As Harshaw paused to let his mare breathe, an abrupt sound smote his ear;
he lifted his head to listen. It was the fitful clank of a cow-bell—and
again; nearer than he had thought at first. He experienced infinite
relief. The prosaic jangling had a welcome significance. It intimated
the vicinity of some dwelling-place, for at this season the cattle are
not at large in the withered pasturage of the mountain. He heard the
bushes cracking at a little distance; he pressed his reluctant mare
in that direction, through a briery tangle, over the trunks of fallen
trees, pausing now and then to listen to the sound. Suddenly there
was a great thwack; a thick human tongue stammered a curse. There was
something strange and repellent and unnatural in the mouthing tones. The
next moment he understood. The laurel gave way into the open aisles of
the brown woods; a red suffusion of the sunset lingered among the dark
boles on the high slopes, contending with, rather than illuminating,
the lucent yellow tints on the dead leaves. A red cow shambled along at
a clumsy run amidst the pervasive duskiness, that was rather felt than
seen; and driving her with a long hickory sprout was a tall mountain boy,
who turned his head at the sound of the hoofs behind him, showing under
the bent and drooping brim of an old white hat a pale and flabby face,
on which pitiless nature had fixed the stamp of denied intelligence.
He gazed, with open mouth and starting eyes, at the horseman; then,
regardless of Harshaw’s friendly hail, he dropped his stick, and with a
strange, unearthly howl he fled along the woodland ways like a frightened
deer. He plunged into the laurel, and was out of sight in a moment.
Harshaw began to drive the cow along, hoping she would take the
familiar barn-yard way. He could hardly gauge his relief when, almost
immediately, he saw before him a rail-fence; and yet he had an accession
of irritation because of the folly, the futility, of the whole mishap.
His consciousness was so schooled to the exactions of political life that
he experienced a sort of grotesque shame as if the misadventure were
already added to the capital of a political opponent expert in the art of
ridicule.
No one was visible in the little clearing. Smoke, however, was curling
briskly from the chimney of a log hut; there was a barn of poles hard by,
evidently well filled. Harshaw hallooed, with no response save that his
hearty voice roused the dogs; they came trooping from under the house and
from out of it, sharply barking, although two or three, still drowsy,
paused to stretch themselves to a surprising length and to yawn with a
vast dental display. The cow went in by the way, doubtless, that she
had come out, stepping over the fence, where a number of rails had been
thrown off. Harshaw, thinking it as well to encounter the dogs within the
inclosure as without, followed her example, the mare resisting slightly,
and stumbling over those of the rails that lay upon the ground. He saw
that his approach had occasioned a commotion within the house; there was
a vague flutter of skirts elusively appearing and disappearing. Across
the doorway, low down, were nailed wooden slats, doubtless to restrain
the excursiveness of a small child, who suddenly thrust his head over
them, and was instantly snatched back by some invisible hand.
Nevertheless, the inhabitants were presently induced to hold a parley,
perhaps because of Harshaw’s manifest determination to force an entrance,
despite the dogs that leaped and yelped about his stirrup irons, their
vocal efforts more shrilly keyed as his whip descended among them; for
although he held his revolver cocked, he was too shrewd a politician to
present its muzzle to a mountaineer’s dog save in the direst emergency. A
woman suddenly appeared at the door. She looked at him with so keen and
doubtful a gaze, with a gravity so forbidding, a silence so significant,
that, accustomed as he was to the hospitable greeting and smile of
welcome that graces the threshold of every home of the region, however
humble, he lost for the moment his ready assurance. When he told her
of his plight, she received the statement with the chilling silence of
incredulity. Nevertheless, upon his request for shelter for the night
and a guide the next morning, she did not refuse, as he had feared, but
told him in a spiritless way to “’light and hitch,” and that the boy
would look after his horse. He strode up to the house, the dogs, suddenly
all very friendly, at his heels, and stepped over the barricade that
restrained the adventurous juvenile who was now hanging upon it, looking
with eager interest at the world of the door-yard, which was a very wide
world to him. He followed Harshaw to his seat by the fire, eying with
great persistence his boots and his spurs. The latter exerted upon him
special fascinations, and he presently stooped down and applied a small
inquisitive finger to the rowel. The interior was not unlike the other
homes of the region,—two high beds, a ladder ascending to a chamber in
the roof, a rude table, a spinning-wheel, at which a gaunt, half-grown
girl was working as industriously as if oblivious of the stranger’s
presence. The woman sat with her arms folded, her eyes on the fire,
pondering deeply. A young man came to the back door, glanced in, and
turned away.
When the woman fixed her grave, wide, prominent eyes upon Harshaw, there
was something in their expression so unnerving that his refuge seemed
hardly more comfortable than the savage wilderness without. But he said
bluffly to himself that he had not stumped Kildeer and Cherokee for
nothing; he rallied his traditions as a politician. Surely, he reflected,
he who could so beguile other men’s adherents to vote for him could win
his way to a simple woman’s friendship, if he tried.
He looked at the child and smiled, and said that the boy was “mighty
peart.” He dropped into the vernacular as a conscious concession to the
habits of the “plain people.”
The woman’s fierce face was transfigured. “That’s a true word, stranger,”
she said, beamingly. “An’ Philetus ain’t three year old yit, air he,
Sereny?”
The girl in an abrupt, piping way confirmed the marvel, and Harshaw
looked again at Philetus, who had no sort of hesitancy in seeking to take
off the spurs and convert them to his own use.
His mother went on: “Philetus, though, ain’t nigh so pretty ez three
others I hed ez died. Yes, sir, we-uns lived up higher than this, on a
mounting over yander thar.”
“You haven’t been living here long?” said Harshaw, merely by way of
making talk.
The woman instantly resumed her stony, impassive manner. “’Tain’t long
nor short by some folkses’ medjure,” she said equivocally. She looked
watchfully at him from time to time. An old gray cat that sat on the
warm stones in the corner of the hearth, purring, and feigning to lift
now one of her fore-paws and then the other, eyed him with a round,
yellow, somnolent stare, as if she too had a charge to keep him under
surveillance. She got up suddenly, arching her back, to affectionately
rub against the great booted feet of the idiot, who came and leaned on
the chimney and gazed solemnly at the stranger. He was overgrown and
overfat, and had a big, puffy, important face and a cavalier, arrogant
manner.
“Don’ wanter,” he said, in his thick, mouthing utterance, as the woman,
once more seeming flustered and anxious, told him to take the basket and
go out to the wood pile and fill it with chips.
The whir of the spinning-wheel was suddenly silent, and the girl, who
officiated as a sort of echo of her mother’s words, a reflection of her
actions, came and emptied the basket of the few bits of bark within it,
and handed it to him.
“G’ way, Sereny,” he said good-naturedly, but declining the duty.
The unfathomable dispensation of idiocy, its irreconcilability with
mundane theories of divine justice or mercy, its presentment at once
repellent and grotesque, has its morbid effect when confronted with
sanity. Harshaw was a man neither of delicate instincts nor of any subtle
endowment, but the contemplation of the great vacant face grimacing at
him, coupled with the singular influences of his reception, required
a recollection of the anguished anxiety he had experienced, the sound
of the rising wind without, the sight of the whirling dead leaves, the
gathering gloom of the cloudy dusk, to reconcile him to the conditions of
his refuge.
“Well, my man,” he said, looking at the boy, “what’s _your_ name?”
The idiot grinned importantly. “Tad,” he stuttered thickly,—“Tad
Simpkins. What’s yourn?”
Harshaw sat for a moment in stunned surprise. Then all the discomforts of
the situation vanished before the triumphs of this discovery. This—this
great, well-fed, hearty creature, the forlorn, maltreated idiot depicted
by the evidence in Mink Lorey’s trial; this, the pitiable boy drowned
in the mill like a rat in a trap; this, the elusive spectre of the
attorney-general’s science! The next moment it occurred to him that he
must use special caution here; the motives that had led these people to
harbor the idiot, if not to conceal him, were suspicious, and favored his
theory in the trial—which he had adopted more from the poverty of his
resources than a full credulity—that the retirement of the boy reputed
drowned was prompted by a deep-seated enmity to Mink Lorey.
He turned to the woman, all his normal faculties on the alert.
“Well, that’s a fact, Mrs. Simpkins; your son ain’t plumb bright,—I can
see that,—but he’s right there. I ought to tell you _my_ name.”
“Mine ain’t Simpkins,” said the woman suddenly, responding quickly to
his clever touch, “an’ Tad thar ain’t my son.” She was mixing corn-meal
batter for bread in a wooden bowl; she stirred it energetically as she
went on with a sort of partisan acrimony: “Mebbe he ain’t bright, ez ye
call it, but I ain’t never hearn o’ Tad doin’ a mean thing yit,—not ter
the chill’n, nor dogs, nor cats, nor nuthin’. He may be lackin’ in the
head, but he ain’t lackin’ in the heart; thar’s whar’s the complaint o’
mos’ folks ez ain’t idjits. I dunno which air held gifted in the sight o’
the Lord. ’Tain’t in human wisdom ter say. Tad’ll make a better show at
the jedgmint day’n many folks ez ’low they hev hed thar senses through
life.”
“Ain’t no idjit, nuther,” protested Tad, gruffly.
“Well, my name’s Harshaw—Bob Harshaw.” The guest leaned forward, with
his elbows on his knees, looking steadily at her as he talked. She held
her head on one side, listening eagerly, almost laboriously, sedulous
that she should lose no point, showing how sharp had been her desire for
him to give an account of himself. As he noticed this, he was more than
ever sure that the household had some cause to fear the law. His vanity
received a slight shock in the self-evident fact that she had never
before heard of him. “I’m a lawyer from Shaftesville. I defended Mink
Lorey when he was tried for drowning that chap.”
“Flung me in the water!” exclaimed Tad parenthetically.
“I hearn ’bout that,” said the woman. She had knelt on the broad
hearth-stone, depositing the bowl beside her while she made up the pones
in her hands, tossing them from one palm to the other, then placing them
upon the hoe which smoked upon the hot live coals drawn out from the bed
of the fire. “I war glad the rescuers tuk him out,” she continued, “fur
Tad ain’t drownded.”
“The rescuers didn’t take him out,” said Harshaw, sharply.
The woman looked up, surprised; her hand shook a little with the
bread in it; she was evidently capable of appreciating the weight of
responsibility.
“Why, Lethe Sayles told me so,” she said.
“Lethe Sayles!” he exclaimed, perplexed. Her name instantly recalled
Gwinnan—incongruous association of ideas!—and Mink’s persuasion of
Gwinnan’s enmity toward him for her sake. Had she known the judge before?
he wondered. Had Mink some foundation for his jealousy beyond the
disasters of the trial? Somehow, this false representation to the people
who knew that the lad was not drowned had, he thought, an undeveloped
significance in view of that fact. Harshaw resolved that there should
be no question of the substantiality of Tad’s apparition when the case
should come up to be tried anew. He forgot himself for the moment. “I’ll
produce you in open court, my fine fellow,” he said, swaggering to his
feet and striking the boy on his fat shoulder. “That’s what I’m bound
for!”
He had naught in mind save the details of his case. He regarded the
incident only as the symmetrical justification of his conduct of the
evidence and his evolution of the theory of the crime. He did not pause
to reflect on its slight and ineffective value to Mink himself, to whom
an acquittal could only mean that a few years were not to be added to the
long term of imprisonment which already impended for him. He did not even
notice that the woman rose suddenly from her knees, went toward the door,
and beckoned in the burly young fellow who had appeared on the porch at
intervals, covertly surveying the scene within.
“Naw, sir,” she exclaimed, with an agitated, accelerated method of speech
and a fierce eye, “ye won’t! Ye ain’t a-goin’ ter kem in hyar an’ spy us
out an’ perduce us in court, fur yer profit an’ our destruction.” Harshaw
turned and gazed at her, with a flushing, indignant face. The young man
had his rifle in his hand; she herself was taking down a gun which lay in
a rack above the fireplace. “Ye warn’t axed ter kem in hyar, but it be
our say-so ez ter when ye go out.”
The surprise of it overpowered him for a moment; he stood blankly staring
at them. The next, he realized that his pistols were in the holster
with his saddle, and his gun that he had placed beside the door had been
removed. He was not, however, deficient in physical courage.
“Take care how you attempt to detain me!” he blustered.
She laughed in return, shrilly, mirthlessly; as he looked at her he was
sure that she would not hesitate to draw the trigger that her long, lean
fingers, bedaubed with the corn-meal batter, already touched.
The idiot put his hands before his eyes, with a hoarse, wheezing moan
of horror and remonstrance. The girl looked on with the tranquillity of
sanity.
Harshaw could rely only on the superiority of his own intellectual
endowments.
“Why, look here, madam,” he said bluffly, rallying his wits, “what do you
want of me,—to stay here? I have got no notion of going, I assure you;
not till daybreak, anyhow.”
He flung himself into his chair, and looked up at her with an
exasperating composure, as if relegating to her all the jeopardy of the
initiative and the prerogatives of action.
She quailed before this unexpected submission. She could have had no
doubts as to her course had he shown fight; the tall and subsidiary
young man also wore an air of sheepish defeat. Harshaw stifled his
questions; he gave no sign of the anger that seethed within him, the
haunting fear that would not down. He stretched out his booted legs to
the warm fire, feeling in the very capacity of motion, in the endowment
of sensation, a relief, an appreciated value in sheer life which is the
common sequence of escape, and remembering that by this time, but for his
quick expedient, he might be in case to never move again. He thrust his
broad hat far back on his yellow head, put his hands into his pockets,
and looked in his confident fashion about his surroundings, while the
woman lowered her weapon, and presently went mechanically about her
preparations for supper, evidently attended by some lurking regret for
her precipitancy. She looked askance at him now and then, and after a
time ventured upon a question.
“Ye say yer name be Harshaw?” she asked.
“I said so,” Harshaw replied. So alert were her suspicions that she
fancied significance in the simple phrase. She exchanged a quick glance
with the young man, who appeared at once lowering and beset with doubt.
Even Tad apprehended the meaning in the look.
“Ye know my name, ’pears like, better ’n yourn,” he grinned, with a
guttural, foolish laugh.
As the boy spoke Harshaw was impressed anew with the change in his fate;
the creature of cuffs and curses, who had been the very derision of
perverse circumstances, was a marvelous contrast to the well-fed, fat,
kindly-tended lad who leered good-humoredly from where he lounged against
the great chimney. Yet despite this attestation of benignant impulses
harbored here, there was the rifle, which had had such importunate
concern for his attention, standing ready at the woman’s right hand.
“Well, madam,” said the politician, “I have been about right smart in the
mountains, and I have partaken of the cheer around many a hearth-stone,
but this is the first time I have ever been invited to look down the
muzzle of a rifle.”
She winced visibly at this reflection upon her hospitality, as she knelt
on the hearth, slipping the knife under the baking pones on the hoe, and
turning them with a dexterous flip.
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” continued Harshaw. “I have never heard of
anybody but law-breakers giving themselves to such practices,—moonshiners
and the like.”
The woman suddenly lifted her face, her dismayed jaw falling at the
significant word. Harshaw could have laughed aloud. The simple little
riddle was guessed. And yet the situation was all the graver for him.
There was a step outside; the door opened for only a narrow space;
darkness had fallen; the room was illumined by the flaring flames darting
up the chimney; he knew that he was scrutinized sharply from without, and
now and then he heard the sound of voices in low conference.
It was well, doubtless, that the secret petitions he preferred to
the powers of the earth and the air for the utter confusion and the
eternal destruction of the mountain hunters who had made so slight
and ineffective a search for him—or perhaps none at all—could not be
realized, or his misfortune might have engendered far-reaching and
divergent calamity, disproportionate in all eyes save his own.
He knew now that he had stumbled upon a gang of moonshiners, and had been
taken for a revenue spy, or a straggler from a raiding party. How to
escape with this impression paramount, or indeed how to escape at all,
was a question that bristled with portentous dubitation. He was content
to pretermit it in the guarded watchfulness that absorbed his every
faculty, as one by one the men strode in to the number of four or five,
each casting upon him a keen look, supplementing the survey through the
door.
One of them he suddenly recognized. “I have seen you before,” he said,
with a jolly intonation. “This is Sam Marvin, ain’t it?”
The owner of the name was discomfited when confronted with it, and seeing
this, Harshaw was sorry that he had, with the politician’s instinct, made
a point of remembering it.
He could with difficulty eat, despite the fatigues of the day, but he sat
down among them with a hearty show of appetite and with his wonted bluff
manner. His sharpened attention took cognizance of many details which
under ordinary circumstances he would not have noticed. He could have
sworn to every one of the rough faces—and right welcome would have been
the opportunity—grouped about the table. The men ate in a business-like,
capacious fashion, especially one lean, lank fellow, with unkempt black
hair and a thin face, the chin decorated with what is known as a goatee.
Notwithstanding their roughness they were not altogether unkind. Philetus
could not complain of disregarded pleas as he begged from chair to chair,
under the firm impression that there was something choice in the _menu_
not included in the contents of the pan placed for him on a bench, which
should serve as table, while he was to be seated on an inverted noggin.
And the dogs spent the time of the family meal alternately in a petrified
expectancy and sudden elastic bounds to catch the bits flung liberally
over the shoulders.
When the repast, conducted chiefly in silence, was concluded, the
group reassembled about the hearth-stone, the pipes were lighted, and
conversation again became practicable. It required some strong control of
his faculties to bear himself as an honored guest instead of a suspected
informer, trapped, but Harshaw managed to support much of his wonted
manner as he lighted a pipe that he had in his pocket and pulled it into
a strong glow. Nevertheless, he was beset with a realization of how easy
it would be for them to rid themselves of him without a possibility
that his fate would excite suspicion. As he looked into the flaming
coals of the fire, his quickened imagination could picture a man lying
lifeless at the foot of a great wall of rocks,—lying motionless where
he had fallen, but with an averted face,—and another vista in which
his horse, with an empty saddle, with pistols in the holster, cropped
the grass on a slope. He thought of it often afterward,—the man lying
lifeless beneath the crags, with a face he did not see! This was the
doom that persistently forced itself upon him as most obviously, most
insistently, his; naught else could so readily release these desperadoes
from the peril that threatened them. He began to remember various stories
of Marvin’s old encounters with the “revenuers:” on one occasion shots
had been exchanged; one or more of the posse had been killed; he could
not remember accurately, but he thought this was accredited to Jeb
Peake,—“hongry Jeb,” who could, according to the popular account of him,
“chaw up five men of his weight at a mouthful an’ beg for more.” They
had much at stake; perhaps, as they looked into the fire with that slow,
ruminative gaze, they also saw a picture,—a halter wavering in the wind.
The room alternately flared and faded as the flames rose and fell. It
bore traces of renovation: the door was new, the floor patched. He made a
rough guess that Marvin had taken possession of one of the long-deserted
huts seen at intervals in the mountains. Raindrops presently pattered on
the roof; then ceased, as if waiting breathlessly for some mandate; and
again a fusillade; and anon torrents. The melancholy elements in the wild
wastes without seemed not uncheerful companions in lieu of the saturnine
group about the fire. Alack, for liberty, the familiar thing! Harshaw
sought to reassure himself, noting their kindness to the idiot and to the
little child. Philetus climbed over their feet, and made demands, of a
frequency appalling to a mind less repetitious than the one encased in
the downy yellow head, to be ridden on their great miry boots.
Suddenly Marvin spoke: “My wife ’lows ez how ye defended Mink Lorey when
he war tried.”
“I did,” said Harshaw jauntily.
“Waal, did this hyar gal,—this Lethe Sayles, ez lives yander at the
t’other eend o’ the county,—did she up an’ tell in court ennything ’bout
me?”
Harshaw was not a truthful man for conscience’ sake; but in the course of
his practice he had had occasion to remark the inherent capacity of the
truth for prevailing. He was far too acute to prevaricate.
“Yes,” he said, sticking two fingers into his vest-pocket and swinging
the leg he had crossed over the other, “she swore that you were
moonshining and told her so; she had told me as much before. We wanted to
prove that Mink was drunk, and had somewhere to get whiskey besides the
bonded still. We couldn’t get in all the evidence, though.”
The fire snapped and sparkled and flared. The pendent sponge-like masses
of soot clinging to the chimney continually wavered in the strong current
of air; now and then fire was communicated to it, and a dull emblazonment
of sparks would trace some mysterious characters, dying out when half
realized.
Harshaw could but see that his frankness had produced its impression:
there was a troublous cast in all the stolid countenances around the
hearth; but he was glad to be regarded as a problem as well as a danger.
“In the name o’ Gawd,” exclaimed Marvin irritably, “why did ye kem hyar
ter this hyar place fur? Ain’t Shaftesville big enough ter hold ye?”
Harshaw repeated the account of himself which he had already given to
Mrs. Marvin. “I ain’t ready to go yet,” he remarked. “But when your
wife thought I wanted to, by George, she got down the gun and said I
shouldn’t.”
“Ye know too much,” suddenly put in “hongry Jeb,” who looked as
cadaverous and as melancholy as his name might imply.
“I know enough to shut my mouth,” said Harshaw bluffly, “and keep it
shut.”
He looked eagerly at “hongry Jeb,” as he threw this out tentatively.
The mountaineer’s face was distinct in the firelight, and he gazed at the
leaping flames instead of at the speaker.
“I ain’t able ter afford ter resk it,” said “hongry Jeb.” He made
a sudden pass across his jugular toward his left ear, exclaiming
“Tchisk!”—the whites of his eyes and the double row of his shining teeth
showing as he smiled horribly on Harshaw.
The lawyer turned sick. How could he hope that these moonshiners would
jeopardize aught for his sake? He could trust only to himself.
There was some drinking as the evening wore on; the monotony of this
proceeding was beguiled by the fact that one of the dogs took a drop
occasionally, at the instance of the youngest of the moonshiners—a mere
boy of twenty—and Marvin’s son Mose. It was desired that he should extend
his fitness as a boon companion by the use of a pipe, but he revolted
at fire and distrusted smoke, and displayed much power of shrillness
when snatched by the ears and cuffed. He was finally kicked out, to
crawl wheezingly under the house, debarred from the hearth-stone which
unaccomplished dogs who were not even bibulous, much less smokers, were
privileged to enjoy.
But the evening was not convivial. The moonshiners brooded silently as
they drank and smoked. Among them, unmolested, Tad sat. He had never been
so happy as now, poor fellow. He goggled about and laughed to himself
till he fell asleep, his grotesque head dropping to one side, his mouth
open, snoring prosperously.
Marvin glanced at him presently. Then he looked at Harshaw, showing
his long tobacco-stained teeth as he laughed. “I hearn ye hev all been
in a mighty tucker ter know what hed kem o’ Tad, down yander in the
flatwoods,” he said. He sat in a slouching posture as he smoked, his legs
crossed, his shoulders bent, his head thrust forward. “Lethe Sayles tole
me ’bout’n it.”
“Old Griff has nearly lost his mind about Tad,” said Harshaw.
“What?” demanded Marvin, with an affectation of deep surprise. “Can’t he
find nuthin’ else ter cuss an’ beat?”
“Pore—old—man!” exclaimed “hongry Jeb,” wagging his black head, and
showing the gleaming whites of his eyes in his characteristic sidelong
glance.
“Well, I expect Tad has been a good deal better off along of you,”
Harshaw admitted. “But that don’t make it right for you to have kidnapped
him.”
“Lord knows, we-uns didn’t want him,” said Marvin. “We-uns ain’t gifted
in goadin’ sech a critter ez him, like old man Griff. We can’t git work
enough out’n him ter wuth the stealin’. He jes’ kem up ter whar we-uns
lived, one night. I reckon ’twar several nights arter he war flung in the
water. He looked mighty peaked.”
“An’ I never see a critter so hongry,” put in the pullet boldly from her
seat in the chimney corner, her long yellow feet dangling beneath her
short homespun skirt, her hair, which was luxuriant, gathered in a sort
of top-knot on her head, “’thout ’twar Jeb thar.” She gave a cackling
laugh of elation at this thrust, as she knitted off her needle in a
manner that might make one wonder to see a pullet so deft.