"LESSEN HE KILLS THE REVENUER"
Tom-John Benson did not come up to Moon mountain the following week, nor
the next. But at the end of the third week he appeared to take Belle-Ann
below to Beattyville and across the Kentucky River to the mission school
at Proctor.
He came riding a strong, mountain horse and leading another for
Belle-Ann. He unwrapped a huge bundle, and displayed an entire new
outfit for the girl--two blue sailor dresses with white collars, shoes,
hat, and kindred articles of apparel.
Belle-Ann dressed herself in these store things; and while Slab prepared
a lunch for Benson, she walked out and down toward the spring, where she
thought Lem was lingering. But Lem was not there, and she continued on
to the old honeybee tree, where he sat on a log in deep meditation.
He wished to see her alone. He knew she would find him.
He looked up with a smile when he saw her trim, round figure approach,
beautiful even in the cheap clothes.
She tossed the black curls from her oval face, smiled back at him, and
stood demurely waiting his approval of her apparel.
"Yo' sho' do look purty, Belle-Ann," he observed. "Air yore pap ready
yet?"
"Yes. When he's done his snack, I 'low we-uns 'll be goin', Lem," she
answered, with an assumed cheerfulness she was far from feeling.
Although her heart ached, she had determined before she came to meet Lem
that she would not cry. She had been steeling herself for days for the
ordeal of this parting. Down in the depth of her heart she held fast to
one great purpose; and if she gave way to her feelings and cried, she
knew that it would be shattered.
"I 'lowed yo'-all wanted t' say good-by, Lem," she said presently. He
aroused himself and stood up before her, his eyes full of a meaning she
had never seen there before.
"Naw, Belle-Ann, I hain't wantin' t' say good-by; but I 'low I hev t'.
But thar air one thing I air wantin' yo' t' promise me, Belle-Ann," he
said soberly as he reached down and took her small, tanned hand.
Belle-Ann's heart was throbbing wildly now. This was the crucial moment
she had foreseen, and now was the time to summon all the forces at her
command.
"Mebby I cayn't promise hit, Lem," she rejoined almost inaudibly, with
violet eyes that wandered guiltily away from his face.
He stared at her. There was a timbre in her tone that startled him. He
saw and felt instinctively that she had discerned what he held in his
mind. The fact that she had divined correctly, and answered in this way,
filled him with a sudden, sinking apprehension.
Her words shocked him into a stupor. He thought that he knew her very
soul as he knew his own soul. Had the years that had unfolded her young
life before him, betrayed him and withheld deep things from his
understanding? Things that would join in the pursuit with other searing
grievances to sting and urge his being onward toward desperation? There
was, in truth, a depth to this girl, whom he had known all her life,
that his cursory penetration had failed utterly to fathom. When Lem's
parents had been killed by the revenuer, then it was that an inexorable
avowal had resolved itself in the soul of Belle-Ann. An inviolable
thing, the evulsion of which could never obtain save at the shrine of
death--the death of the hated Ghost-man. Lem had only a general and
superficial conception of the intrinsic intensity of this thing that had
taken hold of the girl. Little did he know of the doleful hours she had
brooded away over this theme of vengeance. Long, brain-dulling hours
during her waking time. Haunting, troublous hours during her dream-time.
And always in the imaginings of her girl-heart she nurtured and built up
an ideal, who would kill the revenuer. A hero who would hasten to her
with the affiliating tribute, and lay the crimson laurels of the deed at
her feet. She well knew that Lem thirsted for the life of this uncanny
man, who had come and deprived him of his beloved mother and father. She
knew that day and night as he traversed the hills he was ever waiting
and watching for him. She was keen, and appreciatively sensible to this,
and ever prayed that Lem would succeed. But all this was not the deed.
Theoretically, it occupied the tenure of a debt. A premise that looked
for no advancement save payment. Until this thing was done they would
both suffer. She told herself over and over again that she would never
betray her true feelings to Lem until he had killed Burton, and appeased
her vengeance. Love him as she thought she did, some vital element was
poignantly amiss. However unwarranted, and fatuous, an indefinable
barrier would stand between them until the culmination of the yearning
that had made ugly crosses in her heart.
Never could she forget the past. As she stood now before Lem, with
downcast eyes, the past rushed upon her more vividly than ever. That
sun-smitten day, made dark and dreadful, when she had hovered over the
still form of Maw Lutts in the yard. Maw Lutts, who from Belle-Ann's
baby-days to the woman's last minute in the yard, had never uttered to
the girl a cross word, or cast her an impatient look. Her parting smile
was rooted in Belle-Ann's soul, climbing and wrapping its tendrils
around her heart like an evergreen.
Even at this instant in her gloomy retrospection, she could put her
finger on her own bosom, precisely where the bullet had struck. That
reddish-purple spot that did not bleed. Very often the vision of that
small, round death-sore multiplied and floated in one gesticulating
mirage before her eyes. Often they consolidated into one compact darkish
background, against which would develop the satanic, puffed visage of
the revenuer who had done this thing. When old Cap Lutts' spirit went
out by the same hand, the girl's soul had sickened to a distortion of
mingled fear and hate, which at times bade fair to drive her primitive
mind bereft.
A devouring monitor of revenge had skulked into her life, following her
better self relentlessly, as a panther stalks a spent beast. To her it
was all like the happening of the past hour. Three weeks only had
elapsed since she had witnessed the last withering stroke of this evil
creature bent upon their destruction. Across her every mood the
prickling echoes of that frantic bell-scream raked. It filled her ears
when she strove to shut it out, and projected its curse into her
slumbering hours.
She felt that unhallowed hour upon her--the moonlit night when the very
trees shuddered as she and little Buddy, clinging to each other, had
crept through the ghastly shadows back to the meeting-house after the
mad bell's appeal had died and the demon had gone.
Never, while reason held its throne, could she obliterate from her eyes
what they two saw in the church that night. So it was that Belle-Ann had
long since, secretly, reared a citadel within her, and down in a remote
grotto therein, had locked away her love; isolated it from her impulses
and fealty.
With valiant, tender delicacy, she always tried not to sully and
overshadow Lem's life with this that she knew was in her. She knew that
Lem had a cross of his own to bear. Although she fancied, as humans are
prone to do, that his burden did not parallel her own. But she would not
contaminate the boy's love with the presence of this red-rare oath
sticking like a projectile in her being. This rubric, monastic avowal of
vengeance that now hung in her soul like a garnet etching. But always
she prayed that God might direct Lem to avenge her, and thus tear down
this phantom picture that overshadowed her life, and thereby redeem her
peace.
Like animated photography, all this dashed through the girl's mind in a
trice when Lem expressed a wish that she would promise him something.
And with it her cryptic avowal centralized and surged up strong within
her. Taking a firm hold on her will, she raised her eyes full upon his
supplicant figure suing before her. Lem looked, and acted like a man who
had been stunned by a blow. He was confronted with a new and unexpected
phase of her nature. As his own gaze met her eyes, he discerned the
indelible lettering of some palpable, deep purpose. What strange alien
agency had laid hold of her? Was this the call of her blue-grass blood
asserting itself in this, the hour of parting? The celerity of the
transition, from his romping, hilarious play-fellow, to this serious,
solemn, sudden incarnation, who denied him so unexpectedly, the pledge
upon which he had staked his future, was a cyclonic blow that left his
faculties bereft and numbed. Belle-Ann was looking fixedly at him. His
lips were palsied. His mouth moved mutely to form words. Suddenly he
found his voice and launched forth out of a daze.
"Why, Belle-Ann, yo' kin sho' promise me thes, cyan't yo' now?"
"Yo' hain't tol' me whut hit air yet, Lem," she protested faintly.
"Belle-Ann," he blurted out huskily, "I air pizen sho' yo'-all knows
whut I air a firin' at."
She shook the silken mass of black curls that would insist in tumbling
down on her small face, and elevated her pretty brows negatively. But
beneath her drooping lids a flicker of tell-tale light was playing.
"Looky heah, Belle-Ann,"--his voice dropped to pleading tones--"Lem
wants thet yo' should promise em sompin' 'fore yo'-all goes away. I want
yo' t' promise, Belle-Ann," he went on earnestly, recovering the hand he
had dropped in his amazement. "I want yo' t' promise thet when yo'-all
cums back t' home thet yo'll marry me--eh?"
Not rudely, but reverently and slowly she drew her hand away from him.
With eyes averted, her bosom stirred and she struggled with the choking
in her throat.
She removed her sun-hat, and stood swinging it in her perturbation. With
a great will she steadied her voice.
"I cyan't promise thet, Lem--leastways not now," she answered slowly,
without looking at him.
He fell back, crestfallen and hurt.
For a minute silence stood between them. Never before had he seen her so
bewitching.
Then she turned her matchless violet eyes upon him.
"I hain't a spitin' yo', Lem," she explained hurriedly. "I hain't a
spitin' you, cose yo' air a good boy an'--an' I like yo', Lem. But I
jest cyant promise whut yo' want me t' now."
Astounded, he stood fumbling for words. Then he suddenly tossed his long
hair back with a jerk of his head--a gesture that had characterized his
father.
"Belle-Ann," he cried hotly, "whut ails yo', little gal; air hit some
tuther bein' yo' love? Air thet Jutt Orlick bin a pesterin' yo' an'
yo're afeerd t' tell me? Belle-Ann, little gal, do yo'-all love Orlick?
Air hit em whut yo' love, an' afeerd t' own on hit? Air ye 'lowin' t'
get shut o' me, Belle-Ann?" he pursued vehemently.
She faced about and fixed her liquid eyes upon him. Her heart hurt and
she turned away again. And he was instantly sorry that he had accused
her.
She stepped over and sat on the spruce-log, dangling her hat and
regarding her tan shoes.
"Looky heah," he burst out fervently, "cum, deah little Belle-Ann; cum
kiss me."
Very slowly she shook her raven curls.
"I cyant, Lem," she said; "not now." At this refusal from her a pallor
swept his features. Utterly crushed, he walked to and fro, a prey to
conflicting emotions.
Her mysterious mien and unaccountable frigidity drove the chill of
another fear into his being. Could it be that this was the first bud of
a fruit that had already started to thrive in Belle-Ann's heart, before
she had even reached the school?
She was going out into a new world away from him. Did she already regard
herself exalted above the things that made up his humble life?
He looked at her sitting on the log, silent, beautiful,
mysterious--another girl from the one he had known all his life.
Abruptly he halted before her. Her eyes sought his face. He fell back a
few paces, now white to the lips with feelings that tore him. He
stretched his two arms toward her beseechingly.
"Looky heah, Belle-Ann! Look t' me now, little gal!" he cried out in
words that tumbled over each other, "Hain't I fittin'? Gawd cyan't find
th' bein' thet loves yo'-all like me, Belle-Ann! Hain't I honest? Hain't
I knowed yo' all yore little life, Belle-Ann? Whut would maw say, seein'
yo'-all driftin' away from me like thes? Do yo' 'low t' go below an'
never cum back, Belle-Ann? Hain't I alers fit fo' yo'-all, Belle-Ann?
Hain't I fit for yo' all my life?"
He took a step nearer, and with his two strong hands ruthlessly ripped
his flannel shirt open and exposed his naked breast to her eyes.
Transfixed, the girl stared at the twenty wide, white scars that
criss-crossed his bosom. At sight of this, with sheer will and gallant
courage she fought back the tears into her aching heart--fought them
back desperately, just as he had fought off the she-bear that had made
those marks when they two were children--fought her off single-handed
with a club, and saved Belle-Ann's life.
With wide eyes she regarded him as he reached out for her.
His impassioned words penetrated to her very soul. She heard him on
vaguely, struggling to control herself. The tide of emotion past, his
petitions came now in low, entreating accents.
"Gawd 'lows I air honest, Belle-Ann. I hain't pesky, Gawd 'll tell; I
hain't sneakin', Gawd 'll tell. Lem wus rise up 'long side o' yo', deah
little gal; an' he loves yo' now, same as alers. Why, I'd stan', ef yo'd
say th' word, with a laff on my face an' let yo'-all fire on me, an' die
a grinnin'--cose I knowed yo' done hit, Belle-Ann.
"I air jest pore regular Lem, little gal, whut has loved yo' all yore
life--frum a little bitty gal up t' now. An' my heart's jest heah whar
hit alers was--jest heah fo' yo', Belle-Ann, with nothin' hidin' out!"
With back-flung head he paused, his pleading eyes still upon her.
Throughout this, Belle-Ann did not meet his eyes directly. She dared
not. She prayed he would stop.
She could no longer withstand his pleadings. She rose up from the log
and, in her turn, though more slowly, her little feet trod where Lem had
walked.
Unconsciously, her hat dropped to the ground as her fingers relaxed and
she placed her two hands upon her bosom. She looked full into his eyes.
"Lem," she breathed, the carmine leaving her cheeks, "yo' axed me t'
marry yo' when I cum back. I cyant promise. Yo' axed t' kiss me, Lem;
oh, please, please don't kiss me. I--I----"
She shut her teeth tightly, and pressed hard upon her turbulent bosom.
Alarmed, he sprang up to catch her. With a quick gesture she held him
off.
"Lem, I took a vow--I did," she panted. "I took a vow on th'
witch-block. I took hit t' myself--nobuddy but Gawd knows. Now, I got t'
tell yo' all, Lem. _I took a vow that no livin' bein' 's gain' t' kiss
my face lessen he kills th' revenuer!_ I took a vow thet I'll
never--never--_never_--marry nobuddy, till th' revenuer's daid; I vowed
on hit, Lem!"