I had seen much that day that hurt me, and more than all was this. For I
could picture that valiant young spirit going through life, spared by
God's mercy; and it seemed to me that when the enemy, in whatever guise,
should press him hard and defeat should bear him down he would have the
courage and the ardor and the moral strength to rally on the reserve. He
would rally on the guidon."
The old chaplain pulled strongly at his pipe, setting the blue wreaths
of smoke circling about his head. "I should know that young fellow again
wherever I might chance to see him."
"Did he collapse at last and verify the surgeon's prophecy?" asked the
dealer.
"Well," drawled the chaplain, with a little flattered laugh, "I myself
took care of that. Many years ago I studied medicine, before I was
favored with a higher call. Neurology was my line. When the boy's horse
sank exhausted beneath him, and he fell into a sleep or stupor on the
carcass, I removed the object of the obsession. I slipped the
flag-staff, guidon and all, into a crevice of the rocks, where it will
remain till the end of our time, be sure." He laughed in relish of his
arbitrary intervention.
"There was a fine healthy clamor in camp the next morning about the lost
guidon. But I did the soldier no damage, for he had been promoted to a
lieutenancy for special gallantry on the field, and he therefore could
no longer have carried the guidon if he had had both the flag and the
troop."
The stories of camp and field, thus begun, swiftly multiplied; they wore
the fire to embers, and the oil sank low in the lamps. There was a chill
sense of dawn in the blue-gray mist when the group, separating at last,
issued upon the veranda; the moon, so long hovering over the sombre
massive mountains, was slowly sinking in the west.
Among the shadows of the pillars a tall, martial figure lurked in ambush
for the old chaplain, as he rounded the corner of the veranda on his way
to his own quarters.
"Pa'son," a husky voice spoke from out the dim comminglement of the mist
and the moon, "'twas me that carried that guidon in Dovinger's
Rangers."
"I know it," declared the triumphant tactician. "I recognized you as
soon as I saw you again."
"I'm through with this," the young mountaineer exclaimed abruptly, with
an eloquent gesture of renunciation toward the deserted card-table
visible through the vista of open doors. "I'm going home--to work! I'll
never forget that I was marker in Dovinger's Rangers. I carried the
guidon! And that last day I marked their way to glory! There's nothing
left of them except honor and duty, but I'll rally on that, Chaplain.
Never fear for me, again. I'll rally on the reserve!"
WOLF'S HEAD
It might well be called the country of the outlaw, this vast tract of
dense mountain forests and craggy ravines, this congeries of swirling
torrents and cataracts and rapids. Here wild beasts lurked out their
savage lives, subsisting by fang and prey,--the panther, the bear, the
catamount, the wolf,--and like unto them, ferocious and fugitive, both
fearsome and afraid, the man with a "wolf's head," on which was set a
price, even as the State's bounty for the scalps of the ravening brutes.
One gloomy October afternoon, the zest of a group of sportsmen, who had
pitched their camp in this sequestered wilderness, suffered an abatement
on the discovery of the repute of the region and the possibility of
being summoned to serve on a sheriff's posse in the discharge of the
grimmest of duties.
"But he is no outlaw in the proper sense of the term. The phrase has
survived, but the fact is obsolete," said Seymour, who was both a prig
and a purist, a man of leisure, and bookish, but a good shot, and vain
of his sylvan accomplishments. "Our law places no man beyond the pale of
its protection. He has a constitutional right to plead his case in
court."
"What is the reward offered to hale him forth and force him to enjoy
that privilege--five hundred dollars?" asked Bygrave, who was a
newspaper man and had a habit of easy satire.
"Of course he would never suffer himself to be taken alive." Purcell's
vocation was that of a broker, and he was given to the discrimination of
chances and relative values. "Therefore he is as definitely _caput
lupinum_ as any outlaw of old. Nobody would be held accountable for
cracking his 'wolf's head' off, in the effort to arrest him for the sake
of the five hundred dollars. But, meantime, how does the fellow contrive
to live?"
"Jes by his rifle, I reckon," replied the rural gossip whom intrusive
curiosity occasionally lured to their camp-fire. "Though sence that thar
big reward hev been n'ised abroad, I'd think he'd be plumb afraid ter
fire a shot. The echoes be mighty peart these dumb, damp fall days."
The old jeans-clad mountaineer had a certain keen spryness of aspect,
despite his bent knees and stooped shoulders. His deeply grooved,
narrow, thin face was yet more elongated by the extension of a high
forehead into a bald crown, for he wore his broad wool hat on the back
of his head. There was something in his countenance not dissimilar to
the facial contour of a grasshopper, and the suggestion was heightened
by his persistent, rasping chirp.
"That's what frets Meddy; she can't abide the idee of huntin' a human
with sech special coursers ez money reward. She 'lows it mought tempt a'
evil man or a' ignorunt one ter swear a miser'ble wretch's life away.
Let the law strengthen its own hands--that's what Meddy say. Don't
kindle the sperit of Cain in every brother's breast. Oh, Meddy is plumb
comical whenst she fairly gits ter goin', though it's all on account of
that thar man what war growed up in a tree."
The dryadic suggestions of a dendroidal captivity flashed into Seymour's
mind with the phrase, and stimulated his curiosity as to some quaint
rural perversion of the legend. But it was grim fact that the old
mountaineer detailed in answer to the question, as he sat on a log by
the fire, while the sportsmen lay on the ground about it and idly
listened.
"One day--'t war 'bout two year' ago--thar war a valley-man up hyar
a-huntin' in the mountings with some other fellers, an' toward sunset he
war a-waitin' at a stand on a deer-path up thar nigh Headlong Creek,
hopin' ter git a shot whenst the deer went down to drink. Waal, I reckon
luck war ag'in' him, fer he got nuthin' but durned tired. So, ez he
waited, he grounded his rifle, an' leaned himself ag'in' a great big
tree ter rest his bones. And presently he jes happened ter turn his
head, an', folks! he seen a sight! Fer thar, right close ter his cheek,
he looked into a skellington's eye-sockets. Thar war a skellington's
grisly face peerin' at him through a crack in the bark."
The raconteur suddenly stopped short, while the group remained silent in
expectancy. The camp-fire, with its elastic, leaping flames, had
bepainted the darkening avenues of the russet woods with long, fibrous
strokes of red and yellow, as with a brush scant of color. The autumnal
air was dank, with subtle shivers. A precipice was not far distant on
the western side, and there the darksome forest fell away, showing above
the massive, purple mountains a section of sky in a heightened clarity
of tint, a suave, saffron hue, with one horizontal bar of vivid
vermilion that lured the eye. The old mountaineer gazed retrospectively
at it as he resumed:
"Waal, sirs, that town-man had never consorted with sech ez
skellingtons. He lit out straight! He made tracks! He never stopped till
he reached Colbury, an' thar he told his tale. Then the sheriff he tuk a
hand in the game. Skellingtons, he said, didn't grow on trees
spontaneous, an' he hed an official interes' in human relics out o'
place. So he kem,--the tree is 'twixt hyar an' my house thar on the
rise,--an', folks! the tale war plain. Some man chased off'n the face of
the yearth, hid out from the law,--that's the way Meddy takes it,--he
hed clomb the tree, an' it bein' holler, he drapped down inside it,
thinkin' o' course he could git out the way he went in. But, no! It
mought hev been deeper 'n he calculated, or mo' narrow, but he couldn't
make the rise. He died still strugglin', fer his long, bony fingers war
gripped in the wood--it's rotted a deal sence then."
"Who was the man?" asked Seymour.
"Nobody knows,--nobody keers 'cept' Meddy. She hev wep' a bushel o'
tears about him. The cor'ner 'lowed from the old-fashioned flint-lock
rifle he bed with him that it mus' hev happened nigh a hunderd years
ago. Meddy she will git ter studyin' on that of a winter night, an' how
the woman that keered fer him mus' hev watched an' waited fer him, an'
'lowed he war deceitful an' desertin', an' mebbe held a gredge agin him,
whilst he war dyin' so pitiful an' helpless, walled up in that tree.
Then Meddy will tune up agin, an' mighty nigh cry her eyes out. He
warn't even graced with a death-bed ter breathe his last; Meddy air
partic'lar afflicted that he hed ter die afoot." Old Kettison glanced
about the circle, consciously facetious, his heavily grooved face
distended in a mocking grin.
"A horrible fate!" exclaimed Seymour, with a half-shudder.
"Edzac'ly," the old mountaineer assented easily.
"What's her name--Meggy?" asked the journalist, with a mechanical
aptitude for detail, no definite curiosity.
"Naw; Meddy--short fer Meddlesome. Her right name is Clementina Haddox;
but I reckon every livin' soul hev forgot' it but me. She is jes
Meddlesome by name, an' meddlesome by natur'."
He suddenly turned, gazing up the steep, wooded slope with an expectant
mien, for the gentle rustling amidst the dense, red leaves of the
sumac-bushes heralded an approach.
"That mus' be Meddy now," he commented, "with her salt-risin' bread. She
'lowed she war goin' ter fetch you-uns some whenst I tol' her you-uns
war lackin'."
For the camp-hunt had already been signalized by divers disasters: the
store of loaves in the wagon had been soaked by an inopportune shower;
the young mountaineer who had combined the offices of guide and cook was
the victim of an accidental discharge of a fowling-piece, receiving a
load of bird-shot full in his face. Though his injury was slight, he had
returned home, promising to supply his place by sending his brother, who
had not yet arrived. Purcell's boast that he could bake ash-cake proved
a bluff, and although the party could and did broil bacon and even birds
on the coals, they were reduced to the extremity of need for the staff
of life.
Hence they were predisposed in the ministrant's favor as she appeared,
and were surprised to find that Meddlesome, instead of masterful and
middle-aged, was a girl of eighteen, looking very shy and appealing as
she paused on the verge of the flaring sumac copse, one hand lifted to a
swaying bough, the other arm sustaining a basket. Even her coarse gown
lent itself to pleasing effect, since its dull-brown hue composed well
with the red and russet glow of the leaves about her, and its short
waist, close sleeves, and scant skirt, reaching to the instep, the
immemorial fashion of the hills, were less of a grotesque rusticity
since there was prevalent elsewhere a vogue of quasi-Empire modes, of
which the cut of her garb was reminiscent. A saffron kerchief about her
throat had in its folds a necklace of over-cup acorns in three strands,
and her hair, meekly parted on her forehead, was of a lustrous brown,
and fell in heavy undulations on her shoulders. There was a delicate
but distinct tracery of blue veins in her milky-white complexion, and
she might have seemed eminently calculated for meddling disastrously
with the peace of mind of the mountain youth were it not for the
preoccupied expression of her eyes. Though large, brown and long-lashed,
they were full of care and perplexity, and a frowning, disconcerted line
between her eyebrows was so marked as almost to throw her face out of
drawing. Troubled about many things, evidently, was Meddlesome. She
could not even delegate the opening of a basket that her little brother
had brought and placed beside the camp-fire.
"Don't, Gran'dad," she exclaimed suddenly, stepping alertly
forward--"_don't_ put that loaf in that thar bread-box; the box 'pears
ter be damp. Leave the loaf in the big basket till ter-morrer. It'll eat
shorter then, bein' fraish-baked. They kin hev these biscuits fer
supper,"--dropping on one knee and setting forth on the cloth, from the
basket on her arm, some thick soggy-looking lumps of dough,--"I baked
some dodgers, too--four, six, eight, ten,"--she was counting a dozen
golden-brown cates of delectable aspect--"knowin' they would hone fer
cornmeal arter huntin' an' nuthin' else nohow air fitten ter eat with
feesh or aigs. Hev you-uns got any aigs?" She sprang up, and, standing
on agile tiptoe, peered without ceremony into their wagon. Instantly she
recoiled with a cry of horrified reproach. "Thar's ants in yer
short-sweetenin'! How _could_ you-uns let sech ez that happen?"
"Oh, surely not," exclaimed Purcell, hastening to her side. But the fact
could not be gain-said; the neglected sugar was spoiled.
Meddlesome's unwarranted intrusion into the arcana of their domestic
concerns disclosed other shortcomings. "Why n't ye keep the top on yer
coffee-can? Don't ye know the coffee will lose heart, settin' open?" She
repaired this oversight with a deft touch, and then proceeded: "We-uns
ain't got no short-sweetenin' at our house, but I'll send my leetle
brother ter fetch some long-sweetenin' fer yer coffee ter night. Hyar,
Sol,"--addressing the small, limber, tow-headed, barefooted boy, a
ludicrous miniature of a man in long, loose, brown-jeans trousers
supported by a single suspender over an unbleached cotton shirt,--"run
ter the house an' fetch the sorghum-jug."
As Sol started off with the alertness of a scurrying rabbit, she
shrilly called out in a frenzy of warning: "Go the other way, Sol--up
through the pawpaws! Them cherty rocks will cut yer feet like a knife."
Sol had nerves of his own. Her sharp cry had caused him to spring
precipitately backward, frightened, but uncomprehending his danger.
Being unhurt, he was resentful. "They ain't none o' _yer_ feet, nohow,"
he grumbled, making a fresh start at less speed.
"Oh, yes, Sol," said the old grandfather, enjoying the contretemps and
the sentiment of revolt against Meddlesome's iron rule. "Everything
belongs ter Meddlesome one way or another, 'ca'se she jes makes it hern.
So take keer of _yer_ feet for _her_ sake." He turned toward her
jocosely as the small emissary disappeared among the undergrowth. "I jes
been tellin' these hunter-men, Meddy, 'bout how ye sets yerself even ter
meddle with other folkses' mournin',--what they got through with a
hunderd year' ago--tormentatin' 'bout that thar man what war starved in
the tree."
She heard him, doubtless, for a rising flush betokened her deprecation
of this ridicule in the presence of these strangers. But it was rather
that she remembered his words afterward than heeded them now. It would
seem that certain incidents, insignificant in themselves, are the pivots
on which turns the scheme of fate. She could not imagine that upon her
action in the next few seconds depended grave potentialities in more
lives than one. On the contrary, her deliberations were of a trivial
subject, even ludicrous in any other estimation than her own.
Sol was small, she argued within herself, the jug was large and sticky.
He might be tempted to lighten it, for Sol had saccharine predilections,
and the helpless jug was at his mercy. Sol had scant judgment and one
suit of clothes available; the other, sopping wet from the wash, now
swayed in the process of drying on an elder-bush in the door-yard.
Should his integrity succumb, and the jug tilt too far, the stream of
sorghum might inundate his raiment, and the catastrophe would place him
beyond the pale of polite society. The seclusion of bed would be the
only place for Sol till such time as the elder-bush should bear the
fruit of dry clothes.
"Poor Sol!" she exclaimed, her prophetic sympathy bridging the chasm
between possibility and accomplished fact. "I'll fetch the jug myself.
I'll take the short cut an' head him."
Thus she set her feet in the path of her future. It led her into dense,
tangled woods, clambering over outcropping ledges and boulders. By the
flare of the west she guided her progress straight to the east till she
reached the banks of Headlong Creek on its tumultuous course down the
mountain-side. In her hasty enterprise she had not counted on crossing
it, but Meddlesome rarely turned back. She was strong and active, and
after a moment's hesitation, she was springing from one to another of
the great, half-submerged boulders amidst the whirl of the transparent
crystal-brown water, with its fleck and fringe of white foam. More than
once, to evade the dizzying effect of the sinuous motion and the
continuous roar, she stood still in mid-stream and gazed upward or at
the opposite bank. The woods were dense on the slope. All in red and
yellow and variant russet and brown tints, the canopy of the forest
foliage was impenetrable. The great, dark boles of oak and gum and
spruce contrasted sharply with the white and greenish-gray trunks of
beeches and sycamore and poplar, and, thus breaking the monotony, gave
long, almost illimitable avenues of sylvan vistas. She noted amidst a
growth of willows on the opposite bank, at the water's-edge, a spring, a
circular, rock-bound reservoir; in the marshy margin she could see the
imprints of the cleft hoofs of deer, and thence ran the indefinite trail
known as a deer-path. The dense covert along the steep slope was a
famous "deer-stand," and there many a fine buck had been killed. All at
once she was reminded of the storied tree hard by, the tragedy of which
she had often bewept.
There it stood, dead itself, weird, phantasmal, as befitted the housing
of so drear a fate. Its branches now bore no leaves. The lightnings of a
last-year's storm had scorched out its vital force and riven the fibre
of the wood. Here and there, too, the tooth of decay had gnawed fissures
that the bark had not earlier known; and from one of these--she thought
herself in a dream--a ghastly, white face looked out suddenly, and as
suddenly vanished!
Her heart gave one wild plunge, then it seemed to cease to beat. She
wondered afterward that she did not collapse, and sink into the plunging
rapids to drown, beaten and bruised against the rocks. It was a muscular
instinct that sustained her rather than a conscious impulse of
self-preservation. Motionless, horrified, amazed, she could only gaze at
the empty fissure of the tree on the slope. She could not then
discriminate the wild, spectral imaginations that assailed her untutored
mind. She could not remember these fantasies later. It was a relief so
great that the anguish of the physical reaction was scarcely less
poignant than the original shock when she realized that this face was
not the grisly skeleton lineaments that had looked out thence
heretofore, but was clothed with flesh, though gaunt, pallid, furtive.
Once more, as she gazed, it appeared in a mere glimpse at the fissure,
and in that instant a glance was interchanged. The next moment a hand
appeared,--beckoning her to approach.
It was a gruesome mandate. She had scant choice. She did not doubt that
this was the fugitive, the "wolf's head," and should she turn to flee,
he could stop her progress with a pistol-ball, for doubtless he would
fancy her alert to disclose the discovery and share in the reward.
Perhaps feminine curiosity aided fear; perhaps only her proclivity to
find an employ in the management of others influenced her decision;
though trembling in every fibre, she crossed the interval of water, and
made her way up the slope. But when she reached the fateful tree it was
she who spoke first. He cast so ravenous a glance at the basket on her
arm that all his story of want and woe was revealed. Starvation had
induced his disclosure of his identity.
"It's empty," she said, inverting the basket. She watched him flinch,
and asked wonderingly, "Is game skeerce?"
His eyes were at once forlorn and fierce. "Oh, yes, powerful skeerce,"
he replied with a bitter laugh.
There was an enigma in the rejoinder; she did not stay to read the
riddle, but went on to possess the situation, according to her wont. "Ye
hev tuk a powerful pore place ter hide," she admonished him. "This tree
is a plumb cur'osity. Gran'dad Kettison war tellin' some camp-hunters
'bout'n it jes this evenin'. Like ez not they'll kem ter view it."
His eyes dilated with a sudden accession of terror that seemed always
a-smoulder. "Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!" he moaned wretchedly.
Meddlesome was true to her name and tradition. "Ye oughter hev
remembered the Lawd 'fore ye done it," she said, with a repellent
impulse; then she would have given much to recall the reproach. The man
was desperate; his safety lay in her silence. A pistol-shot would secure
it, and anger would limber the trigger.
But he did not seem indignant. His eyes, intelligent and feverishly
bright, gazed down at her only in obvious dismay and surprise. "Done
what?" he asked, and as, prudence prevailing for once, she did not
reply, he spoke for her. "The murder, ye mean? Why, gal, I warn't even
thar. I knowed nuthin' 'bout it till later. Ez God is my helper and my
hope, I warn't even thar."
She stood astounded. "Then why n't ye leave it ter men?"
"I can't _prove_ it ag'in' the murderers' oaths. I had been consarned in
the moon-shinin' that ended in murder, but _I_ hed not been nigh the
still fer a month,--I war out a-huntin'--when the revenuers made the
raid. There war a scrimmage 'twixt the raiders an' the distillers, an'
an outsider that hed nuthin' ter do with the Federal law--he war the
constable o' the deestrick, an' jes rid with the gang ter see the fun or
ter show them the way--he war killed. An' account o' _him_, the State
law kem into the game. Them other moonshiners war captured, an' they
swore ag'in' me 'bout the shootin' ter save tharselves, but I hearn thar
false oaths hev done them no good, they being held as accessory. An' I
be so ez I can't prove an alibi--I can't _prove_ it, though it's God's
truth. But before high heaven"--he lifted his gaunt right hand--"I am
innercent, I am innercent."
She could not have said why,--perhaps she realized afterward,--but she
believed him absolutely, implicitly. A fervor of sympathy for his
plight, of commiseration, surged up in her heart. "I wisht it war so I
could gin ye some pervisions," she sighed, "though ye do 'pear toler'ble
triflin' ter lack game."
Then the dread secret was told. "Gal,"--he used the word as a polite
form of address, the equivalent of the more sophisticated "lady,"--"ef
ye will believe me, all my ammunition is spent. Not a ca'tridge lef',
not a dust of powder."
Meddy caught both her hands to her lips to intercept and smother a cry
of dismay.
"I snared a rabbit two days ago in a dead-fall. My knife-blade is bruk,
but I reckon thar is enough lef' ter split my jugular whenst the eend is
kem at last."
The girl suddenly caught her faculties together. "What sorter fool talk
is that?" she demanded sternly. "Ye do my bid, ef ye knows what's good
fer ye. Git out'n this trap of a tree an' hide 'mongst the crevices of
the rocks till seben o'clock ter-night. Then kem up ter Gran'dad
Kettison's whenst it is cleverly dark an' tap on the glass winder--not
on the batten shutter. An' I'll hev ca'tridges an' powder an' ball for
ye, an' some victuals ready, too."
But the fugitive, despite his straits, demurred. "I don't want ter git
old man Kettison into trouble for lendin' ter me."
"'T ain't his'n. 'T is my dad's old buck-shot ca'tridges an' powder an'
ball. They belong ter _me_. The other childern is my half-brothers,
bein' my mother war married twice. Ye kin _steal_ this gear from me, ef
that will make ye feel easier."
"But what will yer gran'dad say ter me?"
"He won't know who ye be; he will jes 'low ye air one o' the boys who
air always foolin' away thar time visitin' me an' makin' tallow-dips
skeerce." The sudden gleam of mirth on her face was like an illuminating
burst of sunshine, and somehow it cast an irradiation into the heart of
the fugitive, for, after she was gone out of sight, he pondered upon it.