The Duke of Dorset got up slowly and stood looking out over the
mountains, with his hands clasped behind him. Below the dark-green
canopy of fir tops descended to a gleam of water; through the brown tree
trunks the great road wound in and out; beyond that thin gleam another
mountain shouldered into the one on which he stood, and the brown carpet
and the verdigris canopy went again upward fantastically to the sky.
When the Duke turned the mountaineer was tying up the mouth of his sack.
"My friend," said the Duke, "this road seems to wind around the
mountain. As the crow flies this distance should be less than half. Is
there no short trail from the coast?"
"Yes, stranger," replied the man, "there's a trail laid out by the deer
that hain't so ladylike." He made a circular gesture with his arm. "Hit
runs acrost the backbone from the sea. The deer didn't have no compass,
but he had a purty notion of short cuts."
"Could we not take this trail down the mountain?" inquired the Duke.
The mountaineer stroked his chin, "I reckon we'd better mosey along
the road to the bottom," he answered, "the trail's some botherin' to a
mewel."
Something in the man's manner told the Duke that he, rather than the
mule, was the object of this consideration. The man's eyes rested on his
light tweeds, doubtless thought unfitted to the thicket. The Duke was
taken with the fancy to push his suggestion a little.
"If you were alone," he said, "would you not follow this trail?"
The mountaineer was embarrassed. The courtesy at his heart was right,
but the trick of phrasing it was crude. He was a man accustomed to move,
like the forces of Nature, on a line, and he could not easily diverge
from it.
"Well," he said, "if I was in a powerful hurry, I reckon I'd let Jezebel
take her chance on this air trail." Then a memory seized him and his
face lightened, "But, I axed you, stranger, an' you said you warn't in
no sich powerful hurry."
The Duke's impression was established, but his objection was also
conclusively met. He returned smiling with the clumsy diplomat and
Jezebel to the great road.
All the long, hazy afternoon they descended the mountain, on the brown,
noiseless carpet, stretched between its walls of green dashed with
scarlet. For the most part the men traveled steadily in silence, as the
pioneer and the Indian travel always in the wilderness. Now and then,
the mountaineer pointed out something of interest; an eagle rising in
circles from some green abyss. He named the eagle with a certain scorn;
he was a robber like Barabbas. The fishhawk that he plundered was a
better man, for he got his bread in toil fairly, as the _Good Book_ said
it. What a man earned by his own labor he had a right to, but
beyond that there was God to settle with. The Duke sought to turn the
conversation on this sentence, as on a hinge, to Childers. He felt,
that behind the first expressions of this man concerning the American,
something definite and threatening moved, but he got little. It was not
that Childers had great possessions, it was a sort of Divine treason
that he was guilty of. He had "set up shop agin God Almighty!" Childers
was old, almost alone--all of his kin had gone before him through the
door of death. No one of his blood remained, except an orphaned niece,
to sit after him in his place. Jehovah had held back his hand many
years, But His wrath would only he the more terrible when that hand
descended.
The man spoke gently, softly and in pity, like one who foresaw, but
could not prevent a doom already on its way. Had there been passion or
any touch of bitterness in the man's speech it would have passed over
the Duke of Dorset, but coming thus it moved strangely with the impulse
bringing him westward over four thousand miles of sea. That impulse
lifted into a premonition. Something, then, threatened this girl whose
face remained in his memory. He had come at some call! He was seized
with a strange query. Did he know this danger, and the man walking
beside him, have only the premonition of it; or did this man know it,
and he have that premonition?
The Duke became curious to know if any fact underlay this man's shadowy
forebodings. He sounded for it through the long afternoon, but he could
touch nothing. The mountaineer seemed curiously timid, hesitating like
a child that could not be brought to say what was turning in his mind,
lest he should not be able to explain it. The man and everything moving
about him deeply puzzled the Duke of Dorset. Hour after hour he studied
him as they swung down the mountain, always on that noiseless carpet.
The man seemed like an old, gentle child, and yet, a certain dignity,
and a certain matrix of elements, strong, primal, savage, sat like a
shadow behind that child. The Duke felt that the expression of the man's
face was not permanent, that the child might on occasion fade out and
another occupy the foreground. But not easily; that expression sat
bedded in a great peace, as though fixed in plaster. If this thing was
the result of struggle it surpassed, indeed, the taking of a city.
Related, somehow, to this fancy, one slight detail of the man's dress
caught the Duke's attention. It was a thick, conical, lead bullet strung
through the middle on a buckskin string that was looped around the
woolen brace above the trousers button. The bullet was as big as that of
the old English Snyder, and would easily weigh five hundred grains. It
was snubbed off at the end and ridged at the base with concentric rings
cut into the lead. The Duke's interest lifted into a query.
"What sort of bullet is that?" he said.
The mountaineer ran his big thumb over the deep ridges. "Hit's a Minie
ball," he answered.
The Duke was certain that some history attached to this piece of lead.
"May I inquire," he said, "where you got it?"
The man's face relaxed into a smile. "Well, stranger," he answered, "I
shot that air ball into a man onct when I was a young feller, an' then I
cut it out of him."
The smile, the gentle, drawling tone, clashed with the brutal inference.
The Duke probed for the story, and with difficulty he got it, in
fragments, in detached detail, in its own barbaric color. Not because
the man wished to tell it, but because, under the Duke's skillful
handling, he was somehow not able to prevent it. It was a Homeric
fragment, with the great, bloody, smoking war between the American
States for a background. A story, big with passion, savage, virile, hot
with life.
A Northern general was marching desperately across the South. With money
he had hired a native out of the mountains to conduct him. The man was a
neighbor to this circuit rider, one who knew the wilderness as the bear
knew it. In terror, the authorities of the State had sent a messenger to
this youthful hermit priest, bidding him stop the renegade before he
got down from his cabin to the Federal camp, and, without a word, the
circuit rider had taken down his rifle from the wooden pegs, and gone
out into the wilderness. From that morning, gray, chill, three hours
before the dawn, the story was a thing savage and hideous. At daybreak
the circuit rider, leaning on his rifle, two hundred yards from the
other's cabin, called him to the door, explained what he had come to do,
and gave him an hour of grace. Within that hour, the renegade--a man,
too, courageous and desperate--fired his cabin, and walked with his
rifle over his shoulder, across his little clearing, into the opposite
border of the forest. Then for three endless days and nights, they
hunted each other through this wilderness, now one, and now the other,
escaping death by some incredible instinct, or some narrow, thrilling
margin that left the breath of the bullet on his face. Below the
Northern general waited with his army, and the militia of the State
waited, too, hanging on his flanks.
Then, finally, on the morning of the fourth day at sunrise, the circuit
rider, trailing his man all night, stopping behind a ledge of stone, by
chance, as the sun struck down the face of the mountain, saw the other
seated in the fork of a great pine, watching back over his trail for his
enemy that followed. With deliberate and deadly care the circuit rider
shot him. The man fell hanging across the limb, and his enemy climbed
the tree and descended with the body in his arms. The bullet had struck
the bone near the point of the jaw, ripped up the cheek and followed the
bone around the head, under the skin to the spine. Sitting on the earth
the mountaineer cut the bullet out, bandaged the wound with the rags of
his shirt, and taking the man in his arms walked down the mountain into
his enemies' camp; walked through it unmolested, carrying his bloody
burden to the commanding officer's tent door. There he laid the man down
on the ground, hideously wounded, looked the officer steadily in the
face, and spoke his word of comment.
"General," he said, "heah's your renegade. He hain't as purty as he
was."
The Duke of Dorset looked up at the mountain, from which they had
descended. The story of that tragedy, pieced together out of these
fragments, thrilled him like a Saga. He could see the army waiting
below, idle in its camp, while this death struggle went silently on, in
the great, smoky wilderness above it. He followed, with every detail,
vividly, these two desperate men, stalking one another with every
trick, every cunning, every artifice. With unending patience, their eyes
narrowed to slits, their ears straining, noiseless, tireless, ghastly
with fatigue; eating as they crept, sleeping as they crept, mad,
desperate, hideous, moving with the lust of death!
And then on some morning when the sun dozed against the mountain, when
the air was soft, when the world lay silent, as under a benediction,
there came down out of this wilderness, this haze, this mystery, a
creature streaked with sweat, gaunt, naked, lurching as it walked,
carrying a thing doubled together, that dripped blood.
At sunset they came to the bottom of the mountain, and camped there in a
little forest of spruce trees, beside a river, wider and deeper than the
Teith. Its bed colored dark, like the Scottish rivers, not with peat,
but with a stronger pigment, leeched out of roots. The great road
continued along this river, but the guide explained that he would ford
it here in the morning, cross the shoulder of the abutting mountain on
a trail, and thus save half a day of travel. They would stop here at
sundown for the night if the Duke were still agreeable to such leisure.
The Duke was pleased to stop. He unpacked the mule and washed her
shoulders in the river, while his companion lighted a fire and prepared
the supper. The mule was fed and turned loose to crop what green things
she could find. The mountaineer cooked his strips of bacon on a forked
twig, held over the smoldering fire, and laid out the supper on the top
of one of the Duke's good leather boxes. To men who had walked all day
through the forest, in the clear air, under a sun that crept, like a
tonic, subtly into the blood, the odor of this dinner, mingling with
the deep pungent smells of the river and the forest, was a thing
incomparably delicious.
Night swiftly descended. Pigeons winged into the tree tops. The stars
came out. The pirates of the river crept through the yellow bracken, and
swam boldly out on their robbing raid, their quaint inky faces lifted
above the shimmering water. The Duke of Dorset smoked a pipe with his
companion, seated on a packing case upturned by the fire. He smoked in
silence, his face relaxed and thoughtful. Long after the pipe had gone
out, after the smoke had vanished, after the bowl had cooled, he sat
there, unmoving, the firelight flickering on his face. Then he
arose slowly, unstrapped a roll of traveling rugs, handed one to his
companion, and, wrapping himself in the other, lay down by the fire.
The mountaineer carried in a heavy limb, wrenched off by the wind,
thrust the ragged end of it into the fire, and sat down again to his
pipe. Presently the Duke of Dorset, wrapped in his rug, seemed to sleep,
breathing deeply and slowly. The mountaineer came to the end of his
pipe, knocked out the ashes, returned it to his pocket, and regarded the
Duke carefully for a moment. Then, he thrust his arm into the sack that
lay beside him on the ground, and took out the thing that he had carried
all the day with so great a care.
The Duke, awakened by the crackling of the spruce limb on the fire,
watched the man through his half-closed eyelids. It was a bulky packet,
wrapped in a piece of deerskin. The mountaineer laid it on his knees
and unrolled it carefully. Within was a huge leather-bound Bible with
a great brass clasp three inches in diameter. The man spread out the
deerskin on his knees so the book might not be soiled, unhooked the
clasp, and, turning to a page, began to read.
His lips moved, forming the words, and his big finger traveled along the
page slowly under the line. But he read silently, stopping now and then,
with his face lifted as though in deep contemplation of the passage. The
Duke of Dorset, dozing into sleep, wondered vaguely what portion of the
Hebrew Scriptures this strange, gentle person read.
The man, as he read, as his attention passed to the subject,
began unconsciously to murmur. His lips, forming the words, began
unconsciously to speak them, in a voice low, drawling, almost inaudible.
The Duke, straining his ear, caught, now and then, a fragment.
_I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water:
and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, said the Lord of
hosts.... The cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also
and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the
line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.... And the wild beasts
of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons their
pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not
be prolonged.... And owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance
there._
The Duke of Dorset fell asleep with that picture fading into his dreams;
the man's massive gentle face banked in shadow; the light, pouring blood
red over the brass clasp of the book; the big bronzed finger moving
slowly on the page; and the man's voice droning in cadence with the
river.
The night deepened. Soft footsteps passed closer in the forest. The
pirates of the river returned stained with murder, swimming like
shadows, without a sound, as under some gift of silence. The great limb
became an ember. The man's voice ceased. He closed the book and returned
it to its place in the bottom of the sack, arose, took up the extra rug,
shook it out, and spread it carefully over the Duke of Dorset.
Then he lay down, at full length by the fire, with the wooden saddle
under his head.