He did not maintain this sedulous semblance of calmness as he galloped
the wild young horse along the mountain slopes in the mist. His eyes
burned; his teeth were fiercely set; sometimes he lifted his right hand
and shook it clenched as if he held his vengeance within his grasp and
would not lightly let it go. Over and again he cried aloud a curse upon
the man he hated, and then he would fall to muttering his grudges, all
unforgotten, all registered indelibly in his mind despite its facile
laxity, despite its fickle traits. He reviewed the events since the
morning that Alethea had stood by the judge’s desk, and he laid down his
pen to gaze, to the afternoon when, amongst the blossoms and the sunshine
and the birds, they had talked together, and she had asked a futile
thing, doubtless to beguile the hour, and he had warned her solemnly.
“I ain’t goin’ ter North Car’liny, an’ leave ’em hyar tergether,” he
declared vehemently. “I’ll meet up with him somewhar this side o’ the
Craig house. I’ll dare him ter fight, an’ ef he don’t kill me I’ll kill
him, an’ kiss the hand that does the deed!”
The mists shivered to listen; the rocks repeated the threat, and again
in hesitant dread, and still once more a word in an awed and tremulous
staccato. On and on he went,—never abating speed, flying over the
broken ground; deaf to the sound of horn and hounds borne fitfully from
the slopes below on some hardly perceptible current of the air, and
again dying to the dumbness of the shrouded woods; blind to the burly
apparition of a bear trotting out of the clouds and in again, although
the horse reared and pawed the air; callous to the keen chill of the
torrent, swollen out of its banks with the spring rains till it surged
about his limbs as he forded through. Over and again the mountain
water-courses intercepted his path, but only once his attention was
attracted to his surroundings, and this was because there seemed here
a check upon his progress, and he must needs take heed of his way.
The stream known as Gran’dad’s creek showed in the thickening mist
a turbulent volume, a swollen breadth, covering rocks and brush and
gullies, and washing the boles of trees far from its normal channel; he
hardly knew where he might safely take the ford. Now the water elusively
glimmered, swift, foaming, full of enormous bowlders, and with trees
standing in its midst; and as he went down to the verge in a cleft of the
rock the vapors closed again, and it seemed to recede into invisibility.
The horse had become restive. He resisted and snorted, and finally
deliberately faced about, as he was recklessly urged to enter the stream.
He was forced again to the margin, when suddenly Mink thought he was
dreaming. The fluctuating vapors parted once more, and in the rifts he
saw on the opposite bank the man he sought. He stood in numb surprise; a
strange overwhelming sense of hatred possessed him with the image thus
palpably presented; he quivered with a recollection of all his wrongs.
This was no dream. It was Gwinnan returning from the moonshiners’ house.
He rose from his stirrups and waved his hand with a smile. Mink heard his
ringing halloo. Then Gwinnan pressed his roan colt down to the margin of
the water and took the ford.
“Saved us wettin’ our feet agin, Grasshopper,” Mink observed. He was
very distinct as he sat on the bareback stray; his feet dangling without
stirrups, his big wool hat, his flaunting auburn hair, his keen,
clear-cut face, all definitely painted on the opaque white background
of the mist; a bole was barely outlined here and there behind him, or
a towering crag, as if there were other elements of the picture merely
sketched in. More than once Gwinnan lifted his grave eyes toward him. But
when the mist came between them, surging in a great cloudy volume, Mink
drew the pistol from his pocket.
“Ye don’t kerry straight. I ’member yer tricks. I reckon he hev got a
six-shooter, but I’ll resk ye, ennyhows. I’ll wait till he kems across
an’ then dare him to fight.”
As he waited it might have seemed that he was the only human creature in
the world, so desolately vacant were the barren mists, so unresponsive
to the sense of the landscape that they hid, so null, so silent, save
for the river, forever flowing on like life, resistless as eternity.
The interval was long to his impatience,—so long that, alarmed at last
lest his revenge be snatched from him by some mischance, at this supreme
moment when it had seemed the fierce joy he had craved was vouchsafed,
he hastily rode along the clifty bank above the tumultuous current.
Once more the mist lifted. Suddenly he saw the roan colt, his full eyes
starting from his head, his scream almost human in its frantic terror,
pawing the cliffs, to the base of which the encroaching waters had risen;
finding no footing, no shallows, only the forbidding inaccessibilities of
the rocks. The saddle was vacant. The rider had been swept away by the
wanton vagaries of the current.
The young mountaineer stared stolidly and uncomprehendingly for a
moment. In a sort of daze he dismounted from his horse. He hardly
realized what had happened, until, as he climbed deftly down among the
splintered crags, lithe, agile, sure-footed as a deer, he saw clinging
to a bramble growing from a fissure, and supported on a ledge of the
rock, the unconscious figure familiar to his dream of vengeance. It was
forestalled! The wild freak of the mountain torrent had given him his
heart’s desire, and yet his hands were clean. The wolves, the wild dogs,
and the vultures would not leave the man to creep away were there yet
life left in him.
And there was life. He noted the convulsive fluttering of breath, the
trembling clutch of the fingers; for the nerves remembered the saving
boughs that the senses had forgotten.
As Mink stood looking down he suddenly lifted his head with a quick
start, as if a word had been spoken to him from out the silence. Why this
gratuity of pity, this surging fellow-feeling, this clamorous instinct to
aid? Was a hand held out to him in his hour of need? Nay, he might have
known rescue and release, his future might now be fair and free, but for
the device of this man who had bestirred himself to thwart the friendly
mob. Was not his hope attained, his prayer? Here was a sublimated
revenge. His enemy would die at his feet, and yet his hands were clean.
And at this moment he was muttering, “I’ll be bound ef he hed a leetle
wild-cat whiskey now ’twould save his life ez respons’ble ez ef ’twar ez
legal ez the taxed corn-juice.”
He stood thinking for a moment. There was Marvin’s still at the Craig
house, as Alethea had said, two miles away; the man would be dead of
exhaustion before help could come thence. But not a quarter of a mile
below, on one of the divergent ridges of Thunderhead, was Bylor’s home.
Mink started with affright. The old man was a candidate for office. The
certainty of arrest awaited him there, whatever his mission. It was a
decision swift as an impulse. It meant twenty years’ imprisonment at hard
labor, and he realized it as he sprang upon the bare back of his horse.
“I reckon I kin make a break an’ run, or tunnel out, or suthin’,” he
said, with his preposterous hopefulness; “leastwise, I can’t leave him
thar ter die that-a-way, half drownded and harried ter death by wolves
an’ painters an’ buzzards. Ef the darned critter,” he cried out, in a
renewal of despair, “would hev jes’ stood up an’ been shot like healthy
folks!”
Mink never reached his destination.
It was not held to be a strange nor an unjustifiable action that young
Bylor was led to do. He said afterward that that day, as he made his
way home in the midst of the clouds that begirt the mountain, he was
affrighted to behold again, evolved from their expressionless monotony,
the equestrian figure of the mystic herder that rides on Thunderhead. His
nerves were shaken, for before that morning he had seen the “harnt,” and
at close quarters. He noted the wildly beckoning hand vague in the mist;
he heard, or thought he heard, a shrill, insistent hail; he quickened
his pace, pursued by the thunderous hoofs of the spectral steed, riding
him down, as he feared. He faced about in desperate terror and fired his
rifle.
Then he knew what he had done, for the rider lurched from the horse and
fell, and the animal dashed past him, running at full speed. It was Mink
Lorey whom he found upon the ground,—strong enough only to gasp out his
errand; and though Bylor rose instantly to obey his behest and go to
succor Gwinnan, Mink was dead before he left.
No great loss, the country-side said, and indeed it was suspected for a
time that Gwinnan’s straits had resulted from Mink’s wanton mischief.
When the facts became known, one or two reflective souls—recognizing
in his deed that universal vital element of better possibilities astir
within him insistently militant, enlisting every sterling trait common to
humanity—were moved to say that he was not all mink.
No one in the mountains, however, fully appreciated the impulse that had
controlled him except Alethea. To her it served as a sacred apotheosis,
and she adored his memory for what he might have been, and forgot what he
was. Often, when the spring bloomed, or the summer was flushing with the
wild roses and the roseate dawns and the red sunset-tides, she hearkened
to the mocking-bird’s singing, thrice—thrice the mystic strain, and she
was wont to go and search for her lover at their tryst among the crags.
And when she would come back, her face so full of peace, her eyes softly
luminous, her drawling formula, “Jest been talkin’ with Reuben ’mongst
the rocks,” pervaded with tranquil joy, her step-mother and Mrs. Jessup
would whisper apart and look askance upon her, and start at any sudden
jar or sound, as if it were instinct with her spectre lover’s freakish
presence.
And so, patient drudge though she was, they listened to Mrs. Purvine’s
eager insistence to have her bide in the cove; and although she went to
live with this cheery soul, it was with tears and sighs and sadness to
leave the clifty gorges that he haunted.
But she found the mocking-bird singing there, thrice, thrice the mystic
strain, amongst the rocky banks of the Scolacutta River. And so she
smiled again.
Except for this delusion she gave little indication of the unsettling of
her mind. She was placidly happy with her aunt, though the two women were
much alone, for Jerry Price presently married Sophy Griff. He became the
sole dependence of the miller and his grandchildren, but a measure of
Mrs. Purvine’s jaunty prosperity seemed to follow him. Old Griff’s little
log cabin took on a more pretentious guise, and there was a slipshod
thrift within. Jerry lifted the mill-stones and rebuilt the mill, and
the whir began anew as if it had never left off; and the old miller sat
without the door, and listened, and grew garrulous and cheerful and dusty
with meal and flour, and brightened into some faint reflection of his old
imperative self. Tad never reappeared from the moonshiners’ lair, and
they still successfully elude the law.
The failure to secure their testimony proved no disaster to Gwinnan, as
the chancellor held that a duel is a matter of deliberate and formal
arrangement between men who recognize both the nature of the proceeding
and the law infringed.
Nevertheless, Gwinnan was not satisfied. He had never regarded the matter
as a duel; he had forgotten even the circumstances. Once brought forcibly
to his mind, he dissented from the decision of the case, which he had
watched more as if from the bench than from the bar. He resigned when
reinstated.
The relinquishment of his ambition was very bitter to him. He had infused
into it much of the essence of his identity; it had amply promised the
end for which he had rejoiced to labor; it had borne a lofty and isolated
existence. And yet, as he brooded on his despoiled life, his trained
mind, applied to moral discernment, could but perceive at length that
it had been sheerly a technical excellence toward which he had bent his
energies, a selfish end he had held in view. Without a high ennobling
purpose, without a dominate hope to dispense benefit, his unsanctified
ambition had only lured with a wish to rise, and despite the heights
to which it had attained it had been held to earth by its own inherent
weight.
Works of Fiction.