IN WHICH PROVIDENCE TAKES A HAND
He crushed her to him with a passion that bade fair to stop her breath.
He poured out his kisses upon her lips, and face, and eyes. He kissed
the little scar that crossed the part in her hair. And there he held her
for long, lingering minutes, loath to untwine his arms. Her hot breath
was on his neck, and he surfeited his senses upon the incense of her
curls.
"We'll all go down to Blue-Grass together now, won't we, Lem?" she said.
"Sho'--I'm done a warrin' now--I'm done fo' always--an', Belle-Ann, my
darlin'--I want t' git a edication like yo'-all--eh?--I want t' make
myself fittin' fo' yo'. I sho' will do hit, with Gawd's help--an'
yore'n. I aimed to ax yo' again to marry me pint-blank--but I don't want
yo' to jest now--'til I'm fittin'--I air a goin' to study th' books by
day an' by night--I know I kin learn--I'll do hit er bust--then when
yore sure I'm fittin'--an' kin talk nice like yo'--an' look
decent-like--then--then----"
He drew her to him and buried his face in her curls.
"Little Belle-Ann," he muttered, his joy crowding his words, "little
gal, whut I knowed would come back----"
"Did I not cross my heart, Lem?" she said, and as her lips parted to
tell to him all that lay in her heart for the future, a swift, blighting
look of horror dashed into the girl's face, leaving it whiter than
moon-pallor. A half-screamed, incoherent outcry burst from her lips as
with outstretched arm she pointed behind him. Responding instantly to
her alarm, Lem flung himself around.
Together, transfixed and agape, they stared. A startling sight stood in
front of their eyes--a spectacle that filled the sensitive girl with a
panting, sickening horror. She stood all a-quiver, her two little hands
clutching her breast and her violet eyes swimming in terror. For a tense
long minute they could neither speak nor move.
Then Belle-Ann's one hand shot out and grasped Lem's sleeve imploringly.
"Oh, Lem--Lem!" she cried, "can't we get it out--oh! can't we hurry and
take it out, Lem?" but even as she talked she knew the hopelessness of
the intent in her mind.
"I 'low hits too late now, Belle-Ann," returned he, in tones a trifle
unsteady. "Hit air God's buryin' now," he added, with no trace of venom
in his tones.
[Illustration: "Hit air God's buryin' now."]
"Oh!--Lem, it's too awful--too terrible to watch and think about,"
pursued Belle-Ann in half whispers broken with emotion. She dropped her
lids and placed her hands over her eyes.
The night wind carried an ominous groan. A dully grinding, crepitating
sound came up to the lofty heights of Eagle Crown.
Even now there was a tremendous gutting upheaval below them; then with a
dynamitic cough of concussion the entire roof of the church belched
upward and fell in and a wide black flight of smoke hurried up to the
high heavens and blotted the scintillant stars. Then a measureless,
flanged blanket of blood-hued flame followed, propelling still higher
the ebon clouds above it.
Here the flame turned to orange and split, and dropped back into a
seething pit, where it gathered another and greater force. Then a
lance-like turret of pure fire spurted straight upward, struggling and
twisting and stabbing its lurid path through the pitchy volumes of smoke
that rolled and plunged and tumbled infernally; filching with edacious
swirls, great amber flakes of tinder, delivering them up in spiral gusts
to the whining wilderness wind, which in turn hurtled its meteoric
salvage, red and alive, out over the rampant waters of Hellsfork.
The clearing was transformed into an oscillating arena of lurid light
that eclipsed the stars and drove the moon pallid. The front wall
supporting the belfry was last to go. Its superstructure half devoured,
the belfry itself clung on fearfully askew, like a man skidded from a
high cliff, hanging by a single root awaiting his strength to ebb. The
pitiless flames duelled, raged and fought ferociously over their prey of
fire-bitten logs that strove vainly to rise, only to be stricken, again
to fall back, casting groans to the spectral night. They turned and
stirred and crawled in agony, like the maimed half dead.
Suddenly the sheet of flame scathing the front wall fell back again for
another assault and, taking it thrice with blasting, mighty tongues,
took the key-log to the belfry for its own. And as it went the belfry
trembled and quaked on the threshold of its doom. For a minute it hung
there like a mortal thing, having eyes to see down into the white-hot
pit--fearing something there that this grim-hell clasped to its red
breast, vauntingly and gloatingly. Something more scathing, more
horrifying, more contaminating than the mere scourge of molten
annihilation.
The fire gnawed its trembling support away, and the belfry staggered,
tottered and succumbed.
As it hurtled headlong downward, the bell shrieked out across the
night,--a throttled, frenzied medley of fear-stricken mad utterances,
and tumbled over and over, and went screaming into the ghost-man's
casket of destruction. And roundabout them fluted leaves of flame grew.
And the fire made flowers that covered them over.
Incessantly the lurid lustre of the embers died down, only to leap
pulsing up anew, like the rhyming flush of heat lightning playing behind
pearly clouds. As the dull red flung its cycle outward from the
vermilion pyre of the doomed church, it caught in bold, startling
relief, the mask of a human visage. The russet of the dancing, dying
flames touched this pale, marcid face with a florid, sanguine flush.
Only his peaked, lupine features were visible against the purple green
of the laurel. He was there in the beginning, and he meant to stay there
to the end. He meant to keep his adder-like eyes charm-fixed and unmoved
upon this death pile, until its face was gray and cold. He meant to see
that no treacherous, human skeleton pushed up out of the yielding ashes
and stalked abroad. There was reverence and infinite tenderness in his
fondling of the rifle Buddy now hugged in his lap.
His dead father's gun. His heritage that naught would part, until the
epoch, that came to still his little hardened heart, stepped between
them. As the fire smouldered, thus did the boy's eyes smoulder, while he
watched audaciously and fixedly; for deep down in his warped, puerile
soul the curtained joy of revenge was a-sputter. Now his weazened
countenance broke with a satanic grin, ill to behold, the while he
mumbled things to himself.
"I 'low th' ol' Scratch ez a pickin' em, an' a spearin' em, an' a
humpin' em 'roun' down below 'bout now--leastways I'll see his bones
burn up, I will," he muttered in sibilant, soul-deep glee.
Like a luscious, esculent morsel he rolled the words over and over. The
sound of these disjointed phrases spelled happiness to his soul.
"I'll see his bones burn--he cyan't cum back ef I burn his bones all
up--th' ol' Scratch'll have t' keep em, ef I burn his bones up--he'll
have t' keep em." The jungled hills, a-hush, were ominously empty of
night voices.
And all the soft-footed creatures of the wild crouched fear-crazed in
their lairs, and peered tremblingly out at this fire-swept, fearful
night. A furtive, fleeing wind, ocean-bound, whipped the slatternly dawn
clouds away from the wan face of a vigilant moon. Its haggard visage
looked pityingly down upon a boy-heart clasping a rifle to his breast
like a brother, his dream-dizzied head, pillowed upon the soughing bosom
of a wilderness world--fast asleep.
* * * * *
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
GOLIATH'S BRIDE
THE APOSTLE ON HELLSFORK
A GHOST'S VENGEANCE
THE REDEMPTION OF ZACK McCOY
MR. HARTEM'S SPECULATION