It was three days before Steve Hawn returned, ill-humored, reddened by
drink, and worn. As ever, Martha Hawn asked no questions and Jason
betrayed no curiosity, no suspicion, though he was not surprised to
learn that in a neighboring county the night riders had been at their
lawless work, and he had no doubt that Steve was among them. Jason
would be able to help but little that autumn in the tobacco field, for
it was his last year in college and he meant to work hard at his books,
but he knew that the dispute between his step-father and Colonel
Pendleton was still unsettled--that Steve was bitter and had a secret
relentless purpose to get even. He did not dare give Colonel Pendleton
a warning, for it was difficult, and he knew the fiery old gentleman
would receive such an intervention with a gracious smile and dismiss it
with haughty contempt; so Jason decided merely to keep a close watch on
Steve.
On the opening day of college, as on the opening day three years
before, Jason walked through the fields to town, but he did not start
at dawn. The dew-born mists were gone and the land lay, with no mystery
to the eye or the mind, under a brilliant sun-the fields of stately
corn, the yellow tents of wheat gone from the golden stretches of
stubble, and green trees rising from the dull golden sheen of the
stripped blue-grass pastures. The cut, upturned tobacco no longer
looked like hunchbacked witches on broom-sticks and ready for flight,
for the leaves, waxen, oily, inert, hung limp and listless from the
sticks that pointed like needles to the north to keep the stalks
inclined as much as possible from the sun. Even they had taken on the
Midas touch of gold, for all green and gold that world of blue-grass
was--all green and gold, except for the shaggy unkempt fields where the
king of weeds had tented the year before and turned them over to his
camp followers--ragweed, dockweed, white-top, and cockle-burr. But the
resentment against such an agricultural outrage that the boy had caught
from John Burnham was no longer so deep, for that tobacco had kept his
mother and himself alive and the father of his best friend must look to
it now to save himself from destruction. All the way Jason, walking
leisurely, confidently, proudly, and with the fires of his ambition no
less keen, thought of the green mountain boy who had torn across those
fields at sunrise, that when "school took up" he might not be
late--thought of him with much humor and with no little sympathy. When
he saw the smoke cloud over the town he took to the white turnpike and
quickened his pace. Again the campus of the rival old Transylvania was
dotted with students moving to and fro. Again the same policeman stood
on the same corner, but now he shook hands with Jason and called him by
name. When he passed between the two gray stone pillars with pyramidal
tops and swung along the driveway between the maple-trees and
chattering sparrows, there were the same boys with caps pushed back and
trousers turned up, the same girls with hair up and hair down, but what
a difference now for him! Even while he looked around there was a shout
from a crowd around John Burnham's doorway; several darted from that
crowd toward him and the crowd followed. A dozen of them were trying to
catch his hand at once, and the welcome he had seen Gray Pendleton once
get he got now for himself, for again a pair of hands went high, a
series of barbaric yells were barked out, and the air was rent with the
name of Jason Hawn. Among them Jason stood flushed, shy, grateful. A
moment later he saw John Burnham in the doorway--looking no less
pleased and waiting for him. Even the old president paused on his
crutches for a handshake and a word of welcome. The boy found himself
wishing that Marjorie--and Mavis--were there, and, as he walked up the
steps, from out behind John Burnham Marjorie stepped--proud for him and
radiant.
And so, through that autumn, the rectangular, diametric little comedy
went on between Marjorie and Jason in the Blue-grass and between Gray
and Mavis in the hills. No Saturday passed that Jason did not spend at
his mother's home or with John Burnham, and to the mother and Steve and
to Burnham his motive was plain--for most of the boy's time was spent
with Marjorie Pendleton. Somehow Marjorie seemed always driving to town
or coming home when Jason was on his way home or going to town, and
somehow he was always afoot and Marjorie was always giving him a kindly
lift one or the other way. Moreover, horses were plentiful as barn-yard
fowls on Morton Sanders' farm, and the manager, John Burnham's brother,
who had taken a great fancy to Jason, gave him a mount whenever the boy
pleased. And so John Burnham saw the pair galloping the turnpikes or
through the fields, or at dusk going slowly toward Marjorie's home.
Besides, Marjorie organized many hunting parties that autumn, and the
moon and the stars looking down saw the two never apart for long. About
the intimacy Mrs. Pendleton and the colonel thought little. Colonel
Pendleton liked the boy, Mrs. Pendleton wanted Marjorie at home, and
she was glad for her to have companionship. Moreover, to both, Marjorie
was still a child, anything serious would be absurd, and anyway
Marjorie was meant for Gray.
In the mountains Gray's interest in his life was growing every day. He
liked to watch things planned and grow into execution. His day began
with the screech of a whistle at midnight. Every morning he saw the sun
rise and the mists unroll and the drenched flanks of the mountains
glisten and drip under the sunlight. During the afternoon he woke up in
time to stroll down the creek, meet Mavis after school and walk back to
the circuit rider's house with her. After supper every night he would
go down the spur and sit under the honeysuckles with her on the porch.
The third time he came the old man and woman quietly withdrew and were
seen no more, and this happened thereafter all the time. Meanwhile in
the Blue-grass and the hills the forked tongues of gossip began to
play, reaching last, as usual, those who were most concerned, but, as
usual, reaching them, too, in time. In the Blue-grass it was criticism
of Colonel and Mrs. Pendleton, their indifference, carelessness,
blindness, a gaping question of their sanity at the risk of even a
suspicion that such a mating might be possible--the proud daughter of a
proud family with a nobody from the hills, unknown except that he
belonged to a fierce family whose history could be written in human
blood; who himself had been in jail on the charge of murder; whose
mother could not write her own name; whose step-father was a common
tobacco tenant no less illiterate, and with a brain that was a hotbed
of lawless mischief, and who held the life of a man as cheap as the
life of a steer fattening for the butcher's knife. But in all the
gossip there was no sinister suggestion or even thought save in the
primitive inference of this same Steve Hawn.
In the mountains, too, the gossip was for a while innocent. To the
simple democratic mountain way of thinking, there was nothing strange
in the intimacy of Mavis and Gray. There Gray was no better than any
mountain boy. He was in love with Mavis, he was courting her, and if he
won her he would marry her, and that simply was all--particularly in
the mind of old grandfather Hawn. Likewise, too, was there for a while
nothing sinister in the talk, for at first Mavis held to the mountain
custom, and would not walk in the woods with Gray unless one of the
school-children was along--nothing sinister except to little Aaron
Honeycutt, whose code had been a little poisoned by his two years' stay
outside the hills.
Once more about each pair the elements of social tragedy began to
concentrate, intensify, and become active. The new development in the
hills made business competition keen between Shade Hawn and Hiram
Honeycutt, who each ran a hotel and store in the county-seat. As old
Jason Hawn and old Aaron Honeycutt had retired from the leadership, and
little Jason and little Aaron had been out of the hills, leadership
naturally was assumed by these two business rivals, who revived the old
hostility between the factions, but gave vent to it in a secret,
underhanded way that disgusted not only old Jason but even old Aaron as
well. For now and then a hired Hawn would drop a Honeycutt from the
bushes and a hired Honeycutt would drop a Hawn. There was, said old
Jason with an oath of contempt, no manhood left in the feud. No
principal went gunning for a principal--no hired assassin for another
of his kind.
"Nobody ain't shootin' the RIGHT feller," said the old man. "Looks like
hit's a question of which hired feller gits fust the man who hired the
other feller."
And when this observation reached old Aaron he agreed heartily.
"Fer once in his life," he said, "old Jason Hawn kind o' by accident is
a-hittin' the truth." And each old man bet in his secret heart, if
little Aaron and little Jason were only at home together, things would
go on in quite a different way.
In the lowlands the tobacco pool had been formed and, when persuasion
and argument failed, was starting violent measures to force into the
pool raisers who would not go in willingly. In the western and southern
parts of the State the night riders had been more than ever active.
Tobacco beds had been destroyed, barns had been burned, and men had
been threatened, whipped, and shot. Colonel Pendleton found himself
gradually getting estranged from some of his best friends. He
quarrelled with old Morton Sanders, and in time he retired to his farm,
as though it were the pole of the earth. His land was his own to do
with as he pleased. No man, no power but the Almighty and the law,
could tell him what he MUST do. The tobacco pool was using the very
methods of the trust it was seeking to destroy. Under those
circumstances he considered his duty to himself paramount to his duty
to his neighbor, and his duty to himself he would do; and so the old
gentleman lived proudly in his loneliness and refused to know fear,
though the night riders were getting busy now in the counties adjacent
to the Blue-grass, and were threatening raids into the colonel's own
county--the proudest in the State. Other "independents" hardly less
lonely, hardly less hated, had electrified their barbed-wire fences,
and had hired guards--fighting men from the mountains--to watch their
barns and houses, but such an example the colonel would not follow,
though John Burnham pleaded with him, and even Jason dared at last to
give him a covert warning, with no hint, however, that the warning was
against his own step-father Steve. It was the duty of the law to
protect him, the colonel further argued; the county judge had sworn
that the law would do its best; and only when the law could not protect
him would the colonel protect himself.
And so the winter months passed until one morning a wood-thrush hidden
in green depths sent up a song of spring to Gray's ears in the hills,
and in the Blue-grass a meadow-lark wheeling in the sun-light showered
down the same song upon the heart of Jason Hawn.
Almost every Saturday Mavis would go down to stay till Monday with her
grandfather Hawn. Gray would drift down there to see her--and always,
while Mavis was helping her grandmother in the kitchen, Gray and old
Jason would sit together on the porch. Gray never tired of the old
man's shrewd humor, quaint philosophy, his hunting tales and stories of
the feud, and old Jason liked Gray and trusted him more the more he saw
of him. And Gray was a little startled when it soon became evident that
the old man took it for granted that in his intimacy with Mavis was one
meaning and only one.
"I al'ays thought Mavis would marry Jason," he said one night, "but,
Lordy Mighty, I'm nigh on to eighty an' I don't know no more about gals
than when I was eighteen. A feller stands more chance with some of 'em
stayin' away, an' agin if he stays away from some of 'em he don't stand
no chance at all. An' agin I rickollect that if I hadn't 'a' got mad
an' left grandma in thar jist at one time an' hadn't 'a' come back jist
at the right time another time, I'd 'a' lost her--shore. Looks like
you're cuttin' Jason out mighty fast now--but which kind of a gal Mavis
in thar is, I don't know no more'n if I'd never seed her."
Gray flushed and said nothing, and a little later the old man went
frankly on:
"I'm gittin' purty old now an' I hain't goin' to last much longer, I
reckon. An' I want you to know if you an' Mavis hitch up fer a
life-trot tergether I aim to divide this farm betwixt her an' Jason,
an' you an' Mavis can have the half up thar closest to the mines, so
you can be close to yo' work."
The boy was saved any answer, for the old man expected and waited for
none, so simple was the whole matter to him, but Gray, winding up the
creek homeward in the moonlight that night, did some pretty serious
thinking. No such interpretation could have been put on the intimacy
between him and Mavis at home, for there companionship, coquetry,
sentiment, devotion even, were possible without serious parental
concern. Young people in the Blue-grass handled their own heart
affairs, and so they did for that matter in the hills, but Gray could
not realize that primitive conditions forbade attention without
intention: for life was simple, mating was early because life was so
simple, and Nature's way with humanity was as with her creatures of the
fields and air except for the eye of God and the hand of the law. A
license, a few words from the circuit rider, a cleared hill-side, a
one-room log cabin, a side of bacon, and a bag of meal--and, from old
Jason's point of view, Gray and Mavis could enter the happy portals,
create life for others, and go on hand in hand to the grave. So that
where complexity would block Jason in the Blue-grass, simplicity would
halt Gray in the hills. To be sure, the strangeness, the wildness, the
activity of the life had fascinated Gray. He loved to ride the
mountains and trails--even to slosh along the river road with the rain
beating on him, dry and warm under a poncho. Often he would be caught
out in the hills and have to stay all night in a cabin; and thus he
learned the way of life away from the mines and the river bottoms. So
far that poor life had only been pathetic and picturesque, but now when
he thought of it as a part of his own life, of the people becoming
through Mavis his people, he shuddered and stopped in the moonlit
road-aghast. Still, the code of his father was his, all women were
sacred, and with all there would be but one duty for him, if
circumstances, as they bade fair to now, made that one duty plain. And
if his father should go under, if Morton Sanders took over his home and
the boy must make his own way and live his life where he was--why not?
Gray sat in the porch of the house on the spur, long asking himself
that question. He was asking it when he finally went to bed, and he
went with it, unanswered, to sleep.