Private Grant had been bred of the blood of hatred and suckled in
vindictiveness. He had come into being out of the heritage of feud
fighting "foreparents," and he thought in the terms of his ancestry.
When he had fled into the jungle beyond the island village, though he
had been demented and enfeebled, the instinct of a race that had often
"hidden out" guided him. That instinct and chance had led him to a
native house where his disloyalty gave him a welcome, and there he had
found sanctuary until his fever subsided and he emerged cadaverous,
but free. Word had filtered through to him there of Spurrier's
court-martial and its result.
In the course of time, fever-wasted yet restored out of his
semi-lunacy, he had made his way furtively but successfully toward
Manila and there he had supplemented the sketchy fragments of
information with which his disloyal native friends had been able to
provide him.
He knew now that the accused officer had pitched his defense upon an
accusation of the deserter and the refugee's eyes smoldered as he
learned that he himself had been charged with prefacing his flight
with murder. He knew what that meant. The disgraced officer would move
heaven and earth to clear his smirched name, and the condition
precedent would be the capture of Private Grant and the placing of him
in the prisoner's dock. To be wanted for desertion was grave enough.
To be wanted both for desertion and the assassination of his company
commander was infinitely worse, and to stand in that position and
face, as he believed he would have to, a conspiracy of class feeling,
was intolerable.
Haunting the shadowy places about Manila, Grant had been almost crazed
by his fears but with the lifting of the steamer's anchor, a great
spirit of hope had brightened in him, feeding on the solace of the
thought that, once more in the States, he could lose himself from
pursuit and vigilance.
Then he had seen, on the same ship, the face of the man whom, above
all others, he had occasion to fear!
For their joint lives the world was not large enough. One of them must
die, and in the passion that swept over him with the dread of
discovery. Grant had skirted a relapse into his recent mania.
At that moment when Spurrier had looked down and he had looked up, the
deserter had seen only one way out, and that was to kill. But when the
other had moved away, seemingly without recognition, his thoughts had
moved more lucidly again.
Until he had tried soldiering he had known only the isolated life of
forested mountains and here on a ship at sea he felt surrounded and
helpless--almost timid. When he landed at San Francisco, if his luck
held him undiscovered that long, he would have dry land under him and
space into which to flee.
The refugee had hated Comyn. Now Comyn was dead and Grant transferred
his hatred from the dead captain to the living lieutenant, resolving
that he also must die.
The moment to which he looked forward with the most harrowing
apprehension was that when the vessel docked and put her passengers
ashore. Here at sea a comforting isolation lay between first and
third cabin passengers and one could remain unseen from those deck
levels that lay forward and above. But with the arrangements for
disembarkation, he was unfamiliar, and for all he knew, the steerage
people might be herded along under the eyes of those who traveled
more luxuriously. He might have to march in such a procession,
willy-nilly, over a gang-plank swept by a watchful eye.
So Private Grant brooded deeply and his thoughts were not pretty. Also
he kept his pistol near him and when the hour for debarkation arrived
he was ripe for trouble.
It happened that a group of steerage passengers, including himself,
were gathered together much as he had feared they might be, and
Grant's face paled and hardened as he saw, leaning with his elbows on
a rail above him and a pipe in his mouth, the officer whom he
dreaded.
Grant's hand slipped unobtrusively under his coat and his eyes
narrowed as his heart tightened and became resolved.
Spurrier had not yet seen him but at any moment he might do so. There
was nothing to prevent the wandering and casual glance from alighting
on the spot where the deserter stood, and when it did so the
mountaineer would draw and fire.
But as the ex-officer's eyes went absently here and there a girl
passed at his back and perhaps she spoke as she passed. At all events
the officer straightened and stiffened. Across his face flashed
swiftly such an expression as might have come from a sudden and
stinging blow, and then, losing all interest in the bustle of the
lower decks, the man turned on his heel and walked rapidly away.
The deserter's hand stole away from the pistol grip and his breath ran
out in a long, sibilant gasp of relief and reaction. When later he had
landed safely and unmolested, he turned in flight toward the mountains
that he knew over there across the continent--mountains where only
bloodhounds could run him to earth.
Beyond the rims of those forest-tangled peaks he had never looked out
until he had joined the army, and once back in them, though he dare
not go, for a while, to his own home county, he could shake off his
palsy of fear.
He traveled as a hobo, moneyless, ignorant, and unprepossessing of
appearance, yet before the leaves began to fall he was at last
tramping slopes where the air tasted sweeter to his nostrils, and the
speech of mankind fell on his ear with the music of the accustomed.
The name of Bud Grant no longer went with him. That, since it carried
certain unfulfilled duties to an oath of allegiance, he generously
ceded to the United States Army, and contented himself with the random
substitute of Sim Colby.
Now he tramped swingingly along a bowlder-broken creek bed which by
local euphemism was called a road. When his way led him over the
backbone of a ridge he could see, almost merged with the blue of the
horizon, the smoky purple of a sugar loaf peak, which marked his
objective.
When he passed that he would be in territory where his journeying
might end. To reach it he must transverse the present vicinity in
which a collateral branch of his large family still dwelt, and where
he himself preferred to walk softly, wary of possible recognition.
To the man whose terror had seen in every casual eye that rested on
him while he crossed a continent, a gleam of accusation, it was as
though he had reached sanctuary. The shoulders that he had forced into
a hang-dog slough to disguise the soldierly bearing which had become
habitual in uniform, came back into a more buoyant and upright swing.
The face that had been sullen with fear now looked out with something
of the bravado of earlier days, and the whole experience of the
immediate past; of months and even years, took on the unreality of a
nightmare from which he was waking.
The utmost of caution was still required, but the long flight was
reaching a goal where substantial safety lay like a land of promise.
It was a land of promise broken with ragged ranges and it was fiercely
austere; the Cumberland mountains reared themselves like a colossal
and inhospitable wall of isolation between the abundant richness of
lowland Kentucky to the west, and Virginia's slope seaward to the
east.
But isolation spelled refuge and the taciturn silences of the men who
dwelt there, asking few questions and answering fewer, gave promise of
unmolested days.
These hills were a world in themselves; a world that had stood,
marking time for a hundred and fifty years, while to east and west
life had changed and developed and marched with the march of the
years. Sequestered by broken steeps of granite and sand stone, the
human life that had come to the coves and valleys in days when the
pioneers pushed westward, had stagnated and remained unaltered.
Illiteracy and ignorance had sprung chokingly into weed-like
prevalence. The blood-feud still survived among men who fiercely
insisted upon being laws unto themselves. Speech fell in quaint
uncouthness that belonged to another century, and the tides of progress
that had risen on either hand, left untouched and uninfluenced the
men and women of mountain blood, who called their lowland brethren
"furriners" and who distrusted all that was "new-fangled" or
"fotched-on."
Habitations were widely separated cabins. Roads were creekbeds. Life
was meager and stern, and in the labyrinths of honeycombed and
forest-tangled wilds, men who were "hidin' out" from sheriffs, from
revenuers, from personal enemies, had a sentimental claim on the
sympathy of the native-born.
This was the life from which the deserter had sprung. It was the life
to which with eager impatience he was returning; a life of countless
hiding places and of no undue disposition to goad a man with
questioning.
Through the billowing richness of the Bluegrass lowlands, he had
hurried with a homing throb in his pulses. As the foothills began to
break out of the fallow meadows and the brush to tangle at the fringe
of the smoothness, his breath had come deeper and more satisfying.
When the foothills rose in steepness until low, wet streamers of cloud
trailed their slopes like shrapnel smoke, and the timber thickened and
he saw an eagle on the wing, something like song broke into being in
his heart.
He was home. Home in the wild mountains where air and the water had
zest and life instead of the staleness that had made him sick in the
flat world from which he came. He was home in the mountains where
others were like him and he was not a barbarian any longer among
contemptuous strangers.
He plodded along the shale-bottomed water course for a little way and
halted. As his woodsman's eye took bearings he muttered to himself:
"Hit's a right slavish way through them la'rel hills, but hit's a
cut-off," and, suiting his course to his decision, he turned upward
into the thickets and began to climb.
An hour later he had covered the "hitherside" and "yon side" of a
small mountain, and when he came to the highway again he found himself
confronted by a half dozen armed horsemen whose appearance gave him
apprehensive pause, because at once he recognized in them the
officialdom of the law. The mounted travelers drew rein, and he halted
at the roadside, nodding his greeting in affected unconcern.
The man who had been riding at the fore held in his left hand the
halter line of a led horse, and now he looked down at the pedestrian
and spoke in the familiar phrase of wayside amenity.
"Howdy, stranger, what mout yore name be?"
"Sim Colby from acrost Hemlock Mountain ways, but I've done been west
fer a year gone by, though, an' I'm jest broguein' along to'rds
home."
The questioner, a long, gaunt man with a face that had been scarred,
but never altered out of its obstinate set, eyed him for a moment,
then shot out the question:
"Did ye ever hear tell of Sam Mosebury over thet-away?"
It was lucky that the fugitive had given as his home a territory with
which he had some familiarity. Now his reply came promptly.
"Yes, I knows him when I sees him. Some folks used ter give him a
right hard name over thar, but I reckon he's all right ef a man don't
aim ter crowd him too fur."
"I don't know how fur he mout of been crowded," brusquely replied the
man with the extra horse, "but he kilt a man in Rattletown yestiddy
noon an' tuck ter ther woods. I'm after him."
The foot traveler expressed an appropriate interest, then added:
"Howsomever, hit ain't none of my affair, an' seein' thet I've got a
right far journey ahead of me, I'll hike along."
But the leader of the mounted group shook his head.
"One of my men got horse flung back thar an' broke a bone inside him.
I'm ther high sheriff of this hyar county, an' I hereby summons ye ter
go along with me an' ack as a member of my possy."
Under his tan Private Grant paled a little. This mischance carried a
triple menace to his safety. It involved riding back to the county
seat where some man might remember his face, and recall that two
years ago he had gone away on a three years' enlistment. But even if
he escaped that contingency, it meant tarrying in this neighborhood
through which he had meant to pass inconspicuously and rapidly. To be
attached to a _posse comitatus_ riding the hills on a man hunt meant
to challenge every passing eye with an interest beyond the casual.
Finally, though he might well have forgotten him, the man whose trail
he was now called to take in pursuit had once known him slightly, and
if they met under such hostile auspices, might recognize and denounce
him.
But the sheriff sat enthroned in his saddle and robed in the color of
authority. At his back sat five other men with rifles across their
pommels, and with such a situation there was no argument. The law's
officer threw the bridle rein of the empty-saddled mount to the man in
the road.
"Get up on this critter," he commanded tersely, "and don't let him git
his head down too low. He follers buck-jumpin'."
When Grant, alias Colby, found that the men riding with him were more
disposed to somber silence than to inquisitiveness or loquacity, he
breathed easier. He even made a shrewd guess that there were others in
that small group who answered the call of the law as reluctantly as
he.
Sam Mosebury was accounted as dangerous as a rattlesnake, and Bud
doubted whether even the high sheriff himself would make more than a
perfunctory effort to come to grips with him in his present
desperation.
When the posse had ridden several hours, and had come to a spot in the
forest where the trail forked diversely, a halt was called. They had
traveled steep ways and floundered through many belly-deep fords. Dust
lay gray upon them and spattered mud overlaid the dust.
"We've done come ter a pass, now," declared the sheriff, "where hit
ain't goin' ter profit us no longer ter go trailin' in one bunch. We
hev need ter split up an' turkey tail out along different routes."
The sun had long crossed the meridian and dyed the steep horizon with
burning orange and violet when Bud Grant and Mose Biggerstaff, with
whom he had been paired off, drew rein to let their horses blow in a
gorge between beetling walls of cliff.
"Me, I ain't got no master relish for this task, no-how," declared
Mose morosely as he spat at the black loam of rotting leaves. "No man
ain't jedgmatically proved ter me, yit, thet ther feller Sam kilt
didn't need killin'."
Bud nodded a solemn concurrence in the sentiment. Then abruptly the
two of them started as though at the intrusion of a ghost and, of
instinct, their hands swept holsterward, but stopped halfway.
This sudden galvanizing of their apathy into life was effected by the
sight of a figure which had materialized without warning and in
uncanny silence in a fissure where the rocks dripped from reeking moss
on either side.
It stood with a cocked repeating rifle held easily at the ready, and
it was a figure that required no heralding of its identity or menace.
"Were ye lookin' fer me, boys?" drawled Sam Mosebury with a palpable
enjoyment of the situation, not unlike that which brightens the eyes
of a cat as it plays with a mouse already crippled.
With swift apprehension the eyes of the two deputies met and effected
an understanding. Mose Biggerstaff licked his bearded lips until their
stiffness relaxed enough for speech.
"Me an' Sim Colby hyar," he protested, "got summoned by ther high
sheriff. We didn't hev no rather erbout hit one way ner t'other. All
we've got ter go on air ther _dee_scription thet war give ter us--an'
we don't see no resemblance atween ye an' ther feller we're atter."
The murderer stood eying them with an amused contempt, and one could
recognize the qualities of dominance which, despite his infamies, had
won him both fear and admiration.
"Ef ye thinks ye'd ought ter take me along an' show me ter yore high
sheriff," he suggested, and the finger toyed with the trigger, "I'm
right hyar."
"Afore God, no!" It was Bud who spoke now contradicting his colleague.
"I've seed Sam Mosebury often times--an' ye don't no fashion faver
him."
Sam laughed. "I've seed ye afore, too, I reckon," he commented dryly.
"But ef ye don't know me, I reckon I don't need ter know _you_,
nuther."
The two sat atremble in their saddles until the apparition had
disappeared in the laurel.
* * * * *
Gray-templed and seamed of face, Dyke Cappeze entered the courthouse
at Carnettsville one day a few months later and paused for a moment,
his battered law books under his threadbare elbow, to gaze around the
murky hall of which his memory needed no refreshing.
About the stained walls hung fly-specked notices of sheriff's sales,
and between them stamped long-haired, lean-visaged men drawn in by
litigation or jury service from branchwater and remote valley.
Out where the sun lay mellow on the town square was the brick
pavement, on which Cappeze's law partner had fallen dead ten
years ago, because he dared to prosecute too vigorously. Across
the way stood the general store upon which one could still see the
pock-marking of bullets reminiscent of that day when the Heatons
and the Blacks made war, and terrorized the county seat.
Dyke Cappeze looked over it all with a deep melancholy in his eyes. He
knew his mountains and loved his people whose virtues were more
numerous, if less conspicuous, than their sins. In his heart burned a
militant insurgency. These hills cried out for development, and
development demanded a conception of law broader gauged and more
serious than obtained. It needed fearless courts, unterrified juries,
intrepid lawyers.
He had been such a lawyer, and when he had applied for life insurance
he had been adjudged a prohibitive risk. To-day the career of three
decades was to end, and as the bell in the teetering cupola began to
clang its summons he shook his head--and pressed tight the straight
lips that slashed his rugged face.
On the bench sat the circuit-riding judge of that district; a man to
whom, save when he addressed him as "your honor," Dyke Cappeze had not
spoken in three years. They were implacable enemies, because too
often the lawyer had complained that justice waited here on
expediency.
Cappeze looked at the windows bleared with their residue of dust and
out through them at the hills mantling to an autumnal glory. Then he
heard that suave--to himself he said hypocritical--voice from the
bench.
"Gentlemen of the bar, any motions?"
Wearily the thin, tall-framed lawyer came to his feet and stood erect
and silent for a moment in his long, black coat, corroding into the
green of dilapidation.
"May it please your honor," he grimly declared. "I hardly know whether
my statement may be properly called a motion or not. It's more a
valedictory."
He drew from his breast pocket a bit of coarse, lined writing paper
and waved it in his talon-like hand.
"I was retained by the widow Sales, whose husband was shot down by Sam
Mosebury, to assist the prosecution in bringing the assassin to
punishment. The grand jury has failed to indict this defendant. The
sheriff has failed to arrest him. The court has failed to produce
those witnesses whom I have subpoenaed. The machinery of the law which
is created for the sole purpose of protecting the weak against the
encroachments of the malevolent has failed."
He paused, and through the crowded room the shuffling feet fell silent
and heads bent excitedly forward. Then Cappeze lifted the paper in his
hand and went on:
"I hold here an unsigned letter that threatens me with death if I
persist with this prosecution. It came to me two weeks ago, and since
receiving it I have redoubled my energy. When this grand jury was
impaneled and charged, such a note also reached each of its members. I
know not what temper of soul actuates those men who have sworn to
perform the duties of grand jurors. I know not whether these threats
have affected their deliberations, but I know that they have failed to
return a true bill against Sam Mosebury!"
The judge fingering his gavel frowned gravely. "Does counsel mean to
charge that the court has proven lax?"
"I mean to say," declared the lawyer in a voice that suddenly mounted
and rung like a trumpeted challenge, "that in these hills of Kentucky
the militant spirit of the law seems paralyzed! I mean to say that
terrorism towers higher than the people's safeguards! For a lifetime I
have battled here to put the law above the feud--and I have failed. In
this courthouse my partner fought for a recognition of justice and at
its door he paid the penalty with his life. I wish to make no charges
other than to state the facts. I am growing old, and I have lost heart
in a vain fight. I wish to withdraw from this case as associate
commonwealth counsel, because I can do nothing more than I have done,
and that is enough. I wish to state publicly that to-day I shall take
down my shingle and withdraw from the practice of law, because law
among us seems to me a misnomer and a futile semblance."
In a dead silence the elderly attorney came to his period and gathered
up again under his threadbare elbow his two or three battered books.
Turning, he walked down the center aisle toward the door, and as he
went his head sagged dejectedly forward on his chest.
He heard the instruction of his enemy on the bench, still suave:
"Mr. Clerk, let the order be entered striking the name of Mr. Cappeze
from the record as associate counsel for the commonwealth."
It was early forenoon when the elderly attorney left the dingy law
office which he was closing, and the sunset fires were dying when he
swung himself down from the saddle at his own stile in the hills and
walked between the bee-gums and bird boxes to his door. But before he
reached it the stern pain in his eyes yielded to a brightening
thought, and as if responsive to that thought the door swung open and
in it stood a slim girl with eyes violet deep, and a beauty so
alluring and so wildly natural that her father felt as if youth had
met him again, when he had begun to think of all life as musty and
decrepit with age.