overheated runabout out of the blazing highway and into a grove of oaks
where stood the convict camp.
"All right," he said. "Get out."
Tom Abercrombie, face drawn, hands manacled, clambered out of the car.
He was a man of sixty or thereabout, long, lank, wiry, with a white
patriarchal beard and white beetling brows. His cheap suit of black and
his black slouch hat were covered with dust.
"This way," ordered Simmons.
As if he did not hear, the old man glanced about him: at the long,
weather-stained tent, open at both ends and at the sides, and showing
within two rows of untidy bunks; at the smaller tents that formed a
hollow square; at the shed for mules deeper within the grove; at the
small group of Negro convicts--cooks and trusties--who from near the big
tent stared curiously at him.
"This way," repeated Simmons harshly.
The lean cheeks flushed. The old man looked quickly at Simmons, who
during the twenty-mile drive from the county seat had not spoken a word
to him. Then, head bowed, he followed the man toward one of the smaller
tents.
It was plainly the guard tent; it stood at the entrance to the camp,
where a path turned in from the road. In front, under the shade of an
oak, were two or three splint-bottom chairs. And chained to the oak by a
staple driven into the trunk, drowsing in the heat of the summer
mid-afternoon, lay a bloodhound.
He had barely looked up when the car drove in. His heavy black body with
its tan belly and legs was completely relaxed, and he was panting
slightly. His head, which he held up as with an effort, was massive,
leonine, rugged, with chops and dewlaps that hung loosely down, giving
the impression of a detached and judicial attitude toward life. His
expression was grave, thoughtful, melancholy, as if his ancestors,
pondering through the centuries on the frailty of humanity as they saw
it, had set their indelible stamp of gloom and sorrow on his face.
Toward him the burly guard and the tall bearded prisoner made their way.
There are men to whom no dog can be insensible; men with a secret
quality of magnetism or understanding which makes any dog, at their
approach, look up. When Simmons passed the great hound did not stir;
but when Tom Abercrombie came opposite him, he lifted his muzzle,
grizzled with age, and his melancholy, amber-coloured eyes met the
man's.
The old man stopped. It was as if he had found, in all this strangeness,
a friend. He spoke before he thought--half under his breath.
"Old Whiskers," he said gently. "Old Gray Whiskers."
Simmons turned in a flash, his face suddenly more crimson than ever, his
eyes blazing.
"What did you say to that dog?" he yelled.
The old man looked at him steadily but did not reply.
"Now here!" The guard's voice rang out in the grove. "I know you,
Abercrombie, and I know your game, you bloody, long-whiskered,
knife-totin' throat-cutter. You are tryin' to make friends with that
dog!"
He went to a near-by bush, got out his knife, and cut a heavy switch.
"Take this," he commanded. "Oh, you can catch hold of it! Catch it with
both hands. Never mind the bracelets. Take it. Hit that dog. Hit him!"
The dreamlike state in which the old man had been wandering dissolved.
His eyes narrowed to mere slits behind the beetling brows. The cold
steel of the mountaineer, the mountaineer who weighs his words, was in
the slow-drawled reply:
"Wal, now, I reckon I won't."
A moment they faced one another, Simmons' eyes murderous. Some fear of
an investigation if he struck the old man, something daunting, too, that
he saw in the mountaineer's eyes, restrained him.
"Abercrombie," he said, and moistened his lips with his tongue, "I
brought out in that car three boxes of shotgun shells--buckshot--extra
heavy loaded. Get me?"
Such was the initiation of old Tom Abercrombie as a convict. That
afternoon he was entered on the books as a "dangerous" prisoner; that
night he lay on an iron cot, staring up at the roof of a solitary tent,
which, according to law, had to be provided for him. On his ankles were
locked two steel anklets connected by a chain eighteen inches long. This
chain, in turn, was locked to the cot.
Shame lay with him as he stared upward--shame and a terrible loneliness
and dread of the future. At sunset he had watched a long line of
shackled Negroes, followed by guards with shotguns, file into camp.
To-morrow he himself would be one of that gang; and not only to-morrow,
but for two years. Assault and Battery with Intent to Kill--this was the
verdict of the court in Greenville in which he had been tried. And yet
he hadn't intended to kill anybody, he had only meant to remonstrate.
Three young fellows, sitting at a table in a cheap ice-cream parlour--it
had seemed a crystal palace to the old man and to Molly his wife, fresh
from the deepest recesses of the mountains--had made fun of Molly and
her sunbonnet.
When they did that, the mirrors that lined the walls, the enamelled-top
tables, the sunlit street showing through wide-open doors, had all
turned red before his eyes. He had risen from his chair and gone toward
this seat of the scornful. "You fellers," he had warned in a low voice,
"you fellers don't want to say anything like that again."
They had looked at him in sullen astonishment; then they had sprung to
their feet. According to the testimony they gave in court, he had
confronted one of them, an open knife hidden up his sleeve. This was not
true, and he denied it stoutly on the stand. As a matter of fact, he had
not thought of his knife until the three young bruisers, habitues of the
place and of the questionable pool-room in the rear, rushed him all
together, and a dirty-aproned waiter, coming up from behind, hit him a
crack that jarred his skull. Then he had sprung back and drawn his
knife.
The wounds he inflicted were not serious, he had simply held his
assailants off; but the policeman who ran in, followed by a crowd, found
the knife in his hand. The testimony was against him; besides, he did
not make a good witness. No man does who holds something back. And what
old Tom held back was the remark the young men had made.
On that point his lips were stubbornly sealed. He did not even tell his
lawyer. As for Molly, she had not heard. Poor girl, she was a bit deaf,
her sunbonnet came down close over her ears, and she had been eating her
ice cream, oblivious. He did not want her to know, ever. He did not want
the court to hear. What's more, he did not mean that it should hear.
The courts of justice, like the mills of the gods, ought to grind slowly
and grind exceeding small--sifting carefully the evidence, examining
deeply into the character and motives of accuser and accused. But the
gods have eternity at their disposal, and their mills are run by
unerring, self-administering laws, while the courts are sometimes
harassed with a heavy docket that must be got through with and laws are
made and administered by erring mortals. When they are overcrowded,
there is inevitably, now and then, a victim.
Hence old Tom Abercrombie, chained to a cot, staring up at the roof of a
tent, oppressed with a terrible loneliness; thinking of a long double
cabin in a mountain-girded valley, far over the Tennessee line, where he
and Molly had lived forty years; of the cornfields in a creek bottom, of
children and of grandchildren, of widely scattered neighbours and
friends.
Next day he was put to driving four mules hitched to a road scraper.
Chains clanking, he had to climb as best he could into the iron seat.
The humiliation of striped clothes he was spared; that barbarity had
been done away with by law. He wore his black trousers, a blue shirt,
and his broad-brimmed hat. Once on the seat no one passing along the
road could see his shackles, but as if they were heated red-hot these
symbols of shame burned into his flesh.
In the road ahead and in the road behind Negro pickers and shovellers
toiled away, watched over by guards with shotguns. He saw the eyes of
these guards turn constantly toward him. "You want to watch that old
devil," Simmons had warned them. "He's dangerous."
The days that followed were all alike: days of toil that began before
sunrise, continued through blazing middays, and ended after sundown.
Always, before and behind, the gang picked and shovelled, always the
eyes of the guards were turning toward him. Always against the horizon
the mountains, flecked at midday with clouds and shadows, beckoned him
like a mirage.
Sometimes from the top of a hill, under his broad hat, he studied the
lay of the land. In his mind he mapped out the water courses and the
stretches of woodland that led with least open country to the mountains.
Sometimes at night he dreamed of a double cabin in a cool
mountain-girded valley.
"You want to watch him," warned Simmons again and again.
Once Molly came to see him. Simmons himself, at the guard tent,
questioned her roughly, then shrugged his shoulders and let her pass.
Throughout the interview, though, he sat over there by the guard tent,
his eyes always on the two of them; and at his side, but never looking
up at him, lay Sheriff, the bloodhound, panting.
She told him how hard she had tried to get him off; how hard his friends
had tried. They had been to see the solicitor, the sheriff, and finally
the governor himself. "They were all nice to me, Tom," she declared;
"but they say they can't do nothin'. The governor talked to me a long
time in his office. He asked all about us--where we lived, how many
children we had, how it all happened. But he says he was elected to see
the laws carried out, an' can't interfere.
"We done everything we could," she went on, "even the folks that live
'round here an' have seen you workin', po' man, with the gang--even they
tried to help. Squire Kirby an' Mr. Earle, him that lives in that big
white house they call Freedom Hill, up the road whar you been workin',
they headed the petition. They are the richest folks 'round here. They
heered the trial, Tom. They know you was set upon in that low-down
place. Mr. Earle, he went to the capitol with me to see the governor.
Him and the governor are ol' friends. Mr. Earle, he bought my railroad
ticket and paid my board in Greenville. He talked to the governor for
over an hour.... But"--she shook her head--"it never done no good.
"Here's what folks say, though," she whispered quickly. "If you got away
back into Tennessee the law wouldn't follow you. Mr. Earle, he told me
that, just yistiddy, Tom. Squire Kirby he says the same thing. Tom, the
sheriff hisself as good as told me. The governor wouldn't requisition
you, they all's good as said. He wouldn't, either, Tom. I know he
wouldn't."
Then her eyes widened with horror. "Oh, I wasn't goin' to tell you
that!" she gasped. "Don't try to get away. That man over yonder, he'll
kill you, Tom. Folks said he would--said he had killed two. I know he
will, since I've seen him. He's awful, awful!"
She went on protesting, in terror that he would try to do the very thing
she had suggested. She told him about the bloodhound. The newspaper men
said he never lost a trail--that nobody who stayed on the ground had
ever got away from him.
"They know ever'thing, these newspaper men," she went on. "They advised
me right. Tom, two years ain't long. We waited longer than that to get
married. Remember, Tom? We ain't old yet....
"Poor old gal," said Tom.
It was the sight of a dilapidated and deserted blacksmith shop near the
road they were widening, and of some rusted fragments of tools scattered
about here and there, which caused old Tom, as the road-scraper passed
and repassed the spot, to look very closely down into the upturned dirt.
And it was the glimpse of something in that dirt which caused him
suddenly to rein up the four mules and glance quickly in the direction
of the two guards.
It was an afternoon of terrific heat, following a prolonged drought. In
the road ahead the gang of Negro convicts toiled silently, sluggishly,
in the blinding glare. Simmons had driven off in the direction of
Greenville an hour before. The two remaining guards, with shotguns under
their arms, stood in the scant shade of two dust-covered trees.
"Jake," said the old mountaineer calmly to the Negro on the machine
behind him, the Negro who handled the levers, "Jake, there's a bolt
loose some-whar' on this scrape. Reckon I better 'tend to it myself."
Without any apparent hurry, he clambered down from the seat. Quickly,
secretly, he picked out of the upturned earth an object which he thrust
into his shirt. Deliberately, as if encountering obstacles which caused
him trouble, he hammered away at the supposed loose bolt. When at last
he clambered back into the iron seat, heated like the top of a stove,
there was just a slight flush on his lean cheeks and a brightness as of
triumph in his deep-set eyes.
On the way back to camp they passed Tom Belcher's store. Here he asked
permission of one of the guards (they were not all like Simmons) to go
in and buy himself some tobacco. The guard who went in with him saw
nothing suspicious in the fact that, along with the tobacco, the old man
purchased also a package of chewing gum.
That night he did not sleep. By raising up on his elbows in his cot he
could see, in a chair tilted back against an oak tree, the night guard
with a gun across his knees and, farther on, in front of the guard tent,
the outline of the bloodhound asleep. Once, when he thought the guard
nodded, he reached in his shirt. He got out the object he had picked up
in the road and rubbed it against his shackles. The rasp of file on
steel sounded loud in his tent like an alarm. He thought he saw the
guard stir and the bloodhound lift his head. He lay silently down again.
Later he punched a hole in the mattress and stuck the file deep into the
straw.
Next day he thought of Molly and home. As he sat on the road-scraper the
mountains, purple and lofty against the sky, seemed now to be beckoning
him. Once within them, once across the state line, the law would not
follow him. He was satisfied of that from what Molly had told him.
He bided his time until one stormy night when wind and rain drove the
bloodhound within the shelter of the guard tent and, thrashing through
the branches of the oaks and flapping the canvas of the big tent,
drowned out to all ears but his own the rasp of a file on steel. Next
day the continued rain made road work impossible, and as he hobbled back
and forth to feed the mules, chewing gum hid two triangular cuts in his
shackles. Again that night, storm and rain drowned out the sound that
came from the tent where he sat hunched forward on his cot, sawing
patiently and methodically away.
Hours before dawn he slipped out of the rear of his tent and walked
quickly toward the mule sheds, where he stood listening. Then, hat
pulled down low, he hurried through the grove, across a field, and made
for the black rim of the surrounding forest.
He could not have picked a better night had choice been given him. The
rain, falling steadily, was washing his trail. It was the season of full
moon and in spite of storm clouds the night was dimly luminous. He
struck straight for the bottoms and the creek, whose swollen turbulence
sounded above the rain. He plunged into the water, which at the deepest
places came no higher than his waist, and partly by feeling, partly by
sight, now and then stumbling over boulders, now and then having to push
aside thick underbrush, he made his way for something like two miles
up-stream.
Carefully he chose the spot where he left the creek. His eyes, grown
accustomed to the night, picked out a tree that grew out of the ground
at a distance from the bank, then bent over it. He caught hold of the
branches, swung himself up, felt his way like an opossum along the
trunk, swung to another tree, and did not touch ground until he was some
hundred feet from the shore.
An indistinct, dripping dawn that showed low-driving clouds found him,
wet to the skin, like an old fox who has run all night, but confident,
like one who has covered up all trace of a trail, making his steady way
with long mountaineer's stride across tangled bottoms, into stretches of
woodland, over hills that grew ever steeper and higher, through
undergrowth that grew ever denser.
His face was very serious, but not anxious. His nerve was too cool, his
courage too steady for him to feel any impulse to run. His lifelong
experience as a hunter who travels far had taught him to save his
energy. As the light of the gray day grew stronger he distinguished, at
no great distance ahead, it seemed, the outlines of misty mountains. He
recognized the gap where the highway crossed this first ridge into the
recesses of the mountains, beyond the Tennessee line. On the night after
to-morrow, he calculated, he could tramp up on his porch and Molly would
open the door.
Now and then, as twilight advanced, he stopped and listened. One of the
guards, more kindly disposed than Simmons and the other guard, had,
during the hour of lunch one day, told him something about the
bloodhound, Sheriff. The dog, he said, was not a full-bred bloodhound,
his grandfather was a foxhound. Consequently, he ran a man freely, as a
hound runs a fox, barking on the trail.
He was hard to hold in, the guard had gone on to say, so hard that
Simmons never tried to run him to the leash, but turned him loose to
find the track himself. Then Simmons followed as fast as he could. No
trouble to follow him. "You never heard such a voice as he's got in your
life," the guard had added with a grin. "He usually puts a man up a tree
inside two hours, and keeps him there till Simmons comes up. No danger
of the man comin' down, either--not with that dog at the bottom of the
tree."
And so, remembering these things, old Tom stopped now and then to
listen. No sound but the steady dripping of rain from trees--no sound of
pursuit. Miles lay between him and the camp, and still the rain was
washing his trail.
It was on top of a treeless hill that commanded the sights and sounds of
the country for miles about that he stopped once more to listen--and his
white hair stirred on his head, just as the hair of the old fox who has
run all night might rise on his back. From far behind through the
enveloping mists and over intervening hills, so far that at first he
could not be sure, had come the bay of a solitary hound, trailing.
He stood transfixed, his patriarchal beard dripping. Many a creature,
fox and wolf, and man himself, has through the centuries trembled at
that sound. There was a silence during which he collected his wits,
momentarily upset. Then again, faint and far away, like the ringing of a
distant bell, came the sound. Miles between where he swung himself out
of the creek and where he now stood the hound was coming on his trail.
Tom turned like a stag, brushed aside the bushes and began for the first
time to run.
At the top of the next hill, not having heard it while he crashed
through the undergrowth of the bottom, he stopped again, panting. Though
still far away and faint, it was unmistakable now, and there was in the
sound a note of melancholy triumph and joy.
The shrewdness of all hunted animals took hold of the old man's nature.
He ran half a mile, then turned and doubled his track. At a stony spot,
where a trail does not remain long at best, he stopped, swung his arms
and jumped as far as he could to the right. For a quarter of a mile he
continued trotting at right angles to the original trail; then he turned
once more toward the mountains.
He could hear it most of the time, even when he ran. Occasionally, as
the dog crossed a bottom evidently, it was almost inaudible and seemed
far away. Then as he reached a highland, it came clearer and surer,
more resonant, and closer than ever. And now from back there, farther
away than the dog, came a sound that for a moment chilled his blood--the
wild, faint yell of a man urging the hound on.
Unreasoning rage stirred within the old man, flushed his face with hot
blood, made his eyes blaze. Who was he to run from any man? Then quickly
rage cooled and calculation took its place. He must throw that hound off
his trail.
He back-tracked once more. He turned at right angles to his original
trail. He continued for an eighth of a mile, then turned back on his
second track. He crossed the original trail at the point where he had
left it, and kept straight on forming the letter T. Once more, on this
short arm of the T he turned at right angles, this time toward the camp
itself, and retracing his steps formed another T.
Thus he made an intricate pattern of trails, comparable somewhat to the
visible marks made by a fancy skater. The hound, finding tracks running
apparently in every direction, would grow bewildered. He would circle,
of course, but the circles themselves would lead him off on tracks that
turned back on themselves. As an additional puzzle, wherever the old man
doubled, he put his arms about a tree and remained, his body pressed
against the trunk a moment, as if he had climbed it. "His whiskers will
be whiter than they are now," he grinned, "before ever he works all that
out."
Two miles farther on, breathing hard, he sat down on a log, for he must
have some rest. He knew when the oncoming hound, who had worked out the
first and simpler puzzle, struck the second and intricate one. First
deathlike silence--the hound had come to the end of the trail. Probably
he was whiffing the trunks of the trees roundabout, looking up eagerly
into them. As if he had been in one of those trees himself, Tom could
see it all, so well did he know the way of a hound.
Still silence. The dog would be circling now. Followed an eager bay as
he struck one of the misleading trails. He thought he was off! Then
silence again, and after a moment the long-drawn howl of a hound,
frankly perplexed, and the fierce, angry yell of a man far behind. With
fingers that trembled because of the chase he had run, Tom reached in
his pocket and got out a cob pipe. This he filled with tobacco, and
fumbling in an upper pocket of his shirt, found some matches.
For ten minutes he sat on that fallen pine, smoking and listening to the
unseen drama in the bottoms over there beyond the hill, his hopes ever
rising, and with these hopes a gratifying sense of achievement and
triumph. Once or twice the dog bayed uncertainly. Once or twice the man
yelled, it seemed to him with lessened confidence. Once it sounded as
if the hound had sat down on his haunches, raised his muzzle on high,
and poured out to heaven his perplexity. Tom had seen them do that. Then
another silence, as if the chase had died out.
Still Tom sat listening. In his exultation he had forgotten for the time
home and Molly and the horrors he had left. Suddenly he rose, and his
face was drawn and white. He turned and began to run, but even as he did
so he knew that it was all over.
Between him and the farthest outskirts of the pattern he had worked out,
had come one long-drawn, triumphant bay after another. The veteran,
wiser by far than any dog Tom had ever known in all his knowledge of
dogs, had worked the puzzle out, had run in ever-greater circles,
keeping his head, knowing that somewhere, cutting the circumference of a
greater circle, he would find the true and straight trail.
And he was coming, coming fast. He could not be more than a mile behind.
He must be at the top of the hill where Tom had enjoyed his brief
triumph, he must be smelling the very log on which Tom had sat. He had
left the log. The sound burst on the old fugitive now, almost like a
chorus, menacing, terrible, inexorable as fate. All the hills, all the
valleys, were echoing as if a whole pack were running. How much worse
than futile had been his tricks! They had only halted the great
bloodhound long enough for men and shotguns to come up!
From now on he kept straight forward, sometimes walking, sometimes
trotting, sometimes breaking into a run. Now and then he stumbled with
weariness, once he fell face downward. Anybody but a fighter would have
taken to a tree, like an opossum, run at last to shelter.
Out of breath, he came at length to the top of a ridge, and through an
opening in the trees looked across a wooded valley beyond which rose the
lofty undulations of the Tennessee mountains. The clouds had been
growing thin, and now the sun burst through, and flooded those mountains
with light.
"They ain't a-goin' to take me," said the old mountaineer--"not alive!"