In contrast with the steam-cars, the old ox-cart was a slow way of
getting through the world, and had little of that magnificence which
forced itself upon Mink’s jaded and preoccupied faculties. But as
Alethea turned her face toward the mountains, it seemed the progress
into Paradise, so happy was she in the belief that the rescuers had
prevailed. For she, aunt Dely, and Jerry Price had left town early
that morning, before doubts and contradictions were astir. The waning
yellow moon still swung high in the sky, above the violet vapors of the
level west. Long shadows were stalking athwart the fields and down the
woodland ways, as if some mystic beings of the night were getting them
home. A gust of wind came shivering along the road once and again,—an
invisible, chilly presence, that audibly rustled its weird garments and
convulsively caught its breath, and was gone. Above the Great Smoky
Mountains the inexpressible splendors of the day-star glowed and burned.
She walked behind the cart much of the time with Jerry, while aunt Dely
sat, a shapeless mass, within it. A scent of tar issued from its clumsy
wheels, heavy with the red clay mire of many a mile; a rasping creak
exuded from its axles, in defiance of wagon-grease. The ox between his
shafts had a grotesque burliness in the moonlight. The square, unpainted
little vehicle was a quaint contrivance. Four of the dogs ran beneath it,
in leash with their nimble shadows. And aunt Dely’s sun-bonneted head,
nodding with occasional lapses into sleep, was faithfully reproduced in
the antics of the silhouettes upon the ground that journeyed with them.
Now and again the Scolacutta River crossed their way in wide, shining
curves scintillating with the stars, and then Alethea would perch upon
the tail-board, and Jerry would clamber into his place as driver, and the
dogs would yelp and wheeze on the bank, reluctant to swim, and the ox
would plunge in, sometimes with a muttered low of surprise to find the
water so cold. Fording the stream was slow work; the wheels often scraped
against great hidden bowlders, threatening dislocation and destruction
to the running gear. The transit was attended with a coruscation of
glittering showers of spray, and left a foaming track across the swift
current. Sometimes it was a hard pull up the steep, rocky bank opposite.
The old ox had a sober aspect, a resolute tread, and insistently nodding
horns. His sturdy rustic demeanor might have suggested that he was glad
to be homeward bound, and to turn his back upon the frivolities of
civilization and fashion. Not so aunt Dely. It seemed for a time as if
her enforced withdrawal from these things had impaired her temper. She
woke up ever and anon with caustic remarks.
“I reckon now, Lethe Ann Sayles, ye be goin’ ter bide along o’ yer
step-mother?”
“Ye know that’s my home. I hev ter, aunt Dely.”
The girl’s voice was clear, sweet, thrilling with gladness, like some
suddenly awakened bird’s singing a stave before dawn.
“I b’lieve ye!” satirically. “Ennybody but you-uns would be ’shamed
ter own up ez ye hev got no home. Old ez ye be, an’ ye ain’t married
yit! How old be ye? Lemme see,”—with a tone intimating that she would
give no quarter,—“nineteen year, five month, an’ fower days. It’s plumb
scandalous,” she muttered, arranging her shawl about her. “Ye Bluff!”
addressing the ox in a querulous crescendo, “ye goin’ ter jolt the life
out’n me, a-tryin’ ter ape the gait o’ the minchin’ sinners ye seen in
Shaftesville! Actially the steer hev got the shuffles! I tell ye, Sodom
an’ G’morrah warn’t nowhar fur seethin’ sin ter Shaftesville. The devil
be a-gatherin’ his harvest thar. His bin an’ barn air full. Them folks
will know some day ez store clothes ain’t no defense agin fire. They hev
bartered thar salvation fur store clothes. But I do wisht,” she broke off
suddenly, dropping her voice from her sanctimonious whine to her cheery
drawl, “I hed one o’ them ready-made sun-bonnets. I hed traded off all my
feathers an’ truck for store sugar an’ sech afore I seen ’em. I was so
full o’ laff that I couldn’t keep my face straight whenst I viewed the
contrivance.”
The darkness had fled; the moonlight had failed; the fine, chastened
pallor of the interval—the moment’s pause before the dawn—showed the
colorless sky, the massive dusky mountains, the stretches of woods below,
almost leafless now, the gaunt, tawny fields here and there, the zigzag
lines of the rail fences, the red clay road. There were gullies of such
depth on either side that the ox, who received so little supervision that
he appeared to have the double responsibility of drawing and driving
the cart, demonstrated, in keeping out of pitfalls, ampler intellectual
capacities than are usually credited to the bovine tribe. But indeed his
gifts were recognized. “I ain’t s’prised none ef some day Bluff takes
ter talkin’,” his mistress often averred, with her worldly pride in her
possessions.
The wind freshened; the white frost gleamed; a pale flush, expanding into
a suffusion of amber light, irradiated the sky; and the great red wintry
sun rose slowly above the purple ranges.
They had barely passed through a gap of the mountains and entered Eskaqua
Cove, when they saw riding along an intersecting road close to the bank
of the river a girl in a yellow homespun dress, with a yellow bonnet on
her head, and mounted on a great white mare. She had the slaie of a loom
in her hand which she had borrowed of a neighbor, and which served to
explain her early errand.
Alethea, in her joy, had forgotten Elvira Crosby’s sneers and gibes the
night she had brought to the Hollow the raccoon which Mink had given her.
All other considerations were dwarfed by the rapturous idea that he was
at liberty. Eager to tell the news, she sprang forward.
“Elviry!” she cried. The girl drew up her mare and turned about. Alethea
ran down the road and caught the bridle. “Elviry,” she reiterated,
“Reuben air out o’ jail! He’s free! He’s free!”
The news was not received as she expected. Elvira put back her bonnet
from the soft rings of short hair that lay about her head. She fixed her
dark eyes on Alethea in doubting surprise.
“Waal,” she demanded, as if herself sitting in judgment, “who killed Tad?”
“Tad be alive ez I be!” cried Alethea, harried by the reawakening of
those questions which she had thought were forever set at rest.
“An’ did the jury say sech?” Elvira asked. It might have seemed that with
the breach between her and Mink irreparable, she was not rejoiced to hear
of his good fortune.
“The jury couldn’t ’gree,” said Alethea breathlessly. “The rescuers tuk
him out.”
“Sech ez that be agin the law,” said Elvira staidly.
“I ain’t keerin’ fur the law!” cried Alethea. “He hev done no harm, an’
all the kentry knowed it. An’ ’twarn’t right ter keep him cooped in jail.
So they tuk him out.”
She lifted her head and smiled. Ah, did she indeed look upon a wintry
landscape with those eyes? So irradiated with the fine lights of joy, so
soft, they were, it might seem they could reflect only endless summers.
The gaunt, bleak mountains shivered in the niggardliness of the averted
sun; the wind tossed her loose locks of golden hair from beneath her
brown bonnet as if they were flouts to the paler beams.
Elvira looked down at her with the pitiless enmity of envy.
“Waal,” she said, “’twixt ye two ye hev done me a powerful mean turn.
Mink kep’ a-tryin’ ter cut out Pete Rood till I didn’t know my own mind.
An’ then ye a-tellin’ them tales ’bout harnts till Pete drapped dead,—ye
knowin’ he hed heart-disease! Yes, sir, he’s dead; buried right over
yander in the graveyard o’ the church-house in the cove. An’ I reckon ye
be sati’fied now,—ef _ye kin_ be sati’fied.”
She looked away over the swift flow of the river, and began to fleck her
shoe with the hickory switch she carried.
Alethea’s face fell. She still stood holding the mare’s rein, but aunt
Dely’s voice had broken upon the silence. For Bluff had followed Alethea
when she turned from the main road, and had refused to be guided by Mrs.
Purvine’s acrid remonstrance. As to Jerry, he was stalking on ahead,
unaware that the others were not close on his steps. Sawing upon the
ropes on Bluff’s horns which served for reins, Mrs. Purvine succeeded in
drawing him up when she reached the spot where the two girls stood. She
suddenly joined in the conversation with an astute intention.
“Yes, sir, Mink’s out,” she said, confirming her niece’s statement. “An’
ye’ll hev ter do mighty little tollin’ ter git him back agin, Elviry,”
she added beguilingly.
“I don’t want no jail-bird roun’ me,” said Elvira, with a toss of her
head.
“Mebbe ye air right, child!” cried Mrs. Purvine. “That’s edzacly what
I tole Lethe.” She nodded gayly, and her head-gear, swaying with the
expressive gesture, could not have seemed more jaunty had it been a
ready-made sun-bonnet from the store. “Ye mark my words, Lethe air goin’
ter marry a man she seen in Shaftesville.” Elated with this effort of
imagination, she continued, inspirationally, “He ’lowed she war a plumb
beauty, beat ennything he ever dreampt could hev kem out’n the mountings.
He air a town man, an’ he be a fust-rate one.”
“Oh, aunt Dely!” faltered Alethea, amazed and almost speechless.
But aunt Dely, charmed with the image she had conjured up, had no mind to
relinquish this mythical man, and added another touch of verisimilitude:
“He’s well off, too. Lethe, she don’t keer nuthin’ ’bout riches, but
bein’ ez I hev ’sociated so much with town folks, I sorter set store by
worldly goods,—though not enough ter resk my soul’s salvation, nuther.”
Aunt Dely’s evident desire was to combine spiritual and material welfare,
and in this she was not unlike more sophisticated religionists.
The opinionated Bluff being induced to turn around at last, Mrs. Purvine
let fly a Parthian dart: “But ez ter you-uns, Elviry, I dunno whether
ye hed better be lookin’ down on fust one boy, an’ then another. Ye’ll
git lef’ hyar a lonesome single woman, the fust thing ye know,—_the only
one in the cove_! But then, mebbe ye’d better jes’ bow yer mind ter the
dispensation, fur arter all ye moughtn’t be able ter ketch Mink. The gals
honey him up so ez he air toler’ble sp’iled; they ’low he air special
good-lookin’, though I hev never been able ter see good looks in him
sence he kem ter my house, one night, an’ bedeviled my front steps so ez
they hev never been so stiddy sence.”
“Aunt Dely,” cried Alethea, when they were once more on their homeward
way, “what ailed ye ter tell Elviry sech a pack o’”—Respect for her
elders restrained her.
“I war prompted by my conscience!” replied the logical Mrs. Purvine,
unexpectedly. “I can’t be at peace with my conscience ’thout doin’ all
I kin ter purvent a spry, good-lookin’ gal like you-uns from marryin’ a
wuthless critter sech ez Mink Lorey.” She made no secret of her designs.
“He be good a plenty an’ ter spare fur that thar snake-eyed Elviry
Crosby, but I want ye ter marry Jerry Price, an’ kem an’ live along o’
me.”
The immaterial suitor evolved by Mrs. Purvine’s conscience dwelt in
Alethea’s mind with singular consistency and effect afterward. When
she was once more in Wild-Cat Hollow, and day after day passed,—short
days they were, of early winter,—and Mink did not come, expectation was
supplanted by alternations of hope and disappointment, and they in their
turn by fear and despair. Was it possible, she asked herself, that he
could have heard and credited this fantastic invention of Mrs. Purvine’s
affection and pride; that Elvira had poisoned his mind; that he was
jealous and angry; that for this he had held aloof? Then the recollection
of their old differences came upon her. His sorrows had obliterated them
in her contemplation. It did not follow, however, that they had brought
her nearer to him. He had long ago fallen away from her. Why should she
expect that he would return now? She remembered with a new interpretation
his joyous relief the morning that she had told to him and his lawyer
in the jail the story of her glimpse of Tad; although she had shared
his gratulation, it was for his sake alone. She remembered his burning
eyes fixed with fiery reproaches upon her face in the court-room, when
the disclosure was elicited that it was in a graveyard she had seen the
missing boy. After all, she had done nothing for him; her testimony had
fostered doubt and roused superstition, and other and stronger friends
had effected his release.
She became silent, sober-eyed, and absorbed, and went mechanically about
the house. Her changed demeanor occasioned comment from Mrs. Jessup, who
sat idle, with a frowzy head and an active snuff-brush, by the fireside
instead of on the porch, as in the summer days. “When Lethe fust kem back
from Shaftesville she ’peared sorter peart an’ livened up. Her brain war
shuck up, somehow, by her travels. I ’lowed she war a-goin’ ter behave
arter this like sure enough folks,—but shucks! she ’pears ter be feared
ter open her mouth, else folks’ll know she hev got a tongue ’twixt her
teeth.” For Alethea found it hard now to reply to the continued queries
of Mrs. Sayles and Mrs. Jessup, who had relished her opportunity, and in
the girl’s observation of village life were enjoying all the benefits
of travel without impinging upon their inertia or undertaking its
fatigues. The elder woman sat smoking in the corner, her pink sun-bonnet
overhanging her pallid, thin face, ever and anon producing a leaf of
badly cured tobacco, and drying it upon the hearth-stone before serving
her pipe. Now and then she chuckled silently and toothlessly at some
detail of the gossip. It had hurt the girl to know how little they cared
for the true object of the expedition. Mink Lorey was naught to them, and
they did not affect a picturesque humanity which they did not feel.
“Waal, sir!” Mrs. Sayles would say, “I’ll be bound them town folks air
talkin’ ’bout Dely Purvine yit. I jes’ kin view in the sperit how she
went a-boguein’ roun’ that town, stare-gazin’ everything, like she
war raised nowhar, an’ warn’t used ter nuthin’. Didn’t the folks laff
powerful at yer aunt Dely?”
“I never seen nobody laffin’,” protested Alethea, loyally.
Jacob Jessup, sober enough, but surly, was wont also to sit in these
days idle by the fire. The farm work, such as it was, had been done. The
stock he fed when he liked. He chose to consider Alethea’s metropolitan
trip as a bit of personal self-assertion, and sneered whenever it was
mentioned, and sought to ignore it as far as he might. For his own part,
he had never been to Shaftesville, and he grudged her the distinction. He
would not recognize it; he treated the fact as if it were not, and thus
he extinguished it. He seemed somehow, as he sprawled idly about, to take
up much more room by the fire than the women, despite their skirts, and
he was often engaged in altercations with the dogs, the children, and the
pet cub as to the space they occupied. The bear had been reared in a bad
school for his manners; he had grown intelligent and impudent and selfish
in captivity among his human friends. He would stretch himself along the
hearth in front of the family, absorbing all the heat, snarling, and
showing his teeth sometimes, but steeling himself in his fur and his fat
and his fortitude, and withstanding kicks and blows till his persecutor
was tired. Sometimes Jessup would catch him by the rolls of fat about
his neck and drag him to the door, but the nimble beast would again be
stretched upon the hearthstones before the man could reach his chair.
Jessup did the brute no great hurt, for, lowering and ill-natured as the
fellow was, he was kindly disposed toward animals, and this made the more
marked a sort of spite which he seemed to entertain toward the raccoon
which Mink had given Elvira, and which she had brought to Alethea. The
grotesque creature was in some sort a domestic martyr. As it scuttled
about the uneven puncheon floor, he would affect to stumble over it,
swear at it, seize it by the tail, and fling it against the wall. But
the coon’s griefs were readily healed. It would skulk away for a time,
and then be seen eating stolen delicacies in its dainty fashion, washing
the food between its two fore-paws in the drinking pail. Old man Sayles,
silent, subdued, sat a sort of alien at his own fireside, sorting seeds,
and bits of tobacco, buttons, herbs, tiny gourds, which went by the
name of “lumber” with him, in a kind of trough beneath the window that
served in lieu of sill. Now and then he passed his hand over his head
and sighed. Perhaps he regretted his second matrimonial venture; for the
domestic scene was one of frowzy confusion, very pronounced when crowded
into one small room, instead of being shared with the porch, which the
wind swept now and shook, and where the mists congregated in the evenings
or the frosts convened. The Jessup children were shrill at play. The
baby had got on its feet, and was walking into everything,—unwary pans
and kettles and tubs of water. Tige’s overbearing disposition was very
manifest in his capacity as fireside companion. And when the chimney
smoked, and L’onidas preferred his complaints at Alethea’s side as she
sat and carded wool, and the cub leaned his weight against her as he
contemplated the fire with his head upon her knee, and her step-mother
scolded, and Jacob Jessup fumed and contradicted, and the experimental
baby brought down the churn with a crash, while the cat lapped amidst
the waste, Mrs. Jessup would shift her snuff-brush to the other corner
of her pretty mouth, and demand, “Now ain’t Lethe a plumb fool ter live
hyar along o’ sech cavortin’ ways up on the side o’ a mounting, a-waitin’
fur a pore wuthless scamp like Mink Lorey, when she could hev a house
ter herself in Piomingo Cove, with no hendrance but Ben Doaks, a quiet
respectable boy, ez I don’t look down on ’kase he ain’t got religion! I
know some folks ez religion itself can’t holp.”
Sometimes, however,—it was at long intervals,—even Mrs. Jessup would
be summoned to rouse herself from the heavy sluggishness that made all
exertion, beyond the necessary routine, positive pain. The code of
etiquette that prevails in the mountains, simple as it is, has yet its
rigorous requirements; and when the death of a kinsman in Eskaqua Cove
presently occurred, the graceless creature deplored it less than the
supervening necessity of attending the obsequies. There was no snow, nor
ice, nor rain, to urge as an excuse. The weather was singularly fine and
dry. It was easier getting down the mountain now than in the summer. And
so she was constrained to go.
The sunshine was still, languid; the air was calm, Wild-Cat Hollow wore
its wintry aspect, although below in the cove one might have glimpses of
red and yellow, as if the autumn yet lingered. Everywhere there was a
wider outlook because of the denudation of the woods, and the landscape
was the more gaunt, the more rugged. It was like a mind stripped of the
illusions of youth; the stern facts are the plainer, and alas! more
stern. The purplish-garnet hue of the myriads of bare boughs in the
forests covering the mountain slopes contrasted with the indeterminate
blue of the sky. There was a fibrous effect in their fine detail; even
the great mass, seen at a distance, was like some delicate penciling.
Singularly still it was, the air very dry; the dead leaves on the ground
did not rustle; the corn-stalks, standing withered and yellow in the
fields, did not stir. The only motion was the slow shifting of the
shadows as the day went on, and perhaps high, high even above the Great
Smoky, a swift passing of wild geese flying southward, their cabalistic
syllable _Houk! houk!_ floating down, seeming in the silence strangely
intoned and mysterious. At night a new moon looked through the rigid,
naked trees. The feeble glimmer from the little log cabin was solitary.
The stars themselves were hardly more aloof from the world. The narrow
vista through the gap only attested how darkly indistinguishable was the
cove, how annihilated in the blackness were the mountains.
No sound of cattle drifted down now from the bald; the herds were gone;
sometimes in the midnight the howl of a wolf echoed and re-echoed in
all the tortuous ways of the wilderness; then silence, that seemed to
tremble with fear of the reiteration of the savage cry. Alethea was prone
to be wakeful and sad and anxious, so perhaps it was well that she had
much to occupy her thoughts during the day. The baby fretted for his
mother. Mrs. Jessup was not a model mother, but she was the only one
the baby had, and he was not recreant to filial sentiment. He exacted a
vast number of petty attentions from Alethea which he had never before
required. Tige and the cub resented the pampering she gave him; they were
jealous and made their feeling known in many dumb manifestations: they
kept themselves sadly in the way; now they were hungry and now they were
thirsty, and they whined continually about her.
She hardly noticed at first that a thick haze had appeared over the cove,
but as yet did not dim the sky. It climbed the mountain sides, and hung
like a gauze veil about the cabin and the sheds. Suddenly she became
aware of the pungent odor of smoke. She put the child away from her, as
he clung to her skirts, and stepped out upon the porch. The dog and cub
pressed close after her, fancying that they had scored one against the
baby, who had sunk, squalling because of his desertion, upon the floor.
She looked about for a moment at the still white presence that had
usurped the earth, the air, the sky.
“Somebody hev set out fire in the woods!” she cried.
“Hev ye jes’ fund that out?” drawled Jacob Jessup, as he sat on the
porch. Her father and he were languidly discussing whether they should
fire against it. It was far enough away as yet, they thought, and with
the annual conflagrations in the woods they had become experts in judging
of the distance and of the emergencies of fighting fire with fire.
She listened as they talked, thinking that Sam Marvin’s home, miles away,
would presently be in danger, if they were right as to the location of
the fire. The cruel flames would complete the desolation she had wrought.
Her conscience winced always at the recollection of its bare, denuded
plight. Some small reparation was suggested in the idea that she might
save it; she might go thither now and fire the dead leaves on the slopes
below. Above there was a desolate, barren stretch of rocks, covering many
acres, which the flames could hardly overleap. There was no wind, but a
slight stir was now in the air. Its current was down the mountain.
She set out, Tige and the coon with her: the wild thing ambling demurely
along with all the decorum of cultivated manners; the domestic animal
barking and leaping before her in mad ecstasy for the simple privilege of
the excursion. The cub looked after them from the doorway, whined, and
crept within to the fire.
As she went she was vividly reminded of the day when she had journeyed
thither before, although the woods had then worn the rich guise of
autumn, and they were now austere and bleak and silent, and shrouded in
the white smoke. She even noted the lick-log at the forks of the road,
where she had sat and trembled and debated within herself. She wondered
if what she had said in the court-room would pursue the moonshiner in his
hiding place. Would it harm him? Had she done right or wrong?
Still walking on up the steep slant to the moonshiner’s house, seeing
only a yard or two before her, she at last came upon the fence. She
paused and leaned upon the rails, and looked about her. The corn-field
comprised more acreage than is usual in mountain agriculture. The
destination of the crop was not the limited legitimate market of the
region. It was planted for use in the still. She experienced another pang
when she realized that it too was a grievous loss; for Sam Marvin had
been forced to leave the fruit of his industry when it stood immature.
Now, early in December, the full crisp ears leaned heavily from the
sere stalk. She wondered that the abandoned crop, a fine one, had not
been plundered. Then she bethought herself how deep in the wilderness
it stood secluded. All at once she heard a rustling among the corn. Her
first thought was the bear. In amaze she discerned a wagon looming hard
by in the smoke. Then the indistinct figures of a man, a woman, and
a half-grown girl came slowly down the turn row. To judge from their
gestures, they were gathering the corn.