THE RED DEBT
All through these wretched months, Lem Lutts had weltered in jail.
During the first hideous weeks of his incarceration he thought his
reason would not serve him longer. He felt that he would surely go mad.
Night after night he stood with dull, hopeless eyes at his cell door,
his fingers twined around the mercilessly cold iron bars, gazing across
the dim corridor at the blank stone wall.
When "Creeping Jesus" glided up to his cell door like a phantom, and
flashed his lantern upon Lem, he found him hour after hour wide awake,
his eyes burning and starry with the unquenchable fire of a throbbing,
wild, mad unrest. The keepers wondered how he kept alive, considering
the amount of food he took and the sleep he had.
Belle-Ann's face was ever before him. Her beautiful vision floated
evermore through the dark confines of his cell. Many times he had
scribbled letters to Belle-Ann, with fond hopes that some word from her
would come back to him, not knowing that these missives had never
reached the outside of the jail.
He had lolled upon the iron cot through the soul-wrenching hours of
countless nights, staring up through the black toward the concrete
ceiling. His groping mind saw no solution written in the dark. Merciless
assumptions in default of proofs had opened the great loathsome cage
whose maw had gulped his body.
True--he had helped his father work the "still" that his
great-grandfather had worked with a free conscience. That was all--the
"still" that the despised law had never yet unearthed. The aspect of the
law conformed with the teachings of his father. It fitted unto the
sights that his own eyes had beheld. Where was its equity? He had seen
his own relation shot down in cold, cruel blood. This law had never come
forward to punish the wrong and champion the right. This law only
hovered like a python above its prey, and struck when it had advantage.
The law was a mangy, fanged reptile--a monster that bit the honest
rights of the people out of their hearts; then clawed and rolled and
mauled their bodies. He had heard that God inspired the wise men who
made the law. Surely, the Almighty had not lent His seal to this curse.
The God that Maw Lutts had told him about--He, who would some day make
all things right in Kentucky--was not a party to this law that had
finally taken the lives of his parents and had taken him. It was all the
evil, godless work of men. It was the plot of a city faction. He was in
the hands of a gang. In the last days of his jail life, the boy's
philosophy had reduced the blame to a unit, until it fixed the whole
responsibility upon a single man--"Big Pete" Burton--leader of the gang.
The boy, who had never in his life before been outside the limits of the
Cumberland, had gone to jail, on that eventful day, innocent. He came
out guilty. The mountain tinge had long since deserted his cheek and
left it jail-hued. The simple-souled eyes now shone with the flinty
stare, the designing needle-glints, the relentless play from eye to eye
that traverses the orbs of the jail-man. He came out guilty, not of that
which he had knowingly already done, but guilty of the added thing now
stored away in the core of his being that he meant to do.
The heart-breaking midnight loneliness and the nerve-stabbing "third
degree" had not sucked the fire from his feudal veins. His religion now
measured by his capacity for revenge, Lem Lutts came out of prison, his
young heart and soul and strength obsessed by a sacred quest. His
suspicions ratified in jail, he came out tarnished and arrayed against
the world. In the centre of this flaming theatre of vengeance there ever
stalked one leading figure, one solitary actor--a huge animal-headed man
flaunting a frayed precept, called law--the monster law-man reaching for
the rights and the blood of the people--he of the shadow-built body and
the charmed life--that fearless ghost-spawn who never backed away from
the mouth of a gun--he who always plunged toward the flame and the smoke
and fought in the open--he whose skin was tattooed by the Winchester
stencil of the mountaineer; but who still lived, and pursued, and fought
on--the man who forged always onward with uncanny precision, ever
stalking the hillman, ever reaching for his sanctum with merciless,
untiring law-biting fury.
The vision of this supernatural man, who had killed his parents, stood
in front of the boy's life and blocked his untamed spirit with taunts.
Loyal to inherited instincts; guided by the influence of environment;
handicapped by ignorance; fanatically brave in his peculiarly educated
understanding of justice, and property rights--the boy saw only this
man. This hated enemy had not deserted him in jail. "Big Pete" had
visited him time and time again. He had coaxed, abused, threatened,
cajoled. He had even "manhandled" Lem, but never an utterance had
crossed the boy's lips to betray. Finally, they had put him in the
dungeon. When he emerged from the "black hole of Calcutta," he was
thinner, chalk-hued, and benumbed of brain, but unrelenting, and "Big
Pete" knew there was a demerit across his record. He did not make an
informer.
To-day they had released Lem Lutts in disgust. The revenuer, Burton, was
on hand with that same despicable stare, and followed him from the
warden's office to the street.
"I'll get you yet, Lutts," predicted the detective. "I'll bust that
gang, and I'll send you to Atlanta the next time. I'll bust you, or I'll
get you like I did your--your----" his temerity broke. "I'll get you all
right--I'll be on your trail in a week." To this gentle benediction he
added a gentle push as emphasis.
Slight as the push was, Lem lost his balance and went to his knees, his
hat falling to the walk. When he gained his feet and faced about, the
officer stared in dumb amazement at the savage figure before him. Lem's
stoicism had left him. His immobile features yielded to the volcanic
hatred within. His light eyes glinted like full sockets of quicksilver.
The froth fermented and bubbled off his twitching lip.
"Yes--yes--yo' houn' dog!--yo' kilt my pap, an' my maw--yo' did!" he
shrieked out in a riot of rage. "Yore 'lowing t' git hain't a gittin',
hit hain't'--yo' kin 'low, an' 'low, an' 'low--thet hain't a
gittin'--yore a pesky coward--yore a damn woman-killer--an' th' day'll
cum when we'uns 'll run th' cow-brutes acrossin' yore snaky ole grave,
we will! An' our'n hawgs'll root parsley offin' yore ole houn'-dawg
grave, they will--yo' kilt my pap an' my maw, yo' did--an' hits we'uns
what'll make a stinkin' hole fo' yore ole carcass,--what'll run the wild
skunks out o' th' mountains--a hole what'll make th' buzzards puke.
"Yo' kilt my pap an' my maw--yo' he-skunk!--an' ef they's a God up in
th' clouds, He'll see yore ole bones a-burnin' up in hell 'fore long--He
will."
He bleated out his imprecations, his frothy, distraught utterances
tumbling together and stifling his speech. His wrist-band became
loosened, and he stretched a sleeveless, naked arm high over his bared
head to solemnize an oath that had sealed itself in his tempestuous
heart. The sullen officer scowled at him, speechless; then grimly,
silently, turned his back upon the lava of this mountain boy's impotent
frenzy.
Panting and dazed, Lem walked in a circle around his hat, which lay on
the walk. Finally picking it up, he backed away from some curious eyes
that had gathered, and ambled off toward the Kentucky river. Near two
hundred miles from Moon mountain, forlorn, soul-sick, friendless,
moneyless, but free, with one steadfast, consuming purpose fixed in his
heart,--an organic purpose which he kept protected with prayerful
importunities to Providence that it might not go amiss!
When Lem got his bearings, he started cross-country afoot. At the end of
the ninth day he found himself on the skirts of the Big Sandy country.
With that tireless wolf-gait, he put the rugged miles behind him. All
through the moonless night he tramped with eager eyes fixed toward the
east where the hills piled higher and higher, and penciled a sable,
ragged border against the paling, myriad stars.
At length the atmosphere grew heavy and a flume of languid clouds
straggled up where they hung upon the distant mountain peaks, pregnant
with pulsing heat lightning. When, in the loneliness of that weird hour,
the darkest epoch between night and morning, Lem beheld, silhouetted
against the incessant flashes of lightning, the sombre dome of Moon
mountain--that sullen watch-dog of the Cumberland--he pushed ahead
unmindful of fatigue, while out of the wreckage of his battered soul,
and aggrieved senses, there rose up a semblance of his old self as he
lessened the distance between him and his beloved home.
Before the sun was up, and while the transparent jewels still trembled
on the damp face of the wilderness, Lem was on the last half of his
climb. He forged onward, his head aflutter with a multiplicity of
anticipation that precedes the sight of a long absent home. Presently he
espied a thin column of smoke aloft, which he knew issued from his own
cherished habitat. He pulsed with a savage delight. With the pungent
odors of a horde of familiar, endeared growing things in his nostrils,
he throbbed with the salient, rabid joy of an escaped jungle animal back
again to its own. In a vortex of ecstasy he viewed the wild, enchanting
scenes developing through a film of early morning mist.