THE SILENT WATCHER
Troubles never come singly. Florence’s second shock came close on the
heels of the first. Having decided to make the best of a bad situation
and to allow her friends and fellow clansmen to arrange the legal battle
over her trial for carrying a concealed weapon, she went to her work next
day with a brave heart.
With all her strong resolves, the look on the faces of her smaller
charges came near melting her to tears. All knew of the impending trial.
A few greeted her with a glassy stare. These were children of her
enemies. For the most part they looked at her with such a sad and
sorrowful longing as one might expect to find on the face of a mother
whose son has been ordered shot.
“Surely,” Marion said to her, “being tried by a jury in the mountains
must be a solemn affair.”
“It is,” said Florence, swallowing hard, “and Ransom Turner told me last
night this was the first time in the history of the mountains that a
woman has been tried for carrying concealed weapons.”
“It will be a great occasion!” Marion could see the humor of the
situation. “When is it to come off?”
“Ransom says that the judge has set the trial a week from next Monday.”
“That’s school election day. All Laurel Branch will be there!”
“Let them come!” said Florence, a gleam of fire in her eye. “I haven’t
done anything to be ashamed of! They want a fight. We’ll give them one—a
battle royal! They’ve already lost one point; they must give me a jury.
We’ll make them lose some more. I shouldn’t wonder if the tide would turn
and the power that is higher than I would turn this bit of meanness and
trickery to our advantage.”
The forenoon of that day passed much as had the earlier hours of other
days—study and lessons, recess, then again the droning of voices blended
with the lazy buzzing of flies and the distant songs of birds.
In spite of the quiet smoothness of the passing hours, there was in the
air that ominous tenseness which one feels but cannot explain.
This was heightened fourfold by a strange occurrence. Just as Florence
was about to ring the bell after the noon hour, Marion drew her to a
gaping window that looked out on the upper landscape and pointed with a
trembling finger to a solitary figure perched atop a giant sandstone rock
that lay in the center of a deserted clearing a few hundred yards above
the schoolhouse.
The figure was that of a mountaineer. At that distance it would have been
difficult to have told whether he was young or old. Something about the
way he sat slouching over the rifle that lay across his lap reminded
Florence of Black Blevens. An involuntary shudder shook her.
“On Lookout Rock!” she breathed.
The story of that rock they knew too well. In earlier days, when a deadly
feud was raging up and down the creek, this rock had been the lookout for
Black Blevens’ clan. There, on top of the rock, with rifle at his side, a
clansman would watch the movements of his enemy. Smoke curling from a
distant chimney, a woman hoeing corn in the field, the distant boom of a
rifle, all were signs that he read and passed on by signals to his
distant clansmen.
“There hasn’t been a watcher on that rock for years, they say,” said
Florence. Her teeth were fairly chattering.
“See! He’s looking this way. Seems that he must be expecting something to
happen.”
“Wha—what could it be?”
Florence stood trembling, all unnerved for one instant. Then, having
shaken herself as one will to awaken from an unpleasant dream, she became
her brave self again.
It was well she regained her courage. Fifteen minutes later, while Marion
was outside beneath a great beech tree, hearing a lesson, Florence sat
watching over a study hour. On hearing a sound of commotion she looked up
quickly to see her fifty children running for doors and windows. In the
back of the room Bud Wax and Ballard Skidmore stood glaring at each other
and reaching for their hip pockets.
One instant the teacher’s head whirled. The next that dread rumor sped
through her brain: “Bud has been carrying his pistol gun to school.”
Then, like a powerful mechanical thing, she went into action. One instant
she had leaped from the platform; the next found her half way down the
aisle. Before the slow muscles of Bud’s arm had carried a hand to his
pocket, he felt both wrists held in a vice-like grip and a voice that was
strange, even to the speaker herself, said:
“Ballard Skidmore, leave the room. All the rest of you take your seats.”
Had Bud Wax possessed the will power to struggle, he would have found
himself powerless in this girl’s grasp. Nature had endowed her with a
magnificent physique. She had neither neglected it nor abused it. Gym,
when there was gym, hiking, climbing, rowing, riding, had served to keep
her fit for this moment.
As Bud sank weakly to his seat he felt something slide from his pocket.
“My pistol gun,” his paralized mind registered weakly. The next moment he
saw the teacher gripping the butt of that magnificent thing of black
rubber and blue steel and marching toward the front of the room.
“James Jordon,” she said as she tried to still the wild beating of her
heart, “go bring me two sandstones as large as your head.”
“Yes, mam.” James went out trembling.
Florence calmly tilted out the cylinder of the gun and allowed the
cartridges to fall out. After that she stood with the weapon dangling in
her hand.
When the rocks had been placed on her desk she laid the pistol on the
flattest one, then lifted the other for a blow.
She did not look at Bud. She dared not. When a small child she had
possessed a doll that was all her own. A ruthless hand had broken the
doll’s head. No doll ever meant more to a girl than his first gun meant
to a mountain boy.
Without looking, she felt the agony on the boy’s face as the stone
descended. Without listening she heard him crumple in his seat as the
rubber grip broke, springs flew and the barrel bent.
When there remained only an unrecognizable mass of broken and twisted
steel, she walked slowly to the open window and dropped it out. Turning,
she looked them all squarely in the eye (all but Bud, whose face was down
on his desk) and said in her ordinary tune of voice:
“You may resume your lessons.”
In one corner a fly, caught in a spider’s web, droned complainingly. From
a nearby bush there came the liquid notes of a wild canary, while faint
and from far away there came the low of a cow. Save for the occasional
swish of a turned page, no other sound disturbed the Sabbath-like
stillness of the school room. And, as Florence’s glance strayed to the
hillside and sentinal rock, she saw that the silent watcher was gone.
Had Florence been able to open the book of the future and to read there
an account of the far reaching events that were to come out of the
moments that had just passed, she would have been surprised and startled.
As she could not, she could only wonder, and in her heart there was a
feeling of dread.
The hours that followed were filled with a strange, subdued silence. The
careless rustle of pages was gone. Gone, too, was the uneasy shuffle of
feet on the plain board floor. Children recited in tones little above a
whisper. It was as if the room were empty; no children there. And yet,
there they were. Florence saw them with her eyes, but when she closed her
eyes she was subject to an illusion, a feeling that they had vanished.
When the last long hours had dragged its way to a weary end, the children
crept silently away. On the soft soil their bare feet made no sound, and
from their lips there came never a whisper.
Bud Wax was the last to leave and looking neither to right nor left, with
his head upon his breast he disappeared at once in the shadows of a
paw-paw thicket.
Marion had gone ahead with some of the younger children to help them
across the river.
Florence remained behind. As the last child disappeared from sight, she
left the schoolhouse to strike off up the leafy bank and on up the
hillside until, quite out of breath from climbing, she threw herself upon
a soft bed of ferns to bury her face in her hands and burst out crying.
As she lay there pressing her throbbing temples, it seemed to her that
all worth while things in the world had passed away. Being only a girl,
she could not fathom the depth of emotion nor measure the flood tide of
bitterness that flowed over her soul. She only knew that at last memory
came to her rescue, the memory of an old, old story in the Bible of a man
who, having won a marvelous victory over great odds, had gone far away
into the wilderness to at last throw himself prostrate upon the ground
and ask that he might die.
As the girl recalled the story she felt that she had much in common with
this old prophet of Israel. The enemy of her school had tried to destroy
it. She had defeated his end. How long she would remain victor she could
not tell. She only knew that to-day she had won.
“And to-day,” she assured herself stoutly, “is enough. Let to-morrow care
for itself.”
Then of a sudden she recalled a promise. She had told Jensie Crider, one
of her most promising pupils, that she would come to her house and stay
the night. She must be away at once.
An hour later found her on the shake roofed porch of a two room cabin far
up on the side of Big Black Mountain. The light faded from the tallest,
most distant peak as her tiny young hostess bade her shy welcome.
To one accustomed, as Florence was, to the homes of rich and fertile
valleys, this mountain cabin seemed strangely meager. Two rooms, two
beds, a table of pine boards, a fireplace hung with rows of red peppers
and braids of onions, three splint bottomed chairs, a pile of home woven
coverlids in the corner, a box cupboard nailed to the wall, a few dishes
in the cupboard, that was all.
And yet it was scrupulously clean. The hearth had been brushed, the floor
scrubbed and sanded, the coverlids on the beds were spotless and the few
cheap stone dishes shone like imported china.
“It’s something that people from the outside don’t realize,” Florence
told herself. “Many of these mountain folks, living here shut off from
the world, with few tools and many difficulties, would put to shame many
of those whose opportunities have been great. Surely their children
should have a chance! And they shall!” She clenched her hands tight as
this thought passed through her mind. She was thinking of the coming
school election and of the things they would do if they won.
“If we win?” she whispered. “We will win! We will!”
One incident of the evening in that cabin remained long in her memory.
They were at supper. Since there were but four plates and four chairs,
the two younger children must wait while Jensie ate with her teacher and
the father and mother.
The meal was simple enough—corn bread baked on the hearth, fried string
beans, a glass of wild cherry jelly and a plain cake with very little
sugar. The luxury of the meal was a plate of boiled eggs. On the rich,
broad-sweeping prairies, or in cities, one thinks of eggs as staple food.
In the mountains they are hoarded as a golden treasure, to be traded at
the store for calico, shoes, and other necessities of life.
But this night, in honor of the guest, Jensie had served six shining
white eggs. Florence saw the faces of the children glow with
anticipation.
“Probably haven’t had eggs for months,” was her mental comment.
As she took her egg and cut it in two with her knife, it was like the
breaking of bread in sacrament.
As the meal was eaten she watched the eager eyes of the two waiting
children. Then, of a sudden, in the eyes of those little ones, a near
tragedy occurred.
“Have another egg,” said the hostess to Florence, passing the plate as
she did so.
Without thinking, she put out a hand to take one. Then, of a sudden, the
youngest child threw herself flat on the floor while her little form
shook with silent sobbing.
“No, I don’t think I care for another,” Florence said quickly, drawing
back her hand just in time.
At once, with face wreathed in smiles, the little one was on her feet.
“They do this for me,” thought Florence, swallowing hard. “What must I
not do for them?”
Nine o’clock found Florence safely tucked away in the bed which occupied
a corner of the small living room. In the kitchen-living room slept her
host and his good wife, while from above her there came an occasional
rustle or thump that told plainer than words that the three children,
having given up their bed to the teacher, had gone to sleep on the floor
of the attic. Here was one more token of the unusual hospitality of these
kindly mountain people.
The ceiling, at which the girl lay staring with sleepless eyes, was
strange indeed. In some way Jeff Crider had obtained enough mill sawed
boards to cover the rough hewn beams. Some way, too, he had obtained
enough paint to cover the boards. Then, that he might produce a
decorative effect, before the paint was dry he had held a smoking,
globeless kerosene lamp close to the paint, and, moving about in ever
widening circles, had painted there black roads that led round and round
in endless ways to nowhere.
As the girl stared at this fantastic ceiling it seemed to her that these
tracings should mean something, that they led to an important truth, a
truth that she should know, and one of vast importance.
Then of a sudden it struck her all of a heap. This cabin had an attic.
Mrs. McAlpin’s whipsawed cabin must have one, too. There was no entrance
from below. She was sure of that, but the attic was there all the same.
“Confederate gold,” she whispered. “It must be hidden there.”
So intense were her convictions on this subject that she found herself
unable to sleep.
At last, having wrapped a homespun blanket about her, she stepped into
the crisp air of the night.
The moon was just rising over Big Black Mountain. It was lighting up the
scenes of another entrancing mystery, which Florence had stumbled upon a
few days before.
“Who lives at the head of Laurel Branch?” she had asked Ransom Turner.
“I don’t rightly know.”
“Don’t know!” she exclaimed.
“I reckon there ain’t nobody that rightly knows except them that lives
there.”
“But—but where did they come from?”
“Peers like there don’t nobody rightly know.”
“How very strange!” she had exclaimed. “When did they come?”
“Mebby two years back. Came from somewhere away over back of Pine
Mounting. Quarest people you most ever seed. One man half as big as a
mounting, and no arm except one. Mighty onfriendly folks. Coupla men who
went up thar huntin’ got scared off. Quarest folks you most ever seed.”
“Perhaps that’s where little Hallie came from.”
“Might be. But if I was you I’d never go near thar.”
Ransom had gone on to tell weird tales of these strange people, a dozen
families in all who had leased land from a coal company and had gone up
there beyond a natural stone gateway which appeared to shut them from the
rest of the world. He had told how they had stayed there, never coming
down to the settlements for barter and trade, and how they kept other
mountain people away.
Other tales he had told, too; tales that had made her blood run cold.
There was the story of a peddler with a pack who had gone up there at
nightfall and had never been seen to return, and a one-armed fiddler who
had never come back.
“But couldn’t they have gone out some other way?” she had asked.
“Narry a pass at the head of this branch, narry a one. Jest rocky ridges,
so steep an’ high that if you was to drop your hat from the top it would
blow back up to you. No, Miss,” he had added with a shake of his head,
“don’t you never go up thar!”
And yet she had somehow felt that she must and would go through the
natural gateway to the little known valley of mystery.
Now, as she stood looking at the moon that shone down upon it all, she
felt the lure stronger than ever.
“Some day,” she whispered, “I will go up there. I feel sure that I must.”
Little did she dream, as she stood there until the chill night air drove
her inside, that in less than a week up there at the head of Laurel
Branch she was to enter upon the strangest, most mysterious adventure of
her young life.
Before she fell asleep she wondered a little about the strange
experiences that had come to her on Ages Creek. Would she ever know why
they had made her prisoner there? When would the title be proved up on
the Powell coal tract? Would it ever be? Would they get the commission?