THE GHOST-MAN
Lem had said little, but upon his honest, pleasing face there was now
etched the momentous outlines of the most serious, profound problem that
had ever confronted his tempestuous life. With the sober, solemn
realization of this vital issue that had come upon him, he found himself
mentally reaching out for sustenance. Seemingly he stood upon the
pinnacle of an epochal summit, with all the threads governing his life,
past and future, dangling limply beneath him. It was the tensest hour of
his existence.
They sat in the moonshine on the witch-elm block, and the whip-poor-will
was calling. They came here in the whispering gloaming ere twilight and
night had parted. They still sat there; the girl talking incessantly.
Time galloped by unheeded with the flight of an affrighted Pegasus.
Phantom shadows grew and gesticulated and stretched their wraith-like
arms out toward them. And the moon slipped over the spur and laved them
with an effulgent benediction. Lem sat non-committal and stoic.
Belle-Ann's curls bobbed in the moonlight as she tossed them back
restlessly. For more than an hour she had been pouring into his ears all
the things that lay in her heart which had been re-cast in a new mould
of understanding and burnished with ethics of education. The titanic
moment she had anticipated had arrived. The dawn of the morrow was to
part them forevermore, or it was to bind their lives together
irrevocably. He had again begged her to promise to marry him, and this
was her answer. Her low, dulcet tones rippled on and on. Her little
hands fluttered appealingly in their flights of emphasis. Her violet
orbs were starry with the truths that hurried across her lips, and her
whole being throbbed with the vibrant force of this conquest. He spoke
for the first time.
"Ef yo' keep on a talkin' thet away, Belle-Ann,--yo'll make me lie t'
yo'," he predicted dolefully, casting yearning eyes upon her. As yet not
once had he kissed that red-mouthed, dimpled face. Not yet had he
clasped that withy, supple form to him. The price now of that treasured
kiss, and that longed-for embrace, and her priceless love, was his whole
and complete repudiation of his bloody creed of feudalism.
"I am not afraid of your deceiving me, Lem--you have never lied to me in
the past, and I'll trust you-all in the future. I mean to lift you up,"
she went on earnestly,--"to show you a worthy goal that I know is thah
awaiting your acknowledgment. As I have said over and over, Lem, I do
not expect you to understand it all now, but I hoped that you would
believe me, who have gone through it all with its blighting misery. Your
whole life is now and always will be made furtive and fear-ridden, while
you cling to this blood-dogma of revenge--always looking for the blood
of your enemies, and when at last you get that blood and delude yourself
into the thought that you are satisfied, you find springing out of that
very act other enemies waiting in your path. It is an endless chain of
fight and flight and blood that is harrowing. I saw an example of it
yesterday before my very eyes, because I know you would have killed Sap
McGill had I not been thah. It is all fundamentally wicked. Oh, Lem! It
is all hideously wrong. Now that I am rid of that awful sting, I cannot
and will not link my life to one who harbors these awful things to drag
us both down.
"Won't you put this life behind you, Lem, and come down where God has
granted a paradise--a paradise of peace? Down where nature has unfurled
a grassy, level land and men walk in the open and can see each other's
faces? Down thah, Lem, where hearts beat uncontaminated beyond the
maelstrom of feudal hate, and where all men are brothers--down in the
land of hope--hope that makes a song of life--in the land of hope,
Lem,--a cloudless, sunshiny fairy world--where dreams come true?
"You said you would love to go to Lexington to my grandfather, but you
won't leave the mountains until you have killed the revenuer and Sap
McGill. Is that evidence that you love me, Lem? To-morrow morning I'll
ride Rajah back alone. I don't believe that you love me, Lem--I can't
believe it----"
Lem got to his feet. He was very white in the moonlight now. He picked
up a stick off the ground. He rested the butt of his rifle against the
block and, placing the muzzle of the gun against his breast, he reached
down and touched the trigger with the end of the stick before Belle-Ann
realized what he was up to.
"Belle-Ann, say that I don't love yo' agin an' I'll blow my heart out."
Gently and quickly she took the stick out of his hand in alarm.
"Lem, there is a way out for you--there is a sustaining power that will
help you, if you will only have faith," she pleaded. "'Know ye the truth
and the truth shall make ye free.'"
"But he kilt my old pap,--an' my good old maw, Belle-Ann. I'd alers heer
their spirits a cryin' ef I went away an' didn't git th' revenuer's
blood," he protested for the twentieth time. "An' didn't McGill try t'
kill me jest yisterday?"
"Lem," she said, "I tell you what we'll do. We'll go down to the
church--we'll go down thah--you and me and Buddy--down thah by the altar
where your father died. God won't deny you thah. We will offer up a
little prayer for pap and maw, and you will ask God to show you the
truth of my words--that it is wrong for you to hang back and sacrifice
your future for the blood of your enemies. Take my word for it, Lem--God
will surely lay His hand on those who have harmed you. Will you go,
Lem--come now--will you go with Belle-Ann?"
For the first time Lem's face lost a measure of its despair. His eyes
lighted up with the advent of an emollient hope, and a half-smile
touched his lips.
"Come 'long, Belle-Ann," he agreed, "let's do thet." And a prayer
mounted in Belle-Ann's breast as she called to Buddy to come along and
bring a lantern. Then hand in hand they wound their way down the moonlit
mountain-side toward the deserted church. And up from the girl's heart a
spa of hope was abubble. The joy of life was again strong upon her.
There was a song in her soul and the blithesome days of yore were
rippling in her veins.
The forsaken church stood out big and white, magnified in a pool of
moonlight, like a runic tomb guarding the memory of a martyr. With a
ruthless swish, the laurel wall that hemmed the clearing suddenly
parted, and the next instant the scathed, battered semblance of a
man-being crawled out into the silver moonshine.
A wound-burnt, sinister shape, half naked. The revengeful way-path rocks
had bitten into his inflamed knees. The vicious thorns had torn and
stabbed maledictions into his hands. The clawing underbrush had stripped
his clothing away, and the poison ivy and skunk-viper had sprung upon
and spat their gangrene acid against his nakedness. There was misery in
each lift of knees and hands, as though weighted with ball and chain. In
his zigzag wake there was a lesion of nauseous mocking horror. This
thing panted like a spent buffalo, as with popped, blood-rimmed eyes it
stared at the church.
It was the revenuer come back in the hour of his extremity.
With wabbling head, he focused his blighted face upon the church--a
shrine all in white beckoning to him, insistently. Foot by foot he
forged his tortuous way across the open and onward. His corporal being,
ruined, ravished and wrecked, his derelict spirit was blindly
upstanding. Excruciatingly and piteously he moved across the sea of wild
honey clover and foxtail with the slowness of a shore-viewed water
craft, stationary only while the eye held it, but with a trick to move
when the gaze is lifted.
When this odious, strange apparition had gained a point midway to the
church, then it was that a lithe, agile, uncertain shape, a spawn from
the matrix of the shadowless gulch below, slid up out of the dark,
halted on the verge of the shades and then as lightly as air sprung its
haunches upward to a great spruce stump. It was the male panther who
owned a mate and cubs, and who patrolled the darkling hours with a
dare-all note in his minor night-squall; who dominated the animal
kingdom and held in subservient fear all the lesser pantomimic pirates
of the forest.
At first his eyes widened curiously as they settled upon the audacious
trespasser in the clearing. Had this thing under his quizzical gaze
walked upright, he could have understood and would have skulked hastily
away, but now a quick challenge crowded into his feline breast, as he
realized that an alien, hairy creature, that stalked on four legs, had
dared to invade the night that belonged to him and the province that was
his.
Straightway a keen and malignant resentment seized and traversed his
bristling spine, and his long tail began to lash the ground menacingly.
It wagged him into a great fury. As noiselessly as a moccasin slides
into the water, he dropped from the dark spruce stump into the velvet
mullein leaves, and skirted the whiteness of the moon. He leaped lightly
through the space and landed in the shade of the church. With a sudden
wary flash, he darted forward. Then, boldly and ready, he turned sharply
and advanced in the forefront of this new enemy that now was his prey.
Stealth was in his padded paws as he lowered his ermine belly to the
ground and crept sneakingly to meet the newcomer.
When a mere six feet separated the two, the panther's hairy, spotted
lips parted thirstily. He choked back the growl of savage exultation
that welled up in his chest, his yellow eyes all afire with lust. He
gathered his steel-like thews under him with a mighty tenseness to
spring. His wagging tail stopped and stiffened. As he made to leave the
ground, the thing before him jerked its gory head suddenly upward,
looked, and thrust a laugh in the brute's face.
Such a laugh! The splintering, squawking reiterations of petered-out
echoes, bubbling up into a mundane night from the precincts of the
eternally damned. That laugh splashed upon the serene night like the
plunge of a boulder into a placid pool. It drove the pith out of the
panther's militant cat-heart. It curdled the will to kill that had
blazed from the beast's agate eyes. Instantly the brute, dazed with
terror, wrenched his round head askew, to shut from his tan eyes and
black ears the sight and the sound of this monstrous, unknown
antagonist.
The brute's tail went limp as he hurtled obliquely through the air,
landed in the bull-grass, plunged into the inky shadows and fled away
from this moonlit spot with its hideous blot of terror, and hurried
toward the pitchy brakes that hemmed the river, with panic curdling his
jungle blood.
The maimed, bedraggled hulk careened; then at the end of a panting
struggle fell over the door block and tumbled heavily against the church
portal. The dilapidated, weather-scarred door gave way unresistingly to
him and his bedlam cry as though it had boded this unholy visitation. He
stopped on the threshold, sprawling half in, half without. The uncouth
noise of his breathing hissing through a ragged ruin of teeth, cut the
sepulchral stillness of the church room with the portent of some awful
prediction. His haggled, bleeding hand stamped its red curse upon the
door panel. Then, with a mad, mighty will, he lashed his flagging spirit
to another effort and broke into a pitiable, wabbling, four-legged trot.
When his swollen, bleeding feet disappeared, the church door swung back
and engulfed the revenuer's racked, gaunt bones within the ostracised
temple of death. With stark eyes upward and ahead, he stared through the
dark to the spot where a single lance of moonlight stabbed obliquely
through the dismantled window, revealing a cross done in blood that lay
prone athwart the untrodden pulpit floor.
Without, a white virgin mantle of peace and purity enveloped the haunted
church. The honey clover, foxtail, mullein, and dill-poppies had closed
over the horrible path-way leading to the church door-block. The panther
was gone. A seductive south wind rippled across the blossomed clearing
and a hundred families of unnamed flowers raised their heads and nodded
to the stars. The far-off, drowsy baying of a hound drifted down from
the ridge and trailed plaintively into the night. And from somewhere the
sweet love-tale of the elusive nightingale was told over and over again.
There was utter papal peace without for several moments. Then suddenly
this magic spell was startlingly burst asunder with a rising tempo of
sounds issuing from within the church. It grew into a horrific, guttural
clash. The noise of contending demons dead-locked. The riotous commotion
of a thousand struggling, distraught fiends told of some terrible
enactment inside the church.