beclouded and dark. Some turbulent spirit was loosed in the air, and the
wind was wild. Great, surging masses of purple vapor came in a mad rout
from the dank west and gathered above the massive and looming mountains.
The woods bent and tossed and clashed their boughs in the riot of gusts,
the sere leaves were flying in clouds, and presently rain began to fall.
The steady downpour increased in volume to torrents; then the broad,
pervasive flashes of lightning showed, in lieu of myriad lines, an
unbroken veil of steely gray swinging from the zenith, the white foam
rebounding as the masses of water struck the earth. The camp equipage,
tents and wagons succumbed beneath the fury of the tempest, and, indeed,
the hunters had much ado to saddle their horses and grope their way
along the bridle-path that led to old Kettison's house.
The rude comfort of the interior had a heightened emphasis by reason of
the elemental turmoils without. True, the rain beat in a deafening
fusillade upon the roof, and the ostentation of the one glass window, a
source of special pride to its owner, was at a temporary disadvantage in
admitting the fierce and ghastly electric glare, so recurrent as to seem
unintermittent. But the more genial illumination of hickory flames, red
and yellow, was streaming from the great chimney-place, and before the
broad hearth the guests were ensconced, their out-stretched boots
steaming in the heat. Strings of scarlet peppers, bunches of dried
herbs, gourds of varied quaint shapes, hung swaying from the rafters.
The old man's gay, senile chirp of welcome was echoed by his wife, a
type of comely rustic age, who made much of the fact that, though
house-bound from "rheumatics," she had reared her dead daughter's "two
orphin famblies," the said daughter having married twice, neither man
"bein' of a lastin' quality," as she seriously phrased it. Meddy, "the
eldest fambly," had been guide, philosopher, and friend to the swarm of
youngsters, and even now, in the interests of peace and space and
hearing, was seeking to herd them into an adjoining room, when a sudden
stentorian hail from without rang through the splashing of the rain from
the eaves, the crash of thunder among the "balds" of the mountains, with
its lofty echoes, and the sonorous surging of the wind.
"Light a tallow-dip, Meddy," cried old Kettison, excitedly. "An' fetch
the candle on the porch so ez we-uns kin view who rides so late in sech
a night 'fore we bid 'em ter light an' hitch."
But these were travelers not to be gain-said--the sheriff of the county
and four stout fellows from the town of Colbury, summoned to his aid as
a posse, all trooping in as if they owned the little premises. However,
the officer permitted himself to unbend a trifle under the influence of
a hospitable tender of home-made cherry-bounce, "strong enough to walk
from here to Colbury," according to the sheriff's appreciative phrase.
He was a portly man, with a rolling, explanatory cant of his burly head
and figure toward his interlocutor as he talked. His hair stood up in
two tufts above his forehead, one on each side, and he had large, round,
grayish eyes and a solemn, pondering expression. To Meddy, staring
horror-stricken, he seemed as owlishly wise as he looked while he
explained the object of his expedition.
"This district have got a poor reputation with the law, Mr. Kettison.
Here is this fellow, Royston McGurny, been about here two years, and a
reward for five hundred dollars out for his arrest."
"That's Roy's fault, Sher'ff, not our'n," leered the glib old man. He,
too, had had a sip of the stalwart cherry-bounce. "Roy's in no wise
sociable."
"It's plumb flying in the face of the law," declared the officer. "If I
had a guide, I'd not wait a minute, or if I could recognize the man
whenst I viewed him. The constable promised to send a fellow to meet me
here,--what's his name?--yes, Smith, Barton Smith,--who will guide us to
where he was last glimpsed. I hope to take him alive," he added with an
inflection of doubt.
Certainly this was a dreary camp-hunt, with all its distasteful
sequelae. Purcell, who had no more imagination than a promissory note,
silently sulked under the officer's intimation that, being able-bodied
men, he would expect the hunters also to ride with him. They were not of
his county, and doubted their obligation, but they would not refuse to
aid the law. Bygrave, however, realized a "story" in the air, and
Seymour was interested in the impending developments; for being a close
observer, he had perceived that the girl was in the clutch of some
tumultuous though covert agitation. Her blood blazed at fever-heat in
her cheeks; her eyes were on fire; every muscle was tense; and her brain
whirled. To her the crisis was tremendous. This was the result of her
unwarranted interference. Who was she, indeed, that she should seek to
command the march of events and deploy sequences? Her foolish
manoeuvering had lured this innocent man to ruin, capture, anguish,
and death. No warning could he have; the window was opaque with the
corrugations of the rain-fall on the streaming panes, and set too high
to afford him a glimpse from without. And, oh, how he would despise the
traitor that she must needs seem to be! She had not a moment for
reflection, for counsel, for action. Already the signal,--he was prompt
at the tryst,--the sharp, crystalline vibration of the tap on the glass!
The sheriff rose instantly with that cumbrous agility sometimes
characterizing portly men. "There he is now!" he exclaimed.
But Meddy, with a little hysterical cry, had sprung first to the opening
door. "Barton Smith!" she exclaimed, with shrill significance. "Hyar is
yer guide, Sher'ff, wet ez a drownded rat."
The pale face in the dark aperture of the doorway, as the fire-light
flashed on it, grew ghastly white with terror and lean with amazement.
For a moment the man seemed petrified. Seymour, vaguely fumbling with
his suspicions, began to disintegrate the plot of the play, and to
discriminate the powers of the dramatis personae.
"Now, my man, step lively," said the officer in his big, husky voice.
"Do you know this Royston McGurny?"
To be sure, Seymour had no cause for suspicion but his own intuition and
the intangible evidence of tone and look all as obvious to the others as
to him. But he was at once doubtful and relieved when the haggard wretch
at the door, mustering his courage, replied: "Know Royston McGurny? None
better. Knowed him all my life."
"Got pretty good horse?"
"Got none at all; expect ter borry Mr. Kettison's."
"I'll go show ye whar the saddle be," exclaimed Meddy, with her wonted
officiousness, and glibly picking up the bits of her shattered scheme.
Seymour fully expected they would not return from the gloom without,
whither they had disappeared, but embrace the immediate chance of escape
before the inopportune arrival of the real Barton Smith should balk the
possibility. But, no,--and he doubted anew all his suspicions,--in a
trice here they both were again, a new courage, a new hope in that
pallid, furtive face, and another horse stood saddled among the equine
group at the door. Meddlesome was pinning up the brown skirt of her
gown, showing a red petticoat that had harmonies with a coarse, red
plaid shawl adjusted over her head and shoulders.
"Gran'dad," she observed, never looking up, and speaking with her mouth
full of pins, "Barton Smith say he kin set me down at Aunt Drusina's
house. Ye know she be ailin', an' sent for me this evenin'; but I hed no
way ter go."
The sheriff looked sour enough at this intrusion; but he doubtless
imagined that this relative was no distant neighbor, and as he had need
of hearty aid and popular support, he offered no protest.
There was a clearing sky without, and the wind was laid. The frenzy of
the storm was over, although rain was still falling. The little
cavalcade got to horse deliberately enough amid the transparent dun
shadows and dim yellow flare of light from open door and window. One of
the mounts had burst a girth, and a strap must be procured from the
plow-gear in the shed. Another, a steed of some spirit, reared and
plunged at the lights, and could not be induced to cross the
illuminated bar thrown athwart the yard from the open door. The official
impatience of the delay was expressed in irritable comments and muttered
oaths; but throughout the interval the guide, with his pallid, strained
face, sat motionless in his saddle, his rifle across its pommel, an apt
presentment of indifference, while, perched behind him, Meddy was
continually busy in readjusting her skirts or shawl or a small bundle
that presumably contained her rustic finery, but which, to a close
approach, would have disclosed the sulphurous odor of gunpowder.
When the cluster of horsemen was fairly on the march, however, she sat
quite still, and more than once Seymour noted that, with her face close
to the shoulder of the guide, she was whispering in his ear. What was
their game? he marvelled, having once projected the idea that this late
comer was, himself, the "wolf's head" whom they were to chase down for a
rich reward, incongruously hunting amidst his own hue and cry. Or,
Seymour again doubted, had he merely constructed a figment of a scheme
from his own imaginings and these attenuations of suggestion? For there
seemed, after all, scant communication between the two, and this was
even less when the moon was unveiled, the shifting shimmer of the clouds
falling away from the great sphere of pearl, gemming the night with an
incomparable splendor. It had grown almost as light as day, and the
sheriff ordered the pace quickened. Along a definite cattle-trail they
went at first, but presently they were following through bosky recesses
a deer-path, winding sinuously at will on the way to water. The thinning
foliage let in the fair, ethereal light, and all the sylvan aisles stood
in sheeny silver illumination. The drops of moisture glittered
jewel-wise on the dark boughs of fir and pine, and one could even
discriminate the red glow of sour-wood and the golden flare of hickory,
so well were the chromatic harmonies asserted in this refined and
refulgent glamour.
"Barton Smith!" called the sheriff, suddenly from the rear of the party.
There was no answer, and Seymour felt his prophetic blood run cold. His
conscience began to stir. Had he, indeed, no foundation for his
suspicion?
"Smith! _Smith_" cried the irascible officer. "Hey, there! Is the man
deaf?"
"Not deef, edzac'ly," Meddlesome's voice sounded reproachfully; "jes a
leetle hard o' hearin'." She had administered a warning nudge.
"Hey? What ye want?" said the "Wolf's Head," suddenly checking his
horse.
"Have you any idea of where you are going, or how far?" demanded the
officer, sternly.
"Just acrost the gorge," the guide answered easily.
"I heard he had been glimpsed in a hollow tree. That word was telephoned
from the cross-roads to town. It was the tree the skeleton was in."
"That tree? It's away back yander," observed one of the posse, reluctant
and disaffected.
"Oh, he has quit that tree; he is bound for up the gorge now," said the
guide.
"Well, I suppose you know, from what I was told," said the sheriff,
discontentedly; "but this is a long ja'nt. Ride up! Ride up!"
Onward they fared through the perfumed woods. The wild asters were
blooming, and sweet and subtile distillations of the autumnal growths
were diffused on the air. The deer are but ill at road-making,--such
tangled coverts, such clifty ledges, such wild leaps; for now the path
threaded the jagged verge of precipices. The valley, a black abyss above
which massive, purplish mountains loomed against a sky of pearly tints,
was visibly narrowing. They all knew that presently it would become a
mere gorge, a vast indentation in the mountain-side. The weird vistas
across the gorge were visible now, craggy steeps, and deep woods filled
with moonlight, with that peculiar untranslated intendment which
differentiates its luminosity in the wilderness from the lunar glamour
of cultivated scenes--something weird, melancholy, eloquent of a meaning
addressed to the soul, but which the senses cannot entertain or words
express.
With a sudden halt, the guide dismounted. The girl still sat on the
saddle-blanket, and the horse bowed his head and pawed. The posse were
gazing dubiously, reluctantly, at a foot-bridge across a deep abyss. It
was only a log, the upper side hewn, with a shaking hand-rail held by
slight standards.
"Have we got to cross this?" asked the officer, still in the saddle and
gazing downward.
"Ef ye foller me," said the guide, indifferently.
But he was ahead of his orders. He visibly braced his nerves for the
effort, and holding his rifle as a balancing-pole, he sped along the
light span with a tread as deft as a fox or a wolf. In a moment he had
gained the farther side.
They scarcely knew how it happened. So unexpected was the event that,
though it occurred before their eyes, they did not seem to see it. They
remembered, rather than perceived, that he stooped suddenly; with one
single great effort of muscular force he dislodged the end of the log,
heaved it up in the air, strongly flung it aside, whence it went
crashing down into the black depths below, its own weight, as it fell,
sufficing to wrench out the other end, carrying with it a mass of earth
and rock from the verge of the precipice.
The horses sprang back snorting and frightened; the officer's, being a
fine animal in prime condition, tried to bolt. Before he had him well in
hand again, the man on the opposite brink had vanished. The sheriff's
suspicions were barely astir when a hallooing voice in the rear made
itself heard, and a horseman, breathless with haste, his steed flecked
with foam, rode up, indignant, flushed, and eager.
"Whyn't ye wait for me, Sher'ff? Ye air all on the wrong track," he
cried. "Royston McGurny be hid in the skellington's tree. I glimpsed him
thar myself, an' gin information."
The sheriff gazed down with averse and suspicious eyes. "What's all
this?" he said sternly. "Give an account of yourself."
"Me?" exclaimed the man in amazement. "Why, I'm Barton Smith, yer guide,
that's who. An' I'm good for five hundred dollars' reward."
But the sheriff called off the pursuit for the time, as he had no means
of replacing the bridge or of crossing the chasm.
Meddlesome's share in the escape was not detected, and for a while she
had no incentive to the foolhardiness of boasting. But her prudence
diminished when the reward for the apprehension of Royston McGurny was
suddenly withdrawn. The confession of one of the distillers, dying of
tuberculosis contracted in prison, who had himself fired the fatal shot,
had established the alibi that McGurny claimed, and served to relieve
him of all suspicion.
He eventually became a "herder" of cattle on the bald of the mountain
and a farmer in a small way, and in these placid pursuits he found a
contented existence. But, occasionally, a crony of his olden time would
contrast the profits of this tame industry at a disadvantage with the
quick and large returns of the "wild cat," when he would "confess and
avoid."
"That's true, that's all true; but a man can't holp it no ways in the
world whenst he hev got a wife that is so out-an'-out meddlesome that
she won't let him run ag'in' the law, nohow he kin fix it."
HIS UNQUIET GHOST
The moon was high in the sky. The wind was laid. So silent was the vast
stretch of mountain wilderness, aglint with the dew, that the tinkle of
a rill far below in the black abyss seemed less a sound than an evidence
of the pervasive quietude, since so slight a thing, so distant, could
compass so keen a vibration. For an hour or more the three men who
lurked in the shadow of a crag in the narrow mountain-pass, heard
nothing else. When at last they caught the dull reverberation of a slow
wheel and the occasional metallic clank of a tire against a stone, the
vehicle was fully three miles distant by the winding road in the valley.
Time lagged. Only by imperceptible degrees the sound of deliberate
approach grew louder on the air as the interval of space lessened. At
length, above their ambush at the summit of the mountain's brow the
heads of horses came into view, distinct in the moonlight between the
fibrous pines and the vast expanse of the sky above the valley. Even
then there was renewed delay. The driver of the wagon paused to rest the
team.
The three lurking men did not move; they scarcely ventured to breathe.
Only when there was no retrograde possible, no chance of escape, when
the vehicle was fairly on the steep declivity of the road, the precipice
sheer on one side, the wall of the ridge rising perpendicularly on the
other, did two of them, both revenue-raiders disguised as mountaineers,
step forth from the shadow. The other, the informer, a genuine
mountaineer, still skulked motionless in the darkness. The "revenuers,"
ascending the road, maintained a slow, lunging gait, as if they had
toiled from far.
Their abrupt appearance had the effect of a galvanic shock to the man
handling the reins, a stalwart, rubicund fellow, who visibly paled. He
drew up so suddenly as almost to throw the horses from their feet.
"G'evenin'," ventured Browdie, the elder of the raiders, in a husky
voice affecting an untutored accent. He had some special ability as a
mimic, and, being familiar with the dialect and manners of the people,
this gift greatly facilitated the rustic impersonation he had essayed.
"Ye're haulin' late," he added, for the hour was close to midnight.
"Yes, stranger; haulin' late, from Eskaqua--a needcessity."
"What's yer cargo?" asked Browdie, seeming only ordinarily inquisitive.
A sepulchral cadence was in the driver's voice, and the disguised
raiders noted that the three other men on the wagon had preserved,
throughout, a solemn silence. "What we-uns mus' all be one day,
stranger--a corpus."
Browdie was stultified for a moment. Then, sustaining his assumed
character, he said: "I hope it be nobody I know. I be fairly well
acquainted in Eskaqua, though I hail from down in Lonesome Cove. Who be
dead?"
There was palpably a moment's hesitation before the spokesman replied:
"Watt Wyatt; died day 'fore yestiddy."
At the words, one of the silent men in the wagon turned his face
suddenly, with such obvious amazement depicted upon it that it arrested
the attention of the "revenuers." This face was so individual that it
was not likely to be easily mistaken or forgotten. A wild, breezy look
it had, and a tricksy, incorporeal expression that might well befit some
fantastic, fabled thing of the woods. It was full of fine script of
elusive meanings, not registered in the lineaments of the prosaic man of
the day, though perchance of scant utility, not worth interpretation.
His full gray eyes were touched to glancing brilliancy by a moonbeam;
his long, fibrously floating brown hair was thrown backward; his
receding chin was peculiarly delicate; and though his well-knit frame
bespoke a hardy vigor, his pale cheek was soft and thin. All the rustic
grotesquery of garb and posture was cancelled by the deep shadow of a
bough, and his delicate face showed isolated in the moonlight.
Browdie silently pondered his vague suspicions for a moment. "Whar did
he die at?" he then demanded at a venture.
"At his daddy's house, fur sure. Whar else?" responded the driver. "I
hev got what's lef' of him hyar in the coffin-box. We expected ter make
it ter Shiloh buryin'-ground 'fore dark; but the road is middlin' heavy,
an' 'bout five mile' back Ben cast a shoe. The funeral warn't over much
'fore noon."
"Whyn't they bury him in Eskaqua, whar he died?" persisted Browdie.
"Waal, they planned ter bury him alongside his mother an' gran'dad, what
used ter live in Tanglefoot Cove. But we air wastin' time hyar, an' we
hev got none ter spare. Gee, Ben! Git up, John!"
The wagon gave a lurch; the horses, holding back in bracing attitudes
far from the pole, went teetering down the steep slant, the locked wheel
dragging heavily; the four men sat silent, two in slouching postures at
the head of the coffin; the third, with the driver, was at its foot. It
seemed drearily suggestive, the last journey of this humble mortality,
in all the splendid environment of the mountains, under the vast
expansions of the aloof skies, in the mystic light of the unnoting moon.
"Is this bona-fide?" asked Browdie, with a questioning glance at the
informer, who had at length crept forth.
"I dunno," sullenly responded the mountaineer. He had acquainted the two
officers, who were of a posse of revenue-raiders hovering in the
vicinity, with the mysterious circumstance that a freighted wagon now
and then made a midnight transit across these lonely ranges. He himself
had heard only occasionally in a wakeful hour the roll of heavy wheels,
but he interpreted this as the secret transportation of brush whisky
from the still to its market. He had thought to fix the transgression on
an old enemy of his own, long suspected of moonshining; but he was
acquainted with none of the youngsters on the wagon, at whom he had
peered cautiously from behind the rocks. His actuating motive in giving
information to the emissaries of the government had been the rancor of
an old feud, and his detection meant certain death. He had not expected
the revenue-raiders to be outnumbered by the supposed moonshiners, and
he would not fight in the open. He had no sentiment of fealty to the
law, and the officers glanced at each other in uncertainty.
"This evidently is not the wagon in question," said Browdie,
disappointed.
"I'll follow them a bit," volunteered Ronan, the younger and the more
active of the two officers. "Seems to me they'll bear watching."
Indeed, as the melancholy cortege fared down and down the steep road,
dwindling in the sheeny distance, the covert and half-suppressed
laughter of the sepulchral escort was of so keen a relish that it was
well that the scraping of the locked wheel aided the distance to mask
the incongruous sound.
"What ailed you-uns ter name _me_ as the corpus, 'Gene Barker?" demanded
Walter Wyatt, when he had regained the capacity of coherent speech.
"Oh, I hed ter do suddint murder on somebody," declared the driver, all
bluff and reassured and red-faced again, "an' I couldn't think quick of
nobody else. Besides, I belt a grudge ag'in' you fer not stuffin' mo'
straw 'twixt them jimmyjohns in the coffin-box."
"That's a fac'. Ye air too triflin' ter be let ter live, Watt," cried
one of their comrades. "I hearn them jugs clash tergether in the
coffin-box when 'Gene checked the team up suddint, I tell you. An' them
men sure 'peared ter me powerful suspectin'."
"_I_ hearn the clash of them jimmyjohns," chimed in the driver. "I
really thunk my hour war come. Some informer must hev set them men ter
spyin' round fer moonshine."
"Oh, surely nobody wouldn't dare," urged one of the group, uneasily; for
the identity of an informer was masked in secrecy, and his fate, when
discovered, was often gruesome.
"They couldn't hev noticed the clash of them jimmyjohns, nohow,"
declared the negligent Watt, nonchalantly. "But namin' _me_ fur the dead
one! Supposin' they air revenuers fur true, an' hed somebody along, hid
out in the bresh, ez war acquainted with me by sight----"
"Then they'd hev been skeered out'n thar boots, that's all," interrupted
the self-sufficient 'Gene. "They would hev 'lowed they hed viewed yer
brazen ghost, bold ez brass, standin' at the head of yer own
coffin-box."
"Or mebbe they mought hev recognized the Wyatt favor, ef they warn't
acquainted with _me_," persisted Watt, with his unique sense of injury.
Eugene Barker defended the temerity of his inspiration. "They would hev
jes thought ye war kin ter the deceased, an' attendin' him ter his long
home."
"'Gene don't keer much fur ye ter be alive nohow, Watt Wyatt," one of
the others suggested tactlessly, "'count o' Minta Elladine Riggs."
Eugene Barker's off-hand phrase was incongruous with his sudden gravity
and his evident rancor as he declared: "_I_ ain't carin' fur sech ez
Watt Wyatt. An' they _do_ say in the cove that Minta Elladine Riggs hev
gin him the mitten, anyhow, on account of his gamesome ways, playin'
kyerds, a-bettin' his money, drinkin' apple-jack, an' sech."