buckley Simmons was assisted into the rear seat; Lettice sat alone, her

face hidden by the flowery rim of her hat; Merlier was silent,

indifferent, bland. The way grew increasingly wilder, and climbed and

climbed; at their back dipped and spread mile upon mile of unbroken

hemlock; the minute clearings, the solitary cabins, were lost in the still

expanse of tree tops; the mountain towered blue, abrupt, before them. The

stranger consulted a small map. "This is Buck Mountain," he announced

rather than queried; "Greenstream Village is beyond, west from here, with

the valley running north and south."

"You have got us laid out right," Gordon assented; "this all's not new to

you." It was as close to the direct question as Gordon Makimmon could

bring himself. And, in the sequel, it proved the wisdom of his creed; for,

obviously, the other avoided the implied query. "The Government prints a

good map," he remarked, and turned his shoulder squarely upon any

prolongation of the conversation.

They were now at the summit of Buck Mountain, but dense juniper thickets

hid from them any extended view. After a turn, over the washed, rocky

road, the Greenstream Valley lay outspread below.

The sun was lowering, and the shadow of the western range swept down the

great, somber, wooded wall towering against an illimitable vault of rosy

light; the lengthening shadows of the groves of trees on the lower slope

fell into the dark, cool, emerald cleft. It was scarcely three fields

across the shorn, cultivated space to the opposite, precipitous barrier;

between, the valley ran narrow and rich into a faint, broken haze of peaks

thinly blue on either hand. And, held in the still green heart of that

withdrawn, hidden space, the village lay along its white highway.

The stage dropped with short, sharp rushes down the winding road; the

houses lost the toy-like aspect of distance; cowbells clashed faintly; a

dog's bark quivered, suspended in hushed space. The stage passed the

first, scattered houses, and was speedily in the village: each dwelling

had, behind a white picket fence, a strip of sod and a tangle of simple,

gay flowers--scarlet, white, purple and yellow, now coated with a fine,

chalky, summer dust. The dwellings were, for the most part, frame, with a

rare structure of brick under mansard slates green with moss. The back

yards were fenced from the fields, on which hay had been cut and stood in

high ricks, now casting long, mauve shadows over the close, brilliant

green. The stage passed the white board structure of the Methodist Church,

and stopped before the shallow portico of the post-office.